Stuff AP Loves: Women’s History Colonial to 1848

1. Stuff AP Loves:Women’s HistoryColonial to 1848 Adapted from City University of New York

2. Colonial Era Economics • Subsistence farming makes family unit group of equal partners • Husband, sons tend fields, hunt, fish • Wife, daughters maintain household • Clean, make, & mend clothes • Prepare, cook food, tend house • Make soap, candles, spin, sew, weave • Help with planting, harvest

3. Colonial Era Philosophy • Enlightenment thinkers (Rousseau, Voltaire) called for egalitarian treatment of all (natural rights) • Not applied to women • Mary Wollstonecraft writes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791)

4. Early National Era Philosophy • Abigail Adams (1776) tells John to “remember the ladies” while drafting new laws that will necessarily follow the Declaration of Independence • John jokingly tells her to forget it, and not much is done (lest men be subject to the tyranny of the petticoat)

5. Early National Era Philosophy • Popular sovereignty requires educated electorate steeped in the principles of civic virtue (sacrificial giving to the state) • With little public education available, mothers become the primary providers of education in children (mainly sons) so that civic virtue is instilled in the next generation—”Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” (JFK-1961) • Gives rise to “Republican Motherhood” • Promotes early educational efforts for women

6. Early National Era Politics • Some states had granted suffrage to women before the revolution! • 1777-1807 The states of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey which had previously allowed women to vote rescind those rights.

7. Early National Era Economics • Men begin to work outside home in manufacturing, causing division of work roles between men and women • Men leave the home for work; women stay at home and perform traditional duties • Women begin to be less important for the economic well-being of home • Reinforces role of women at home

8. Early National Era Economics • In the1820s, young women are taken from farms to work at Lowell textile town • By the1830s, women begin to protest wages, hours, and conditions of employment • Women begin the labor movement!

9. Mary S. Powell • “At half past six [the bell] rings for the girls to get up and at seven they are called to the mill. At half past 12 we have dinner are called back again at one and stay till half past seven. I get along very well with my work. I can doff as fast as any girl in our room. If any girl wants employment I advise them to come to Lowell.” • Read more about the Lowell Girls at http://www.nwhm.org/exhibits/Industry/MSPaulLetters.htm

10. Cult of Domesticity -I When husbands went off to work, they helped create the view that men alone should support the family. A woman who ventured out into such a world could easily fall prey to it, for women were weak and delicate creatures. A woman's place was therefore in the private sphere, in the home, where she took charge of all that went on.

11. Cult of Domesticity - II A new ideal of womanhood and a new ideology about the home arose out of the new attitudes about work and family. Called the "cult of domesticity," it is found in women's magazines, advice books, religious journals, newspapers, fiction--everywhere in popular culture.

12. Cult of Domesticity Virtues • Piety • Purity • Submissiveness • Domesticity

13. Piety The modern young woman of the 1820s and 1830s was thought of as a new Eve working with God to bring the world out of sin through her suffering, through her pure, and passionless love.

14. Purity Without sexual purity, a woman was no woman, but rather a lower form of being, a "fallen woman," unworthy of the love of her sex and unfit for their company.

15. Submissiveness Men were to be movers, and doers--the actors in life. Women were to be passive bystanders, submitting to fate, to duty, to God, and to men.

16. Domesticity A woman's place was in the home. The bourgeois wife was busy about her duties and childcare, keeping the home a cheerful, peaceful place which would attract men away from the evils of the outer world.

17. Summary • By 1850, women were politically, economically, and socially subordinate to their husbands. • A powerful reform movement began in the 1840s and continued for over 100 years. That reform movement addressed political, economic, and social injustice.

18. Reform Efforts • Margaret Fuller (Transcendentalist editor of The Dial) • Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845) • She compared the condition of women to slavery: women had neither suffrage nor equality under the law, their property belonged to their husbands.

19. in many cases, divorce was practically impossible, and the guardianship of children was almost exclusively given to the fathers. • Husbands tended to treat their wives at best as children and at worst as servants. • Generally, middle and upper class women were not allowed careers and their education was not aimed to be on a par with their male counterparts. • The double standard of sexuality and morality was not questioned.

20. Seneca falls • Abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott lead group at Seneca Falls, New York • Seneca Falls Convention, 1848, adopts “Declaration of Sentiments,” modeled on Declaration of Independence, deleting king and inserting men.

21. Declaration of Sentiments • When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. • We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

22. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. • He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.…. • He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. • He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. Nothing changed