Reading the panel discussion has reminded me of my debts to the pioneer scholars in the field, and it has also helped me to see my specific location in the field of women's history. Unlike the scholars on the panel for whom their introduction and commitment to women's history was inseparable from their own participation in second-wave feminism, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s outside of the United States and never had a first-hand experience of U.S. second-wave feminism. Consequently, while the second wave is quite central to the way I think about U.S. women's history, the agenda and/or the problems of the second wave have not defined the way I conceptualize women's history in the same way they have for my predecessors. Furthermore, although I read almost no texts by or about women throughout my undergraduate curriculum at a Japanese university, by the time I entered graduate school in the United States in the early 1990s, women's studies had already become a well-recognized field and feminist inquiry an established tool for historical analysis in the American academe.
Women’s status in this liberal culture has changed over time, as has the culture itself. In part, these changes in the lives of women are a result of the organized women’s movement, which challenged the rigid roles assigned to women and expanded women’s options in such areas as education and employment.
Women participated in political activities long before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920), which established women’s right to vote in all federal, state, and local government elections. During the American Revolution, many women joined the Daughters of Liberty and supported the war effort by providing supplies such as food and clothing to soldiers and by persuading women to boycott goods imported from England...............
