Women's Voices, Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History

The editors draw on diaries, letters, essays, court documents, sermons, wills, plantation records, newspapers, fiction, and advice manuals to reconstruct women's lives and roles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to sources that convey women's experiences in their own words, the work includes prescriptive and proscriptive materials, most written by men, to further illuminate women's behavior and attitudes. The book is divided into six thematic chapters: sex and repro…