Encyclopedia of women in American history

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Consultants and Contributors......Page 13
Preface......Page 14
Timeline of Historical Events (Vol. 1)......Page 15
Timeline of Historical Events (Vol. 2)......Page 16
Timeline of Historical Events (Vol. 3)......Page 17
PART 1: ESSAYS......Page 18
Women in Colonial and Early National America......Page 20
Women and the Law in Colonial and Revolutionary America......Page 23
Domestic Life in the Colonial Years......Page 27
Women and Religion......Page 31
Gender Ideology in the Revolutionary Era......Page 36
Social Control......Page 40
Stages in a Woman's Life in the Early Republic......Page 44
Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic......Page 48
PART 2: ARTICLES......Page 54
Adams, Abigail Smith......Page 56
Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson......Page 57
Aitken, Jane......Page 58
Algonquian Household Economy......Page 59
American Revolution......Page 60
Anti-miscegenation Laws......Page 63
Arnold, Peggy Shippen......Page 64
Arts, Patrons of the......Page 65
Bailey, Lydia R,......Page 66
Baptists......Page 67
Benevolent Associations, Women's......Page 68
Bethune, Joanna Graham......Page 69
The Bible and the Subordination of Women......Page 70
Bingham, Anne Willing......Page 71
Bradford, Cornelia Smith......Page 72
Brant, Molly......Page 73
Brewer, Lucy......Page 74
Brown, Phoebe Hinsdale......Page 75
Captivity Narratives......Page 76
Catholics......Page 77
Childbearing Years......Page 79
Childbirth......Page 81
Child Custody......Page 82
Childhood......Page 83
Christianity......Page 84
Church Membership......Page 85
Civic Life......Page 86
Colonial Household Economy......Page 88
Common Law......Page 89
Constitution, United States......Page 90
Corbin, Margaret Cochran......Page 91
Courts......Page 92
Coverture......Page 93
Crimes Against Women......Page 94
Custis, Eleanor Calvert......Page 95
Darragh, Lydia Barrington......Page 96
Declaration of Independence......Page 97
Denominationalism......Page 98
Diaries and Journals......Page 99
Diseases......Page 100
Divorce Laws......Page 101
Domestic Arts......Page 102
Domestic Life......Page 104
Dow, Peggy......Page 106
Duchesne, Rose Philippine......Page 107
Eldridge, Elleanore......Page 108
Entertainment......Page 109
Entrepreneurs......Page 110
Estaugh, Elizabeth Haddon......Page 111
Factories......Page 112
Family Life, Colonial......Page 113
Family Life, Native American......Page 114
Family Life, Republican......Page 115
Fashion......Page 116
Ferguson, Elizabeth Graeme......Page 117
Foster, Hannah Webster......Page 118
Franklin, Deborah Read......Page 119
French and Indian War......Page 120
Friendship......Page 121
Frontier Life......Page 122
Galloway, Grace Growdon......Page 123
Games......Page 124
Gender and Racial Differences......Page 125
Gender Frontiers......Page 126
Gentility......Page 127
Gossip......Page 128
Graham, Isabella Marshall......Page 129
Great Awakenings......Page 130
Greenleaf, Anna......Page 131
Gynecology......Page 132
Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler......Page 133
Health......Page 134
Hemings, Sally......Page 135
Hume, Sophia Wigington......Page 137
Hutchinson, Anne Marbury......Page 138
Immigration and Naturalization......Page 139
Indentured Servitude......Page 140
Jackson, Rachel Donelson Robards......Page 141
Jemison, Mary......Page 142
Jews and Judaism......Page 143
Jones, Rebecca......Page 144
Judson, Ann Hasseltine......Page 145
Kaahumanu......Page 146
Knight, Sarah Kemble......Page 147
Law, Elizabeth Custis......Page 148
Lesbians......Page 149
Literacy......Page 150
Literature, 18th Century......Page 151
Litigation......Page 152
Logan, Martha Daniell......Page 153
Madison, Dolley Payne Todd......Page 154
Magic and Astrology......Page 156
Marriage, Companionate......Page 157
Marriage Laws......Page 158
Mathews, Ann Teresa......Page 159
Medicine......Page 160
Methodists......Page 161
Midwifery......Page 163
Missionaries......Page 164
Montour, Madame......Page 165
Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp......Page 166
Murray, Judith Sargent Stevens......Page 167
Native Americans......Page 168
Newell, Harriet Atwood......Page 169
Novels and Romantic Love......Page 170
Nurse, Rebecca......Page 171
Old Age and Mortality......Page 172
Painting and Sculpting......Page 173
Patriarchy......Page 174
Pelham, Mary Singleton Copley......Page 175
Philanthropy......Page 176
Philipse, Margaret Hardenbrook......Page 177
Pinckney, Eliza......Page 178
Poetry......Page 179
Preaching......Page 181
Pregnancy......Page 182
Printing and Publishing......Page 183
Property Rights......Page 184
Pueblo Household Economy......Page 185
Puritans......Page 186
Quakers......Page 187
Randolph, Mary......Page 189
Religious Sects......Page 190
Republicanism......Page 191
Republican Motherhood......Page 192
Rowson, Susanna Haswell......Page 193
Rural Life......Page 194
Sacagawea......Page 195
Schools......Page 197
Schuyler, Catherine van Rensselaer......Page 198
Science......Page 199
Servants, Domestic......Page 200
Sexuality, Regulation of......Page 201
Shakers......Page 202
Shippen, Anne (Nancy)......Page 203
Slavery......Page 204
Slocum, Frances......Page 205
Spanish Household Economy......Page 206
Starbuck, Mary Coffyn......Page 207
Tekakwitha, Catherine......Page 208
Thompson, Sarah, Countess of Rumford......Page 209
Tituba......Page 210
Tyler, Mary Hunt Palmer......Page 211
Van Buren, Hannah Hoes......Page 212
Voluntary Associations......Page 213
Voters, Women......Page 214
Watteville, Henrietta Benigna Justine Zinzendorf von......Page 215
Widowhood......Page 216
Wilkinson, Eliza Yonge......Page 217
Winthrop, Elizabeth Fones......Page 218
Witch Trials, Salem......Page 219
Women, Status of......Page 220
Wood, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating......Page 222
Wright, Patience Lovell......Page 223
Wright, Susanna......Page 224
Zane, Elizabeth "Betty"......Page 225
PART 3: DOCUMENTS......Page 226
Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London (1619-1624)......Page 227
An Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson (1637)......Page 230
Selected Poetry of Anne Bradstreet (1650)......Page 235
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1773)......Page 241
Selected Letters of the Adams Family (1775-1776)......Page 245
The Gleaner (1798)......Page 248
History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805)......Page 252
PART 1: ESSAYS......Page 256
Women and Nineteenth-Century America......Page 257
Domesticity and Ideology of Separate Spheres......Page 262
Family, Marriage, and Sexuality......Page 265
Public Life: Citizenship and Women's Rights......Page 269
Women and Reform......Page 272
Women and Religion......Page 276
Women and Western Expansion, 1820-1900......Page 280
Race and Slavery......Page 285
Women, Work, and Industrialization......Page 288
Immigration and Urbanization......Page 291
PART 2: ARTICLES......Page 294
Abolition......Page 295
Abortion......Page 297
Adams, Marian Hooper......Page 298
Addams, Jane......Page 299
Advice Books......Page 300
African-American Women......Page 301
Ah Tsun......Page 302
American Anti-Slavery Society......Page 303
American Woman Suffrage Association......Page 304
Anthony, Susan B.......Page 305
Anti-miscegenation Laws......Page 306
Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary......Page 307
Baptists......Page 308
Barnett, Ida B. Wells......Page 309
Barton, Clara......Page 310
Beecher, Catharine Esther......Page 311
Benevolent Societies......Page 312
Blackwell, Elizabeth......Page 313
Blake, Lillie Devereux......Page 314
Boyd, Belle......Page 315
Bradwell, Myra Colby......Page 316
Bryn Mawr College......Page 317
California Gold Rush......Page 318
Carlisle School......Page 319
Catholics......Page 320
Centennial Exhibition of 1876......Page 321
Chicago Women's Club......Page 322
Child Custody......Page 323
Childhood, Children......Page 324
Chinese Immigrants......Page 325
Civil War......Page 326
Colleges......Page 329
Collins, Jennie......Page 331
Contraception......Page 332
Courtship......Page 333
Croly, Jane Cunningham......Page 334
Davis, Paulina Kellogg Wright......Page 335
Denominationalism......Page 336
Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth......Page 338
Dickinson, Emily......Page 339
Dix, Dorothea Lynde......Page 340
Domestic Arts......Page 341
Douglass, Sarah Mapps......Page 342
Eddy, Mary Baker......Page 343
Education......Page 344
Elaw, Zilpha......Page 345
Emancipation Proclamation......Page 346
Entertainment......Page 347
Entrepreneurs......Page 348
Etiquette Books......Page 349
Factories and Factory Workers......Page 350
Family, Nuclear and Extended......Page 351
Fashion......Page 352
Fillmore, Abigail Powers......Page 353
Foster, Abigail Kelley......Page 354
Freedmen's Schools......Page 355
Frémont, Jessie Ann Benton......Page 356
Fuller, Margaret......Page 357
Gage, Matilda Joslyn......Page 358
General Federation of Women's Clubs......Page 359
German Immigrants......Page 360
Godey's Lady's Book......Page 361
Greenhow, Rose O'Neal......Page 362
Grimké, Sarah Moore......Page 363
Gynecology......Page 365
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins......Page 366
Hayes, Lucy Ware Webb......Page 367
Hispanic Family Life......Page 368
Housework......Page 369
Hull House......Page 370
Indian Removal......Page 371
Indian Rights Movement......Page 372
Industrial Revolution......Page 373
Insanity......Page 375
Irish Immigrants......Page 376
Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske Hunt......Page 377
Jacobs, Frances Wisebart......Page 378
Jewett, Helen......Page 379
Johnson, Eliza McCardle......Page 380
Jones, Mary Harris "Mother"......Page 381
Journalism......Page 382
Kemble, Frances Anne......Page 383
Labor Reform Association, Female......Page 384
Lawyers......Page 385
Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens......Page 387
Lee, Jarena......Page 388
Letters......Page 389
Lincoln, Mary Ann Todd......Page 390
Livermore, Harriet......Page 391
Lockwood, Belva Ann Bennett McNall......Page 392
Lowell, Josephine Shaw......Page 393
Lowell Mill Workers......Page 394
Lynching......Page 395
Lyon, Mary......Page 396
McKinley, Ida Saxton......Page 397
Magazines and Periodicals......Page 398
Marriage......Page 399
Marriage Laws......Page 400
Medicine......Page 401
Methodists......Page 402
Midwifery......Page 403
Mining Camps......Page 404
Missionaries......Page 405
Mormons......Page 406
Motherhood......Page 407
National Association of Colored Women......Page 408
National Woman Suffrage Association......Page 409
Native American Family Life......Page 410
New England Female Medical College for Women......Page 412
New York Female Moral Reform Society......Page 413
Novels......Page 414
Nursing......Page 415
Old Age and Mortality......Page 416
O'Neale, Margaret L.......Page 417
Outwork......Page 418
Page Act......Page 419
Passionlessness......Page 420
Patterson, Mary Jane......Page 421
Philanthropy......Page 422
Pierce, Jane Means Appleton......Page 423
Populism......Page 424
Preaching......Page 425
Prostitution......Page 427
Quakers......Page 428
Rape......Page 429
Reconstruction......Page 430
Richards, Ellen Swallow......Page 431
Rogers, Mary......Page 432
Rural, Farm, and Ranch Life......Page 433
Sanitary Commission......Page 434
Say, Lucy Sistare......Page 435
Science......Page 436
Second Great Awakening......Page 437
Settlement House Movement......Page 438
Sexuality, Regulation of......Page 440
Shoe Industry......Page 441
Slavery......Page 442
Solomon, Hannah Greenebaum......Page 443
Spelman Seminary......Page 444
Spiritualism......Page 445
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady......Page 446
Stone, Lucy......Page 448
Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher......Page 449
Strikes......Page 450
Suffrage......Page 451
Teaching......Page 453
Temperance......Page 454
Tenements......Page 456
Terrell, Mary Church......Page 457
Thomas, Martha Carey......Page 458
Tillson, Christiana Holmes......Page 459
Truth, Sojourner......Page 460
Tubman, Harriet Ross......Page 461
Tyler, Letitia Christian......Page 462
Underground Railroad......Page 463
Voluntary Associations......Page 464
Wage Earners......Page 465
Weld, Angelina Grimké......Page 467
Wellesley College......Page 468
Widowhood......Page 469
Willard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline......Page 470
Women's Christian Temperance Union......Page 471
Women's Club Movement......Page 472
Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary......Page 473
Women's Rights Movement......Page 474
Woodhull, Victoria......Page 475
Working Class......Page 476
World's Columbian Exposition of 1893......Page 477
Wright, Frances......Page 478
Writers......Page 479
Wu Tien Fu......Page 480
Young Women's Christian Association......Page 481
PART 3: DOCUMENTS......Page 482
Nancy Ward to the Cherokee Council (1817)......Page 483
An Address to the United Tailoresses Society (1831)......Page 484
Letters on the Equality of Women and the Condition of the Sexes (1837)......Page 486
The Lowell Offering (1840s)......Page 490
A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)......Page 493
Declaration of Sentiments (1848)......Page 496
Maria Perkins to Her Husband (1852)......Page 498
Susan B. Anthony Announcing Her Having Voted (1872)......Page 499
"Solitude of Self" (1892)......Page 500
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892-1895)......Page 504
Sadie Frowne: A Sweatshop Girl (1902)......Page 508
PART 1: ESSAYS......Page 514
Industry, Modernity, and Diversity: A Historical Overview of the Twentieth Century......Page 515
Women in Public Life......Page 519
Women and the Labor Force......Page 522
Women and the Consumer Society......Page 526
A Woman's Body......Page 529
Violence Against Women......Page 532
The Civil Rights Movement......Page 534
The Changing American Family......Page 537
Women and the Media......Page 540
Feminism......Page 542
PART 2: ARTICLES......Page 546
Abbott, Grace......Page 547
Abzug, Bella Savitsky......Page 548
Actors......Page 549
Adkins v. Children's Hospital......Page 551
Adolescence......Page 552
African Americans......Page 553
Aid to Dependent Children......Page 554
American Association of University Women......Page 555
American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations......Page 556
Anderson, Mary......Page 557
Anorexia Nervosa......Page 558
Arden, Elizabeth......Page 559
Artists......Page 560
Asian Americans......Page 561
Athletics......Page 562
Aviation and Space......Page 564
Baez, Joan......Page 565
Baker, Josephine......Page 566
Beard, Mary......Page 567
Benedict, Ruth Fulton......Page 568
Bethune, Mary McLeod......Page 569
Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sha)......Page 570
Brooks, Gwendolyn......Page 571
Brownmiller, Susan......Page 572
Bush, Laura Lane Welch......Page 573
Business and Industry......Page 574
Cable Act......Page 575
California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra......Page 576
Cannon, Annie Jump......Page 577
Carson, Rachel......Page 578
Cather, Willa......Page 579
Child Care......Page 580
Child Custody......Page 582
Child Labor......Page 583
Children's Bureau......Page 584
Cisneros, Sandra......Page 585
Congress, Women in......Page 586
Coolidge, Grace Goodhue......Page 587
Dance......Page 588
Day, Dorothy......Page 590
Del Rio, Dolores......Page 591
Division of Labor, Sexual......Page 592
Divorce Laws......Page 593
Domestic Service......Page 594
Dyk, Ruth Belcher......Page 595
Earhart, Amelia......Page 596
Education......Page 597
Eisenstadt v. Baird......Page 598
Entertainment......Page 599
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission......Page 601
Equal Pay Acts of 1963 and 1972......Page 602
Equal Rights Amendment......Page 603
Family and Medical Leave Act......Page 604
Fashion......Page 605
Fiorina, Cara Carleton S.......Page 607
Florence Crittendon Homes......Page 608
Franklin, Aretha......Page 609
Frontiero v. Richardson......Page 610
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader......Page 611
Glass Ceiling......Page 612
Grable, Betty......Page 613
Graham, Martha......Page 614
Great Depression......Page 615
Griswold v. Connecticut......Page 616
Hamer, Fannie Lou......Page 617
Harding, Florence Kling......Page 618
Health......Page 619
Height, Dorothy Irene......Page 621
Hepburn, Katharine Houghton......Page 622
Holiday, Billie......Page 623
Home Economics......Page 624
Homemaker......Page 625
Horne, Lena......Page 626
Huerta, Dolores Fernandez......Page 627
Hyde Amendment......Page 628
Infant and Child Health......Page 629
Jazz......Page 631
Jewish Americans......Page 632
Johnson, Sonia......Page 633
Jordan, Barbara......Page 634
Journalism......Page 635
Keller, Helen......Page 636
King, Coretta Scott......Page 637
Kirkpatrick, Jeane Jordan......Page 638
League of Women Voters......Page 639
Literature......Page 640
Lopez, Jessie de la Cruz......Page 642
Loving v. Virginia......Page 643
McDaniel, Hattie......Page 644
Magazines, Women's and Girls......Page 645
Marriage......Page 646
Maternalism......Page 647
Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson......Page 648
Military Service......Page 649
Miss America Pageant......Page 652
Mitchell, Margaret......Page 653
Morgan v. Virginia......Page 654
Mothers, Unmarried......Page 655
Movies......Page 656
Ms. Magazine......Page 657
Murray, Pauli......Page 658
Music......Page 659
National Abortion Rights Action League......Page 660
National Congress of Mothers......Page 661
National Council of Negro Women......Page 662
National Organization for Women......Page 663
National Women's Conference......Page 664
Native Americans......Page 665
Nevelson, Louise......Page 666
New Woman, The......Page 667
Nineteenth Amendment......Page 668
Norton, Eleanor Holmes......Page 669
Nursing......Page 670
O'Connor, Sandra Day......Page 671
Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy......Page 672
Pacificism......Page 673
Parks, Rosa McCauley......Page 675
Perkins, Frances......Page 676
Photographers......Page 677
Plath, Sylvia......Page 679
Pornography......Page 680
Poverty......Page 681
President's Commission on the Status of Women......Page 682
Protective Labor Legislation......Page 683
Quilts......Page 684
Reagan, Nancy Davis......Page 685
Religion......Page 686
Reproductive Rights......Page 688
Roe v. Wade......Page 689
Roosevelt, Eleanor......Page 690
Rubyfruit Jungle......Page 691
Sage, Margaret Slocum......Page 692
Sanger, Margaret......Page 693
Schlafly, Phyllis Stewart......Page 694
Science and Technology......Page 695
Sexual Revolution......Page 696
Silko, Leslie Marmon......Page 697
Smith, Bessie......Page 698
Social Work......Page 699
Stein, Gertrude......Page 700
Streisand, Barbara......Page 701
Suffrage Movement......Page 702
Taft, Helen Herron......Page 703
Tarbell, Ida Minerva......Page 704
Taussig, Helen Brooke......Page 705
Television and Radio......Page 706
Title VII......Page 707
Tomlin, Lily......Page 708
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire......Page 709
UAW v. Johnson Controls......Page 710
Unions, Labor......Page 711
Urbanization and Immigration......Page 712
Vietnam War......Page 714
Walker, Alice......Page 715
Weeks v. Southern Bell......Page 716
Welfare......Page 717
Wharton, Edith Jones......Page 718
Williams, Claudine......Page 719
Winfrey, Oprah......Page 720
Women Accepted for Emergency Volunteer Service (WAVES)......Page 722
Women's Baseball League......Page 723
Women's Independent Forum......Page 724
Women's Liberation Movement......Page 725
Women's Sports Foundation......Page 726
World War I......Page 727
World War II......Page 728
Youth Culture......Page 731
Zaharias, Mildred "Babe" Didrickson......Page 732
PART 3: DOCUMENTS......Page 734
Muller v. Oregon (1908)......Page 735
A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912)......Page 737
The Woman Rebel (1914)......Page 739
Mothers' Letters to the U.S. Children's Bureau (1916, 1920)......Page 741
'My Day" (1939-1962)......Page 743
The Feminine Mystique (1963)......Page 747
The Equal Rights Amendment (1923, 1972)......Page 750
Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970)......Page 751
Testimony of Anita Hill before Senate Judiciary Committee (1991)......Page 755
Violence Against Women Act (1994)......Page 758
Selected Bibliography (Vol. 1)......Page 760
Selected Bibliography (Vol. 2)......Page 762
Selected Bibliography (Vol. 3)......Page 764
General Index......Page 766

Citation preview

ENCYCLOPEDIA

OF

WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY VOLUME I-III

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY VOLUME I Colonization, Revolution, and the New Nation, 1585-1820

General Editor

JOYCE APPLEBY, Ph . D . U NIVERSITY OF CALIFORN IA AT L OS ANGELES

VOLUME II Civil War, Western Expansion, and Industrialization, 1820-1900

General Editor

EILEEN K. CHENG, Ph.D. SARAH L AWRENCE COLLEGE

VOLUME III Suffrage, World War, and Modern Times, 1900-Present

General Editor

JOANNE GOODWIN, Ph.D. U NIVERSITY OF NEVADA AT LAs V EGAS

A dvisers

MIRIAM J. COHEN, Ph.D. VASSAR COLLEGE

LYDE C. SIZER, Ph.D. SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

E N C YC L O P E D I A

O F

WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY V

General Editor J O Y C E A P P L E B Y, P H . D UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES

EILEEN K. CHENG, Ph.D. S ARAH L AWRENCE C OLLEGE

JOANNE L. GOOD WIN, Ph.D. U NIVERSITY

OF

N EVADA

AT

L AS V E G AS

Advisers MIRIAM J. COHEN, PH.D. VASSAR COLLEGE

LY D E C . S I Z E R , P H . D . SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

First published 2002 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor &and& Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. SET ISBN: 0-7656-8038-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of women in American history. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Contents: v. 1. Colonization, revolution, and the new nation, 1585–1820 / general editor, Joyce Appleby — v. 2. Civil War, western expansion, and industrialization, 1820–1900 / general editor, Eileen K. Cheng — v. 3. Sufferage, world war, and modern times, 1900–present / general editor, Joanne Goodwin. ISBN: 0-7656-803 8-6 1. Women—United States—History—Encyclopedias. I. Appleby, Joyce Oldham. II. Cheng, Eileen K. III. Goodwin, Joanne L. HQ1410 .E53 2001 305.4’0973’03—dc21

2001042025

ISBN 13: 9780765680389 (hbk)

SET CONTENTS xii Consultants and Contributors Preface xm Timeline ofHistorical Events (Vol. I) x1v Timeline of Historical Events (Vol. 2) xv Timeline of Historical Events (Vol. 3) xv1 VOLUME I

PART 1: ESSAYS Women in Colonial and Early National America Women and the Law in Colonial and Revolutionary America Domestic Life in the Colonial Years Women and Religion Gender Ideology in the Revolutionary Era Social Control Stages in a Woman's Life in the Early Republic Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic

PART 2: ARTICLES Abortion Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adolescence Aitken, Jane Alexander, Mary Spratt Provoost Algonquian Household Economy Alston, Theodosia Burr American Revolution Anglicans Anti-miscegenation Laws Apprenticeships Arno ld, Peggy Shippen Arts, Patrons of the Bache, Sarah Franklin Bailey, Abigail Abbot Bailey, Lydia R. Ballard, Martha Baptists Barnard, Hannah Jenkins Benevolent Associations, Women's Berkeley, Lady Frances Culpeper Bethune, Joanna Graham The Bible and the Subordination of Women Bill of Rights Bingham, Anne Willing Bleecker, Ann Eliza Bradford, Cornelia Smith

3 6 10

14 19 23 27 31

Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Brant, Molly Brent, Margaret Brewer, Lucy Brooks, Maria Gowen Brown, Phoebe Hinsdale

Eldridge, Elleanore Emerson, Mary Moody Entertainment Entrepreneurs Equality of Female Intellect Estaugh, Elizabeth Haddon

Bundling Captivity Narratives

Factories Family Life, Colonial

Catholics Charters, Colonial Cherokee Household Economy Childbearing Years Childbirth Child Custody Childhood Choctaw Household Economy Christianity Church Membership Civic Life Cockacoeske Colleges Colonial Household Economy Common Law Congregationalists Constitution, United States Cooke, Harriet B. Coolidge, Ellen Randolph Corbin , Margaret Cochran Corey, Martha Courts Courtship Coverture Crimes Against Women Crocker, Hannah Mather Custis, Eleanor Calvert Dame Schools Darragh, Lydia Barrington Death and Funerals Declaration of Independence Denominationalism Diaries and Journals

Family Life, Free Black Family Life, Native American Family Life, Republican Farrar, Elizabeth Ware Rotch Fashion Feme Sole Trader Acts Ferguson, Elizabeth Graeme Fisher, Mary Fornication Foster, Hannah Webster Franklin, Ann Smith Franklin, Deborah Read Free Black Communities French and Indian War French Household Economy Friendship Frontier Life Gage, Margaret Kemble Galloway, Grace Growdon Games Gender and English Identity in the Seventeenth Century Gender and Racial Differences Gender Frontiers Gentility German Household Economy Goddard, Sarah Updike Gossip Gould, Hannah Flagg Graham, Isabella Marshall Great Awakenings Green, Anne Hoof Greene, Catharine Littlefield

Diseases Divorce Laws

Greenleaf, Anna Gynecology

Domestic Arts Domestic Life Dow, Peggy Dower Rights Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwich

Hall, Thomas/Thomasine Hallam, Mrs. Lewis Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler Harrison, Anna Symmes Hart, Nancy

Duchesne, Rose Phillippine

Health

Dutch Household Economy Edwards, Sarah Pierpont

Heck, Barbara Ruckle Hemings, Sally

v

vi

SET CONTENTS

Hibbins, Ann Hume, Sophia Wigington Hutchinson, Anne Marbury Illegitimacy Immigration and Naturalization Indentured Servitude Infancy Iroquois Household Economy Jackson, Rach el Donelson Robards Jay, Sarah Livingston Jeffe rso n, Martha Wayles Skelton Jemison, Mary Jews and Judaism Jones, Rebecca Judson, Ann H asse ltine Judson , Sarah Hall Boardman Kaahumanu King Philip 's War Knight, Sarah Kemble Lalor, Alice (Mother Teresa) Law, Elizabeth Custis Lee, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lesbians Lewis, Eleanor Parke Custis Literacy Literatu re, 17th Century Literature, 18th Century Litigation Logan , Deborah Norris Logan , Martha Daniell McCrea, J ane Madison , Dolley Payne Todd Magic and Astrology Marriage Ceremonies Marriage, Companionate Marriage Laws Marriages, Slave Mathews, An n Teresa Mayflower Compact Mecom,J ane Franklin Medicine Merry, Ann Brunton Methodists Midwifery Missionaries Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright Montour, Madame Moody, Lady Deborah Dunch Morris, Elizabeth Carrington Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Murray, Judith Sargent Stevens Native Americans N ewe II, Harriet Atwood Novels and Romantic Love Nurse, Rebecca Old Age and Mortality Painting and Sculpting Parrish , Anne Patriarchy

Pawnee Household Economy Pelham , Mary Singleton Copley Penn, Hannah Callowhill Perkins, Elizabeth Peck Philanthropy Philipse, Margaret H arde nbrook Pierce, Sarah Pinckney, Eliza Pinney, Eunice Griswold Poetry Poor Laws Preaching Pregnancy Prince, Lucy Terry Printing and Publishing Prior, Margaret Barrett Allen Property Rights Prophesying Prostitution Pueblo Household Economy Puritans Quakers Ramsay, Martha Laurens Randolph , Martha J efferson Randolph, Mary Randolph, Nancy Religious Sects Republicanism Republican Motherhood Rind, Clementina Rowson, Susanna H aswe ll Royall, Anne Newport Rural Life Sacagawea Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Schools Schuyler, Catherine van Rensselae r Science Seminole Household Economy Servants, Domestic Sexton, Lydia Cadas Cox Sexuality, Regulation of Shakers Shawnee Household Economy Shippen, Anne (Nancy) Slander Slave Family Structure Slavery Slocum, Frances Smith, Margaret Bayard Spanish Household Economy Sports Starbuck, Mary Coffyn Stoneman, Abigail Suffrage, Woman Tekakwitha, Catherine Tenney, Tabitha Gilman

Textbook Writing Thompson, Sarah , Countess of Rumford Timothy, Ann Donovan Timothy, Elizabeth Ann Tituba Trade and Retailing Tureli,Jane Colman Tyler, Mary Hunt Palmer Urban Life Van Buren , Hannah Hoes Van Rensselaer, Maria Van Cortlandt Vickery, Sukey Virginia Company Brides Voluntary Associations Voters, Women Wage Earners Washington, Mary Ball Watteville, Henrietta Benigna Justine Zinzendorf von Weetamoo Wells, Rachel Lovell Widowhood Wilkinson, Eliza Yonge Wilkinson, J emima Wilson, Sarah Winthrop, Elizabeth Fones Winthrop, Margare t Tyndal Witch Trials, Salem Wome n, Status of Wood, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wright, Lucy Wright, Patience Lovell Wright, Susanna Zane, Elizabeth "Betty"

PART 3: DOCUMENTS Proceedings of the Virginia Company ofLondon (1619-1624) 210 An Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson (1637) 213 Selected Poetry of Anne Bradstreet (1650) 218 The Poems of Phillis Wheatley 224 (1773) Selected Letters of the Adams Family(1775-1776) 228 The Gleaner (1798) 231 History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution ( 1805) 235

VOLUME II PART 1: ESSAYS Women and Nineteenth-Century America

240

SET CONTENTS Domesticity and Ideology of Separate Spheres Family, Marriage, and Sexuality Public Life: Citizenship and Women's Rights Women and Reform Women and Religion Women and Western Expansion , 1820-1900 Race and Slavery Women, Work, and Industrialization Immigration and Urbanization

245 248 252 255 259 263 268 271 274

PART 2: ARTICLES Abolition Abortion Adams, Marian Hooper Addams, Jane Adultery Advice Books African-American Women African Methodist Episcopal Church Ah Tsun Alcott, Louisa May American Anti-Slavery Society American Equal Rights Association American Woman Suffrage Association Anthony, Susan B. Anti-miscegenation Laws Antislavery Petitions Arthur, Ellen Lewis Herndon Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary Bagley, Sarah G. Baptists Barnett, Ida B. Wells Barry, Leonora Marie Barton, Clara Beecher, Catharine Esther Benevolent Societies Blackwell, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bly, Nellie Boyd, Belle Bradley, Lydia Moss Bradwell, Myra Colby Brown, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Olympia Bryn Mawr College Cabrini, St. Frances Xavier California Gold Rush Carlisle School Cassatt, Mary Catholics Catt, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman Centennial Exhibition of 1876

Chapman, Maria Weston Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller Chicago Women's Club Child, Lydia Maria Francis Childbirth and Pregnancy Child Custody Childhood, Children Chinese Exclusion Act Chinese Immigrants Chopin, Kate O'Flaherty Civil War Clerical Work Cleveland, Frances Folsom Colleges Collins, Jennie Colored Women's League Comstock Law Contraception Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood Courtship Crandall, Prudence Croly,Jane Cunningham Dall, Caroline Healey Daughters of St. Crispin Davis, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawes Act Denominationalism Diaries and Journals Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Emily Diseases Divorce Dix, Dorothea Lynde Domestic Arts Domestic Servants Douglass, Sarah Mapps Dress Reform Eddy, Mary Baker Edmonds, S. Emma Education Elaw, Zilpha Ellet, Elizabeth Fries Lummis Emancipation Proclamation Entertainment Entrepreneurs Equal Rights Party Etiquette Books Factories and Factory Workers Family, Nuclear and Extended Family Wage System Fashion Fern, Fanny Fillmore, Abigail Powers Foote, Mary Hallock Foster, Abigail Kelley Freedmen's Aid Societies Freedmen's Schools

vii

Freeman, Mary Wilkins Fremont, Jessie Ann Benton Friendships, Female Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Barker Gage, Matilda Joslyn Garfield, Lucretia Rudolph Gayle, Sarah Ann Haynesworth General Federation of Women's Clubs German Immigrants Gibson Girl Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Godey 's Lady 's Book Grant, Julia Dent Gratz, Rebecca Greenhow, Rose O'Neal Grimke, Sarah Moore Gynecology Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harrison, Anna Symmes Harrison , Caroline Lavinia Scott Hayes, Lucy Ware Webb Health Hispanic Family Life Home Protection Ballot Homestead Act Housework Howe, Julia Ward Hull House Illinois Women's Alliance Indian Removal Indian Rights Movement Industrial Christian Home Industrial Revolution Infancy Insanity Irish Immigrants Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jacobi, Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobs, Frances Wisehart Jacobs, Harriet Ann Jewett, Helen Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewish Americans Johnson, Eliza McCardle Jones, Mary Harris "Mother" Journalism Kearney, Belle Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs Kemble, Frances Anne Knights of Labor Labor Reform Association, Female Laney, Lucy Craft Larcom, Lucy Lawyers Lazarus, Emma

viii

SET CONTENTS

Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee,Jarena Lesbians Letters Liliuokalani Lincoln, Mary Ann Todd Lind, J enny Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice Lockwood, Belva Ann Bennett McNall Love, Romantic Lowell, Josephine Shaw Lowell Mill Workers Lynching Lynn Shoe Workers Lyon , Mary McCord, Lousia Cheves McKinley, Ida Saxton Magazines and Periodicals Marriage Marriage Laws Medical College of Pennsylvania, Female Medicine Methodists Middle Class Midwifery Miner, Myrtilla Mining Camps Minor v. Happersett

Missionaries

iVIissouri v. Celia

Mitchell, Maria Mormons Motherhood Mott, Lucretia Coffin Mount Holyoke Seminary National Association of Colored Women National Council of Jewish Women National Woman Suffrage Association Native American Family Life Neurasthenia New England Fe male Medical College for Women New Era Club New York Children 's Aid Society New York Female Moral Reform Society Newman , Angie Novels Nursing O akley, Annie Oberlin College Old Age and Mortality

O 'Neale, Margaret L. Oregon Trail O 'Sullivan, Mary Kenney Outwork Page Act Painting and Sculpture Parker, Cynthia Ann Passionlessness Paternalism Patterson, Mary J ane Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Philanthropy Piecework Pierce, Jane Means Appleton Plessy v. Ferguson

Polk, Sarah Childress Populism Post, Amy Kirby Preaching Presbyterian Mission Home Prostitution Protective Labor Laws Purvis, H arriet Forten Quakers Radcliffe College Rape Recon struction Rescue Homes Richards, Ellen Swallow Richards, Linda Rogers, Mary Rose, Ernestine Louise Potowski Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre Rural, Farm, and Ran ch Life Sanitary Commission Say, Lucy Sistare Schuyler, Louisa Lee Science Second Great Awakening Sedgwick, Catharine Seneca Falls Convention Settlement House Movement Seventh Day Adventism Sexuality, Regulation of Sharecropping Shoe Industry Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Slavery Smith, Sophia Smith College Solomon, H an nah Greenebaum Sorosis Southern Lady Spelman Seminary Spies, Civil War Spiritualism Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

Starr, Ellen Gates Stewart, Maria Miller Stone, Lucy Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth Beech er Strikes Suffrage Taylor, Margaret Mackall Smith Taylor, Susie King Teaching Temperance Tenements Terrell, Mary Church Textile Industry Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, Martha Carey Tibbles, Susette La Flesche Tillson, Christiana Holmes Towle , Nancy Troy Female Seminary Truth, Sojourner Tubman, H arriet Ross Tuskegee Institute Tyler, Letitia Christian Underground Railroad Vassar College Voice of Industry

Voluntary Associations Wage Earners Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Warner, Susan Weld, Angelina Grimke Wellesley College Western Frontier, Family Life Widowhood Willard, Emma H art Willard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline Williams, Frances Barrier Women's Central Association of Relief Women's Christian Temperance Un ion Women's Club Movement Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary Women's National Loyal League Women's Rights Movement Woodhull, Victoria Woodhull and Claflin 's Weekly

Working Class Working Girls' Clubs Working Wome n 's Protective Union World's Columbian Exposition ofl893 Wright, Frances Writers Wu Tien Fu Young Women 's Christian Association

SET CONTENTS

PART 3: DOCUMENTS Nancy Ward to the Cherokee Council (1817) An Address to the United Tailoresses Society (1831) Letters on the Equality of Women and the Condition of the Sexes (1837) The Lowell Offering ( 1840s) A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) Declaration of Sentiments (1848) Maria Perkins to Her Husband (1852) Susan B. Anthony Announcing Her Having Voted (1872) "Solitude of Self' ( 1892) Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892-1895) Sadie Frowne: A Sweatshop Girl (1902)

466 467

469 4 73 476 479 481 482 483 487 491

VOLUME III PART 1: ESSAYS Industry, Modernity, and Diversity: A Historical Overview of the Twentieth Century Women in Public Life Women and the Labor Force Women and the Consumer Society A Woman's Body Violence Against Women The Civil Rights Movement The Changing American Family Women and the Media Feminism PART 2: ARTICLES Abbott, Edith Abbott, Grace Abortion Abzug, Bella Savitsky Actors Adams, Eva B. Adkins v. Children's Hospital Adolescence African Americans Aid to Dependent Children Albright, Madeleine American Association of University Women American Civil Liberties Union

498 502 505 509 512 515 517 520 523 525

American Federation of Labor /Congress of Industrial Organizations American Federation of Teachers Anderson, Laurie Anderson, Mary Angelou, Maya Anorexia Nervosa Anti-miscegenation Laws Arden, Elizabeth Artists Ash, Mary Kay Asian Americans Athletics Avery, Byllye Aviation and Space Baez,Joan Baker, Ella Baker, Josephine Barbie Beard, Mary Benedict, Ruth Fulton Berry, Mary Francis Bethune, Mary McLeod Black, Cathleen Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sha) Brice, Fannie Brooks, Gwendolyn Brown , Helen Gurley Brown , Rita Mae Brownmiller, Susan Bush, Barbara Pierce Bush, Laura Lane Welch Business and Industry Cable Act Cadet Nurses Corps Calderone, Mary Steichen Caldicott, Helen Broinowski California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra Callas, Maria Camp Fire Girls Cannon, Annie Jump Carpenter, Candice Carson, Rachel Carter, Rosalynn Smith Cather, Willa Chavez-Thompson, Linda Chicana Child Care Child Custody Child Labor Child Support Children 's Bureau Cisneros, Sandra

Clinton, Hillary Rodham Congress, Women in Consent Laws, Age of Coolidge, Grace Goodhue Cooney,Joan Ganz Dance Daughters of Bilitis Davis, Angela Day, Doris Day, Dorothy Deloria, Ella Cara Del Rio, Dolores De Varona, Donna E. Dewson, Mary Williams (Molly) Division of Labor, Sexual Divorce Laws Dole, Elizabeth Hanford Domestic Service Drew, Nancy Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dyk, Ruth Belcher Eagle Forum Earhart, Amelia Education Eisenhower, Mary (Mamie) Geneva Doud Eisenstadt v. Baird EMILY's List Endo, Mitsuye Entertainment Entrepreneurs The Equal Credit Opportunity Act Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Equal Pay Acts of 1963 and 1972 Equal Rights Amendment Fair Labor Standards Act Family and Medical Leave Act Fashion Feinstein , Dianne Goldman Feminism, Radical Ferraro, Geraldine Fiorina, Cara Carleton S. Fitzgerald, Ella Florence Crittendon Homes Ford, Elizabeth (Betty) Bloomer Franklin, Aretha Friedan, Betty Goldstein Frontiero v. Richardson Garland, Judy Gibson, Althea Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Girl Scouts of America Glass Ceiling Goldman, Emma

ix

X

SET CONTENTS

Governments, State and Local Grable, Betty Graham, Katharine Meyer Graham, Martha Great Depression Griffiths, Martha Wright Griswold v. Connecticut Haley, Margaret Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamilton, Alice Harding, Florence Kling Harlem Renaissance Harvey Girls Health Hearst, Phoebe Apperson Height, Dorothy Irene Hellman , Lillian Hepburn, Katharine Houghton Hispanic Americans Holiday, Billie Hollander, Nicole Home Economics Homemaker Hoover, Lou Henry Horne, Lena Hoyt v. Florida Huerta, Dolores Fernandez Hurston, Zora Neale Hyde Amendment Immigration and Naturalization Infant and Child Health Jazz Jefferson , Mildred Jewish Americans Johnson, Claudia (Lady Bird) Alta Taylor Johnson, Sonia Joplin , Janis Jordan, Barbara Journalism Keller, Helen Kelley, Florence King, Billie Jean King, Coretta Scott Kingston, Maxine Hong Kirkpatrick, Jeane Jordan Kuhn, Margaret League of Women Voters Lesbians Literature Lopez, Jessie de Ia Cruz Lorde, Audre Loving v. Virginia Lynd, Helen Merrell McClintock, Barbara McDaniel, Hattie Magazines, Women's and Girls' MANA, A National Latina Organization Marriage Martin, Anne

Martin, Lynn Morley Maternalism Maternity and Infancy Protection Act Menopause Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson Midwifery Military Service Millett, Katherine Murray Miss America Pageant Mitcheli,Joni Mitchell, Margaret Monroe, Marilyn Moreno, Luisa Morgan v. Virginia Moseley-Braun, Carol Mothers' Pensions Mothers, Unmarried Movies Ms. Magazine Muller v. Oregon Murray, Pauli Music National Abortion Rights Action League National Association of Colored Women National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage National Committee to Stop ERA National Congress of Mothers National Consumers League National Council for Research on Women National Council of American Indians National Council of Negro Women National Education Association National Federation of Business and Professional Women 's Clubs National Organization for Women National Right to Life Committee National Woman's Party National Women's Conference National Women 's Political Caucus Native Americans Nevelson, Louise New Deal New Woman, The Nineteenth Amendment Ninety-nines Nixon , Patricia Ryan Norton, Eleanor Holmes Novello, Antonia Nursing O 'Connor, Sandra Day Old Age and Mortality Onassis,Jacqueline Kennedy O 'Reilly, Leonora Our Bodies, Ourselves Pacific ism Parker, Dorothy

Parks, Rosa McCauley Parsons, Elsie Clews Perkins, Frances Peterson, Esther Eggertsen Photographers Planned Parenthood Plath, Sylvia Pornography Poverty Pregnancy President's Commission on the Status of Women Prostitution Protective Labor Legislation Quilts Rainey, Ma Rape Reagan , Nancy Davis Reedv. Reed Religion Reproductive Rights Rich, Adrienne Ride, Sally Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich Roev. Wade Roosevelt, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, Eleanor Rubyfruit jungle Rukeyser, Muriel Sabin , Florence Rena Sage, Margaret Slocum Sager, Ruth Salt of the Earth Sanger, Margaret Schlafly, Phyllis Stewart Schroeder, Patricia Scott Science and Technology Sexual Harassment Sexual Revolution Shalala, Donna Siebert, Muriel Silko, Leslie Marmon Smeal, Eleanor Cutri Smith-Lever Act Smith, Bessie Smith, Margaret Chase Social Security Act Social Work Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Streisand, Barbara Suburbanization Suffrage Movement Taft, Helen Herron Tan, Amy Tarbell, Ida Minerva Taussig, Helen Brooke Taylor v. Louisiana Television and Radio Tenayuca, Emma

SET CONTENTS Title VII Title IX Tomlin , Lily Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Truman, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace UAW v. johnson Controls Unions, Labor Urbanization and Immigration Vanderbilt, Gloria Van Kleeck, Mary Vietnam War Walker, Alice Walters, Barbara War Brides Act Weeks v. Southern Bell Welfare West, Mae Wharton, Edith Jones Wilder, Laura Ingalls Williams, Claudine Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, Ellen Louise Axson Winfrey, Oprah Womanist

Woman 's Peace Party Women Accepted for Emerge ncy Volunteer Service (WAVES) Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) Women 's Armed Services Integration Act Women's Army Corps Women's Baseball League Women's Bureau Women's Equity Action League Women's Independent Forum Women'sJoint Congressional Committee Women's Liberation Movement Women 's National Basketball Association Women 's Sports Foundation Women 's Studies World War I World War II Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman Young Women 's Christian Association Youth Culture Zaharias, Mildred "Babe" Didrickson

xi

PART 3: DOCUMENTS

Muller v. Oregon (1908) 641 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) 720 722 The Woman Rebel (1914) Mothers' Letters to the U.S. Children's Bureau (1916, 1920) 724 "My Day" (1939-1962) 726 The Feminine Mystique (1963) 730 The Equal Rights Amendment (1923, 1972) 733 Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) 734 Testimony of Anita Hill before Senate Judiciary Committee (1991) 738 Violence Against Women Act (1994) 741

Selected Bibliography (Vol. 1) Selected Bibliography (Vol. 2) Selected Bibliography (Vol. 3) General Index

743 745 747 749

CONSULTANTS AND CONTRIBUTORS GENERAL EDITORS

ADVISERS Miriam J. Cohen

Joyce Appleby (Volume 1) University of California, Los Angeles

Vassar College

Eileen Ka-May Cheng (Volume 2) Sarah Lawrence College

Lyde Sizer Sarah Lawrence College

Joanne L. Goodwin (Volume 3) University of Nevada, Las Vegas

CONTRIBUTORS Dee E. Andrews Department of History California State University Joyce Appleby Department of History University of California, Los Angeles Ruth Bloch Department of Women's Studies and History University of California, Los Angeles Holly Brewer Department of History North Carolina State University Eileen Ka-May Cheng Department of History Sarah Lawrence College Elsie Crowell Department of Insurance State Government of Florida Rebecca Dresser Independent Scholar Sara Dwyer-McNulty Department of History Marist College Elizabeth Faue Department of History Wayne State University Nancy Fernandez Program oflnterdisciplinary General Education California State Polytechnic University Bonnie Ford Department of Women's Studies Sacramento City College Edith Gelles Institute for Research on Women and Gender Stanford University Joanne L. Goodwin Department of History University of Nevada, Las Vegas Laura Goodwin Department of College Resources Sarah Lawrence College

xii

Christine Grant Department of Athletics University oflowa Beth Haller Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies Towson University RonaL. Holub Department of History Barnard College Anna R. Igra Department of History Carleton College Thomas Ingersoll Department of History Ohio State University Gwen Kay Department of History State University of New York at Oswego Jane Lancaster John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization Brown University Peg Lamphier Department of Social Sciences Chaffey College Virginia Leonard-Ewing Department of History Illinois University Karen Meyers Department of Continuing Education University of Toledo David Peterson Del Mar Department of History Portland State University and Oregon State University Ann Plane Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara Laura Prieto Department of History Simmons College

Jessie B. Ramey Department of Women 's History Sarah Lawrence College Mary Reynolds Department of Women 's History Sarah Lawrence College Ruth Rubinstein History of Art Department Institute of Fashion Technology Elizabeth Diane Schafer Independent Scholar Mary Schweitzer Department of History Villanova University Holly C. Shulman Program of Studies in Women and Gender University of Virginia Camille Pepe Sperrazza Department of Journalism Manhattan Community College Amy Gilman Srebnick Department of History Montclair State University Carole Srole Department of History California State University Brenda Stevenson Department of History University of California, Los Angeles Sarah Swedberg Department of Social and Behavioral Science Mesa State College Sherrie Tucker Assistant Professor of American Studies University of Kansas at Lawrence Doris Weatherford Department of Women 's Studies University of South Florida Rosemarie Zagarri Department of History and Art History George Mason University

PREFACE

T

he topic of women, so long neglected by historians and other scholars, is now the focus of rich research and lively debate. In its entries, essays, and special features, this new three-volume reference-Encyclopedia of Women in American History-brings together the fruits of the past 40 years of scholarship. In successive probes into the past, what has been fascinating about American women is the breadth of accomplishment and variety of experiences from the earliest decades of European settlement to Native American contact to Mrican enslavement to the present. These volumes also provide insight into the ways that encounters among people of various ethnicities and with very particular histories have defined the distinctive, often tragic, history of the United States. It is a history in which women have always played a central part.

