Major Problems in American Women's History: Documents and Essays

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. Major Problems in American Women's History is the leading reader for courses on the history of American women, covering the subject's entire chronological span. While attentive to the roles of women and the details of women's lives, the authors are especially concerned with issues of historical interpretation and historiography.

Sharon Block is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She received an M.A./A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Princeton University before taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Her writing on race and rape has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and her book, RAPE AND SEXUAL POWER IN EARLY AMERICA, was published in 2006. She has been at the forefront of data mining for humanities research, including a published analysis of more than half a million historical abstracts. Her second monograph explores eighteenth-century constructions of gender and race in colonists' descriptions of the people around them. Professor Block teaches courses on the histories of early America, sexuality, race, colonialism and crime.

Ruth M. Alexander is Professor of History at Colorado State University and an Affiliate Faculty member with the CSU Public Lands History Center. She received her B.A. from the City College of New York and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Professor Alexander is the author of THE "GIRL PROBLEM": FEMALE SEXUAL DELINQUENCY IN NEW YORK, 1900-1935 (1998). She has won research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Schlesinger Library, New York State Library, and Western Association of Women Historians. Her scholarly interests center on modernity's distortion of the natural in the 1960s writings of Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan. She teaches courses in women's history and environmental history.

Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She teaches courses in the history of exploration, early America, women’s history, Atlantic world and American Revolution. Her many books have won awards from the Society of American Historians, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and English-Speaking Union. Her book, FOUNDING MOTHERS & FATHERS, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 her book SEPARATED BY THEIR SEX: WOMEN IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN THE COLONIAL ATLANTIC WORLD was published. She was the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge in 2005-2006. The Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation and Huntington Library, among others, have awarded her fellowships. Dr. Norton has served on the National Council for the Humanities and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has appeared on Book TV, the History and Discovery Channels, PBS and NBC as a commentator on Early American history.