Woman: The American History of an Idea

by Lillian Faderman

Overview

A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

“Exhaustively researched and finely written.”—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

“An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.

This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. Noting that every attempt to cement a particular definition of “woman” has been met with resistance, Faderman also shows that successful challenges to the status quo are often short-lived. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300271140
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Pages:	600
Sales rank:	642,387
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Lillian Faderman is professor emerita at California State University, Fresno. Her books on the history of gender and sexuality have won numerous prizes, including seven Lambda Literary Awards, two Stonewall Book Awards, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. She lives in La Jolla, CA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Tyranny and Mutability in the Idea of Woman 1

1 Woman in Seventeenth-Century America 11

2 Woman, Lady, and Not a Woman in the Eighteenth Century 36

3 Daughters of Liberty: Woman and a War of Independence 62

4 Woman Enters the Public Sphere: The Nineteenth Century 86

5 Nineteenth-Century Woman Leaves Home 115

6 Woman Goes to College and Enters the Professions 142

7 The Struggle to Transform Woman into Citizen 168

8 The "New Woman" and "new women" in a New Century 198

9 "It's Sex o'Clock in America" 224

10 Woman on a Seesaw. The Depression and World War II 249

11 Sending Her Back to the Place Where God Had Set Her: Woman in the 1950s 276

12 A New "New Woman" Emerges (Carrying Baggage): The 1960s 302

13 Radical Women and the Radical Woman 332

14 How Sex Spawned a New "Woman": The 1990s 360

15 "Woman" in a New Millennium 384

Epilogue: The End of "Woman"? 414

Notes 425

Acknowledgments 535

Illustration Credits 537

Index 539

Illustrations follow page 248

Editorial Reviews

An ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. Woman is exhaustively researched and finely written.”—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

“An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“A comprehensive and lucid overview of the ongoing campaign to free women from ‘the tyranny of old notions.’”—Publishers Weekly

“Faderman’s engaging style defies the fear of this being a dense, obtuse, textbook. It isn’t. It’s a page-turner with regular ‘you ;gotta be kidding’ moments triggering head-in-hands reactions.”—New York Journal of Books

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews

“Fascinating. . . . Few books are timelier than Woman. . . . Will be a rite of passage for generations of LGBTQ folk.”—Kathi Wolfe, Washington Blade

“Faderman, a renowned scholar of gender and sexuality, has crafted a detailed, fascinating discussion of the social, legal, and political meanings of the term woman in the US.”—K. B. Nutter, Choice

“A fast-paced journey in women’s and gender history from seventeenth-century America through the early twenty-first century. . . . Woman offers an excellent analysis of sexuality and gender, drawing from Faderman’s extensive research and her expertise.”—Joan M. Johnson, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Lillian Faderman’s is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of ‘woman’ with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women.”—Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote

“A rewarding read. Pioneering scholar Lillian Faderman illuminates how concepts of female difference and inferiority stubbornly persist and captures the ongoing struggles of women to free themselves from the idea of ‘woman.’”—Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania

“A sweeping history of conceptions of women by themselves and others told through fascinating stories that get the reader to turn the page.”—Claudia Goldin, author of Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity

“A wide-ranging, deeply researched, and very well written survey of how the idea of woman has been deployed over more than three centuries of American history.”—Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

“With dazzling scholarship and monumental vision Faderman has, with illuminating detail and persuasive argument, brilliantly woven a rich tapestry of how the American ‘woman’ has been created and re-created over centuries.”—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States

From the Publisher

★ 2022-01-05
The distinguished feminist historian analyzes how the concept of woman has evolved over almost 500 years of American history.

Woman, Faderman argues, is a patriarchal concept with roots that run deep. Even the most liberal views of (White) womanhood, such as those of 17th-century Puritan minister Roger Williams, centered around woman as the “weaker Vessel…more fitted to keep and order the House and Children.” Wealthy women, especially widows, had slightly more agency, but a woman’s place, then and in the centuries that followed, was in the home. As the states expanded into Native American land, that idea was forced on Native women throughout the territories. At the same time, enslaved women suffered both race and gender marginalization that, as Angela Davis noted, “annulled” their womanhood. By the 19th century, women transformed the chains that bound them to woman into what Faderman calls the “visas” that took them out of the home and allowed them to “claim a voice in the public square.” Yet even as females—largely middle-class and White—gained greater access to public life in the 20th century, patriarchy, in the guise of medical science, denounced independent-minded women for violating gender norms. By the 1980s, Faderman engagingly demonstrates, thinkers like the radical lesbian feminist Monique Wittig called woman a dangerous patriarchal “myth” and helped liberate the concept of gender—and gender-prescribed behaviors—from sexuality. Faderman ably brings the discussion into the 21st century and the present day, when nonbinary conceptions of gender are gaining further acceptance in the mainstream even as the resolutely patriarchal system—perfectly embodied by Donald Trump and his cohorts—continues to fight against anything other than a strictly binary gender structure. This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.

An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience.

Kirkus Reviews