America's women : four hundred years of dolls, drudges, helpmates, and heroines / Gail Collins.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 511-540) and index.

The first colonists: Voluntary and otherwise -- The women of New England: Goodwives, heretics, Indian captives, and witches -- Daily life in the colonies: Housekeeping, children, and sex -- Toward the Revolutionary War -- 1800-1860: True women, separate spheres, and many emergencies -- Life before the Civil War: Cleanliness and corsetry -- African American women: Life in bondage -- Women and abolition: White and Black, north and south -- The Civil War: nurses, wives, spies, and secret soldiers -- Women go west: Pioneers, homesteaders, and the fair but frail -- The Gilded Age: Stunts, shorthand, and study clubs -- Immigrants: Discovering the "woman's country" -- Turn of the century: The arrival of the new woman -- Reforming the world: Suffrage, temperance, and other causes -- The twenties: All the liberty you can use in the backseat of a Packard -- The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt -- World War II: "She's making history, working for victory" -- The fifties: Life at the far end of the pendulum -- The sixties: The pendulum swings back with a vengeance.

By culling the most fascinating characters of American history -- the average as well as the celebrated -- Gail Collins charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes -- thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate -- wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders."