The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Woman: The American History of an Idea, Lillian Faderman

Woman: The American History of an Idea

Lillian Faderman

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 5 reviews on

BookMarks logo
A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

"Exhaustively researched and finely written."--Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

"An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

What does it mean to be a "woman" in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God's plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.

This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. Noting that every attempt to cement a particular definition of "woman" has been met with resistance, Faderman also shows that successful challenges to the status quo are often short-lived. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 7th, 2023
  • Pages: 600
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.75in - 1.26in - 1.19lb
  • EAN: 9780300271140
  • Categories: WomenUnited States - GeneralWomen's Studies

More books to explore

Book Cover for: Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tiya Miles
Book Cover for: This Woman's Work: Essays on Music, Kim Gordon
Book Cover for: The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush
Book Cover for: They Didn't See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties, Lisa Levenstein
Book Cover for: Figuring, Maria Popova
Book Cover for: The Woman They Could Not Silence: The Shocking Story of a Woman Who Dared to Fight Back, Kate Moore
Book Cover for: Women Holding Things, Maira Kalman
Book Cover for: Women & Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard
Book Cover for: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, Adam Hochschild
Book Cover for: The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live, Danielle Dreilinger
Book Cover for: No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History, Gail Collins
Book Cover for: Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, Linda Lawrence Hunt
Book Cover for: Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tiya Miles
Book Cover for: Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World, Elinor Cleghorn
Book Cover for: Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert

About the Author

Lillian Faderman is professor emerita at California State University, Fresno. Her books on the history of gender and sexuality have won numerous prizes, including seven Lambda Literary Awards, two Stonewall Book Awards, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. She lives in La Jolla, CA.

More books by Lillian Faderman

Book Cover for: The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America - A History, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired "The Children's Hour", Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: Gay L. A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: My Mother's Wars, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: Ghost Trio, Phyllis Irwin
Book Cover for: Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, Lillian Faderman
Book Cover for: I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience, Lillian Faderman

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"An ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. Woman is exhaustively researched and finely written."--Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

"An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"A comprehensive and lucid overview of the ongoing campaign to free women from 'the tyranny of old notions.'"--Publishers Weekly

"Faderman's engaging style defies the fear of this being a dense, obtuse, textbook. It isn't. It's a page-turner with regular 'you;gotta be kidding' moments triggering head-in-hands reactions."--New York Journal of Books

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews

"Fascinating. . . . Few books are timelier than Woman. . . . Will be a rite of passage for generations of LGBTQ folk."--Kathi Wolfe, Washington Blade

"Faderman, a renowned scholar of gender and sexuality, has crafted a detailed, fascinating discussion of the social, legal, and political meanings of the term woman in the US."--K. B. Nutter, Choice

"A fast-paced journey in women's and gender history from seventeenth-century America through the early twenty-first century. . . . Woman offers an excellent analysis of sexuality and gender, drawing from Faderman's extensive research and her expertise."--Joan M. Johnson, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Lillian Faderman's is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of 'woman' with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women."--Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote

"A rewarding read. Pioneering scholar Lillian Faderman illuminates how concepts of female difference and inferiority stubbornly persist and captures the ongoing struggles of women to free themselves from the idea of 'woman.'"--Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania

"A sweeping history of conceptions of women by themselves and others told through fascinating stories that get the reader to turn the page."--Claudia Goldin, author of Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity

"A wide-ranging, deeply researched, and very well written survey of how the idea of woman has been deployed over more than three centuries of American history."--Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

"With dazzling scholarship and monumental vision Faderman has, with illuminating detail and persuasive argument, brilliantly woven a rich tapestry of how the American 'woman' has been created and re-created over centuries."--Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States