In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself. In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues by S. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki L. Ruiz 1. Where the Girls Aren't: Women as Reluctant Migrants but Rational Actors in Early America by Trevor G. Burnard and Ann M. Little 2. "Your Women Are of No Small Consequence": Native American Women, Gender, and Early American History by Gail D. Macleitch 3. From Daughters of Liberty to Women of the Republic: American Women in the Era of the American Revolution by Susan Branson 4. Southern Women of Color and the American Revolution, 1775-1783 by Betty Wood 5. From Dawn to Dusk: Women's Work in the Antebellum Era by Inge Dornan and S. Jay Kleinberg 6. To Bind Up the Nationa's Wounds: Women and the American Civil War by Susan Mary Grant 7. Turner's Ghost: A Personal Retrospective on Western Women's History by Susan Armitage 8. Gender and U.S. Imperialism in U.S. Women's History by Laura Briggs 9. Chinese American Women in U.S. History: Explaining Representatives of Exotic Others, Passive Objects, and Active Subjects by Shirley Hune 10. Migrations and Destinations: Reflections on the Histories of U.S. Immigrant Women by Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicki L. Ruiz 11. African American Women Migration by Leslie Brown 12. Morena/o, Blanca/o, y Cafe con Leche: Racial Constructions in Chicana/o Historiography by Vicki L. Ruiz 13. The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1848-1920 by Elizabeth J. Clapp 14. Engendering Social Welfare Policy by Eileen Boris and S. Jay Kleinberg 15. Interrupting Norms and Constructing Deviances: Competing Frameworks in the Histories of Sexualities in the United States by Leisa D. Meyer 16. Strong People and Strong Leaders: African American Women and the Modern Black Freedom Struggle by Mary Ellen Curtin 17. A New Centruy of Struggle: Feminism and Antifeminism in the United States, 1920-Present by Kristin Celello Contributors Index