Alice Kessler-harris

U.S. History As Women's History: New Feminist Essays - Gender and American Culture Alice Kessler-harris New edition

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-441) and index. Review Quotes: "This is history that matters, that makes a difference."Journal of American History""Review Quotes: There are many lessons for historians and political activists in this valuable collection."Women's Review of Books"Review Quotes: "An impressive contribution to the pursuit of knowledge. Buy it, read it, assign it, and use it."North Carolina Historical Review""Review Quotes: "This is a collection of work of inestimable worth and interest, valuable for all American historians, not only feminists."Journal of Southern History""Review Quotes: This is history that matters, that makes a difference."Journal of American History"Review Quotes: An impressive contribution to the pursuit of knowledge. Buy it, read it, assign it, and use it."North Carolina Historical Review"Review Quotes: This is a collection of work of inestimable worth and interest, valuable for all American historians, not only feminists."Journal of Southern History"Commendation Quotes: "U. S. History as Women's History" is an impressive contribution to the pursuit of knowledge. Buy it, read it, assign it, and use it.--"North Carolina Historical Review"Commendation Quotes: An evocative and stirring collection of essays. Every scholar and activist concerned about public life and social change, feminist consciousness and empowerment, civil rights, human rights, and dignity for all people, will want to read and ponder this book.--Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of "Eleanor Roosevelt"Commendation Quotes: "U. S. History as Women's History" is theoretically literate without being highly theorized. . . . It demonstrates the extraordinary importance of analyzing gender within historically specific contexts also shaped by race, class, political structures, and culture. . . . The result is a richly dynamic view of the past, which no brief summary can convey. . . . This is history that matters, that makes a difference.--"Journal of American History"Commendation Quotes: There are many lessons for historians and political activists in this valuable collection. It succeeds in celebrating the power of gender analysis and demonstrating that women's contribution must be seen and taught as an essential part of U. S. history.--"Women's Review of Books"Commendation Quotes: [An] exciting collection of feminist writings by some of the most acute historians writing today. . . . This is a collection of work of inestimable worth and interest, valuable for all American historians, not only feminists.--"Journal of Southern History"Commendation Quotes: This evocative and stirring collection of essays to honor Gerda Lerner, a foremost pioneer of feminist and multiracial history, does full justice to the range of her challenging vision: remove barriers, think boldly, understand power, end the silences, transform the margins, make a difference. Like the woman it honors, this collection is a work of profound integrity: courageous, path-breaking, powerful, important. Every scholar and activist concerned about public life and social change, feminist consciousness and empowerment, civil rights, human rights, and dignity for all people, will want to read and ponder this book.--Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of "Eleanor Roosevelt" [short version; doesn't include Gerda Lerner refs; for ads & pb]Publisher Marketing: 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 the American Revolution 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." State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood as the subjects of women's history, but they are the themes that permeate this book. Individually and together, the essays explore how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge and to meld these into accepted practice and state policy. They show how the study of women's history has moved from the discovery of women to an evaluation of social processes and institutions. Publisher Marketing: 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.' State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood as the subjects of women's history, but they are the themes that permeate this book. Individually and together, the essays explore how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge and to meld these into accepted practice and state policy. They show how the field of women's history has moved from the discovery of women to an evaluation of social processes and institutions. 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. from the book The contributors to this volume grew up into a world in which history was rigidly limited. It paid little attention to social relationships, to issues of race, to the concerns of the poor, and virtually none to women. Women figured in it for their ritual status, as wives of presidents like Abigail Adams or Dolly Madison; for their role as spoilers, from the witches of Salem to Mary Todd Lincoln, or for their sacrificial caregiving, like Clara Barton or Dorothea Dix. Even when women like Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, and Eleanor Roosevelt were named by historians, the radical substance of their work and their lives was routinely ignored. A very few historians of women--Eleanor Flexner, Julia Cherry Spruill, Caroline Ware--worked on the margins of the profession, their contributions unappreciated, and their writing vulnerable to the charge of irrelevance. Contents Part 1. State Formation 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 Part 2. Power 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 Part 3. Knowledge 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"

Contributor Bio:  Kerber, Linda K Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and professor of history at the University of Iowa. She is coeditor of "U. S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays" and author of "Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber". Contributor Bio:  Sklar, Kathryn Kish Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton, is author of "Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900". Contributor Bio:  Kessler-Harris, Alice Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of history at Rutgers University, is author of "Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States".