The Encyclopedia of Women in American History offers its readers not only an extensive list of entries about particular women but also topical entries that help readers situate women's lives and accomplishments within the larger structures of society. There are also signed essays and longer articles by distinguished scholars, all of which serve to analyze and interpret the developments that have carried women from traditional societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the complex modern world of the twenty-first century. I would like to thank my fellow editorsEileen Cheng and Joanne Goodwin-as well as the managing and copy editors, designers, and photo researchers at Book Builders, particularly Elizabeth Parry; Phyllis Goldstein, project editor; and Lauren Fedorko, president. Joyce Appleby GENERAL EDITOR

xiii

~

Time line of Women and American History 1820-1900 (Vol. 1)

1585

1607

An expedition commanded by Capt. John Smith establishes the first permanent English settlement in North America, at Jamestown, Virginia. In 1619, English women arrive in Jamestown and the first Africans are brought to the colony.

1620

Puritan Separatists aboard the Mayflower arrive at Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, and establish a colony in New England. The 102 passengers include 30 women and girls.

1637

Anne Hutchinson is found guilty of Puritan heresy by a Massachusetts general court and banished from the colony.

1650

Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet publishes The Tenth Muse Sprung Up in America, the first book of verse written in North America.

1673-83 1676

xiv

English settlers dispatched by Sir Walter Raleigh establish a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Starving, they return to England a year later. In1587, a second group of colonists settles at Roanoke. By 1591, the colony has disappeared. Meanwhile, the French have established outposts to the north and the Spanish have settled the West Indies and Southwest.

1692

1730s-40s

The Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals, sweeps the colonies.

1754-63

French and Indian War

1775-83

The American Revolution

1776

The Declaration of Independence is adopted. Abigail Adams appeals to her husband, John Adams, and the other members of the Continental Congress to "remember the ladies" and consider granting rights to women in the laws of the new nation.

1787

The U.S. Constitution is drafted. Voting rights, established by the laws of individual states, are limited to white males.

1790

The religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening begins. The first textile mill in the colonies is established in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; many of the workers are women and children.

1803

The Louisiana Purchase. From 1804 to 1806, Lewis and Clark explore the territory, crossing the Rockies and reaching the Pacific Coast.

France expands its holdings in the Mississippi Valley. Connecticut colonist Mary Rowlandson and her children are captured by Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War. Her 1682 account of the experience, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, is to become a classic of colonial literature.

Witchcraft trials are held in Salem, Massachusetts, resulting in the execution of 19 "witches," most of them women.

1812-14

The War of 1812. When British troops burn Washington, D.C., first lady Dolley Madison rescues a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and vital documents before fleeing the president's house.

~

Time line of Women and American History 1820-1900 (Vol. 2)

1821 Emma Willard opens the Troy (NY) Female Seminary, the first American institution to provide higher education for women.

1833 Oberlin College, the nation's first institution of

1869 The transcontinental railroad is completed.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton establish the National Woman Suffrage Association.

higher learning to accept both men and women, opens in Ohio.

1870 The Wyoming Territory grants suffrage to

The American Anti-Slavery Society is founded.

1872 Susan B. Anthony is arrested in Rochester, New

1834 Women mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, stage a strike to protest wage cuts. The strike proves unsuccessful.

1836 Texas declares independence from Mexico.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke begin to lecture against slavery.

1845 The United States annexes Texas. 1846-48 The Mexican War is fought. 1848 The Women's Rights Convention, the first

public meeting to promote women's rights in America, is held at Seneca Falls, New York. Leaders issue the "Declaration of Sentiments."

1849 California gold rush. Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and begins to transport fugitive slaves north via the Underground Railroad.

1850 At the peak of the California gold rush, the

great migration west is still predominantly male. The population of California is only 8 percent female.

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin, her best-selling and highly influential novel depicting the injustices of slavery.

1861-65 The Civil War is fought. Some 3,000

women serve as nurses for the Union and the Confederacy. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolishes slavery; 1.9 million enslaved women are freed.

women.

York, for attempting to vote in the presidential election.

1874 The Women's Christian Temperance Union is founded in Cleveland, Ohio.

1877 At the close of Reconstruction, an estimated one-half of African-American women have wage-earning jobs.

1881 Clara Barton founds the American Red Cross, becoming its first president.

1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr open Hull House, one of the nation's earliest and most famous settlement houses, in Chicago.

1890 At Wounded Knee, South Dakota, U.S. soldiers

kill more than 200 Indian men, women, and children; it is the last major encounter between Indians and white men on the Northern Plains.

1892 Newspaperwoman Ida B. Wells Barnett begins

her antilynching campaign in Memphis, Tennessee; she is forced to flee when her offices are burned.

1893 At the World's Columbian Exposition in

Chicago, a special pavilion is dedicated to the artistic and cultural achievements of women in America.

1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton publishes the controversial Women's Bible.

1898 The Spanish-American War is fought. The

United States annexes Hawaii and the Philippines. Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics.

XV

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Time line of Women and American History 1900-Present (Vol. 3) 1903

Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful flight of a self-propelled airplane.

1908

In a landmark case, Muller v. Oregon, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that states are constitutionally permitted to limit the work day of women laundry workers to ten hours.

1912

Julia Lathrop is appointed director of the Children's Bureau, becoming the first woman to head a U.S. federal agency.

1914

The Panama Canal is opened, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

1916 Jeannette Rankin (R-MT) becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Margaret Sanger opens the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. 1917-18

The National Organization for Women is founded.

1968

After four years of escalation, U.S. military forces in Vietnam total 500,000; during the course of the war (1964-75), some 1,200 women serve as nurses. At home, massive peace demonstrations begin to turn public opinion against the war. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated.

1969

The Apollo 11 space mission successfully lands two men on the moon.

1973

In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, with qualification, that state laws prohibiting abortion are unconstitutional.

1974

Under threat of impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon resigns from office.

U.S. fights in World War I.

1981

1920

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, is ratified.

Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman justice of the Supreme Court.

1982

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment fails to win ratification.

1921

The U.S. Congress establishes a national quota system, which remains in effect until 1965, to limit immigration.

1983

Astronaut Sally Ride becomes the first woman m space.

1984

Democrat Geraldine Ferraro is the first woman nominated by a major political party for vice president of the United States.

1929-39

1941-45

1950-53

1963

xvi

1966

The Great Depression. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launches the relief and recovery program known as the New Deal. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins becomes the first woman to serve in a cabinet position. U.S. fights in World War II. The Women's Army Corps (WAC) is made a regular component of the U.S. Army in 1943; the major contribution by women, however, is made on the homefront. The United States fights the Korean War. U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy attacks alleged communist subversives in the federal government and remains a powerful figure until his allegations are discredited in 1954. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. The civil rights movement reaches a climax with antisegregation demonstrations in the South and the historic March on Washingtonculminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

1989-91

The Cold War comes to an end, as Soviet-bloc countries throughout Europe install democratic governments and the Soviet Union is dissolved.

1993

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton heads a national task force on national healthcare reform. Carol Moseley-Braun becomes the first African-American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.

1999

President Bill Clinton is acquitted on two charges of impeachment stemming from his affair with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

2000

George W. Bush is declared the winner of one of the closest and most controversial presidential elections in U.S. history.

2001

In the aftermath of attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, the United States declares war on world terrorism.

PA R T 1 Essays

Page Intentionally Left Blank



Women in Colonial and Early National America

I

n 1607, the English succeeded in establishing a colony in North America, naming it Virginia after their virgin queen, Elizabeth. Soon 12 more settlements stretched up and down the Atlantic coast joining Spanish colonies in Florida and Mexico and French ones in Louisiana and Canada. European colonization in North America brought profound changes in the lives of three groups of women: the settlers, the Native American women, and the women stolen from Africa and brought to the colonies as slaves. With the formation of the United States after a successful revolution fought under the banner of equality and liberty, descendants of all three of these groups became a part of the new American nation. In the pages that follow, you will find information about many events, places, and developments in the years between 1585 and 1820. You will also find fascinating stories about individual women, some pacesetters, others distinguished by their creative talents, still others known to us because they got caught up in historic events. The European men and women who came to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not expect, or want, things to be different in these new homes precariously perched on the western edge of the Atlantic world. They yearned to recreate the familiar. They brought with them decided ideas about proper personal behavior and social mores, but they could not anticipate what starting a European outpost in this new world (as it was to them) would be like, much less replicate their old ways in it.

THE SCARCITY OF WOMEN Initially there were many fewer women than men. The Puritan leaders of the New England colonies insisted that men bring their wives and children with them, but throughout the colonial period a majority of communities, especially in

the South, had too few women. Because marriage was a sign of maturity and an ideal for men as well as women, women benefited from the shortage; they enjoyed a higher status in North America than in Europe. They also proved more hardy, surviving in these wilderness communities better than men. Widows remarried rapidly. The most dramatic break with Europe came from the introduction of SLAVERY in the English colonies, principally the southern ones. Here, too, many more men than women came as slaves from Africa to North America. Transportation across the Atlantic for enslaved women was a horrible experience. Forced into the hold of merchant slave vessels, chained to their narrow berths, roiled by storms and weakened by disease and hunger, African women arrived in North America ill prepared for the rigors of their new lives as enslaved laborers. Only their incredible resilience enabled them to achieve a modicum of family life within the slave system that developed in the English colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

THE STATUS OF WOMEN In the early years of Virginia as in the French and Spanish colonies, many men took Native American wives, but the English disliked this practice. While intimate relations continued between a few Africans and Europeans, and Native American and Europeans, racial “purity” became very important to British Americans. This attitude, principally a reaction to slavery, persisted in the nation that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. To be part of a charter colony was to plant values and habits with long-range influence. Most of the colonies in setting up their governments drew on the English COMMON LAW for their system of rules and procedures. Differing from the European courts, the common law placed great importance on securing rights to

3

4

W O M E N I N C O L O N I A L A N D E A R L Y N AT I O N A L A M E R I C A

individual property. The common law also determined the STATUS OF WOMEN according to whether they were single, married, or widowed. When women married, their legal personality dissolved into that of their husband. They could not hold property or enter into contracts binding at law. They were rarely given custody of their children should the marriage come to an end. Single women, unmarried or widowed, could control their own property and some even went into business. Many settlers came to North American for religious reasons, either to act on their own beliefs undisturbed or to found churches that would be examples for other Protestant Christians. There were few CATHOLICS or JEWS, and even fewer Moslems, in the English colonies. The PURITANS went mainly to New England; the QUAKERS to Pennsylvania; and BAPTISTS and ANGLICANS lived in all of the colonies. Women, especially Quaker women, played a major role in their communal life. Where people followed closely their religious precepts, families were held in high esteem; women gained respect; and authorities were vigorous in punishing sexual crimes. For most women, the weekly church services were the only occasions for leaving the round of domestic duties—child care, cooking, sewing, preserving, spinning, and house cleaning. Because of the shortage of women, the importance of their labor, and the religious support for strong morals, white women’s position improved, in comparison to Europe. Women also shared in the unusual health enjoyed in the colonies after the initial months of “seasoning.” Many more children lived to adulthood, and the life expectancy of men and women extended longer than in Europe. What women did not have in the colonial period were many opportunities to act as individuals, to receive an education, to cultivate their talents, and to participate in public life. The American Revolution ushered in a new era that changed this situation, but slowly. Because of the rhetoric of revolution, new ideas about personal liberty circulated widely. Men became more selfconscious about their institutions—be they of family, government, or church. Women were drawn into these discussions, first as listeners and later as contributors. Revolutions exert unex-

pected influences. When established ways are swiftly and violently ended, people begin to reflect on other customs, bringing them under the microscope of reasonable inspection. Many women ardently supported the colonial resistance movement that turned into rebellion. They discovered ways to make their voice, their work, and their spending influence events. More tangibly, the free black population grew dramatically after the Revolution. In cities, African Americans founded churches, VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS, SCHOOLS, and newspapers, which gave women a whole new world to explore in the new nation.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN AFTER THE REVOLUTION Although it had been no part of the reasoning behind the American Revolutionary movement to extend the range of opportunity for women, the convergence of national independence and unprecedented economic developments introduced an array of possibilities for women’s lives that had never existed before. Many women lacked even the minimal resources to change their lot in life, and a majority still found their lives circumscribed by the persisting authority of the man of the house, armed by law and custom with enormous power over his dependents. Still, some women moved outside the limits of domestic life and transformed people’s attitudes about women’s capabilities. Perhaps nothing challenged the careful differentiation of women and men’s activities more than women’s education. Women, it was argued, must be educated so that they could rear boys to be citizens and girls to be the mothers of future citizens. The vibrancy of urban culture found expression in lecture series, scientific demonstrations, and a heightened appreciation of learning. The simultaneous growth of female literacy and publishing enterprises opened the doors to a writing career for many women. Commercial expansion and democratic politics facilitated women’s access to a larger world more than any other development in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the campaign to get the vote that would emerge in the 1840s, the effects of publishing and writing did not appear to intrude upon male prerogatives.

W O M E N I N C O L O N I A L A N D E A R L Y N AT I O N A L A M E R I C A

Protestant women responded passionately to the religious revivals that began in the 1730s and again in the 1790s. Many participated more actively in their church activities or became effective fund-raisers. A few flouted the biblical injunction, “Let your women keep silence in the churches,” and became itinerant preachers. Others wrote on religious topics and one actually preached before Congress. A group of young American ministers formed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionaries and raised money to send preachers and teachers to India, Syria, and Hawaii as well as to Native Americans in the West. When MISSIONARIES went to India and Burma, they called upon their wives to reach the sequestered women in these missionary fields. Some of these missionary wives discovered a talent for translating the Bible for the converts. More than women, men began discussing women’s role in politics, debating its merits pro and con. Hard-pressed to fill all his Post Office positions, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, appointed in 1801, actually suggested that the government might name women to the vacant posts, a notion that prompted a brusque reply from President Thomas Jefferson: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” Despite attitudes like Jefferson’s, within a generation women would be pressing for the vote. In New Jersey, single, propertied women actually voted until 1807 when a law was passed denying them suffrage. Manufacturing developed quickly in the United States after independence. Advertising throughout the farming villages of northern New England, Boston’s pioneering industrialists drew young, unmarried women to planned communities to work in their textile mills. In new towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, adolescent girls and young women lived in dormitories under strict discipline, but with lots of female conviviality. Still other women helped their husbands as printers, journalists, storekeepers, and tavern-owners, often inheriting and running the family business after their husbands’ deaths. Teaching became the opening to a larger world for many women in the early nineteenth

5

century. District schools and private academies hired thousands of teachers on yearly contracts. Young men and women turned to teaching to support a bid for independence, churning annually through primary schools where farmers’ children went for a few months for four or five years to learn the fundamentals of reading, writing, and “summing.” A large number of women took advantage of the quickening of interest in girls’ education to establish their own schools, and many more were hired to teach, mastering math, the classics, and the natural sciences in order to earn positions in the private academies which sprang up everywhere, North and South. To a remarkable degree women were able to capitalize on the general enthusiasm for educating future mothers, now construed patriotically as providing the critical bridge between childhood and republican citizenship. North and South they stepped forward to claim the teaching jobs which materialized quickly during the early decades of the nineteenth century. EMMA HART WILLARD (see Volume 2) opened her TROY FEMALE SEMINARY in 1821 (see Volume 2), her fame having spread across the country after she petitioned the New York legislature to give state aid to girls’ schools. Access to academy education became critical to these pioneers in women’s education, but equally important was the support they gave each other, hiring one another in their schools while they raised money and circulated plans for new schools and seminaries for women. The most common female occupation was domestic work, since many American families employed maids. The spirit of independence even influenced women in these humble jobs. They disdained being called servants. One European traveler was so astounded by the behavior of maids that he recounted a conversation that he had at the front door of an acquaintance: “Is your master at home?”—“I have no master.”— “Don’t you live here?”—“I stay here”—“And who are you then?”—“Why, I am Mr. ———’s help.” During these same years, more and more American families were becoming prosperous enough to permit wives to cultivate refinements like polite conversation, painting, and piano playing. The pressures upon middle-class women

6

WOMEN AND THE LAW IN COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

became acute when they were expected to maintain a refined atmosphere in their house and ensure that all its members behaved respectably. People expected a woman to preside gracefully in the parlor and to teach both her sons and daughters how to conduct themselves in society. At the same time the death of her husband or a downturn in the economy could upset the family’s support and require the wife to find the means to care for herself and her children when her husband was unable to. Both colonial America and the new nation presented societies in flux. Traditional institutions backed by law had defined a very narrow sphere of action and responsibility for women. Independence brought new challenges to these customary arrangements, and slowly the patriarchal world changed to one in which women had a great scope of action. When they succeeded in acting in a larger public realm, they became living proof of the injustices of unequal treatment. Joyce Appleby

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Appleby, Joyce O. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. DePauw, Linda G., and Conover Hunt. Remember the Ladies: Women in America 1750–1815. New York: Viking, 1976. Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. ———. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.



Women and the Law in Colonial and Revolutionary America

A

ll people’s lives are partially defined by the laws under which they live. Obviously, the extent to which those laws shaped the lives of girls and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depended to a large degree on whether or not they were enforced and who enforced them. The fact that men—usually elite men—were in charge of the judicial and legislative systems meant that those who were making and enforcing the laws were not necessarily sympathetic to women’s issues. On the other hand, men’s lives were interconnected with those of their wives and mothers and daughters. So female relations of men who had power usually had their interests better looked after. If one had no illustrious connections and were female, she was doubly distant. If she were also black or Indian she had little in

common with those who set and implemented the laws. Thus she was more likely to find herself on the losing end. In a society that regarded inequality as normal, as did British-American society (especially prior to the Revolution), that losing end meant that “English Liberties” such as they were, generally did not apply to women.

POLITICAL POWER One’s gender, in this society, was less important (in terms of legal status) than one’s “rank.” Consider only the three queens of England who ruled in their own right during the first century and a half of the establishment of the British Empire in the New World: Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603), Queen Mary II (1689–1694), and her sister Queen Anne (1702–1714). While Mary ruled

WOMEN AND THE LAW IN COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

jointly with her husband William (who also had a claim to the throne, although more distant), Anne’s husband had no such title or authority. Elizabeth never married. The status of these queens reveals something very important about the status of women in the whole structure of English law: birthright trumped gender. While under the English rules of primogeniture the firstborn son had the right to the lands and title, when a father (usually) had no son, his daughter would inherit. The mistress of a household controlled male servants and slaves. If you were female, your status under the law depended to a great degree on your rank. Elite women like LADY FRANCES BERKELEY (and her peers in England) exercised considerable political influence in seventeenth-century Virginia. When Bacon’s Rebellion erupted in Virginia in 1676 and threatened to unseat her husband, Governor Berkeley sent her as his deputy to England to arrange for troops and other support to quash the rebellion, a mission she successfully accomplished. Partly due to her connections in the British Court, Lady Frances actually was considered the leader of what came to be called the “Green Spring Faction” which opposed the new governor after her husband’s death. Likewise, MARGARET BRENT was the executor of the governor’s estate in Maryland, and became virtual lieutenant governor there during the 1640s. While women had no formal seats in the Houses of Parliament in England they could often influence people on those bodies, and often played political roles. The same was true in the colonies, where women were excluded from the upper houses of government, bodies usually called the Governor’s Councils, which also formed the superior courts. Although we have no examples of women actually voting, female freeholders who met the property requirements were not specifically excluded, especially in the seventeenth century. Virginia did not ban female voters until 1699. Even after that, women who owned property could deed it to men and could then influence their votes. The majority of adult men, it should be added, probably did not vote during the colonial period, although the extent to which they did depended on the colony and the time. Women were not generally judges and did not serve on juries, although in some cases,

7

where women’s bodies needed to be examined, as in a rape, a “jury of women” would be called. These women then made the decisions about what had happened. Other cases that sometimes required a jury of women were infanticide cases and witchcraft cases (where the female jury looked for “witches teats,” what we would probably call warts or moles, where demons were supposed to suck). Male jurors had to meet high property requirements, even higher than those for voting, and judges yet higher, so although gender played a role in this privilege, rank played an even greater one. There were two ways in which women traditionally exercised a political role in English society, both of which women in the colonies used: petitions and riots. In England, where most subjects, male and female, old and young, could not vote (indeed, the privilege of voting was granted to only 5 to 10 percent of English adult males at the time), women found ways to express their opinions, especially in times of crisis such as a famine. They could send the monarch a petition asking for relief, a political device of great importance in a system in which few voted. If the peaceful petition failed, then the subjects could riot. Women who rioted seem to have been treated better by the English authorities than men: perhaps they were less threatening. Women’s riots occurred rarely, but when they did they often accomplished their aims, such as preventing grain from being exported when they were starving. ABIGAIL ADAMS recounts such a women’s riot in Boston, Massachusetts, when women forced a shopkeeper to sell his coffee and sugar for much lower prices. Indeed they shoved him into a wheelbarrow and paraded him around town, paying him only what they chose. When women rioted, they were rarely arrested and prosecuted. For common and middling women, these options were often the only ones available to them—but so, too, were they often the only options for men of the same rank.

WOMEN AND PROPERTY Most historians of colonial America have described women as rarely owning property. Only when they were heiresses not yet married (and such heiresses usually married young) or

8

WOMEN AND THE LAW IN COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

when widows, they say, could a woman really “own” property. Once married, most historians agree, women came under COVERTURE, which means that their legal identities were subsumed under their husbands’. According to the English COMMON LAW, a married woman was one with her husband in the eyes of the law, with that one being him. There were broad exceptions to these rules, and the English common law, upon which all colonists drew deeply, underwent fundamental changes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of which affected women and the concept of coverture. That definition of a woman’s identity being subsumed under that of her husband, for example, was only written down by the extremely influential judge and professor of law, William Blackstone, in 1765. Before then, coverture had a much narrower meaning. Throughout this period, husbands were to some degree responsible for their wives’ expenditures, and a wife’s credit depended upon her husband’s. In a world where many if not most exchanges were based on credit relationships, this was important. When women became merchants in their own right while they were married, the colonial legislatures actually passed FEME SOLE TRADING ACTS, which allowed married women to be as independent before the law as if they were single. Women often managed estates in their own right upon their husbands’ deaths: it was normal in the seventeenth century for a man to name his wife as the executrix of his estate (a practice which became less common in the eighteenth century). Many women whose husbands practiced trades continued to supervise and practice those businesses upon their husbands’ decease (especially in the printing trade, as women such as CORNELIA SMITH BRADFORD, ANN SMITH BRADFORD, ANN SMITH FRANKLIN, and SARAH UPDIKE GODDARD bear witness). In all of these latter cases, women could (and did) initiate LITIGATION, for example, to demand payment of a debt. Women who carried on their own trades, however, like MARTHA BALLARD the midwife, often had an income and could pay in cash or in kind (trading service for goods). Women might also make small amounts of products for market. Exploring some of the exceptions to coverture reveals that men did not always control the

purse strings, nor could they easily sell property that a wife had brought to the marriage. Men’s ability to control their wives’ property and the family money was actually increased by Blackstone’s definition of feme covert. Elite women, through entails or premarital jointure agreements, could often prevent their husbands from fully controlling the estate. Entails were provisions in wills that determined who could inherit the property. Upon their husbands’ death, women by law had to receive at least one-third of the estate, both real and personal: this was called their DOWER RIGHT, and was usually similar to the amount they had brought as their dowry to the marriage. The real estate (land and slaves) they often received only for the remainder of their life—this meant that they could not designate who would receive the land when they died. The personal estate (from sheets to silver spoons to their own dresses) was their own. When the couple had no children, the wife often received the whole of the estate.

WOMEN AND MARRIAGE The MARRIAGE LAWS of the period were very different from our own: They assumed, for example, that women could be much younger and marry. Even girls under age 12 could legally marry, as they could under the common law until 1753, but most women married in their twenties. Parental consent was expected, but could not always be enforced. For an elite woman, issues surrounding her dowry might often make her (and her suitor) wish to wait until they had obtained her father’s consent. If a man ran off with an heiress under the age of 16, he could be prosecuted for abduction.

WOMEN AND CRIME While women were prosecuted more rarely for crimes than men, for several crimes they were the most likely to be prosecuted: witchcraft, infanticide, FORNICATION and ILLEGITIMACY, and SLANDER. In the WITCH TRIALS in Salem, for example, 80 percent of those prosecuted were female, and most of the men who were accused were the husbands of accused women. The punishment for witchcraft and infanticide was death. The punishment for fornication, illegitimacy, and

9

WOMEN AND THE LAW IN COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

slander varied from a fine to a public whipping. Given that women who were indentured servants could not marry without their masters’ permission (and were bound until age 24), if they became pregnant they usually were prosecuted for illegitimacy. In Frederick County, Virginia, in the 1750s, this meant that they had two years added to their term of service (and so had to serve until age 26) and were whipped on the bare back 25 lashes at the public whipping post. Infanticide was the only crime under the common law where guilt was assumed: if a woman was unmarried and bore a child alone who died, she was presumed guilty of murdering it. Thus, if she felt ashamed or had no support, and the child was stillborn or died through her inability to properly sever the umbilical connection, she was assumed guilty. While ABORTION was not considered a crime until a child had “quickened” (begun to kick, at about four months), neither abortion or birth control was easily accessible. Apothecaries could dispense drugs that might cause an abortion, if one lived near enough a town to have easy access. Surgical abortions seem to have been rare and very dangerous. We have no cases of women being prosecuted for abortion. Women technically had the same protections from crimes as did men, and had a few special protections. Rape was punished with death, but it was hardly ever prosecuted. We have no known cases, for example, of indentured servant women successfully prosecuting their masters for

rape, even though it is clear that their masters were not infrequently the fathers of their children. They had no real protection against what we would now term sexual harassment. The age limit for statutory rape, meanwhile, was under ten. These cases, likewise, were rarely prosecuted. Among the difficulties were COMMON LAW rules that stated that a woman’s word should not be taken against a man’s (if they were the only witnesses) and that a woman who was raped could not become pregnant (based on medical theory of the time). As a consequence, many cases that were almost certainly rape were prosecuted, if at all, as “assault with intent to ravish.” Female "Criminals" in Seventeenth-Century New England This table categorizes court cases involving women according to how severely the defendant was judged to have violated the expected passive, deferential female sex role. Total cases:

710 248 135 105 83 61 38 40

(22%)

1,233

(38%)

Moderate violators of the female sex role: Theft Drunkenness Keeping a disorderly house Running away (servants) Arson

292 180 55 36 14 7

(9%)

Offenses not in conflict with the passive female sex role: Sabbath violations Operating tavern illegally Lying Non-appearance in court Nightwalking Marrying contrary to law Idleness Card-playing

691 431 146 52 26 11 10 8 7

(21%)

* In selected counties or towns in Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Plymouth Colony

Other (miscellaneous; nature of offense unrecorded)

350

(11%)

Adapted from Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Adapted from Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Punishment for Women Suspected of Killing Their Infants in New England, 1620-1700

All cases* Hanged Acquitted Whipped Final disposition not recorded

Total Married Widowed 35 11 1 16 5 10 2 1 5 2 4 1 -

No record of marital Single status 19 4 9 1 6 1 3 1 2

Severe violators of female sex role: Abusive behavior Adultery, adulterous behavior Contempt of the authorities "Heresy" violations (Quakers, e.g.) Witchcraft Swearing Manslaughter, murder

3,276

Fornication:

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DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE COLONIAL YEARS

A wife who killed her husband was punished for “petit treason,” meaning that in killing her husband she committed the same kind of crime as if she had killed the king: she killed someone who had just authority over her. Petit treason was a crime for which a woman could be burned alive. A servant who killed her master was guilty of the same crime. This common law principle reflected the way that PATRIARCHY was built into the law.

IMPACT OF REVOLUTION

make divorce much easier: the principle that a people had a right to break the bonds of allegiance translated easily to the personal realm. Surely a man or woman who had experienced “a long train of abuses” could dissolve a marriage on the same grounds as America had dissolved her ties with Britain. While divorce had been legal only in Connecticut prior to the Revolution (except by legislative act for a handful of wealthy individuals in other colonies), virtually every new state enacted DIVORCE LAWS in the wake of the Revolution. Holly Brewer

The idea expressed in the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE that “all men are created equal” had mixed consequences for women: was the term “men” used in a general way to include all people, or did those who signed the document (all male) mean just men, and not women? The ambiguity set off more than a century of debate about who was entitled to the rights listed in the Declaration and on what grounds. Indeed, one of the immediate impacts of the Revolution and the ideals enshrined in the Declaration was to

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G S

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Spruill, Julia Cherry. Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938.



Domestic Life in the Colonial Years

E

uropean colonists brought many things with them to the Americas, but among the most enduring were a set of ideals and practices that organized domestic life. Notions of proper gender roles, household order, and marital relations helped to structure almost every aspect of colonial life—legal, political, economic, religious, and social. The colonial world presented many challenges to European domestic forms, however. Most colonial societies were marked by extreme gender imbalances, with many more European men than women crossing the ocean for the “new” world. The economic or religious goals of many colonial enterprises worked against the establishment of orderly domestic relations on European models. Contact with Native American societies, with their wholly different notions

of proper domestic relations, and the introduction of race-based slavery also stretched early modern European household structures in new directions. The English view of family life is exemplified by William Gouge, who wrote in his 1622 book, Of Domesticall Duties, “a familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth. Or rather, it is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth.” Early modern households in the English colonies were generally organized around a single male head (the father, husband, or “patriarch”), and they exemplified “patriarchal” government typical of the time. Heads of household were responsible for the conduct of subordinates in their care, including wives, children, servants,

11

DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE COLONIAL YEARS

or lodgers. In theory, the patriarch reigned supreme, though in practice his rule was softened by corresponding responsibilities to care for his dependents. As Gouge’s words suggest, the family was often seen as a mirror of the larger political arrangements in monarchical society. Orderly marriage was essential to the harmony of communities, the transmission of property by inheritance between generations, and the economic survival of its members. Historians have learned much about the family by carefully mining court records, wills, demographic data, and prescriptive texts like that of William Gouge. The picture they have pieced together suggests that while most colonists hoped to create a harmonious “little commonwealth,” the reality often fell short of communal ideals. Take, for example, the family of Nicholas Pinion, an iron worker in seventeenth-century New England. As historian Mary Beth Norton notes, few families “could match the Pinions’ two-generation record of 26 prosecutions over two decades in four [New England] colonies, along with other accusations that did not result in formal charges.” Nicholas, his wife Elizabeth, and their four children came to court “for offenses ranging from profanity and absence from sabbath services to theft, adultery, and infanticide.” Members of the family “were sued for defamation and assaulted by other

colonists; one was the victim of an attempted rape reputedly instigated by her husband; and three others repeatedly engaged in lascivious conduct.” Nicholas failed either to control his wife or to control himself: he once battered her so severely that she suffered a miscarriage. As Norton notes, “a seventeenth-century commentator would have predicted disaster for the Pinions’ children.” Since husband and wife were the models for children of proper social relationships, if parents misbehaved, “their children would not learn suitable modes of conduct.” Though sometimes troubled, family relations in the New England colonies (Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Colony, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) came closest to replicating the conditions found back in England. If anything, the region’s town fathers spent even more time observing and ordering families and households than had authorities in the old country. Governance in these colonies was profoundly influenced, at least in the first generation or two, by the goals of radical Protestant reformers sometimes known by the term PURITANS. Courts and congregations worked assiduously to root out transgressions like premarital FORNICATION, often bringing flirtatious individuals to court to answer for such “light” or “lascivious conduct” as might lead to sin. Still, Puritan

Petitions for Divorce in New England, 1620-1699* Total cases Cause cited: Desertion Adultery Bigamy Impotence Abuse Affinity † Refusal of intercourse Incest Mutual consent Disobedience Unknown

Brought Brought Brought by wife by husband by both

Granted

Disposition Denied Separated Unknown

126

82

35

7

99

10

5

11

51 29 11 10 4 3 2 2 2 1 11

39 18 10 9 3 – – 1 – – 5

10 11 1 1 1 – 2 1 – 1 4

– – – – – 3 – – 2 – 2

45 25 9 5 2 3 1 1 1 – 6

2 – 1 3 – – 1 – – 1 3

1 1 1 1 1 – – – 1 – –

3 3 – 1 1 – – 1 – – 2

*Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, New Hampshire Colony, Connecticut Colony, New Haven Colony, and Rhode Island–Providence Plantations Colony †Discovery of familial relationship between spouses Adapted from Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

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DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE COLONIAL YEARS

strictures worked both ways: had Elizabeth Pinion not resorted to adulterous relations, as she did on more than one occasion, she might have found the courts of New England unusually sympathetic to her plight. She might even have been able to secure a divorce from her weakwilled husband, and well into the eighteenth century Connecticut was known as a colony given to unusually liberal DIVORCE LAWS. This was not so much to protect women from abusive or neglectful spouses as it was designed to ensure that individuals lived orderly lives and households remained harmonious. In Connecticut as in other colonies, informal community censure (through interventions by female neighbors, for example) might also serve to restore order or document transgression. In everyday life, ordinary New England families loved, traded, gossiped, raised children, and lived lives of a complexity that belies old stereotypes of the dour Puritan. Historical records reveal many surprises. For example, married women were frequently entrusted to act in the place of their husbands in all matters of household business. Such “deputy husbanding,” as historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has termed it, depended upon the complementary roles assumed by husband and wife. In the absence of their husbands, women exercised power of attorney, testified in court, oversaw complex business transactions, indentured their children to tradesmen, and, in general, maintained a surprisingly public presence. When their husbands returned, these same women usually retired to the realm of women’s work: preparing meals, gardening, dairying, and participating in neighborhood life. So too, the image of sexual repression has been overturned by careful research: in fact, the rates of premarital pregnancy increased in every decade of the eighteenth century, peaking just before the American Revolution. And because of high fertility rates and relatively limited agricultural resources, many children who lived to adulthood had to move far from their original homes to find farmland for their families. Thus, intercolonial migration would prove to be a critical factor in colonial life, right from the earliest decades of PlymouthColony, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts. But what of life in other parts of the colonial world? Most places lacked the relatively even

gender ratio found among the Euro-American population of the New England colonies. In the plantation societies of the Chesapeake region (Maryland and Virginia) economic conditions and gender imbalances conspired to reshape early modern domestic practices. The seventeenth-century southern colonies had as many as three or four English men for every English woman. These demographic factors forced women’s average age at marriage to drop from the early twenties to the late teens. Some of the evidence that Mary Beth Norton has collected even suggests that frequent economic partnerships between two young men running a tobacco farm together might have also led to other sorts of partnerships. These might have been bigamous, as in the 1651 case of Richard Holt, his wife Dorothy, and his partner, Edward Hudson, or even, possibly, homosexual, as between cohabiting partners or (in local parlance) “mates.” In addition, the Chesapeake saw staggeringly high rates of mortality. Unlike New England, where the relatively healthful environment led to lower infant mortality and longer life span, early residents of Maryland or Virginia were unlikely to reach adulthood without losing one or both of their natural parents to disease. Households thus frequently included step-parents, step-brothers or sisters, half-siblings, more distant, orphaned relations, and an assortment of boarders and tenants. All these demographic factors brought legal and social innovations to the early modern families of the colonial South. One such new institution inspired by the high death rate was the orphans’ court, charged with determining the fate and overseeing the fortunes of parentless minors. Elsewhere in the colonial world the chief influences on domestic life were not European but Native American. In the Hudson’s Bay colony of northern Canada (founded in 1670), English traders, mostly men, frequently married into Native American kin groups. Thus their wives’ relations provided inland trading partners. The men could also count on their wives’ labor in processing and packing furs for shipment. French coureurs de bois (as fur traders were called) frequently traveled hundreds of miles into the interior of North America. Frontier areas like the inland Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia were also more likely to

DOMESTIC LIFE IN THE COLONIAL YEARS

see occasional white male traders than settled colonial families. Many of these men took Native women as partners, either temporarily or, less frequently, in lifelong relations. Such men were more likely to identify with Native American than Euro-American domestic life. Since many Native societies were matrilineally organized, such relations did little to disturb extant kin relations: families were used to accepting sons-in-law from far away, and a woman’s loyalty to her home and family were not considered at odds with her love for her husband. Still, such intermarriage opened new opportunities to European men, Native American women, and their offspring (referred to as métis, French for “mixed”) who quickly filled a gap as translators, negotiators, and cultural intermediaries between Native American and Euro-American societies. In most parts of Spanish America (including Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and, by the eighteenth century, Arizona and California), European conquistadores were quickly followed by Catholic missionaries. Mostly men, the missionaries encouraged Natives to adopt white practices of domestic life. In the Jesuit missions among the Apalachee of Florida, Indian couples were encouraged to move to mission communities where they learned Spanish and were baptized with Spanish names. In the Southwest, the missionaries’ influence took longer to take effect: the more tenacious matrilineal systems of the Pueblo were left intact over several centuries of contact. In California, eighteenth-century competition with Russian fur traders to the north encouraged the Spanish to found a series of missions and presidios (fortified garrisons) as far north as San Francisco. In these eighteenth-century missions, celibate priests regulated every aspect of Indian life, especially focusing their efforts on the eradication of polygamy and premarital sexual experimentation among young men and women. A few women—either local Natives or immigrants from Mexico—congregated in the meager pueblos (towns) associated with the presidios, and raised families with husbands who had served at the garrison. Almost all efforts were directed at trade, ranching, or subsistence agriculture. According to Albert L. Hurtado, the majority of Californios (colonists of Mexican origin) in early-nineteenth-century Los

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Angeles lived in traditional extended families, augmenting ties of blood through compadrazgo— the naming of godparents who were expected to take a parental and financial interest in their godchildren throughout their lives. In addition to the many European and Native American practices detailed here, African practices of the family also made a mark on colonial domestic life in many parts of North America. In the upper South (Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) living conditions were such that African-American communities quickly emerged. African slaves appear to have had a high resistance to the strains of malaria that had made the Chesapeake such a death trap for European colonists. African-American men and women frequently formed relationships despite serving different masters, causing many men to travel midweek or on Saturday night for a visit with his wife and children. Thus, John Brown advertised in 1767 for the return of his slave, Peter, who “has a wife at Little Town.” Such “abroad” wives “away from the husband’s domicile” were “very common,” according to historian Mechal Sobel, and in fact constituted “the only possible matches for the large population living on farms with small numbers of other blacks.” One crucial difference marked the domestic lives of enslaved men and women: The system of patriarchal relations often broke down. In the mid-seventeenth century, Maryland and Virginia passed important laws that condemned all children of female slaves to lifelong bondage. The primary allegiance and legal identity of the enslaved lay with their enslaved mother and her Euro-American master, not with the African-American husband or father. Slave marriages had no legal standing. Governed by customary rights, they could be violated at any time by miscegenation, separation by sale, or a forced remarriage, and African Americans had only limited resources at hand to reaffirm their own choices in domestic life. Still, the lives of slaves in the upper South were perhaps preferable to the high mortality rates and very low fertility rates found in the rice and indigo plantations of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Here African-American women had very low rates of pregnancy, given the poor nutrition, unhealthy climate, and arduous nature of their work. Because of low fertility, the proportion of African- or Caribbean-born slaves

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remained high. This combined with the large numbers of absentee owners in this region to ensure that family forms, language, and domestic practices remained indelibly West African in style. Colonial America saw a wide range of practices and conditions in domestic life. In every case, family forms, household organization, economic activities, gender roles, childbearing, and child rearing diverged from their original forms, whether Native American, European, or African. Still, the institution of patriarchal family relations and the idea of the family as a “little commonwealth,” whose order reflected the health of the larger society, remained a critical component of early American society. Ann Marie Plane F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial

Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.



