U.S. Women's History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood

by Leslie Brown, Jacqueline Castledine, Anne Valk, Deborah Gray White, Nancy A. Hewitt

Overview

In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.  
 
The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women’s history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches.
 
Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women’s immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women’s history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813575834
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	01/25/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

LESLIE BROWN was a professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Urban South, the editor of Voices of Freedom II: A Documentary History, from Emancipation to the Present, and (with Anne Valk) coeditor of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South. 
 
JACQUELINE CASTLEDINE teaches interdisciplinary studies in the University Without Walls at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also directs program innovation for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She is the coeditor of Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945-1985 and the author of Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Justice. 
 
ANNE VALK is the associate director for public humanities at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  She is the author of Radical Sisters: Women’s Liberation and the Black Freedom Movement in Washington, D.C., 1968-1980 and the coeditor (with Leslie Brown) of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South. 
 

Table of Contents

Contents
 
Foreword
Deborah Gray White
 
Preface: A Feminist Way of Being—Celebrating Nancy A. Hewitt
Paula J. Giddings
 
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
 
Part One  Searching for Sisterhood
 
Chapter 1 Cleaning Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers in the Northeast United States, 1865-1930
Danielle Phillips
 
Chapter 2 “By Any Means Necessary”: The National Council of Negro Women’s Flexible Loyalties in the Black Power Era
Rebecca Tuuri
 
Chapter 3 “This Is Like Family”: Activist-Survivor Histories and Motherwork
Ariella Rotramel
 
Part Two  Challenging Established Narratives
 
Chapter 4 The Maid and Mr. Charlie: Rosa Parks and the Struggle for Black Women’s Bodily Integrity
Danielle L. McGuire
 
Chapter 5 Cold War History as Women’s History
Jacqueline Castledine
 
Chapter 6 “I’m Gonna Get You”: Black Womanhood and Jim Crow Justice in the Post-Civil Rights South
Christina Greene
 
Part Three:  Rethinking Feminism
 
Chapter 7 Gender Expression in Antebellum America: Accessing the Privileges and Freedoms of White Men
Jen Manion
 
Chapter 8 When a “Sister” Is a Mother: Maternal Thinking and Feminist Action, 1967-1980
Andrea Estepa
 
Chapter 9 Contested Geography: The Campaign against Pornography and the Battle for Urban Space in Minneapolis
Kirsten Delegard
 
Chapter 10 Remembering Together: Take Back the Night and the Public Memory of Feminism
Anne Valk
 
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index 
 

Editorial Reviews

This is women’s history at its finest. With essays on diverse women, the anthology at once builds upon generations of scholarship as it pushes the field in exciting new directions.”
 

Professor of History, New York University - Michele Mitchell

This indispensable volume collects the most current scholarship on gender and U.S. history.  The essays are a testament to the vibrancy of the field of women's history and illustrate the range of methodological and theoretical innovations that continue to drive the field."
 

author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery - Jennifer L. Morgan

This is women’s history at its finest. With essays on diverse women, the anthology at once builds upon generations of scholarship as it pushes the field in exciting new directions.”
 

From the Publisher