Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Teresa Anne Murphy , Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States , Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania , 2013. Pp. 228. $42.50 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8122-4489-2 ).
Book Reviews
Teresa Anne Murphy's Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States is an important new book on United States women's history. A must-read for anyone who cares about the historiography of early American women's history, Murphy's book examines the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War. It devotes "particular attention to how competing ideas of women's citizenship were central to the ways in which those histories were constructed" (2). As Murphy notes, "Earlier histories that criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women in the past created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the differentiated citizenship considered suitable for women" (3). Part I of the book "analyzes how the discourse of women, history, and nation was created and contested in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (8). Part II "focuses on the ways in which women's history was used more...