LibGuides: American Women's History: Books & eBooks

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Celebrating Women in American History Presents a diverse and panoramic view of women and their accomplishments in American history by bringing their achievements to light and helping them gain the recognition they deserve.
Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States Women's history emerged as a genre in the waning years of the eighteenth century, a period during which concepts of nationhood and a sense of belonging expanded throughout European nations and the young American republic. Early women's histories had criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women while emphasizing the importance of female domesticity in national development. These histories had created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the variety of citizenship considered suitable for women, which they argued should be constructed in a very different way from that of men: women's relationship to the nation should be considered in terms of their participation in civil society and the domestic realm. But the throes of the Revolution and the emergence of the first woman's rights movement challenged the dominance of that narrative and complicated the history writers' interpretation of women's history and the idea of domestic citizenship. In Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, Teresa Anne Murphy traces the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the time of the Civil War, demonstrating that competing ideas of women's citizenship had a central role in the ways those histories were constructed. This intellectual history examines the concept of domestic citizenship that was promoted in the popular writing of Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Ellet and follows the threads that link them to later history writers, such as Lydia Maria Child and Carolyn Dall, who challenged those narratives and laid the groundwork for advancing a more progressive woman's rights agenda. As woman's rights activists recognized, citizenship encompassed activities that ranged far beyond specific legal rights for women to their broader terms of inclusion in society, the economy, and government. Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States demonstrates that citizenship is at the heart of women's history and, consequently, that women's history is the history of nations.
The War on Women in the United States: Beliefs, Tactics, and the Best Defenses The book examines gender roles, gender inequity, and the real-world impacts of both unintentional and purposeful efforts to undermine women's equal treatment in the United States, documenting what women have faced in the past and still face living in America today. * Demonstrates how existing cultural roles and historical context in the United States are sufficient to result in gender-based inequality even without the purposeful, direct efforts to undermine women's equal treatment * Covers many different aspects of inequality, both obvious and subtle, such as occupational sex segregation; workplace harassment; gender bias in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education; reproductive rights and health of women; the glass ceiling and glass cliff; intimate partner violence; and sexual violence * Illuminates the multilayered nature of gender inequality to inform a multifaceted approach to dealing with it on a governmental (societal) level and on an individual level
When Women Didn’t Count: The Chronic Mismeasure and Marginalization of American Women in Federal Statistics Erroneous government-generated "data" is more problematic than it would appear. This book demonstrates how women's history has consistently been hidden and distorted by 200 years of official government statistics. * Provides new ways of thinking about the history of women in the United States * Examines the systems used to gather and publish federal statistics, identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and biases * Demonstrates the need for applying critical thinking skills even when examining assumedly trustworthy statistics from official sources * Reveals how details of women's lives in the United States have been erased or disguised in data that is considered authoritative and reliable
Women in the Workplace in America, 1900-2021 Women in the Workplace in America, 1900--2021 is a resource guide that provides historical context and helps people and organizations better understand the challenges women have faced and continue to face in the American workplace, along with opportunities and recently discovered and developing success stories.
Women Past and Present In Western societies, many traditional feminist claims have already been fulfilled both in law and in official discourse. Indeed, legislative steps have already been taken towards securing civil and political rights and equal opportunities for women. This, of course, is not the case in many other regions of the world, as some of the chapters in this book clearly testify. Yet, notwithstanding the gains achieved in Western societies, residual forms of resistance and prejudice still persist in discourses, categories and discriminative practices in this so-called post-feminist era. Furthermore, new manifestations of asymmetries in gender relations and new ways of thinking and experiencing subjectivity are currently emerging, as a result of growing globalisation, economic crisis, migration patterns, female sex and labour trafficking, trans-nationalism, and new technologies, not to mention the beauty and body-sculpting industries.The chapters in this collection represent a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and international engagement with biography, and feminist and gender issues, and reveal important insights and challenge some traditional views, interpretations and understandings. The focus of attention of this collection is twofold. It outlines the struggle of women to overthrow the various forces that have, in various spatio-temporal relations, worked against them. It also reveals the significant contribution made by specific women to the establishment of more democratic and gender-balanced societies that grant women a more egalitarian political, economic and social existence. To this end, central questions and issues surrounding gender identity and gender politics are discussed, which serve to raise awareness about gender, power, ideologies, institutions, everyday practices, culture and discourse.

