Disorderly conduct : visions of gender in Victorian America / Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1: Hearing women's words: a feminist reconstruction of history -- The female world of love and ritual: relations between women in nineteenth-century America -- 2: Bourgeois discourse and the age of Jackson: an introduction -- Davy Crockett as trickster: pornography, liminality, and symbolic inversion in victorian America -- Beauty, the beast, and the militant woman: a case study in sex roles and social stress in Jacksonian America -- The cross and the pedestal: women, anti-ritualism, and the emergence of the American Bourgeoisie -- 3: Bourgeois discourse and the progressive era: an introduction -- Puberty to menopause: the cycle of femininity in nineteenth-century America -- The hysterical woman: sex roles and role conflict in nineteenth-century America -- The abortion movement in the AMA, 1850-1880 -- The new woman as Androgyne: social disorder and gender crisis, 1870-1936.

Essays look at feminist history, female friendships, Davy Crockett, sex roles, the feminine cycle, hysteria, abortion, and androgyny in nineteenth-century America.