American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Ware

American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Ware

What does U.S. history look like with women at the center of the story? From Pocahantas to military women serving in the Iraq war, this survey chronicles the contributions, recognized and unrecognized, that women have made to the American experience. Committed to a multicultural approach to women's history, the narrative opens not with the European settlers who came to America but with the Native American peoples who were already there. Women who seized opportunities for political and cultural influence during and after the American Revolution were mainly white women. Women's domestic and waged labor shaped the Northern economy, and slavery affected the lives of Southern women, both free and enslaved. Women took the lead in 19th century movements such as temperance, moral reform, and abolitionism, as well as women's rights. The demand for the vote first enunciated at Seneca Falls in 1848 culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. New patterns of work, leisure, and education shaped modern women's lives after 1920, as did international events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Women played especially large roles in the civil rights movement and the revival of feminism, as well as in the backlash these movements provoked. Moving beyond the well-documented lives of white middle-class women, this survey recognizes the diversity of American women's experiences defined by race, ethnicity, and class, but also geography, sexual orientation, age, and religion. At the core of the narrative is the recognition that gender--the changing historical and cultural constructions of roles assigned to the biological differences of the sexes--is central to understanding the history of American women's lives, and the history of the United States.

I imagine that a reader new to US. women's history would come away from this book with a sense of the ways in which race, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender and the forces that have shaped women's lives from the past into the present. And that is the intent of the volume. * Leila J. Rupp, The American Historical Review *

A pioneer in the field of women's history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history. She currently serves as general editor of the American National Biography.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199328338
ISBN 10	0199328331
Title	American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction
Author	Susan Ware
Series	Very Short Introductions
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2015-01-22
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.