In deze bundel laten de auteurs zien hoe de bestudering van de geschiedenis van vrouwen veranderd is door het ontdekken van de rol van vrouwen in de sociale ontwikkelingen en instituties van de Verenigde Staten. Bevat o.a. een bibliografie van de werken van Gerda Lerner / samengesteld door Thomas Dublin. De bundel bevat de volgende bijdragen: A constitutional right to be treted like American ladies : women and the obligations of citizenship / door Linda K. Kerber: Two political cultures in the progressive era : the National Consumers' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation / door Kathryn Kish Sklar: Putting children first : women, maternalism, and welfare in the early twentieth century / door Linda Gordon: Designing women and old fools : the construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939 / door Alice Kessler-Harris: Giving character to our whole civil polity : marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century / door Nancy F. Cott: Soul murder and slavery : toward a fully loaded cost accounting / door Nell Irvin Painter: Gendered expectations : women and early twentieth-century public health / door Judith Walzer Leavitt: Separatism revisited : women's instituttions, social reform, and the career of Miriam Van Waters / door Estelle B. Freedman: The personal and the political : two case studies / door William H. Chafe: Rights and representation : women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States / door Jane Sherron De Hart: Reading 'Little Women': the many lives of a text / door Barbara Sicherman: Between culture and politics : the Emma lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's History, 1944-1989 / door Joyce Antler: The Congress of American Women : left-feminist peace politics in the Cold War / door Amy Swerdlow: The female generation gap : daughters of the fifties and the origins of contemporary American feminism / door Ruth Rosen: The making of 'Black Women in America : an historical Encyclopedia / door Darlene Clark Hine