Placing Women's History in the American History Survey [microform] / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

The paper describes and evaluates the development of materials produced by the Organization of American Historians' (OAH) project entitled "Restoring Women to History." Contributors to the OAH project faced several choices in developing guidelines for incorporating women's history into the basic American survey at the college level. The guide's combination of conventional historical periodization and unconventional content reflects conscious decisions on the part of the compilers concerning audience and scope of the project. While the course is targeted for conventional history instructors, it assumes a crucial distinction between U.S. history, which is predominantly political and economic, and history of the American people, which emphasizes social trends. Thus, standard topics such as "Reconstruction" and "The Machine Age" include a preponderance of social and women's history. To present women as central characters in American history, the survey utilizes the theme of public and private spheres in American life, pointing out that in politics, for example, the close association of women and the private sphere was used to justify their exclusion from formal political life. The guide also offers suggestions for presenting famous women as legitimate representatives of the women's experience. (LP)