In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed "Sisterhood is powerful," and women's historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach--acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful--women's historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.     The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women's history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches.   Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women's immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women's history.  

"This collection of essays, all by Russian scholars, is the first of its kind to address a broad English-speaking audience. It presents the theories and methodologies employed by Russian national historiography to make sense of Russian gender and women's history. The essays in this volume discuss women's and gender history in Russia, highlighting sensitive areas in the Russian academic community and in Russian society in general. The book appears in the context of an intense backlash against the liberal ideology of Russian modernization. That backlash has manifested itself in constant and persistent calls for traditional values and the rejection of gender as a concept, which many Russians believe entails the ability to choose one's sex. Women are expected to return to their "natural state" as mothers and housekeepers; feminism has once again become a perceived cause of bad motherhood, is seen as a general threat to the family, and is even held responsible for "unnatural vices." These attacks on gender and feminism as academic concepts, together with their further politicization, underscore the importance of women's history in Russia. They also force scholars to reflect on the reasons and roots of such hostility. Furthermore, they bring up immanent questions about the nature and origins of these traditional values. These are the questions this books answers."

Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women's histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women's and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

The world is full of women we don't know whose stories have been overlooked or airbrushed from history.Often faced with limited life choices, this book proudly showcases those women who took matters into their own hands and became forces to be reckoned with.These are women you SHOULD know about. Love them or loathe them, they made their mark. From cross dressing soldiers to scheming mistresses and courtesans, Warriors and Wenches offers up an indulgent romp through centuries of history, from widows turned tank drivers bent on bloody vengeance and fierce martial arts fighters, to women who magnificently and outrageously turned their social lot in life to their advantage: the mistresses, courtesans and uniquely French maitresse-en-titres who wielded incredible power and influence in the sumptuous courts of Europe.Warriors and Wenches doesn't seek to decide whether these women were 'good' or 'bad;' we'll leave it up to you to make up your own minds. But these are just some of the women who, through military skill, incredible courage and loyalty, scandal, poison plots and sexual debauchery, have crossed over into the realm of legend and myth and become powerful symbols of feminist power."When the destiny of a nation is in a woman's bedroom, the best place for the historian is in the antechamber." ~Charles-Augustin Sainte-Reuve

A compelling account of how women shaped the common law right to privacy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Drawing on a wealth of original research, Jessica Lake documents how the advent of photography and cinema drove women--whose images were being taken and circulated without their consent--to court. There they championed the creation of new laws and laid the groundwork for America's commitment to privacy. Vivid and engagingly written, this powerful work will draw scholars and students from a range of fields, including law, women's history, the history of photography, and cinema and media studies.]]>

Why bother to invert the history of Western women? We must do so to fight an insidious, fallacious assumption that patriarchy is universal and eternal, and we must do so to nullify the amnesic effects of Domesticity's potent semantics. We must resist this two-pronged attack that reduces women to powerless incubators. When we invert the patriarchal hegemony and center the ordinary woman as empowered owner and hostess to her life story, we find women, rich and poor, who chose when, where, how and if they would cooperate with the rules of patriarchy, rules often supported by other women. Our heroines demanded the rights due them for properly occupying their societal place in the home, in church or on the street corner. We find this to be consistent across time and space. We start in the seventeenth century with European women on three continents: Europe, North Africa and North America. We present Isabel de Jesus, Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston, and soldiers' wives, widows and femes sole of the Tangier and Gibraltar garrisons. Here we have women of different religions, language groups and social classes, and they all used patriarchal laws to protect their rights. We move across time to the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland, Puerto Rico and the United States where we find women as wives of rich men in Toledo's Woman Suffrage Association, as middle class professionals in the civilizing missions of the Christian Church in Puerto Rico, the magdalen homes of Ireland, and the eugenics movement in the US, and as sex workers serving tradesmen in Ireland. Again, these women manipulated the legal systems and demanded the powers due them from legislators, mission boards, and judges. The microhistories of women in this volume adulterate the assumption of universal and eternal patriarchy. As these women claimed the rights due them for properly occupying their prescribed social roles, they also created alliances with men who partnered with them in their feminist projects. Why should we invert Women's history with microhistory? We must do so to liberate men and women from fallacious, patriarchal oppression.