Women in Early America

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

This project, Women in Early America, is an anthology on women in America from contact through the Revolutionary era. Proposals for essays that employ a transnational approach and that rewrite master narratives are especially encouraged. As the volume is largely intended for use in undergraduate courses, essays that are written for that audience and that address major themes in women’s and gender history courses are also particularly desirable.

New York University Press has expressed strong interest in publishing this project. I’m in the process now of soliciting proposals for chapters so that I may put together a book prospectus within the next few months to secure a contract. If you are interested in proposing an essay for this volume, please send an abstract and cv to tfoster4@depaul.edu.

Additional Information

Recently, I edited New Men: Manliness in Early America which explored how manliness was defined and redefined in the context of colonial and Revolutionary America. This volume is a companion volume and uses the same starting point as New Men which began as follows: “In 1782 when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published his description of American society and wrestled with what it meant to be an American he articulated a question that many were asking: ‘What, then, is the American, this new man?’ For every generation that followed, the question has resonated.” Women in Early America takes up Crevecoeur’s question and applies it to early American women using the insights of women’s and gender history.

Scholarship on early American women’s history is abundant but to date there are few affordable, undergraduate-friendly, broadly focused collections of essays. Instructors have at their disposal narrowly focused monographs, documents collections, and women’s history survey text books. As a collection of essays, this work will be able to broadly address the variety of standards and ideals of womanhood in early America and highlight differences including by region, religion, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age, politics, commerce, leisure, education, and period, while still maintaining the type of focus and depth that essays provide.

The collection will showcase the latest research of junior and senior historians. It will draw from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history including feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism.

This book will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike. It will serve as a useful anthology in courses on the history of women and gender. It will be especially useful for courses that seek to incorporate women into histories of colonial and Revolutionary America – as well as for courses in US Women’s history that wish to broaden their focus to include early American women. It will, therefore, be of interest to academic audiences and to popular audiences interested in women’s and gender history and early American history.

The collection will be approximately 350 pages in length. I hope to have completed submissions by late fall 2012. The manuscript will be completed by Spring 2013.

Please let me know if you would be interested in submitting an abstract or proposal for a chapter. Please feel free to email to discuss the project.

Please circulate this call for contributors.

Thanks.

Tom Foster

Email: tfoster4 @ depaul.edu
Office: 773-325-4169
http://las.depaul.edu/history/People/Faculty/Foster.asp