Women and Religion

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he women and girls who inhabited colonial North America and the new United States were active participants in a stunning array of religious traditions and experiments—from Native American and African religious cultures to nearly every form of Western European Christianity and small congregations of Sephardic Jews. These traditions provided varying opportunities for women. Among Protestants in particular—the faith of the great majority of English America’s colonists—gender roles often reflected churches’ differing views of the clergy and the individual’s relationship to God. The Church of England (ANGLICANS ) stressed the importance of ministers as priestly mediators between believers and the Holy Trinity. Women served as deaconesses in their parish churches, but could not be ordained and were discouraged from seeking too ardent a connection with God. By contrast, beginning in the late sixteenth century, the PURITANS (later Congregationalists) and Presbyterians, products of the Calvinist move-

ment, emphasized Bible-reading over the sacraments and ministers’ role as teachers. Puritans taught that only those predestined by God would enter heaven, but they believed that a Christian’s fate might be known through a personal experience of grace: a powerful idea that produced outspoken women seeking true faith. Separatist movements—breaking from taxsupported churches like the Anglicans and Puritans—often espoused unorthodox teachings. The Religious Society of Friends (QUAKERS) rejected the doctrine of original sin and recruited an unordained clergy from their spiritually gifted followers—including numerous women. Quakers practiced the greatest gender equality by far among colonial churches, but evangelical preachers, first active in the 1730s and 1740s, also encouraged their female supporters to proclaim their spiritual rebirth in the public forum of their churches. Ultimately evangelical women would take their message of religious regeneration to the wider world. In sum,

WOMEN AND RELIGION

the growing religious diversity of the colonies and new republic opened doors for women and girls seeking spiritual fulfillment, although, as many were to discover, their strivings for respect were not always welcomed.

THE COLONIAL CONTEXT Among NATIVE AMERICANS throughout North America, women were leaders in all areas of life. While few were shamans—priest-doctors— women acted as healers, clan heads, counselors, and occasionally tribal chiefs. In the densely settled pueblos of New Mexico, women were excluded from the kivas, the ritual center of each village, but female deities called Corn Mothers were believed to have created the earth, and women exercised equal if not greater religious and social power than men. In the colonial period, Spanish and French missionaries extended the influence of the Catholic Church in New Mexico, California, and Canada by converting Native American women and encouraging intermarriage. In 1639, the Ursulines founded an order for French women in Quebec. Otherwise, European women were rare sights in the vast interior and western regions of North America.

ENGLISH AMERICA, 1585–1700 By contrast, women and girls were plentiful in the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard, and many were participants in bold religious ventures.

First Settlements Following the failed colony at Roanoke in the 1580s, English women, undoubtedly Anglicans, first arrived in Jamestown (Virginia) after 1607. In 1620, separatist Pilgrims, including women and girls, settled Plymouth (later part of Massachusetts) as a holy commonwealth for God’s chosen people. This was the first significant religious experiment in English America. The New England Way Religious women’s importance grew exponentially in the New England colonies of Massachusetts (including Maine), Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Here, beginning in Boston in 1630, the Puritans instituted their ideas for reformation of the Anglican

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Church, based on the CHRISTIAN DOGMA of John Calvin. The ideal Puritan woman was wife and mother first, but with public duties tied to her religious faith. ANNE BRADSTREET described her mother as a “worthy matron of unspotted life” and “obedient wife” who was “pitiful to poor” and “wisely awful” to her servants, a “true instructor to her family,” a frequenter of “public meetings,” and “religious in all her words and ways.” After 1650, Puritanism began to lose its allure for many New England men, engaged in trade and other worldly concerns, and women came to make up the majority of CHURCH MEMBERSHIP. This change signaled a new gender divide in Puritan culture, but not as yet a change in women’s place in their churches.

Colonial Diversity European women and girls also emigrated with their families or as indentured servants to the South and the Middle Colonies. In Maryland and Virginia, and then in the Carolinas, most women and girls were Anglicans, but in 1634, English CATHOLICS celebrated their first Mass in Maryland. African women in the lower South almost certainly practiced the religious traditions of their West African homelands, including ring-dancing, trance possession, reverence for ancestors, and “obeah,” or folk witchcraft. The Middle Colonies provide further evidence of the diverse religious character of English America. Dutch Calvinists, as well as small numbers of Swedish and Finnish Lutheran families (similar to the Calvinists), practiced their faiths throughout the New Netherlands (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware). Sephardic JEWS arrived in New Amsterdam (New York City) in the 1650s. The 1664 English conquest opened the region to other European Protestant women and men, including Huguenots (French Calvinists). By 1700, religiously curious girls and women might find nearly every kind of Protestant, as well as Catholics, Jews, and Africans of various faiths, in and around the region. The Quakers were also key figures in the settling of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The Quakers argued that St. Paul’s stricture against female PREACHING (1 Corinthians 14: 34–35) was historical rather than universal, and that an alternative text—“there is neither male

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nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3: 28–29)—verified that men and women were equal in Christ. Nearly half of the 59 Quaker ministers who traveled to the colonies between 1656 and 1663 were female. Dominant in Pennsylvania, the Quakers ultimately became the third major church in the colonies, after the Puritans (CONGREGATIONALISTS) and Anglicans. At the same time, Germans of varying faiths—Lutherans, Calvinists, and separatists— were attracted by Pennsylvania’s policy of toleration. Calvinist Presbyterians, especially Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants, settled in New Jersey and along the piedmont of the Appalachian Mountains. Jewish settlers built synagogues in the cities of Philadelphia, Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina. Each of these groups emphasized the importance of community and family life, central to women’s lives.

Dissent and Danger Three important episodes, all in New England, also signaled the danger, especially for women, of not conforming to the dictates of colonial authorities. In 1637–1638, ANNE HUTCHINSON was twice tried for questioning whether the colony’s leading ministers had experienced saving faith. Hutchinson’s PROPHESYING was among women, but she had important allies among men. Hutchinson claimed to have received her understanding of the doctrine of grace “by an immediate revelation” from God, a claim that the Massachusetts authorities condemned as a dangerous precedent for other religious rebels. The Massachusetts legislature denounced Hutchinson, a faithful wife and mother, as anti-Christian, unchaste, and an outcast. Hutchinson was excommunicated and banished from the colony. Also in Massachusetts, Mary Dyer, a Hutchinson follower and convert to Quakerism, purposefully broke the colony’s laws against Quaker meetings and the dissemination of Quaker teachings. She was hanged in 1660. The Salem Witch Trials in 1692 further revealed the limits of girls’ and women’s power in New England. Unconventional women were regularly suspected of witchcraft. Before Salem, 139 cases, most directed against women, had already been brought to court in New England. In Salem Village, an unusually large number of

girls, many of them poor and socially powerless, claimed to be “possessed” by the Devil and tormented by, among others, the village’s independent older women. Nineteen villagers, the great majority female, were executed as witches.

ENGLISH AMERICA, 1700–1775 After 1700, women and men were no longer hanged for witchcraft. Girls and women, especially along the frontier between New England and French Canada, continued to be victimized by religious conflict. But the freer religious climate also opened up new forms of Protestant ritual and expression for colonial women.

White Indians and Anglo Canadians Beginning with KING PHILIP’S WAR in 1675–76, New Englanders were abducted into French Canada in extraordinary numbers by Indian raiding parties seeking survival through ransoming. Many women were among the 1,641 people known to have been seized between 1675 and 1763. In 1682, Mary Rowlandson published her CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE, emphasizing “the Soveraignty & Goodness of God” despite her afflictions as an Indian captive. The book became an instant best-seller at a time when hundreds of girls continued to be forcefully adopted into Indian or French families. In the early 1700s, Eunice Williams prompted a scandal in New England when she converted to Catholicism and married a Mohawk man. Esther Wheelwright, kidnapped in 1703, became Esther Marie Joseph de L’Enfant Jesus, a sister in Quebec’s Ursuline convent. Eight other New England girls are known to have joined Catholic orders. Quaker Ministers Hundreds of Quaker women continued to serve as public ministers between 1700 and 1775, many traveling great distances from their families, even across the Atlantic, to prophesy “in the service of Truth.” One minister, Pennsylvanian Elizabeth Webb, preached to blacks as well as whites in the early 1700s. Competition from evangelical churches, stricter discipline, and the disruptions of the AMERICAN REVOLUTION turned the Quakers into one of the smaller churches in the new republic. But Quaker innovations in child-rearing, based on their belief in the innate

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goodness of children, and their pioneering work in social reforms like the antislavery movement would influence Americans for years to come.

The Great Awakening, 1735–1745 In the mid-eighteenth century, the first of the GREAT AWAKENINGS, or evangelical revival movements, encouraged young and adult women alike to seek religious rebirth—the evangelical equivalent of the experience of grace. Led by Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist ministers, and the famous Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, the Awakening drew many men back into the churches, but the emphasis on rebirth inevitably underscored the spiritual equality of women and men. Thirteen women are known to have preached as informal public evangelists in these years. The BAPTISTS, emphasizing the baptism of reborn believers, benefited from revivals in New England and the South, and elevated women to church offices, although not the clergy. In the 1760s, Sarah Osborn led an Awakening-inspired revival in Newport, Rhode Island, that attracted women, men, and children. Presaging the remarkable impact of evangelicalism on African Americans, free and enslaved women and men were also “awakened” at religious revivals. Probably for most girls and women, the Awakening’s significance was profoundly personal. As Sarah Edwards wrote: “The glory of God seemed to be all . . . and to swallow up every wish and desire of my heart.” The Moravians RELIGIOUS SECTS, like the separatists before them, were more inclined toward experiments in gender relations. Survivors of the Protestant Reformation in central Europe, the Moravians sought salvation through communal living and the doctrine of perfection—that believers might become sinless in this life. By the 1730s, Moravian missionaries were at work in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and English America. The best-known American Moravian community was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, founded in 1741. The settlement represented a radical redefinition of the family, with adherents orchestrated into monastery-style residential groups separated by gender, age, and marital status. Women exercised significant authority at Bethlehem, serving on governing boards on equal terms with men.

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The education of girls was promoted by the Girls’ Seminary. By 1759, 600 people were living at Bethlehem. While adult men outnumbered women, unusual proportions of both were unmarried. By the 1760s, women outnumbered men.

THE NEW NATION, 1776–1820 The American Revolution had serious implications for American churches and religion. Congregationalists and other Calvinists tended to favor the break with Britain, while Quakers and German churches were neutral. Anglicans were torn between the two sides. The turmoil of the time and a new emphasis on religious freedom led to new religious sects and marked changes in American DENOMINATIONALISM.

Image Breakers Several women broke dramatically with traditional gender expectations. JEMIMA WILKINSON, influenced by her Quaker background and her Universalist belief that salvation was accessible to all, styled herself the “Public Universal Friend,” dressed in men’s attire, and preached the perfection of believing Christians in the early 1780s. Traveling through the new states, she had several hundred followers by the end of the century. At the same time, the SHAKERS, formed by “Mother” Ann Lee and several male believers, organized a community in upstate New York. Like the Moravians, the Shakers experimented with alternative marital relations, later becoming an exclusively celibate sect. After Lee’s death, LUCY WRIGHT initiated the Gathering Order to seek converts further west. By 1823, the Shakers had established 16 villages from Maine to Kentucky. The Revival Churches After 1800, with the second Great Awakening, many more women joined Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches. The METHODISTS, an English evangelical movement, split away from the Anglicans, now called Episcopalians, and grew spectacularly after 1800. Like other evangelicals, the Methodists preached the new birth, but their doctrines rejected Calvinist predestination and espoused the free will of the believer to convert—a teaching that appealed to Americans newly freed from

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their colonial past. The Methodists drew thousands of women and girls into their religious societies, led by young, earnest traveling preachers. Like the other evangelical churches, the Methodists did not accord women preaching authority. But women regularly functioned as class leaders—spiritual guides for other women— and as the confidantes and wives of traveling preachers. Sustained by thousands of women and their families, the Methodist movement rapidly undermined the popularity of the Calvinist denominations. By the Civil War, Methodists comprised an estimated one-third of all church membership in the United States. The BAPTISTS also exploded in numbers and were especially successful in the South and West. Although Baptist clergy attempted to strengthen the place of men in the churches after 1800, individual Baptist congregations continued to include women in church governance. The Presbyterians also expanded into the South and West. The Second Great Awakening transformed the lives of scores of women and girls who sought to convert members of their families, acted as hosts to traveling preachers, distributed Bibles among poor families, and otherwise magnified their authority in the domestic sphere. Even more than in the past, religion was women’s business, as daughters followed their mothers into their chosen churches, swelling church membership.

African Christians Black women, eager to break from SLAVERY and claim new identities, also joined evangelical churches and formed the core of what were now called “African” congregations, celebrating black Christianity. In revival meetings, black women and men merged ecstatic rebirth experiences with West African spiritual practices to create an authentic African-American religious culture. Northern black women, soon to be free, were attracted to African Methodism, while enslaved women in the South tended to join African Baptist congregations, often meeting away from the view of white masters. Baptism— ritual induction into a new life—was especially treasured by slaves, and the millennial language of the Bible provided a rich new vocabulary of liberation. In the early 1700s, an African Catholic community also developed in and around

New Orleans, with Ursuline Sisters educating slaves whenever permitted by slaveholders.

CONCLUSION: MISSIONARIES AT HOME AND ABROAD The Second Great Awakening was in many respects a conservative movement, emphasizing girls’ and women’s roles as religious models in the home and exemplars of domesticity. Yet in the liberating context of the new republic and inevitably through their church activities, religious women honored the dignity of women’s work and traveled far and wide to testify to their beliefs. This new American generation included western women like Julia Anne Hieronymus Tevis, a Methodist convert who founded the Science Hill Academy for Young Women in Kentucky. “Teaching,” Tevis wrote, “should be considered as a Profession, and the loftiest calling except that of preaching the Gospel.” CATHARINE BEECHER (see Volume 2), calling for the professionalizing of home management, published widely and established several schools for girls and young women. New Englander HARRIET ATWOOD NEWELL, traveling with her husband, died on a formal mission to bring the gospel to poor women in India. Thousands of women, working for Bible and religious tract societies, brought the urban poor to Christ. Others became pioneers in TEMPERANCE (see Volume 2), prison reform, antislavery, and the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT (see Volume 2). And for the first time, women, white and black, sought to preach from church pulpits. Bigger changes lay ahead: after 1820 Irish Catholics transformed the religious landscape of American cities. In 1848, after the MexicanAmerican War, Mexican Catholics in New Mexico and California, including thousands of women and girls, became part of the United States. Other women joined the Mormons—a movement synthesizing millennial Christianity with experimental family relations. NATIVE AMERICANS, men and women alike, continued to struggle with the entreaties of missionaries to abandon their ancestral faiths. Even more than in the colonial era, American girls and women, for whom religion had always mattered so much, would learn to live with each other’s religious

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differences and come to terms with the challenges of religious freedom. Dee E. Andrews F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and

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Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Larsen, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775. New York: Knopf, 1999. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Knopf, 1982. Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.



Gender Ideology in the Revolutionary Era

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merican revolutionaries frequently used the language of gender to express their political passions and ideas. Notions of what they called “manliness” and “effeminacy” permeated their thinking about citizenship, and models of ideal republicans (a term which meant at the time citizens of the new republic, without any connotations of party) took both masculine and feminine forms. At times notions of gender were embodied in abstract symbols like the female figure of Liberty; at times American patriots drew analogies between the duties of government and the everyday familial roles of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters; and at times sexual metaphors like seduction and rape were used to illustrate the imperial conflict with Britain. Gender imagery at once intensified the rhetorical power of political argument and provided a vocabulary with which to discuss highly charged political issues. Difficult and fundamental questions about the responsibilities of rulers, the justifications of violence, and the meanings of liberty and equality were posed in gendered terms. A new American identity was shaped in part by playing off different masculine and feminine stereotypes and by developing new ones in the process. To grasp the significance of gender to Revolutionary ideology, it is important to understand that scarcely any rhetorical references to male or female qualities were meant to be taken literally. Masculine and feminine images were invoked primarily as symbols—for example, heroic selfsacrifice and corrupt tyranny. Revolutionary

leaders did not think about gender relations in concrete terms as a political problem, and they would be astonished to know that subsequent generations have taken their often casual language so seriously. The very force of their rhetoric depended on unquestioned assumptions about masculine and feminine traits. That these assumptions were malleable, and that gender definitions significantly changed during the Revolutionary period, was largely lost on the Revolutionary generation itself. Those few Americans who publicly advocated a higher social position for women did so privately, like ABIGAIL ADAMS, or only after independence from Britain was won, and they never gained political influence. However radical at the time, JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY and others who wrote on behalf of women in the 1780s and 1790s concentrated their arguments on female education, not political rights. The few legal reforms produced by the Revolution that significantly affected the status of women—changes in DIVORCE LAWS in some states and the gradual erosion of DOWER RIGHTS—were indirect byproducts of other legal changes and had little immediate practical value. However limited in its short-term political impact, the gendered language of the Revolution did help to change the ways that Americans thought about the differences between men and women. This ideological change had a powerful impact on the status and roles of American women in the long run. The Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth century laid the

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groundwork for what in the nineteenth century became the dominant middle- and upper-class attitudes toward women. To appreciate this change it is necessary to compare the typical gender images used in the early years of the revolutionary movement, in the 1760s and 1770s, to the revised images that emerged in the new American nation in the 1780s and 1790s.

1760s AND 1770s: FEMININE LIBERTY AND THE BAD MOTHER When in the mid-1760s American colonists mounted their initial resistance to new British laws, they saw themselves as defenders of traditional English liberties. The ideology of the movement was from the beginning framed in terms of a struggle between the forces of liberty and tyranny. Drawing from older English political debates and from ancient Roman symbolism, the cause of liberty was figured in feminine terms— not only was the concept of Liberty pictorially depicted as a virtuous woman, but, more tellingly, liberty was repeatedly described in patriot propaganda as a passive principle vulnerable to the assaults of power. Tyranny, the most extreme manifestation of unbridled political ambition, typically carried the opposite masculine connotations. According to a widely used Biblical analogy drawn from the Book of Revelation, America was the helpless woman lying in the wilderness exposed to her British predator, the manyheaded Beast of Satan. The aggressive, evil masculinity of the British threat to innocent American liberty was further accentuated by the colonists’ initial tendency to blame specific royal ministers such as Lords Grenville and Bute for the disastrous turn in imperial policy in the 1760s. Never, however, was the gender symbolism of Revolutionary ideology simply a matter of a single, polar dichotomy. Always running alongside this highly negative use of masculine imagery was a contrary, positive vision of manliness. If in the language of the American Revolution the symbol of Liberty was a woman, her defenders were chiefly conceived to be men. While the male British ministers were seen as corrupt and power-hungry, their male patriots counterparts were deemed to be honest and dutiful. The very name “Sons of Liberty,” taken by the most

important popular political organization of the early revolutionary movement, points to the high value attached to male filial loyalty and unblemished youth. The term used most to encapsulate the highest ideal of public service— “virtue”—possessed distinctively male as well as female connotations. The concept derived from classical political theory, and just as the word virtue stems from the same classical root as virility it often referred to specifically masculine traits such as military courage and statesmanship. The noble character of the virtuous male patriot thus complemented that of the virtuous female Liberty. Just as no one image of masculinity dominated American revolutionary rhetoric, neither did one image of femininity. The ideal vision of female Liberty, embodying positive characteristics of innocence and devotion, vied from the beginning with the contrary, negative conception of “effeminacy.” In this variation, the very same corruption and deceit that lay at the basis of British tyranny took feminine rather than masculine symbolic form. Age-old representations of women as shrewish, materialistic, and vain served to illuminate the decadence of English aristocratic values and to cast blame for the supposed over-consumption of luxury goods. Patriots appealing to American women to boycott English textiles and tea during the 1760s and 1770s juxtaposed the allure of such frivolous fineries to the virtue of self-restrained abstinence. The elegant dress and cultivated manners of English high society that normally conveyed GENTILITY were increasingly derided as soft, superficial, and feminine “foppery” during the years of the early American revolutionary movement. British officials who curried favor with superiors and indulged in the common spoils of patronage likewise found themselves likened to females. Even so powerful a man as the royal minister Lord Bute suffered from his rumored dependence upon a woman. The aged Queen Mother together with her favored Bute fell under popular suspicion of wielding despotic power from behind King George’s throne. American colonists often turned to familial imagery to describe their unraveling relationship with Great Britain. Portraying themselves as abused sons and England as the bad “mother

GENDER IDEOLOGY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

country,” their propaganda evoked powerful feelings of abandonment and betrayal. Had England properly enacted the role of a “tender” mother, they implied, no disobedience on the part of her loving children would have occurred. The metaphorical equation of ordinary subjects with children had long been used by Europeans to justify the hierarchical system of monarchy. As American resistance to imperial laws gained intensity in the early 1770s and broke into war, colonists increasingly turned this metaphor on its head. Instead of taking their dependence as a natural given, they depicted the ruthlessness of the British parent as grounds for separation. At the time of American independence the more general criticism of the “mother country” became a focused attack on the King. In such influential Revolutionary writings as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson’s DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, the image of George III as an evil father against whom Americans had to rebel served to justify a republican rather than monarchical system of government. The Revolutionary depiction of royal rule as irrational and oppressive also drew upon well-known educational writings by John Locke and others that criticized arbitrary patriarchal authority within families. This collective selfportrait of the colonists as enterprising sons coming of age included the promise of a glorious future of independent maturity ahead.

1780s AND 1790s: INDEPENDENT MEN AND VIRTUOUS MOTHERS Behind this association of manliness with independence was the far more traditional association of women with dependency. According to the British law of COVERTURE, which remained in place in America after the Revolution, a married woman’s civic identity was subsumed into that of her husband. As political activism spread among white men in the revolutionary era, women supported the American cause in numerous ways— from participating in organizations such as the “Daughters of Liberty” to becoming writers of polemical literature like MERCY OTIS WARREN. With rare exceptions, however, government remained the province of men. Despite little change in the political rights of women, the revolutionary era brought funda-

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mental changes in gender ideology. Familial imagery continued to be used to describe political relationships, but by the 1790s the theme of youthful rebellion was supplanted by that of benign paternal authority. Virtue came to be best displayed in domestic relations rather than in military or political life. George Washington, commonly revered as the father of the country, drew acclaim for his retreat to private life as a farmer after the war and his apparent reluctance to serve as the first president. On patriotic occasions the American family over which he presided was idealized as a happy and harmonious union, in sharp contrast to the fractured family previously headed by the English king. This shift from bad to good father can partly be seen as a postrevolutionary reassertion of patriarchal values. In the new republican model of the political family, however, the authority of the father over his children depended on mutual affection, not birth. Concepts of American masculinity shed much of their earlier militancy and took on a more sentimental and domestic cast. The earlier revolutionary ideal of the independent male citizen was never eliminated—it lived on especially in the Southern white notion of male honor and in a developing national literature celebrating heroic male adventures in the wilderness. But masculine independence increasingly implied devotion to home and hearth, especially among the Northern middle classes. Alongside this new exaltation of private life came a revised conception of womanhood. Wives and mothers embodied the domestic ideal even more than responsible husbands and fathers. Indeed, according to the stories featured in growing numbers of sentimental novels and the first American MAGAZINES AND PERIODICALS (see Volume 2), women exerted key influence upon the moral character of both children and men. Female domesticity was now deemed critical to the development not only of families but of the American nation as a whole. Through the performance of the ideal role of REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD, women bore the civic responsibility of raising future generations of responsible citizens. Comparisons of women to men within this new ideology stressed gender differences more than equality. While the best of both sexes presumably shared qualities of generosity and affec-

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tion, women were increasingly credited with innately superior morality, greater capacity for self-sacrifice, and stronger feeling for others. Whereas men continued to be regarded as the more rational sex, the supposed emotionalism of women no longer received automatic condemnation. Theories of female education influenced by the Enlightenment blamed women’s intellectual deficiencies on their upbringing and environment. Reflecting a widespread ambivalence about female rationality, these arguments on behalf of women’s education generally stopped short of advocating the same curriculum recommended for men. Marriage and motherhood, most writers agreed, required intellectual training only to a point. Compassion, not reason, was increasingly seen as the source of the goodness of women. In the decades following the Revolution, this tendency to value emotionality and to celebrate female empathy received still further reinforcement from the religiosity of evangelical Protestantism and the beginnings of literary romanticism. The emphasis upon domesticity and the differences between men and women had, in the long run, both conservative and progressive consequences. Women lost a degree of power they had earlier enjoyed outside the home, both in churches and local communities. Femininity became so closely associated with marriage and motherhood that women had to struggle all the harder to overcome the confinement of the domestic realm. Ironically, however, the same middle-class gender ideology that restricted women offered new opportunities. For the qualities associated with female domesticity were never completely encapsulated in private life. As women gained in moral authority they began to take more active roles in education, helping to found new female academies and SCHOOLS and becoming writers and teachers. Through their activities in early nineteenth-century VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS middle-class women stepped into the public worlds of charity and social reform. Only in the 1840s, however, decades after the close of the American Revolution, did a women’s movement draw upon the words of Jefferson to demand equal political rights. Looking back, there is no simple historical explanation for the shifts in gender ideology

during the Revolutionary era. The social and political changes produced by the imperial conflict, together with the effort to create new republican institutions later on, played a part in the transformation. So did the commercialization of the economy and the dispersion of a rapidly growing population. Further complicating the process, the rise of evangelical religion and the incorporation of Enlightenment and romantic conceptions of human nature all stimulated new patterns of thought. Several ideas affecting American notions of gender originated overseas, and similar ideological developments occurred in England around the same time. That the transformation in America so closely coincided with the Revolution, however, meant that new gender definitions became deeply intertwined with the creation of American republicanism and national identity both. Ruth H. Bloch

See also: American Revolution; Civic Life; Equality of Female Intellect; Family Life, Republican; Novels and Romantic Love; Patriarchy; Republicanism; Women, Status of.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Albanese, Catherine L. Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford, 1986. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigal Sons and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Yazawa, Melvin. From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginning of the American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

SOCIAL CONTROL

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Social Control

B

oth men and women in colonial North America and the early republic had unquestioned beliefs concerning the necessary subordination of women to men. This essay examines those beliefs and the means by which social leaders and laws enforced the hierarchy.

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION Some women in colonial North America—especially propertied white women—enjoyed more opportunity than women in Europe, but all were under a patriarchal regime of social control. Patriarchy privileged the absolute authority of the husband and father in the family, which custom and Biblical injunctions supported. If American radicals modified or republicanized PATRIARCHY after 1776, it continued to keep women subordinate to men by various means. Key laws excluded women from civil and political rights reserved to men, but less formal social attitudes, conventional wisdom, and ideology, which were shared by men and women, supported the law. Many women upheld the values that seemed to make a hierarchical relation between men and women necessary to maintain the social order—primarily the domestic values of reproduction and “goodwifery.” Some women violated limits and tried to expand their liberty, however, thereby triggering the sanctions of social control.

Reproduction Certainly the key method by which men controlled women was the prevalent view that they must marry, sometimes to a man chosen by their fathers, and should reproduce abundantly in North America. Pioneering farm families regarded children as welcome hands for labor, and the individual woman was thought to be best fulfilled by pregnancy, CHILDBIRTH, and nursing. These beliefs strongly implied the corresponding limitations on women’s behavior in other spheres beyond the child-rearing domes-

tic household. Farm women devoted as much time and energy to heavy farm work as they could spare from reproducing, and gender relations may have been more equal on farms. Everywhere, however, the prevailing social imperative kept the majority of women of childbearing age pregnant or nursing much of the time, which detracted greatly from the energy they had to put into other forms of self-expression, restricting them largely to the roles of wife and mother.

Civil Law The fundamental law that subordinated women was that of feme covert in the COMMON LAW. A basic principle of English law stemming from the Norman Conquest of 1066, COVERTURE ruled that any female was legally “covered” or subsumed in the legal personality of a man: her father, husband, or, at least, a judge. This was less absolute in England than in France, for a queen in the legitimate line of succession could rule in England—like Elizabeth I—whereas this was legally impossible in France. In general, an Englishwoman had no personal standing in the courtroom separate from that of the man by whom she was covered. In the COURTS, women faced a solid phalanx of men, for the law restricted the offices of judge, attorney, and juror to men. Women’s LEGAL PARTICIPATION was restricted to that of witness in criminal cases, and only then when it was necessary. The MARRIAGE LAWS and DIVORCE LAWS were the main statutes by which they were hemmed in. At the same time, most of these laws also contained certain basic guarantees of women’s rights, which they could enjoy only by acknowledging the legitimacy of the restrictions on their behavior. According to law and theory, a woman was so subordinated to her husband that he could discipline her strictly, even by corporal punishment. In practice, marital relations varied widely, even within relatively homogeneous

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communities like those of the PURITANS. Corporal punishment was probably the exception rather than the rule, and many companionate marriages existed in which women shared in domestic decision making or might even dominate it in defiance of conventional rules. Still, upon the death of her husband, a widow was usually guaranteed only one-third of the estate during her life. In other words, she had no say in the disposition of the other two-thirds to their children and other heirs, except in the minority of cases in which her husband’s will appointed her his executor. WIDOWHOOD frequently meant poverty or dependency. Cultural and regional differences existed: Wealthy widows might maintain their customary level of comfort by employing poor widows to perform domestic service, and widows in areas where women were few might easily remarry to their advantage. Indentured women had far fewer options either as wives or widows, for their masters had the right to prohibit them from marrying and could discipline them, restrained only by rare interventions by authorities to prevent abuse. The condition of slave women was deplorable, of course, in that they had no rights either to legitimate marriage or inheritance of any kind. Masters might force them into marriage matches and break up families at will. Free AfricanAmerican and Native American women might have formal rights similar to those of white women in some colonies, but in practice they were subject both to legal restrictions as women and to white racial prejudice. Divorce was hard to come by, but an intractable marital difficulty might be solved through separation of bed and board, which meant authorities permitted spouses to live apart. A few women obtained this right in all the colonies. It was subject to civil authority rather than ecclesiastical courts as in England. Divorce was legal from the beginning in Puritan New England, but it remained rare and difficult to procure. Neither separation nor divorce were socially acceptable enough to give women any real leverage to counter domination by their husbands.

Criminal Law The application of criminal justice to women varied from colony to colony. Marked differences of class affected an accused woman’s treat-

ment by a court: Poor women found guilty of offenses were more likely to suffer corporal punishment like whipping, whereas women of property were more likely to pay fines or suffer some symbolic public humiliation. Regional differences existed. In New England, and in parts of other colonies settled by evangelical Protestants like the Puritans, penalties for moral crimes were more severe than in England. These included capital punishment for adultery, and authorities accused women of adultery more often than they did men. The history of criminal justice is best known for the New England colonies, and it is revealing. Statistics show that over two-thirds of accused women pleaded not guilty, and the conviction rate for women was about the same as for men. In other words, many individual women did not behave meekly or fatalistically in court. Nonetheless, women’s crimes were mainly against persons (such as homicide or infanticide) rather than property, and that meant they were more likely than men to face judicial corporal punishments. These could be severe, since long-term imprisonment was unusual for either men or women. In all colonies female convicts could suffer hanging, whipping, and mutilations like branding. Courts required a few women to wear the letter “A” for adultery, just like Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. Others had to stand in a noose in the public gallows. All of these punishments were very public, attended by a ceremonial display of male officialdom and the harassment of the convict by her fellow citizens. For smaller offenses, like drunkenness, the pillory in the town square was ready for man or woman. A pilloried woman would be pelted with dirt, refuse, or eggs by passersby. Executions and public humiliations short of capital punishment served as a warning to others.

Religion Given the sharp legal limitations on women, they had to look elsewhere for acceptable venues of self-expression, and religion was the most likely choice for evangelicals like Puritans or Presbyterians. Very soon after the foundation of Massachusetts Bay, ANNE HUTCHINSON adopted an informal, quasi-clerical role in Boston that deeply divided the town in the mid-1630s. Male

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authorities finally silenced her, primarily on the grounds of her heretical views, but also because they regarded her as a presumptuous woman. They exiled her and her followers from the colony. In the 1650s, a ruling of capital punishment was passed and carried out by authority in Massachusetts to punish radical Quaker women who protested the formal theology of the strict Calvinists. These executions for religious offenses were repeated on rare occasions in several colonies, most notably in Massachusetts when several women were hanged for witchcraft in 1692. Women’s moral claim to piety was strong, in that they had a tendency to be the most staunch churchgoers, outnumbering men. The reasons are not entirely clear. One explanation is that evangelical Protestant, Calvinist women had the same obligation as men to search their souls for signs of salvation and describe these to church members to qualify for membership. CHURCH MEMBERSHIP was an extraordinary, empowering outlet that did not exist for women in more ritualistic religions, and the majority of women in the northern colonies and an increasing number in the South belonged to evangelical sects. Female piety also expanded women’s moral claims by a curious development. The evangelical male clergy sought to expand their authority by diminishing the power of the male laity in their churches; and women were better prepared than laymen to accept that new clerical authority, thereby subtly increasing their collective sway in relation to men. Women did not restrict their piety to churchgoing, at least in New England. A series of deeply religious writers from ANNE BRADSTREET in 1650 to ABIGAIL BAILEY in 1815 published works that validated women’s piety and intellect. Countering this “feminization” of the evangelical churches were church morals committees, dominated by male church officials, which kept close watch on the day-to-day behavior of members, and no system of surveillance was more effective in restraining the movements of women. These bodies held the power to excommunicate a member for acts—like drinking or quarreling—that secular courts seldom prosecuted or did not even regard as being illegal. Even if the civil results of excommunication

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were not serious in Protestant colonies, the social results for a woman could be devastating.

Economics Personal expression and social control also seemed indissolubly entwined in the economic sphere. Opportunities for women to participate in the marketplace seemed potentially great. Their supposed “sphere” included household production. The high price of imported goods in the colonies meant that women’s production in their houses and barns had a tendency to acquire market value. The production of butter is the best-known example. In most households that kept a cow or a herd, women made butter, and by the end of the eighteenth century they could sell their surplus to people who did not own cattle. The money from these sales became an increasingly important part of family farmers’ income, and informal familial authority could accrue to individual women through this market activity. Household production may have been even more liberating for enslaved women. In areas where slavery was the dominant form of production, sources suggest that they could dominate the local markets for foods they gathered from forests and streams or cultivated in personal gardens. They also sold common kitchen aids they made from natural materials, and provided numerous services like laundering, to earn a small amount of cash in their free time. With that money they could provide their families with a few necessities and luxuries slaves seldom received from masters. Much the same was true of indentured women. Native American women also commanded domestic arts of production by which they might earn some cash in local markets, but household production was most liberating for white women, who might even parlay that production into shopkeeping. By the end of the colonial period, about one-tenth of shopkeepers who advertised in Boston newspapers were women. The liberating effects of profitable economic activity by women had limits, for public opinion widely regarded it as inappropriate for women to engage in such behavior for their own advancement. They could not bargain with men on any basis of equality, they could not claim any customary PROPERTY RIGHTS in courts, and they

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risked being regarded as unfeminine if they worked physically like men without restraint. The limits on women’s economic and political ambitions appear in the history of MARGARET BRENT, daughter of a wealthy English family, who established a plantation of her own in Maryland in 1638. Benefiting from her family’s prestige, she also refused to marry and in other ways behaved assertively, in defiance of conventional wisdom about woman’s place. When she demanded a vote in the Maryland assembly in 1648, the legislators roughly rejected her appeal, as well as her remonstrance “against all proceedings in this present Assembly,” which refused her a vote to which her property should have entitled her. Women did not enjoy direct political representation in any colony, and so could not exploit the principal means by which male property owners served their interests in common: in colonial governments.

CHANGES AFTER THE REVOLUTION The War for Independence gave some individual women special opportunities for self-expression, especially through patriotic activities in the army or on the home front. Some black slaves seized the opportunity of wartime confusion to escape SLAVERY by running away. Nevertheless, the AMERICAN REVOLUTION as a social and political event did not lead to dramatic changes in the short term, even though it established an ideological foundation for the later women’s movement. For example, radical women would repeatedly use the language of the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE to protest their subordinate status. In the immediate future, however, the social control of women became more methodical than ever before. In the period from 1776 to 1820, several trends pointed in the direction of women’s liberation after 1820. An emergent ideology of REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD accorded women a special role in bearing and raising conscious citizens in a revolutionary republic, and a majority of men adhered to this ideology. As a result, republican girls and mothers had better access to education than ever before so as to be effective in that special role. More women came to the fore in radical religion than in the past, like the Quaker JEMIMA WILKINSON or the SHAKERS’

leader, Ann Lee (see RELIGIOUS SECTS). Widely read women writers began publishing, like Mercy Otis Warren or JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY. Secular opinion overcame moral objections to women acting on the stage even in New England in the 1790s. An increasing number of women dared to defy the conventional wisdom that they must marry, finding “liberty a better husband” as one wrote, and remaining single, devoting themselves to a variety of public services. These trends set off loud alarms among most men and conservative women too. A powerful backlash set in during the 1790s. Although aimed at the radical feminism of Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft, the criticism reasserted the simple virtues of the domestic sphere in a way meant to quash any change in women’s traditional role. It seems that the equalitarian ideology of white men led them to be just as insistent on women’s subordination as more conservative men, as if white male equality required that everyone else be strictly excluded from it on principle. Newspapers and pamphlets bombarded readers with exhortations to women and men alike to marry and reproduce, and to women in particular not to “unsex” themselves by too much ambition. While the press had an expanded role in influencing women in the new republic, evangelical religion also became increasingly important during the Second GREAT AWAKENING that began about 1800. Morals committees in these churches—still dominated by men—paid disproportionate attention to the disorderly conduct of women, so that they were under virtually constant surveillance by their neighbors. While white and free black women’s participation in churches, BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATIONS, and education would give them moral authority that would nourish political feminism in the future, for the time being they seemed as strictly controlled as ever. As for slavery, the Revolution was a boon to slaves in the northern states, which summarily or gradually abolished the institution. In the South, by contrast, the Revolution freed the slaveholding class to tighten the slave regime for their chattels and expand slaveholding into new territories and states. Native American women were besieged after 1776 by a new wave of white settlement that displaced the Indians east of the Mississippi River. They were subject to all the

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special horrors of war visited on women, and found it increasingly difficult to protect their land and families. While the Revolution made possible certain opportunities for free, propertied white women, for most women in the near future it was the occasion of more effective social controls than ever. Thomas N. Ingersoll F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

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Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Jensen, Joan M. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Klein, Laura F., and Lillian A. Ackerman, eds. Women and Power in Native North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Matthaei, Julie A. An Economic History of Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.



Stages in a Woman’s Life in the Early Republic

R

achel Mordecai was eight years old in 1796 when her mother died after giving birth to her sixth child. Judith and her husband, Jacob, had understood the hazards to her health of further pregnancies after her fourth child was born three years before. Nevertheless, she bore one more healthy child before succumbing along with her newborn infant, leaving behind a bereft family of four children in addition to Rachel. Jacob Mordecai was grief-stricken; he was also incompetent as a manager of a household with a brood of small children. Therefore, Rachel and her siblings were sent to live with relatives for three years. When her father remarried (his former wife’s youngest sister), the Mordecai family was reconstituted. The three years of exile were a torture to young Rachel, who, along with her younger sister Ellen, lived with an aunt and uncle in Richmond, Virginia. There the girls had a room to themselves and attended Mr. Bodgsin’s School for Young Ladies. But despite the good circumstances of her new life, Rachel longed to return to her family home in Warrenton, North Carolina. The Mordecais are known today—when they are known at all—because of the boarding school

for young women (and a few male day students) that the family ran in Warrenton during the early nineteenth century. For its time, the Mordecai Academy was considered progressive. It offered, in addition to the traditional female curriculum of social and domestic arts, classes in science and geography. The school was operated primarily— its faculty, administration, and staff—by members of the Mordecai family. As a young woman of 20 Rachel became the primary teacher, and eventually she became the chief administrator. Rachel Mordecai was an exemplary woman in the early republican era (1790–1820), not because all women were like her, but because her life represented some of the experiences and issues important to many women of the time. Clearly, there was no one pattern for women’s lives in the early nineteenth century any more than there is one model in the early twenty-first century. However, it is possible to identify similar stages in the lives of most women and recognize similar social constructions of behavior prescribed for all women. Anthropologists note that life stages are culturally determined. In different times and places the boundaries that separate the years from birth to death are adjusted to accommo-

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date the conditions and values of particular people’s lives. Gender is one factor that affects these boundaries; women’s lives follow a different pattern than men’s. In general, it has been noted that while men experience Shakespeare’s “seven stages” from infancy to death (infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old age, second childhood), women have only four stages: daughter, wife, mother, and widow. All of these stages derive from their relationships with others— father, husband, and children. These stages in women’s lives are further determined by the political and economic context that govern their worlds as well as the social circumstances of race, class, and ethnicity. In most respects Rachel Mordecai is a good model for women during the early national period. She was white and Southern. She was also Jewish in a primarily Protestant world. Her family moved many times before settling in Warrenton; her relatives were widely dispersed in New York, Philadelphia, Petersburg, and Richmond. Her brothers would move to Alabama and Tennessee. The Mordecais’ financial circumstances varied broadly over the years; sometimes they were comfortable, sometimes they were poor. Jacob, the family’s primary breadwinner, started and closed many businesses from tobacco investments to retail shops, never succeeding for long in any of them until he started his school in 1808. The school, ultimately, thrived on the labor of his children, particularly his eldest daughter Rachel, who delayed marriage for many years to serve her family’s interests. Rachel’s work as a teacher was not typical for young women of her time and social class. Most women, like the students she taught, were destined to be wives and mothers exclusively. While the number of married women declined at the beginning of the nineteenth century from a high of 95 percent in the seventeenth century to 90 percent in the postrevolutionary years, the age at marriage had increased slightly from 22 to 23 years. Overall, a woman in 1800 could expect to have slightly fewer children, seven on average. The life span of her students, barring the many hazards of childbirth and disease, was longer. During those long years of adulthood, the workplace of women from the upper and middling classes centered in the home. Their work differed little from that of their mothers and grandmothers.

