Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
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In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia. Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers & Fathersreveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimate domestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor, strangeness, and unruly passion.
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"An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgic image of a 'golden age' of family life and re-creates a more complex past whose assumptions and anxieties are still with us."—Raleigh News and Observer
Liked Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 Shares history, nonfiction, american history -
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia Shares history, american history, nonfiction -
Sexual Revolution in Early America Shares american history, nonfiction, history -
The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison Shares history, american history, nonfiction
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Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
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Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
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Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
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The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
