Did you know that March is National Women’s History Month? Why not honor the women in your family tree by learning a little more about what their lives were like? While our female ancestors didn’t always leave as many records as we would like, their contemporaries may have. Look for social histories on what life was life in the times and places in which your family lived. If you’d like to see some titles from my collection, see the titles below. Feel free to add your favorite women’s history titles in the Comments section.Â
America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, by Gail Collins (Harper Collins, 2003)
Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century, by Hasia R. Diner (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)
Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, selected by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly
(W.W. Norton & Co., 1994)A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Vintage Books, 1990)
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Vintage Books, 1980)
Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930, by Doris Weatherford (Facts on File, 1995)
There is a database, North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, that “includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters” from colonial times to 1950. This is one of the databases provided free to all North Carolinians through NC Live and their library. Readers in other states should check with their local library to see if they can provide access.
Thank you for the reading list. A book that might be added is “Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era”, by Linda Grant DePauw (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975)