Women in Early America

Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the RepublicWomen in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies.In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation.Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

A number of essays are particularly valuable in that they examine understudied areas of women's experiences...Other essays provide new insight into better-studied subjects., These essays reveal the exciting intellectual payoff of a transcultural approach to womens lives in the past. Not only will readers confront a richly varied cast of historical actors, but they will come away convinced that womens relationships to each other, to men, to the law, the economy, and culture were central to the experimentation and adaptation of colonialism and nation-building., Women in Early America, an ambitious series of eleven essays edited by Thomas A. Foster, offers a more compelling version of early America and its heroines. The collection attends to two lacunae at once by focusing on women, a group whose presence in the records is often hard to come by, to unearth overlooked and understudied figures only touched on in earlier research (if at all)., A first-rate collectionvivid, varied, and provocativethat expands our view of early America. The expert essays interrogate sources, challenge assumptions, reconstruct mindsets, and vault over boundaries of nation, region, status, and culture., I really think this book will become a landmark volume. Without losing sight of any of the complexities integral to our postmodern sensibilities, the authors have managed to return to a crucial but too often neglected subjectthe lived experiences of real women in Early America. Perhaps we can have it both ways after all.

Thomas A. Foster is Professor of History at Howard University, in Washington, DC, and author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America, and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past. He is also editor of Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality (NYU Press, 2007), New Men: Manliness in Early America (NYU Press, 2011), and Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America. Foster tweets at @ThomasAFoster.pasting Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History and Women's History at Baruch College. Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University.