Linda K. Kerber - Böcker

Women's history has never been as important as it is now. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 has made it increasingly urgent for students to understand the long struggle women have waged for the right to make decisions about themselves and their bodies. The source-based approach of Women's America allows instructors to show students how ideas about women, gender, sexuality, and human rights have evolved over time -- in both law and in wider American society.The 10th edition of Women's America: Refocusing the Past remains an indispensable text for the study of US women's history. Featuring a mix of primary-source documents, scholarly articles, and illustrations, Women's America introduces students to many of the leading theorists and historians in the discipline. The 10th edition offers more material on the impact of ethnicity on American culture, the experiences of Indigenous women, the roles that women have played in the creation of male-dominated structures, the international dimensions of women's lives, and the conflicts over reproductive justice, sexuality, and personal freedom that have riven modern American society.

The Federalists of Jefferson's time have been described by historians as complainers and obstructionists. A very different picture evolves from this book, which the author calls "a reconsideration of American political conversation in the early national reriod." Mrs. Kerber shows that the rift between Federalists and Jeffersonians was caused by differences in ideology. The Federalists, according to the author, feared that an ordered world was disintegrating and that the sources of stability were being undermined by Jeffersonian concepts of science and education, of law and democracy, and by social arrangements founded on slavery. The book demonstrates how the rolitical differences of the two groups were reflected in all cultural forms and issues.By a skillful use of quotations from varied sources—newspapers, letters, literary works, congressional debates—Mrs. Kerber lets her rrotagonists speak for themselves. The work has current significance because Federalist beliefs emphasized the rrecariousness of popular democracy and the difficulty of maintaining a stable social order-both widesrread concerns of Americans today.

The Federalists of Jefferson's time have been described by historians as complainers and obstructionists. A very different picture evolves from this book, which the author calls "a reconsideration of American political conversation in the early national reriod." Mrs. Kerber shows that the rift between Federalists and Jeffersonians was caused by differences in ideology. The Federalists, according to the author, feared that an ordered world was disintegrating and that the sources of stability were being undermined by Jeffersonian concepts of science and education, of law and democracy, and by social arrangements founded on slavery. The book demonstrates how the rolitical differences of the two groups were reflected in all cultural forms and issues.By a skillful use of quotations from varied sources—newspapers, letters, literary works, congressional debates—Mrs. Kerber lets her rrotagonists speak for themselves. The work has current significance because Federalist beliefs emphasized the rrecariousness of popular democracy and the difficulty of maintaining a stable social order-both widesrread concerns of Americans today.

Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The ""women of the army"" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. ""I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government,"" wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of ""Republican Motherhood"" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.

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.