America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Name: America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
Price: 10.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Gail Collins
ISBN: 9780061227226

America's Women features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work.

She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke, then spans wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, describing the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders."