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Alphabetical articles on major events, documents, persons, social movements, and political and social concepts connected with the history of women in America.
Housewives constitute a large section of the population, yet they have received very little attention, let alone respect. Glenna Matthews, who herself spent many years as "just a housewife" before becoming a scholar of American history, sets out to redress this imbalance. While the male world of work has always received the most respect, Matthews maintains that widespread reverence for the home prevailed in the nineteenth century. The early stages of industrialization made possible a strong tradition of cooking, baking, and sewing that gave women great satisfaction and a place in the world. Viewed as the center of republican virtue, the home also played an important religious role. Examining novels, letters, popular magazines, and cookbooks, Matthews seeks to depict what women had and what they have lost in modern times. She argues that the culture of professionalism in the late nineteenth century and the culture of consumption that came to fruition in the 1920s combined to kill off the "cult of domesticity." This important, challenging book sheds new light on a central aspect of human experience: the essential task of providing a society's nurture and daily maintenance.
What accounts for the growing income inequalities in Silicon Valley, despite huge technological and economic strides? Why have the once-powerful labor unions declined in their influence? This book examines these questions from a fresh perspective: that provided by the history of women in Silicon Valley in the twentieth century.
Women have become a strong force in electoral politics, as candidates, office holders, and vocal constituents. In Running as a Woman, Linda Witt, Karen Paget, and Glenna Matthews explore the significant issues for women in public life: their marital status, the threat of sexual innuendo, what’s involved in becoming a credible candidate, and raising enough money to run. They also explain how voters are mobilized to vote for women, how the media cover them, how they get their campaign message out, what it’s like to lose, and what difference women make once elected. In addition, Running as a Woman includes a compelling history of women in politics that both records the political role women have played throughout the last two centuries and explains how and why women have continually been stifled in their attempts to enter political life. While the 1992 elections were hailed as a giant leap forward for women, the 1994 elections created a skepticism that real, permanent changes occurred. In Running as a Woman, the authors set the record straight with a chapter that analyzes the results of the 1994 elections and their relevance for women today.
In the 1630s, Anne Hutchinson - the wife of a Boston merchant and mother of fifteen children - defied the Calvinist clergy by holding meetings and espousing a controversial religious stance. When asked to stop, she did not, and as a result of her outspokenness, Hutchinson was subjected to two trials, then excommunicated and exiled to upstate New York. For 200 years, Hutchinson was held as the model of an American Jezebel, a female transgressor who threatened the community with social chaos and sexual impropriety. But as The Rise of Public Woman skillfully reveals, what was really on trial was not Anne Hutchinson but the expression of public womanhood. This richly woven history ranges from th...
Looks at Silicon Valley's business environment, and what features have made it a fertile ground for start-up companies who develop radical and disruptive technologies.
In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about “Mother Love,” signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation’s mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers—all for their own distinct reasons—sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.
In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, beginning a war that would last four years and claim many lives. This book brings together a collection of voices to help explain the commencement of Am.
The rags-to-riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor. American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors. It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame ...
This richly woven history ranges from the seventeenth century to the present as it masterfully traces the movement of American women out of the home and into the public sphere. Matthews examines the Revolutionary War period, when women exercised political strength through the boycott of household goods and Elizabeth Freeman successfully sued for freedom from enslavement in one of the two cases that ended slavery in Massachusetts. She follows the expansion of the country west, where a developing frontier attracted strong, resourceful women, and into the growing cities, where women entered public life through employment in factories and offices. Matthews illuminates the contributions of such o...