To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790 - Softcover

Gundersen, Joan R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807856975 ISBN 13: 9780807856970

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2006

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author

JOAN R. GUNDERSEN is research scholar in women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh and professor emeritus of history at California State University, San Marcos. She is author or coauthor of four other books, including The Anglican Ministry in Virginia, 1723-1776: A Study of a Social Class.

From the Back Cover

Gundersen's analysis benefits from two decades of scholarly research into the lives of colonial women. Her vivid account synthesizes the work of her colleagues and brings an essential multicultural perspective to the discussion. She examines the lives of African women brought as slaves to the colonies and their American-born descendants, as well as of Native American women. Gundersen also extends the parameters of her study to include the decades that bracketed the Revolution, framing her argument around three generations of women in three households. To be Useful to the World opens with engaging accounts of three women: Elizabeth Porter, a Virginian of the small-planter class whose household includes her extended family and several slaves; Deborah Franklin, the Philadelphian wife of Benjamin Franklin; and Margaret Brant, an Iroquois woman whose family became British allies during the Revolutionary War. Through her examination of these women's lives, Gundersen illustrates the diversity of the colonial experience for women as well as the trends that crossed ethnic and class boundaries. She then follows the lives of these women's daughters through the years of the Revolution and closes her account with their granddaughters, who began their lives in post Revolutionary America. In presenting these daughters of the Revolution, Gundersen finds that while the Revolution provided opportunities for some women it also restricted the lives of others in a give and take resulting from the integrated yet divergent communities that made up the new world. This lucid account brings to life the experience of women during a period of war and profound change, a period that continues to shape Americanthought and culture to the present.

From the Inside Flap

This is the first paperback edition of a book that has become the reliable standard synthesis of scholarship on women's experiences during the Revolutionary era. Chapters have been revised to incorporate the work of 100 studies that have appeared since the original publication in 1996. Gundersen traces the lives of women in 3 households over 3 generations, including perspectives from Native American, wealthy white revolutionary, and middle-class plantation and slave households.

Edition details

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807856975
• ISBN 13: 9780807856970
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 344