Toward an Intellectual History of Women

Essays By Linda K. Kerber

Linda K. Kerber

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807846544, 9780807823484
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620404
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

As a leading historian of women, Linda K. Kerber has played an instrumental role in the radical rethinking of American history over the past two decades. The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this remarkable collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume is gathered some of Kerber's finest work. Ten essays address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, she starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's sophisticated contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with an eloquent and personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a vital field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its leading scholars.

INDEX

Abolitionists, 77–78, 228

Abortion, 12, 308

Adams, Abigail, 64; on women and politics, 15, 57, 263, 287; on men, 57, 129, 205–6, 265–66; on Common Sense, 107n

Adams, Hannah, 85n

Adams, John, 108; and women’s political rights, 37, 57, 129, 206, 287; on property qualifications, 88; on “spirit of liberty,” 95, 264; and Common Sense, 107n; and Murray’s Gleaner essays, 116, 119; and Patience Wright, 127; on republicanism, 131; and James Sullivan, 282, 287

Adams, Rev. John, 234, 235

Adams, John Quincy, 280

Adams, Randolph G.: Political Ideas of the American Revolution, 132

Adams, Sam, 282n

Addams, Jane, 184, 191 (ill.), 249; “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” 192; Twenty Years at Hull House, 192

Advice literature, 129

African Americans. SeeBlacks

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, 217–18

Almond, Gabriel, 59n

Almshouses, 89, 109

Ambition, 90, 121, 211, 241–42

American army: women in, 70, 71, 72–74; recruitment and training, 78

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 12, 304

American Historical Association (AHA), 9; Rose Committee Report, 9, 10–12

American Indians, 173

American Magazine, 24, 33

American Medical Association, 184

American Philosophical Society, 29

American Quarterly, 14

American Revolution: and “republican motherhood,” 16, 174; effects on gender roles and relations, 38, 68, 69, 95, 96, 98, 173–75, 301; women’s participation in, 63, 64–69, 70–74, 79, 84, 102, 103, 128, 206; and social hierarchies, 69–70, 74–75, 98, 146; and women’s political rights, 84, 87–88, 90–91, 96–99, 128, 174–75; and historical cycles, 93; and patriarchalism, 102, 262, 263–64, 265–66; and republican ideology, 111, 12...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. FINDING WOMEN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
• II. TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF WOMEN
• III. FINDING GENDER IN AMERICAN CULTURE
• Index
• Permissions
• Gender and American Culture