First Generations - by Carol Berkin (Paperback)

About the Book

Traditional scholarship has tended to omit the obvious truth that European, Indian, and African women of 17th- and 18th-century America were critical actors in shaping the new nation's culture and history. FIRST GENERATIONS examines women as active participants in the creation of their society and, finally, gives early American women their proper place in history.

Book Synopsis

Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history.

Review Quotes

"A revision, amplification, and synthesis of a rich succession of studies about every aspect of colonial society and culture. [Berkin] brings her subject down to earth . . . and shows sensitivity to the experiences of individual women . . . [First Generations] offers what Mary Beth Norton [author of Founding Mothers and Fathers] rightly calls 'the best available introduction to the lives of women in colonial and revolutionary America.'" --Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review of Books

About the Author

Carol Berkin is Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, Women's Voices/Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History, and coeditor, with Mary Beth Norton, of Women of America: A History.