Using primary source documents in a U.S. history class is a fairly standard practice these days, both in high school and college courses. In most cases, textbook publishers create a separate, slim volume of sources, called a "reader", as a supplemental text. The problem with this approach is twofold. On a pragmatic level, the students are forced to spend more money on the U.S. history textbook. On the other hand, students view documents as somehow separate from history and not integrated. Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents by Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil tackles both issues and does so with depth and meaning, creating not just a women's history textbok but a U.S. history text that is enjoyable for non-students as well.
Women's History Textbook
Over the past decade a variety of women's history textbooks have hit the shelves, tackling U.S., western Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia and integrating women into the story. The problem with many of these selections is that the integration is more "and women did it too!" than "and women happened to do it." Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents bridges the two approaches, never pretending to somehow fix the historiography that left women out of so many of history's narratives, but instead presenting the reader with a chronological textbook that presents the history of the United States, and major historical themes, through the lens of women via primary documents.
As the authors note in the introduction, "Initially, women's history emphasized the rise and fall of the system of separate gender spheres....In organizing Through Women's Eyes, we employ another framework, one that emphasizes three major themes that shaped the diversity of women's lives in American history: work, politics, and family and personal life." (xxix)
Primary Documents on Women
The book is not a simple primary source reader. Each chapter includes authored text that presents the period's paradigms and discusses how women were affected by these themes. Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents opens with "'New World' Women to 1750", examining the role of native women in what would become the United States.
The chapter begins with 40 pages of text written by the authors, a general history overview, and then settles into the primary documents on women, incorporating images of pottery, figurings, drawings, paintings, and text-based documents on the period. At the end of various sections DuBois and Dumenil interject discussion questions designed to help the reader analyze the material and cross-reference and compare documents.
U.S. Women's History and Sources
Later chapters in Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents pack the strongest punch, as the authors draw on rich selections of newspapers, magazines, photographs, legal documents, songs, poetry, and more to examine U.S. women's history and sources. Chapter 7, "Power and Politics: Women in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920" is particularly compelling, as the authored text examines the convergence of a well-educated middle class female population, leisure time and WWI and the impact of the Progressive Movement on such topics as birth control and family planning, voting rights, and populism.
The primary sources section at the end of Chapter 7 uses government posters from WWI, food ration posters, documents from the Great Migration, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations report, and personal letters from archives to illustrate not just the history of white, educated middle class women. One of the sharpest critiques of women's history has been its focus on this small sliver of women, but DuBois has worked on multiculturalism in women's history for decades, and Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents continues her work, incorporating women from different classes, education levels, races, and immigrant populations to create as complete a picture as possible of the overall experience of women in U.S. history.
Chapter 8, "Change and Continuity: Women in Prosperity, Depression and War, 1920-1945" best illustrates the multicultural approach in the documents. Sources include pictures of Mexican-American garment workers in Texas, African American women working in defense factories, African American female domestic servants, Mexican women in agricultural work, and popular advertisements from women's magazines showing stereotypes of white and black women.
This women's history textbook could easily be used simply as a U.S. history textbook. While the focus on women's history is significant, the overall aproach to American history is so well-written that professors could use this book in any standard U.S. course. If the point of women's history as a subfield is to make itself obsolete by being integrated into the whole of just "U.S. history" then Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents is a significant step in that direction.
To read more about women's history books, please go to Women in Latin American and the Caribbean for a review of one of the few books on women in Latin American history that comprehensively addresses themes pertaining to gender issues from pre-Colombian times through the 20th century.
To Buy the Book Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents:
DuBois, Ellen Carol and Lynn Dumenil, Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents, 2nd ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. ISBN: 978-0312468873
Melanie Zoltan - Melanie Zoltan is a former college professor and administrator who has written for About.com, PCWorld, Brain Child, Thomson Gale, and ...
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