Brave New Worlds: Women's and Gender History

Abstract

CHOLARS working within the dominant theoretical framework for S American women's history have for many years attributed the most dramatic changes in women's historical experience to the emergence of capitalism and liberal democracy between I 820 and i 88o. The colonial period conveniently presented the before picture for studies that went on to analyze the rise of feminist movements, the impact of wage labor, and the reasons for declining numbers of children in white families after i8oo. Colonial women's history thus served as a baseline for measuring the declension of women's status in the nineteenth century. During the last two decades, scholars such as Mary Beth Norton, Linda K. Kerber, Laurel T. Ulrich, Lorena S. Walsh, and Lois Green Carr transcended this framework, finding complexity and change in their investigations of white women's lives before i 8oo. Since these pioneering efforts, scholarship on African-American, Indian, southern, and rural women (much of it for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) has called into question the utility of subsuming the variety of women's experiences and roles under the label women's status for the purpose of making linear comparisons.1