Linda K. Kerber

Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic

This discussion of issues relating to the historical study of gender was presented as a symposium on December 4, i987, at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pew Memorial Trust. Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennsylvania organized the panel. The text has been edited and revised for publication; several comments or questions from the floor have been omitted; footnotes have been added. Linda K. Kerber, who chaired the panel, has supplied a new conclusion. The editors hope that Forum will continue to attract collective contributions on topics of general and timely interest.

Toward an intellectual history of women : essays

The maturation and increasing complexity of studies in womens history are widely recognized, and in this collection of essays, Kerbers essential contribution to the field is made clear. In this volume are ten essays which address the role of women in early American history, and more broadly in intellectual and cultural history, and explore the rhetoric of historiography. In the chronological arrangement of the pieces, the author starts by including women in the history of the Revolutionary era, then makes the transforming discovery that gender is her central subject, the key to understanding the social relation of the sexes and the cultural discourse of an age. From that fundamental insight follows Kerbers contributions to the intellectual history of women. Prefaced with a personal introduction, an account of the formative and feminist influences in the authors ongoing education, these writings illustrate the evolution of a field of inquiry and trace the intellectual development of one of its scholars.