Sunday Review: America's Women

I picked up America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines by Gail Collins about six years ago, hoping it would be an interesting and inspiring book.

It very much was.

Collins documents the female participants in United States history going all the way back to the first colonists, even briefly touching on the mysterious female infant, Virginia Dare.

Collins leaves no one out in her quest to honor America's Women--everyone from Pocahontas to the women accused of witchcraft in Salem, the nurses, wives, mothers, pioneer women, teachers, and everyone in between. Collins discusses all things that drove a woman's existence in her time in history, from catastrophic wars to sexual expectations from her husband, corsets, menstruation, careers, suffrage, all the way up to burning bras. She concludes with the tumultuous Sixties, leaving the last three decades of the Twentieth Century for another time, or another writer. Still her book, at 450 pages a lofty, but very interesting read, is an excellent overview of how women have fared in this country's history.