America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and… (edition 2004)

What a great book to read for Women's History month. I am keeping this book so my daughter can read how women's lives have changed and how hard women have fought for equality. Very inspiring and enlightening. I also recommend Collin's book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present which covers the time period after this one ends. ( )

This is actually a very balanced book, which, oddly enough, is a pretty rare thing in...life, and an almost strange accomplishment, especially for...people.

Or, to grasp the nettle, and put things a little more bluntly: at least she didn't feel the need to lie to get her point across, right? I mean, honesty isn't a one-way street; it's more like a six-lane super-highway.

.....

But, to be honest, I had to take a point off for length. Usually I try to give the benefit of the doubt, and not take off, as long as the quality remains the same, (and sometimes it doesn't), but I've come to the point where lots of footnotes don't impress me the way they used to, and if the writing avoids being terrible, it's still...pretty average.

(Yeah, sometimes it doesn't, I meant....it's hard to say, to explain. Sometimes it doesn't, in general, I meant, but here, too, I guess. Although it is better than average *at times*, such as in the part about Salem....and, although part of me wanted a little more about John Proctor, ('John Proctor, you are conspired with *Antichrist*!'), and Giles Corey, ('More weight!'), I *try* not to whine as much as I might....even if *I* think it's kinda funny sometimes! But it's good that Rebecca Nurse got her due, because she deserves it, and so do Elizabeth Proctor and Martha Corey, and the others.)

And if social history, and women's history, and so on, has its own pretensions to importance, so does political history and military history, and every other kind of history, and so on.

(Even though not everybody always shares those assessments....not even, say, "the rock people", as Sheldon put it.)

Then again, I've started to think that it's just difficult to turn history into something worth reading, in general. It's fun to dig documents out of the archives, but less fun to read about it...and I've been on both sides of it now, more or less.

......

Anyway, it's basically just an average book, but that doesn't really matter...what I really learned (which I was sorta already learning), was that the less history I let myself read, the better off I'll (probably) be.

In other words, I'm not going to read any more Paul Johnson, nor any more of this....

..............

Anyway....I normally try not to do this sort of thing, talking about the subject instead of the book, but since I do sometimes, and since it is what is....

The past is my ballast, and so is suspicion. I try to think about it all, I try to fix things, to do things better, to do it all right....but is anybody listening? It just seems like you want to get me out of the way....what's expected of me, I wonder....And I don't want anyone to get shunted aside into anything that nobody wants, why can't people just be who they are, and be appreciated....and so I try this and I try that, but I'm so alone....and suspicion makes everything nothing!

{And, again, personally, I feel like, if it were just me, then perhaps that would be one thing, but if it's me, ***and all the sorts of girls that I like too***.... I just really can't figure out, *why* I would want to help people that I don't like, hurt people that I do like.... I mean, it's one thing of we're going to help Anne Boleyn, *quite another* if we're gonna ***drag her through the mud***.... Although to be honest, sometimes I felt like Gail here understood more than she was maybe capable of telling in her capacity as a historian.... And there's that issue of, perhaps knowing perhaps more than your publisher would especially like you to tell your audience.... Since they are, at the end of the day, *paying your bills*, and the audience doesn't especially like to have its assumptions challenged, now does it? They'd prefer to think that you've given them an arbitrarily large contribution of 'facts' and 'evidences' to rest all of their assumptions on.... And, you know, the only reason that *I* can say all this is because *I'm nobody*, isn't it? If I were famous or whatever my agent or whoever would be sure to censure this, quick as Pan..... Ha!}

Anyway.

But I guess it's not the book's fault....

A book is just so much paper, after all. ^^

(So, no more hobby horses for me!)

.........

And I will stand behind that--a book is just so much paper....and sometimes, it's not even that.

WE SHOULD ALL AGREE (that I'm good and you suck). *rolls eyes*

But, like I said, it could have been worse....and sometimes, I'm not even sure that it's the same sort of book that some of you are reading into it!

*shrugs*

(8/10) ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this well-researched and fascinating book. It is a history of America through the lives of women, ordinary citizens as well as leaders and innovators. Most history books deal primarily with war, expansion and politics – and the men who dominated those events. They tend to leave out the women who participated in those endeavors, as well as the home and community life to which many of them contributed heavily.

I loved reading about the clothing and food of the times, the ways in which women managed households and children, the laws that bound them, and the astonishing strength it took for them to do what was asked of them, or refuse to do it. Without a book such as this that presents the other side of the story, it would be difficult to understand just how much women contributed to the history of America.

Written in intelligent, well-documented prose, it is an easy, entertaining and occasionally humorous read. I read each page eagerly and even after 450 pages, was sorry to see it finished. ( )

This is a very easily read and hard to put down history. I could have wished for more detail but it is covering quite a bit of time so has to be more of an overview. It was great to have ordinary women's lives included in the book as well as more famous ones. I will definitely be researching some people and events that this book introduced to me more thoroughly in the future. ( )

I loved this book! It's an excellent, readable overview of the history of women in the United States. Because of the breadth of the subject, sometimes there wasn't enough information about certain women or subjects to satisfy my curiosity, but overall, this is a great and comprehensive book. There are numerous inspiring stories of famous and not-so-famous women. I recommend this for history fans and women everywhere, and it's a great place to start if you're interested in women's studies. Four and a half stars. ( )