Toward an Intellectual History of Women

by Kerber, Linda K.

• ISBN13: 9780807846544
• ISBN10: 0807846546
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

As a leading historian of women, Linda K. Kerber has played an instrumental role in the radical rethinking of American history over the past two decades. The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this remarkable collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume is gathered some of Kerber's finest work. Ten essays address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, she starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's sophisticated contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with an eloquent and personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a vital field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its leading scholars.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(22)
I. FINDING WOMEN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805 (1973)	23	(18)
The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective (1976)	41	(22)
``History Can Do It No Justice'': Women and the Reinterpretation of the American Revolution (1989)	63	(37)
``I Have Don... much to Carrey on the Warr?'': Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology after the American Revolution (1990)	100	(31)
The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation (1985)	131	(28)
II. TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF WOMEN
Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History (1988)	159	(41)
Can a Woman Be an Individual?: The Discourse of Self-Reliance (1991)	200	(24)
``Why Should Girls Be Learn'd and Wise?'': The Unfinished Work of Alice Mary Baldwin (1993)	224	(37)
III. FINDING GENDER IN AMERICAN CULTURE
The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805 (1992)	261	(42)
Women and Men: Boredom, Violence and Political Power (1993)	303	(16)
Index	319	(16)
Permissions	335