Mysteries of sex : tracing women and men through American history
In a sweeping synthesis of American history, Mary Ryan demonstrates how the meaning of male and female has evolved, changed, and varied over a span of 500 years and across major social and ethnic boundaries. She traces how, at select moments in history, perceptions of sex difference were translated into complex and mutable patterns for differentiating women and men. How those distinctions were drawn and redrawn affected the course of American history more generally. Ryan recounts the construction of a modern gender regime that sharply separated male from female and created modes of exclusion and inequity
eBook, English, ©2006
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, ©2006
History
1 online resource (432 pages) : illustrations
9780807876688, 9781469606057, 0807876682, 1469606054
232568517
pt. I. Making sex in America : 1500-1900
1. Where have the corn mothers gone? : Americans encounter the Europeans
The coordinates of gender : asymmetry, the relations of the sexes, and hierarchy
The sexual frontier
Warriors and farmers on the gender frontier
2. Who baked that apple pie and when? : how domesticity conquered American culture
The prehistory of feminine domesticity : 1620-1692
Between patriarchy and domesticity : 1750-1840
Homemaking in antebellum and Victorian America
3. How did race get colored? : gender and sexuality in the American South
How slavery became colored African American
The gendering of slave society
Civil war and the reconstruction of race and gender
The sexual politics of Jim Crow
pt. II. Dividing the public realm
4. What is the sex of citizenship? : engendering the American political tradition from the Revolution to the New Deal
When citizenship was male : 1776-1865
The mother as citizen : segregated and secondary
The woman citizen goes to Washington
Second-class citizenship : male and female
pt. III. Women remake gender in the twentieth century
5. How do you get from home to work to equity? : 1900-1960
Who made the woman worker? : an overview
The new woman goes to work : 1890-1940
A private detour through the 1920s
The next generation combines work and family : the 1940s and 1950s
The mystery of the feminine mystique
6. Where does sex divide? : feminism, sexuality, and the structures of gender since 1960
The second wave of feminism : 1960-1970
Sexual revolution and gay rights
Restructuring gender differences : 1980-2000
7. Where in the world is the border between male and female? : immigration and generation in the twentieth century
The generations of gender
New immigrants meet postmodernity : 1965-2000
Joining together to remake male, female, and America
English