Nancy F. Cott

History of Women in the United States: Household constitution and family relationships

Theory and Method in Women's History

The Intersection of Work and Family Life

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

Working on the Land

This twentieth anniversary edition of Nancy F. Cott’s acclaimed study includes a new preface in which Cott assesses her own and other historian’s development of the concept of domesticity from the 1970s to the 1990s. “Nancy Cott’s Bonds of Womanhood is not just a pioneer work in women’s history. It is a classic. Despite all the work published since, it is still an essential starting place for understanding New England in the early republic.”—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich “Cott, still the best historian of women’s bonds and bondage, foresaw twenty years ago the tendency of domesticity’s bonds to lead both to feminism and the far right. An essential book for understanding today’s women.”—Carolyn Heilbrun Reviews of the earlier edition: “A lovely, gentle, scholarly, and valuable book.”—Doris Grumbach, New York Times Book Review “Women’s history at its best.”—Phyllis Kriegel, New Directions for Women

"Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835

The Bonds of Womanhood

Professional and White-collar Employments

Presents essays that trace the lives and experiences of women in the United States from the colonial period to the present.

A History of Women in the United States

No Small Courage

Women and War

Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality

Robert O. Self

Margot Canaday

Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History

Intimate States

Examines changes in the women's movement in the twenty years following women's suffrage, and describes the complex issues of that period.

The Grounding of Modern Feminism

Jeanne Boydson

Presenting a diverse collection of documents, Root of Bitterness reaches from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, focusing on six dominant themes: women's work, the power of gender, the physical body, women's collective efforts, diversity and conflict among women, and women's relation to state authority. This edition contains about twenty selections from the original volume and almost sixty new ones.

Documents of the Social History of American Women

Root of Bitterness

Essays discuss feminist theories, child abuse, working women, welfare, motherhood, medicine, legal rights, and conservative feminism

What is Feminism?

From a Harvard historian, this riveting portrait of four trailblazing American journalists highlights the power of the press in the interwar period. In the fragile peace following the Great War, a surprising number of restless young Americans abandoned their homes and set out impulsively to see the changing world. In Fighting Words, Nancy F. Cott follows four who pursued global news -- from contested Palestine to revolutionary China, from Stalin's Moscow to Hitler's Berlin. As foreign correspondents, they became players in international politics and shaped Americans' awareness of critical interwar crises, the spreading menace of European fascism, and the likelihood of a new war -- while living romantic and sexual lives as modern and as hazardous as their journalism. An indelible portrayal of a tumultuous era with resonance for our own, Fighting Words is essential reading on the power of the press and the growth of an American sense of international responsibility.

The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars

Fighting Words

Juliet Mitchell

This Veritas edition of Nancy Cott’s acclaimed study includes a new introduction by the author, situating the work for a new generation of readers. “Elegant and convincing. . . . Better than any other work available, The Bonds of Womanhood describes both the classic attitudes of the nineteenth century toward women and the opposition to the oppression of women in the historical context from which they grew.”—Willie Lee Rose, New York Review of Books “A lovely, gentle, scholarly, and valuable book.”—Doris Grumbach, New York Times Book Review

Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

History of Women in the United States

Organizational Life

Women Together

Examines family history in the context of the general history of women in the USA. It considers women's social history and looks at the marital, parent-child relationships and the non-conforming instance of the single woman, in different regions and among many ethnic and racial groups in the USA.

Household Constitution and Family Relationships

"The time has come to define feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it." The Century Magazine, 1914 In this landmark addition to scholarship, Nancy F. Cott, author of The Bonds of Womanhood, offers a new interpretation of American feminism during the early decades of this century--a period traditionally viewed as on in which women won the right to vote and then lost interest in feminist issues. Cott argues instead that his period was a time of crisis and transition from the nineteenth-century "woman movement' to the beginning of modern feminism. Many of the issues that are central to women today, says Cott, were firmly articulated in the early decades of this century. For example, the problem of defining sexual equality so as to recognize sexual difference between men and women, the ambiguous potential of a movement seeking individual freedoms for women by mobilizing sex solidarity, and the tensions involved in attaining full expression in work and love are all enduring elements of feminism seized upon by women of the 1910s and 1920s. First discussing how feminism was indebted to its predecessors, Cott shows that increasing heterogeneity and diverse loyalties among women in the early twentieth century contradicted the premise of the nineteenth-century "cause of woman" (the singular noun symbolizing the unity of the female sex). From this crisis emerged feminism, championing individual variability and refuting the premise that a singular "woman" existed. Cott focuses on the suffrage-campaign milieu in which feminism arose, giving particular attention to the character and role of the National Woman's Party from its militant suffrage days to its advocacy of the equal right amendment in the 1920s. Against prevailing interpretations of the decline of women's political activities after 1920, Cott counterposes the swelling numbers in women's voluntary associations and their political efforts. She also analyzes the pitfalls that awaited women who tried for effectiveness in the male-dominated political parties. She sets the controversy over the equal rights amendment in new context, discussing the full dimensions of the conflict as not merely over personalities, tactics, or class loyalties, but as a signal example of the modern problem of capturing sexual equality and sexual difference in law. The book explores the irony-strewn path of women who as aspiring professionals and political actors attempted to put into practice the feminist intent to replace the abstraction "woman" with, instead, "the human sex." This history--the story of women who first claimed the name feminists--builds an essential bridge between the presuffrage period and today.

Nancy F. Cott

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