ABSTRACT
This volume collects under one cover a series of essays on women’s history which were originally published in the journal Feminist Studies. 1 Focusing for the most part on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America and including work by contemporary scholars in both countries, this collection takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. It was in the 1600s, after all, that Anne Hutchinson migrated from Britain to New England full of the dissenting religious ideas which inspired women on both sides of the Atlantic. In the next century, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was printed, debated, celebrated and ridiculed in the United States as well as in England. It was a journey to London by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, for the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, which reputedly kindled the idea of calling the first women’s rights convention, held eight years later in Seneca Falls, New York. And from that point forward there was a heavy traffic of feminists between English and American ports.
