Synopses & Reviews
This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.'
State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood as the subjects of women's history, but they are the themes that permeate this book. Individually and together, the essays explore how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge and to meld these into accepted practice and state policy. They show how the field of women's history has moved from the discovery of women to an evaluation of social processes and institutions.
The book is dedicated to pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works.
Review
There are many lessons for historians and political activists in this valuable collection.
Women's Review of Books
Review
This is a collection of work of inestimable worth and interest, valuable for all American historians, not only feminists.
Journal of Southern History
Review
An impressive contribution to the pursuit of knowledge. Buy it, read it, assign it, and use it.
North Carolina Historical Review
Review
This is history that matters, that makes a difference.
Journal of American History
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-441) and index.
About the Author
Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History at the University of Iowa, is author of Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America.Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of history at Rutgers University, is author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States.Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton, is author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900.
Table of Contents
State information. -- A constitutional right to be treated like American ladies: women and the obligations of citizenship / Linda K. Kerber -- Two political cultures in the Progressive Era: the National Consumers' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation / Kathryn Kish Sklar -- Putting children first: women, maternalism, and welfare in the early twentieth century / Linda Gordon -- Designing women and old fools: the construction of the Social Security amendments of 1939 / Alice Kessler-Harris -- Giving character to our whole civil polity: marriage and the public order in late ninteenth century / Nancy F. Cott -- Power. -- Soul murder and slavery: toward a fully loaded cost accounting / Nell Irvin Painter -- Gender expectations: women and early twentieth-century public health / Judith Walzer Leavitt -- Separatism revisited: women's institutions, social reform, and the career of Miriam Van Waters / Estelle B. Freedman -- The personal and the political: two case studies / William H. Chafe -- Rights and representation: women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States / Jane Sherron De Hart -- Reading Little Women: the many lives of a text / Barbara Sicherman -- Between culture and politics: the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs and the promulgation of women's history, 1944-1989 / Joyce Antler -- The congress of American women: Left-Feminist peace politics in the Cold War / Amy Swerdlow -- The female generation gap: daughters of the fifties and the origins of contemporary American feminism / Ruth Rosen -- The making of Black Women in America: an Historical Encyclopedia / Darlene Clark Hine -- Bibliography of the writings of Gerda Lerner / compiled by Thomas Dublin.