In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach-acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful-women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.
Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women’s immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women’s history.
Contents
Foreword
Deborah Gray White
Preface: A Feminist Way of Being—Celebrating Nancy A. Hewitt
Paula J. Giddings
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One Searching for Sisterhood
Chapter 1 Cleaning Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers in the Northeast United States, 1865–1930
Danielle Phillips
Chapter 2 “By Any Means Necessary”: The National Council of Negro Women’s Flexible Loyalties in the Black Power Era
Rebecca Tuuri
Chapter 3 “This Is Like Family”: Activist-Survivor Histories and Motherwork
Ariella Rotramel
Part Two Challenging Established Narratives
Chapter 4 The Maid and Mr. Charlie: Rosa Parks and the Struggle for Black Women’s Bodily Integrity
Danielle L. McGuire
Chapter 5 Cold War History as Women’s History
Jacqueline Castledine
Chapter 6 “I’m Gonna Get You”: Black Womanhood and Jim Crow Justice in the Post–Civil Rights South
Christina Greene
Part Three: Rethinking Feminism
Chapter 7 Gender Expression in Antebellum America: Accessing the Privileges and Freedoms of White Men
Jen Manion
Chapter 8 When a “Sister” Is a Mother: Maternal Thinking and Feminist Action, 1967–1980
Andrea Estepa
Chapter 9 Contested Geography: The Campaign against Pornography and the Battle for Urban Space in Minneapolis
Kirsten Delegard
Chapter 10 Remembering Together: Take Back the Night and the Public Memory of Feminism
Anne Valk
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
A propos de l'auteur
LESLIE BROWN was a professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Urban South, the editor of Voices of Freedom II: A Documentary History, from Emancipation to the Present, and (with Anne Valk) coeditor of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South.
JACQUELINE CASTLEDINE teaches interdisciplinary studies in the University Without Walls at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also directs program innovation for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She is the coeditor of Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945–1985 and the author of Cold War Progressives: Women’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Justice.
ANNE VALK is the associate director for public humanities at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of Radical Sisters: Women’s Liberation and the Black Freedom Movement in Washington, D.C., 1968–1980 and the coeditor (with Leslie Brown) of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South.
Résumé
The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them.
