This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women’s history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, ''intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.'' The book is dedicated to pioneering women’s historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works.

The contributors include:

Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship
Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era
Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century
Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939
Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century
Nell Irvin Painter on ''soul murder'' as a legacy of slavery
Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health
Estelle B. Freedman on women’s institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters
William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein
Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States
Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women
Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation’s efforts to promulgate women’s history
Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war
Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties
Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women’s history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, ''intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.'' The book is dedicated to pioneering women’s historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works.

The contributors include:

Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship
Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era
Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century
Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939
Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century
Nell Irvin Painter on ''soul murder'' as a legacy of slavery
Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health
Estelle B. Freedman on women’s institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters
William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein
Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States
Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women
Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation’s efforts to promulgate women’s history
Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war
Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties
Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia