Women's America: refocusing the past

From the Preface. Twenty-seven years ago, writing the preface for the second edition of Women's America, we observed that in the few years since the first edition, "an extraordinary amount of new scholarship has appeared, changing the way in which professional historians address the major issues in the field... The pace of scholarly development is so rapid that comparisons can appropriately be made to scientific fields, which are expected to change overnight, rather than to the leisured pace of traditional history." That observation is even truer today, as the history of women in the United States reaches out to embrace changing understandings of gender and to engage comparisons with other national histories. Recognizing the wider range of new scholarship, this eighth edition of Women's America includes some 23 new items, many on subjects new to these volumes, with enhanced coverage of women's transnational contacts and activities; sexual choices and dilemmas, including transsexuality; and women's lives in the West, the Midwest, and the South. Even more than all previous editions, Women's America gives fresh attention to the challenges of citizenship and its grounding in the law, now in global context. We have written a new, more succinct Introduction, reflection on the book's purposes and its readers' questions in the 32 years since Women's America was first published. We continue to offer an account of different stages in historians' inquiries into the history of women and gender in the United States. In it, we explain key terms and concepts, such as feminism, the social construction of gender, and intersectionality (the understanding that categories of difference, of race, ethnicity, class, able-bodiedness, sexual expression, culture, nationality, religion, and historical memory intersect and define one another). We give a few examples of how mainstream ideas about proper gender roles and women's and men's differing sexual drives have changed dramatically over the four centuries of US history. For example, today, sex (male/female) is increasingly seen as a spectrum. We stress that varied activism aimed at improving women's lives, expanding rights, and fulfilling goals of liberation occurred continuously throughout the nation's history -- and sometimes in unexpected places and ways. The introduction contains tips on using the book and a roadmap in terms of the book's major themes. Here and throughout the book, we invite students to join us in asking how we can find equality in an American society shaped, like all human societies, by differences (page [xix]).