Writing Women's Lives: American Women's History Through Letters and Diaries

The 69 selections in this volume are for the most part the voices of women who saw themselves not as inhabiting a separate and enclosed sphere but as coworkers, often but not always in specialized female tasks, in a common enterprise: tending fields, raising children, coping with the stresses of wartime. Some of the women here have written and acted demanding full partnership in the social institutions that they were expected to sustain mostly as subordinates. Together, the entries give a rich depiction of an American womanhood that, even when perceived by husbands, politicians, and scholars as the other, was a participant in a history committed, at least in theory, to equality.