Women in the United States, 1830-1945 Book

"Here the underlying concern is the female component of the grand forces shaping American life: the commercialization of agriculture, urbanization, industrialization, the demographic transition, immigration, slavery, and the westward movement. This book focuses on the part women played in the intersecting patterns of economics, social structure, religion, education, family life, politics and reform movements; the organizations they constructed in the work place, church, and polity; their integration and their separation from economic, social, cultural and political movements; and the enduring importance of gender in women's activities. It plots women's search for economic, social, and political equity and their responses to those grand forces in their novels, poems, diaries, magazines, songs crafts, and popular culture."—from Women in the United States, 1830-1945.

Throughout American history, women's roles have been a source of controversy. Despite having to struggle to be heard or listened to, women vigorously participated in the political debates and cultural lives of American society. They responded actively to the social problems of their day, joining anti-slavery and temperance groups in the nineteenth century, only to discover that gender hindered their right to speak or act in public. Such limitations led to the women's rights movement and a long struggle for the vote and full citizenship rights.

In this important new history, Jay Kleinberg explores the transformations in women's lives. She sets women's economic, social and political organizations. The overview of women's changing lives ranges widely across racial, ethnic, and class groups to build an inclusive history to women in urban and rural America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kleinberg shows the continued dominance of socially restrictive interpretations of women's roles despite dramatic transformations in women's relation to the world inside and outside the home.