YOUTH AND EDUCATION Most women received their primary and practical education for their lifelong work as housewives in their parents’ home. Little girls began to do chores as soon as they were capable of performing simple tasks; as they aged they took on increased responsibilities, including cooking, cleaning, and child care. Very early, little girls learned to differentiate women’s work from men’s as their brothers went outside the home to learn their work as farmers or artisans from their fathers or through apprenticeship. The states did not support public schooling until well into the nineteenth century. However, many communities did provide basic learning for small children. At DAME SCHOOLS, which were run by women in their homes, young girls and boys would learn to read and do arithmetic. Most little girls, however, were taught by their mothers or older siblings. Literacy is difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Some demographers claim that at the turn of the nineteenth century, 50 percent of women were literate. This number is derived by counting women who signed legal documents, but it is well known that some women learned to read in order to study the Bible but could not write. In any event, literacy for women lagged behind that of men, whose rate is estimated at 60 percent for the same period. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, numerous boarding schools, like the Mordecai Academy, sprang up, catering primarily to substantial middle- and upper-class girls whose parents could afford the tuition. Most of the girls in the Mordecai school were between the ages of 12 and 18, though some were younger. The school curriculum did not differ greatly from the domestic and fine arts program that traditionally prepared young women for their future social roles as housewives and mothers. In addition to reading some classical and secular literature, they studied music and art and learned some French. The Mordecais stressed geography and mathematics (often taught by a Mordecai son). Their students also learned to sew. In fact, the original building of the Mordecai Academy was burned to the ground one night when a young scholar stayed up late to finish some sewing by candlelight and fell asleep.

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Girls usually stayed at school for one year, just long enough to introduce them to the rudiments of culture, although serious students might remain as long as four years. These were privileged women.

MATURITY AND WORK Women’s work consisted of cooking and cleaning, spinning and sewing, and above all, care of children. Chances are a woman would bear a child every two years, more if she chose not to nurse her own infant (nursing can work as a form of birth control). This was the domestic routine for women, day in and day out, year after year. Variations on this pattern were often a result of economic or cultural circumstances. If a woman was wealthy, she would supervise servants who performed household chores for her. If she was middling, as most women were, she would work alongside of her servants. If she was poor, she would do all of the work herself or with the help of daughters. Young daughters would rock a cradle, spin, or do light cleaning. Eventually they could work alongside their mothers, even taking responsibility for rearing younger siblings, as did Rachel Mordecai. Very poor women, often widows who needed the extra income, performed domestic tasks for other women. They might exchange or barter homemade food or other items for various goods. Some enterprising women ran taverns or shops or worked as midwives, governesses, or servants. Widows remarried quickly if they could in order to gain the support of a man. For some men, marriage to a widow provided a favorable opportunity, either because he, too, was widowed and had children to be cared for or would assume proprietary control of her fortune under the still-prevailing system of the COVERTURE. This legal system, inherited from British law, stated that a husband took control of his wife’s property and wealth after marriage. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did states begin to change this law so that married women could possess their own property and fortunes. The system of coverture may have accounted for some women’s decision to remain single. Older women, especially widows, could expect to be cared for by children, either those in their homes or living close by. In return, a

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grandmother might assist with child care and household chores. For older women who were destitute, churches provided minimal support.

MINORITY WOMEN Such was the working life of most white women. Unlike these women, who were accountable either to fathers or husbands, enslaved women were always subject to their masters. Children born into slavery endured the same harsh conditions as their parents. From the earliest years, as soon as they were capable of performing chores, slave girls went to work. They tended the infants of their white mistresses, carried water, or picked pests from cotton plants. Unlike most white, coastal farm women, enslaved women worked in the fields, toiling to raise rice in the Carolinas as well as cotton and tobacco in the Chesapeake and the western frontier. While some slave women, but not men, worked as domestics, most worked along with the men in the fields. Those who were pregnant worked until they gave birth and returned as soon as possible to the fields, sometimes with their babies. In other cases, elderly slave women tended to the infants. The small minority of Indian women who had survived disease, warfare, and removal had a different tradition from European women. Historians have argued that some tribes, like the Seneca, were matriarchal, meaning that women ruled the household. Others, like the Cherokee, were matrilocal, and husbands moved in with their wives’ families. Farming was women’s work among several tribes, and among the Seneca their power extended to participation in the ruling councils. Still, among all peoples there was gender differentiation, and girls followed their mothers’ tradition, while the boys patterned their lives after their hunter and warrior fathers. In addition to this gendered inversion of work for women, what white people noted was the native women’s sexual freedom. By the early part of the nineteenth century, missionaries were hard at work converting the natives, first to western cultural mores, and then to religion. In all, these labors were minimally effective as the tribes were reduced to destitution by war, disease, and soon by removal to western territories.

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S TA G E S I N A W O M A N ’ S L I F E I N T H E E A R L Y R E P U B L I C

WOMEN’S RELIGION By the nineteenth century, religion had been feminized, continuing a long drift toward women’s increasing church membership that began as early as the 1660s. However, the most marked trend in religion during this early republican period was the spread of evangelical religion, a trend also that had begun earlier. While New York had always had a great variety of religious denominations in the eighteenth century, other states were becoming diversified by the early nineteenth century. The QUAKER hegemony of Pennsylvania had given way to Moravians and Lutherans. BAPTISTS and METHODISTS made inroads in the Anglican South. Even PURITAN Massachusetts had given way to other Protestant sects. Historian Ruth Bloch has argued that during this period, women were accorded the primary role as moral mediators in a culture of growing commercialism and secularism. Women not only attended church more but also in some evangelical sects, took over leadership functions. It is not possible to measure church attendance over the life span. Presumably women, if they attended church, took their children with them. The Sunday school movement that began for indigent children in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century was flourishing and had begun to spread. Women’s historians have suggested that women attended church more often and were more religious than men because they sensed themselves closer to death because of CHILDBEARING and ministering to the sick and dying. Religion certainly was not practiced uniformly throughout the vast expanse of the colonies. In many areas, for instance the South, where people lived at great distances from each other, ministers traveled the circuit. In the frontier regions, where few churches were within reach of many farms, women prayed on their own.

WOMEN’S HEALTH People in the early nineteenth century were sickly much of the time; HEALTH would not greatly improve for another century. Mothers in particular lived close to DISEASE and death. The time of greatest danger was INFANCY. If a child survived her first year, chances for longevity

improved. If she lived to five they improved still more. Then she might be long-lived—particularly if she survived the dangerous years between 20 and 45, the childbearing years. She also faced the threat of tuberculosis or one of the epidemic scourges that periodically occurred— smallpox, influenza, yellow fever, diphtheria, and more. The warm seasons were especially unhealthy. A yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 resulted in thousands of deaths. In an era before modern medicine was understood, physicians were few and only marginally more helpful than lay people. Women took responsibility for their family’s health. Their best hope for their young children was their own tender care, frequent cleansing, good nutrition—and prayer.

MATERIAL CULTURE Geographic area as well as social standing determined the material surroundings in which a child grew up. By the early nineteenth century, the homes of the privileged had rooms differentiated by function, such as sleeping, entertaining, and cooking. A plantation might boast a large expansive wood-frame house, several stories high, with a surrounding verandah to catch the breezes. A different ambiance was provided by a Manhattan townhouse still in the Dutch mode with narrow gabled roofs, and a Georgian structure in Boston would yet again be different. Material culture was significant for women, because their daily lives revolved around the home and their surroundings determined both how they lived and how they saw themselves. Privileged women relied on servants for many tasks. Still, women did the work of keeping a large, luxuriously furnished house, perhaps with imported furniture or furnishings made by an American craftsman (women did not engage in production crafts). Servants also gave the most affluent women time to read, write, or play the piano. At the other extreme, a farmhouse in Kentucky on average measured 700 square feet with one large room that served all functions. Privacy was not available to most families. Nor did most women have leisure time. It was a hardscrabble life on the frontier, notable for the loneliness

WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

many women might feel for family in the East or female companionship. Clothes were also determined by social advantage. From the age of six, young girls were dressed like their mothers. Their basic attire was a chemise worn close to their bodies and then layered by petticoats (particularly important in cold weather), a blouse, a skirt, and finally an apron. A girl’s hair was covered by a cap. An important option was a pocket, worn as a purse tied around the waist. It was useful for carrying many small items. Affluent women possessed several outfits, often made of material imported from Europe. Poor women wore clothing made of homespun materials. Slaves were given simple outfits several times a year. Their clothing was cheaply made and quickly wore out.

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whose lives they would repeat. Education reinforced this image for women in the new nation. But the national image was more. It contained more variety than uniformity, and that was the great achievement of the experiment in “inventing” a nation. The ideal daughter, wife, mother was primarily white, but also black, brown, and red. She was primarily Protestant, but many were Catholic or Jewish or practiced African-American or Indian religions. If she was Protestant, she was perhaps a CONGREGATIONALIST or Unitarian, ANGLICAN or Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, or Moravian. She was Southern, Western or Northern; she was middle class, frontierswoman, or poor. Her family was indigent. She spent her days in leisure. She was literate, barely literate, or illiterate. She was young and old. This was the national image. Edith B. Gelles

LIFE STAGES FOR WOMEN IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Clearly, no single pattern emerges from this portrait of women’s lives during the period 1790 to 1820. For the most part, women fit into the pattern of daughter, wife, mother, widow over their life spans. Their venue was the home. Their primary work was housework and child rearing. When women needed income to support their families, they performed work that was derived from the domestic sphere and could be done in the home. Little girls learned their roles as soon as they were capable of doing simple chores and their primary teachers were their mothers,

Bingham, Emily Sims. “Mordecai: Three Generations of a Southern Jewish Family.” Dissertation: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998. Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Reinier, Jacqueline W. From Virtue to Character; American Childhood, 1775–1850. New York: Twayne, 1996. Smith, Daniel Blake. Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.



Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic

T

he AMERICAN REVOLUTION transformed the inhabitants of the United States from subjects into citizens. Prior to 1776, colonists had considered themselves loyal denizens of the British empire, subject to the will of the king whom they regarded as their ultimate protector and guardian. With independence, however, Americans overthrew monarchy and established a republican form of government. In

a republic, the people rule themselves. Rights and liberties are considered inalienable, not subject to human delegation or manipulation. In a very literal sense, the people are the government. In shifting from monarchy to a republic, Americans had to confront the question of whether women were citizens of the new polity. Citizenship was a vague concept, referring to a person’s participation in, or sense of belonging

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WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

to, a particular political community. Yet the precise meaning has changed over time and according to circumstances. With the coming of independence, Americans assumed that any free, white person who did not swear allegiance to the British was an American citizen. Eventually, Americans began to distinguish between inhabitants and citizens, between those who merely lived in the United States and those who could participate in its government and enjoy certain rights and privileges. Slaves, for example, were clearly excluded from the benefits of citizenship. Americans also differentiated among other groups, such as free blacks, Indians, and foreigners, when defining citizenship. Women, however, represented a special case. For some purposes they were considered citizens, and for other purposes they were not. It is thus difficult to make generalizations about women’s citizenship without looking at specific aspects of the concept, including naturalization, voting, and civil rights.

they could inculcate virtue, promote patriotism, and encourage self-sacrifice for the common good. Women as well as men could hence be considered citizens of the republic. The Revolution also changed women’s status in a more symbolic way. Early Americans often used feminine symbols and images to portray their country. A bare-breasted woman, Native American in origin, was a common image, a symbol that transformed feminine weakness into a symbol of strength and boldness. Two other female icons, Liberty and Columbia, were even more widespread. Participants would often carry statues of Columbia or wave banners displaying the goddess Liberty during parades or at public festivities. Pictures of these mythic figures appeared in books, broadsides, and magazines. Strong as well as delicate, firm but feminine, these figures conveyed complex notions about the relationship between gender and national identity in the new nation.

MOTHERS AND SYMBOLS

ALLEGIANCE AND NATURALIZATION

As in England, American women had few rights inscribed in law. Women’s legal status was that of feme covert, a person who was protected by a male, usually a father or husband. COVERTURE, as it was called, meant that married women could not own property, make contracts, sue or be sued in court. Only widows left to fend for themselves in the absence of a man were exceptions. Because independence, grounded in the ownership of property, was thought to be the hallmark of freedom, women were precluded from voting or holding public office. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that prior to the Revolution, women were legal and political nonentities. The Revolution altered women’s relationship to the political community. Patriot leaders were quick to realize that their success depended, at least in part, in persuading women to support their side. Using poems, essays, and orations, they urged women to boycott imported luxury goods, produce homemade fabric and clothing, and, if necessary, sacrifice their husbands, sons, and brothers on the field of battle. Women responded to men’s pleas. Their efforts during the war helped create a new understanding of woman’s political role, a concept that historian Linda Kerber has called REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD. As wives and mothers,

During the American Revolution, citizenship came to be defined according to a person’s allegiance or voluntary acts of loyalty to the state. Whereas loyalty to the Crown had hitherto been assumed, now everyone could choose their rulers and the form of government they preferred. This situation provided a brief opening for women. Recognizing the need to expand the patriot ranks, several states passed laws acknowledging the possibility that a woman might have a political will separate from that of her husband. In 1779, for example, the Massachusetts legislature enacted a statute that confiscated the estates of men who fled to England. Yet the law also stipulated that wives who remained in this country, presumably supportive of the American cause, could retain a third of the estate. Implicitly, Massachusetts recognized that a wife might make a different choice from her husband. Other states passed similar provisions. The situation changed after the war. State and federal judges retreated from the idea that women could be politically autonomous. They invalidated the Revolutionary-era statutes and reaffirmed the older notion that wives must defer to, and be subsumed by, their husband’s political choices. The legal status of women as citizens remained ambiguous. With independence, all

WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

In this 1796 allegorical image, Liberty, in the form of a goddess, offers a cup to an eagle, symbol of the American republic. She treads beneath her feet chains, a scepter, a key, and other symbols of tyranny.

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WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

free white inhabitants were assumed to be citizens, both of the particular state in which they resided and of the United States. Yet it was not always clear what rights and privileges were associated with citizenship. The U. S. CONSTITUTION, for example, did not specifically mention women. However, women were included in the decennial census count. More than simply a tally of inhabitants, the census determined the number of representatives each state received in the House of Representatives. As Senator Samuel Mitchill of New York explained to his wife, “In the theory of our Constitution women are calculated as political beings. They are numbered in the census of inhabitants . . . and the Representatives are apportioned among the people according to their numbers, reckoning the females as well as the males. Though, therefore, women do not vote, they are nevertheless represented in the national government to their full amount.” As part of the enumerated population, women thus helped constitute the body politic. They were nonvoting “political beings.” The issue of naturalization perpetuated the ambiguities regarding women’s status as citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 did not limit citizenship to males. “Free white” foreigners, including women, could become citizens merely by residing in the country for two years, proving their “good character,” and taking an oath to support the United States Constitution. In practice, however, most of the people who sought naturalization in the early United States were men, presumably because they wished to purchase land or vote. Other provisions reinforced the law’s male bias. Parents could pass on citizenship to their children, regardless of where they were born. However, children whose fathers had never resided in the country were specifically prohibited from inheriting American citizenship. Nothing was said about the mother’s citizenship being inheritable. Women’s status was thus separate from, and inferior to, that of men. Nonetheless, the fact that women could be naturalized implied that they, like men, had standing as citizens.

SUFFRAGE The vote has not always been considered an essential feature of citizenship. During the colonial period, voting was considered a privilege

rather than a right. As in Britain, colonists believed that only those who owned a certain amount of property were entitled to vote. Enfranchisement required economic independence and an ongoing stake in society. Depending on the colony, as many as 30 to 50 percent of all white males were ineligible to vote. Slaves and free blacks could not vote. Even widows, the only women who might own property and thus be eligible to vote, were considered to lack the judgment and experience necessary for the franchise. After the Revolution, these assumptions came under scrutiny. Young men without property, who were willing to fight and die for their country, wondered why they could not elect representatives to their assemblies. Other groups also began to question their exclusion. Suffrage requirements changed, but did so rather slowly. Most of the first state constitutions, written between 1776 and 1790, lowered but did not abolish property qualifications for voting. Only Vermont, which did not become a state until 1791, eliminated all property restrictions and opened the door for universal male suffrage. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, Americans came to realize that voting represented the most direct means of expressing their will to their representatives. States came under increasing pressure to expand the scope of the voting population. By 1830, universal white male suffrage prevailed throughout the country. Newly admitted states as well as many of the original states abolished existing property qualifications for voting. Yet they also added new restrictions, specifically limiting the franchise to “free white males.” Whereas earlier constitutions had excluded women because of their lack of property, the new codes excluded them because they were women. Gender rather than economic status now determined the franchise. Voting became a male prerogative. Moreover, voting became not only one feature of citizenship, but its defining characteristic. The rise of universal white male suffrage meant a decline in the political importance of nonvoting citizens, most especially women. One state, however, took a different course. Under the auspices of its 1776 constitution, the women of New Jersey were allowed to vote. The wording of the New Jersey constitution was gender-neutral, providing simply that “all inhabi-

WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

tants of this colony of full age, who are worth fifty pounds . . . shall be entitled to vote.” The ambiguity in this wording disappeared in 1790 and 1797 when the New Jersey assembly passed election laws referring to voters as “he” and “she.” In subsequent years, women who could meet the rather substantial property qualification of £50 (mostly, wealthy widows) did vote. They voted in both state and federal elections, for state legislators as well as members of Congress. Controversy, however, dogged the women voters. Politics was a masculine preoccupation; voting was considered unfeminine. Partly due to the stigma, women voted in relatively small numbers, with no more than a few hundred voting in any given election. Hostility to the female voters was widespread. Deriding the very idea of woman suffrage, one contemporary author jeered: To Congress, lo! Widows shall go, Like metamorphosed witches! Cloth’d in the dignity of state, And eke! In coat and breeches! Prejudices such as these doomed the experiment. In 1807, the New Jersey legislature passed a law restricting the franchise only to white males. Significantly, women neither objected to its loss of the privilege nor demanded its reinstatement. They did not yet see voting as an essential feature of citizenship.

CIVIL RIGHTS Women of the early republic realized that even if they did not have all the rights of men, they did possess certain rights. The universal ideals of the Revolutionary period enabled women to be regarded as men’s equals in their own appointed realm. The domestic sphere, as it was called, was understood to encompass not only the home but also a wide array of religious matters and moral issues. Women’s growing sense of their own status encouraged them to strive for more equality with men: for greater access to educational opportunities, greater control over national morality, and greater influence on social policy. Women also realized they had some protection for their rights. The Constitution guaranteed women as well as men certain civil rights, including freedom of religion and

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speech, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. This broader understanding of women’s rights allowed women to play a larger role in public affairs than they had before the American Revolution. The right to petition represented one of the most powerful tools women possessed as nonvoting citizens. During and after the Revolution, individual women sought relief from the state and federal government for a variety of reasons, seeking compensation for the ravages of war, reimbursement for wartime expenditures, or payment of their husbands’ pensions. By the early nineteenth century, women began to organize into groups to promote various social causes. Women reformers were especially active in the TEMPERANCE (see Volume 2) and antislavery movements. These causes required women to appeal not just to their fellow citizens but to their government, which could enact legislation to effect their goals. Petitions allowed women to make their voices heard at a time when they could not vote. By gathering signatures and making their wishes known, they hoped to influence Congress and the state legislatures. Some men opposed the women’s involvement in reform movements and denied their standing as petitioners. Women insisted that petitioning was their right. “Although we are women,” noted the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, “we are still citizens.” In 1838 Congress attempted to quash women’s antislavery petitions by imposing the “gag” rule. Congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams defended the women’s actions. “Are women,” he asked his colleagues, “to have no opinions or actions on subjects relating to the general welfare?” Like men, women had a right to express their views to their government—and to expect legislators to take their views seriously. Ultimately, female reformers realized that petitioning alone would not work. They needed to participate directly in the political process in order to change society in the ways they desired. By the 1830s some women began to campaign for the right to vote and hold public office. Their efforts culminated in the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION of 1848 (see Volume 2). The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, mod-

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WOMEN’S CITIZENSHIP IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

eled on the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, voiced women’s frustration at their exclusion from government and the professions. It challenged women’s subordinate legal status, their inability to own property, and their lack of educational opportunities. Demanding full equality with men, the Declaration demanded that women gain “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” Only by becoming fully enfranchised could women achieve their goals. Their demands would take many years to realize. In fact, not until the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT in 1920 (see Volume 3) did women throughout the country gain the right to vote. Only then did they move closer to truly equal citizenship with men. Rosemarie Zagarri F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Isenberg, Nancy. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. ———. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Lewis, Jan. Politics and the Ambivalence of the Private Sphere: Women in Early Washington, D.C. In A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capital and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals : Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995.

Part 2 Articles

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A
ABORTION

The deliberate termination of a pregnancy. There is some controversy about how people in colonial America regarded abortion. Facts and statistics are hard to find, especially because abortions, if performed, were done at home and not recorded. What is known is that until 1821, there were no statutory laws prohibiting abortion. Until that point, American law followed British common law, which allowed abortion until the time of “quickening,” when the mother could feel movements of the child, usually in the fourth or fifth month. At the time, most people believed that the fetus was actually not alive until that point. What abortions were performed were usually done by midwives and involved using herbal remedies or bloodletting. Women were bled to release “menstrual blockages,” many of which were certainly pregnancies. Pills and mechanical devices were also used. In 1989, 400 historians signed a brief presented to the United States Supreme Court in which they cited historical evidence that the United States had from the beginning supported a woman’s right to choose. These historians claim that abortion “was not uncommon in colonial America.” They also claim that the anti-abortion laws enacted after 1821 had little to do with protecting the fetus. They say that the laws were aimed at convincing people to use doctors rather than midwives, protecting women against unsafe procedures, and preventing Catholic immigrants from becoming more numerous than Protestant residents.


ADAMS, ABIGAIL SMITH

(1744–1818) Letter writer, wife of the second president of the United States, and mother of the sixth president. Abigail Smith was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational minister, the Reverend William Smith, and Elizabeth Quincy, who was related to many of the old Puritan families who had founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Like most girls of her day, Abigail received no formal schooling, but she was surrounded by books and intelligent conversation and read voraciously.

Abigail was only 14 years old when she met John Adams, a lawyer from Braintree (today called Quincy), Massachusetts. Adams was at first unimpressed with “Nabby.” He later recorded in his diary that she was a “wit” but felt she did not possess the “tenderness” and “fondness” he detected in the woman he was seeing at the time. Just a few years later, however, Abigail and Adams were exchanging love letters; they were married in October 1764. John Adams was 29 and Abigail 19. During the couple’s first ten years together, Abigail gave birth to five children, and Adams became increasingly well known as a lawyer and politician. At the end of that decade, the couple was separated for many years, while John traveled beginning in 1774 when Adams went to Philadelphia as a delegate to the first Continental Congress. During this time Abigail was left to manage the household and the farm. She did the work with such skill that Adams once jokingly wrote that he was starting “to be jealous, that our Neighbors will think Affairs more discreetly conducted in my Absence than at any other Time.” Abigail’s grandson, Charles Francis Adams, believed that Abigail’s abilities as a manager saved her husband from the financial failure that devastated many of the new nation’s public servants. As much as the couple missed each other, their separation had one happy result: the hundreds of letters Abigail Adams wrote to her husband. Although her handwriting was inelegant and her spelling poor, Abigail’s letters are charming and intelligent, giving a lively picture of life during the American Revolution. Among the most famous is one written in March 1776, in which she urges her husband to Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation. (See Documents.)

At a time when women were not expected to take any interest in or express opinions about politics,

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ADAMS, LOUISA CATHERINE JOHNSON

grandchildren. While Abigail did not live to see her son, John Quincy Adams, become president, she did see him appointed Secretary of State under James Monroe in 1817. Many of her letters to her son survived, and it is clear that she never hesitated to give him advice. Abigail Smith Adams died of a fever in October 1818. FURTHER READING

Akers, Charles W. Abigail Adams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Levin, Phyllis Lee. Abigail Adams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.


ADAMS, HANNAH See civic life

ADAMS, LOUISA
CATHERINE JOHNSON

Abigail Adams had strong political opinions.

Abigail’s letter demonstrates that she was quite interested in politics and keenly aware of current events. Abigail also expressed her opinions on the lack of educational opportunity for girls and on racial discrimination. She believed that girls should be educated with the same care as boys and was a vigorous opponent of slavery. After the American Revolution, the family moved to Europe, where John served as American minister to the Hague and then as the first American Ambassador to Britain. From 1789 to 1801, John Adams served as vice-president and then president of the United States. Abigail divided her time between Quincy and the nation’s new capital, Washington, D.C. She occupied the White House even before it was completed. As the White House’s first tenants, the Adamses did not enjoy their time there; the house was cold and damp. Abigail had to hang her laundry in the East Room. Although she was often ill during John’s presidency, Abigail was a dutiful hostess who sometimes surprised people with her strong political opinions. She was an astute adviser to her husband. After John Adams retired from public life in 1801, the couple lived peacefully in Quincy, taking care of the farm and spending time with their

(1775–1852) Only foreign-born First Lady of the United States, wife of John Quincy Adams. Louisa Johnson was born in London and educated in France. In 1795, John Quincy Adams met her while on a temporary mission to London. The couple were married in 1797. In 1801, Louisa traveled with John and their son to the United States, where she met John’s family for the first time. She was intimidated by her famous mother-in-law, Abigail Smith Adams, but had an affectionate relationship with her father-inlaw, former president John Adams. Between 1803 and 1817, John Quincy Adams served as a United States senator and as ambassador to Russia. While in Russia, the couple lost their only daughter, who was born in 1811 and died the next year. When President James Monroe chose John Quincy Adams as his secretary of state in 1817, the couple returned to Washington. Louisa became known for her skill as a hostess, and the parties at the Adamses’ house were famous for good company and lavish entertainment. Louisa continued in this role during her husband’s term as president from 1825 to 1829. Shortly after, John Quincy Adams was defeated in his bid for a second term, their oldest son fell or jumped to his death from a steamer entering New York harbor. In 1830, John Quincy Adams ran for the House of Representatives, a decision Louisa opposed.

AITKEN, JANE

Louisa Adams was a famous hostess.

While she feared for his health, she supported him in all the causes for which he fought for the next 17 years. The couple celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1847; John died at the Capitol in 1848. Louisa suffered a stroke in 1849 and died in 1852.

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tasks of weaving, spinning, knitting, and sewing. In the South, white girls were even put to the task of making slaves’ clothing—so the slaves could be put to more profitable work. Enslaved children were put to work at very early ages. Young girls often cared for even younger white children. Girls who were in their teens were often sent to live with an older sister to help with pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing. Some young girls were bound over as servants to help them learn housework. This was true even for girls from wealthy families, since their parents believed that living in someone else’s home would help them learn better manners. Most girls were denied education past the level of dame school. If adolescent girls received any higher education at all, what they learned was usually limited to those skills that would supposedly make them better wives and mothers. Cotton Mather, among the more enlightened men of his generation, wrote in Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion (1691) that women needed education in housewifery, needlework, arithmetic, accountancy, surgery and “such other arts related to business, as may enable her to do the man whom she may hereafter have, good and not evil, all the days of her life.” In the South, girls tended to marry while still in their late teens; in the North, they married a few years later, usually by age 23. See also: Childhood; Infancy; Old Age. FURTHER READING


ADOLESCENCE

According to David Freeman Hawke in Everyday Life in Early America, “The colonial child moved toward adulthood in a fairly straight line, with no pause for the miseries of adolescence. That phase, except in its physical manifestations, did not exist then.” At about the age of six, colonial children began wearing adult clothing; this was a symbolic moment in a child’s life, similar to high school graduation today, in that it signaled the end of childhood. At the same time, girls would be given various tasks associated with the manufacture of cloth—spinning flax, combing wool, or weaving. Even if families believed in educating girls beyond their first few years, their labor in the area of cloth manufacture was so important to the well-being of the family that few girls could be spared from the

Hawke, David Freeman. Everyday Life in Early America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.


ADULTERY See fornication

AFRICAN HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY See family life, free black; marriages, slave; slave family structure




AITKEN, JANE (1764–1832) Bookseller and bookbinder who produced the only Bible ever printed by a woman in North

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ALEXANDER, MARY SPRATT PROVOOST

America. Jane Aitken was born in Paisley, Scotland, to Robert and Janet Aitken. The family emigrated to the United States in 1771 and settled in Philadelphia, where Robert established a printing and bookbinding business. In 1782, he printed the first English Bible in North America. When he died in 1802, Robert Aitken left Jane $3000 in debts and two younger sisters to look after. At 38 years-of-age, Jane took over her father’s business and began to publish books. At least 60 books are known to have been published by her between 1802 and 1812. Aitken’s most important publication was the four-volume Thomson Bible (1808), the first English translation of the Greek version of the Old Testament, and the first Bible. It was also the only Bible ever printed by a woman in North America. Although she printed many volumes, Aitken earned most of her money from bookbinding. Her work showed that she was very skilled and had excellent taste. It may be that Jane, herself, was responsible for much of the bookbinding that was done in Robert’s shop before his death. Unfortunately, Aitken’s abilities were not enough to allow her to pay off all the debt she had inherited, and her business failed several times. In 1814, she was imprisoned for debt, since there was no possibility of declaring bankruptcy in those days. She died in 1832, after “a long and painful illness.”

ALDEN, PRISCILLA
MULLINS See Puritans

ALEXANDER, MARY SPRATT
PROVOOST

(1693–1760) Colonial businesswoman. Mary Spratt was born in New York City to John and Maria Spratt. Her father died in 1697, and her mother in 1700. Mary was raised by her maternal grandmother. In 1711, Mary wed Samuel Provoost, with whom she had three children, Maria, John, and David. She invested the inheritance she received from her parents in Samuel’s trading business. After Samuel’s death in 1720, Mary took over his import business and ran it for the next 39 years. In 1721, she married James Alexander, a Scottish immigrant who became one of New York’s leading political figures. Together they had seven children.

Mary was a successful businesswoman. She imported so many goods for her New York store that some said no ship ever entered the harbor without something of hers on board. During the French and Indian War, Mary and her son William supplied the British forces with horses, food, tools, weapons, and boats. While it cannot be documented, it is said that Mary was very much interested in New York politics and that she was the one who persuaded attorney Andrew Hamilton to defend newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger in his trial of libel charges. Zenger’s acquittal helped to establish freedom of the press in America. After John’s death in 1756, Mary administered his estate until her death in 1760.

ALGONQUIAN HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY During the seventeenth century, the Algonquian (or Algonkin), a North American Indian tribe, inhabited the upper St. Lawrence and the lower Ottawa River areas of present-day Quebec, Canada. Early French fur traders and settlers gave the name “Algonquin” to a number of independent bands of hunting peoples whom they encountered in that region. The Algonquian allied themselves with the French. They warred against the Iroquois, who finally forced the Algonquian farther north and west. Too far north for agriculture, most Algonquian were loosely organized into small, semi-nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. Although a few southern bands were just beginning to grow corn in 1608, the Algonquian relied heavily on hunting for their food, which made them excellent hunters and trappers; these skills quickly attracted the attention of French fur traders after 1603. The Algonquian used their birch-bark canoes to travel great distances for trade, and their strategic location on the Ottawa River became the preferred route between the French on the St. Lawrence River and the tribes of the western Great Lakes. Groups of Algonquian would gather during the summer for fishing and socializing, but at the approach of winter, they separated into small hunting camps of extended families, with men, women, and children joining in on the expedition. The climate was harsh, and starvation was common. These small foraging bands spoke closely related languages of the Algonquian (Algonkian) family and were similar in culture and social or-

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ganization. The Algonquian language was spoken by over 30 different Native American groups, including the Cheyenne, Miami, Shawnee, and Ojibwa. This conglomeration of tribes and cultures practiced various religions and arranged their families according to diverse social codes. The Algonquian were patrilineal, with the right to use specific hunting territories being passed from father to son, but some Algonquian tribes used matrilineal descent (traced through the mother) in determining kinship. Algonquian dwellings, or wigwams, were rounded structures covered by saplings and were ususally constructed by Algonquian females. One or two families lived in each wigwam. The frames of these wigwams could also be extended into longhouses, such as those used by the Iroquois. See also: Iroquois Household Economy.

ALSTON, THEODOSIA
BURR

(1783–1813) Beloved daughter of Vice-President Aaron Burr, and one of the best educated women of her generation. Theodosia Burr was the only child of Aaron Burr, the third vice-president of the United States. Burr adored Theodosia and was keenly interested in her education. Unlike many men of his era, Burr believed that women should be as well educated as men. He personally supervised his daughter’s education, which included reading the classics and learning mathematics, the natural sciences, and French. Burr also saw to it that Theodosia learned music and dancing, and on her mother’s death, she became her father’s official hostess. She and her father wrote letters to each other throughout their lives. In 1801, the year her father became vicepresident, Theodosia married Joseph Alston of South Carolina. The couple had one son, named after Burr. In 1804, when Burr was accused of murder as a result of a duel with Alexander Hamilton, his daughter was his staunchest supporter. And in 1807, when Burr was arrested for treason as a result of his attempt to found a new republic in the western part of the United States, Theodosia remained by her father’s side throughout his trial. Though acquitted of both crimes, Burr left the United States in disgrace and remained abroad for several years. During this time, Theodosia became the target of those who disliked Burr, and even her

Theodosia Burr Alston was one of the best-educated women of her generation.

husband and his family were disturbed by her fierce loyalty to her father. But Theodosia never wavered. “You appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men,” she wrote to her father while he lived in Europe. “I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man.” Tragedy struck the Alstons in June 1812, when their son died of a tropical fever. Later that year, Burr returned to the United States, and Theodosia planned to travel to New York to see him. Because the United States was at war with Britain, passage by ship was dangerous, but Theodosia was determined. Unable to keep her from traveling, her husband wrote to the British Navy, requesting safe passage for his wife. On December 30, 1813, Theodosia boarded the schooner the Patriot—and was never heard from again. It is not known what happened to the ship and its passengers. In 1848, a former pirate confessed on his deathbed that he and others had captured the ship and forced Theodosia Alston to walk the plank.


AMERICAN REVOLUTION

(1775–1783) The War of Independence from Great Britain by the United States. It was a turning point in the

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AMERICAN REVOLUTION

history of American women, but its most important implications were not manifested for a long time. Women’s direct participation in the event gave them political consciousness, but it did not immediately lead them to organize and demand political rights. American republican men did not even consider giving women the vote or the right to hold office, although most states legalized divorce for the first time, and permitted other minor changes that worked in favor of women. Men and women together created a new ideology of republican motherhood that in many ways looked backward, confining women to their own sphere. A new sense of being the mothers of the revolutionary republicans nonetheless contained the seeds of later feminism. The responsibility would convince them that they deserved and required equal rights to be effective republican mothers. In the period of protests against British taxation and other imperial measures, beginning in the mid-1760s, women were frequently the informal agents who enforced resolutions not to consume British manufactures, who found or made substitutes for the many household British consumer goods that Americans boycotted. Others opposed British policies more directly, like newspaper publisher Sarah Updike Goddard, in the pages of her Providence Gazette and Pennsylvania Chronicle. Some women organized, as in 1774, when 51 women of North Carolina publicly signed a stern resolution, the Edenton Resolution, not to drink tea or wear the manufacture of England until the British repealed the Intolerable Acts. Public spinning bees were staged by the Daughters of Liberty to support boycotting in prerevolutionary New England; they stressed a form of political resistance based on austere self-sacrifice and religious piety. According to legend, Betsy Ross made the first United States flag. One of the most remarkable of politically active women was Mercy Otis Warren, whose plays in the 1770s satirized local Tories for their loyalty to an oppressive royal government. The lively history of the Revolution she subsequently published helped vindicate the value of the female intellect. About twenty thousand women served as auxiliaries in the Continental Army during the War for Independence, nursing, cooking, and washing for the troops, carrying heavy loads when on the move. Quaker mystic Jemima Wilkinson served in a different capacity, ministering to the spiritual needs of soldiers, by preaching and faith healing.

Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War. An artist imagined her presenting a letter to General Washington.

Most famous of the camp followers is Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley of Pennsylvania, known as Molly Pitcher, who accompanied her husband and, when he was disabled under fire, took his place in a gun crew during the Battle of Monmouth. At least one woman served the army as a regular soldier disguised as a man. Another fearless woman, Nancy Hart of Georgia, frequently fought Tories at close range in the bitter “War of Extermination” in that state. Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler bravely forged her way into enemy territory to reach her Hudson Valley estate, where she destroyed her crops so the British could not harvest them. One unnamed woman was arrested for setting New York ablaze in 1776 when the British took the city, proclaiming, as Edmund Burke quoted her on the floor of the Parliament, that she was “determined to omit no opportunity of doing what her country called for.” Teenager Elizabeth Zane smuggled gunpowder under enemy fire to relieve Fort Henry, on the Far Western frontier of Virginia. Many other women played a less dramatic but essential role on the home front. Some had full responsibility for family and farm while their husbands were absent on duty, like future First Lady Abigail Smith Adams. The supply of imported finished goods was interrupted by the war, and women played a major role in coping imaginatively with the shortage. Many women who had abandoned spinning yarn and thread began to spin

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

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again, and to make cloth and garWOMEN’S FIRSTS ments for their families and the soldiers. The Continental Army was chronically short of supplies, and a Deborah Sampson Gannett was the first North American few rich businesswomen supported it woman to serve as a soldier. She twice enlisted in the Contiwith cash donations, like Elizabeth nental Army; the first time she was caught and discharged, Peck Perkins of Boston. Esther Reed but the second time she managed to fool everyone around and Deborah Franklin Bache of her. Because many of the recruits were teenage boys with no Philadelphia organized to go door-tobeards and because Deborah was tall for a woman at the time door for funds to support the Army, (5⬘8⬙), she was able to pass for a young man. She enlisted in promoting their campaign with a pub1782, using the name Robert Shurtleff, and served in the lished broadside appealing to women army for 18 months. She fought in several battles until she in other states to join them. They conwas wounded in Tarrytown, New York. It was in the hospital demned the prejudice “opinions and that her true identity was revealed, and she was dismissed manners” that forbade them “to march from the army in 1783. to glory by the same paths as the Men.” Sampson married Benjamin Gannett in 1785 and had three For even white women were cut off children. In 1792, the Massachusetts legislature awarded her a from full citizenship despite their work pension and wrote that she “exhibited an extraordinary inin the cause. stance of female heroism, by discharging the duties of a faithA few women played important ful, gallant soldier.” roles as opponents of the War of Independence, like Elizabeth SandIn 1797, Herman Mann published a biography of Deborah wich Drinker. A committed pacifist, Gannett entitled The Female Review; he also wrote the text she organized a group of like-minded of a lecture that she delivered in many towns in New York women to pressure General George and New England. The story told in the biography and in the Washington and other authorities to lecture considerably exaggerated Deborah’s exploits, but her release imprisoned pacifist men. A diftour was nevertheless successful. In 1804, Paul Revere wrote ferent example is Mary Jemison, a to Congress on her behalf, helping her secure a pension from white captive raised as a Seneca Inthe federal government. dian, whose tribe opposed American Deborah Sampson Gannett died in 1827 at the age of 66. rebels. She had to establish a new home for her family when hers was deSee also: Brewer, Lucy; Darragh, Lydia Barrington. stroyed in the fighting. The significance of changes in the revolutionary era is subject to much debate by historians. Some, led by Linda K. Ker- Others enjoyed wartime opportunities to make a ber, argue that republican men recoiled from ex- little money in their spare time, like Amelia Green, panding the liberty of women, so the Revolution of Craven County, North Carolina, who purchased was very conservative. By contrast, Mary Beth Nor- her freedom, and that of her children, after the ton and others argue that what changed was im- war. The Revolution had few positive results for portant and even radical, laying the groundwork most slave women, however. Although slavery was for the women’s future political struggles. These abolished during and after the Revolution in the historians emphasize the emergence of an ideol- northern states, most African-American women ogy of republican motherhood, which exalted the (10 percent of the whole population) remained in role of the mothers in raising republican citizens, slavery. In the short term, the limited benefits the and the related movement to admit girls to public American Revolution brought about for women and some private schools. were, in some ways, confined to white women. The experience of African-American women in Thomas N. Ingersoll the Revolution was quite different. Women slaves wanted primarily to take advantage of wartime conditions to enlarge the scope of their personal liberty. Thomas Pinckney’s mother reported from South Carolina in 1779, that she had lost control of his women slaves, who did as they pleased.

FURTHER READING

Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

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ANGLICANS

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.


ANGLICANS

Members of the Anglican Communion, an international fellowship including the Episcopal Church of the United States of America and other churches tracing their origins to the Church of England. The Anglican Church was formed in 1533 when Henry VIII, denied papal permission to divorce Catherine of Aragon, rejected the authority of the Pope and declared himself “supreme governor” of the Church of England. Until 1558, Anglicans and Roman Catholics shared similar beliefs and practices. By Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Anglicans considered their Church of England the via media, or middle way, between the Catholic tradition and the Puritan zeal for reform. Anglicanism was brought to British America by the company that established the Virginia colony, which was obliged by its charter to spread the Christian religion. Anglicanism became the established religion of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and some New York counties. In most royal colonies, which were governed directly by the king, only members of the Church of England could vote. While the Puritans relaxed the standards for divorce, in Anglican colonies marriages could be ended only on grounds of adultery. As in England, church members were organized into geographical units called parishes. However, not all colonists belonged to a church. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was established to provide Anglican ministers to colonists without them. During the Revolution, most Anglicans maintained their allegiance to the king. After independence, the Anglican church was disestablished in every colony. No further taxes were collected for its support. Some of the nation’s approximately 400 Anglican churches maintained their ties to the English church, while others became independent. The consecration of the first American Anglican bishop, Samuel Seabury, in 1784 was an important turning point for Anglicans. Candidates for the ministry no longer had to travel to England to be ordained. One reason for the delay in establishing an American episcopate was the resistance of the laity, who wished to retain a strong voice in their church. In 1789, American Anglicans united as the Protestant Episcopal Church.

While Anglican women could not assume offical leadership roles in colonial and Republican times, they instructed children in the faith and served as teachers and musicians. Significant Anglican women include Deborah Read Franklin; Margaret Brant (mother of Mary Brant), a Mohawk who converted to Christianity; and Mary Taney, who requested that the Archbishop of Canterbury send a permanent minister to his “stray flock” in Virginia in 1685.

