The Female Experience: An American Documentary

by Gerda Lerner

Book Overview

While women's experience encompasses all that is human, while women have participated in history and the making of history through all time, until very recently they have been largely excluded from the writing of that history. Most of what we know of the past experience of women comes to us largely through the distorting lens of men's reflections and observations.
In the now classic The Female Experience, Gerda Lerner describes history as seen...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195072588
• ISBN13: 9780195072587
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

SPECTACULAR COLLECTION OF PRIMARY SOURCES

This is one of the best collections of primary sources on American Women's History that is available. I teach a Women in American History elective to high school students. We read a large number of the readings in my class. The students find the readings engaging and not too difficult. I highly recommend it for teachers who are looking to include some women's history in their American History curriculum. The book covers a wide variety of topics and includes things from various eras. It does not include much on the "post-feminist era".

an excellent anthology

The Female Experience is a marvelous anthology of women's voices in American history from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Most of the sources are short - no more than 6 pages in length, which lends itself well to "reading on the go." As a reviewer has earlier pointed out, women of all social strata are represented here, which is also a strength. However, I was dismayed by the fact that the vast majority of the selections are by whites - African - Americans, Asian - Americans, Native Americans and other groups are not well represented at all, which detracted from the book's merit as "the Female Experience." In spite of this minor point, it is fascinating reading.

Understanding modern women's history

This is an invaluable and concise introduction to the experiences of American women (across a class- but not a racial spectrum) as seen through their own testimony, from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Well-known pioneers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Sanger) are represented as are unknown women. Though the emphasis is on nineteenth-century white women, their letters, articles, journal entries, and other writings resound with feelings and experiences from all aspects of life that offer much insight into the sources of our own dilemmas in the twenty-first century. Lerner's generous and incisive chapter introductions and her selection of sources is brilliant, and I intend to use this text in a college course focusing on issues in modern American women's history and literature. The entries are brief, for the most part, and lend themselves to the kind of sporadic pick-up "reading on the run," when you want something wonderful but only have a few minutes. However, Lerner's unifying commentary also makes the reading of larger chunks both possible and appropriate.