Volume 43, Number 17 · October 31, 1996
Subject Women
By Edmund S. Morgan
First Generations: Women in Colonial America
by Carol Berkin
Hill and Wang, 234 pp., $23.00
Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
by Mary Beth Norton
Knopf, 496 pp., $35.00
Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789
by Cornelia Hughes Dayton
University of North Carolina Press, 382 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here. Their descendants have kept it up, and none more zealously than professional historians in the past fifty or sixty years. These three books on women in the colonies can be understood as revisions, amplifications, and syntheses of a rich succession of studies about every aspect of colonial society and culture.
Review, 4629 words
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