1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929; PN471.W6 1929a), 25-26.[back]
2. Linda Gordon, U.S. Women's History (Washington: American Historical Association, 1997), 2. [back]
3. “Gerda Lerner on the Future of Our Past,” interview by Catharine R. Stimpson, Ms.(HQ1101.M55) 10 (September 1981): 94, 95.[back]
4. Gordon, U.S. Women's History, 5. [back]
5. In the short space of this introduction, it is not possible to provide a summary of the content of American women's history, although some of the key topics and concerns will be touched on. Readers desiring a general overview of the field or discussion of central topics and themes should consult the bibliography of major works at the end of this introduction, as well as bibliographical material presented in individual chapters.[back]
6. Historians use the term “second-wave feminism” to refer to the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to the suffrage movement, the so-called first wave of women's activism.[back]
7. Linda K. Kerber, “Gender,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998; D13.5 U6 I657 1998), 41. [back]
8. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985; HQ1419.S58 1985), 53. The essay originally appeared in the first issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (HQ1101.S5). The journal's beginning in 1975 was itself a noteworthy marker of the professionalization of the field. Other important journals founded in these years included Feminist Studies: (HQ1101.F46) and Frontiers. [back]
9. Quoted in Karen Anderson, Changing Woman: A History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; E184.A1 A673 1996), 16. [back]
10. Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Tool of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review (E171.A57) 91 (December 1986): 1,053-75.[back]
11. Karen Anderson, Teaching Gender in U.S. History (Washington: American Historical Association, 1997), 3.[back]
