America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
Gail Collins, 2003
HarperCollins
608 pp.<
ISBN-13: 9780061227226
Summary
America's Women tells the story of more than four centuries of history. It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America.
By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too.
"The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that wasaccepted by almost everybody of both genders."
Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 25, 1945
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Marquette University; M.A., University of
Massachusetts
Gail Collins was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first female Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Prior to that, she was an editorial board member and an op-ed columnist.
In January 2007 Collins stepped down as Editor to write a book; she returned to the Times to reprise her role as columnist six months later. Her column presently runs every Thursday and Saturday and usually covers contemporary American politics and other current events in a humorous or satirical light.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Gail Gleason, Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to the New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.
Collins also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau which operated from 1972 to 1977 and provided coverage of the state capital and Connecticut politics. When it was sold, the company served more than thirty weekly and daily newspaper clients.
Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics; America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines; The Millennium Book which she co-authored with her husband, CBS News producer Dan Collins; and most recently When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.
She also has been a journalism instructor at Southern Connecticut State University. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It is in grappling with that contortionism that Collins, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, reveals her evenhandedness. The 19th-century obstetrician bungled as much because of women's modesty as because of the constraints of his profession. If there is a villain in this tale she may just wear a skirt; as Collins sees it, we have repeatedly tripped ourselves up. The enemy is not so much the other half of the human race as the mixed messages, our love-hate relationship with hearth and home.
Stacy Schiff - New York Times
In her lively and readable survey of women in America, Gail Collins shows how ideology about gender roles always gives way to economic necessity. Women who are considered constitutionally unable to do men's work do men's work as soon as war comes and men are needed to fight it...Collins has an eye for such ironies and a good-humored way of presenting them.
Phyllis Rose - Washington Post
The basis of the struggle of American women, postulates Collins, "is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Today's issues—should women be in the fields, on the factory lines and in offices, or should they be at home, tending to hearth and family?—are centuries old, and Collins, editor of the New York Times's editorial page, not only expertly chronicles what women have done since arriving in the New World, but how they did it and why. Creating a compelling social history, Collins discovers "it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." These confusing messages are repeated over 400 years and are typified in the 1847 lecture of one doctor who stated that women's heads are "almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love" (ironically, around this time Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from an American medical school). The narratives are rich with direct quotes from both celebrated and common women, creating a clear picture of life in the 16th through 20th centuries, covering everyday (menstruation, birth control, cooking, cleanliness) and extraordinary (life during war, the abolition movement, fighting for the right to vote) topics. Beginning with Eleanor Dare and her 1587 sail to the colonies and ending with the 1970s, Collins's work is a fully accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable, primer of how American women have not only survived but thrived.... Her book deserves a wide readership and is smooth enough to engage almost any kind of reader, academic or not.
Publishers Weekly
Illuminating cultural history of American women from the first colonists to the present day. New York Times editorial page editor Collins has turned a veritable mountain of research into an exceptionally readable, lively account of the contradictions and conflicts that have shaped women’s roles in the US. Her central theme is "the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Both sexes, she states, have accepted mixed messages about women’s proper role, and our history is full of about-faces on the subject. In an anecdote-laden text often relying on diaries and other contemporary records, she recounts how colonial women were not just housewives, midwives, and innkeepers, but religious dissidents (Anne Hutchinson) and Indian fighters (Hannah Dustin). During the Revolution, some donned men’s clothing and joined the army, but more traveled with their soldier husbands, doing the cooking and washing, or stayed home and ran the family farm. Juliette Brier, who walked 100 miles through Death Valley carrying one child on her back and another in her arms while leading a third, epitomizes the endurance and spirit of pioneer women. But it’s not all heroics and hardship. Collins fills her pages with fascinating details of everyday life over four centuries, including how women dressed, managed personal hygiene, and raised children. The roles they played in the temperance, abolition, and suffrage movements, the effects of the Civil War on southern women, white and black, the lives of 19th-century immigrant women are all explored. Collins shows how women, kept out of the workplace during the Depression, were brought into it by necessity duringWWII. Their retreat to the home in the ’50s, the subsequent sexual revolution, and the rise of feminism may be more familiar dramas than the earlier history, but the details are no less absorbing. Informative and entertaining, full of vivid stories that reveal not only what women were doing but how they felt about it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The book says that for American women "the center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Do you agree?
2. Were the early colonial women very brave or easily led? If you had lived in 17th century England, would you have opted to stay home or brave the journey? Where would you have wanted to end up—in New England or Virginia?
3. America's Women seems to attribute the witch craze in Salem to "teenage girls in crisis who stumbled on a very bad but very effective way of trying to take control of their unhappy environment." Do you agree? The story can be told from any number of perspectives: economic, religious, social, psychological. Is any one, or combination, satisfactory?
4. When families moved from farms to the city after the Revolutionary War, women's role changed and their status fell. The whole concept of the True Woman who radiated goodness was an effort to raise their stature again. Was it a satisfactory strategy? Can you come up with alternatives?
5. There are two role models for women who wanted to have public lives in the early 19th centur—Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Blackwell. How did they differ? If you had been alive then, which would you have been like?
6. Women were the best clients for the growing medical profession in the period before the Civil War. Why do you think that was? How did it work out for them?
7. Some white Southern women had different views of slavery than their husbands. Why was that?
8. The book says the "emotional burden on middle-class black women in the 19th century was stupendous." Has this burden been duplicated in the 21st century?
9. The rise of department stores at the turn of the century meant a huge change for women—both as consumers and as workers. Why was that?
10. If you had been an immigrant around the turn of the century, what country would you have wanted to come from? Why?
11. Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to serve in Congress, and she wound up voting against not one, but both world wars. Do you approve or disapprove?
12. In the Twenties, women won freedom in areas like dress, dating and drinking but many lost interest in politics and "feminism" fell totally out of fashion. All in all, would you regard the decade as a step forward or back?
13. When women got the vote, the first president they helped elect was one of the worst—Warren Harding. How, if at all, does this reflect on suffrage?
14. Do you agree that Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important woman in American history? If not, who would you nominate?
15. Speaking about the American civilians during World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith said "Never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation." Do you agree?
16. In the 1950s, less than 10 percent of the population felt a person could live a happy life without being married. The status of single women seems to have gone up and down several times in our history. Why is that? Where do you think it is now?
17. Things changed so fast for women in the late 1960s. Why do you think that was? Will we ever go back to the way things were in the 1950s, when the full-time housewife was the universal American ideal?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)