Author: S. Jay Kleinberg
Subject: American Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2728-7
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2729-5
Pages: 336 pp.
Description: The first general introduction to the history of women in industrializing America

Throughout American history, women's roles have been a source of controversy. Despite having to struggle to be heard or listened to, women vigorously participated in the political debates and cultural life of American society. They responded actively to the social problems of their day, joining anti-slavery and temperance groups in the nineteenth century, only to discover that gender hindered their right to speak or act in public. Such limitations led to the women's rights movement and a long struggle for the vote and full citizenship rights.

In this important new history, Jay Kleinberg explores the transformations in women's lives. She sets women's economic, social, and political developments in their cultural context in order to analyze the interactions between women's place in the home, family, and political organizations. The overview of women's changing lives ranges widely across racial, ethnic, and class groups to build an inclusive history of women in urban and rural America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kleinberg shows the continued dominance of socially restrictive interpretations of women's roles despite dramatic transformation in women's relation to the world inside and outside the home.

S. J. Kleinberg is professor and head of the Department of American Studies and History at Brunel University in England. She is the editor of Retrieving Women's History: Changing Perception of the Role of Women in

Politics and Society, as well as the author of The Shadow of the Mills: Working Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870-1907 and Women in American Society.