Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 217
•
Trim: 5¾ x 8¾
978-0-7425-5197-8 • Paperback • March 2013 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
978-1-4422-0559-8 • eBook • October 2010 • $49.00 • (£38.00)
Carol Lasser is professor of history at Oberlin College. Stacey Robertson is Oglesby Professor of American Heritage, chair of the History Department, and director of the Women's Studies Program at Bradley University, where she has been teaching since 1994.
Introduction
Section I: Antebellum Women
Phase 1: Deferential Domestics
Phase 2: Companionate Co-Laborers
Phase 3: Passionate Partisans
Section II: Primary Documents
Combining lucid analysis of women, black and white, Native and Euro American, elite and laboring classes, with a dazzling variety of documents, Lasser and Robertson freshly synthesize decades of scholarship and introduce us to women's experiences in all their richness and vibrancy. We learn how women's civic identity and impassioned participation changed the face of antebellum America's society and politics. We find in the documents women playing multiple roles—Cherokees filing petitions to resist cessions of land, Lowell Mill girls laboring in factories, elite Blacks and Whites organizing benevolent societies, activists calling for the end of slavery, suffragists claiming the vote. Bravo for splendid presentation of women's kaleidoscopic lives.
— Mary Kelley, University of Michigan
Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson have compiled a superb work that will challenge readers' conventional understanding of American women's involvement in politics in the decades before the Civil War. The wide range of primary sources allows women from a variety of social classes and races to express their political opinions in their own words. Lasser's and Robertson's excellent introduction provides readers with a compelling framework for understanding the changes and continuities in women's political role throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.
— Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University
Review of the scholarship on women and gender between the Revolution and the Civil WarNew synthetic interpretationSelection of documents that includes key landmarks as well as new discoveriesFormat easy to use for classes in American history or women's historyStacey Robertson author of Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan maintains a website at http://www.staceymrobertson.com/books/antebellum-women/