The Practice of U.S. Women s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues

In the last several decades, U.S. women’s history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women’s history itself.

In this collection of seventeen original essays on women’s lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials’ attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women’s mobilization for civil and labor rights.

S. Jay Kleinberg is director of the Centre for American, Transatlantic, and Caribbean History at Brunel University, London, England, where she is a professor of history.

Eileen Boris holds the Hull Chair and is chair of the women’s studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Vicki L. Ruiz is a professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies and interim dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.