Revised 1/03/2005

Author(s)

Kaufman Polly Welts (Eds.)

Corbett Katharine T.

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Here is a guide to finding and presenting places that bring new visibility to women's lives and illuminate their goals.  Some of these sites, such as city hall, are not generally associated with women; some are sites of long-forgotten women's activities; others, such as kitchens, usually assumed to be women's domain, reflect unexpected complexities of meaning.  Eleven essays explore possibilities for using women's history and feminist analysis to look at familiar places through the lens of gender.  Case studies become guides for interpreting or reinterpreting similar places.  The text also contains  lists of suggested sources pertaining to the subjects presented. The sites analyzed here include homes, gardens, factories, cemeteries, business districts, and even entire communities.  They are places to learn about women running millinery shops, surviving in a new country by working in another woman's kitchen, stripping tobacco leaves in a factory in the South, laboring for slave owners, commemorating achievement, and mourning the dead. This collection of essays is designed to be useful to teachers and historical societies searching their own communities for new sites significant to the history of women. The essays also will interest those who want to use local and national historic sites as windows into women's history.

"A compelling aspect of this book is the variety of approaches it uses for uncovering women's pasts. Her Past Around Us is a book that will prove most valuable to those who wish to promote women's history in public settings. The case study approach stimulates ideas for local implementation and the background resources, including web sites, provide the needed resources for getting started." -- Page Putnam Miller, The Public Historian, October 2003

"With this practical, how-to manual, the authors should achieve their goal of inspiring individuals and communities to situate women in time and place in diverse settings. The chapters guide public historians, students and faculty from elementary through graduate school, and members of historical societies and preservation groups to locate, document, and make visable women's past and present." -- K. Gedge, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, CHOICE, October 2003

"Goes a long way to explain why the task of putting women's history back in place has been and still is difficult…important "how to" book, a guide to surmounting difficulties and breaking through some of the turf barriers and conceptual gaps among the varied academic disciplines, communities, and political interests involved." -- Linda Witt, AASLH History News, Volume 58, #4,  Autumn 2003

"The strength of Her Past Around Us is the wealth of solid, practical advice it offers. The essays are grounded in specific tools, techniques, and strategies for public history practice, and each essay is followed by a long list of related websites, readings, and historic sites." -- Marla R. Miller, The New England Quarterly

"Her Past Around Us focuses primarily on how existing historic places can rethink the stories they present. The collection is particularly useful as a series of case studies, in which the authors describe in detail how to construct and conduct walking tours, theme tours at historic houses, and research on women in various spheres of society..also valuable to professors of women's history and preservation, because the individual essays are of a length and style that students should find comfortable." -- Jennifer Pustz, The Annals of Iowa, 62, Number 3, Summer 2003

"This is an important book for those who manage historic sites and a challenge to educators and visitors to demand to hear the stories previously hidden in attics and basements, traditionally ignored and considered minor." -- Sandy Brue, CMR: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Summer 2004

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