U.S. History As Women's History

by Kerber, Linda K.; Kessler-Harris, Alice; Sklar, Kathryn Kish; Sklar, Kathryn Kish

• ISBN13: 9780807844953
• ISBN10: 0807844950
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
State Formation	p. 15
A Constitutional Right to be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligation of Citizenship	p. 17
Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era: The National Consumer' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation	p. 36
Putting Children First, Women Materialism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century	p. 63
Designing Women and Old Fool: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939	p. 87
Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity : Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century	p. 107
Power	p. 123
Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward Fully Loaded Cost Accounting	p. 125
Gendered Expectations: Women and Early Twentieth-Century Public Health	p. 147
Separatism Revisited: Women's Institurions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam Van Waters	p. 170
The Personal and the Political: Two Case	p. 189
Rigths and Representation: Women, Politics and Power in the Contemporary United States	p. 214
Knowledge	p. 243
Reading Little Women: The Manu Lives of a Text	p. 245
Between Cultures and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs and the Promulgation of Women's History, 1944-1989	p. 267
The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War	p. 296
The Female Generation Gap: Daughters of the Fifties and the Origins of Contemporary American Feminism	p. 313
The Making of the Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia	p. 335
Notes	p. 349
Bibliography of the Writing of Gerda Lerner	p. 439
Contributors	p. 443
Index	p. 447
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