Description
Book SynopsisA comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century
Trade Review“An ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries.
Woman is exhaustively researched and finely written.”—Alexandra Jacobs,
New York Times “Lillian Faderman’s is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of ‘woman’ with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women.”—Ellen Carol DuBois, author of
Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote “A rewarding read. Pioneering scholar Lillian Faderman illuminates how concepts of female difference and inferiority stubbornly persist and captures the ongoing struggles of women to free themselves from the idea of ‘woman.’”—Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
“A sweeping history of conceptions of women by themselves and others told through fascinating stories that get the reader to turn the page.”—Claudia Goldin, author of
Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity “A wide-ranging, deeply researched, and very well written survey of how the idea of woman has been deployed over more than three centuries of American history.”—Susan Ware, author of
Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote “With dazzling scholarship and monumental vision Faderman has, with illuminating detail and persuasive argument, brilliantly woven a rich tapestry of how the American ‘woman’ has been created and re-created over centuries.”—Michael Bronski, author of
A Queer History of the United States
