A Companion to American Women's History

The most important collection of essays on American Women's History
This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second edition updates essays related to Indigenous women, slavery, the American Revolution, Civil War, the West, activism, labor, popular culture, civil rights, and feminism. It also includes a discussion of laws, capitalism, gender identity and transgender experience, welfare, reproductive politics, oral history, as well as an exploration of the perspectives of free Blacks and migrants and refugees.
Spanning from the 15th through the 21st centuries, chapters show how historians of women, gender, and sexuality have challenged established chronologies and advanced new understandings of America's political, economic, intellectual and social history.
This edition also features a new essay on the history of women's suffrage to coincide with the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment, as well as a new article that carries issues of women, gender and sexuality into the 21st century.

• Includes twenty-three original essays by leading scholars in American women's, gender and sexuality history
• Highlights the most recent scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field
• Substantially updates the first edition with new authors and topics that represent the expanding fields of women, gender, and sexuality
• Engages issues of race, ethnicity, region, and class as they shape and are shaped by women's and gender history
• Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including Native women, colonial law and religion, slavery and freedom, women's activism, work and welfare, culture and capitalism, the state, feminism, digital and oral history, and more

A Companion to American Women's History, Second Edition is an ideal book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying American/U.S. women's history, history of gender and sexuality, and African American women's history. It will also appeal to scholars of these areas at all levels, as well as public historians working in museums, archives, and historic sites.


Nancy A. Hewitt, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books and edited collections, including Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds, and No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism. She is also co-author of Exploring American Histories: A Survey with Sources.
Anne M. Valk, PhD, is Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and Executive Director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. She wrote the award-winning, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. and co-authored Living with Jim Crow: African Americans and Memories of the Segregated South. She is also co-editor of U.S. Women's History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood.