Women in Colonial and Revolutionary America

Abstract

Abstract The modern field of women’s history did not grow in a linear fashion. The first area of interest for the women scholars who turned to study their own lost past was not colonial society but the era of industrialization. These scholars, often motivated by their own participation in the radical politics or reform movements of the 1960s, were sharp critics of a modern America that they believed had its roots in the isms and izations of the nineteenth century. Social relations had gone terribly wrong, they argued, when capitalism took productive labor out of the household, defined “paid” labor as the only legitimate labor, and sharpened the separation between women’s confined sphere and men’s broader domain. They began a close examination of these developments—and produced, in the process, many insightful and analytically powerful studies. Meanwhile, modern study of the colonial and early national eras and the twentieth century lagged behind; nineteenth-century women’s history was like an alpine peak, its two sloping sides of past and future buried in shadow.