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America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines America's Women tells the story of more than four centuries of history. It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters -- the average as well as the celebrated -- Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes -- thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate -- wound up marrying their way through three or four. 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, America's Women 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, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history.
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet Before Steve Jobs put a personal computer in your hands; before Larry Page and Sergey Brin put any answer at your fingertips; before Mark Zuckerberg connected you to your long-lost friends, female visionaries were at the vanguard of the technology you love (and love to hate). VICEfutures editor and lead singer of the band YACHT Claire Evans presents the first social history of women and the internet. These innovators, concentrating where computers have made our lives better, richer, and more connected, are the unsung heroes of network culture. Join the ranks of women who have pioneered technology, like Ada Lovelace, the tortured, imaginative daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote the first program for a mechanical computer. Grace Hopper, a navy admiral and mathematician created machine-independent programming languages. Stacy Horn ran one of the Internet's earliest social networks, Echo, out of her Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. To say nothing of database poets, desktop thespians, cyber-ingenues, glass ceiling-shattering entrepreneurs, and the self-proclaimed "biggest bitch in Silicon Alley." Evans shines a light on these bright minds whom history forgot, showing us how women have always pushed technology forward and will continue to shape our world in powerful ways that we can no longer ignore.
Great Events from History: Women's History Volumes 1 & 2 This book chronicles significant moments in the history of American women, including legal, political, and cultural milestones. It covers citizenship, access to education, women's suffrage, the ERA, changing sexual and reproductive mores, workplace equality, and the #meToo movement. Includes such landmark events as the Seneca Falls Convention, civil rights activism by Rosa Parks, first birth control clinic, and passage of laws that impact women, such as the Equal Pay Act.
Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle, and how they served as nurses and cooks in the army camps, risked their lives seeking personal freedom from slavery, and served as spies, saboteurs, and warriors. She introduces us to sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who sped through the night to rouse the militiamen needed to defend Danbury, Connecticut; to Phillis Wheatley, literary prodigy and Boston slave, who voiced the hopes of African Americans in poems; to Margaret Corbin, crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth; to the women who gathered firewood, cooked, cleaned for the troops, nursed the wounded, and risked their lives carrying intelligence and participating in reconnaissance missions. Here, too, are Abigail Adams, Deborah Franklin, Lucy Knox, and Martha Washington, who lived with the daily knowledge that their husbands would be hanged as traitors if the revolution did not succeed. A recapturing of the experiences of ordinary women who lived in extraordinary times, and a fascinating addition to our understanding of the birth of our nation.
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style" (People). When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research--covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work--When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted--Male" and "Help Wanted--Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way. Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known. Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were--"Father Knows Best" and "My Little Margie" on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams--some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.
A Woman in the House (and Senate): How Women Came to the United States Congress, Broke Down Barriers, and Changed the Country For the first 128 years of our country's history, not a single woman served in the Senate or House of Representatives. All of that changed, however, in November 1916, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress-even before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women across the U.S. the right to vote. Beginning with the women's suffrage movement and going all the way through the results of the 2012 election, Ilene Cooper deftly covers more than a century of U.S. history in order to highlight the influential and diverse group of female leaders who opened doors for women in politics as well as the nation as a whole. Featured women include Hattie Caraway (the first woman elected to the Senate), Patsy Mink (the first woman of color to serve in Congress), Shirley Chisholm (the first African-American woman in Congress), and present-day powerhouses like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. The book is filled with lively illustrations and archival photographs. It includes a glossary, index, and chart of all the women who have served in Congress.
Women in Early America Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women--both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant--who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President's house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women's and gender history--feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women's lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, "add women, and stir," but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.