Betsy Israel - Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules--a Social History of Living Single

A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of womens historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document Ive quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.

There are many excellent overviews of womens history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 19201970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Libertys Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 17501800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

On the history of feminism:

The standard reference and most frequently assigned womens history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Womans Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 18151897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. ONeill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 18701920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Womans Body, Womans Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a womens history class (usual recollection: It was gay; it had this stigma; it was pass), here is a brief beginners reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969); Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clios Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York/London: Basic Books, 1971), (see especially famed sociologist Jesse Bernards The Paradox of the Happy Marriage); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (complete with diagrams for the revolution) (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979); the brilliant but scattered opus by individualist and celebrity feminist Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Juliet Mitchell, Womens Estate (New York: Vintage, 1973); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Womens Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men (1898; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Lau rel/Dell, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York: Vintage, 1989).