The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson. Although the period after the Revolution produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men. Yet as Rosemarie Zagarri argues in Revolutionary Backlash, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.

Spanning the first fifty years of the nation's history, Revolutionary Backlash uncovers women's forgotten role in early American politics and explores an alternative explanation for the emergence of the first women's rights movement.

In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself. In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights.

The second edition of A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution updates Rosemarie Zagarri's biography of one of the most accomplished women of the Revolutionary era. The work places Warren into the social and political context in which she lived and examines the impact of Warren's writings on Revolutionary politics and the status of women in early America. Presents readers with an engaging and accessible historical biography of an accomplished literary and political figure of the Revolutionary era Provides an incisive narrative of the social and intellectual forces that contributed to the coming of the American Revolution Features a variety of updates, including an in-depth Bibliographical Essay, multiple illustrations, a timeline of Warren's life, and chapter-end study questions Includes expanded coverage of women during the Revolutionary Era and the Early American Republic

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, theMajor Problemsseries introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history.Major Problems in American Women's Historyis the leading reader for courses on the history of American women, covering the subject's entire chronological span. While attentive to the roles of women and the details of women's lives, the authors are especially concerned with issues of historical interpretation and historiography. The Fourth Edition features greater coverage of the experiences of women in the Midwest and the West, immigrant women, and more voices of women of color. Key pedagogical elements of theMajor Problemsformat have been retained: 14 to 15 chapters per volume, chapter introductions, headnotes, and suggested readings. New!In Chapter 1, an exclusive essay by Kate Haulman examines the evolution of the field of women's history and the state of women's history today. New!Chapter 2 now focuses on Native American women, while a new Chapter 3 covers witches and their accusers in New England and the Salem witch trials. New!Chapter 6 draws on recent scholarship on the roles of ordinary and elite women in the numerous reform movements of the Early Republic. Revised!Chapter 7 rethinks and refocuses the text's coverage of women's roles in slavery and the Civil War, and more directly addresses the lives of African American women during and after slavery. New!Post-1960 coverage (in Chapters 15–16) has been thoroughly revised to highlight the women's movement, women's health, recent immigration, and economic changes affecting women.

Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery’s fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible. Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.

Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated to the principle of equality among free men, and reveals the enormous consequences of U.S. expansion into the region that became the Deep South.