ANTI-MISCEGENATION
LAWS Laws prohibiting marriage and extramarital relations between persons of different races. In the early days of settlement in America, white and black indentured servants worked side by side and sometimes intermarried. Although it was not common, intermarriage was permitted. But as the plantation economy in the southern colonies grew increasingly dependent on slaves, owners feared mixing the races because the institution of slavery depended on clear distinctions between blacks and whites. According to David Grimsted, laws against intermarriage served slave owners’ need “to keep visible that distinction that was essential to one group’s perpetual exploitation of another.” Slave owners also wanted to protect their property rights by stipulating that the child of a slave and a person of another race would be considered a slave. Thus laws against miscegenation in the American colonies were enacted largely in order to protect the property rights of slaveholders. The first such law was passed in Maryland in 1664. A similar statute, enacted in Virginia in 1691, forbade “negroes, mulattos and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women [and] their unlawfull accompanying with one another.” By 1725, five other colonies had passed laws against miscegenation. Most states not only legislated against fornication between members of different races, they also declared marriages between whites and people of color to be void. White women whose sexual relations with African American men were revealed when a mixedrace child was born were often assumed by courts to have been raped. As Cornelia Hughes Dayton notes in Women Before the Bar, “the fornication caseload [in New Haven, Connecticut] contains clues that magistrates could conceive of interracial sexual relations only as coercive.” As an example, Day-

ARNOLD, PEGGY SHIPPEN

ton describes the case of Mary Potter of New Haven, who bore “a male Child of a Negro Complexion.” She says that “in an era when women who bore outof-wedlock children were invariably prosecuted, the fact that authorities never moved to charge or punish Mary implies that they perceived this as a case of coercion.” African American men who had sexual relations with white women were subjected to much harsher punishments than white men convicted of fornication: while most white men were fined, African American men were often whipped. Relations between white men and African American women were seldom punished, even though in many cases these women were in fact raped. Anti-miscegenation laws stayed on the books through the Civil War. Only two states repealed their statues before then, Pennsylvania in 1780 and Massachusetts in 1843. Alabama did not repeal its law until 1999. FURTHER READING

Grimsted, David. “Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Sable Veil,’ ‘Length’ned Chain,’ and ‘Knitted Heart.’” In Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989. Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.


APPRENTICESHIPS

One of the three forms of bound labor; the other two were slavery and indentured servitude. Apprenticeship was a contractual relationship exchanging a defined period of service for instruction in a trade. The enslaved were considered property and could therefore be bought and sold. The contracts of indentured servants were also regarded as property, but neither apprentices nor their contracts could be sold to a new master. Apprenticeship was generally the only way to learn a trade or profession such as law or medicine. Until work for wages became common in the mideighteenth century, apprenticeship was also an important source of colonial labor. Young men usually became apprentices between the ages of 14 and 16. In exchange for room and board, clothing, and instruction in the trade, apprentices worked in their masters’ shops until they reached the age of 21. During their four- to sevenyear term of service, apprentices were paid no wages; at its end, contracts often specified that they

47

would receive a set of tools and a suit of clothes. Those who continued to work for their masters became journeymen. Contracts between apprentices and masters were based on medieval indenture agreements. Typically, apprentices could not marry, gamble, or waste a master’s property, while masters were required to provide for their basic needs and instruct them in the “mystery” of their trade. The British colonies did not adopt the guild system, which required an apprentice to produce a proof piece to become a “journeyman” and create a masterpiece to become a “master” craftsman. The New England colonies laid new obligations on masters, requiring them to teach apprentices to read (and sometimes write) and to instruct them in religion. In general, masters had the same authority as fathers. Masters who abused this authority could be charged with cruelty; however, beatings and long hours were common and the courts intervened only in extreme cases. Women in prosperous families were rarely formally apprenticed. However, they were often “shadow apprentices,” learning skills such as printing and blacksmithing by working in a family business. Some, like Lydia R. Bailey, became “masters” who ran businesses after the death of their husbands, but they retained the title only as long as they remained unmarried. Poor girls, who were often “bound out” to trades such as needlework, spinning, and baking, were frequently treated as drudges.


ARNOLD, PEGGY SHIPPEN

(1760–1804) Co-conspirator and wife of Revolutionary War general and traitor Benedict Arnold. Margaret “Peggy” Shippen Arnold was involved in the plot to turn over the West Point garrison and its 3,000 troops to the British in exchange for 20,000 pounds during the American Revolution. Many historians believed that Peggy Shippen actually planned the transfer through correspondence with British aide John Andre´ beginning in 1779. According to Shippen’s close friend Theodosia Prevost Burr, wife of Aaron Burr, Shippen admitted that she had made the arrangements to surrender West Point to the British. Peggy Shippen was the youngest daughter of Judge Edward Shippen of Philadelphia. The prominent Shippens supported the British cause and had disdain for American revolutionaries.

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ARTS, PATRONS OF THE

In 1779, Shippen married Benedict Arnold, who was appointed commander of West Point. Arnold became dissatisfied with his pay and lack of promotions. To support the couple’s lavish lifestyle, Arnold made a deal with the British. Arnold agreed to hand over West Point to John Andre´, aide to British leader Sir Henry Clinton. Peggy Shippen Arnold wrote the coded messages from Arnold to the British commander. The plot was soon uncovered, and Andre´ was hanged as a spy. Benedict Arnold fled to the British ship Vulture and his wife tried to remain in Philadelphia. After she was banished from her hometown, the couple moved to New York, Canada, and finally London. Peggy Shippen Arnold became ill in 1803 and was diagnosed with cancer. She died a year later.

ARTS, PATRONS
OF THE

TRAILBLAZERS Sarah and Anna Peale were painters who achieved a remarkable degree of fame, considering their gender and the period in which they lived. They were two of the six children of James Peale, one of the best known portrait painters of his day; their father’s brother, Charles Peale, was also a noted artist. Both Sarah and Anna showed early talent for art themselves, and they were soon pressed into what had become a family business. As James Peale’s eyesight grew worse, Anna took over the task of painting his miniatures, and both sisters worked on the backgrounds of their father’s portraits. Anna Peale remained primarily a miniaturist throughout her career. She traveled to several cities to paint portraits; presidents James Monroe and Andrew Jackson were among her customers. She was elected to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1824, and was best known for a sense of warmth in her paintings. Her fees were high, and she was much in demand as an artist. If anything, though, her sister Sarah was even better known within the art world. Her interest lay in oil portraits, although she did produce still lifes and other types of work as well. Like her sister, Sarah was a member of the Pennsylvania Academy, and she too painted portraits of famous Americans. Sarah lived in Baltimore and later in St. Louis, where she was the best-known painter of the region. During the nineteenth century, the Peale sisters were among the bestknown American women in the arts.

In early America, women were not encouraged to excel in creative pursuits. Young ladies were expected to have a passing acquaintance with music and perhaps writing, drawing, or painting, but few women of the time made much of a name for themselves in these areas. However, some wealthy women of the colonial and early national periods did become quite well known as patrons of the arts. The lives and interests of these women varied considerably, so it is difficult to draw any consistent conclusions about them. For the most part, however, they came from cultured backgrounds and grew up in families that valued artistic expression. Many, including the Peale sisters of Philadelphia, were talented artists in their own right. Some used their money primarily to underwrite the expenses of promising young artists,

while others focused more on bringing the arts into the forefront of American culture. Similarly, some put their energies into music, others into the visual arts. Regardless of their individual interests and backgrounds, however, all of these women helped to improve the quality and the variety of arts in America.


ASTROLOGY

See magic and astrology

BACHE, SARAH FRANKLIN

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B
BACHE, SARAH FRANKLIN

(1743–1808) Established the first relief organization to raise money and make clothing for the Continental Army. Sarah Franklin was the youngest of the three children born to Benjamin and Deborah Read Franklin. She was born and raised in Philadelphia. Her father saw to her education, and many people thought that she was the best-educated woman in the colonies. In 1767, Sarah married Philadelphia merchant Richard Bache. While her mother approved of the match, her father, who was in England at the time, was concerned because Bache was in debt. But once Franklin met his new son-in-law, he changed his mind and even loaned the couple £200 to open a dry goods store. Sarah and Richard had eight children, seven of whom survived. During the Revolution, Sarah and her friend Esther De Berdt Reed organized the women of Philadelphia, raising $7,500 in gold to purchase supplies for the army. At Washington’s suggestion, much of the money was used to buy fabric from which the women made shirts. On December 26, 1780, Sarah was able to tell Washington that 2,005 shirts were available for the soldiers. This was among the earliest organized efforts of women to take part in civic life. From the time of her mother’s death in 1774 until Franklin’s death in 1790, Sarah served as her father’s hostess and later cared for him in his old age. She died of cancer in 1808.


BAILEY, ABIGAIL ABBOT

(1746–1815) An ordinary, pious New Hampshire farm woman, mother of 17 children between 1768 and 1791, she demonstrated bravery and made history by taking her abusive husband to court and writing a detailed description of their relationship. Printed in Boston immediately after her death, Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey was a publishing landmark in America. The book described her husband Asa’s persistent verbal and physical abuse, his adulterous affairs, and his incest with one of their daughters beginning when the girl was 16 years old. Although New England’s divorce laws were liberal com-

Sarah Franklin Bache organized the women of Philadelphia to make thousands of shirts for the Revolutionary soldiers.

pared to both British legal tradition and that of other states, in practice courts seldom granted complete legal separations to women on the grounds of adultery and cruelty alone. Bailey hoped to shield her daughter from public humiliation, so she did not charge him with incest in court. She recorded how he tried to spirit away their property and children, and how she made a dramatic escape from an isolated house to which he had confined her. She fought to gain freedom by persuading local authorities to grant her a divorce in 1793 because of her husband’s adultery. Bailey’s Memoirs helped provide moral justification for divorce and increased public awareness of spousal and child abuse.


BAILEY, LYDIA R.

(1779–1869) One of the first women printers in Philadelphia. After her husband’s death, Bailey successfully ran his printing business for nearly 60 years.

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BALLARD, MARTHA

Little is known of Bailey’s early life. She was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to William and Elizabeth Steele. Her father was a captain in the American Revolution. He and his brothers then began a papermaking business. Elizabeth Steele was from a printing family, and as a girl had helped her brothers in their print shop. However, Elizabeth’s involvement ended with her marriage. Like her mother, Lydia Steele became involved in the family printing business. At 19, she married her cousin Robert Bailey, the manager of her uncle Francis’s Philadelphia office. They worked together to keep the struggling business going. In 1808, Robert Bailey died, leaving his wife with four children and numerous debts. The young widow first paid off her husband’s financial obligations. She then developed the business by looking for jobs that would bring in a steady income, such as almanacs, bookseller catalogs, and broadsides. In 1808, Philip Freneau, known as “the poet of the Revolution” hired her to print the third edition of his Poems. Bailey also served as the printer for the Third Presbyterian Church, of which she was a devout member. Eventually, she became the City Printer for Philadelphia. More than 40 employees worked in Bailey’s busy shop. She organized them efficiently and encouraged them to lead good Christian lives. Several went on to become well-known printers with their own businesses. Bailey was widely respected for her printing expertise and business ability. When she died shortly after her ninetieth birthday, one newspaper commented that Bailey had “enjoyed women’s rights to the full” in a time when few women achieved independent careers. See also: Printing and Publishing.


BALLARD, MARTHA

(1735–1812) Midwife and diarist. Martha Ballard began keeping a diary when she was 50 years old. Had she not done so, historians would probably know little more about her than a few spare facts: her birth in 1735, her marriage in 1754, the births of her nine children, and the brief summary of her life in her obituary: “Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years.” Fortunately, Martha Ballard did leave her diary,

a very detailed account of her 27 years as a midwife. In the years between 1785 and 1812, Martha delivered 816 babies in the area around Hallowell, Maine, and ran a cloth-weaving business out of her home. When historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich read the diaries, she saw that they provided important insights into the lives of women in colonial America. She turned Martha’s diary into a book, A Midwife’s Tale, which showed the importance of the work that women like Martha did. Martha not only worked as a midwife, she also grew and prescribed herbal remedies, nursed the sick, and laid out the dead. Perhaps Martha Ballard’s life influenced the career choice of one of her nieces, Clarissa Barton. She is known today as Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross (see Volume 2). See also: Diaries and Journals; Midwifery.


BAPTISTS

A Protestant denomination that rejected infant baptism. Many of the beliefs held by Baptists originated during the Reformation in England as part of a general protest against the Church of England. Baptists believe that a church can be made up only of people who have converted to the faith, individuals who have had a personal religious experience. Thus, people must voluntarily join the church, as opposed to acquiring membership because their parents were members. Baptists reject the idea of infant baptism and require that adults who are capable of making their own decisions be baptized by immersion. Baptists do not consider baptism a sacrament—a holy ceremony in which a person receives grace from God—but rather a public statement of a conversion that has already taken place. Although women made up more than 50 percent of the membership of early Baptist congregations, they were expected to submit to male leadership. Baptists held that women could not be ordained and could not have a vote in church affairs. While women were occasionally allowed to speak in church, such occasions were rare. Exceptions to these general principles were made in some congregations. For example, in Baptist churches in Virginia and Rhode Island, women were allowed to vote on such questions as the admission of new members and the election of deacons. Some churches even elected female deacons. Baptists were among the earliest advocates of

BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATIONS, WOMEN’S

the separation of church and state. When Roger Williams founded the first Baptist church in America in 1639, he also helped to establish the colony of Rhode Island, which was the first civil government based on the concept of the separation of church and state. Rhode Island became a refuge for people driven from their homes by religious intolerance. While Baptists themselves were originally subject to persecution outside of Rhode Island, their enthusiastic backing of the American Revolution led to greater acceptance. Their numbers increased dramatically during the period of the great awakenings, in the mid-eighteenth century, and today Baptists are among the largest of the Protestant denominations.

BARNARD, HANNAH
JENKINS

(1754?–1825) Quaker preacher who was disowned by church elders because of her beliefs. Hannah Jenkins was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Baptist parents. She became a Quaker, or Friend, in 1772. Sometime in the late 1770s she married Peter Barnard. The couple moved to the Quaker colony of Hudson, New York, in the 1780s. Barnard became active in the Society of Friends, where she was known as an effective speaker. In 1798, she received permission from church elders for a religious visit to Friends in Scotland, England, and Ireland. While in Ireland, Barnard was influenced by a group of Quakers known as the “New Lights.” These Quakers opposed a literal reading of the Bible. Barnard agreed. She maintained that individuals had to decide for themselves what portions of the Bible to accept. When she applied for permission from British elders to visit Friends in Germany, her request was rejected and she was ordered to stop preaching and return to New York. The elders charged her with heresy—preaching beliefs that were counter to Quaker teachings. Barnard defended herself by arguing that her beliefs were closer to the original ideas of the Quaker faith than those of the elders. Her arguments were rejected, and she returned home in 1801. The elders in Britain sent copies of their proceedings against Barnard to New York, and she was accused of heresy there as well. In 1802, she was disowned for showing a “contentious disposition of mind.” Many elders were especially outraged at being lectured to by a woman.

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Barnard continued to preach and organized a peace society, but little is known about her life after 1802. She died in 1825.

BENEVOLENT
ASSOCIATIONS, WOMEN’S Charitable organizations. In 1797 Joanna Graham Bethune, Isabella Marshall Graham, Elizabeth Seton, and Sarah Hoffman founded one of the first charitable organizations in the United States— the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. This organization was remarkable in that it was among the first established by women working without the assistance or involvement of men. Like many of the other benevolent associations that were founded in the early years of the republic, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows was incorporated, granting its female directors legal status unavailable to most women of the period and allowing them to make contracts, buy and sell property, and file lawsuits. Many women’s associations secured state charters, which also allowed women members these kinds of legal rights. The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth saw the establishment of thousands of women’s benevolent associations. This rapid growth can be attributed in part to a change in how women and their roles were perceived. While the early Puritan settlers tended to regard women as both intellectually and spiritually weak, by the end of the eighteenth century a sea change had taken place in how society perceived women. Women came to be seen as spiritually strong, and as the guardians of morality and virtue. Benevolence itself was seen as a feminine trait. Just as women nurtured and cared for their families, the argument ran, they were the ideal caretakers of the poor and downtrodden in society. Women’s benevolent associations in big cities and small towns founded orphanages, kindergartens, and colleges. They built libraries, museums, and parks. Many tended to focus their attention on the needs of women and children. For example, members of the Boston Fragment Society, founded in 1812, became famous for sewing yellow flannel layettes for poor pregnant women. Other associations founded schools in the hope that poor children could escape the cycle of poverty through education. Not only did these associations give their women directors a legal identity they had not had before,

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BERKELEY, LADY FRANCES CULPEPER

they also allowed women members to acquire and use new skills. According to Anne Firor Scott, membership in benevolent associations taught women “how to conduct business, speak in public, manage money [and] . . . prepared [them] for politics, broadly defined.” Women began to think of themselves differently, and this new self-concept was one factor that led eventually to the woman suffrage movement. There were some significant differences between the benevolent associations established by white and African-American women. While white women who joined associations saw themselves as being quite different from the poor people they helped, African-American women’s associations were originally established to provide assistance to members, rather than to outsiders, and to help members educate themselves. Eventually, however, both African-American and white women began to make clear class distinctions. Some historians, in fact, see the associations as a significant factor in the growth of the middle class and of class consciousness in general. Although associations often reminded members that any one of them could fall on hard times—and that women were particularly vulnerable to economic downturns–their elite members did not usually expect to need help themselves. African-American women’s associations were also different from those run by white women in that they could not count on the help of very wealthy members and donors or expect aid from state governments. While white women worried about how to distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, African-American women tended not to concern themselves with such distinctions. Since their beginnings in the 1790s, women’s benevolent associations have been a powerful social force, providing many needed services to communities and individuals. They also changed forever the role and status of women in American society. See also: Coverture; Gratz, Rebecca; Philanthropy; Property Rights. FURTHER READING

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

BERKELEY, LADY FRANCES
CULPEPER

(1634–1695?) Wife of three governors and leader of the “Green Spring Faction” in colonial politics. Frances Culpeper was born to an aristocratic English family that emigrated to Virginia in 1650. Two years later, Frances married Samuel Stephens, governor of a settlement in North Carolina. Six months after Stephens’s death in 1669, Frances married the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, who was many years older than she. In 1676, Lady Frances’s cousin Nathaniel Bacon accused Berkeley of failing to protect the colony from attacks by Native Americans. Bacon raised his own army, which eventually turned on the colonial government and burned the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. These actions came to be known as Bacon’s Rebellion. Berkeley sent Lady Frances to England to secure help. She returned in 1677 with a thousand soldiers. By then, however, Bacon had died, and Berkeley had hanged 23 rebels and confiscated their property. Berkeley was ordered to return to England to account to the king for the way he managed his actions in handling the rebellion. He died while there. Lady Frances continued to defend her husband’s reputation in the colonies and even organized opposition to the newly appointed governor. The party was called the “Green Spring Party,” after the Berkeley mansion. Lady Frances remained active in politics for many years, often working behind the scenes. In 1680, Lady Frances married Philip Ludwell, who became governor of North and South Carolina. It is not known when she died.

BETHUNE, JOANNA
GRAHAM

(1770–1860) One of the first women in the United States to organize a charity. Joanna Graham was born in Fort Niagara, Canada, in February 1770. She was the daughter of a surgeon, John Graham, and Isabella Marshall Graham. The couple was originally from Scotland. After her husband’s death in 1773, Isabella Graham moved back to Scotland with her children. There she founded a school for small children and, later, one for young ladies. Joanna was educated in her mother’s schools before studying for two years at a French school in Rotterdam, Holland.

THE BIBLE AND THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN

In 1789, the family moved to New York City, where Joanna taught at yet another school founded by her mother. She married Divie Bethune, a wealthy merchant, in 1795. After Joanna’s marriage, Isabella lived with her daughter and son-in-law. Divie Bethune’s wealth allowed Joanna and her mother to pursue their charitable and religious interests. Together they founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in 1797 and, in 1806, the Orphan Asylum Society, which, with financial help from the Bethunes, built one of the first residences to house orphans in the United States. Joanna taught in the asylum’s school and served on the Society’s board of directors for 50 years. The societies founded by Joanna and her mother were incorporated and had female directors. These directors were granted legal powers not generally available to women of the era, such as the right to own property, file lawsuits, and manage organizations without the intervention of men. Joanna herself founded the Society for the Promotion of Industry among the Poor, which provided work for women during the difficult economic times following the War of 1812. Isabella Graham died in 1814. On her deathbed she asked her daughter to devote her time to working with children, rather than adults, because she felt that there was a greater opportunity of reaching and reforming the young. Heeding her mother’s advice, in 1816, Joanna Bethune established the Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath-Schools, an organization that provided Sunday-school classes for over 8,000 children in New York City. In 1827, Bethune founded an Infant School Society, which eventually opened nine schools in New York City that taught basic skills to very young children. Bethune served as superintendent of all nine schools and taught at one. She also wrote several books, including a biography of her mother, The Life of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1839). Joanna Graham Bethune died in New York City in 1860 at the age of 90.

THE BIBLE AND THE
SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN From the beginnings of Christianity, certain Biblical texts have been used to justify the subordination of women to men. The texts most often cited are Genesis 1–3, the story of the creation and the

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fall, and two of Paul’s epistles: 1 Corinthians 14:34– 35, and 1 Timothy 2:11–14. The story of the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis has been interpreted by many Christians as evidence that God created woman to be subordinate to man. Those who hold this position point to the version of the creation story that says Eve was created after Adam and drawn from his rib. These details are cited as evidence that woman is secondary to and should be dependent on man. The story of the temptation and fall has been cited as proof that woman is morally inferior to man, and womankind in general has been blamed for humanity’s banishment from Eden. 1 Timothy 2:11–14 has also been frequently used as a justification for woman’s second-class status. The text reads, in part, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” This passage has been used to deny women a say in all aspects of public life. Similarly, 1 Corinthians, 14:34–35 reads, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in church.” This passage, too, has been used to prohibit women from preaching. The Puritans who colonized Massachusetts were among those who used the Bible to justify the subordination of women to men. Although Puritan men felt justified in defying the king of England’s authority over their religious observance, they firmly believed in the authority of fathers over daughters and husbands over wives. On the other hand, several of the religious sects that flourished in British North America during the colonial period, abandoned this hierarchical view of the relationship between the sexes. Quakers were influenced by the writings of Margaret Askew Fell Fox, wife of the Quaker founder, George Fox. Her reinterpretation of Paul’s words supported the idea of women preachers. She analyzed the passage from Corinthians to demonstrate that the command to keep silent was intended for women who were “in Transgression” and speaking from “malice, strife, and confusion,” not those who “have the everlasting Gospel to preach, and upon whom the Promise of the Lord

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BILL OF RIGHTS

To support their male-dominated system, Puritans quoted St. Paul’s words, “Let the women learn in silence.”

is fulfilled, and his Spirit poured upon them according to his Word.” Thanks to Margaret’s interpretation, the Society of Friends from its earliest days allowed women to preach and serve as missionaries. Like the Quakers, Anne Hutchinson preached that people could be saved by the intuition of God’s grace within themselves. Because her ideas threatened the authority of the Puritan male clergy, she was tried for heresy and banished. The Shakers believed that God was both male and female and thought that since God’s first earthly incarnation as Jesus had been in male form, his second coming would be as a female. Shaker communities gave equal authority to male and female leaders.


BILL OF RIGHTS

The first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The states ratified them in 1791 to counter objections that the new federal compact might endanger the liberty of individuals. The rights of women are implied in the amendments, even though the pronouns in the Sixth Amendment are masculine. Other amendments guarantee the rights of the “people,” or basic freedoms of which individuals may not be deprived by governmental power. Women benefited as much as men from First Amendment guarantees of the

freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press. Both female and male housekeepers valued the Third Amendment limits on military quartering in private homes and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, in that both women and men had suffered from forced quartering and warrantless searches by the British. Judicial safeguards in the Fifth through Eighth Amendments benefited the accused of any sex. The essential exclusion of women from the full political rights of citizenship appear in the main body of the United States Constitution, in which masculine pronouns implicitly limit the highest offices to men, and in the state constitutions, all but one of which restricted to men the right to vote. Nevertheless, in the future, women would insist on exercising the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to campaigning for the right to vote, which they won in 1920 by the Nineteenth Amendment.


BINGHAM, ANNE WILLING

(1764–1801) Socialite and model for Lady Liberty. Anne Willing was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of wealthy and socially prominent parents. She was considered to be one of the most beautiful women of her time and had many suitors. In 1780, at the age of 16, she was married to William Bingham, one of

BRADFORD, CORNELIA SMITH

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BLEECKER, ANN ELIZA

(1752–1783) Author of poetry, letters, and prose narratives. Ann Eliza Bleecker was the youngest child of Brandt Schuyler, a wealthy New York merchant, and his wife Margaret. She was well educated, and began to write poetry as a child. She married John James Bleecker in 1769, and the couple moved to Tomhanick, a rural area north of Albany, New York. In 1777, as the British army neared their home, John Bleecker traveled to Albany to find a place for his family to stay. While he was gone, Ann heard rumors that General Burgoyne’s army was only two miles away and fled on foot to Albany with her two daughters, Margaretta, who was four, and an infant, Arbella. After a harrowing journey, she met her husband on the road and the couple finished the journey together. Unfortunately, Arbella died shortly after the family’s arrival in Albany. Ann wrote a poem about her grief:

Anne Willing Bingham was a famous beauty and a sophisticated hostess. This engraving is based on Gilbert Stuart’s portrait.

the wealthiest men in the country. The couple had three children. Over a period of three years in the 1780s, the Binghams traveled in Europe. Anne’s beauty and charm captured the attention of royalty in both the English and the French courts. During this period, she was introduced to the French salons where gatherings of notable individuals gathered to discuss the arts and the issues of the day. Anne was particularly impressed with the fact that women played an important role in these gatherings, not only hosting them but taking part in the discussions on an equal level with men. She wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “The women of France interfere in the politics of the Country, and often give a decided Turn to the Fate of Empires.” On her return to the United States, Anne Bingham hosted French-style salons, in which she became known for her style and wit. Many of the most important Americans and distinguished foreign visitors attended Anne’s gatherings. Anne Bingham was also the model for Lady Liberty on one of the first coins to be issued by the U.S. Mint, in 1795. Gilbert Stuart, known for his portraits of George Washington, painted Anne Bingham.

In bitter anguish o’er her limbs I hung, At length her languid eyes closed from the day, The idol of my soul was torn away; Her spirit fled and left me ghastly clay!

In 1781, John Bleecker was captured by Loyalists. He was to be taken to prison in Canada but was rescued at the last moment. Ann had a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered. She died in 1783 at the age of 31. Ann’s daughter Margaretta began publishing her mother’s writing when she was 18. Thirteen poems, a prose narrative entitled The History of Maria Kittle, and a short tale, “The Story of Henry and Ann,” were published between 1790 and 1793. Also in 1793, Margaretta published The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, in Prose and Verse. While Ann’s poetry is sentimental and conventional, 24 letters included in the volume provide a realistic look at life before and during the American Revolution. These letters include village gossip as well as descriptions of the hardships of life on what was then the frontier.

BRADFORD, CORNELIA
SMITH

(?–1755) One of the first women to publish a newspaper on her own. Cornelia Smith was born in New York City, but the date of her birth is unknown. She married Andrew Bradford, a printer from Philadelphia, probably in 1740. She reportedly was a

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BRADSTREET, ANNE DUDLEY

strong-willed woman who prevailed upon her husband to revoke a will in favor of his nephew, William, and leave everything to her. Thus, when Andrew died in 1742, Cornelia was left in comfortable circumstances. Although she had no need to continue in the printing business, she took over the publication of Andrew’s paper, the American Weekly Mercury. Just a week after Andrew’s death, the paper reappeared with this notice prominently displayed: “All Persons who have any Printing Work to do, or have Occasion for Stationary Ware, shall be thankfully served at the lowest prices.” In addition to publishing the paper, Bradford managed a printing office and a shop in which she sold such things as clothing, medicine, furniture and farm equipment. The last issue of the American Mercury appeared in 1746. From 1746 until 1751 Bradford did bookbinding and some printing. Bradford is one of only 32 women who published papers before 1820. She died in 1755. See also: Printing and Publishing.




BRADSTREET, ANNE DUDLEY (1612–1672)

First published North American poet. Anne Dudley was probably born in Northampton, England. She grew up in Lincolnshire, where her father, Thomas Dudley, was steward to the Earl of Lincoln. Thanks to her father’s wealth and position, Anne was educated by private tutors; she also had access to the Earl’s vast library. Anne, like the rest of her family, was a devout Puritan. In 1628, at the age of 16, Anne married Simon Bradstreet. In 1630, Anne, her husband, and her parents sailed for New England. Anne’s first glimpse of the New World was shocking to her; she said her “heart rose” in fear. But she later came to believe that God had chosen her to live in this “new world.” The Bradstreets originally settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The couple then moved to Ipswich and finally to North Andover, where they lived for the rest of their lives. They had eight children and Simon was twice selected governor of the colony. Bradstreet’s poetry was written for herself and her family; she did not write for publication. Her brother-in-law, without Anne’s knowledge or permission, published a volume of her poems in England in 1650 under the title, The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America. Or Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight . . . by

a Gentlewoman in those parts. (See Documents.) These poems are conventional and give no hint that their author lived in the wilds of America. Bradstreet is known today primarily for her later poetry, which was published after her death and deals not only with life in America but also with the feelings and emotions of a woman confronting life’s hardships. One of her best-known poems, “Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 8th, 1666,” gives a vivid portrayal of her sorrow as she looks upon the ruins of her home: Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best, My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under the roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall e’er be told Nor things recounted done of old.

When she contemplates having a child, she expresses to her husband the fear that she may not survive: How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend. How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend.

And she expresses her love for her husband: If ever two were one, then surely we If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

In addition Bradstreet wrote about her own religious struggles and her relationship with nature. She also wrote angrily about the popular idea that a woman could not be a poet: I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits. A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits. If what I do prove well, it won’t advance; They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

As poet Adrienne Rich has said, Anne Bradstreet’s accomplishment as a poet is enhanced by the fact that she also had eight children, struggled with hardship and disease, and “kept house at the edge of the wilderness.” She died in North Andover in 1672.


BRANT, MARY

(1736–1796) A Native American woman who helped persuade the Iroquois and others to support the British dur-

BREWER, LUCY

ing the American Revolution. Mary Brant, called Molly, was born in the Mohawk Valley in New York. Her father was a Mohawk chief and her mother a member of the Iroquois Nation. Molly’s brother, Joseph, was the most famous Native American warrior of the American Revolution, fighting for the British. In 1759, Brant met Sir William Johnson, a wealthy man who was the superintendent for Indian affairs for the British. According to one story, she caught Johnson’s attention when she vaulted onto the back of a galloping horse. In any case, the two lived together until his death in 1774. Brant bore Johnson nine children and helped him in all his dealings with Native Americans. Perhaps because of the dominant role played by Iroquois women, Molly was able to exert her influence in diplomatic relationships between the British and Native Americans. After Sir William’s death, Brant and her children moved to a farm near Canajoharie, New York. During the Revolutionary War, Brant helped the British with information, food, and ammunition. In particular, she informed the British about the whereabouts of the American army before the Battle of Oriskany. Her son Peter may have instrumental in capturing American patriot Ethan Allen during a battle near Montreal. When the war ended, Brant and her family, along with other Loyalists, moved to Canada and settled near what is now Kingston, Ontario. Several of her daughters married officers of the Canadian military. Brant herself was granted a lifetime pension by the British government. Molly Brant died in Kingston in 1796. See also: Iroquois Household Economy.


BRENT, MARGARET

(c. 1600–c. 1670) The first woman in the American colonies to request the right to vote. In 1638, Margaret Brent, her sister, and two brothers emigrated to America from England. As Catholics, they chose to settle in Maryland, the colony owned by the Catholic Lord Baltimore. Margaret was granted 701⁄2 acres of land and later received an additional thousand acres from her brother. Eventually, she became one of the major landowners in the colony. She appeared in court as her own attorney and on behalf of others more than 100 times.

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On his deathbed in 1647, Maryland’s governor, Leonard Calvert, brother of Lord Baltimore, made Brent his executor, telling her to “Take all, pay all.” He was referring to the fact that he had formed a small army to put down a rebellion but failed to pay the soldiers, who were threatening mutiny that could have led to the destruction of the colony. Brent was able to pay only part of the debt by selling Calvert’s property, so she persuaded the assembly to allow her to sell some of Lord Baltimore’s cattle to pay the balance. Baltimore was furious when he heard what she had done, but the assembly defended her. They assured him that “it was better for the Collonys safety at that time in her hands then in any mans else in the whole Province . . . for the Soldiers would never have treated any others with that Civility and respect.”

“I’ve come to seek a voice in this assembly. And yet because I am a woman, forsooth I must stand idly by and not even have a voice in the framing of your laws.” —Margaret Brent, request to the Maryland General Assembly

It was during this period that Brent went before the assembly to request two votes for herself, one as a landowner (to which she would have been entitled if she were a man) and one as Lord Baltimore’s attorney. The assembly turned her down. She replied that she would never again accept the assembly’s proceedings unless she was granted a vote. In 1651, Brent left Maryland for Virginia, where she lived until her death. Many people today regard Brent as the first woman lawyer and voting rights advocate in North America. This characterization is not entirely accurate. It was not unusual for landowners, men or women, to serve as their own lawyers, and Brent was hardly a suffragist. Although she wanted a vote for herself, she did not advocate the vote for all women.




BREWER, LUCY (late 1700s–early 1800s) Claimed to be the first woman marine. Lucy Brewer was working as a prostitute in Boston, Mas-

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BROOKS, MARIA GOWEN

sachusetts, when she heard the story of a woman who pretended to be a man so that she could fight in the Revolutionary War. Under the name Louisa Baker, Brewer published an account of her own supposed enlistment in the Marines. She claimed to be an expert shot who participated in several battles at sea during the War of 1812. The Marine Corps does not accept Brewer’s story. They say that the lack of privacy aboard ship would have made it impossible for a woman to disguise her identity. Opha Mae Johnson is officially considered to be the first woman Marine. She enlisted in 1918, during the First World War.


BROOKS, MARIA GOWEN

(1794–1845) Poet. Abigail Gowen was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1794. She had her name legally changed to Mary Abigail when she was married. Later in life, when she lived in Cuba, she called herself Maria. Abigail Gowen’s prosperous parents saw to it that she was well educated, and by the time she was 12 she could speak several languages. But in 1809, her life changed completely. Her father died bankrupt, and she was placed under the guardianship of John Brooks, her older sister’s widowed husband. In 1810, she and John were married. The bride was just 16, and the groom, the 50-year-old father of two boys. In 1812, John lost his fortune, and he and Maria were forced to move to Portland, Maine, where Maria was miserable, lonely, and bored. By 1813, she was the mother of two sons, Horace and Edgar. As she matured, she realized that she had married her husband out of gratitude rather than love, and she fell desperately in love with a Canadian army officer whose name she never revealed. Since she could not act on her feelings, Brooks turned to writing. In 1820, she published a book of poetry entitled Judith, Esther, and Other Poems. When her husband died in 1823, Maria traveled to Matanzas, Cuba, to live on the coffee plantation of an uncle. After turning down a proposal of marriage from a neighboring planter, she traveled to Canada, where she became engaged to the army officer with whom she had earlier fallen in love. Eventually, however, the engagement was broken; Brooks was so distraught that she twice tried to commit suicide. When she returned to Cuba, her uncle had died, leaving her the plan-

tation, which was a source of income for the rest of her life. Maria again began to write and soon had composed the first canto of a poem called Zo´phie¨l. It tells the story of a fallen angel who falls in love with a mortal. The poem is romantic and scholarly at the same time, with many learned references that made it difficult for many people to understand. One canto of the poem was published in 1825. In 1826, Maria began to correspond with the British poet Robert Southey, who eventually invited her to visit him at his home in Keswick. Southey admired Maria’s work and helped her to publish Zo´phie¨l under the pseudonym Maria del Occidente (Maria of the West). When Brooks’s son Horace was accepted into the United States Military Academy at West Point, Maria went to live near him. There she began work on a fictionalized autobiography entitled Idomen: or, the Vale of Yumuri. When she was told that her writing was “of too elevated a nature to sell,” she eventually published the work herself. In 1843, the death of Brooks’s son Edgar and one of her stepsons brought Maria back to Cuba. She continued to write but died before she could complete the romantic epic, “Beatrix, the Beloved of Columbus.” Maria Brooks was praised by contemporary critics, one of whom said that she was the “only American poet of her sex whose mind was thoroughly educated.” Southey described her as “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses.” Her work is little read today.

BROWN, PHOEBE
HINSDALE

(1783–1861) Hymnist. Phoebe Hinsdale Brown was poor and had little formal education. In 1818, she was living with her husband—a house painter—her invalid sister, and four children in a small house in Ellington, Connecticut. Since there were no private spaces in the house, Brown frequently walked in the garden of a nearby estate. During these walks, Brown said in her autobiography, she “felt quite retired and alone with God.” While visiting a friend one day, Brown met the woman who owned the garden and who asked Brown why she spent so much time there. As Brown said, “There was something in her manner more than in her words, that grieved me. . . [later] I sat down in the kitchen, with my child in my arms,

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES

when the grief of my heart burst forth in a flood of tears. I took pen and paper, and gave vent to my oppressed heart in what I called ‘My Apology for my Twilight Rambles, addressed to a Lady.’” The poem Brown wrote that evening was published in 1824 in the popular collection, Village Hymns for Social Worship by the Reverend Asahel Nettleton under the title “Twilight Hymn.” The original verse began: Yes, when the toilsome day is gone . . . I love to steal awhile away From little ones and care And spend the hours of setting day In gratitude and prayer.

Susan VanZanten Gallagher, in “At Home in the Hymn: Early Nineteenth-Century Women Hymnists,” says that when the hymn was published later, Brown’s references to her domestic cares were edited out by the Reverend Nettleton, reducing the contrast Brown intended between her earthly home and her heavenly one. The revised first stanza reads: I love to steal awhile away From every cumbering care, And spend the hours of setting day In humble, grateful prayer.

Gallagher notes that Brown’s mild complaints about the hardships of her life may have been eliminated because they contradicted the idea, popular at the time, that women were completely contented in the domestic sphere. The altered poem was also published under the title “Private Devo-

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tions” in Thomas Lounsbury’s Yale Book of American Verse (1912). FURTHER READING

Brown, Phoebe Hinsdale. The Tree and Its Fruits; or, Narratives from Real Life. New York: Ezra Collier, 1836.


BUNDLING

A courtship practice involving sleeping together while fully clothed. The practice of bundling is most often associated with New Englanders, though it originated in Europe and may have occurred in ancient times. The reason for bundling can be found in the austere life lived by the early settlers in America. The work days were long and the living conditions uncomfortable. There were few parties or dances, and people usually went to bed soon after dark to conserve fuel. So young people who were interested in marriage had neither the place nor the time to court, especially during the cold winter months. With their parents’ approval, then, young lovers would “bundle.” Usually this involved going to bed fully clothed, with a long board, called a “bundling board,” separating the couple. Sometimes the girl’s legs would be tied together or encased in a sack. The couple could talk, get to know one another, and even kiss. The practice declined in the nineteenth century, when churches began to preach against bundling.

C
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES

In the early years of European settlement in North America, Native Americans occasionally took captives in raids and wars. Some captives died of natural causes or were killed; others were ransomed by friends and relatives; and a few elected to live out their lives among their captors. Several of those who returned safely wrote about their experiences, works that came to be known as “captivity narratives.” These narratives often had a strong religious message, suggesting that the ordeal the writers experienced was God’s way of testing the faithfulness of his chosen people. Throughout the stories, which are full of action and adventure, the authors

constantly praise God and try to interpret events to show his wisdom and mercy. Many of the writers also make it clear that they do not regard their captors as fully human; in fact, Native Americans are often portrayed as devils or witches. Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (1697), written by Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman, and delivered as a sermon, describes the captivity of Hannah Duston. Duston, her week-old daughter, and a nurse, Mary Neff, were captured on March 15,1697, by a band of Abenaki Indians who murdered the baby and forced Duston and Neff to march 100 miles to the north. On the evening of March 30, Duston, Neff, and a young boy named

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CATHOLICS

Perhaps the most famous of the narratives is that of Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson is the only woman captive to have written her own story. The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) went through four editions during Rowlandson’s life and 39 total editions. The captivity narrative is a distinctly American genre. It reflects Americans’ complex relationship with wilderness—the deep, dark forest that is home to both fears and dreams.


CATHOLICS Mary Rowlandson’s captivity.

Samuel Lennardson managed to steal hatchets. As Mather notes, “the good God who hath all Hearts in his own Hands, heard the sighs of these Prisoners, and gave them to find unexpected favor from the Master.” They used the hatchets to kill their captors. As they were about to escape in some stolen canoes, Duston, who had killed nine of the ten captors herself, went back and took scalps as proof of what she had done. During an attack on the settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts, John Williams, a clergyman, and his family were captured. Two of his children were killed and his wife died on the journey to Canada. One of his sons remained with the Native Americans when Williams and his surviving children were released in 1707. His narrative, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, tells the story of his captivity and of his staunch resistance to attempts by French Jesuits to convert him to Catholicism. Williams’s narrative and others like it probably inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Last of the Mohicans, which describes the journey of a group taken captive by Huron warriors during the French and Indian War.

The Catholic Church began its influence in North America around 1521, when Juan Ponce de Leo´n arrived in St. Augustine, Florida. Spanish Franciscan monks built missions throughout the southern part of what is now the United States. British Catholics

WOMEN’S FIRSTS In 1675, a leader of the Wampanoag people, Metacomet, began a series of attacks on colonial villages and towns. Because the English name for Metacomet was Philip, these raids came to be called “King Philip’s War.” In February 1676, a war party attacked Lancaster, Massachusetts, and took 24 people captive. Among the captives was the wife of a minister, Mary Rowlandson, and her three children. Mary and her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, were wounded, and Sarah died of blood loss and starvation a week after the group was captured. For the next three months, Rowlandson lived as a slave among her captors. Although life for Rowlandson was hard, her skill at sewing and knitting was admired by her captors, and she was allowed privileges not granted to others. For example, she was occasionally allowed to see her children. She also met and talked to Metacomet himself. Throughout her captivity, Rowlandson was able to take comfort from a Bible given to her by one of the Native Americans; she never despaired and trusted in her faith to sustain her. In May 1676, Rowlandson was ransomed by her husband for 20 pounds. Her surviving children were also returned some months later. Rowlandson originally wrote the story of her captivity for her children. The small volume was published in 1682 and has since then been considered an especially fine example of a colonial captivity narrative. It is not known when or where Rowlandson died.

CATHOLICS

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arrived in North America after the WOMEN’S FIRSTS Church of England was formed in 1532. However, they escaped religious persecution in England only to be perElizabeth Seton founded the first charitable organization in secuted in the colonies as well. Catholthe United States: the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows icism was practiced quietly in the home with Small Children. Seton was the first person born in the with mothers performing the religious United States to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church duties. They led family prayer and edu(1975). cated the children in religious matters. Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in New York in 1774 to The only colony in which Catholics Dr. Richard Bayley and Catherine Charlton Bayley. Her could freely practice their faith was mother died when Elizabeth was only three years old. ElizaMaryland, founded specifically for beth was baptized in the Anglican Church. Catholic immigrants by George CalElizabeth Ann Bayley married wealthy merchant William vert, Lord Baltimore, a Roman CathSeton in 1794 at the age of 19. The Setons had two sons and olic nobleman from Ireland. The three daughters. During the years of her marriage Seton bename of the colony was in itself repcame more involved in charitable work, founding the Society resentative of the Catholic faith, in for the Relief of Poor Widows at age 23. She became known which devotion to Mary, the virgin as the Protestant Sister of Charity because of her work with mother of Jesus and model of obedithe poor. A year after her husband died in 1803, Seton conence and Godly womanhood, is central. The empowerment of Catholic verted to Catholicism. She was 31. women in Maryland was reflected in Seton opened a boarding school for young girls in Balti Baltimore’s land grant provisions. Unmore, Maryland, in like in other British Colonies, women 1808. She also estabcould claim land just as men could. lished a women’s reliOne such landowner was Margaret gious community that Brent, executor of Governor Leonbecame known as the ard Calvert’s estate. Well known for Sisters of Charity of St. her courtroom expertise, Brent arJoseph. Under Seton’s gued 134 cases between 1642 and direction, the sisters 1650. Upon Calvert’s death in 1647, opened the first North Brent acted as governor of Maryland. American Catholic orHowever, in 1689, the Church of phanage in Philadelphia England became the official church in 1814. Seton also of Maryland and Catholic women opened schools in New were disbarred as lawyers and excluded from offices. Catholic widows York and Philadelphia, were required to give up their chilwhich are considered the dren if the father had been Protesfoundation of the U.S. tant, thus preventing the children parochial school system. from being raised Catholic. Catholics Seton contracted tuwere not free to openly practice their berculosis and died in religion again until after the Ameri1821. Pope John XXII can Revolution. proclaimed Seton venThe appointment of John Carroll erable in 1959, and she as the first American bishop in 1789 was beatified in 1963. marked the beginning of Catholic convents in the United States. Carroll believed that Protestants would accept the Catholic Church more if it seemed to be “contributing to the common good.” He suggested that Catholic nuns, young girls. A group of French Ursuline nuns, the women who emulated the Virgin Mary by taking a first order of religious women to arrive in North vow of celibacy and devoting their lives to God’s America, had been in New Orleans since 1727. service, be sent to the United States to educate However, New Orleans was not part of the United

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CHARTERS, COLONIAL

States until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Therefore, in 1790, a group of Carmelite nuns founded the first U.S. convent in Port Tobacco, Maryland. Nuns established the first parochial schools in North America, took care of orphans, rehabilitated women of “ill repute,” and converted African Americans and Native Americans to the Catholic faith.

sylvania, and Rhode Island) were royal colonies. The king appointed their governors and approved all legislation. George III continued the effort to reclaim royal rights, which increased tensions between England and the colonies.




The Cherokee originally inhabited the region of the Carolinas, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee before their defeat by the Iroquois and Delaware. In the 1600s and 1700s, the Cherokee migrated to the Southeast, becoming the largest Native American group in the region. The Cherokee culture included agriculture, settled villages, and ceremony. After the American Revolution, the Cherokee became influenced by white culture, adopting plow agriculture, animal husbandry, and cotton and wool industries, as well as slavery. The Cherokee were a patrilineal society; leadership roles within the community came through the father. Cherokee boys were highly valued, and instruction and discipline came from fathers and mother’s brothers. Even though the Cherokee society at large was patrilineal, families were matrilineal. Women held respected positions in Cherokee families. Kinship was based on mothers. Women owned housing and property, which were passed upon their death to their blood relatives.

CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS

See philanthropy


CHARTERS, COLONIAL

The written grant of rights to establish an English colony. A charter, or royal patent, gave individuals, corporations, or trustees an area of land and the power to govern it. After failed settlements, like Roanoke, proved that North American colonies required more resources than one individual could provide, the king allowed trading companies to found colonies as for-profit ventures. The first such colony was established by the Virginia Company in 1607. Trading companies encouraged immigration by promising to establish a representative assembly. This right to representation became a common feature in colonies established by two other types of charter: proprietary and corporate. In proprietary colonies, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland, a lord proprietor had the right to make all laws and receive all revenues. In corporate colonies, such as Connecticut and Rhode Island, charters of incorporation were granted after people began living there, encouraging the idea that government was based on the sovereignty of the people. (In keeping with the assumptions of the time, no mention was made in any of the charters of the position of women. Women were not expected to have any role or interest in government.) All of the charter colonies had a governor and two legislative bodies. Most also had the exclusive right to tax themselves, a right for which the colonists later fought. Charles II attempted to consolidate all of the colonies into the Dominion of New England (1686–1689). Though the effort failed, by 1763 all but four colonies (Connecticut, Maryland, Penn-

CHEROKEE HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY

See also: ‘‘Nancy Ward to the Cherokee Council,’’ Documents, Volume 2.

CHILD, LYDIA MARIA
FRANCIS See volume 2


CHILDBEARING YEARS

Women’s lives in colonial America were dominated by childbearing and rearing. Fully two-thirds of a woman’s adult life might be spent pregnant or nursing. According to Judith Walzer Leavitt in Brought to Bed, women “had to face the physical and psychological effects of recurring pregnancies, confinements, and postpartum recoveries, which all took their toll on their time, their energy, their

CHILDBEARING YEARS

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women. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes in Goodwives, “In no other experience in the premodern world were women so completely in control or so firmly bonded.” In addition to the comfort of community, women also endured the pain of loss. Most women lost more than one child; some lost as many as five or six. Women also worried that they themselves would not survive the pregnancy. A woman who learned she was pregnant would prepare for her own demise at the same time she prepared clothes for the new baby. Some women wrote in their diaries of their fear of death; others confided in their friends or husbands; a few made wills stating that their jewelry and personal possessions should be given to their children. These fears were well grounded; a woman’s risk of death compounded TRAILBLAZERS over five pregnancies was one in 30. Women could do little but accept the “Nanye-hi,” whose anglicized named became Nancy Ward, risk of death as their lot; many relibecame a Cherokee leader in 1775 after the death of her husgions taught that the suffering of band, Kingfisher of the Deer. Ward took her fallen husband’s childbirth was women’s punishplace at the battle of Taliwa, a skirmish between the Cheroment for Eve’s sin. kees and the Creeks. After her act of valor, Ward’s people If a woman did not die in childcalled her Beloved Woman and she became their leader. birth, complications could affect the Ward sat on the Women’s Council and Council of Chiefs, quality of the rest of her life. Because where she had an equal voice with the men. She later negotiof difficult deliveries or damage inated several peace treaties with white settlers, and expressed flicted by forceps, women could get surprise that no white women appeared as negotiators. tears in their bladders or rectums, reWard’s second husband was Bryant Ward, a white sulting in a lifetime of incontinence. Tears in the vaginal wall or cervix trader, with whom she had a daughter, Elizabeth. Although might result in painful intercourse or Bryant Ward left Nancy, she continued her friendship with problems with future pregnancies and him and other white settlers in the region of present-day deliveries. The most common comNorth Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. For explaint as a result of childbirth was a ample, Ward personally intervened when Mrs. William Bean prolapsed uterus, a condition in which was captured by Cherokee warriors who intended to burn the uterus drops, sometime so far that her at the stake. it protrudes from the vaginal opening. In 1817, the Cherokee adopted a new constitution to please While childbearing had many risks, the U.S. government. Power was taken away from women and it also brought women great honor. they were eliminated from making any decisions. Ward was For example, Puritans idealized mothforced to resign as Cherokee leader. She and other Cherokee erhood and especially valued women women pleaded with the Cherokee council not to sell more who had many children. According to land to white settlers. However, with the Hiwassee Purchase Ulrich, “To bear children and, above of 1819—an agreement made between the U.S. government all, to see those children bear chiland the Cherokee—the Cherokee gave up all land north of the dren were accounted rich blessHiwassee River. Ward died in 1822, and 13 years after her ings. . . . Aside from any abstract death, the Cherokee surrendered all their lands and were quality of character or spirit, fruitfulmoved to reservations in present-day Oklahoma. ness in itself conferred status.” Judith Coffin, a woman who died in NewSee also: ‘‘Nancy Ward to the Cherokee Council,’’ Documents, Volume 2. bury, Massachusetts in 1705 at the age of 80, lived to see 177 descendreams, and on their bodies.” Many women had their first child within ten months of marriage and were continuously pregnant or nursing for the next 20 years. Childbearing created a community of women who helped and cared for one another. In the first stage of labor, women neighbors gathered to provide the mother-to-be with emotional support. As the child was delivered, the laboring woman was held by or leaned against another woman. After the birth, women would wash and dress the infant and make the mother comfortable. In general, men were excluded from the birth process, and any information they received about what was happening was communicated and controlled by

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CHILDBIRTH

Children dominated women’s lives.

dants. That accomplishment is memorialized on her tombstone. She is described as a “grave, sober, faithful, fruitfull vine.” See also: Ballard, Martha; Childbirth; Midwifery; Pregnancy.


CHILDBIRTH

Women in colonial British America had, on average, one child every two to two-and-a-half years throughout their reproductive lives. Women became pregnant frequently not only because there was no reliable form of birth control but also because many families needed the labor of their children. Farmers, especially, relied on sons and daughters to help with the work. The average family in Hallowell, Maine, in the late eighteenth century, for example, had seven children. Some women had as many as 16 pregnancies. Although, then as now, a pregnancy was an event to celebrate, many women had mixed emotions because of the risks associated with childbirth. According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

in A Midwife’s Tale, midwife Martha Ballard lost one mother for every 198 live births. In contrast, the rate in the United States today is approximately one death in every 10,000 births. Even if the woman herself survived the pregnancy, her child might not; in one birth out of every 24, the child died. Forty percent of these babies were stillborn; the rest died in the first day of life. The vast majority of women gave birth at home, attended by female relatives and neighbors and the local midwife. Husbands were generally home but not allowed in the room where the birthing process took place. Doctors were seldom involved unless there were complications that the midwife could not handle. In the eighteenth century, only the very poorest women in urban areas had their children in hospitals, and these women had a much greater rate of infection and death than did those who had their babies at home, primarily because the importance of sterile procedures was not understood at the time. The midwife was the first to be called to monitor the early stages of labor. As contractions be-

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Virginia Dare was the first child born in America of English parents. Her parents were among 120 colonists who sailed to the continent of North America in 1587. Sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh to found a colony to be named Virginia, after Elizabeth I, England’s “Virgin Queen,” they landed at Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. The governor of the new colony, John White, was accompanied by his daughter Eleanor and her husband, Ananias Dare. Their daughter was born on August 18, 1587, and was christened on August 24. The name “Virginia” signified, as her grandfather wrote, that “this childe was the first Christian born in Virginia.” Nine days later, John White left for England in order to resupply the colony. When he arrived there in England, White found the country at war with Spain. He was unable to return with the needed supplies until 1590. When he did, he found the colony in ruins, and the word Croatoan carved on a doorpost. None of the colonists was ever found. There are many theories and legends about what happened to the colonists. The most plausible explanation seems to be that the word Croatoan referred to an island off the coast that was the home of Native Americans. The colonists may have been rescued by, and later lived with, the Croatan tribe.

CHILD CUSTODY

came more frequent, mothers might be given herbal remedies, wine, or rum mixed with sugar and water to help ease the pain. When it was near the time for the child to be born, relatives or neighbor women were called in to help. Medical practice in the colonial period required that mother be wrapped with soft, dry cloths after the birth. It was believed that as the placenta was expelled, air would enter the uterus and cause pain and inflammation. Thus, the cloths were applied to the abdomen and thighs of the newly delivered woman. An afternurse might be called in to help the mother through the first few days after the birth. Often the midwife and her helpers stayed to dinner and an evening of celebration; many stayed the night if they had come from some distance. Women usually nursed their babies, which not only helped the baby thrive but also tended to prevent the mother from becoming pregnant again until the child was weaned. Women were expected to “lie in” for a period of six to eight weeks after a birth, although in rural areas, many mothers were

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lucky if they got three or four days before they had to return to work. Martha Ballard described a woman who was up and around again as being “in her kitchen,” an appropriate image. See also: Midwifery.


CHILD CUSTODY

Because of the concept of coverture, a married woman in colonial America was not considered to have a legal identity apart from her husband. Although divorce was extremely rare, those women who did divorce were never granted custody of their children. Essentially, children were considered to be property, and all property, even that which the woman brought into the marriage as a dowry or through inheritance, belonged to the husband. The emotional welfare of children was not considered relevant to the question of who should be granted custody until the end of the nineteenth century. See also: Divorce Laws.

This is how a nineteenth-century artist imagined the baptism of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America.

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CHILDHOOD


CHILDHOOD

WOMEN’S FIRSTS

Although colonial families in British North America had many children, Louisa Caroline Huggins Tuthill was one of the first women those children did not always live very in the United States to write for and about children. Some of long. In the year 1789, a five-year-old her many books, such as I Will Be a Lady: A Book for Girls could expect to live to only 40 years of (1845) and I Will Be a Gentleman: A Book for Boys (1846) age. Due to poor health care and the harsh lifestyle of colonial times, child provided advice on conduct and manners for young girls and mortality was high and many died of boys. Tuthill also wrote the first history of architecture pubdiseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, lished in the United States, History of Architecture from the and yellow fever. Earliest Times (1848). In the colonies, children over the Louisa Huggins was born in New Haven, Connecticut in age of six were considered little adults 1799. The youngest of seven children born to Mary Dickerand were expected to work. Because man and Ebenezer Huggins, she was educated at seminaries colonial society was primarily agrarian for girls in New Haven and Litchfield, Connecticut. She beand many hands made the work gan writing as a child, but burned her compositions, resolvlighter, families had many children— ing never to become one of the literary women she disdained. sometimes as many as 25 in one famHuggins’s literary career began with her marriage to Corily. In addition, the Puritan notion nelius Tuthill, an ordained minister who published a literary that idle hands did the devil’s work afmagazine called the Microscope for six months in 1820 and fected the age at which children were edited the Christian Spectator from 1822 to 1823. Louisa expected to complete chores. ChilCaroline hosted literary meetings at their house, which dren were taught that laziness was the brought her into contact with the likes of Henry E. Dwight worst type of sin. and poet James Gates Percival. Tuthill’s husband encourThe work of children was modeled aged her to write and once published one of her works anonon the traditional gender structure; ymously without her knowledge. girls learned house chores, and boys Tuthill’s husband died in 1825, leaving her with four learned to work the farm. A girl of young children and $131.62. She turned to writing to support four to eight years old might be expected to harvest vegetables in the her family. garden or pluck geese. Older girls would spin thread, sew, clean, cook, and make candles or soap. At age nine or ten, a girl from a low-income family could be cording to a 1642 New England law, parents were sent to work as a maid or cook in the home of a obligated to teach their children to read and write. wealthy family, while a girl from an advantaged Unfortunately, books were scarce because the first family would stay home learning domestic duties printing press in colonial North America was not available until 1646. When schools were started, until she was married. When children had time for play after their girls were less likely than boys to attend, as girls daily chores, they usually played with their siblings. were expected to complete household duties. Common games included hopscotch, marbles, and Only boys of high social status went to school. leapfrog. Toys of the time were few, and were usu- Boys from poor families usually entered apprenally handmade from available resources. Girls ticeships around the age of eight. Families were also expected to teach the chilmade dolls from cornhusks, straw, and rags. Another popular toy was the barrel hoop, which dren to live according to God’s law and to become could be rolled with a stick. If the family had well-behaved citizens. According to the dominant enough money, toys such as dollhouses could be religious belief of the seventeenth century, chilimported from England, but such elaborate play- dren were born with original sin, the legacy of the biblical fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genthings were rare. Although children learned domestic and agri- esis. Their natural tendency to evil must be batcultural skills, in early colonial times most were not tled by the strict teaching of obedience, formally educated because there were no schools self-control, and responsibility. Puritan families until the latter part of the seventeenth century. Ac- believed that a child’s will must be broken—in

CHRISTIANITY

other words, the child’s natural pride must be eliminated in order for the child to behave appropriately. Therefore, beatings were not an uncommon punishment. Some laws of discipline were profoundly harsh, such as the 1648 Massachusetts law that required that children in their teen years who insulted or struck their parents would be put to death. Although there is no official record of this law ever being carried out, its mere existence illustrates the gravity of discipline at the time. By the time young people reached 16 years of age, they were considered full adults. Girls were expected to marry after this age; boys became taxpayers and eligible to serve in the militia. Overall, a colonial childhood was a short one, full of chores and adult expectations. See also: Family Life, Colonial; Infancy; Schools. FURTHER READING

Gordon, Michael, comp. The American Family in Socialhistorical Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.

CHOCTAW HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Choctaw of present-day Mississippi were divided into three regions, with each group being headed by its own chief. Each village chief met with a council of male elders and other experienced males to govern the village. The Choctaw were farmers whose villages were composed of log houses and cornfields. Women planted and tended the fields and men were hunters and warriors. Women also prepared deerskins, which men traded with white settlers. Families were divided in two major divisions, or iksas. Children belonged to their mother’s iksa and were required to marry into a different iksa. Males had political power, but chiefs were chosen through the women’s lines. For examples, a chief’s nephew, his sister’s son, generally inherited power.


CHRISTIANITY

Women’s roles in Christian religions of the era were shaped by Christian interpretations of the Bible, especially in reference to Eve. According to

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the Book of Genesis, Eve, the first woman, was created from Adam’s rib as his “helpmate.” This notion that they were created to serve men put women in a subordinate position. Colonial women lacked power in most churches even though they composed a majority of the congregation populations. In general, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women could not be ordained ministers, could not conduct formal meetings, and could not hold a congregational office (with the exception of the Quaker sect). Because religious belief influenced all colonial society, similar restrictions were placed on secular life as well. Occasionally women were allowed to perform certain functions in the church. There was a conviction that women were naturally pious, and therefore well suited to promote strict adherence to Christian morality. Women of the Baptist faith often served as public speakers on sexual misconduct, pridefulness, and theft. Also, Baptist women could occasionally vote on congregational matters, and in 1764 when the Philadelphia Baptist Congregation tried to prevent the women’s vote, the women of the congregation defended their right. Led by Joanna Anthony, the women won. But it was a short-lived victory; following the American Revolution, their voting rights were officially rescinded. Women were put in charge of funerals, baptisms, and weddings, which were often performed in the home and managed by women who worked under the guidance of male ministers. Women were expected to teach their children religious subjects, a task completed in the home because there were no formal schools in the colonies until the latter part of the seventeenth century. Quakers were allowed more direct roles in the church than women of other denominations, because Quaker theology stated that women and men were partners, as were Adam and Eve before their fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. They were allowed to head women’s meetings and served philanthropic roles such as caring for the sick, widowed, and orphaned. They also disciplined men and women who violated religious law, especially within the vows of marriage, and were qualified to renounce “wayward” Quakers. Although the Quakers promoted a certain amount of equality among the sexes, the Puritans thought much differently. Puritan women who attempted to take leadership in religious issues were often, like Anne Hutchinson, expelled from the church. In Hutchinson’s case, she was banished

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CHURCH MEMBERSHIP

not only from the church but also from the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony for preaching against the Puritan belief that a person’s outward actions indicated whether he or she was born “saved” or “damned.” Many of her preachings threatened the authority of certain clergymen as well as the basic tenets of the Puritan faith. Women of various religious sects also had to pay the price of Eve’s succumbing to temptation in Eden. Christians believed that every person was born with original sin, a result of Eve eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Therefore, women were thought more liable than men to give in to temptation and to become agents of the devil. Hence, most of those persecuted for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were women. FURTHER READING

Braude, Ann. Women and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Butler, Jon. Religion in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.


CHURCH MEMBERSHIP

The status of being an official member of a church. During the colonial era, there were strict tests for becoming a church member. In New England, membership rates hovered around 33 percent, while in some Southern colonies only 5 percent were members. Low percentages do not indicate that colonial churches were unimportant. Church attendance and participation rates were extremely high. Between 50 and 75 percent of colonists participated in their churches, often spending all Sunday at church. Furthermore, churches stood at the heart of colonial society. Situated in the center of Northern colonial towns and villages, churches were the tallest edifices in each settlement. Religion was also intimately tied to the government. Before 1780, many colonists paid taxes to support their congregations and ministers; church buildings served as meeting halls and schools. Although only men could be ordained ministers, in most denominations women made up the

A church service in seventeenth-century Plymouth, Massachusetts

CIVIC LIFE

majority of church attendants and members. One reason that women outnumbered men resides in the differing ways men and women became church members. In the New England Congregational churches, when a man wanted to become a member of a church, he had to speak before the entire congregation and answer any questions that other members may have. If another church member sought to humiliate that man, they could publicly challenge or expose him in front of the entire church. Unlike the men, women did not have to defend themselves to the entire congregation because they were not allowed to speak in church. Women only had to tell their conversion to the local minister. Thus, they did not have to endure public scrutiny. Women also played a more significant role than men in religious and church education as teachers of Sunday schools and the Bible. As Anne Grant, a New York woman commented in her 1808 autobiography, “it was on the females that the task of religious instruction generally devolved.” Colonial religion showed significant pluralism. While Congregationalist churches dominated New England, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans were evenly matched in the middle and Southern colonies. In addition, some denominations thrived in specific locales. While Quakers dominated Pennsylvania religion and politics, Catholics and Jews congregated in Maryland. Other colonial denominations included Lutherans, Moravians, and Methodists. Pluralism, however, had its limits. Colonists who challenged church doctrine experienced censure and sometimes expulsion from the community. Losing one’s church connections meant the severing of social and political links as well. In 1635, for example, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts colony for teaching against state taxation for local churches. Two years later, Massachusetts cast out Anne Hutchinson for leading prayer meetings. Women, Congregationalist leaders maintained, were not allowed to lead in church affairs.

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woman to discuss or show any interest in politics. However, in the years just before the American Revolution, male political leaders realized that they needed the support of women if boycotts of tea and British manufactured goods were to be successful. The first public role women played in American political life involved boycotting tea. Women enthusiastically supported the movement, drinking coffee and herbal teas with gusto in order to bolster the colonial cause. In Edenton, South Carolina, a group of 51 women signed a pact stating that it was their “duty” to do whatever they could to support the “publick good.” According to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “Never before had female Americans formally shouldered the responsibility of a public role. . . . Accordingly, the Edenton statement marked an important turning point in American women’s political perceptions.” Women also helped the colonial cause by refusing to purchase British cloth. Instead, they made and wore their own homespun material. In the South, enslaved women were put to the task of


CITIES AND TOWNS See urban life


CIVIC LIFE

Before the 1760s, women played only a minor role in civic life. It was considered unfeminine for a

Hannah Adams, the first American woman who was able to support herself by writing. Women’s perceptions about their roles in civic life began to change in the late 1700s.

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CIVIC LIFE

spinning and weaving, which eventuTRAILBLAZERS ally raised their status slightly because their skills were valuable. In the North, women were pleased to disHannah Adams was the first American woman who was able cover that an ordinary domestic task to support herself by writing. Although Adams had no formal could become an act of patriotism. education, she learned a great deal from her father, who was Newspapers began to publish infora great lover of books, and from divinity students who mation about women’s activities, inboarded at her parents’ home. cluding how much cloth was One of these students gave Adams Thomas Broughton’s produced by various households or Historical Dictionary of All Religions. This gift sparked her towns. In 1769, the Boston Evening Post interest in studying religion, and she began to read and take wrote that “the industry and frugality notes about different denominations and sects. When her faof American ladies must exalt their ther’s poor business decisions left the family in impoverished character in the Eyes of the World and circumstances, Hannah published her notes under the title serve to show how greatly they are An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects (1784). contributing to bring about the politiThe book was unique in two ways: Hannah had used a wide cal salvation of a whole Continent.” variety of sources for her information, and she had remained Heady words indeed for women who objective in her discussion of the various religions. Although had never before seen their domestic her book was not at first profitable, later editions bought in work similarly praised. enough money for Hannah to pay off all the family’s debts Women who called themselves and support herself. “Daughters of Liberty” met regularly In later years, Hannah became the center of a controversy in many locales to spin thread and involving Reverend Jedidiah Morse. While she was working weave cloth. In some areas the whole on an abridged edition of a history of New England, Morse community came out to watch the published one of his own, even though he had assured her women spin. The women themselves that he would not compete with her. Her many friends were occasionally challenged one another to see who could produce the most in outraged at Morse’s “ungentlemanly” action, and they proa specified time period. All this activity vided an annuity to help support her. In her later years, she led to a revolution in women’s perceppublished several more books about religion. tions of their role in civic life, and As she grew older, Hannah was regarded as an eccentric many women began to read newspawho talked to herself and claimed she had seen a ghost. She pers and pamphlets and to discuss died in 1831 and was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts. politics with their husbands and friends. The first organized civic effort by women in America life began in 1780 as a result of place that which Congress should provide. But the publication of The Sentiments of an American General Washington vetoed her ideas and asked Woman, by Esther De Berdt Reed, a broadside in that the money be used to buy fabric to make which Reed said that women wished to be “really shirts. Reed died before the controversy was enuseful” to the war effort, “like those heroines of tirely worked out. In her place Sarah Franklin antiquity, who have rendered their sex illustrious.” Bache supervised the shirt-making process. She suggested that women give up “vain orna- Women volunteers produced more than 2,000 ments” so that could donate money to the Conti- shirts, each embroidered with the name of the nental troops as “the offering of the Ladies.” woman who made it. In a sense, the first effort to Within a month, women in Philadelphia had col- engage women in organized political action was lected 300,000 continental dollars, the equivalent diminished by turning their effort into “General of $7,500 in gold and silver. Women in New Jersey, Washington’s Sewing Circle.” But once American Maryland, and Virginia were so inspired by the suc- women had gotten a taste of politics, they never cess of the Philadelphia women that they began looked back. As Abigail Smith Adams wrote, “If a woman does not hold the reigns [sic] of Governtheir own collections. Reed wanted the money to be used to give sol- ment, I see no reason for her not judging how they diers something special from the ladies, not to re- are conducted.”

COLONIAL HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

After the war, men began to accept women who expressed their political opinions in private, but few accepted the idea of a public political role for women. In only one state were women granted a public role. The New Jersey state constitution of 1776 gave “all free inhabitants” who held a specified amount of property the right to vote. Thus, women and African Americans voted in New Jersey until 1807, when a law disenfranchising both groups was passed.


COCKACOESKE

(co ca kes kee) (?–1686) Reigning queen of the Pamunkey Indians. The widow of a descendant of the Powhatan, in 1656, her tribe selected her to lead them instead of following their tradition of bestowing kingship on the son of the deceased chief’s eldest sister. After Powhatan’s death in 1618, the coalition of tribes he had forged to dominate eastern Virginia broke down as a result of the periodic wars, especially with the colonists, and the population of the tribe declined. Into this crisis, Cockacoeske brought political shrewdness, a fine sense of style, the formation of a family with an influential white man named West, and the determination to keep her warriors out of white man’s wars. She and her son, “Captain” John West, signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation in 1677, establishing a permanent peace with the English. She made a brief and unsuccessful attempt to restore the traditional tributary obligations of small neighboring tribes, but continued to rule until her death despite the failure of that policy. She appears to have been succeeded by at least two queens, Betty and Ann; the latter still held the title in the 1720s. Cockacoeske successful rule illustrates the great flexibility of Native American social institutions.


COLDEN, JANE See science


COLLEGES

Before the Revolution, few Americans paid attention to the education of women. After the Revolution, however, ideas and attitudes changed markedly. Both men and women began to believe

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that the education of women was crucial to further the ideals of the new republic. Women, after all, would be the first teachers of boys, who would later grow up to be the nation’s future citizens and leaders. And educated men, it was thought, needed educated wives. Despite the concerns of dissenters, who felt that higher education would make women unfeminine and unsuited to be wives and mothers, in the 1780s and 1790s many private academies were founded to educate young women. Before the Revolution, “higher” education for young women consisted of “adventure schools,” which taught such subjects as music, drawing, needlework, and dance. Toward the end of the century, however, several academies were founded to educate young women in such subjects as mathematics, history, geography, Greek and Latin, and rhetoric and logic. These included John Poor’s Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia, a school for young ladies in New York City established by Isabella Marshall Graham and Joanna Graham Bethune, Caleb Bingham’s school in Boston, Jedidiah Morse’s in Boston, Sarah Pierce’s in Litchfield, Massachusetts, and Susanna Rowson’s in Medford, Massachusetts. Many considered the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to be the best of the “female academies.” This school, which was originally limited to students of the Moravian sect, was opened to young women of other religions in 1785. The South tended to lag behind the North in the establishment of schools for young women; the first such school in the South was founded in 1809 by Jacob Mordecai, in Warrenton, North Carolina. The primary reason for the delay was that the South had been more thoroughly devastated by the Revolution than the North and took longer to rebuild. According to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “the republican academies and the reform climate of which they were the chief manifestation had a significant effect on the lives of American women.” Among those who graduated from the early academies were many of the women who led social and reform movements in the nineteenth century.

COLONIAL HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The English household in prerevolutionary North America varied depending on economic status and

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COMMON LAW

not relinquish English legal tradition. Families continued to live by—and most states reenacted— laws based on large portions of the common law. See also: Family Life, Colonial.


COMMON LAW

Colonial women often deferred to men, but their work was crucial to the household economy.

region. The first families to settle in North America faced extreme hardships. The majority died within the first few years. Between 1607 and 1624, only 1,275 of the 6,000 settlers who came to Jamestown, Virginia, were still alive. Before 1640, colonists had a 50 percent chance of dying during their first year in Virginia. Family life, therefore, was transient. In Jamestown, families living in close proximity could help one another. Social ties were established and a sense of community was essential to family survival. Men led the community and established laws by which families had to abide. In the Chesapeake region, family farms were spread out and families became more self-sufficient. Men remained the heads of households and made major family decisions. Wives took an active role in the family farm in the fields in addition to tending to domestic duties and raising children. The structure of most colonial homes was based on biblical standards, in which the husband and father was the head of the household. A man’s wife was to be submissive to him and to his decisions about what was best for the family. English families in America continued to follow common law, in which husbands had control over their wives who had no political power. Husbands continued to exercise their rights of coverture, in which a married woman’s property was completely controlled by her husband during the life of the marriage. After the Revolutionary War, many colonial families loyal to the British crown remade their lives in England. Those remaining in America did

The term common law refers to the body of law that arises out of precedent, or decisions that judges and juries have made in the past. During the colonial period, judges relied on guides to English case law that were written and printed in England. The three most influential guides, written by Edward Coke (1620s), Matthew Hale (1670s), and William Blackstone (1760s), had the greatest influence. The words of all three men were repeated in many different guides throughout the colonial and early national periods. Indeed, one study found that in the United States in the 1790s, newspapers cited Blackstone’s name more often than the name of any political thinker. Many lawyers (and, following their example, historians) describe the common law as unchanging, but it is not. The common law has constantly been changing, and the three men mentioned above left their stamp upon it. Hale, for example, wrote the guidelines about rape that were discussed in the essay on Women and the Law (see pages 6–10). Before that, a jury had more discretion to decide what might constitute a rape. Blackstone extended the meaning of coverture to include many different facets of women’s legal identity, not simple monetary or property questions: he suggested, for example, that women should perhaps not be able to testify against their husbands. If husband and wife were one in the eyes of the law, he reasoned, then a wife testifying against her husband was tantamount to a husband incriminating himself. The implications of his legal strictures on wives reached far into the nineteenth century. The thinkers who expounded the common law did not always offer definitive opinions: They debated throughout the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries about whether a husband was allowed to beat his wife, and if so, how harshly. If a wife died while a husband was punishing her for disobedience, was he guilty of murder? Such questions exemplified the ongoing refinement of legal principles and the evolution of American common law. Holly Brewer

CONSTITUTION, UNITED STATES


CONGREGATIONALISTS

Members of Protestant denominations that are governed by local congregations, including the United Church of Christ and several smaller fellowships. Congregationalism, the modern form of New England Puritanism, became the dominant religious denomination in New England in the 1800s. Both Pilgrims and Puritans believed that all believers share the priesthood of Jesus Christ and should have a voice in church decisions. Both rejected the idea of a national church in favor of autonomous congregations formed by covenants among believers. The two traditions merged in 1648 with the acceptance of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the adoption of the Cambridge Platform, which defined their government. To promote knowledge of the Bible, Congregationalists established elementary schools and universities. Most ministers were college-educated, which was unusual for the time. When disputes about requirements for full church membership threatened to become divisive, the Saybrook Platform (1708) created a central council to resolve disputes between congregations and approve candidates for ordination. However, many congregations preferred to maintain their independence. Women were first attracted to the Congregational church by preachers like John Cotton (1585– 1682), who stressed a personal experience of grace. The biblical story of Eve, who gave her husband the apple of forbidden knowledge, had been traditionally used to teach that women were weak and sinful by nature. However, as women became the majority in most congregations, preachers began describing them as heirs to salvation instead of the inheritors of Eve’s sin. While women sat separately from the men and generally did not speak in church, widows occasionally served as deacons and women conducted Bible study groups in their homes. The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both strengthened and weakened Congregationalism. The denomination organized the first American Protestant missions in 1810. Women formed groups to support the spread of the Christian faith and also served as missionaries. However, Baptists and Unitarians broke away to form their own denominations. At the end of the American Revolution, forms of Congregationalism were the established religion in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New

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Hampshire. Members of the rapidly growing new sects were working to end tax support for Congregational churches. Significant female Congregationalists include poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet; Sarah Pierpont Edwards, whose faith inspired her husband, Jonathan, a noted preacher; and Ann Eliot, who came to New England with her husband, John, to spread the Christian message to Native Americans. FURTHER READING

Hudson, Winthrop S. Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life. 3rd ed. New York: Scribner’s, 1981.

CONSTITUTION, UNITED
STATES The “federal” Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation and established a much stronger frame of national government. Drafted in 1787 by a convention of men, its immediate effect on women was virtually nil, except to reaffirm in yet another way their exclusion from formal political life. All pronouns in the language of the document are masculine, as when it is assumed that either a member of congress (Article I) or the president (Article II) would be a “he,” although women are not specifically excluded from those offices or any others. The document reserves the determination of basic political rights, like the right to vote, to the states, in which women at that time had few political rights. (New Jersey was an exception, with a state constitution bestowing the right to vote on adults who met property and residency requirements. Some women voted under this rule until 1807, when the state legislature closed the loophole.) Debate about the Constitution’s implications for women is lively. Linda K. Kerber and others believe that it reinforced the doctrine of coverture, according to which a woman had no legal personality apart from her husband’s. Jan Lewis argues that the Constitution’s framers made free women the touchstone of the modern liberal state by enumeration all free “person,” including women, to determine representation in Congress (Article I, Section 2). It thereby made white women indubitably citizens with the right to representation. By the three-fifths compromise, however, Congress would include only three out of five slaves in the count for apportioning representation to free people, so all historians agree the Consti-

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COOKE, HARRIET B.

tution did nothing for slave women, defining them implicitly as non-citizens.


COOKE, HARRIET B.

(1786?–?) Nothing is known of Harriet Cooke beyond what appears in her autobiography, which was published in 1858 under the title Memories of My Life Work. The book gives a glimpse of the challenges faced and met by ordinary women in the early years of the Republic. It tells the story of considerable hardship; “I never was a child,” she tells the reader on the first page. The eldest of four children, Cooke became a schoolteacher at the age of 16. She taught for five years before marrying and starting a family. During the War of 1812, Cooke’s husband and brother went into business together but were unsuccessful, so much so that her husband was sent to debtors’ prison. When he was freed, her husband spent the next several years looking for work, until his death from yellow fever. During this period, Harriet supported the family by teaching. After her husband’s death, Harriet borrowed money to establish a boarding house. She later founded a school with her son.

COOLIDGE, ELLEN
RANDOLPH

(1796–1876) Granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. Ellen Randolph was born in 1796 to Martha Jefferson Randolph, one of Thomas and Martha Jefferson’s three children. Ellen was the third child of 11 and Jefferson’s favorite granddaughter. The family lived at Edgehill, a plantation near Monticello. Ellen was almost as serious a student as her notoriously studious grandfather, whom she called her “earliest and best friend.” Jefferson once remarked that “Ellen and Cornelia [Ellen’s sister] are the severest of the students I ever met with. They never leave their room but to come to meals.” In 1825, Ellen married Joseph Coolidge, a native of Boston and a merchant who traded with China. One of the young couple’s wedding presents was from Jefferson, a beautiful handmade desk made by John Hemings. The desk was lost at sea on its way from Virginia to Boston, and John was too old to make another. As a substitute, Jefferson gave the couple the desk on which he signed the Declaration of Independence. According to Jefferson, the desk

was made from a drawing of my own by Benjamin Randolph, a cabinetmaker in whose house I took my first lodgings on my arrival in Philadelphia in May, 1776. And I have used it ever since. It claims no merit of particular beauty. It is plain neat, convenient, and taking no more room on the writing table than a moderate quarto volume, it yet displays itself sufficiently for any writing.

Ellen kept the desk for her entire life. Ellen and Joseph had six children. Their youngest child, Sydney, was killed in the Civil War, fighting on the Union side. Ironically, Ellen’s brother George fought for the Confederacy. Ellen corresponded with her grandfather from her earliest youth until his death in 1826. She and Joseph were married for 52 years; she died in 1876.

CORBIN, MARGARET
COCHRAN

(1751–1800?) The first woman in the United States to receive a military pension. Margaret Cochran was orphaned in 1756, when she was five years old. Her father was killed in a raid by Native Americans and her mother was taken captive and never heard from again. Margaret married John Corbin in 1772. When John enlisted in the Pennsylvania Artillery during the Revolutionary War, Margaret went with him. This was not unusual. Many wives accompanied their husbands, cooking, doing laundry, and nursing the troops. What was unusual was Margaret’s bravery during the Battle of Harlem Heights, New York in 1776. Her husband manned a cannon. When he was killed, Margaret took over his post and continued to fire until she was herself shot with three rounds of grapeshot. She was wounded in the shoulder, chest, and jaws. When the fort was captured by the British, Margaret escaped being taken prisoner. She was taken to Philadelphia to recover from her wounds, but Margaret was never again to have the use of her left arm. In 1779, the Continental Congress granted Margaret a pension, the first ever granted to a woman. Their resolution reads in part: “Margaret Corbin . . . was wounded and utterly disabled at Fort Washington while she heroically filled the post of her husband, who was killed by her side serving a piece of artillery.” In 1783, Margaret Corbin was formally discharged from the Continental Army. She died near West Point, New York, sometime near the turn of

COURTS

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the century. In 1926, the Daughters of the American Revolution moved her remains to a cemetery behind the Old Cadet Chapel at West Point and erected a monument to her.




COREY, MARTHA (?–1692) One of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Before she became 70-year-old Giles Corey’s third wife, nothing is known of Martha Corey’s life. She is remembered today primarily as a victim of the hysteria that gripped the village of Salem in 1692 and led to the execution of 19 people convicted of witchcraft. A group of teenage girls began the madness by accusing the Reverend Samuel Parris’s West Indian slave Tituba and two beggar women of being in league with the devil. Martha Corey was the first respectable member of the community to be accused. “Why I am a Gospel woman & do you think I can have to do with witchcraft too?” —Martha Corey, spoken at her trial for witchcraft

Martha’s initial reaction may have worked against her; she reportedly laughed at the idea of witchcraft and maintained that the girls were not possessed. During her trial, every move she made was exploited by the girls to condemn her. When she bit her lip, the girls screamed and showed bite marks, when she clenched her hands, the girls accused her of pinching them. When she cried out that she was a “gospel woman,” the girls responded that she was a “gospel witch.” On September 22, 1692, Martha Corey and seven others were hanged for witchcraft and buried in an unmarked grave.


COURTS

The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts hoped to establish a society based on religious principles, and, in keeping with this goal, based their legal system on the Bible as opposed to English common law. Virginia and other southern colonies based their legal systems on English law from the beginning.

Later colonial courts served women less well than those of the seventeenth century.

Because of the religious basis for law in Puritan society, women in New England had unusual opportunities for their voices to be heard in court, even though Puritan law was harsh with respect to women. Puritan judges punished women who refused to submit to male authority and accused many more women than men of witchcraft. At the same time, because courts in colonial New England at first did not allow lawyers and had clear and simple rules that most people could understand, access to the legal system for women was relatively easy. Women came before the courts to request the payment of debts, to defend themselves against accusations of slander, and to petition for divorce. When women accused men of sexual assault, the Puritan justices were initially much more willing to listen to women’s testimony than would be the case in the eighteenth century. They held men to strict standards of moral behavior and, according to Dayton, “came close to establishing a single standard for men and women in the areas of sexual and moral conduct.” In the eighteenth century, as the authority of the church declined in New England, the legal system shifted to resemble the English system, which included professional attorneys and strict rules of procedure and evidence. These changes led to fewer women coming in contact with the courts. According to Dayton, “after 1700, women’s cases were filtered through several layers of men dis-

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COURTSHIP

pensing legal advice and decrees.” In addition, stricter rules of evidence led to fewer men receiving punishments for sexual crimes. In colonial courts, for example, a woman’s testimony about who had fathered an out-of-wedlock child was accepted if she identified the father to the midwife during labor and swore an oath in court. In the eighteenth century, however, a man accused of fathering a child would hire a lawyer and request a jury trial. Thus, the burden of proof was shifted to the woman. Stricter rules of evidence required that she bring in a witness to the sexual act itself, a nearly impossible task. These cases most often resulted in a ruined reputation for the woman and a not- guilty verdict for the man. This was the beginning of a long legal tradition of putting a woman on trial for sexual crimes perpetrated against her. FURTHER READING

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.


COURTSHIP

Courtship in the 1600s and early 1700s in Britain’s American colonies was quite different from courtship in Europe in the same era. Chaperones, an important element in European courtship rituals, were not necessary because most colonists lived in small villages where everyone knew everyone else. Young people could not wander far from home to be alone, because they would soon find themselves in a dangerous wilderness. Young women in New England had some more say in determining who they married than their European counterparts. The same was true in the South. In fact, in 1632, Virginia passed a law that allowed young people to choose a mate without parental consent. Wealthier parents generally had more say in who their daughters married and did not hesitate to break off love matches if they thought that they could improve their daughter’s prospects by marrying her to another. For example, the father of Nancy Shippen refused to let her marry Louis Otto because of his lack of prospects; instead, he pressured her to marry the wealthy Henry Livingston. Unfortunately, the marriage was an unhappy one. Livingston eventually left her husband but was not free to remarry. When Otto married her best friend, all Nancy could do was wish the couple well. Even though women had some say in whom they wished to marry, formal courtship could not

begin until the couple’s parents were consulted. Once the parents had granted permission for a couple to court, they could not arbitrarily withdraw consent. While the young people got to know each other, often systematically revealing their faults so there would be no surprises after marriage, the parents discussed the business side of the arrangement. Parents who were able provided dowries or bride’s portions for their daughters, and both families contributed to buying or building a home for the young couple. Eventually dowries became much less important in British America than in Europe, where poor peasant girls were sometimes forced to seek dowries from charitable organizations in order to marry. Near the end of the eighteenth century, it became fashionable for socially prominent young women to turn courtship into a teasing game. They would flirt with many young men while pretending to give them no encouragement. When a young man did propose, the woman was required to toy with his feelings a bit and turn him down at least once. Linda Grant DePauw notes that “Courting practices in which so much dishonesty was involved did not encourage frankness and mutual understanding in marriage.” After the Revolution, courtship in America became even more open, especially when compared with customs on the continent. In fact, European visitors were often surprised by the public nature of American courtship. When the Marquis de Chastellux saw a couple holding hands, he commented on “the extreme liberty that prevails in this country between the two sexes, as long as they are not married. It is no crime for a girl to kiss a young man” (Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782). Many writers after the Revolution urged parents to allow their daughters to choose their husbands for themselves, and many daughters did just that. According to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “when Anna Rawle wanted to marry John Clifford in 1783, she simply informed her mother of her plans, asking her opinion only about the timing of the wedding, and then she rejected even that limited advice.”


