The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers, illuminating how they entered and navigated higher education, a world concerned with - and dominated by - whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish the fields of African American and African American women's history.

Award-winning women scholars from nontraditional backgrounds have often negotiated an academic track that leads through figurative--and sometimes literal--minefields. Their life stories offer inspiration, but also describe heartrending struggles and daunting obstacles. Reshaping Women's History presents autobiographical essays by eighteen accomplished scholar-activists who persevered through poverty or abuse, medical malpractice or family disownment, civil war or genocide. As they illuminate their own unique circumstances, the authors also address issues all-too-familiar to women in the academy: financial instability, the need for mentors, explaining gaps in resumes caused by outside events, and coping with gendered family demands, biases, and expectations. Eye-opening and candid, Reshaping Women's History shows how adversity, and the triumph over it, enriches scholarship and spurs extraordinary efforts to affect social change. Contributors: Frances L. Buss, Nupur Chaudhuri, Lisa DiCaprio, Julie R. Enszer, Catherine Fosl, Midori Green, La Shonda Mims, Stephanie Moore, Grey Osterud, Barbara Ransby, Linda Reese, Annette Rodriguez, Linda Rupert, Kathleen Sheldon, Donna Sinclair, Rickie Solinger, Pamela Stewart, Waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy, and Ann Marie Wilson.

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.' The book is dedicated to pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works. The contributors include: Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939 Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century Nell Irvin Painter on 'soul murder' as a legacy of slavery Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health Estelle B. Freedman on women's institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation's efforts to promulgate women's history Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

As a leading historian of women, Linda K. Kerber has played an instrumental role in the radical rethinking of American history over the past two decades. The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in women's history are widely recognized, and in this remarkable collection of essays, Kerber's essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume is gathered some of Kerber's finest work. Ten essays address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, she starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerber's sophisticated contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with an eloquent and personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the author's ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a vital field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its leading scholars.

Looks at the works of women historians, from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, and their impact on the social and cultural history of the United States.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study. This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism. According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.

Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.