East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Women in early America, struggle, survival, and freedom in a new world, Dorothy A. Mays

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

contains biographical information

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Women in early America

bibliographyencyclopedias

56493967

Dorothy A. Mays

struggle, survival, and freedom in a new world

Mays greatly expands the scope of Carol Berkin's First Generations: Women in Colonial America (Farrar, 1996) with this alphabetically arranged encyclopedia. Combining articles on several dozen individual women with both general ("Cooking," "Sport and Leisure") and more specific ("Widowhood," "Islamic Women," "Marriage and Family among Enslaved Women") topical studies, she draws heavily from both primary sources and modern scholarship to present clear overviews of the diversity, as well as the commonalities, of both immigrant and native women's experience between 1607 and the outbreak of the War of 1812. She enhances many narratives with boxed (and sourced) asides, and an occasional dark but usually relevant black-and-white illustration. Along with a documentary appendix, the author closes with an extensive annotated bibliography, plus some Web sites, to back up the bibliographies that close nearly every article. With entries linked by an analytical index, many "see" references, and topical and alphabetic tables of contents, this resource offers large doses of easily accessible, hard-to-find-elsewhere information. Collections of any size serving students of our country's past will find it a popular and worthwhile addition.-John Peters, New York Public Library Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information