Her Past Around Us

Book excerpt: 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 his