Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

As promised by the title, each successive edition of this richly conceived textbook refocuses our perspective on United States women's history by adding documents, deleting (alas) some now less pressing or compelling ones, and re-editing and recontextualizing the ones that remain. Surveying American women's history from the English colonial experience to the present, Women's America incorporates reprinted interpretive essays, primary documents, and original essays to create provocative and often exciting mixes of materials on important phases of women's experiences in American society. This reviewer's experience of adopting this text in the current and previous editions is that students like this text, its materials spark classroom discussion, and its use saves resources and money, offering the mixture of sources many instructors like to use inside one cover.	1
One of the textbook editor's most difficult tasks comes after the selection of materials, in deciding how to position and highlight chosen documents. Here Kerber and De Hart score both high (substantive) and less high (cosmetic) marks. One of their boldest editorial decisions was not to shy away from using longer excerpts from documents and secondary articles. The text's excitement stems largely from the students' and instructor's opportunity thus to enter into the authors' intentions, in fact in many cases the authors' worlds, as in the generous excerpt on women soldiers in the Gulf War from Linda Bird Franke's book on women in the military offered for the first time in this edition. The less-high marks this reviewer might assign the editors stem from the cosmetic and organizational dilemmas posed by inclusion of new documents. The adoption of double columns for everything but the editors' own commentary makes perfect sense, but the size of type necessitated by squeezing so much material into a manageable format is at the small end, and there are, throughout the text, fewer clear chapter and section divisions and less white space in general than many readers might choose for optimal comfort. It should be added that other editorial decisions, such as retaining full documentation with included articles, tend to "clutter" the book but also insure that this text is sophisticated enough for advanced undergraduates and history majors. Finally, some cosmetic and organizational improvements were made from the fourth to the fifth edition. The table of contents is easier to read, and "essential documents," instead of being relegated to an appendix position, are scattered through the text in appropriate places.	2
The editors have tried to be inclusive in representing ethnic and class distinctions among women, and in this edition they have also added important antifeminist documents as well as documents illustrating differences among feminists over the shape of feminism, as for example the excerpt from Faye Ginsburg's Contested Lives, about the abortion debate, Daniel Horowitz's article about Betty Friedan's spin on the Feminine Mystique, and excerpts from public comments to a Congressional subcommittee about a women's Vietnam War memorial. For the pre-Revolutionary period, there seems still to be a preponderance of documents on Anglo-American lives, though these are tempered by selections on Native American women and African-American women. The editors faced the dilemma that some of the landmark commentary on sex, gender, and society in colonial America has been written by outstanding historians of Anglo-American culture such as Mary Beth Norton, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Carol Karlsen. And though Kerber and De Hart rightly point out in the introduction that Hispanic women who represent a variety of nationalities, ethnic origins, and classes are often misleadingly lumped together, there is among the documents simply a dearth of Hispanic voices from any perspective, at least until the modern period. Carol Deutsch's article on Southwestern Hispanic village women included in the fourth edition has been omitted from the fifth edition. These were surely painful decisions, but they need nonetheless to be noted. What the book may lack in even-handed demographic representation it makes up for in its intelligent coverage of political, legal, and cultural issues. The authors opt away from a snapshot approach and toward a more dynamic picture of women's history.	3
Kerber and De Hart include a coauthored introduction on "gender and the new women's history" and a concluding essay, by De Hart, on "the new feminism and the dynamics of social change." Both are excellent and significantly enhance an already valuable text. The introductory essay helps students to grapple with the historiographic significance and ever-broadening scope of women's history, and the conclusion helps students reckon with the last twenty years of change and ideological development within feminism.	4
Oregon State University Mina Carson

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