No Small Courage A History of Women in the United States

Energized by a wealth of new research into women's history, No Small Courage offers an unprecedented chronicle of American experience, charting women's gradual struggle for social and political independence, from the precolonial era to the present. Individual stories and primary sources--including letters, diaries, and news reports--animate this history of the domestic, professional, and political efforts of American women and explore the diverse realities that they have faced. John Demos begins the book with a discussion of Native American women confronting colonization. Other leading historians illuminate subsequent eras of dramatic social and political change--including Jane Kamensky on women's lives in the colonial period, Karen Manners Smith on the rising tide of political activity by women in the Progressive Era, Sarah Jane Deutsch on the transition of 1920s optimism to the harsh realities of the Great Depression, Elaine Tyler May on the challenges to a gender-defined social order encouraged by World War II, and William H. Chafe on the women's movement and the struggle for political equality since the 1960s. The book retells the story of America, looking at women of different types and in many roles: as wives, mothers, and housekeepers, wage-earners, immigrants and migrants, community builders, political rebels, policy makers, intellectual innovators, voluntary organization leaders-women of no small courage, as the title suggests. The authors vividly relate such events as Anne Hutchinson's struggle for religious expression in Puritan Massachusetts, former slave Harriet Tubman's perilous efforts to free others in captivity, Rosa Parks's resistance to segregation in the South, and the newfound opportunities for professional and personal self-determination available as a result of decades of protest. Dozens of archival illustrations add to the human dimensions of the authoritative text. No Small Courage dynamically captures the variety and significance of American women's experience, demonstrating with authority and engaging detail that the history of our nation cannot be fully understood without focusing on changes in women's lives.

Nancy F. Cott is Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, and the director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, among other books.