Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

The 1890s and the 1930s were periods of intense consumer activism during which organized consumers pressured government to regulate business on behalf of the consuming public. In both periods, however, the heightened awareness of the consumer had an impact that extended beyond the realm of grass-roots activism or government regulation. One of the areas profoundly affected by this heightened awareness was political–economic thought. In both periods, political–economic theorists turned their attention to the consumer, debating such issues as whether humans were fundamentally producers or consumers, whether civic identity should be rooted in the consumer or the producer identity, and whether the “good society” was one based on “producerist” or “consumerist” values.

In the work of contemporary writers who explore the racial and social geography of growing up in the American South, fleeting encounters between white and black girls abound but enduring friendships prove to be more problematic to represent. In Ellen Foster (1987), Ellen and Starletta's association stretches across the novel whereas, most frequently in fictions, the points at which black and white women converge and relate tend to be brief and transient, as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) where a heavily pregnant and fugitive Sethe is aided by poor white Amy; or in Thulani Davis's 1959 (1992) where the brief kindness of a white woman is remembered as a significant, if fleeting gesture. I wish to raise questions about the ways in which cross-racial childhood relationships are represented formally and aesthetically. There is often an understandable but troubling literary–critical impasse whereby black girls are contained within the first-person narrations of white protagonists which, whilst explicating the connection between the girls, risk engulfing or subsuming the black “best friend.” I shall examine the ways in which this may be the inevitable result of the Bildungsroman form and consider how the representation of the cross-racial friendship at the heart of Ellen Foster is modified in direct correspondence to the novel's structuring.

Sue Barton is the fictional redhaired nursing heroine of a series of novels written for young women. Recalled by several generations of women readers with affection, Sue Barton has remained in print ever since the publication of the first novel in the series: Sue Barton, Student Nurse, written by Helen Dore Boylston, was published in America in 1936. Neither the covers of her four novels now in paperback, nor the publisher's catalogue entry, however, acknowledge Sue Barton's age: “Sue Barton Series – The everyday stories of redheaded Sue Barton and hospital life as she progresses from being a student nurse through her varied nursing career.”

The catalogue entry for the series and the novels' paperback covers now claim Sue Barton as a contemporary young woman, poised for romance. Sue is, however, a pre-war heroine, and very much located within an American history and tradition of nursing. With her close contemporary, Cherry Ames, Sue Barton is one of the nursing heroines who were to establish a genre in popular fiction for young women, the career novel, and, more particularly, the nursing career novel.

Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1997, £28.50). Pp. 274. ISBN 0 19 511242 3.

Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, £19.95). Pp. 311. ISBN 0 674 893 9 3.

Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, £38.00). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8032 3716 2.

Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, £24.99). Pp. 240. ISBN 0 19 5114833.

The historical study of women has evolved from a consideration of elite women, the quest for suffrage, and women in organized groups to encompass different classes, ethnic groups, and social settings. Writing women back into the historical record has led to a more creative use of data sources, a greater depth of understanding about how societies work on both formal and informal levels, and the exploration of gendered patterns of most aspects of the economy, social structure, and politics. However, the conceptual frameworks of women's history have not kept pace with the expansion of scholarship to encompass a more diverse population.

These four books highlight two trends in contemporary historical practice: the inclusion of gender as an essential aspect of our understanding of the past and the use of comparative frameworks to investigate the significance of socially constructed sex roles for society. By contrasting women's lives in different settings and racial groups, the authors illustrate how communities shape gender roles and how those roles influence a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural events. Gender thus takes its place as a fundamental category of historical analysis without which it is difficult to understand American (or any other) history; women's work, family relationships, voluntary, social, and political activities are as central to understanding society as men's.