WOMEN IN HISTORY: SELECTED BACKGROUND READINGS

Feminist Page

Foregrounding Women in History in Children's and Young Adult Books Page

Examining history from the standpoint of women scholars provides the reader with greater depth and insight into the roles women played in the development of world-wide cultures. The absence of women in history too often continues and we need to study carefully what contributions women made to society over the centuries.

Adams, Janus. Sister Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African American Women’s Lives. New York: Wiley, 2000.

Albers, Patricia and Beatrice Medicine. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.

Allen, Marjorie N. What Are Little Girls Made Of? A Guide to Female Role Models in Children’s Books.  New York: Facts on File, 1999.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992.

Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Andaya, Barbara Watson, ed. Other  Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia. Honolulu, HI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.

Anderson, Bonnie S. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. Volumes I and II. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Antler, Joyce. The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Armitage, Susan and Elizabeth Jameson, eds. The Women's West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Armitage, Susan and Sherna Berger Gluck. “Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An Exchange.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Vol. 19 No. 3, 1-12.

Bashevkin, Sylvia B. Women of the Defensive: Living Through Conservative Times. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Bataille Gretchen and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Bataille, Gretchen, and Others, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Ames, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1980.

Baumgardner, Jennifer. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Black, Cheryl. The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Blair, Karen J., ed.  Women in Pacific Northwest History. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Blenz-Clucas, Beth. Ideas for Using Video to Teach Women's History: A Resource Guide. Madison, WI: Her Own Words: Women's History and Literature Media, 1992.

Boardman, Kay. “A Material Girl in a Material World: The Fashionable Female Body in Victorian Women’s Magazines.” Journal of Victorian Culture Vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 98), 93-111.

Boris, Eileen and Nupur Chaudhuri, ed. Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, The Political, The Professional. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Borzello, Frances. A World of our Own: Women as Artists Since the Renaissance.  New York: Watson-Guptill, 2000.

Breuer, William B. War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.

Bridenthal, Renate; Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner. Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Burkett, Elinor. The Right Women: Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “From Good Looks to Good Thoughts: Popular Women’s History and the Invention of Modernity.” Modern Philology. Vol.97 No1 (August 99), 46-76.

Cain, Chelsea, ed. Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1999.

Cass, Victoria Baldwin. Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

Chesler, Phyllis. Letters to a Young Feminist. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.

Collier-Thomas, Betty and U.P. Franklin, eds. Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Collins, Lisa Gail. The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Cordingly, David. Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History. New York: Random House, 2001.

Costa, Dora L. “From Mill Town to Board Room: The Rise of Women’s Paid Labor.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 14 No. 4 (Fall 2000), 101-123.

Cott, Nancy F. No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Crane, Cynthia. Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

Crew, Hilary. " The Making of a Heroine; a Feminist Approach to the Representation of Heroines in Selected Historical Novels," in Mosaics of Meaning: Enhancing the Intellectual Life of Young Adults through Story. ed. by Kay E. Vandergrift. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996, pp. 103-33.

Davis, Flora. Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Davis-Kimball, Jeannine. Warrior Women: An Archaeologists Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner, 2001.

Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Druett, Joan. She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Dubey, Georges and Michelle Perrot, eds. A History of Women in the West: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century. Volumes I - V. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992-.

Edwards, June. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform. Westport, CN: Greenwood, 2002.

Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Eisenmann, Linda. “Creating a Framework for Interpreting US Women’s Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexicography. History of Education. Vol 30 No. 5 (September 2001).

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America--A History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood: MS. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Feminist Historiography 1968-1993 Compiled by Georgia NeSmith, this is an annotated and comprehensive bibliography for the historiographical literature of America's women's history from 1968-1991.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Yuri Slezkine, eds. In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Freedman, Estelle. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine, 2002.

Freeman, Jo. A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Frost-Knappman, Elizabeth, Ed. American Journey: Women in America. CD-ROM for IBM only, contains primary source documents, 1995.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Morrow, 1984.

Gilbert, Sandra M. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2000.

Gleadle, Kathryn. British Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Goodwin, Joanne. Encyclopedia of Women in American History. Armouk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2002.

Grobman, Laurie. Teaching at the Crossroads: Cultures and Critical Perspectives in Literature by Women of Color. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2001.

Gunderson, Joan R. To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Gustafson, Melanie, ed. We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880-1960. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Hannigan, Jane Anne. "A Feminist Analysis of the Voices for Advocacy in Young Adult Services." Library Trends. Vol. 44 No.4 (Spring 1996): 851-74.

Hartman, Mary and Lois W. Banner, eds. Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Heinemann, Sue. Timelines of American Women's History. New York: Roundtree/Perigee, 1996.

Her History: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Famous American Women. Pilgrim New Media. CD-ROM for Windows PC and Macintosh, 1995.

Hildenbrand, Suzanne, ed. Reclaiming the American Library Past: Writing the Women In. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996.

Hine, Darlene Clark. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway, 1999.

Hine, Darlene Clark and Others, eds. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Press, 1993.

Holland, Mary Gardner. Our Army Nurses: Stories from Women in the Civil War. Roseville, MN: Edinborough, 1998.

Holm, Jeanne M. and Judith Bellafaire, eds. In Defense of a Nation: Service Women in World War II. Arlington, VA: Vandamere, 1998.

Howe, Florence. The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers. New York: Feminist Press, 2000.

Howes, Ruth. Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999.

Hunter, Tera W. To ‘Joy my Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

James, Joy. Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women: Civilizing the West? 1840-1880. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Kerber, Linda K. and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds. Women's America: Refocusing the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Kerber, Linda K., Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds. U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1995.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out of Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Kessler, Lauren. Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family. New York: Random House, 1993.

