A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
On the history of feminism:
The standard reference and most frequently assigned women’s history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a women’s history class (usual recollection: It was “gay”; “it had this stigma”; “it was passe”), here is a brief beginner’s reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969); Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York/London: Basic Books, 1971), (see especially famed sociologist Jesse Bernard’s “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage”); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (complete with diagrams for the revolution) (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979); the brilliant but scattered opus by “individualist” and celebrity feminist Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1973); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men (1898; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Lau rel/Dell, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York: Vintage, 1989).
Major cultural overviews:
There are a few academics who break through and, without sacrificing the beauty and complexity of their argument, write their studies in colloquial English. To put single women in context I relied on three scholarly works. First, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s erudite and imaginative essay collection, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Another essential work is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988). And Lois Banner’s American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983) is a well-researched and amusing book on beauty culture and a must-read for anyone with an interest in the tangled evolution of female style.
Image and advertising:
For advertising in the nineteenth century, Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Ox ford University Press, 1996); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, The Leadership of Advertised Brands (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1923); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). The best and most amusing feminist media survey of the postwar years is Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); also Joan Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).
On film:
The two best books on women in film, both published in 1973, approach the subject from differing perspectives. Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973) is a thorough sociological and historical accounting of women’s roles in film from the silent era through the 1960s; Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), takes a psychoanalytic approach to the female characters and film tropes of the same period. Two period studies that attempt to assess the effects film had on young women are: Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (New York: Macmillan, 1933) and Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillian, 1935); Kate Simon’s memoir A Wider World (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) is one of many memoirs and stories of taking refuge, and plotting out a life, at the movies. As she writes, “The brightest, most informative school was the movies. We learned how tennis was played and golf, what a swimming pool was and what to wear if you ever got to drive a car… and… we learned about love, a very foreign country like maybe China and Connecticut.” Also: Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Margolis and Emily Gwathmey, Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
On New York:
Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951); Hank O’Neill, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), on the premiere photographer of the city; Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); James McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872); Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (New York: Knopf, 1993); Luc Sante, Low Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
ON THE PRESS:
American journalism:
Frank Luther Mott, A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Single Blessedness, or the Single Ladies and Gentlemen Against the Slanders of the Pulpits, the Press and the Lecture Room (C. S. Francis and Co., 1852); Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1920); Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: JB Ford, 1868); Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville
