Catherine Clinton

A lively, comprehensive account of the struggle for women's rights at a vital time in our national history. The American women who worked for our country's indepence in 1776 hoped the new Republic would grant them unprecedented power and influence. But it was not until the next century that a hardy group of pathbreakers began the slow march on the road to autonomy, a road American women continue to travel today. When "The Other Civil War was first published in 1984, it was hailed as a thought-provoking narrative of women's lives, among the first books to bring together the new accomplishments of the then-infant discipline of women's history. This revised edition offers a thoroughly updated bibliography, including not only new books and articles but also Internet sources from the past fifteen years of innovative scholarship.

Civil War Stories is Catherine Clinton's fresh look at some everyday and extraordinary people whose lives were forever transformed by the impact of war. Her multifaceted perspective includes the stories of sisters, children, and friends torn apart by the crisis of Confederate independence, as well as those to whom silence was a way to "keep the peace," although true peace would never again be restored.Two sisters, one a staunch defender of the Union, the other a passionate advocate of the rebel cause, are traumatized by the divide the Civil War imposes. Thousands of orphans, scattered from Maine to New Orleans, learn the hard lessons of the war at an early age. Clinton urges us to reconsider this fatherless generation's devastating losses. The war's outcome was acrimoniously contested after Appomattox. The story of two South Carolina women, one black and one white, illuminates that fires of bitterness raged even after surrender.Clinton suggests those on opposing sides sought to vindicate their losses and assert their rights by taking up the pen. The histories and memoirs she contrasts, the lives she reconstructs, and the stories she highlights provide appreciation of the cultural impact of the American Civil War, for those who endured it and for those of us who continue to be fascinated by its legacy.

Until recently, the "womanless" American history was the norm. But in fact, without a history of women we neglect consideration of gender dynamics, sex roles, and family and sexual relations -- the very fundamentals of human interaction. In Portraits of American Women, editors G.J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton present twenty-five short essays on American women beginning with Pocahontas and ending with Betty Friedan. These essays aim to locate the histories of women and men together by period and to provide a sense of their continuities through the whole gallery of the American past. The editors selected women who made "significant contributions in the public realm," be they in the areas of art, literature, political engagement, educational activities, or reform movements. Included here are portraits of such women luminaries as Georgia O'Keeffe, Margaret Mead, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to name a few. Clearly women's lives provide a vital perspective through which the great panorama of social change in the American past can be understood. Each portrait is fashioned to appeal to a wide range of readers, and all include sound scholarship and accessible prose, and raise provocative issues to illuminate women's lives within a broad range of historical transformations.

This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it." Eric Foner, History Book Club Review "Clinton has assembled many interesting quotations from old letters and diaries to support her belief that women in the antebellum South were generally overworked, often unhealthy, and little freer than their slaves." Atlantic Monthly "One can be grateful that the recent emphasis on the study of women's history has encouraged this much-needed work." Christian Science Monitor