Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Ninth Edition

Edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg

Presents an in-depth and comprehensive picture of women's experiences in American history
Encourages students to grapple with complex questions of activism, sexuality, work, and family across time and space
Primary and secondary sources have been carefully selected by a leading team of scholars, including new coeditor Karissa Haugeberg of Tulane University
Selections in each part are organized into thematic clusters
Focuses on six main themes: family/household/sexuality, labor/economy/class, race/ethnicity/religion, law and citizenship, and the global context of US women's history
The introduction focuses on key approaches and concepts in US women's history and invites students to "do history"

New to this Edition:

New "In Brief" sections provide short treatments of fascinating topics or people, including an eighteenth-century entrepreneur, a nineteenth-century astronomer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
New documents and document essays include a colonial woman's divorce petition, a list of the property a South Carolina widow owned at her death, and the voices of women like Gloria Steinem on their experiences with abortion in the twentieth century
Six new scholarly essays include Miroslava Chávez-Garcia's examination of a murder trial in Los Angeles when it was part of Mexico, Linda Gordon on the women who were central to the renewed Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and Heather M. Stur's study of U.S. women who served in the Vietnam War
A new, streamlined single-volume format and a reduced part structure (four instead of five) make the text more teachable and accessible
A Companion Website includes additional sources; an interactive timeline of U.S. women's history; film, podcast, and website suggestions; assignment prompts; and much more

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Ninth Edition

Edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg

Description

Featuring a streamlined single-volume format, Women's America: Refocusing the Past is more teachable, accessible, and affordable than ever before. The ninth edition incorporates insights from new coeditor Karissa Haugeberg and appears at a time of anxiety about the meaning of equality in the twenty-first century. Some of the inequalities with which women have long struggled have been eliminated, while others have emerged or reemerged. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, Women's America is an indispensable text for the study of US women's history.

Digital Learning Tools to Enrich Your Course

All print and electronic versions of Women's America: Refocusing the Past come with access to a full suite of engaging digital learning tools that work with the text to bring content to life and build critical skills.

Podcasts, web based research, books and journal articles, and films provide additional resources for students to further their understanding of the text.

Interactive timelines summarize the important events covered in the text.

