Women's America: Refocusing the Past

by Kerber, Linda K.; De Hart, Jane Sherron; Dayton, Cornelia H.; Haugeberg, Karissa

• ISBN13: 9780197788721
• ISBN10: 0197788726
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197788738
• Edition: 10th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-11-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Women's history has never been as important as it is now. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 has made it increasingly urgent for students to understand the long struggle women have waged for the right to make decisions about themselves and their bodies. The source-based approach of Women's America allows instructors to show students how ideas about women, gender, sexuality, and human rights have evolved over time -- in both law and in wider American society.

The 10th edition of Women's America: Refocusing the Past remains an indispensable text for the study of US women's history. Featuring a mix of primary-source documents, scholarly articles, and illustrations, Women's America introduces students to many of the leading theorists and historians in the discipline. The 10th edition offers more material on the impact of ethnicity on American culture, the experiences of Indigenous women, the roles that women have played in the creation of male-dominated structures, the international dimensions of women's lives, and the conflicts over reproductive justice, sexuality, and personal freedom that have riven modern American society.

Author Biography

Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts, Professor of History Emerita, and Lecturer in Law at the University of Iowa.
Jane Sherron De Hart is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Cornelia H. Dayton is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.
Karissa Haugeberg, Associate Professor, holds the Eva-Lou Joffrion Edwards Newcomb Professorship in History at Tulane University.

Table of Contents

Part I. EARLY NORTH AMERICA, 1600-1800

Indigenous Women's Worlds
Helen C. Rountree, A Typical Day's Work for Tsenacomoco Women and Girls
Ann Marie Plane, Childbirth Practices among North American Indigenous Women


Dislocations and Violence in the Atlantic African Diaspora
Jennifer L. Morgan, “Some Could Suckle Over their Shoulder:” Male Travelers, Female Bodies
Judith A. Carney, Toiling in the Carolina Rice Fields

DOCUMENTS
Virginia Establishes a Double Standard in Tax Law
Virginia's 1662 Law Defining Race-Based Enslavement
A Massachusetts Minister's Slave Marriage Vows


Settler Households
Mary Beth Norton, An Indentured Servant Identifies as “Both Man and Woeman”: Jamestown, 1629
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Three Inventories, Three Households
Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Taking the Trade: Sarah Grosvenor's Abortion

DOCUMENTS
English Jurist William Blackstone Defines Coverture
Widow Mary Collins's Probate Inventory
An Early Divorce Law and Sarah Welsher's Petition


Disorderly Women
Carol F. Karlsen, Inheriting Women and Witchcraft Accusations

DOCUMENT
“You have stept out of your place”: The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, 1637


Three Eighteenth-Century Lives
Ann M. Little, Esther Wheelwright Becomes an Ursuline Nun
Jessica Marie Johnson, Marie Baude, a Free African woman, Arrives in New Orleans
Susan Hanket Brandt, Hannah Freeman, Lenape Healer, Persists near her Homelands


Revolutionary Legacies

DOCUMENTS
Philadelphia Women Raise Money Door to Door
Sarah Osborn, Woman of the Army
Deborah Sampson Gannett, Soldier
Grace Growden Galloway, Loyalist
Rachel Wells, “I have Don as much to Carrey on the War as maney . . .”

Linda K. Kerber, Republican Mothers and Women Citizens
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemings-Jefferson Treaty: Paris, 1789


Part II. MANY FRONTIERS, 1800-1880

Workplaces
Jeanne Boydston, The Pastoralization of Housework
Sharon Block, Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic

DOCUMENT
Eliza R. Hemmingway and Sarah Bagley Testify on Working Conditions in Early Factories, 1845


Enslavers' Households
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Mistresses in the Making
Thavolia Glymph, Women in Slavery: The Gender of Violence


Intimacy and Bodily Control
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual
James C. Mohr, The Abortion Landscape, 1800-1880
Kim E. Nielsen, A Female Physician Is Institutionalized


Activists and Reform
Gerda Lerner, The Meaning of Seneca Falls
Rose Stremlau, “I Know What an Indian Woman Can Do”: Sarah Winnemucca Writes about the Northern Paiute Frontier

DOCUMENTS
The Grimké Sisters Talk Truth to Power
Keziah Kendall Protests Coverture
The Declaration of Sentiments, 1848
New York's Married Women's Property Acts
Amelia Bloomer, the Short Dress, and the Media Backlash
Sojourner Truth's Visiting Card


Nineteenth-Century Lives
Helen Wright et al., Maria Mitchell, Astronomer and College Professor
Jen Manion, Female Husbands and Their Wives
Tiya Miles, Harriet Tubman, Night Flyer
Miroslava Chávez-García, Guadalupe Trujillo and Her Servant, Ysabel


