Forget Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Queen Latifah, and Diane Sawyer.
Today's media magnets are nothing compared to the forthright ladies
and rustic women who helped create the United States of America.
The names we should know are Eleanor Dare, Temperance Flowerdew,
the Brent sisters, Mary Johnson, Susan Blunt, Eliza Lucas, Phillis
Wheatley, Deborah Sampson Gannett, Sarah Hale, Katy Ferguson, Maria
Chapman, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, and Jane Addams, to name just a few
of the thousand women Gail Collins has put on display in the
seductive and sprawling historical romp AMERICA'S WOMEN. From the
Victorian age to the Age of Aquarius, this ambitious volume brings
to life the brave, selfless and patriotic ladies who stood in front
of, on top of, in spite of and sometimes even behind the men
America still stubbornly celebrates as the sole defenders of
freedom.

So richly filled with newly uncovered historical fact and
biographical detail, the book is a fantastic time machine,
beginning in braless 1587 and ending in the bra-burning era of
1960-1970. Collins's effort is unique because it is not just
another encyclopedic listing of famous women of the ages that choke
our library shelves. With a diary quote opening each section,
AMERICA'S WOMEN relies on the original sources to tell the tales,
interspersed with spicy and informative editorialization from
Collins. "One of the tricks to being a great historical figure is
to leave behind as much information as possible," the author
explains, revealing that primary source material was drawn from the
New Englanders' "winning habit of keeping diaries." However,
Collins, herself a noteworthy figure as the first female editorial
page editor for the New York Times, digs deep to chronicle
the lives of the women who "left behind almost nothing of their
voices," like the Native Americans who met the first English
settlers.

Collins introduces Eleanor Dare, purportedly the first female
colonist; Margaret and Mary Brent, unmarried sisters who ran the
colony of Maryland during wartime, Margaret being the first woman
to demand the right to vote in the Assembly; and Temperance
Flowerdew, the wife of two of the Virginia colony's governors. Mary
Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1620 as the first African American
woman. Susan Blunt was appointed at just 10 years old as
housekeeper for twin girls and an elderly man. It's hard to imagine
an elementary school girl today even attempting Blunt's duties,
which began each day at 5 a.m., toting water from a well, making
breakfast, caring for the old man, making dinner, cleaning and
mending. "As her reward, she received enough money to buy a new
apron," Collins reports. No Playstation, Eminem, air conditioning,
hair dryers, cell phones, or Powerpuff Girls. While cleaning and
mending might sound easy enough, Collins continually offers solid
doses of colonial reality: "Washing clothes was an arduous
process… The laundress scrubbed and pounded the clothes in
the tubs, working up to her elbows in hot water, sometimes for
hours on end." Then there was the farm work, the animals, the
children, the weather, and the husband, who was off politicking or
fighting and dying in a war.

Eliza Lucas ran her father's Charleston plantation and cared for
her invalid mother and young sister; Phillis Wheatley, a
13-year-old slave, published her poetry in the New England
newspapers, and Deborah Sampson Gannett pretended to be a man so
she could fight alongside her husband in the Revolutionary War.
Sarah Josepha Hale was a powerful magazine editor in the 1830s,
slave Katy Ferguson established New York's first Sunday school,
Maria Weston Chapman led abolitionists, Mary Ann Bickerdyke took
control in Illinois to aid the soldiers, and Jane Addams was a
famous journalist who exposed the social wrongs that crippled the
nation.

Collins makes each page exciting in this powerfully moving, funny
and emotionally charged tour of our past, making the perfect
history book for the millennium. The brisk narrative suffers only
by the author's lack of attention to early lesbianism, which is not
even mentioned until page 256, and overly extensive coverage of the
Salem Witch Trials, with no reference to the telling theory that
the children's claims of witchcraft might have been caused by
hallucinations brought on by eating LSD-laced rye bread. While
Mormon renouncer and author Ann Eliza Webb Young, the wealthy
beauty product mongering Seven Sutherland Sisters, and pioneer
obstetrician Peggy Warne are unfortunately missing from AMERICA'S
WOMEN, there are still plenty of heroines here who contemplated,
labored, mothered, lobbied, wrote, spoke out, fought, and even gave
their lives to make far more than just a village.