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51
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
90/100Critics
13/100Scholars
Author:
Lillian Faderman
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Date:
March 15, 2022
One of the nation's pre-eminent lesbian feminist scholars offers a sweeping history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the 17th to the 21st-century
What The Reviewers Say
... an ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. Woman is exhaustively researched and finely written, with more than 100 pages of endnotes.
... enslaved women are not named in Faderman’s history.
... a somewhat conventional women’s history survey from the sixteenth century to the present, and I mean that in a nice way. It is written with grace and style, reintroducing characters long familiar to devotees of women’s history.
Faderman ably brings the discussion into the 21st century and the present day, when nonbinary conceptions of gender are gaining further acceptance in the mainstream even as the resolutely patriarchal system—perfectly embodied by Donald Trump and his cohorts—continues to fight against anything other than a strictly binary gender structure. This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture. An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience..
