Women's Studies
Almost from the beginning the Press published important studies by women scholars, including Harriet L. Herring's Welfare Work in Mill Villages (1929) and Guion Griffis Johnson's Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (1937). In the late 1930s, the Press was one of the first to focus on gender as a subject of historical and cultural inquiry. In the 1970s, it took an early lead in publishing feminist works. Today, its Gender and American Culture series, under the general editorship of Linda Kerber and Nell Irwin Painter, develops and publishes some of the best works in the field.
Women's History
In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in
Revolutionary America, published in 1980 for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, Linda Kerber takes the novel step of viewing
the American Revolution through women's eyes. Kerber argues that the
history of women in America is the story of their efforts to accomplish
for themselves what the Revolution did not.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988) was one of the first publications in the Press's Gender and American Culture series. In it, Fox-Genovese establishes an alternative model for the study of antebellum southern women, whom, she argues, cannot be understood using traditional, New England-based models of American women's history. The book's expertly integrated discussion of race, class, psychology, and gender garnered it numerous awards, including the 1989 Julia Cherry Spruill Award from the Southern Association of Women Historians.
Reading Women
The breadth of the Press's publications in the field of feminist
literary criticism is represented by two very different but important
studies, one on how women read, the other on how they are read. Annette
Kolodny's The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in
American Life and Letters (1975) is an early classic of feminist
literary criticism by one of the most prominent scholars in the field.
Kolodny analyzes the metaphoric use of language in American literary
classics to argue that men treat the landscape the way they do because
they understand and articulate it as a feminine entity.
Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984) takes women readers of popular fiction seriously. Challenging conventional and often demeaning myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of female readers, Radway's study brings reader-response and feminist criticism to bear on the new field of book history.
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