Toward an Intellectual History of Women

The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume are ten essays which address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, the author starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with a personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its scholars.