Birth of American Feminism

Virginia Bernhard has published two historical novels, set in seventeenth-century Virginia and Bermuda, as well as a biography of a Texas governor's daughter. She coedited Southern Women: Histories and Identities (1992) and teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Professor Bernhard has served on the Advanced Placement test development committee for United States history.Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University. She is editor of the Journal of the Historical Society, and author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988); Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991); "Feminism is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (1996); Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a Historical Society, co-edited with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (1999); and Women and the Future of the Family (2000).

• Introdution. Part I: Women as Activists: The Beginnings.Part II: The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.Part III: The Flowering of the Women's Movement: The Lily(1849-1856).Part IIII: The Momentum: Women's Rights Conventions AfterSecneca Falls.Part V: The History as Participants Remembered It.