Mysteries of sex : tracing women and men through American history / Mary P. Ryan.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 361-408) and index.

pt. I. Making sex in America : 1500-1900 -- 1. Where have the corn mothers gone? : Americans encounter the Europeans -- The coordinates of gender : asymmetry, the relations of the sexes, and hierarchy -- The sexual frontier -- Warriors and farmers on the gender frontier -- 2. Who baked that apple pie and when? : how domesticity conquered American culture -- The prehistory of feminine domesticity : 1620-1692 -- Between patriarchy and domesticity : 1750-1840 -- Homemaking in antebellum and Victorian America -- 3. How did race get colored? : gender and sexuality in the American South -- How slavery became colored African American -- The gendering of slave society -- Civil war and the reconstruction of race and gender -- The sexual politics of Jim Crow -- pt. II. Dividing the public realm -- 4. What is the sex of citizenship? : engendering the American political tradition from the Revolution to the New Deal -- When citizenship was male : 1776-1865 -- The mother as citizen : segregated and secondary -- The woman citizen goes to Washington -- Second-class citizenship : male and female -- pt. III. Women remake gender in the twentieth century -- 5. How do you get from home to work to equity? : 1900-1960 -- Who made the woman worker? : an overview -- The new woman goes to work : 1890-1940 -- A private detour through the 1920s -- The next generation combines work and family : the 1940s and 1950s -- The mystery of the feminine mystique -- 6. Where does sex divide? : feminism, sexuality, and the structures of gender since 1960 -- The second wave of feminism : 1960-1970 -- Sexual revolution and gay rights -- Restructuring gender differences : 1980-2000 -- 7. Where in the world is the border between male and female? : immigration and generation in the twentieth century -- The generations of gender -- New immigrants meet postmodernity : 1965-2000 -- Joining together to remake male, female, and America.

Print version record.

In a sweeping synthesis of American history, Mary Ryan demonstrates how the meaning of male and female has evolved, changed, and varied over a span of 500 years and across major social and ethnic boundaries. She traces how, at select moments in history, perceptions of sex difference were translated into complex and mutable patterns for differentiating women and men. How those distinctions were drawn and redrawn affected the course of American history more generally. Ryan recounts the construction of a modern gender regime that sharply separated male from female and created modes of exclusion and inequity.

English.

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