Rating: 
Summary: A marvelous book!
Review: The author worked very hard compiling this fascinating treatise on the history of the American woman. Beginning with the earliest Americans to today, I learned a lot that I hadn't heard before. Interesting details and observations, make you feel like you are really there, living in the century or era described. You can actually feel it, real. Let me tell you! Our foremothers had GUTS and TRUE GRIT.I am a history buff and have been reading up on women's history for at least 20 years. This book is the best compilation I have ever read. Gail Collins deserves a Congressional Medal for this one!
Rating:
Summary: A marvelous book!
Review: The author worked very hard compiling this fascinating treatise on the history of the American woman. Beginning with the earliest Americans to today, I learned a lot that I hadn't heard before. Interesting details and observations, make you feel like you are really there, living in the century or era described. You can actually feel it, real. Let me tell you! Our foremothers had GUTS and TRUE GRIT. I am a history buff and have been reading up on women's history for at least 20 years. This book is the best compilation I have ever read. Gail Collins deserves a Congressional Medal for this one!
Rating:
Summary: Gripping from beginning to end
Review: This is a fascinating, absorbing and thoroughly entertaining history of American women, starting with a mention of the Viking women Gudrun and Freydis, and working through to the present.
Some of the information in this book I was already familiar with, but most of it was new to me, and all of it was interesting. I learnt some surprising things, I had no idea, for instance, that the first black people in America were free settlers, not slaves.
some parts of the book are painful to read, you need a strong stomach to get through the chapter on women slaves, which is incredibly harrowing. And there are some appalling details about domestic life, the horrors of medical treatment, , and the terible difficulties involved in keeping clean
in the pre-Civil War era. It's a wonder women had the energy left to do anything at all apart from coping with the complications of domestic life.
In this book you will meet famous women like Pocahontas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Annie Oakley, Lillian Russell, and many other lesser-known women. You can admire their efforts to forge lives for themselves in the wilderness, to raise families, follow careers,and have their own adventures.It's thrilling to read the stories of the women who fought and spied in the revolutionary and civil wars, and the heroines of the Wild West. You can read of the struggle for political recognition,sometimes against almost insurmountable odds, especially in the case of black women, who were fighting racial as well as sexual prejudice in their efforts to gain legal right for themselves. The story of Rosa Parks and how she started the Civil Rights movement simply by refusing to give up her seat on a bus is moving and thrilling.
Gail Collins tells the fascinating story of American womanhood in a lively, witty style that carries you easily through the book and leaves you wishing it were twice as long.
Rating:
Summary: A Book for all of America's women
Review: To put it simply, I loved this book. It gives an almost-complete review of the history of women and the women's movement in America. It is thorough, interesting, and amusing to read the ironic circles in which American society places women. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes giving enough information to make one despair for the whole of humanity, sometimes enough to encourage one to shout for joy. The author shines a true light on the American woman's history without sending a one-sided cliched message for or against feminism. A brilliant read for all women (it wouldn't hurt for men to read it, either!)
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