This new edition of Women in Ancient America draws on recent advances in the archaeology of gender to reexamine the activities, roles, and relationships of women in the prehistoric Native societies of North, Central, and South America. Women—and women’s work—have been crucial to the survival and success of American peoples since ancient times. And as hunting and foraging societies developed farming techniques and eventually created permanent settlements, women’s roles changed. Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert consider the various economic adaptations that followed, as well as the ways in which women participated in food production and the specialized industries of their societies. They also look at women’s access to power, both political and religious, paying particular attention to the place of priestesses and goddesses in the spiritual life of ancient peoples. The narrative that unfolds in Women in Ancient America is based on the most recent research, using evidence and examples from a wide range of cultures dating from the Paleoindian period to European invasion. This book, unlike others, treats many different types of societies, as the authors develop arguments sure to provoke thinking about the lives of women who inhabited the Americas in the distant past.

Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

A Companion to Gender History surveys the history of womenaround the world, studies their interaction with men in genderedsocieties, and looks at the role of gender in shaping humanbehavior over thousands of years. An extensive survey of the history of women around the world,their interaction with men, and the role of gender in shaping humanbehavior over thousands of years. Discusses family history, the history of the body andsexuality, and cultural history alongside women’s history andgender history. Considers the importance of class, region, ethnicity, race andreligion to the formation of gendered societies. Contains both thematic essays and chronological-geographicessays. Gives due weight to pre-history and the pre-modern era as wellas to the modern era. Written by scholars from across the English-speaking world andscholars for whom English is not their first language.

A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance. This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.

More than a generation after the rise of women's history alongside the feminist movement, it is still difficult, observes Catherine Brekus, to locate women in histories of American religion. In this collection of 12 essays, contributors explore how considering the religious history of American women can transform our dominant historical narratives. Covering a variety of topics--including Mormonism, the women's rights movement, Judaism, witchcraft trials, the civil rights movement, Catholicism, everyday religious life, Puritanism, African American women's activism, and the Enlightenment--the volume enhances our understanding of both religious history and women's history. Taken together, these essays sound the call for a new, more inclusive history.

Knowledge about the roles of women in ancient civilizations has been limited to traditionally held notions, but recent discoveries and research have led to exciting insights into the great variety of ways in which women contributed to ancient cultures. This reference work, designed for student research, features lengthy essays and a wealth of new information about women's roles in twelve ancient civilizations around the world--China, India, Japan, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, West Africa, Greece, Rome, the Maya, the Inca, and Native North America. Historical studies have tended to ignore women's roles in ancient civilizations and to devalue their contributions to the community. These essays examine women's religious, political, public, economic, and domestic roles, their legal status, creative expression in art and literature, and notions of beauty. Students can then compare women's roles across cultures. The contributors, each of whom is a subject specialist, examine not only the nature of women's limitations in patriarchal culture but the ways in which women often succeeded, despite these limitations, in becoming agents of social change. Each essay begins with a timeline of events in the history of that culture to place the narrative in historical context, and concludes with suggestions for further reading about women in that culture.