Examines the everyday life of women in the United States during the 1800s, contrasting society's ideal view of women with their real lives.

Our image of nineteenth-century American women is generally divided into two broad classifications: victims and revolutionaries. This divide has served the purposes of modern feminists well, allowing them to claim feminism as the only viable role model for women of the nineteenth century. In All-American Girl, however, Frances B. Cogan identifies amid these extremes a third ideal of femininity: the “Real Woman.” Cogan's Real Woman exists in advice books and manuals, as well as in magazine short stories whose characters did not dedicate their lives to passivity or demand the vote. Appearing in the popular reading of middle-class America from 1842 to 1880, these women embodied qualities that neither the “True Women”—conventional ladies of leisure—nor the early feminists fully advocated, such as intelligence, physical fitness, self sufficiency, economic self-reliance, judicious marriage, and a balance between self and family. Cogan's All-American Girl reveals a system of feminine values that demanded women be neither idle nor militant.

Argues that most nineteenth century American women were neither helpless victims nor radical political activists, and discusses education, marriage, and work

From the Publisher: A new mother longing to write is judged "hysterical" and confined to her bedroom where she slowly loses herself in horrific fantasy. A young girl stirred by two beings--a handsome young man and an ethereal white heron--is forced to make a choice between them. A love affair quashed by convention ignites during a sudden storm. These tales of remarkable and ordinary lives in nineteenth-century America are told throughout women's voices that call out from the kitchen hearth, the solitary room, the prison cell. Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton, as well as by others less familiar, reveal a universe of emotions hidden beneath parochial scenes. American writers claimed the short story as their national genre in the nineteenth century, and women writers made it the most important outlet for their particular experiences. A unique selection, with an introduction, notes, selected criticism, and a chronology of the authors' lives and times.

In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and th

Victoria Woodhull is remembered as the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States—in 1872—and as an advocate of a single standard of morality for both sexes. We the Women describes a side of Woodhull less well known: the first woman stockbroker in America, she was successful on Wall Street while lambasting in her journal the railroads, insurance companies, and other special-interest groups. Stern offers biographical sketches of Belva Ann Lockwood, who fought for the right to practice law before the Supreme Court; Isabel C. Barrows, the first woman stenographer in the State Department; Rebecca Pennell Dean, criticized for not "knowing her place" when she joined a college faculty; Ellen H. Richards, the first university-trained chemist and a relentless worker for public health; Lucy Hobbs Taylor, who led women into the field of dentistry; Sarah G. Bagley, the first woman telegrapher; Rebecca Lukens, a premier captain of industry whose vision helped shape America's iron age; Mary Ann Lee, the ballerina who introduced Americans to revolutionary dances from abroad; Ann S. Stephen, the author of the first Beadle Dime Novel; Candace Wheeler, who brought women into the profession of home interior decoration; and Harriet Irwin, Louise Bethune, and Sophia G. Hayden, who paved the way for women to become professional architects. These nineteenth-century American women were the first to succeed in professions previously open only to men. Madeleine B. Stern has restored them richly to life in We the Women. The determination and intelligence of these women won for women a place in the arts, science and technology, education and the law, and business and industry. Among Stern's other books are Louisa May Alcott and The Life of Margaret Fuller.

A convenient handbook of dates, names, terms, and resources as well as a highly readable overview of the pivotal role of women in a century of profound political and social change. The authors emphasize areas in which scholars have identified important changes (such as suffrage and reform), topics in which researchers are now making great strides (such as racial, ethnic, religious, and regional diversity), and innovative and relatively recent explorations (for example, work on female sexuality).