Lexington Books
Pages: 422
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-5018-4 • Hardback • April 2011 • $162.00 • (£125.00)
978-0-7391-5019-1 • Paperback • April 2011 • $68.99 • (£53.00)
Louise V. North is an independent scholar and co-author of Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay. Janet Wedge is a former high school teacher and adjunct professor at Manhattanville College and co-author of Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay.
Landa Freeman is a visiting lecturer at numerous historical societies and university groups and co-author of Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay.
1 Foreword
2 Acknowledgments
3 Editorial Guidelines
4 Timeline
5 Dramatis Personae
6 Setting the Scene
Part 7 Part I. Women during the American Revolution
Chapter 8 1. Advancing toward a State of Independancy
Chapter 9 2. Things indeed look dark
Chapter 10 3. Every one of them . . . could shoot very well
Chapter 11 4. Branded by the names of rebellion and treason
Chapter 12 5. The heavy Cloud that hangs over us
Part 13 Part II. Women Living Their Lives
Chapter 14 6. This week . . . my Family are all sick
Chapter 15 7. Safely arrived at the Haven of Matrimony
Chapter 16 8. in her own sphere
Chapter 17 9. we set out on our journey
Part 18 Part III. Women in the Emerging Nation
Chapter 19 10. Willing to re-sheathe the sword
Chapter 20 11. a flattering and a Glorious Reward
Chapter 21 12. a favored nation
22 Notes
23 Bibliography
24 About the Authors
Through fascinating documents, deft notes, and unobtrusive editing, this collection provides a valuable addition to the literature of the American Revolution and American women's history. In the Words of Women performs the impressive feat of embedding women's experience in the political and military upheavals of the era without losing sight of the ways in which everyday life—household priorities, illness, travel, marriage, parenthood, and social amusement—did not cease for women or men living in the midst of larger events. Scholars and students will turn to this work to see the late eighteenth century with greater illumination.
— David Gellman, DePauw University
So often, women of the Revolutionary Era are ghettoized, set apart from the central narrative. Not so with In the Words of Women. In this valuable documentary resource, female experiences and perspectives are contextualized and integrated into the flow of history. Women thus become real players, and as the title suggests, we meet them on their own terms.
— Ray Raphael, author of A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
The voices of the women of the revolutionary generation have sometimes been lost in the rush to provide analysis and narration of their roles. …The story is too often told about the women who protested, boycotted, fought, nursed, spied, and took over the task of running farm and shop, but the voices we hear do not come from the women themselves. The challenge is to bring those voices to the written page, to make us as familiar with the cadences of the housewife and the camp follower as we are with the tempo of Patrick Henry's oratory. …This is the challenge that the editors of In the Words of Women have met.
— Carol Berkin, from the foreword