Entangled Lives

"A beautifully researched, richly textured study of women's community of labor in the critical half-century after the American Revolution. Expanding the treatment of women's work beyond the boundaries of household labor, this book captures the complicated web of social and economic interactions among women (and, to a lesser degree, men). A sophisticated treatment of the tight connections between place as spatial geography, landscape, and material environment, and place as social and economic position, Entangled Lives is engaging and illuminating."

"Marla Miller has emerged as a preeminent scholar of eighteenth-century American women's work and has done perhaps more than any other single recent historian to challenge our assumptions and reshape our understanding of the character and significance of women's labor in early America. This rich microhistory of a place over time is a study of the best kind, with women at the center of the picture. Miller compels us to regard class, gender, and race in the early American North with fresh insight."

"With a sharp eye and a sensitive ear, Miller provides us with access to the spaces where women worked, courted, and took care of the sick. As we eavesdrop on intimate conversations and witness changes in the material worlds of women's labor, we gain a beautifully detailed picture of an early nineteenth century New England village poised for economic transformation."

"Deftly weaving together archival and material sources, Entangled Lives makes clear that women's history is not simply part of early American economic history; it is inseparable from it. Miller's skillful reconstruction of the intertwined, quotidian labor practices of white, black, and indigenous women in New England will particularly delight readers yearning for local histories in the midst of the global turn."

"As one of the best historians of women and work, Marla Miller writes lovingly, but unsparingly, of a place she holds dear. Entangled Lives models an intersectional social history for the twenty-first century: empathetic towards its subjects, yet clear-eyed about the overlapping inequalities their lives reflected and too often reproduced."

"The vision of homes as sanctuaries of morality, set apart from the market and centered on child-rearing, was never true to life in early America or in the modern society that followed. In exposing that myth, Marla R. Miller brilliantly restores to view a complex, interdependent world that, for all its contrast with our lives today, reminds us that we are all 'entangled' together for good and ill."