"The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History" boldly explores the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In 29 chapters, the handbook showcases women's and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community-building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the handbook's six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent" --