No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States

by Nancy F. Cott (Editor)

Enriched by the wealth of new research into women's history, No Small Courage offers a lively chronicle of American experience, charting women's lives and experiences with fascinating immediacy from the precolonial era to the present. Individual stories and primary sources-including letters, diaries, and news reports-animate this history of the domestic, professional, and political efforts of American women.

John Demos begins the book with a discussion of Native American women confronting colonization. Leading historians illuminate subsequent eras of social and political change-including Jane Kamensky on women's lives in the colonial period, Karen Manners Smith on the rising tide of political activity by women in the Progressive Era, Sarah Jane Deutsch on the transition of 1920s optimism to the harsh realities of the Great Depression, Elaine Tyler May on the challenges to a gender-defined social order encouraged by World War II, and William H. Chafe on the women's movement and the struggle for political equality since the 1960s. The authors vividly relate such events as Anne Hutchinson's struggle for religious expression in Puritan Massachusetts, former slave Harriet Tubman's perilous efforts to free others in captivity, Rosa Parks's resistance to segregation in the South, and newfound opportunities for professional and personal self-determination available as a result of decades of
protest. Dozens of archival illustrations add to the human dimensions of the authoritative text.

No Small Courage dynamically captures the variety and significance of American women's experience, demonstrating that the history of our nation cannot be fully understood without focusing on changes in women's lives.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Womens Studies

656 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2000

About the author

Nancy F. Cott is Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, and the director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Reviews

[Laura J · Rating 3 out of 5]

so this book took me a bit over three years to read. I found it at my high school library in the donate bin, and i thought it would be a cool way to interact with the many histories that comprise the female experience in the US. I read it off and on again until the summer of this year. Though the content is robust and interesting, it’s a lot of material. I read most of this book as a way to wind down before going to bed so it was hard to retain a lot of the information. i cant say this book is a comprehensive recount of women in the us as it focused on white women and black working class women mostly. There were a few mentions of other demographics but not anything meaningful. This book would be a bible if it had included so much more information on latinx, indigenous, eastern european, or asian women in the US. I liked how the second half of the book focused on how feminist er theory changed over the 20th century. the timeline stops at 2000.
the artifacts included in the book are really compelling. The narration was easy enough to follow. personal accounts of actual women were a nice way to illustrate how larger historical themes were demonstrated on the individual level.
im happy to say i have read this book. It was very good for a free book despite lacking in some critical areas of the american female identity. its really crazy how long this book has been in my life, and im thankful for how it have strengthened my reading stamina to use towards future literature.