U.S. History As Women's History

Introduction

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. 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.

Contributors

Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship

Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era

Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century

Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939

Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century

Nell Irvin Painter on soul murder as a legacy of slavery

Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health

Estelle B. Freedman on women’s institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters

William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein

Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States

Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women

Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation’s efforts to promulgate women’s history

Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war

Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties

Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia