From the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs, America's Women tells the story of how women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, this book describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Gail Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot too.

Gail Collins is the editorial page editor at the New York Times -- the first woman to hold this position. Prior to that, she was a columnist for the paper's op-ed page, a member of the editorial board, and a columnist for the New York Daily News and New York Newsday

Introduction	p. xiii
The First Colonists: Voluntary and Otherwise	p. 1
The Women of New England: Goodwives, Heretics, Indian Captives, and Witches	p. 23
Daily Life in the Colonies: Housekeeping, Children, and Sex	p. 47
Toward the Revolutionary War	p. 67
1800-1860: True Women, Separate Spheres, and Many Emergencies	p. 85
Life Before the Civil War: Cleanliness and Corsetry	p. 115
African American Women: Life in Bondage	p. 140
Women and Abolition: White and Black, North and South	p. 161
The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers	p. 188
Women Go West: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Fair but Frail	p. 208
The Gilded Age: Stunts, Shorthand, and Study Clubs	p. 238
Immigrants: Discovering the "Woman's Country"	p. 258
Turn of the Century: The Arrival of the New Woman	p. 279
Reforming the World: Suffrage, Temperance, and Other Causes	p. 304
The Twenties: All the Liberty You Can Use in the Backseat of a Packard	p. 327
The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt	p. 350
World War II: "She's Making History, Working for Victory"	p. 371
The Fifties: Life at the Far End of the Pendulum	p. 397
The Sixties: The Pendulum Swings Back with a Vengeance	p. 421
Epilogue	p. 443
Acknowledgments	p. 451
Notes	p. 453
Bibliography	p. 511
Index	p. 541
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

America's Women
Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Chapter One

The First Colonists:
Voluntary and Otherwise

The Extremely Brief Story of Virginia Dare

Eleanor Dare must have been either extraordinarily adventurous oreasily led. In 1587, when she was pregnant with her first child, she setsail across the Atlantic, headed for a continent where no woman of herkind had ever lived, let alone given birth. The only English-speakingresidents of the New World at the time were a handful of men whohad been left behind during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at settlementon Roanoke Island, in what is now Virginia. Eleanor's father,John White, was to become governor of the new colony. Her husband,Ananias, a bricklayer, was one of his assistants.

Under the best of circumstances, a boat took about two months toget from England to the New World, and there were plenty of reasonsto avoid the trip. Passengers generally slept on the floor, on dampstraw, living off salted pork and beef, dried peas and beans. They sufferedfrom seasickness, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. Their shipcould sink, or be taken by privateers, or run aground at the wrongplace. Even if it stayed afloat, it might be buffeted around for so longthat the provisions would run out before the travelers reached land.Later would-be colonists sometimes starved to death en route. (Theinaptly named Love took a year to make the trip, and at the end of the voyage rats and mice were being sold as food.) Some women consideredthe odds and decided to stay on dry land. The wife of John Dunton,a colonial minister, wrote to him that she would rather be "aliving wife in England than a dead one at sea."

But if Eleanor Dare had any objections, they were never recorded.She and sixteen other women settlers, along with ninety-one men andnine children, encountered no serious problems until they stopped topick up the men who had been left at Roanoke. When they wentashore to look for them, all they found were the bones of a single Englishman.The uncooperative ship's captain refused to take them farther,and they were forced to settle on the same unlucky site.

Try to imagine what Eleanor Dare must have thought when shewalked, heavy with child, through the houses of the earlier settlers,now standing empty, "overgrown with Melons of divers sortes, andDeere within them, feeding," as her father later recorded. Eleanor wasa member of the English gentry, hardly bred for tilling fields and fightingIndians. Was she confident that her husband the bricklayer and herfather the bureaucrat could keep her and her baby alive, or was shebeginning to blame them for getting her into this extremely unpromisingsituation? All we know is that on August 18, the first English childwas born in America and christened Virginia Dare -- named, like thecolony, in honor of the Virgin Queen who ruled back home. A fewdays later her grandfather boarded the boat with its cranky captain andsailed back to England for more supplies, leaving Eleanor and theother settlers to make homes out of the ghost village. It was nearlythree years before White could get passage back to Roanoke, andwhen he arrived he discovered the village once again abandoned, withno trace of any human being, living or dead. No one knows what happenedto Eleanor and the other lost colonists. They might have beenkilled by Indians or gone to live with the local Croatoan tribe whenthey ran out of food. They were swallowed up by the land, and by history.

The Dares and other English colonists who we call the first settlerswere, of course, nothing of the sort. People had lived in North Americafor perhaps twenty millennia, and the early colonists who did survive lasted only because friendly natives were willing to give themenough food to prevent starvation. In most cases, that food was producedby native women. Among the eastern tribes, men were generallyresponsible for hunting and making war while the women did thefarming. In some areas they had as many as 2,000 acres under cultivation.Former Indian captives reported that the women seemed to enjoytheir work, tilling the fields in groups that set their own pace, lookingafter one another's youngsters. Control of the food brought power,and the tribes whose women played a dominant role in growing andharvesting food were the ones in which women had the highest statusand greatest authority. Perhaps that's why the later colonists kept tryingto foist spinning wheels off on the Indians, to encourage what theyregarded as a more wholesome division of labor. At any rate, it's niceto think that Eleanor Dare might have made a new life for herself withthe Croatoans and spent the rest of her life working companionablywith other women in the fields, keeping an eye out for her daughterand gossiping about the unreliable men.

"FEDD UPON HER TILL HE HAD CLEAN DEVOURED ALL HER PARTES"

Jamestown was founded in 1607 by English investors hoping to make aprofit on the fur and timber and precious ore they thought they weregoing to find. Its first residents were an ill-equipped crew of youngmen, many of them the youngest sons of good families, with nomoney but a vast sense of entitlement. The early colonists included alarge number of gentlemen's valets, but almost no farmers. Theyregarded food as something that arrived in the supply ship, andnobody seemed to have any interest in learning how to grow his own.(Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in 1611 after two long winters of starvation,said he found the surviving colonists at "their daily and usuallworkes, bowling in the streetes.")

America's Women
Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. Copyright © by Gail Collins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.