The best books to discover the hidden lives of women in early America

I read this book when I was first starting to write my book, and the way Ulrich unravels the history is a total revelation. Each chapter begins with a passage from Ballard’s diary describing a day of her life in her small Maine town. The passages are almost impossible to decipher—shorthand, obscure names, and references that one just can’t understand. Then Ulrich spends the chapter unpacking the entry, telling its full story.

If you like mysteries and figuring out clues (I do!), then this book is enormously satisfying. It also tells a fascinating story about women and medical history. Female midwives like Ballard were gradually replaced by male doctors. 

I listened to this audiobook about motherhood while pushing my newborn second child in a stroller. Sarah Knott takes the reader through the stages of becoming a mother–conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, newborn care, childcare, and resuming work–and then doing it again with a second child.

Throughout, Knott contrasts her own experiences with those of women in the past, especially in North America and Britain. The differences are striking, not just in healthcare but also in social support. I thought about the women I'd written about who had many children and how important familial support was.

As a fellow professor, I was heartened to read about Knott's experience returning to work and re-finding her academic mind. She writes poignantly about how motherhood is a constant interruption. It is so true!

When researching my book, I often had access to letters, diaries, and even houses of affluent women whose papers archives were preserved. But recreating their intimate home music-making proved difficult. This book contrasts starkly–it's about enslaved colonial Barbadian women. Yet Marisa Fuentes' masterful stitching of archival scraps accessing their lives is moving.

She inventively reads maps, architecture, and ephemera alongside traditional sources to glimpse past existences. Reading this helped me recognize my sources' abundance, but also that sources demand continual re-reading and re-understanding. You can't take their meaning for granted. As Fuentes portrays enslaved lives, I realized my book's genteel subjects, while documented, still harbored unplumbed depths requiring creative interpretation to access their full intimacies.

This recommendation may seem like a wildcard, but bear with me. The book follows two Chinese immigrant siblings in nineteenth-century California who must survive after their father dies. I love how it explores tough family relationships, including between the siblings–a girl and a trans boy.

There's exciting new research on trans people in early America, and I appreciate how the book presents the character straightforwardly without overexplaining his identity anachronistically. I also appreciate its exploration of survival strategies for women and non-cis men in harsh circumstances, despite not being strictly eighteenth-century.

While the setting differs from my usual remit, the book's nuanced handling of gender and depiction of underrepresented experiences make it a valuable addition. Sometimes, works from adjacent periods can shed important light on the ones we study most closely.

I love an epic family novel, and this fits the bill. It’s set in 1875 in the Cherokee Nation and centers largely on a Cherokee matriarch as she cares for her dying husband, who is white while raising her sons and managing a substantial farm.

It’s also about her neighbors and employees, and there’s a bit of a mystery, too. I’m recommending this book because it shows just how complex family can be and how kinship can be a powerful force for protection, but also, in U.S. legal contexts, it can be used against Native American people.