★★★★☆ Balancing the record a bit

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Gail Collins

I read this book ten years ago and barely remember it. I remember my impression of the book better than the book itself. Gail Collins is a columnist at the New York Times whose columns I regularly read.

This book attempts to redress the male-dominated balance of history as conventionally taught by telling us what life was like for women in American history. In my ten-year-old memory it is not so much as book about Great Women in American History as a book about how life was for women. I particularly remember her showing the heroism of women in bearing children. Childbirth has been extraordinarily risky for most of human history. Collins shows us that American women have put their lives more at risk to bear children than have American men in war.

About a fifth of the pregnant women in New England died giving birth, and the figures were much higher in the South. Cotton Mather, ever one to look on the bright side, advised pregnant women that “PREPARATION FOR DEATH is that most Reasonable and Seasonable thing, to which you must now apply yourself.” Wealthy women had special sets of childbed linens, which they put on their beds after delivery was completed. If tragedy occurred, the linens became the woman’s shroud. In an era in which masculine bravery was celebrated, it was the women who actually dared to stare down death on a regular basis.

That's just one small snippet that remains in my memory after all these years.

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