'[An] excellent book…[Norton's] first concern… is to trace the decline of patriarchy; the growth of free choice of a spouse; the rise of marital equality…the greater equality in educational attainments; the more intense concern of parents for the proper education of children; the greater permissiveness in child-rearing; and the increased cooperation between spouses in birth control…[Her] fascinating documentation, drawn from a vast range of manuscript sources, establishes the facts beyond any reasonable doubt…Norton suggests that the change resulted from… two factors. The first was the practical experience of women during the long years of revolutionary upheaval…The second…was the impact of egalitarian and republican ideology." ~Lawrence Stone, New York Times Book Review
This book represents social history on a grand scale, imaginatively conceived and massively researched. Norton brilliantly portrays a dramatic transformation of women's private lives in the wake of the Revolution.
First published in 1980 and recently out of print, Liberty's Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution itself.
PART I: THE CONSTANT PATTERNS OF WOMEN'S LIVES
1. The Small Circle of Domestic Concerns
2. The Important Crisis upon Which Our Fate Depends
3. Fair Flowers, If Rightly Cultivated
4. In What Would You Shew Your Activity?
5. As Independent as Circumstances Will AdmitPART II: THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF WOMEN'S LIVES
6. We Commenced Perfect Statesmen
7. Necessity Taught Us 195 8. A Reverence of Self
9. Vindicating the Equality of Female IntellectConclusion: A New Era of Female History
Abbreviations Appearing in the Sources and References
Glossary of Major Families and Sources
Essay on Sources
Chapter References
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. She is the author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 and the coeditor of 'To Toil the Livelong Day': America's Women at Work, 1780–1980, also from Cornell.