Everyone should read this book....

I just finished reading America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, by Gail Collins. Not since Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States have I felt so deeply moved and satisfied by historical writing. Collins' book traces the history of women in this country, beginning with Eleanor Dare in 1587, one of the first European women to sail across the Atlantic.

She writes of the early hardships and housework of the colonial women, the Salem Witch Trials, infant textile workers, horrific medical experiments performed on slave women, opium addiction, corsets, the abolitionists, birth control, female soldiers, Hollywood, rape, bicycles, menstruation, etc, etc, etc... Collins touches on most aspects of the daily life of women, but also maintains a broad and coherent perspective.

Collins references magazines and journals commonly read by women of the day to help the reader understand the existing social and cultural pressures. The female authors of these publications usually promoted submissiveness, marriage, and the classic ideals that we still to read about in many women's magazines today.

The movement of women from the domestic sphere to the workplace is one of the more fascinating strands in the book. The acceptance of working women comes only when absolute necessity warrants it (although the women who lost their jobs after WWII were fired regardless of the needs of their families). Often, through nationalism and propaganda, the government determined and probably still determines, what the role of women should be.

The struggles and triumphs presented are moving: often tragic, but often empowering. Through Collins' amazing work, we can see that we have a multitude of rights, privileges, conveniences, and freedoms that the early colonists could not begin to imagine.

Yet we also have not achieved true freedom. I hope that in another 400 years a historian again writes of the progress of American women. Maybe our 21st century brains would be blown away!