Bibliograph

America's women, four hundred years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines, Gail Collins

Type

Label

America's women, four hundred years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines, Gail Collins

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [511]-540) and index

Illustrations

portraitsillustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

America's women

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

144598489

Responsibility statement

Gail Collins

Sub title

four hundred years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines

Summary

Traces the history of women in America, from the female settlers who vanished from Roanoke to the twenty-first century, noting the societal and political rules that influenced fashion, attitudes, education, sex, health, and work

Table Of Contents

The first colonists: voluntary and otherwise -- The women of New England: goodwives, heretics, Indian captives, and witches -- Daily life in the colonies: housekeeping, children, and sex -- Toward the Revolutionary War -- 1800-1860: true women, separate spheres, and many emergencies -- Life before the Civil War: cleanliness and corsetry -- African American women: life in bondage -- Women and abolition: white and Black, north and south -- The Civil War: nurses, wives, spies, and secret soldiers -- Women go west: pioneers, homesteaders, and the fair but frail -- The gilded age: stunts, shorthand, and study clubs -- Immigrants: discovering the "woman's country" -- Turn of the century: the arrival of the new woman -- Reforming the world: suffrage, temperance, and other causes -- The twenties: all the liberty you can use in the backseat of a Packard -- The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt -- World War II: "she's making history, working for victory" -- The fifties: life at the far end of the pendulum -- The sixties: the pendulum swings back with a vengeance

Classification