Civil War and Its Aftermaths
Stephanie McCurry, Women Numerous and Armed: Politics and Policy on the Confederate Home Front
Leslie A. Schwalm, Enslaved Mothers: Claiming Freedom and Risking Death
Tera W. Hunter, Reconstruction and the Meanings of Freedom

DOCUMENTS
A.S. Hitchcock, I Would Treat Them as Vagabonds
Reconstruction Amendments, 1865, 1868, 1870
Victoria Woodhull and the “Feminine Invasion of the Capitol”
Supreme Court Test Cases: Bradwell v. Illinois and Minor v. Happersett


Part III. MODERN AMERICA EMERGES, 1880-1945

Women in the West
Peggy Pascoe, Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook Indian Wife: Miscegenation Laws
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: From China to San Francisco's Chinatown

DOCUMENTS: Women in the West
Chinese Exclusion: The Page Act and Its Aftermath
Zitkála- S?á, The Americanization of Native American Children

DOCUMENTS: Gender and the Jim Crow South
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (with an introduction by Patricia A. Schechter)
Mary McLeod Bethune, How the Bethune-Cookman College Campus Started


Change Agents
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and Women's Activism in the Progressive Era
Annelise Orleck, From the Russian Pale to Labor Organizing in New York City

DOCUMENTS
Pauline Newman, Life in the Garment District
Crystal Eastman, Now We Can Begin


Suffrage and Citizenship
Liette Gidlow, African American Women and the Rise of a 'Woman's Vote'

DOCUMENTS
Mackenzie v. Hare, 1915
Equal Suffrage (Nineteenth) Amendment, 1920
Equal Rights Amendment, 1921, 1923


Jazz Age Girlhoods
Vicki L. Ruiz, The Flapper and the Chaperone: Mexican American Teenagers in the Southwest
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emerging Ideal of Slenderness
Margaret D. Jacobs, Resisting Assimilation: Young Indigenous Women Working in White Households

DOCUMENTS: Debates over Birth Control Access
The Comstock Act
Emma Goldman's Mug Shot, 1901
Margaret Sanger, Contraception for All Women


Women, Policy, and Labor in the 1930s
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Storms on Every Front: Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights
Brenda J. Child, Ojibwe Knocking Sticks: How Labor Changed on the Great Lakes during the Depression
Alexandra Minna Stern, Sara Rosas Garcia Sues to Block Her Daughter's Sterilization

DOCUMENT
Pauli Murray, The Making of Jane Crow


Women and War
Beth Bailey and David Farber, The Women of Hotel Street during World War II
Alice Kessler-Harris, Rethinking Women's Work during World War II

DOCUMENT
The Forced Removal of Japanese Americans


Part IV. A TRANSFORMING WORLD, 1945-2018

Personal Lives in the Cold War
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan, Labor Radicalism, and Feminism
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Filipino Women Who Built Communities, Sustained Families
Danielle L. McGuire, Rosa Parks and the Struggle for Black Women's Bodily Integrity
Lauren Jae Gutterman, Lesbian Desire, Marriage, and the Household

DOCUMENTS
Betty Friedan, The Problem that Has No Name
Phyllis Schlafly, Difference, Not Equality


Legal Feminism in the 1960s
Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Making of a Feminist Advocate

DOCUMENTS
Hoyt v. Florida, 1961, and Taylor v. Louisiana, 1975
Civil Rights Act, Title VII, 1964
Loving v. Virginia, 1967


Organizing against Injustice
Katherine Turk, The Creation of the National Organization for Women in June 1966
Mary Ellen Curtin, Barbara Jordan: How She Changed the Nation
Lina-Marie Murillo, Race and Abortion in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Karissa Haugeberg, Women's Experiences with Abortion before and after Dobbs

DOCUMENTS: Women's Activism
Radicalesbians, The Woman-Identified Woman, 1970
Johnnie Tillmon, Welfare is a Woman's Issue, 1972
Lily Lee Adams, Vietnam Taught Me a Lot
The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977
Jo Carrillo, And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You (poem), 1981

DOCUMENTS: Reshaping the Law
Equal Rights Amendment, 1972
Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972
Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973


Remaking Citizenship
Nancy F. Cott, How History Matters in Obergefell v. Hodges
Nicole Bateman and Martha Ross, Why Was Covid-19 Especially Harmful for Working Women?

DOCUMENTS
Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson et al., 1986
Anita Hill's Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1991
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, 2009
Women's March, 2017
Jennifer Finney Boylan, The First Time I Said, “I'm Trans,” 2020
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with supporting remarks by Pramila Jayapal, Brenda L. Lawrence, Ayanna Pressley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Barbara Lee, and Ilhan Omar, A Question of Personal Privilege, 2020