Jay Kleinberg on The History of American Women

Your first book is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

This is an iconic American text. It was written in the years immediately following the American Civil War. Alcott presents a portrait of a northern family of women managing on their own while their husband/father is serving as an army chaplain. This classic work contains a powerful message to young women, namely that they do not have to marry in order to achieve success. Jo is one of the first in a long line of what might be described as ‘plucky’ heroines who follow their own destiny. She doesn’t end up marrying her leading man in this book although she finally does in a later volume.

Nancy Drew is another series which follows in those footsteps. The book is all led by her. I think if one looks in the magazine literature it would be hard to find a similar character at that time. These were stories initially published in a magazine and then bound together as a book.

Alcott was one of the first professional women authors and she had a very interesting life herself having served as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War. Her father was a leading social innovator who joined one of the first social communities which didn’t last very long because, while the men were off thinking their thoughts and communing with nature, the women’s lives didn’t change at all!

How did you feel when you read this book?

What it meant to me is something I wasn’t aware of at the time, but later I came to recognise this ‘can do’ spirit which is terrifically American. As a girl growing up in New York in the 50s and 60s I absorbed this notion of enterprising activism, of being the leader rather than a follower. And I think that is what this whole genre of girls’ stories is all about: women and girls taking charge of their own lives.

Your second choice, The Response to Industrialism, was written by your mentor Samuel P Hays.

Yes, he was my mentor at the University of Pittsburgh, where I took my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. He and my other mentor, David Montgomery, supervised my PhD.

This brief book examined the changing economic structure of the United States between the years 1885 to 1914. The importance of this book, which has become a historical classic, is that it looked at a broad variety of responses to economic change during the American Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The most powerful aspect of the book for me was that it regarded the women as a historical subject. It’s also a beautifully written book which I still refer my students to for knowledge and the clarity of its prose.

Studying Sam’s book, as well as talking to my two mentors, enabled me to formulate a research project that focused and still focuses upon the relationship between economic, demographic and political forces. Both Hays and Montgomery looked behind the labels to determine the origins of public protest and policy.

Pittsburgh when I started my PhD in 1968 was very much a steel industry town. What interested me was the lives of the women who lived in the shadow of the steel mills and how all the work they did at home enabled their husbands, sons and lodgers to work the way they did in the mills. Apart from Margaret Byington, there had never been a study of these women. What I wanted to do was to look at the ordinary women’s lives who were not working in the mills and see the impact they had on the men around them. And my mentors encouraged me to do that.

Maybe it was because Sam was a Quaker, I don’t know, but what I liked about him was he took what I was interested in seriously and agreed that I could teach a course entitled The History and Social Role of Women in 1969/1970. This was one of the first courses in the United States on the history of women and I was a postgrad at the time.