Woman

“An ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. Woman is exhaustively researched and finely written.”—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

“An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“A comprehensive and lucid overview of the ongoing campaign to free women from ‘the tyranny of old notions.’”—Publishers Weekly

“Faderman’s engaging style defies the fear of this being a dense, obtuse, textbook. It isn’t. It’s a page-turner with regular ‘you ;gotta be kidding’ moments triggering head-in-hands reactions.”—New York Journal of Books

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews

“Fascinating. . . . Few books are timelier than Woman. . . . Will be a rite of passage for generations of LGBTQ folk.”—Kathi Wolfe, Washington Blade

“Faderman, a renowned scholar of gender and sexuality, has crafted a detailed, fascinating discussion of the social, legal, and political meanings of the term woman in the US.”—K. B. Nutter, Choice

“A fast-paced journey in women’s and gender history from seventeenth-century America through the early twenty-first century. . . . Woman offers an excellent analysis of sexuality and gender, drawing from Faderman’s extensive research and her expertise.”—Joan M. Johnson, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Lillian Faderman’s is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of ‘woman’ with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women.”—Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote

“A rewarding read. Pioneering scholar Lillian Faderman illuminates how concepts of female difference and inferiority stubbornly persist and captures the ongoing struggles of women to free themselves from the idea of ‘woman.’”—Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania

“A sweeping history of conceptions of women by themselves and others told through fascinating stories that get the reader to turn the page.”—Claudia Goldin, author of Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity

“A wide-ranging, deeply researched, and very well written survey of how the idea of woman has been deployed over more than three centuries of American history.”—Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

“With dazzling scholarship and monumental vision Faderman has, with illuminating detail and persuasive argument, brilliantly woven a rich tapestry of how the American ‘woman’ has been created and re-created over centuries.”—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States