COVERTURE

The common-law concept governing the rights of married women. When the British North American colonies were settled, British common law governed many aspects of life. Under the common

CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN

law, a single woman or feme sole became a feme covert, or covered woman, upon marriage, or coverture. She lost many of her basic rights, including the right to control property. Her legal identity was submerged into that of her husband. If she owned any property before her marriage or acquired any afterward, her husband became the legal owner of these assets. He also, by law, controlled any money that she earned. A wife could not enter into contracts, or even initiate a lawsuit. In 1839, Mississippi became the first state to change these laws. Over the years, women were granted increased legal rights.


CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN

Although court records are incomplete and testimonies often lacking, colonial criminal justice statistics indicate that men committed approximately 5 percent of violent crimes and 25 percent of thefts. Crimes committed against colonial women include physical assaults such as murder and burglary, which violated legal codes enacted by governing authorities. Because women could not vote, they had minimal input into writing legal codes to define crimes and appropriate punishments for violators.

Bodily Crimes Home was often the most dangerous place for women. In 1664, a Maryland petit jury found Pope Alvey guilty of beating his servant Alice Sandford to death. He was punished by a sheriff who branded his right hand with a hot iron. Some girls were victims of incest. English law defined rape as intercourse with a child less than ten years old both with or against their consent and any physical penetration with unwilling women over the age of ten. When three of John Humfry’s servants raped his nine-year-old daughter in 1640s Massachusetts, they were punished with fines and whippings. One man had his nostrils slit and seared and was forced to wear a noose. The severity of this case resulted in the General Court declaring rape a capital offense. The question of victims’ credibility and consent were crucial to trial outcomes. Juries and judges also considered the social status of the accused rapists. Victims had to convince juries that they had been raped and that they had resisted the attack. When Rebeccah Tripp accused her neighbor Simon Tripp, a Native American laborer, of rape in 1723, several witnesses supported him and said

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that she had told different versions of the incident. Her social status and the belief by some jurors that she would not have lied about such a serious crime resulted in Tripp being declared guilty, lashed, and fined to pay court costs. In 1687 New Jersey, Charles Sheepey was convicted of raping Elizabeth Hutcheson because the jury did not believe his claims that she had been a willing participant. He was whipped publicly while being transported naked in a cart through town. In other cases, such as Mary Hawthorne versus Moses Hudson and Abigail Kindall versus Thomas Procter, jurors doubted that the women had been forced to have sexual intercourse or that penetration had happened.

Criminal Activity Married women were not allowed to own property; however, women wore clothing, used cooking tools, and formed bonds with livestock that were identified as belonging to them. When these items or animals were stolen, though, the woman’s husband, not the woman, was designated the crime victim. Court records did not record the woman’s name, nor did she receive any compensation for her loss. Although most colonial criminals who victimized women were males, women also committed crimes against females. Elizabeth Browne was a servant who ran away in 1664 Charles County, Maryland, depriving her mistress of labor. Women killed female babies. In 1701, Esther Rogers was hung for infanticide. That crime, however, was difficult to prove, and only one woman was found guilty of infanticide in Massachusetts from 1730 to 1780. Because most women were economically dependent on men, trusting them with monetary decisions, criminals often cheated women who became impoverished. Women who had been victimized and were unable to pay their creditors often were incorrectly labeled as criminals by courts while their robber remained unpunished. Some women were unfairly jailed and held in stocks to achieve public humiliation and physical discomfort. Older women and widows were the most vulnerable to theft, and their impoverished status sometimes resulted in males, including their perpetrator, making false accusations of witchcraft against them. Between 1620 and 1725, 36 people were killed based on accusations made during witch hunts in New England. Women comprised four out of five

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CROCKER, HANNAH MATHER

of these victims. Margaret Jones was the first woman found guilty and executed as a witch in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1648, the same year witchcraft was designated a capital offense by The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts. Fourteen women were hung during the 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials. Native Americans abducted and killed white women, but some captivity narratives were dramatized as anti-Indian propaganda. Survivors, such as Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Duston, verified that women were forced to march long distances and occasionally were stripped naked to run a gauntlet. In 1697, Duston and her nurse, Mary Neff, murdered Indian women in self-defense to escape her captors, and her actions were considered justified and heroic at that time. Some historians, though, say that she unnecessarily murdered those females because they posed no threat to her. See also: Fornication; Property Rights. FURTHER READING

Bellesiles, Michael A., ed. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Crane, Elaine Forman. Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The “Weaker” Sex in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Lindemann, Barbara S. “ ‘To Ravish and Carnally Know’: Rape in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts.” In Charles O. Jackson, ed., The Other Americans: Sexual Variance in the National Past. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, Chapter 4. Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

CROCKER, HANNAH
MATHER

(1752–1829) An early advocate of the equality of the sexes. Hannah Mather was the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Mather and granddaughter of Cotton Mather, the great Puritan clergyman. Her mother, Hannah Hutchinson, was the sister of Thomas Hutchinson (who became governor of the Massa-

chusetts Bay Colony), and a descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Despite her distinguished family connections, Hannah had little education. As she later wrote, it was considered enough at the time “if women could even read and badly write their name.” She married Joseph Crocker in 1779 and bore him ten children. Crocker began her career as a writer in her sixties. She is best remembered for her 1818 publication, Observations on the Real Rights of Women, in which she said that God had “endowed the female mind with equal powers and faculties, and given them the same right of judging and acting for themselves, as he gave to the maile sex.” Crocker agreed with the basic ideas of British writer Mary Wollstonecraft, but did not agree with Wollstonecraft’s call for “the total independence of the female sex.” Crocker favored better education for girls so that they could earn their own livings. She also said that women should be equal partners in marriage and share in financial decisions. Crocker kept writing well into her seventies and took a lively interest in public affairs. She died in 1829.

CUSTIS, ELEANOR
CALVERT

(1758–1811) Daughter-in-law of George Washington. Eleanor Calvert was born in 1758, the second daughter of Benedict Calvert, son of the fifth Lord Baltimore. When she was just 14 years old, Eleanor first met George Washington’s stepson, John ( Jacky) Parke Custis. Jacky paid a number of visits to the Calvert home on trips between Mount Vernon and King’s College in New York, and, in 1774, proposed to Eleanor. When Washington learned of the romance, he wrote to Benedict Calvert that Jacky’s “youth, inexperience, and unripened education are, and will be, insuperable obstacles in my opinion to the completion of the marriage.” Washington emphasized that he did not want to break off the match, only to postpone it for a couple of years. He did not prevail, however, and on February 3, 1774, the couple were married. Eleanor was just 16, Jacky 21. Eleanor and Jacky settled at Abingdon, near Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. They had four children: Elizabeth, born in 1776, Martha, born in 1777, Eleanor, born in 1779, and George,

DARRAGH, LYDIA BARRINGTON

born in 1781. When Washington left Mount Vernon to command the Continental Army, he left his wife, Martha, in Jacky’s charge. Near the end of the war, Jacky joined Washington in Yorktown as an aide and almost immediately contracted dysentery. He died in October 1781, leaving Eleanor with four young children. Two years after Jacky’s death, Eleanor married Dr. David Stuart. Her two youngest children, Nelly and “Wash,” were adopted and raised by George and Martha Washington. Some historians say that on his deathbed Jacky asked Washington to raise the children; others say the adoption took place

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later, perhaps because Stuart did not want to marry a woman with four children. After the marriage, the Stuarts moved to Hope Park, near Alexandria, Virginia. Historian Charles Moore says that Eleanor “is credited generally with seven children by her second husband,” but he quotes a letter, written in 1802 by Eleanor’s daughter, Nelly, in which she says, “My Dear Mother has just recovered from her confinement with her twentieth child.” Thus, Eleanor may have had 16 children with Stuart. Eleanor Calvert Custis died in 1811. See also: Law, Elizabeth Custis.

D
DAME SCHOOLS

Schools that provided basic education for young children. Dame schools existed in North America from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s. They were modeled on similar schools in England. “Dame” refers to the fact that women were in charge of the instruction. In most cases dame schools were located in the home of the schoolmistress, who could take care of her own children and do her household chores while she taught. Often these schools were an important source of income, but the women who ran them varied widely in their qualifications. In 1827, a dame school proprietor, Mary Jacobs, advertised that she would teach “reading, writing, cyphering, spelling, needlework and fancy Knitting at her house by Sewall’s Bridge.” The six-cent weekly tuition “could be paid in sugar, tea or coffee.” While Jacobs offered quite a bit of instruction, many dame schools were little more than babysitting services, and not very good ones at that. English novelist Charles Dickens describes a dame school of this sort in Great Expectations (1860). He says that “Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept [a] . . . school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep . . . in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it.” Both boys and girls attended, boys usually from age six to ten, girls sometimes longer. The curriculum was the “three Rs,” reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. The first and most important subject taught in a dame school was reading. It was be-

lieved that students had to master reading before writing, and writing before arithmetic. Often, in the case of girls, instruction was limited to reading, since it was not considered necessary for a girl to know how to write or use numbers. Girls who continued their educations might go on to “adventure schools” where they learned drawing, painting, music, dancing, and needlework. After the American Revolution Thomas Jefferson proposed that the new nation create a system of free public schools supported by taxes, but it was not until the 1830s that his vision was put into action. Dame schools were gradually replaced by free public schools.


DARE, VIRGINIA See childbirth

DARRAGH, LYDIA
BARRINGTON

(1729–1789) Revolutionary War hero. Lydia Darragh and her husband, William, emigrated to Philadelphia from Ireland in 1753. For 40 years, Lydia supplemented the family income by working as a nurse, midwife, and undertaker. During the American Revolution, General William Howe lived across the street from the Darraghs while British forces occupied Philadelphia. He used a room in their home for a secret meeting of his staff in December 1777. He asked the family

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simple affairs. Members of the family and friends prepared the body for burial, and male family members dug the grave on the family land. A minister might say a few words at the grave side, then everyone would gather in the home to share a meal. People did not romanticize death; in fact, their attitude seems almost casual. In the early national period funerals became much more elaborate. More people were buried in cemeteries, and the family would present gifts, such as gold rings, to those who attended the funeral. Tombstones were carved with angels, willow trees, and tearful family members. The simple meal of earlier years became an elaborate feast. In general, funerals became an opportunity to display wealth, as well as grief.

to go to bed early and not get up until morning. Instead Lydia listened at the keyhole and heard his plans to attack the Continental forces, which were stationed at Whitemarsh. In the morning, Darragh got a pass to travel beyond Philadelphia on the pretext of buying flour. On her way to Washington’s camp, she met Colonel Thomas Craig, whom she warned of the attack. Craig passed the information on to Washington. Darragh’s story was first told by her daughter Ann in 1827. Earlier, Elias Boudinot, Commissary of Prisoners, had claimed to be the person who warned Washington. He said a “poor, little old lady” had given him the information in a needle case while he was dining at the Rising Sun Tavern. Because there were two contradictory versions of events, some historians discounted the story completely. Today many historians believe that it was, in fact, Lydia Darragh who performed the heroic deed. Lydia Darragh died in 1789.

DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE


DEATH AND FUNERALS

The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 to justify the separation of the American colonies from British rule. Fundamental to the document’s message is the idea of equality:

Death in colonial North America was a public event; friends and neighbors joined the family to wait at the deathbed. The person who was dying hoped to die with dignity and to speak last words that would be remembered by family members. The high death rate in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland made remarriage quite common. Sometimes there were children from two or three marriages living in the same house. Children often referred to their fathers’ new wives as “now wives,” and parents referred to their stepchildren as sons and daughters “in law.” Orphans became a tremendous social problem because, as Carol Berkin notes in First Generations, “There were not enough uncles, aunts, or older siblings to provide a sufficient safety net—economic or emotional— for orphaned boys and girls.” Special courts had to be established to oversee the care of orphaned children. Because of healthier climates, the average life span became longer as one traveled north. In New England, for example, the average life span was many years longer than in the South. In fact, it has been said that New England “invented” grandparents, because many hardy individuals there lived into their sixties and seventies, longer even than in Europe. In the seventeenth century, funerals were very

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 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.

In writing that “all men” were “created equal,” Jefferson presumably meant men, not all of humanity. The ideas concerning equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence did not generally include women. Nor did the Declaration directly alter the status of women in the American colonies. Ironically, after the American Revolution, laws limiting the freedom of women were enforced more strictly than in the period before the Revolution. For example, although colonial women were not legally allowed to bring lawsuits, many did anyway. After the Revolution, few women saw the Declaration as a document that applied to their situation, and even fewer suggested that women should be equal to men in marriage or politics. Those women who did demand rights tended to focus on the subject of an equal education. Some women felt that the superficial education given to women in 1700s—instruction in drawing, cooking, music, sewing, and dancing—was inap-

DENOMINATIONALISM

TRAILBLAZERS Mary Katherine Goddard and her mother, SARAH UPDIKE GODDARD, were among the first women to publish newspapers and run printing businesses in the United States. Mary Katherine, who was born in 1738 in Connecticut, and her older brother William were brought up in the business. One of Goddard’s most important contributions occurred in January 1777, when Congress authorized her to print the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that included the names of those who had signed it. In 1768, William Goddard began publishing the Pennsylvania Chronicle; at the end of that year Mary Katherine arrived in Philadelphia to help him with the business. From 1773 to 1774, Goddard ran the Chronicle on her own while William established a new paper, the Maryland Journal, in Baltimore. Goddard then closed the Chronicle and joined William in Baltimore to assist him with this new venture. By 1775, “M. K. Goddard” was listed as the publisher of the Maryland Journal. Though William still owned the paper, he had been asked to establish a colonial postal service in Annapolis and had left the day-to-day work of the paper and print shop to his sister. During the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, Goddard was one of the largest and most important printers in Baltimore. She was also appointed postmaster at Baltimore in this period, making her perhaps the first woman to serve in this capacity in the colonies and certainly the first to do so after the Declaration of Independence. In 1784, a bitter quarrel with her brother resulted in Goddard’s turning the paper back over to him. Neither Goddard nor her brother ever revealed what they argued about, but Goddard never worked as a printer again. She continued as postmaster until she was asked to step down in 1789, on the grounds that a woman could not adequately perform the duties, which involved extensive travel. She also operated a bookstore until 1809 or 1810. She died in Baltimore in 1816 at the age of 78.

propriate for republican women. For example, Judith Sargent Murray asked, in a magazine article, “Is it reasonable that . . . an intelligent being . . . should at present be so degraded as to be allowed no other ideas, than those that are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or sewing the seams of a garment?” Abigail Smith Adams expressed similar sentiments when she wrote to her husband, John, “If we mean to have heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, we should have

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learned women.” Almost no one called for political freedom or overall sexual equality. It was not until 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention, that women issued a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal.” FURTHER READING

DePauw, Linda Grant, and Conover Hunt. Remember the Ladies: Women in America 1750–1815. New York: Viking, 1976. Mankiller, Wilma, et al., eds. The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587– 1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

DENOMINATION
ALISM

The tendency to divide into religious denominations or sects. Many colonists in British North America came to America in order to practice religions that were not tolerated in European countries. Although members of several denominations such as the Puritans, did not tolerate other religions in their settlements, members of others, such as the Quakers, did. Over time, however, the sheer number of different denominations led to greater tolerance. Overall, women were more involved in religion than men, especially if one looks at church membership as a measure. By the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, women made up almost 75 percent of all of the congregations in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Some preachers at the time speculated that women were more pious because of the threat to life that childbirth posed. Whatever the reason, women began to be valued as the backbone of religion. Different faiths had different attitudes toward women, and women themselves began to establish denominations that stressed equality between

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the sexes. Although Puritans believed that women should be ruled by men in their daily lives, Puritan preachers, such as Cotton Mather, stressed that women were spiritually equal to men—in God’s eyes, according to Mather, men and women were “joynt Heirs of salvation.” But when Anne Hutchinson wanted to put this concept of equality into practice in the 1630s by preaching about her own beliefs, she was banished from the colony. The Quakers of Pennsylvania and Maryland were much more egalitarian than the Puritans of Massachusetts. Women were allowed and encouraged to preach, and they even held their own meetings, separate from men. William Penn said of the women’s meetings, “Women whose bashfulness will not permit them to say or do much, as to church affairs, before men, when by themselves, may exercise their gift of wisdom and understanding, in a direct care of their own sex.” Southerners in the early days of settlement were primarily members of the Church of England, and women were expected to follow the words of St. Paul and “keep silent” in matters of religion. However, Mary Taney, from Calvert County, Maryland, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking for help to build a church because of the “sad condition” of the “stray flock” in the colony. The king himself granted her request. In later years, Southern women were active in establishing and promoting the Methodist and Baptist faiths. At least three women were influential in founding religious denominations in America. From 1740 to 1744, Anna Nitschman, a Moravian leader, unified the congregations of the United Brethren. Jemima Wilkinson, preaching doctrines similar to those of the Quakers, founded a religious settlement called Jerusalem in western New York state. Ann Lee founded the American branch of the United Society of Believers, known as Shakers, and taught that God was both male and female. Many African Americans, when given a choice, converted from the West African religions of their forebears—animist or Muslim—to the Methodist and Baptist faiths, incorporating some distinctive African beliefs into the Christian systems. Catholic women in the new world could practice their religion actively as either laywomen or nuns. Jeanne Mance, a lay Catholic, ran Montre´al’s first hospital. A nun, Marie Guyart, was the first female missionary in New France.


DIARIES AND JOURNALS

A number of women in Britain’s North American colonies kept diaries. Some diaries were written by prominent women, such as Abigail Smith Adams, while others were written by ordinary women struggling with ordinary life. If these latter works are known today, it is because they were published by the women themselves, or by relatives and friends. A few were discovered by scholars many years after the writers had died. The earliest American diaries are unadorned records of daily life, often repetitious, with daily tasks and the deaths of children recorded in the same spare prose. Many women diarists began writing as a result of a life change, often when they were married. Others wrote to keep in touch with family and friends left behind as they traveled westward. One clear purpose was simply to keep a record of what happened in the family, of births, deaths, marriages, and visits to family and friends. For example, Mary Vial Holyoke, who lived from 1737 to 1802, writes:

In her teens, Caroline Howard Gilman kept a poetry journal and was upset when a poem of hers appeared in a local newspaper.

DISEASES

Sept 5. I was brought to bed about 2 o’Clock A.M. of a daughter. [Sept.] 6. The Child Baptized Mary. [Sept.] 7. The baby very well till ten o’Clock in the evening and then taken with fits. [Sept.] 8. The baby remained very ill all day. [Sept.] 9. It died about 8 o’Clock in the morning. [Sept.] 10. Was buried.

TRAILBLAZERS Caroline Howard was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. When she married Samuel Gilman in 1819, at 25, she moved with him to Charleston, South Carolina. Although she missed her native New England, Caroline Gilman came to love her adopted home in the South. In the 1830s and 1840s, when tensions between the North and South were growing, Gilman became convinced that the differences between the two regions were actually slight compared to their similarities. What held the nation together, she felt, were the domestic values—families, and especially women and children. Beginning in about 1832, Gilman began to write about and for the American family. She published one of the earliest magazines for children, Rose-Bud, or Youth’s Gazette, and she wrote romances, humorous sketches, short stories, poetry, articles, and almanacs. Among her publications were The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (1838), Tales and Ballads (1839), Love’s Progress (1840), and A Gift Book of Stories and Poems for Children (1850). Her focus was often on the underlying similarities of families, no matter where they lived. Gilman’s career as a writer had begun when she was only ten years old. Her father, Samuel Howard, had died when she was three, and her mother died seven years later. After her mother’s death, Gilman began to write poems to help herself cope. When one of her poems appeared in a local newspaper without her knowledge, she was horrified. She said she was “as alarmed as if I had been detected in man’s apparel.” Another poem was published, this time with Gilman’s consent, in the North American Review in 1817. During the Civil War, Gilman was loyal to the Southern cause. After the war, her popularity with readers dwindled, and she no longer published. She died in 1888 at the age of 94.

Martha Ballard’s diary, begun in 1785, when she was 50, and covering a period of 27 years, is similarly spare in its presentation of details. In the same simple language, she records how many yards of cloth she wove, the death of a baby she delivered, and the insanity of a neighbor who murdered his entire family before taking his own life. These early diaries give little insight into the inner lives of their authors, in contrast to diaries written in later years. Women during the colonial period did not have a lot of leisure time to spend writing; more importantly, according to Margo Culley in A Day at a Time, they did not consider the inner, emotional state to be as important as the social fabric of their lives. The diaries of Abigail Abbot Bailey (1746–1815) and Nancy Shippen (1763–1841) are much more personal than Mary Holyoke’s or Martha Ballard’s. Both women write with great feeling about their unhappiness in marriage and the helplessness they feel in trying to cope with their husbands’ tyrannical behavior. Other diarists of the period are Elizabeth Sandwich Drinker (1735–1807), Elizabeth Fuller (1776–1856), and Margaret Van Horn Dwight (Bell) (1790–1834).


DISEASES

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The most devastating disease in North America in the colonial and early national periods was smallpox. If this deadly virus attacked a community, almost everyone was sure to get it. Among Europeans,

one in every seven or eight people who contracted the disease died from it. The death rate was higher among Native Americans, with some populations entirely wiped out. African Americans had some immunity to the disease, so fewer died. In his journal (1630–1649) Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts described in vivid detail the suffering of the Native American population near Plymouth who were afflicted with smallpox: They lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running into one another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn . . . a whole

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DIVORCE LAWS

side will flay off at once . . . and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold.

Those people who did not die of smallpox were often scarred for life, their faces and bodies deeply pitted. Smallpox continued to devastate the population until vaccines began to be used, in the 1720s. Unfortunately, the method of inoculation used through most of the eighteenth century was itself quite dangerous, and many people would not allow themselves to be vaccinated. With Edward Jenner’s discovery of the safer cowpox vaccine in 1796, more people were inoculated, and the incidence of the disease began to decline. Malaria, while not usually deadly, was common, especially in the South. People who contracted this disease often found that their immunity to other illnesses was lowered. In addition to smallpox and malaria, colonists also contracted infectious diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, cholera, measles, scarlet fever, and yellow fever. Often, people died not from disease but from the treatment they received. It was believed that bleeding restored the body’s balance and that vomiting expelled toxins from the body. Some prescriptions for bleeding patients called for removing 40 ounces of blood; others actually called for removing more blood than doctors now know exists in the entire body. Both lances and leeches were used to take the blood. It is easy to see why an English physician who visited America wrote, “More die of the practitioner than of the natural course of the disease.” Herbal remedies were also used. As male doctors gradually replaced mostly female folk healers, homemade remedies came under fire. But the truth about these homemade concoctions is that some of them helped, many were harmless, and few caused any real damage—which could not be said for some of the methods used by early doctors. Remedies prescribed by folk healers included everything from sassafras and alcoholic spirits to turkey buzzard eggs, wolf fangs, and rattlesnake oil. When colonial women of European descent spoke of recipes or “receipts,” they were usually referring to instructions for concocting homemade medications. For example, a recipe book belonging to Martha Washington contains instructions for making “capon ale,” which she thought might cure tuberculosis. “Take an old Capon with yellow Leggs pull him and crush ye bones . . . and put him into two gallons of strong ale.”

During the American Revolution, women who traveled with the army nursed many wounded men back to health, and where women were not present, disease often was. One observer of the siege of Boston noted that the men often contracted dysentery because their wives were not around to tell them to wash their hands and faces and keep themselves clean.


DIVORCE LAWS

Prerevolutionary divorce laws in British America followed the English model. While annulment was allowed in some strictly limited circumstances, divorce was not. Sometimes a spouse could be awarded a divorce from “bed and board,” meaning that the couple could live apart even though they were not legally divorced. This meant that neither spouse could remarry. Before the American Revolution a divorce was virtually impossible to obtain in the colonies, although a divorce was granted by a Puritan court in Massachusetts in 1639. Marriages were considered permanent, and the only thing other than death that could end a marriage would be a condition predating the marriage that rendered the ceremony itself invalid, such as a prior marriage. After the Revolution, divorces could be granted under a “fault” system. The liberalization of divorce laws after the Revolution may have been related to the ideas of liberty and freedom articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote a brief in a divorce case in 1772, in which he said it was cruel “to chain a man to misery until death” and that “the liberty of divorce prevents and cures domestic quarrels.” But even so, a divorce was not easy to obtain. The “fault” system required that one party to the suit be guilty and the other innocent, a very high standard to meet. Many states allowed only adultery and desertion as grounds for divorce, while others had somewhat broader grounds. Vermont allowed divorce on the grounds of “intolerable severity” while Rhode Island included “gross behavior and wickedness.” In practice, it was generally acceptable for a man to have an affair. His wife was expected to tolerate his behavior. Women who engaged in extramarital sex, however, were condemned for their “loose” behavior. Because of the concept of coverture, divorced women had no legal status as persons and no legal rights to either children or property, including their

DOMESTIC ARTS

own personal property, inheritances, or dowry. Only in the nineteenth century did courts begin to weigh the interests of the children over a father’s rights; this led to mothers being granted custody more often, especially of young children, and to the idea of child support. Because divorces were difficult to obtain, some unhappy couples separated by mutual consent. Such agreements, however, were not legal, and the parties could not remarry. In other cases, the husband or wife would simply run off. If a man deserted his wife, she was left in particularly difficult circumstances, since she could not legally conduct business. Any money or property she did manage to acquire could later be claimed by the husband. Her marital status was also at issue: How could she remarry if she did not know where her husband was or even if he was still alive? Men in Southern states would often advertise for runaway wives in the same manner as they did for runaway slaves. In a response that was by no means typical, Sarah Cantwell of South Carolina answered her husband’s advertisement with one of her own: John Cantwell has the impudence to advertise me in the Papers, cautioning all Persons against crediting me; he never had any Credit till he married me; As for his Bed and Board mentioned, he had neither Bed nor Board when he married me; I never eloped, I went away before his face when he beat me.

Most women chose to stay in unhappy marriages rather than risk the consequences of divorce. Even a woman who was severely abused had little recourse other than to accept her situation. Beatings that came just short of rendering the woman crippled for life were considered moderate punishment and allowed under the law. With westward expansion, the legalities surrounding marriage and divorce were frequently ignored. The absence of judges or clergy to conduct ceremonies on the frontier often resulted in couples’ simply declaring themselves husband and wife. Such a married couple might simply declare themselves divorced and then remarry, creating a serious problem with bigamy. See also: Franklin, Deborah Read. FURTHER READING

Basch, Norma. Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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Riley, Glenda. Divorce: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Sochen, June. Herstory: A Record of the American Woman’s Past. 2nd ed. Sherman Oaks, CA: Alfred, 1981.


DIX, DOROTHEA See volume 2


DOMESTIC ARTS

Colonial women had five basic areas of responsibility: to feed their family; make the clothing and other household essentials; clean; nurse the sick; and rear the children. Each of these tasks brought with it a series of specific duties. Since little food in the colonies was eaten raw, a primary task for the women of a household was maintaining the fire, winter and summer. Fireplaces were large enough to walk around in, and the work involved in adding and banking wood was considerable. Fires could not be allowed to go out, since it was difficult to restart them. If a fire did go out, someone usually had to be sent to fetch glowing embers from a neighbor’s fire, which could then be used to start a new one. While men hunted to provide meat for the table, women were in charge of growing herbs and vegetables, keeping bees for honey, and taking care of barnyard animals such as pigs and chickens. They also preserved fish, meat, fruits, and vegetables, using recipes handed down from mother to daughter. Food was generally preserved in large quantities. A recipe from the period, for example, calls for salting a hundred pounds of beef tongue. Cooking itself was a strenuous physical activity, since a typical pot filled with soup could weigh as much as 80 pounds. The cook was always at risk of being burned over the hot flames. For most women, making clothing was their most important domestic task. Though spinning, weaving, and sewing took a lot of time, women’s letters and diaries reveal that they enjoyed these duties much more than cooking because the results were more lasting and they could socialize while they worked. Because women had to spin the flax and wool into thread and then dye the thread before they wove it into cloth, making a man’s cloth suit could take as long as a year. In addition to producing clothing, women also made all of the family’s bedding, candles, soap, beer, and medicines.

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DOMESTIC ARTS

Charles Weisberger’s painting helped disseminate the legend of Betsy Ross’s creating the first American flag.

By modern standards, houses, clothes, and even people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not very clean. Still, the effort involved in housekeeping was substantial, starting with the manufacture of the soap itself, which women made from ashes and animal fat. Then they had to fetch water from a nearby stream or well. Women who could read studied medical texts so they could treat the various diseases their families contracted. More often, however, women shared remedies with one another and passed them down from mother to daughter. Some women served as midwives; that is, they specialized in helping with the childbirth process. Although male doctors existed, most of the actual treatment of the sick was done by women who learned from one another. Because of the high rate of death in infancy, many women in the colonial and early national period adopted a somewhat detached attitude toward their offspring at first, often referring to a baby as

“it,” or simply “the baby” until the child had reached the age of two or three. Children were frequently named after a sibling who died, almost as if they were replacements rather than individuals in their own right. Children were put to work around the house as soon as possible and later sent away from home to serve as helpers in someone else’s house or as apprentices. Many people believed that children ought to become adults as soon as possible, and punishments for childish behavior were often very severe. Mary Beth Norton, in Liberty’s Daughters, notes that women seldom complained about how hard they worked. They expected to work hard. Instead they complained about how boring and repetitive their work was and how little time they had for themselves. Wealthy women had more leisure time than poor or middle-class women, but those with servants or large households often faced daunting management tasks. Native American women spent

DOMESTIC LIFE

TRAILBLAZERS Betsy Ross was an American patriot and flag-maker during the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Her major contribution to the war effort was sewing flags for the Pennsylvania State Navy Board. The traditional story that Betsy Ross made the first American flag did not begin until about 1870, 34 years after her death. Ross’s grandson William Canby introduced the story. In a paper presented to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Canby asserted that George Washington, Robert Morris, and George Ross, her late husband’s uncle, approached Betsy Ross in June 1776 to make the nation’s first flag. According to the legend, Ross was asked to make this flag for the new nation that would gain its independence the following month. Canby stated that his grandmother then made the flag in her upholstery shop. The story is that Ross decided to use a simpler five-point star rather than the six-point star suggested by Washington. Evidence suggests that Francis Hopkinson of New Jersey, one of the signers of the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, actually designed the nation’s first flag. In May 1780, Hopkinson sent a bill to the Board of Admiralty and was paid for “designing the flag of the United States.” Betsy Ross was born Elizabeth Griscom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was brought up a QUAKER. The Society of Friends nullified her CHURCH MEMBERSHIP when she married John Ross, an Episcopalian, in 1773. John Ross was killed in 1776 while serving in the Revolutionary War. After her husband’s death, Ross continued to operate their profitable upholstery shop in Philadelphia. Records show that she was paid in May 1777 for making “ship’s colours.” However, there is no firm evidence to support the belief that Ross either designed or sewed the first national flag. The Betsy Ross memorial site in Philadelphia is also a point of controversy. It is not known for certain whether Ross ever actually lived in the building. A nineteenth-century owner of the house, possibly in an attempt to increase the property’s value, advanced the claim that Ross had lived there. When the building was scheduled for demolition in 1892, the Betsy Ross Memorial Foundation collected donations from nearly two million schoolchildren and citizens. Donors received a copy of the painting “Birth of Our Nation’s Flag” by Charles Weisberger, which showed Betsy Ross displaying her five-pointed star flag to Washington, Morris, and Ross. This painting and an article in Harper’s Monthly, based on the assertions of her grandson, helped to advance the legends about Ross and her alleged home site.

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more time in agricultural pursuits than European women, and no time at all in spinning and weaving, since clothing was made primarily from animal skins. Enslaved women had the worst lot of all, sometimes working all day in the fields and then taking on many of the other tasks performed by European women. See also: Diaries and Journals; Midwifery.

DOMESTIC
LIFE Throughout early British North America, over 90 percent of families lived on farms. To a large extent, the “home” (the “domicile”) was the farm itself, a space shared by both men and women. Nevertheless, within a household women were more likely to work in or near the house, while men were out in the fields. Although domestic life was not the segregated women’s sphere it would become later, a separate women’s culture did exist. It centered on women’s duties around the house and the relationships women formed with female relatives and neighbors. Farm women were responsible for preparing food; making, repairing, and laundering clothing; caring for young children and the sick; manufacturing soap from lye and ashes; fetching firewood and water; and keeping the home clean. Many women also kept a vegetable garden, domestic fowl such as geese or chickens, and at least one milk cow for making butter and cheese. It was nearly impossible to do these tasks alone. A few households purchased indentured servants or slaves. Most families relied on their own children, relatives, and friends to fill in whenever additional labor was needed. Therefore, one of the most important functions a woman performed was to make and maintain ties to neighbors, religious community, and a network of brothers and sisters, in-laws, and cousins.

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Couples generally married when a woman was 21 to 23, and a man 23 to 25. Ideally, the groom received land and tools and the bride livestock and household goods. Together, they had the means for a productive household but not the labor. A wife with young children could be quickly overwhelmed with household duties. With a strong family network, however, a younger sibling, niece, or cousin could be dispatched to help. As a woman’s children grew, both boys and girls took over small household tasks, lessening the need for outside help. Once the oldest daughter could function capably on her own, the household would finally “break even” between work requirements and available labor. Still, when a family member became ill, the female head of the household might once again have to call on the larger network of family and neighbors for help—particularly if she herself fell ill. Then, an older female relative or neighbor would arrive to take charge. By the time the children were young adults, the household was an immensely productive unit. This period provided the family with an opportunity to accumulate enough land and wealth to establish each grown child in an independent household. Except for the Chesapeake area in the 1600s, European American households averaged at least five children. Independence for all would have been an unthinkable goal in Europe. Ten years of labor from five or more healthy young people made that goal realistic in British North America. As a son from one family married a daughter from another, the cycle recommenced—with in-laws now part of the horizontal family network. The success of a family in reaching this mature, highly productive stage had ramifications for all of their relatives and friends. These were the households that could lend a hand to young couples, who could spare a competent, older woman to care for the sick. With support, young households could maintain a fully functioning farm from the beginning, and illness did not have to cause impoverishment. Indeed, a competently organized household lessened the risk of serious illness and death. Vertical links were also critical: girls had to learn to perform the tasks of running a farm household, including caring for the sick. Women not only passed along family recipes for herbal remedies but also taught younger women how to recognize symptoms and treat injuries. The eldest daughter learned how to care for children by helping with younger siblings; the youngest would learn by helping her older sister.

The Ideology of Domesticity The ideology of domesticity assumed that women were responsible for creating a calm, nurturing world inside the home to provide a refuge from the harsh, competitive, commercial world of men. The ideal came from Europe as early as the mid1700s, but the type of lifestyle it required was neither economically nor socially realistic at the time. With the exception of the very wealthy, most women had too many responsibilities to spare time for genteel activities. However, the women’s networks that were created and nurtured during this period would prove a component of domesticity in later years.

Urban Domestic Life As late as 1820, only 7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. Yet women in mercantile families participated in an urban culture that stretched from Newport, Rhode Island, to Charleston, South Carolina, including the West Indies. Merchants maintained close contact with their clients in other ports, and one way to ensure open communication lines was to marry a daughter into a merchant family in another city. A young woman growing up in a merchant household in Philadelphia might thus find herself living in Charleston; cousins ensuing from such marriages later were eligible marriage partners to keep the families together. Written correspondence among women in these families was emotionally important, but it was also as critical as country networks in keeping the family business going. Along with large plantation owners and the independently wealthy, these were the women who first began to adopt the trappings of domesticity as the culture spread from England. The vast majority of urban women lived in the outside world as much as the inside. In 1790, fewer than 10 percent of Philadelphia householders claimed the title of “gentleman” or “gentlewoman” or were classified as merchants. More than half of all male householders in Philadelphia in 1790 were artisans, shopkeepers, or innkeepers. Their wives had the same duties as their country counterparts, except that they substituted a daily trip to market for the care of a garden and animals. In many artisan households, the wife also kept the books, as Deborah Read Franklin did for Ben Franklin. One-eighth of Philadelphia households in 1790 were headed by women; one-sixth of these were

DOW, PEGGY

“gentlewomen” with wealth; the rest were “widows” living in the shopkeeping district. After a ship captain’s wife cheated several prominent merchants by using her feme covert status to avoid paying debts, mariners’ wives were granted the same status as widows. Many of these women ran shops while their husbands were at sea. So many women became shopkeepers that a writer to the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 1780s urged men to start new communities in the back country, “leaving shopkeeping to the women.” By the end of the eighteenth century an uncounted number of women in the cities were simply poor. That left the genteel lifestyle to a very few, very rich women. Men and women shared much of the same space in early British North America; at no time after 1820 would their lives be so intertwined. Nevertheless, domestic life was dominated by a female culture, reinforced by a network of women connected by family, religion, and community. Both farming and artisan households depended upon an efficiently-run women’s sector; networks maintained by women were essential to the functioning of the economy and society as a whole. The rapid population growth, good health, and longevity that characterized early America owed much to the organizational innovations of women in domestic life. Mary M. Schweitzer FURTHER READING

Amott, Teresa, and Julie Matthaei. Race, Gender, and Work. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Carson, Cary, Ron Hoffman, and Peter Albert, ed. Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Hoffer, Peter Charles, ed. Colonial Women and Domesticity. New York: Garland, 1988. Marsh, Lori. Sentimental Materialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Schweitzer, Mary. Custom and Contract: Households, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.


DOW, PEGGY

(1780–1820) Autobiographer. Peggy Dow was born in Granville, Massachusetts, in 1780. When her mother died and her father remarried, Peggy was sent to live

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with an elder sister in New York. In her late teens, Peggy experienced a religious conversion and, along with her sister and brother-in-law, joined the Methodist church. In 1802, Peggy and her family were visited by the itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow. Lorenzo discussed the possibility of marrying Peggy with her sister before he had even met Peggy herself. He asked her sister if Peggy was religious and if she kept wicked company. To demonstrate how religious Peggy was, the sister reported to Lorenzo something Peggy had said: “I had rather marry a Preacher than any other man, provided I was worthy; and . . . I would wish them to travel and be useful to souls.” At this point Peggy entered the room and confirmed that such was her disposition. Right then and there Lorenzo asked her to marry him. “I made him no reply,” Peggy wrote in her autobiography, Vicissitudes: or the Journey of Life (published posthumously in 1848), “but went directly out of the room—as it was the first time he had spoken to me, I was very much surprised.” Peggy accepted Lorenzo’s proposal the next evening, but since Lorenzo had two years of preaching appointments already set, the couple was not married until 1804. Peggy accompanied Lorenzo on many of his journeys, but at other times lived with friends for long periods while he traveled to various camp meetings and faraway frontier towns. On one of their earliest trips together, the couple spent 18 months in England and Ireland, where their first and only child was born. The baby girl died before she was a year old. Peggy accompanied Lorenzo through the wilderness to preach in parts of Georgia and Alabama, where “no Protestant Preacher had ever raised his voice to remind the Tombigvee and Tensaw settlers of their duty to the Most High.” The couple never had a house of their own, and Lorenzo never had a regular income. They depended on friends and fellow religionists to house and feed them for much of their married lives. Lorenzo, it is said, was a powerful orator with a memorable and eccentric appearance. He wore his hair and beard very long and his clothing was frequently described as being rather odd. He deeply influenced many of his listeners, as evidenced by the fact that thousands of young southern boys were named after him. Peggy Dow died in Hebron, Connecticut, in 1820. Lorenzo remarried within six months and had one son by his second wife.

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FURTHER READING

Dow, Peggy. Vicissitudes; or the Journey of Life. Washington, OH: Joshua Martin, 1848.


DOWER RIGHTS

The right of a widow to a share of the marital property. Although married women of European descent had few rights in colonial America, they did have the right to a dower, or portion of their husband’s estate after his death. Most colonies had laws that required that a husband to leave his wife at least a life interest in one-third of his real estate plus a portion of his personal property if there were children, and half of the real estate if there were no children. If a man died without a will, courts would usually grant the wife her “thirds,” and wives could challenge wills that did not leave the expected portion. Colonies supported dower rights primarily because it ensured that the widow’s community would not have the obligation of supporting her. To protect dower rights, many colonies ensured that wives were consulted before the sale of real estate, in case the sale would affect their dower rights. Women had to be “separately examined”; that is, they had to be examined in private, presumably so their husbands could not influence their response.

DRINKER, ELIZABETH
SANDWICH

(1735–1807) Diarist. Elizabeth Sandwich Drinker is remembered especially for her diary, which she kept from 1758 until her death in 1807. She records many interesting details about the Revolutionary War and the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, as well as invaluable information about everyday life in colonial America. Drinker is also remembered for her pacifism and a historic meeting with George Washington. As Quakers, Elizabeth and her husband were looked on with suspicion by their neighbors because of their refusal to join the war effort. In September 1777, Elizabeth’s husband Henry was banished from their home in Philadelphia and imprisoned in Virginia, accused of “aiding and abetting the cause of the enemy” because of his refusal to fight. In 1778, Elizabeth and four other women made the dangerous journey to Lancaster, Penn-

sylvania—the provisional capital of the state at the time—to plead for their husbands’ freedom. They met and had dinner with George and Martha Washington. Washington gave the women a pass so they could continue their journey, but said he could do nothing further for them. When the women reached Lancaster, they were unable to schedule an official hearing. Soon thereafter, however, the husbands were released and allowed to return home. Elizabeth’s diary also records the experience of having her house taken over by a British major general and his staff during the war. This was a very trying period for the family, since the general brought with him horses, turkeys and sheep, and insisted on staying out late nearly every night. Drinker’s diary indicates that she read and sympathized with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. “In many of her sentiments she [Wollstonecraft], as some of our friends say, speaks my mind.”

DUCHESNE, ROSE
PHILLIPPINE

(1769–1852) Catholic missionary and founder of the first American Convent of the Sacred Heart. Born into a wealthy and influential family in Grenoble, France, Rose Phillippine Duchesne joined the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1804. This new Catholic order was dedicated to aiding the poor and educating young women. In 1818, Duchesne headed a group of nuns sent to assist Bishop William Louis Dubourg in Louisiana. Within a decade, Duchesne had founded six convents, with adjoining schools and orphanages, in the Mississippi River valley. Amid complaints about her leadership, she was removed from her post in 1839. Two years later, the church sent Duchesne to serve the Potawatomi Indians at the mission at Sugar Creek, Kansas. Impressed by her piety, the Potawatomi called her Quah-kah-ka-num-ad (“woman who prays always”). Ill health forced Duchesne to leave the mission in 1842. She spent the rest of her life at the convent she established in St. Charles, Missouri. In 1940, Duchesne was beatified by Pope Pius XII.


DUSTON, HANNAH See family life, colonial

ELDRIDGE, ELLEANORE

DUTCH HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company sponsored a Dutch colony at New Netherland (what is now New York City and the surrounding area) and numbers of Dutch settlers arrived. Dutch ships cruised up and down the eastern coast of North America, bringing slaves to Virginia and livestock and provisions to New England. Dutch colonists followed their customs from the old country where domestic arrangements were concerned. If a couple in New Netherland wished to marry, parents would negotiate dowries, or money and properties gained through marriage, before their betrothal (engagement) would be announced. The man became the head of the household and made major family decisions. Dutch families attended church on Sundays and then went to the taverns to enjoy the remainder of the day.

