Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

The emergence of the current field of women's history was contemporaneous with the rise of interest in family history and demographic history. While these fields are separable because of their differing emphases and because of differing practitioners' goals or interests, their subject matters often overlap. Analysis and interpretation of women's domestic lives has required investigation into the same data of household structure and family relationships over time that family and demographic history explore. This volume includes signal early articles in the history of the family, which helped to inform the emerging field of women's history. It represents also the continuing stream of articles on women's social history treating marital or parent-child relationships, or the nonconforming instance of the single woman, in different regions and among many ethnic and racial groups in the U.S.

The laws of marriage, divorce, property transmission and child custody, made by men, have powerfully conditioned women's lives. In the tradition of the English common law a woman by marrying, buried her own legal status in that of her husband: in law she could neither own property, sue in court, or even write a will of her own. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth these legal "disabilities" as women who crusaded to repeal to them called them, were gradually changed, so that by the time women became voters in 1920, the law regarded women, even married women, as individuals similar to men in most although not all ways. This volume includes articles which treat women's legal status and change over time in women's interaction with the legal structures of marriage, divorce and property.

Between 1970 and 1990 there has been an evolving discussion of theory and method in women's history, which the articles in this volume represent. The articles span from the first articulation of a framework to be designated "women's history", to very recent discussion of the concept of gender in history. Also included are critiques of standard American history texts from the perspective of women's history, controversies among women's historians concerning the definition of the field, and assessments of its distinctiveness as compared to family and social history.

Today, with the majority of adult women in the paid labour force, the issue of women's combination of work and family life-work and motherhood, in particular - is much in the news, as though it were an unprecedented phenomenon. Historians of women have shown, however, that women's combination of productive economic activity and childbearing has been more the norm than the exception in past time; only a small stratum of prosperous women, for a relatively short period of years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were ever able to devote themselves wholly to child care and housekeeping. What is unprecedented, in our own time, is the extent to which women's work is performed outside of the household rather than in or around it, and for a wage or salary rather than for barter or "in-kind" services. The articles in the volume detail how women of various ethnic and racial groups have managed the necessary combination of economic and familial tasks, in both rural and urban settings. The coverage, from Native American and slave women in the early nineteenth century, through pioneers and immigrants, to modern college graduates in the mid-twentieth century, gives a compelling overview of the persistent weightiness and consequence of women's economic roles.