Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

W ork on the history of American women has exploded in recent years, building on and challenging the interpretations and frameworks first developed in the 1960s and 1970s. From the emergence of American women's history as a field, scholars explored the diverse experiences of women. Barbara Welter's “The Cult of True Womanhood” (1966) was joined by Anne Firor Scott's Southern Lady (1970), Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White America (1972), and Thomas Dublin's Women at Work (1979) as hallmarks of the first generation of scholarship. Not until the decade from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s did studies of white, middle-class women in the northeastern United States come to dominate the landscape. During that period, this single group of women not only received the bulk of scholarly attention, but in addition interpretations based on their lives came to govern scholarship in the field as a whole. Still, there was no single approach to American women's history. Some scholars focused on prescriptive literature and the way popular discourses reflected and/or shaped behavior; others emphasized material conditions and the way the market economy and industrial capitalism transformed women's lives. A few examined how the breadth and instability of the emergent “middle class” created divisions among white bourgeois women in the early to mid-nineteenth century. These studies, pioneered ... log in or subscribe to read full text