Book Information

Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (2nd edition), by Nancy F. Cott

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Brief Synopsis:

Women's "doings" in early Colonial life. Focused on: work, domestic, education and sisterhood.

Long Synopsis:

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION: This twentieth anniversary edition provides an opportunity to look backward to my writing of The Bonds of Womanhood and forward from it to other historians' subsequent attention to the meaning of domesticity and "woman's sphere." The project really originated in 1972, when I was finishing a collection of documents in United States women's history, Root of Bitterness, and was formulating my doctoral dissertation. Both the anthology of documents and the method of the dissertation shared a common emphasis on finding the personal "voices" of nonfamous women of the past in their untapped private writings.' In the women's movement of the previous several years I had, like hundreds of thousands of other women, reeducated myself by discovering new intellectual premises that made it possible to see women as subjects in history (and agents of change) as never before. To locate women as subjects, no sources seemed more promising- less tainted by stereotypes or unwarranted assumptions about femininity- than the ones women had penned for themselves and to other women. My assumptions owed a great deal (more than I recognized at the time) to the emphasis on women's consciousness and on "consciousness-raising" in the women's liberation movement, of which I felt myself a part. Consciousness-raising was a political strategy: in all-female groups, women shared reflections on their lives, with the intent to recognize and confront the ways that they had been taught to be "women" (that is, to conform to the gender expectations and constraints that created sexual inequality). The aim was to undermine or throw off one's socialization and change the structures that maintained it. The heady dynamic of consciousness-raising made me very interested in questions about consciousness in the past: had women been aware of themselves as women, and how had they been aware? The likeliest place to discover answers seemed to be in private writings.

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

236 Pages

ISBN-10:

0300072988

ISBN-13:

9780300072983

Publisher:

N/A

Date of Addition:

10/23/08

Copyright Date:

1997

Copyrighted By:

Yale University

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Categories:

Textbooks and Educational Materials, History, Nonfiction

Submitted By:

KariG

Proofread By:

KariG

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