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Ninth Edition

Edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. EARLY AMERICA, 1600-1800
Gender Frontiers
Kathleen M. Brown, The Anglo-Indian Gender Frontier
Jennifer L. Morgan, "Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder": Male Travelers, Female Bodies
In Brief: Childbirth Practices among North American Indigenous Women (by Ann Marie Plane)
Gender and Labor
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Three Inventories, Three Households
Mary Beth Norton, An Indentured Servant Identifies as "Both Man and Woeman": Jamestown, 1629
Judith A. Carney, Toiling in the Carolina Rice Fields
Founding Documents: Black and White Women Defined in Law
Virginia Establishes a Double Standard in Tax Law
Virginia's 1662 Law Defining Race-Based Enslavement
A Massachusetts Minister's Slave Marriage Vows
English Jurist William Blackstone Defines Coverture
Mary Collin's Probate Inventory
An Early Divorce Law and Sarah Welsher's Petition
Disorderly Women
Carol F. Karlsen, Inheriting Women and Witchcraft Accusations
Document
The Trial of Anne Hutchinson, 1637
Two Eighteenth-Century Lives in Brief
Esther Wheelwright Becomes an Ursuline Nun (by Ann M. Little)
Abigail Stoneman, Entrepreneur (by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor)
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
Slaveowning Households
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Mistresses in the Making
Thavolia Glymph, Women in Slavery: The Gender of Violence
Document
Maria Perkins, Writes to Her Husband on the Eve of Being Sold, 1852
Intimacy, Birth Control, and Abortion
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual
James C. Mohr, The Abortion Landscape, 1800-1880
Activists and Reform
Gerda Lerner, The Meanings 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
Declaration of Sentiments, 1848
Married Women's Property Acts, New York State, 1848 and 1860
Sojourner Truth's Visiting Card, 1864
Nineteenth-Century Frontiers
Miroslava Chávez-García, The Murder Trial of Guadeloupe Trujillo: Los Angeles, 1843
In Brief: Maria Mitchell, Astronomer and College Professor (by Helen Knight et al.)
Photo Essay: Women in Public
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
Supreme Court Test Cases: Bradwell v. Illinois and Minor v. Happersett
PART III. MODERN AMERICA EMERGES, 1880-1945
Gender and the Jim Crow South
Glenda Gilmore, Forging Interracial Links in the Jim Crow South
Documents
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (with an introduction by Patricia A. Schechter)
Mary McLeod Bethune, "How the Bethune-Cookman College Campus Started"
Women in the West
Peggy Pascoe, Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook of Oregon, Challenges Miscegenation Laws
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: From China to San Francisco's Chinatown
Document
Zitkála-Sá, The Americanization of Native American Children
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
Leila J. Rupp, Sexuality and Politics in the Early Twentieth-Century International Women's Movement
Documents
Chinese Exclusion: The Page Act and Its Aftermath
Mackenzie v. Hare, 1915
Equal Suffrage (Nineteenth) Amendment, 1920
Jazz Age Opportunities and Limits
Vicki L. Ruiz, The Flapper and the Chaperone: Mexican American Teenagers in the Southwest
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emerging Ideal of Slenderness
Linda Gordon, Women and the KKK in the 1920s
Document
Equal Rights Amendment, 1921, 1923
Photo Essay: Adorning the Body
Great Depression
Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Storms on Every Front: Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights
Documents
Comstock Act
Emma Goldman's Mug Shot, 1901
Margaret Sanger, Contraception for all Women
Pauli Murray and 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
Women's Cold War Activism
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Origins of Feminism in Cold War America
Michelle M. Nickerson, Politically Desperate Housewives
Documents
Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name"
Phyllis Schlafly, Difference, Not Equality
Sexuality at Midcentury
Susan K. Cahn, Lesbians and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sports
Joanne Meyerowitz, Christine Jorgensen and the Story of How Sex Changed
Women and Movements against Injustice
Danielle L. McGuire, Sexual Violence and the Long Civil Rights Movement
In Brief: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Making of a Feminist Advocate (by Jane Sherron DeHart)
Documents
Hoyt v. Florida, 1961, and Taylor v. Louisiana, 1975
Civil Rights Act, Title VII, 1964
Loving v. Virginia, 1967
Reinvigorated Feminisms
Heather M. Stur, "We Weren't Called Soldiers": WACs and Nurses in Vietnam
Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, The Women's Liberation Movement
Documents
Poster, "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No"
Equal Rights Amendment, 1972
Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972
Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973
Carol Sanger, "The Law from Roe Forward"
In Brief: Women's Experience with Abortion before and after Roe v. Wade (by Karissa Haugeberg)
Claims for Dignity
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domésticas Demand Dignity
Ashraf Zahedi, Muslim American Women after 9/11
In Brief: How History Matters in Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015 (by Nancy F. Cott)
Documents
Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson et al., 1986
Anita Hill's Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1991
Violence Against Women Act, 1994
Women's March, 2017

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Ninth Edition

Edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg

Author Information

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 Hughes Dayton is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Karissa Haugeberg is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University.

Women's America

Refocusing the Past

Ninth Edition

Edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg

Reviews and Awards

"Women's America is exceptional at providing a variety of perspectives, experiences, and knowledge about women's economic, social, cultural, political, and sexual lives throughout a broad expanse of time and geography."--Sandra Slater, College of Charleston

"I have not been able to find a text that presents the information for my Women in US History course better than Women's America does."--Robert Bergman, Central Arizona College

"Women's America is the most complete text currently on the market. It covers a diverse range of topics, but does so in a way that does not seem rushed. In addition, the primary documents included in the text are ideal companions to the articles and great sources to elicit in-class discussion."--Brady L. Holley, Middle Tennessee State University

"The articles in Women's America are thoughtfully edited; each preserves the document's argument, leaving enough evidentiary information to allow readers to see how the argument is supported."--Susan Yohn, Hofstra University