America's women : four hundred years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines / Gail Collins.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [511]-540) and index.

The first colonists: voluntary and otherwise -- The women of New England: goodwives, heretics, Indian captives, and witches -- Daily life in the colonies: housekeeping, children, and sex -- Toward the Revolutionary War -- 1800-1860: true women, separate spheres, and many emergencies -- Life before the Civil War: cleanliness and corsetry -- African American women: life in bondage -- Women and abolition: white and Black, north and south -- The Civil War: nurses, wives, spies, and secret soldiers -- Women go west: pioneers, homesteaders, and the fair but frail -- The gilded age: stunts, shorthand, and study clubs -- Immigrants: discovering the "woman's country" -- Turn of the century: the arrival of the new woman -- Reforming the world: suffrage, temperance, and other causes -- The twenties: all the liberty you can use in the backseat of a Packard -- The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt -- World War II: "she's making history, working for victory" -- The fifties: life at the far end of the pendulum -- The sixties: the pendulum swings back with a vengeance.