CONTENTS

Epigraph

Introduction

1. The First Colonists: Voluntary and Otherwise

2. The Women of New England: Goodwives, Heretics, Indian Captives, and Witches

3. Daily Life in the Colonies: Housekeeping, Children, and Sex

4. Toward the Revolutionary War

5. 1800–1860: True Women, Separate Spheres, and Many Emergencies

6. Life Before the Civil War: Cleanliness and Corsetry

7. African American Women: Life in Bondage

8. Women and Abolition: White and Black, North and South

9. The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers

10. Women Go West: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Fair but Frail

11. The Gilded Age: Stunts, Shorthand, and Study Clubs

12. Immigrants: Discovering the “Woman’s Country”

13. Turn of the Century: The Arrival of the New Woman

14. Reforming the World: Suffrage, Temperance, and Other Causes

15. The Twenties: All the Liberty You Can Use in the Backseat of a Packard

16. The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt

17. World War II: “She’s Making History, Working for Victory”

18. The Fifties: Life at the Far End of the Pendulum

19. The Sixties: The Pendulum Swings Back with a Vengeance

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms



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