Kevane, Bridget A. Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Knoepflmacher, U.C. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Lawler, Jennifer. Encyclopedia of Women in the Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Larson, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Videocassette produced and directed by Susana Munoz and Lourdes Portilla. New York: Women Make Movies, 2001.

Leder, Jane Mersky. Grace and Glory: A Century of Women in the Olympics. Washington, DC: Triumph, 1996.

Lees, Clare A. Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

LeGates, Marlene. In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Leon, Vicki. Uppity Women of Medieval Times. Berkeley, CA: Conari, 1997.

Leon, Vicki. Uppity Women of the New World. Berkeley, Ca: Conari, 2001.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lerner, Gerda. ed. Black Women in White America. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

Lerner, Gerda. The Female Experience: An American Documentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 (paperback edition)

Lerner, Gerda. The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Lindenmeyer, Kriste. Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000.

Litoff, Judy Barrett and David C. Smith, eds. American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997.

Malson, Micheline R. and Others. Black Women in America: Social Studies Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Markus, Julia. Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Marshall, Susan E. Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Woman Suffrage. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

McCandless, Amy Thompson. The Past Is Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth Century American South. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

McElvaine, Robert S. Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

McEuen, Melissa A. Seeing America: Women Photographers Between the Wars. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

McFeely, Mary Drake. Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

McNamara, Jo Ann. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Miedzian, Myriam. Generations: A Century of Women Speak about their Lives. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Miles, Rosalind. Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women’s History of the World. New York: Three Rivers, 2001.

Mills, Kay. From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know About Women's History in America. New York: Plume, 1995.

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina Markell. Conduct Unbecoming to a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

More, Ellen Singer. Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Morgan, Carol E. Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835-1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Morton, Patricia. Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991.

Mulvey, Kate. Decades of Beauty: The History of 100 Years of Change in Clothes, Cosmetics, Underwear, Hairstyling, Media, and Women’s Place in Society. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

National Women's History Project. Las Mujeres: Mexican American/Chicana Women. Windsor, CA: National Women's History Project, 1991. Available as video.

O’Farrell, Brigid and Joyce L. Kombluh, eds. Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices, 1915-1975. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

O’Shea, Kathleen A. Women and the Death Penalty in the United States, 1900-1998. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

One Women, One Vote. PBS video on the women's suffrage, Educational Film Center, 1995, Produced by Ruth Pollak.

Opdycke, Sandra. The Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Passet, Joanne E. Cultural Crusdaers: Women Librarians in the American West--1900-1917.Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Perdue, Theda, ed. Sifters: Natives American Women’s Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Petro, Patrice. Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Plant, Sadie. Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. New York: Viking, 2000.

Roberts, Cokie. We Are our Mother’s Daughters. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Robinson, Jane. Parrot Pie for Breakfast: An Anthology of Women Pioneers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Robnett, Belinda. How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Romero, Mary and Abigail J. Steward, Women’s Untold Stories: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.

Rosenthal, Naomi Braun. Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln, NE: Univeristy of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Ruiz, Vicki and Ellen DuBois, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. 2nd. ed. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Has Feminism Changed Science? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Senier, Siobbhan. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Sherr, Lynn and Jurate Kazickas. Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women's Landmarks. New York: Time/Random House, 1994.

Showalter, Elaine. Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Skaine, Rosemarie. Women at War: Gender Issues of American Combat. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999.

Smith, Karen Patricia, ed. "Imagination and Scholarship: The Contributions of Women to American Youth Services and Literature," Library Trends. Vol. 44, No. 4 (Spring 1996):679-877.

Spain, Daphne. How Women Saved the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1997.

Summers, Barbara. Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed the Fashion Industry. New York: Amistad Press, 2001.

Theophano, Janet. Eat my Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Thompson, Kathleen and Hilary Mac Austin, eds. The Face of our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Tomblin, Barbara. G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996.

Tougas, Cecile, T., ed. Presenting Women Philosophers. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000.

Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Vandergrift, Kay E. "A Feminist Perspective on Multicultural Children's Literature in the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century," Library Trends. Vol. 41, No. 3 (Winter 1993): 354-77.

Vandergrift, Kay E. "Female Advocacy and Harmonious Voices: A History of Public Library Services and Publishing for Children in the United States," Library Trends. Vol. 44, No. 4 (Spring 1996): 683-718.

Vickery, Amanda, ed. Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Vivante, Bella, ed. Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.

Waal, Carla and Barbara Oliver Komer, eds. Hardship and Hope: Missouri Women Writing about their Lives, 1820-1920. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography. New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Walker, Nancy A. Shaping our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000.

Weatherford, Doris. A History of the American Suffragist Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998.

Weigand, Kate. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of the Women’s Movement. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Wertheim, Margaret. Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars. New York: Norton, 1997.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Women in American Life Video Series. Five videos from Civil War through 1977. National Women's History Project, Written and produced by Mary Ruthsdotter and Bonnie Eisenberg.

Woodford, Charlotte. “Women as Historians: The Case of Early Modern German Convents.” German Life and Letters. Vol. 53 No. 3 (July 99), 271-281.

Wosk, Julie. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Wynn, Rhoda. “Saints and Sinners: Women and the Practice of Medicine Throughout the Ages.” Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. 283 No. 5, p. 668-670.

Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Yoon, Taek-Lim. “Locality, Women, and History: Local History Research from a Feminist Perspective.” Korea Journal. Vol. 38 No. 2 (Summer 98), 82-104.

Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Yung, Judy. Chinese Women of America: A Pictorial History. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1986.

Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Zinsser, Judith P. History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Created September 15, 1995 and is continuously revised

SCILS, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey