ABSTRACT

Unequal Sisters has become a beloved and classic reader, providing an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s history in the United States today.

First published in 1990, the book revolutionized the field with its broad multicultural approach, emphasizing feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, region, and sexuality, and covering the colonial period to the present day. Now in its fifth edition, the book presents an even wider variety of women’s experiences. This new edition explores the connections between the past and the present and highlights the analysis of queerness, transgender identity, disability, the rise of the carceral state, and the bureaucratization and militarization of migration. There is also more coverage of Indigenous and Pacific Islander women. The book is structured around thematic clusters: conceptual/methodological approaches to women’s history; bodies, sexuality, and kinship; and agency and activism.

This classic work has incorporated the feedback of educators in the field to make it the most user-friendly version to date and will be of interest to students and scholars of women’s history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of race and ethnicity.

part 1II|8 pages

chapter |6 pages

When and Where We Entered Unequal Sisters

A Revolutionary Reader in U.S. Women's History

part III|130 pages

Conceptualizing Women of Color History

chapter 1|16 pages

Multi-Generational Indigenous Feminisms

From F Word to What IFs 1

chapter 2|11 pages

Venus in Two Acts

chapter 3|11 pages

Raiz Fuerte

Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers

chapter 4|17 pages

Unpacking Our Mothers' Libraries

Practices of Chicana Memory before and after the Digital Turn

chapter 5|11 pages

Daughter of a Daughter

The Labor of Memorykeeping

chapter 7|18 pages

Rechronicling Histories

Toward a Hmong Feminist Perspective

chapter 9|13 pages

Transgender

A Useful Category?: Or, How the Historical Study of “Transsexual” and “Transvestite” Can Help Us Rethink “Transgender” as a Category

part IV|258 pages

The Politics of the Body and Kinship

chapter 10|18 pages

“[A]n Unpleasant Transaction on this Frontier”

Challenging Female Autonomy and Authority at Michilimackinac

chapter 12|13 pages

“[S]he could … spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner”

White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses' Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets

chapter 13|19 pages

Mothering the “Useless”

Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery

chapter 14|28 pages

The Pleasures of Resistance

Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861

chapter 15|11 pages

Open Secrets

Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity

chapter 16|22 pages

“Crimes which startle and horrify”

Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870–1900

chapter 20|24 pages

Sex, Lies, and Agriculture

Reconstructing Japanese Immigrant Gender Relations in Rural California, 1900–1913

chapter 21|14 pages

“Up to My Elbows in Rice!”

Women Building Communities and Sustaining Families in Pre-1965 Filipina/o America

chapter 22|17 pages

Intergenerational Ties

Diné Memories of the Crownpoint Boarding School During the 1960s

chapter 23|14 pages

A Dreadful Mosaic

Rethinking Gender Violence Through the Lives of Indigenous Women Migrants

part V|189 pages

Women of Color as Global Activists

chapter 24|20 pages

“I'm a Radical Black Girl”

Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History

chapter 25|24 pages

A Delicate Subject

Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism 1

chapter 26|8 pages

“Our Democracy and the American Indian”

Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Native Vote in the 1920s

chapter 27|14 pages

Class Acts

Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930

chapter 28|22 pages

“A Picture of Peace”

Friendship in Interwar Pacific Women's Internationalism

chapter 29|17 pages

Transnational Pan-American Feminism

The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944

chapter 32|17 pages

Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle

Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California

chapter 33|10 pages

Refocusing Chicana International Feminism

Photographs, Postmemory, and Political Trauma

chapter 34|7 pages

Arab and Black Feminisms

Joint Struggle and Transnational Anti-Imperialist Activism

chapter 35|20 pages

Guns and Motherhood

A Millennial Maternalism

chapter 36|13 pages

Geographies of Difference

Transborder Organizing and Indigenous Women's Activism