Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Women’s liberation

Taken as a whole, our researches particularly concentrated on a reevaluation of the role of women in the “long” nineteenth century, post Revolution to pre World War I. The centerpiece of this first phase of modern US women’s history was the rediscovery and evaluation of the influential nineteenth century ideology of femininity, known as “the cult of true womanhood.”

The efforts of women’s historians concentrated first on describing the elements of this ideology – piety, purity, subordination, domesticity, and maternity. A wide range of cultural products of the periods, from ministers’ sermons to women’s own diaries to popular novels written by women for women (most famously Uncle Tom’s Cabin) yielded a complex portrait of this ideology.