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New Netherland was conquered by the English in the 1660s and became New York. Rather than adapt to the English common law that was prevalent in the colonies, the Dutch followed a more Roman set of standards regarding women. The Dutch woman or housewife, huysvrouw, had many privileges that other women in Europe and North America rarely enjoyed. She could own a business, sue on her own behalf, inherit equally with her brothers, and decide how she would leave property in her will. Dutch law assumed that women, although subordinate to their husbands, had equal rights with their husbands. The Dutch also imported bees to America, which were raised for honey and could be found in almost every Dutch household. Besides beekeeping, the Dutch also introduced the cookie (koekje in Dutch) and the cruller (krulle).


DYER, MARY See Quakers

E
EDUCATION

See colleges; dame schools; schools; textbook writing

EDWARDS, SARAH
PIERPONT

(1710–1758) Puritan mystic and pioneer. Few people could claim the distinguished lineage of Sarah Pierpont. Her father was a graduate of Harvard and a founder of Yale. On her mother’s side, she was related to Thomas Hooker, who established Hartford, Connecticut. Sarah grew up in a home that was both cultured and religious. Even as a young woman, she was renowned for her piety and religious fervor, qualities that attracted Yale graduate and minister Jonathan Edwards. They were married in 1727. Sarah became a successful frontier wife and mother. She raised 11 children and maintained a home well known for its hospitality to visitors. Both Edwardses played a crucial role in the Great Awakening, a religious revival movement of the 1730s and 1740s. In writings such as Some

Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742), Jonathan Edwards defended the movement, largely on the basis of Sarah’s religious experiences. He wrote of how in moments of religious ecstasy, she often fainted and fell into trances. Those involved in the Great Awakening believed such physical manifestations of spiritual joy were caused by the Holy Ghost. More conservative leaders, however, claimed that they were nothing but outpourings of emotion. Sarah died six months after her husband, at the age of 48.


ELDRIDGE, ELLEANORE

(1784–1845?) Businesswoman. Elleanore Eldridge was born in Warwick, Rhode Island. Her father, Robin Eldridge, was an African who had been brought to America as a slave. Her mother, Hannah Prophet, was a Native American. Elleanore was born free because of legislation enacted in the year of her birth that gradually freed enslaved people living in Rhode Island.

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EMERSON, MARY MOODY

After her mother died in 1794, Eldridge went to live with the family of Joseph Baker. She worked for Baker’s family for six years, earning 25 cents a week. Elleanore became an expert at spinning and weaving and could make complicated items, such as carpets and bedspreads. At the age of 16, Eldridge left the Bakers and went to work for Captain Benjamin Green. There she not only continued to spin but also worked in the dairy, becoming an expert at making cheese. After Green’s death in 1812, Eldridge went into business with her sister, weaving and making soap. Later, she became a house painter. She also began to invest in rental property. In 1833, it was erroneously reported that she had died of typhoid, and her property was confiscated to pay off her loans. In order to recover her property, Eldridge pled her own case before the Court of Common Pleas. Although she lost the case, friends and neighbors were impressed with how well she handled herself in court. She eventually got her property back but had to pay $2,700 in order to do so. Her autobiography, The Memoirs of Elleanore Eldridge, were published in 1838, and it is thought that she died in 1845.


ELLET, MARY ISRAEL See volume 2


EMERSON, MARY MOODY

(1774–1863) Intellectual, transcendentalist. By all accounts Mary Moody Emerson was eccentric. She was barely 4’3” tall, wore her blonde hair cut short, and, as she grew older, insisted on wearing a shroud and sleeping in a coffin-shaped bed. Her famous nephew, poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, once said that Mary “spins faster than all other tops,” referring to her endless energy, both physical and intellectual. Mary had a difficult life. Her father died when she was two years old, and her mother left her with an aunt so that she could remarry. Eventually Mary was adopted by her aunt Ruth and her husband. Leading a lonely life with no formal education, Mary turned to books and read voraciously. When Mary’s brother William died, she helped his widow rear her six young children. In particular she tutored Ralph Waldo, Edward, and Charles.

When Ralph went off to college, he corresponded with his aunt. She urged him to find God in nature, be self-reliant, and overcome his fears. In fact, significant elements of Ralph’s transcendentalist philosophy were shaped by his aunt’s teaching, and Ralph often copied whole passages from his aunt’s letters into his own essays. The two remained close throughout Mary’s life, although they disagreed on some theological issues. Mary Emerson died in New York at the age of 88.


ENTERTAINMENT

Life in colonial America was hard, and there was little time for entertainment. Still, the colonists found ways to amuse themselves and enjoy the company of neighbors and friends. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, many Americans began to adapt European customs to the new American society and engage in more lavish forms of entertainments. Visiting one’s neighbors was an important form of entertainment in America. After the American Revolution, as American society became more “genteel,” well-to-do women would “pay calls” to one another, often leaving printed cards to record their visits if the women they were visiting were out paying calls themselves, much as wealthy European women did. Some people set aside a day each week to call on friends. In the South, where plantation life resulted in the nearest neighbors being miles away, plantation owners and their family members would visit one another for weeks at a time. In towns, middle-class women held tea parties to allow them to catch up on the latest news and spend time with neighbors. During the Revolution, women of all classes held spinning parties as part of an effort to show that Americans were not dependent on imported cloth. Various kinds of fairs and “frolics” provided diversions for people in all stations of life. People would gather from miles around and spend as long as a week conducting business, selling wares, and socializing. Fairs might include puppet shows, jugglers, exotic animals, and contests to see who was the best whistler, singer, wrestler, or even spitter. Taverns and stores provided convenient and friendly places for people to gather. The mail was often delivered to the local tavern, so people would gather to hear both the local news and what was

ENTREPRENEURS

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happening far away. In towns, men esWOMEN’S FIRSTS tablished social clubs and fraternal orders, which often met in taverns. Members would drink, talk, and play Very little is known of Sybilla Righton’s early life, other than billiards. Women held a variety of that she grew up in New Jersey. Sometime in the 1690s, she “bees,” working together to make married a Quaker businessman named Thomas Masters and quilts, spin thread, and weave cloth. moved to Philadelphia. The couple had several children, of Childbirth was an important social whom four survived infancy. event for women. When a neighbor’s Sybilla Masters had a talent for mechanical engineering. time came to deliver, the midwife Sometime before 1715, she developed and built a machine to would usually ask neighbor women to process corn. The machine included a series of mortars and help, and when the baby was safely depestles for pulverizing the corn, along with several bins for livered, all the helpers would enjoy a drying the resulting cornmeal. The device could run by water celebratory meal together. or horse power. Although the British government issued a In the evenings, particularly in winpatent on the machine in Thomas Masters’s name, the patent ter, families would gather around the specified that the idea was Sybilla’s; as a result, she has often fire to read, play games, and tell stobeen called the first American woman inventor. ries. In the summer, families would Masters went on to market the corn produced by her inwork together in gardens. While garvention, though her efforts did not meet with much success. dens were initially practical necessiIn 1716, she patented another invention, again under her ties, over time people began to garden husband’s name; this one involved a method of using straw for amusement, planting flowers and palmetto leaves to cover hats and bonnets. Masters proalong with vegetables and herbs. duced hats and also baskets using this technique, and marThen as now, people would gather keted them herself; it is not clear how commercially successfor parties and dancing. Dances ful this invention was. She died in Philadelphia in 1720, ranged from simple country parties, probably not much older than 40. where people would often dance all night, to elegant balls. Square dancing was popular, as were minuets, jigs, reels, and hornpipes. The Virginia Reel became a standard at almost every dance in women’s economic activity were loosely enforced. the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centu- Although wives’ income remained under the conries. The most frequent musical accompaniment trol of their husbands, women found new business to a dance would be a fiddle, but colonists also opportunities in the colonies. For both women and men, the most common played harpsichords, spinets, banjos, and fifes. In the country, instruments might be as simple as business was running a plantation or farm. A woman would typically become an agricultural combs, spoons, or pots and pans. Colonists also gathered to celebrate baptisms, manager in her husband’s or father’s absence or birthdays and weddings. Even funerals were im- as a means of supporting herself after being widportant social events in the colonies. They hap- owed. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who pioneered pened all too frequently, and people were quick to indigo production in South Carolina, began offer one another support and companionship at managing her father’s plantations when she was such times. Wealthy families would present gifts to 17. In the middle and Northern colonies, wealth those who came, and the formal ceremony would often be followed by a feast, as elaborate as the fam- was usually built through industry or trade. Wives often worked with their husbands in a family busiily could afford. ness. Deborah Read Franklin kept the accounts for her husband’s printing business and expanded the business from a print shop into a general store. ENTREPRENEURS Like many craftsmen’s widows, Lydia R. Bailey People who organize, operate, and assume the risk took over her husband’s business after his death, for a business venture. Because of the shortage of becoming a master printer in her own right. Howlabor in British colonial America, laws restricting ever, widows generally retained their master status




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only as long as they did not remarry or bring a male family member into the business. When Sarah Kemble Knight was widowed, she supported herself in ways typical of entrepreneurial colonial women: running her family’s shop, taking in boarders, and opening a tavern. One-third of the shops in prerevolutionary Philadelphia were run by women, as were about one-fifth of colonial taverns. Although women did not serve formal apprenticeships, they often learned crafts in family businesses. Widows with specialized skills supported themselves as independent blacksmiths, shipwrights, foundry owners, and printers. One woman even commanded her husband’s whaling ship. Rebecca Pennock Lukens, who assumed management of the Brandywine Rolling Mill, became the first female executive in the iron industry. Teaching, like running a boarding house, was seen as a natural extension of women’s domestic role. By the 1730s, women began to establish schools throughout the colonies. After the Revolution, women were expected to train their children to be good citizens of the new republic. Interest in women’s education increased. See also: Feme Sole Trader Acts; Patriarchy.


EPISCOPALIANS See Anglicans

EQUALITY OF
FEMALE INTELLECT In early British America the ideal woman was white, frail, innocent, and did not use her education or intellect to become equal to or to subjugate men. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was rare for a girl to receive any formal intellectual stimulation in the way of structured schooling outside of learning to read her Bible and write simple letters. Intellectual endeavor was a male domain into which women either did not enter or entered only privately. Intellectual studies and abstract thought were commonly considered to be out of reach for most females, unbecoming, and outside God’s purpose for women. Women of the 1600s and 1700s saw themselves as inferior to men in intelligence. Girls were taught to be delicate, simple, indecisive or “silly,” and ignorant. A woman of strong intellect who sought formal studies, especially in the sci-

ences, was viewed as being too masculine and rebellious. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stated that a young woman had lost “her understanding and reason” because she had given “herself wholly to reading and writing, and written many books.” Winthrop continued, “If she had attended to household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.” After the American Revolution, the nation began to embrace the ideals of self-reliance and independence. Women’s involvement with the Revolutionary War brought out obvious strengths and abilities in various forms. Judith Sargent Murray stated in 1798, “I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history,” referring to their newfound intellectual strengths and capabilities. Through their war efforts, women had proved themselves in a way never before seen. Although still unequal to those of men, educational opportunites for women increased after the Revolution, especially in the areas of science and mathematics. For example, in 1812 chemist John Griscom held a series of lectures on natural philosophy exclusively for women. The lectures were attended by hundreds of women. Women themselves began organizing groups for intellectual development. Twenty young women organized the Boston Gleaning Circle in 1805. They defined their group as a “self-improvement society.” The met weekly to discuss “any book favourable to the improvement of the mind—Divinity, History, Geography, Astronomy, Travels, Poetry, etc., but Novels and Romances are absolutely excluded.” As the nineteenth century was beginning, women were starting to see themselves as intellectually capable and equal to men. FURTHER READING

Hawke, David Freeman. Everyday Life in Early America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

ESTAUGH, ELIZABETH
HADDON

(1680–1762) Founder of Haddonfield, New Jersey, and a character in Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. Elizabeth Haddon was born in London, England, and

FACTORIES

came to America by herself when she was only 21 to settle on land owned by her father. Before she left England, she met a young Quaker, John Estaugh, who was preparing to begin a ministry in America, and she too felt a religious calling to help Native Americans and to establish a place for traveling ministers to stay. According to Longfellow’s poem, when John Estaugh stopped at Elizabeth Haddon’s home in New Jersey, she said, “I will no longer conceal what is laid upon me to tell thee;/I have received from the Lord a charge to love thee, John Estaugh.” John accepted Elizabeth’s pious proposal, and the couple was married in 1702.

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Elizabeth founded the village of Haddonfield in 1713. In 1723, on behalf of her father, she donated the land for the first Friends Meeting House in Haddonfield. In 1742, John went as a missionary to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, and he died there in 1743. With the help of her nephew, Ebenezer Hopkins, whom she later adopted, Elizabeth continued to manage her considerable property. She also sent a book John had written, A Call to the Unfaithful Professors of Truth, to Benjamin Franklin to be published. Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh died in Haddonfield at the age of 82.

F
FACTORIES

Buildings in which goods are manufactured. Before the American Revolution, the colonies were dependent on Britain for most manufactured goods. After the Revolution, Americans were reluctant to encourage manufacturing. Land was plentiful, and most Americans could grow most of what they needed on their land. In addition, Americans were not eager to import into their new nation the evils of the Industrial Revolution as it existed in England. Before the Industrial Revolution, women carried out the various tasks associated with the domestic manufacture of fabric. They spun cotton, flax, and wool into thread and then wove the thread into fabric. Women often earned extra income for their families, either by selling cloth for money or by bartering it for food or other household goods. When machines were invented that performed some of the tasks of making fabric, factories were built to produce cloth in large quantities. The women who used to make cloth at home now had to work long hours, in dangerous conditions, for little pay. They operated machines such as spinning jennies—devices that allowed one woman to spin eight threads at once—and steam-powered looms. Children also worked in the textile mills as scavengers, picking up loose cotton from under running machinery, or as piecers, catching broken threads as the machines wove. The more highly paid supervisory and skilled jobs went to men. In England, factory towns arose, where whole families were crowded into inadequate housing and where disease was rampant because of unsanitary condi-

tions. Workers were paid in company-issued scrip that could only be used to buy goods from the company store, a system which often kept workers in debt to the mill owner and unable to quit their jobs to look for better situations. The first factory in the United States was Samuel Slater’s cotton mill built in 1790 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater’s mill used the British system of labor, employing whole families to run the machines that carded, or untangled, and spun the fibers. Slater’s mill was equipped to do only a part of the textile manufacturing process, however, and thread was still sent to women to weave into cloth in their homes. In 1812, when Francis Cabot Lowell decided to manufacture textiles, he realized that few Americans were likely to accept the British system of labor. While a dissatisfied factory worker in England had few other options, Americans could always turn pioneer and move west. So when he opened a mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, he also developed a new system of labor that came to be known as the “Waltham System.” Lowell’s machines were too complex to be run by children, so he targeted young women as his labor force. Knowing that farmers would not send their daughters to work in a place where they might be tempted into illicit romances and other unacceptable behavior, Lowell established boardinghouses where the young women would live under the supervision of a matron who represented the company and enforced its strict rules. The young women who worked in Waltham had to reside in the boarding house, be in bed each night by ten o’clock, and attend

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church services. They were paid in money rather than scrip, because most of the girls worked in order to be able to send money home to their families back on the farms. In 1820, Lowell’s original investors, known as the Boston Associates, began to build mills at the junction of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in the town of east Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The town was renamed Lowell, after Francis Lowell, who had died in 1817. By 1839, there were nine mills in Lowell. In Waltham and Lowell, women ran the roving machines that stretched and twisted the wool, as well as the spinning machines. Men worked as supervisors, mechanics, and teamsters. Women were paid a set wage, while men’s wages were negotiated individually. Women workers earned about $1.75 a week, with $1.45 deducted for board. The women worked 12- to 13-hour days, six days a week, with a half an hour off for breakfast and lunch. They had only four holidays a year. Eventually, Lowell became known worldwide for its enlightened labor practices, and especially for the educational opportunities offered to the

young women in the evenings. To the modern sensibility, of course, the working conditions do not seem particularly enlightened, but they were much improved over conditions in England. In the next few decades, however, conditions in the American mills declined (as conditions improved in Britain), leading to strikes in the 1830s and giving an impetus to the growth of labor organizations in the 1830s and 1840s. FURTHER READING

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826– 1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Foner, Philip S. The Factory Girls. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Prude, Jonathan. The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.


FAMILY LIFE, COLONIAL

Although the first settlers to North America were single men and not families, families that came

An artist’s impression of Hannah Duston’s escape from captivity.

FAMILY LIFE, NATIVE AMERICAN

later to colonial North America varied based on ethnic and religious background. The majority of new families settling in early British North America were of English heritage. The first English families that settled in America faced extreme hardship and uncertainty. In 1607 the London Company—a group of men—made its first trip to Jamestown, Virginia. By 1622 only 2,000 of 10,000 immigrants were still living. Families were unprepared for the harsh Virginia winters and difficult farming conditions. The Virginians first lived in palisaded (heavily fenced) communities. Later they built plantations stretching along the rivers that flowed into Chesapeake Bay. Families had to become self-sufficient. Most colonial families lived in a typical nuclear unit. The average family had between seven and ten children. Infant mortality rates were high. In New England, families remained intact for the most part; divorce was almost unheard of, but it was completely acceptable for a widow or widower to remarry one or several times. Family members from the age of three had a role to play in supporting the family. Children helped tend cows and sheep, plant and harvest crops, and spin cloth by the fireside. Children who could read and write were usually taught by another family member. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, it became more common for children to attend schools. Women in British colonial America were not only responsible for the household, the children, and dairying, but they also helped their husbands in the fields. Wealthier families hired indentured servants and domestic servants to help with such tasks. As family skills diversified and rural areas grew into small towns, some women helped their husbands in various businesses, such as general stores, taverns, or newspaper publishing. See also: Domestic Arts; Domestic Servants; Indentured Servitude; Widowhood.


FAMILY LIFE, FREE BLACK

Free blacks in the colonial era and the early decades of the republic lived primarily in cities of the North and those of the upper South, such as Baltimore and Richmond. Although they had more power over their own lives than did enslaved blacks, free blacks still experienced prejudice and limitations in early America. European settlers viewed Africans as intellectually and culturally inferior. These racial prejudices affected family structures and oppor-

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Free blacks had more power over their own lives than slaves.

tunities for most free black families and especially black children in early North America. In the North, black men could seek work, own land, and be heads of households. In several states they could vote, but they were rarely allowed to serve in the militia. They were often able to voice their opinions more than white women could. Often a black man’s social status depended on whether or not he could read and write. Those who were literate fared much better than those who could not read or write. Free African households were based on the Christian model, in which women were subservient to their husbands, and on the African tribal model in which control was usually passed down through male lines. Children in free black families worked alongside their mothers and fathers and rarely were afforded the opportunity to attend school. If they did learn to read and write, they were most often instructed by family members in Bible reading.

FAMILY LIFE, NATIVE
AMERICAN East Coast Native American nations in colonial America had distinct cultures, but their family structures had common characteristics. In general, women had more power in the more agricultural societies. Families were organized into clans, and kinship networks became the basis of alliances among different tribes. Members of the same clan did not marry. Since the European family system was based on patriarchy, settlers were scandalized by the Native Americans’ division of labor. The newcomers

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FAMILY LIFE, REPUBLICAN

portant clan members. Since most Algonquian clans were matrilineal, newlyweds often lived with or near an older member of the bride’s family. During her lifetime, the dramatic story of Hannah Duston Grandparents, aunts, and uncles were was told throughout New England, making her one of the often involved in raising their young first legendary figures in American history. Hannah’s story relatives. An uncle rather than a parbegan on March 15, 1697, when just after she had given birth ent might discipline a child who reto her twelfth child the Dustons’ home was attacked by Inquired punishment. If a spouse died, dians. Hannah Duston, her infant, and Mary Neff, a settler the in-laws would handle the burial, who was helping Duston care for the child, were taken capdistribute any property, and care tive. After killing the baby, the Indians marched Duston and for the surviving partner until reNeff toward Canada, where they were joined by Samuel Lenmarriage. nardson, a white boy who had been captured eight months These family relationships earlier. strengthened the ties between a couOn March 30, the three captives carried out a plan of esple’s clans. However, marriage was a cape, in the course of which Duston and Lennardson killed mutual agreement that had no legal and scalped ten of their Indian captors. After making her or religious basis. Divorce was permitway safely back to Haverhill, Duston traveled to Boston ted on grounds ranging from disconwhere she told her tale before the General Court. At Thomas tent to infidelity. Duston’s insistence, the Court paid him the 25 pounds that a Encounters with European settlers Massachusetts law offered as a bounty for Indian scalps. began reshaping Native American Even after her death in 1736, her legend continued to be families. Colonists often consciously told. She was cast sometimes as a hero and sometimes as a attempted to “civilize” the country’s villain, depending on the interpreter’s view of female viooriginal inhabitants, while Native lence. Among those who wrote about Duston were Cotton Americans both adapted and resisted. Mather, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Christianized Indians in Puritan “praying villages” adopted European customs. However, when Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins told a Creek considered farming men’s work and hunting a widow in 1797 that white males govsport, so they condemned “lazy” and “effeminate” erned their families, she broke off marriage neNative American men for hunting while their wives gotiations with him. bore the burden of farming. Europeans also had difficulty understanding that Native American F U R T H E R R E A D I N G women owned property, and that land and lead- Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Negotiations of Change: Historical ership positions were often inherited through the Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. female line. Some Indian cultures have been described as Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma matriarchies. Among the Iroquois, clan matrons Press, 1983. chose the chiefs and faith-keepers, spared or condemned prisoners of war, and impeached chiefs who failed to perform their office. In many Eastern Woodland nations, women stopped conflicts by reFAMILY LIFE, REPUBLICAN fusing to provide food for the war parties. Families that were a part of the new republic, sepaAlong the East Coast, parents raised children to rate from British control. Following the victory for be independent, stoic, and physically resilient. In- independence from Britain in the American Revfants were swaddled and breast-fed until they were olution, the new republic had a fresh, indepenthree to six years old. Children who misbehaved dent identity. Families could now view themselves were shamed rather than spanked. At puberty, ad- as part of a separate, strong nation, no longer olescent girls and boys participated in coming-of- bound to the British crown and its laws. Families age ceremonies. now felt comfortable venturing into new busiCourtship customs varied, but young people nesses to support their new nation and becoming generally chose their spouses with the advice of im- more politically involved.

TRAILBLAZERS




FASHION

Although men remained the civic and political leaders both within and outside their families, women took on greater roles in civic affairs. They began educating themselves in political matters, holding meetings and “societies” not only to increase their knowledge of politics and specifically republican ideology, but also to hone their conversational skills. Women also took on the responsibility of educating their children in civic matters. The new nation would need self-sufficient, responsible citizens who could carry on the cause of independence. Although women themselves were not considered important political citizens within a community and they could not vote, they functioned as the primary instructors on civic matters for their children. Women educating daughters about republican thought had a special problem. They attempted to combine their ideas about their domestic domain with the postwar ideology of individual responsibility and civic virtue, but there were inherent contradictions in this task. The good republican was expected to embrace the new ideology of independence, but women were still being ridiculed for trying to increase their intellectual grasp or trying to become politically significant. These contradictions would continue into the mid-1800s, when, as women began attending schools and colleges in greater numbers, they became more politically active, and began speaking out against inequality.


FARMS AND FARMING See rural life

FARRAR, ELIZABETH
WARE ROTCH

(1791–1870) Author. Born to American parents living in Dunkirk, France, Elizabeth Ware Rotch was the daughter of a prosperous whaling merchant. Her family later moved to Wales. At their estate, named Castle Hall, they entertained many of the luminaries of their day. The Rotches were acquainted with painter Benjamin West, war hero Horatio Nelson, and Princess Charlotte, Queen Victoria’s cousin. After her family lost everything in 1819 due to bad investments, Eliza Rotch went to live with her grandparents in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

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There she met John Farrar, a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. They married in 1828 and quickly established themselves in Boston’s social and literary circles. Eliza Farrar was friends with several prominent female reformers, including Margaret Fuller and Catherine Sedgwick. (See Volume 2.) Although an advocate for abolition, women’s rights, and prison reform, Farrar had little time for activism because she had to attend to her chronically ill husband. Often confined to her home, Farrar expressed her views through her writing. She wrote many books for children that were meant to instruct as well as entertain. In The Children’s Robinson Crusoe (1830), she recast Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel to make the story appropriate for children. Farrar also wrote juvenile biographies of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette and of the English prison reformer John Howard. Her most popular book was The Young Lady’s Friend (1836). The work offered advice, but unlike other etiquette books of the day, it went beyond instructing readers in good manners. Farrar emphasized the importance of “find[ing] pleasure in intellectual effort.” The book remained in print in the United States and in England for most of the nineteenth century. After her husband’s death, Farrar wrote her final work, Recollections of Seventy Years (1865). Ostensibly an autobiography of her early life, the book also counseled readers about women’s rights issues. Using the language of a proper lady, Farrar discussed the need for women to become educated and to resist social rules that inhibited their freedom. Before her death in 1870, Farrar had become a role model for many readers by questioning the dictates of society while successfully functioning within it.


FASHION

The styles of clothing, hair, and accessories that are popular in a given place and time. In the early seventeenth century, most colonial women had little time for fashion. Most wore linen blouses tucked into wool skirts. They kept their legs warm with woolen stockings, and usually wore aprons around the house. They wore white neckcloths crossed over fitted sleeveless vests called doublets. Small, close-fitting bonnets covered the head. As the country became more populous and prosperous, wealthy American women began to imitate European styles. Before and during the

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FEMME SOLE TRADER ACTS


FEME SOLE TRADER ACTS

Laws that enabled women to do business independently of their husbands. Under both British and American common law the phrase feme sole referred to a woman who had never been married or who was widowed, or divorced. It could also refer to a married woman whose legal subordination to her husband, or coverture, had been set aside by law. A feme sole trader, then, was a married woman who was legally granted the right to act on her own in a business situation. An instance of a feme sole trader act, for example, is one passed in Pennsylvania in 1718 for the relief of wives of sailors. Under the provisions of the act, sailors’ wives who had their own businesses would not be liable for the debts of their husbands. The act also said that creditors could “with certainty and safety, transact business with a married woman” and that feme sole traders could “sue and be sued, plead and be impleaded at law during their husbands’ natural lives, without naming their husbands.” Fashion involves the style of hair, clothing, and accessories that are popular at a given time and place.

Revolution, fashionable women wore their hair in huge pompadours. To achieve the desired look, the hair was frizzed and stretched over cushions that were stuffed with cows’ tails, rags, and other such materials. After the Revolution, many women wore their hair curled and close to the head. Before the Revolution, well-to-do women wore gowns that had tight, pointed bodices over full skirts, often with matching or contrasting petticoats that were slightly exposed. Dressy outfits for special occasions were made of silk, and everyday dresses of chintz, a shiny cotton fabric. Whalebone corsets cinched waists tightly, so tightly, in fact, that many women were subject to fainting because their breathing was restricted. After the Revolution, a style of dress that attempted to imitate Greek statuary became common. The dresses were gauzy, high-waisted, and low-cut at the neckline. To achieve the look that was popular, women wore a great deal less underwear than they had in the past, and young ladies even went without corsets. Fashionable women’s shoes were high-heeled before the Revolution, and made of silk or brocade. After the Revolution, women wore flat slippers or sandals. Since ladies’ shoes were too delicate to be worn outside, women wore pattens—overshoes on raised metal frames—over their shoes.

FERGUSON, ELIZABETH
GRAEME

(1737–1801) Socialite and writer. Elizabeth Graeme was the daughter of Thomas Graeme. As a young woman, Elizabeth published a translation of Franc¸ois Fe´nelon’s Te´lemaque and a journal she had kept during a trip to Europe. As a result of these publications she was accepted into Philadelphia’s literary circles, and every Saturday evening held gatherings at her father’s estate at Graeme Park that were similar to the literary salons of Europe. In 1772, Elizabeth inherited Graeme Park from her father and married Henry Ferguson, a Scot. During the Revolutionary War, Henry was loyal to the British Crown, and in 1778 was charged with treason. While trying to have her husband freed, Elizabeth met George Johnstone, a member of the British peace commission, who asked her to carry a letter to Joseph Reed, a member of the Continental Congress, offering him a large sum of money to switch sides. Reed’s reply was famous. “He was not worth purchasing, but such as he was, the King of Great Britain was not rich enough to do it.” After the war, Henry returned to Britain and the couple was permanently estranged. As a result of her husband’s activities and her own behavior, Elizabeth Ferguson lost Graeme Park. The estate was eventually returned to her, but financial difficulties forced her to sell it in 1791. She died in 1801.

FOSTER, HANNAH WEBSTER


FISHER, MARY

(1623–1698?) Quaker preacher and missionary. Mary Fisher was born in England and converted to the Quaker faith in about 1652. Rebuking those who did not follow the true path was characteristic of early Quakers. In the course of the next two years, Fisher was imprisoned at least three times for publicly criticizing ministers and civil officials. At Cambridge University in 1653, Mary and a companion were stripped to the waist and publicly flogged for preaching to students. In 1655, Mary traveled to the island of Barbados and from there to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where Quakers were considered heretics. On their arrival in Massachusetts, Mary and a companion were taken prisoner, searched for marks that they were witches, imprisoned for five weeks, then sent back to Barbados. Three years later another Quaker, Mary Dyer, was executed in Massachusetts for her religious beliefs. In 1658, Mary traveled alone from southern Greece to Turkey to meet with Sultan Mahomet IV. She succeeded in arranging an interview with him and was allowed to talk freely about her faith. The story of this visit made a huge impression on the British, since the “Great Turk,” as the Sultan was known, was a figure who inspired dread. Mary was married twice, once to a sea captain named William Bayly and a second time to John Cross, with whom she emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. It is believed that she died in Charleston sometime in 1698.


FORNICATION

Sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons. In 1636, the Puritan settlers of Plymouth Colony established a legal code, one section of which forbade “fornication and other unclean carriages [ways of behaving].” Different punishments were imposed depending on whether or not the couple was engaged to be married. Those who were not engaged could be sent to prison for up to three days and either whipped or fined ten pounds. For engaged couples, the fine was reduced to five pounds. In fact, whippings and fines were imposed frequently, while imprisonment was rarely used. Fornication was one of the most common crimes in Plymouth; there were 69 cases of fornication presented to the court between 1633 and 1691. Men were often punished more severely for fornication than women. Adultery, which was defined as sexual miscon-

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duct between married persons, was punishable by death. It was also one of the few grounds on which Puritan colonists allowed divorce, but it is significant that men and women were treated unequally when it came to adultery. Sexual contact between a married man and an unmarried woman was classified as fornication, but sexual contact between a married woman and any man—married or not– was considered adultery. Although the death sentence was never actually imposed for adultery, it was considered a very serious offence. Adulterers could be fined, sentenced to the stocks, whipped, and branded, either by an actual branding iron, or by being forced to wear letters proclaiming their crime on their outer clothing, as Hester Prynne does in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. Women were often more severely punished than men for adultery. Puritans frequently named their children for virtues, such as faith, hope, or charity, that they wanted their children to possess; some, however, named their children for vices they wanted them to avoid. There is actually a birth registry for a Puritan child named Flie Fornication Andrewes. Many of the original Puritan laws are still on the books in some New England states. As recently as 1996, Massachusetts state law provided for a threemonth jail sentence for fornication.

FOSTER, HANNAH
WEBSTER

(1758–1840) Author of the first novel written by a native-born American woman. Hannah Webster was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, to Hannah and Grant Webster. When her mother died in 1762, Hannah was probably sent to boarding school. In 1785, she married John Foster, a Unitarian minister. The couple had six children. A year after the birth of Hannah’s first child, her novel The Coquette (1797) was published anonymously. The novel was only modestly successful at first, but went through 13 editions during Hannah’s lifetime and was in print for many years after her death. Only in 1866 did the author’s name finally appear on the title page of the novel. The Coquette’s plot is modeled on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, a woman who was seduced, abandoned, and left to die in childbirth. It is said that her seducer was Pierpont Edwards, son of Jonathan and Sarah Pierpont Edwards. In Foster’s version of the tale, the central character, Eliza Wharton, is punished for her transgressions—as

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are similar characters in English novels of the time—but she is also a rebel who refuses to accept the limitations imposed on women. Foster also wrote The Boarding School, a didactic novel about the education of women. Two of her daughters, Eliza Lanesford Cushing and Harriet Foster Cheney, also wrote novels. Foster died in Montreal, Canada, at the age of 81.


FRANKLIN, ANN SMITH

(1696–1763) Printer. Ann Smith was born in Boston on October 2, 1696. She married printer and newspaper publisher James Franklin in 1723, making her the sister-in-law of Benjamin Franklin. Soon after marriage, Ann and James Franklin moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where James opened another printing business. When James died in 1735, she took over his position, and she trained her son and two daughters to help out in the shop as well. Franklin’s business benefited by being the only print shop in Newport. Among her publications were the 1737 Rhode-Island Almanack, the 1745 edition of the colony’s Acts and Laws, and a variety of other government and private publications. In all she produced at least 50 known printed documents, along with dozens of blank forms for business use. She was among the first colonial women to write an almanac of her own. In 1748, Franklin’s son James became the titular head of the business, but Franklin herself continued to work. When her son died in 1762, Franklin once more took over the shop, this time adding newspaper publishing to her list of duties. Her health was not good, however; she took on a business partner later that same year and died in Newport on April 19, 1763.

Read and his future father-in-law, who were standing in the doorway of their Market Street home. Later, Franklin became a lodger in the Read home. He proposed to Deborah, but her mother opposed the marriage, because Franklin was on the verge of leaving for an extended visit to England. While he was gone, Deborah’s mother convinced her to marry John Rogers; the marriage failed, and Rogers left Philadelphia for the West Indies, where he was reported to have died. When Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1730, he again asked Deborah to marry him, but she could not divorce Rogers and was not sure he was actually dead. So Deborah and Franklin decided to enter into a common-law marriage, with the approval of her relatives. Deborah Franklin was not a well-educated woman, and so never shared in her husband’s political and scientific interests. She took care of their children—Francis, who died at the age of four, and

FRANKLIN, DEBORAH
READ

(1707–1774) Wife of Benjamin Franklin and mother of Sarah Franklin Bache. Deborah Read was born either in Birmingham or in Philadelphia, the daughter of John Read, a carpenter, and his wife Sarah. The story of her first meeting with Franklin is well known from his autobiography. Franklin was walking along with “three great puffy rolls,” two stuck under his arms while he munched on the third. He looked “ridiculous” as he passed by Deborah

Deborah Read entered into a common-law marriage with Benjamin Franklin. She was the manager of his stationery shop.

FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

Sarah, who outlived both her parents. Franklin’s son William, who later became governor of New Jersey, was likely Deborah’s son, but the relationship cannot be proved. William was born before Benjamin and Deborah were married, and Benjamin refused to reveal who the mother was, to protect her reputation. Deborah was also a good businesswoman who managed the stationery shop that was attached to Franklin’s printing shop. Deborah Franklin died in 1774, just before the beginning of the American Revolution.




FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES

Of the approximately one million black people counted by the U.S. census of 1800, 108,000 were free. Most of these men, women, and children were former slaves freed either when the Northern states abolished slavery or by individual manumissions from Southern slaveholders. Hundreds of slaves won their freedom by fighting in the Revolutionary War, and many churches adopted an antislavery postition that encouraged individual manumissions. The free life that was sought so eagerly was far from easy. In the South, every free African American was open not only to suspicion of being a runaway slave but also to the danger of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery. There was daily harassment. Slaveholders feared that the very presence of free blacks in the vicinity could unsettle enslaved blacks, and local governments placed restrictions on the movements of free blacks to encourage them to leave. Free blacks were drawn to Northern cities, where they were safer than in the South and where the communities they formed provided support. Still, life was difficult. White working people feared competition from black laborers and pressured politicians to enact laws restricting what occupations were open to blacks. It was often an insurmountable challenge for an African-American man to find skilled or steady employment. Women, on the other hand, could count on steady, if unrewarding, work as domestic servants. Women’s economic contributions therefore acquired more importance in free black families than in white families. The vigorous African-American community organizations that came into being in Northern cities to provide social services such as education and

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welfare for widows were run by men. It appears that free black women consciously left the leadership roles to men, whose lives outside the black community provided daily humiliations. They also may have been too busy to take on added responsibilities. African-American periodicals of the early nineteenth century were full of exhortations to black wives to educate themselves and their children, keep perfect households, and be the moral lodestars for their families and the community.


FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR (1754–1763) Conflict between England and France for control of North America in which English forces were successful. The war began in 1754 with a skirmish between a small force of colonial militia led by George Washington and French troops on the Virginia frontier. In 1755, England sent regular troops commanded by General Edward Braddock west to remove the French forces at Fort Duquesne on the

Women bore the brunt of many attacks in the French and Indian War.

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Ohio River. Braddock’s army was destroyed by the French, and the frontier lay open to raiding parties composed of Indians allied to France. In 1756, French forces destroyed the English Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario. Advancing south the following year, they attacked Fort William Henry at the base of Lake George in New York. The fighting throughout was marked by atrocities on both sides, often against women and children. Fighting continued along the frontier throughout 1758 and into 1759. In the fall of 1759, the French capital at Quebec fell to English forces. With the defeat of the French, atrocities along the frontier began to decline. During the 1760s, more English settlers began to travel westward and establish new towns. The war ended officially with the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

FRENCH HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The French were one of the least represented groups in British North America. They settled north of the colonies in “New France” (present-day Canada) and, with French explorer Samuel de Champlain, settled Quebec in 1608. There were few French households with families when Quebec was founded. The vast, rough area was inhabited mostly by fur traders seeking their fortunes and Catholic priests and nuns on missionary expeditions. As French families began to settle in New France, they formed alliances with Native American groups, including the Huron. Many French women, along with their husbands, became successful in the fur trade. They traded with and supported Native Americans, who became allies with the French against the British. Beginning in 1689, armed conflicts between English colonists and the French led to the French and Indian War. The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, gave the British all of North America east of the Mississippi River including Canada and Florida, which was controlled by Spain. This victory for the British meant French families had to relocate or swear loyalty to the British crown.


FRIENDSHIP

Colonial women valued companionship. Girls enjoyed friendships with their siblings and children

of both genders. As they matured, women tended to trust other females more than males with personal information. Such relationships were viewed as more publicly appropriate and moral than social ties between unmarried adult women and men. Women’s first intense emotional friendships usually were formed with their female relatives. Sisters Mary and Margaret Brent immigrated, purchased land, and managed servants together in seventeenth-century Maryland and Virginia. Grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and aunts such as the Adams women participated together in domestic and community activities such as cooking, quilting, and worshiping. Girls enjoyed friendships with the siblings and children of both genders, playing games. Although many colonial marriages were based on socioeconomic factors, wives such as Anne Dudley and Anne Bradstreet often felt affectionate toward their husbands and respected their friendship. Friendships bonded women with similar social expectations. In the early 1700s, Sophia Wigington Hume of Charleston, South Carolina, attended theatrical and musical entertainment with her friends. Parties and masquerade balls provided female friends the opportunity to plan and participate in social activities which reinforced their relationships. Hume later experienced a religious epiphany and converted to Quakerism in 1741, distressing her friends when she asked them to forsake their material possessions, as she had done, to seek religious salvation. Friendships were sometimes formed across lines of race and social class. Margaret Brent developed a close friendship with Mary Piscataway, a Native American princess whom Brent raised and educated. The Cherokee leader Nancy Ward warned white settlers about impending raids and saved Mrs. Bean, a captive, from execution. Ward and Bean became friends while Ward nursed Bean’s wounds. Bean taught Ward how to weave cloth and tend cattle, introducing textile production and dairy husbandry to the Cherokees. Friendship provided women in both urban and rural areas comforting connections that eased loneliness and hardships, especially on the frontier and during military actions. Friends sometimes were the only people who validated a woman’s feelings and fears and provided moral support and advice during childbirth and domestic crises. Friendships also emboldened women to defend their opinions, decisions, and actions.

FRONTIER LIFE

Education provided another forum for female friendships, and teachers served as mentors to girls. Milcah Martha Moore’s Commonplace Book represented the verses and prose created by her network of friends. Female friends corresponded, expressing their fondness for each other and common interests. They also valued their friendships for improving their creativity in literary and artistic endeavors. Literate women frequently composed eulogies and poems while grieving for deceased friends. Not all colonial friendships resulted in positive outcomes. A group of friends instigated the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. In Rehobeth, Massachusetts, during the early 1700s, Mary Peck Butterworth convinced many of her friends to participate in her counterfeiting ring. She taught them how to iron currency and muslin to transfer the bills’ imprints without using copper plates that could be used as evidence in court. See also: Death; Old Age; Widowhood. FURTHER READING

Adams, Abigail. Adams Family Correspondence. Vol. I. Ed. L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Blecki, Catherine L., and Karin A. Wulf, eds. Milcah Martha Moore’s Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Woloch, Nancy. Early American Women: A Documentary History, 1600–1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.


FRONTIER LIFE

North American colonists considered the frontier to be the remote areas on the periphery of populated coastal communities. As more settlers migrated into the interior, the frontier expanded westward from several to hundreds of miles from the Atlantic. Frontier women discovered varying situations according to their social class, whether they lived in the northeastern, Middle Atlantic, or southern colonies, and when they lived there. Some common frontier elements included climatic extremes, treacherous terrain, and wild predators. Alice of Dunk’s Ferry, a seventeenthcentury African-American bridge toll collector, recalled when Philadelphia was a wilderness where panthers and wolves roamed.

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Native American women lived throughout the North American frontier and knew how to use indigenous plants for food and medicines. White women settling the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Jamestown, and St. Augustine were among the first European colonists to experience frontier conditions. While Native American women viewed the Massachusetts frontier as familiar and non-threatening, the Puritan Margaret Winthrop, wife of the colony’s governor, described it as unfriendly and dangerous when she arrived in 1631. Margaret Brent appreciated the religious toleration offered by the Maryland frontier in 1638. A member of the gentry, she possessed social connections that, combined with her single status, enabled her to buy thousands of acres, initiate legal action to collect debts, and represent the colonial governor to resolve territorial disputes. Most colonial women lacked such influence and equated the frontier with work. They had to be self-sufficient and had few legal rights. White indentured servants, often orphans and widows, and black slaves experienced hardships because of labor demands. Other women were recruited as brides for men settling the frontier. By the early 1700s, the Casket Girls arrived in the Mississippi Valley frontier to marry French settlers and Spanish and Mexican women had migrated into the California frontier. Because many frontier women were illiterate, little is known about them except for information listed on ships’ manifests. Others, such as Judith Giton, a French Huguenot who sought refuge in South Carolina in 1685, documented their hardships in letters or journals, referring to hunger,

Families living on the frontier had to be self-sufficient.

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illness, and poverty. By the mid-1700s, many female servants had acquired sufficient funds to purchase frontier land and gain some autonomy. Threatened by white settlers, some Native Americans captured or killed frontier women, including Hannah Duston, Penelope Van Princes, and Eunice Williams. In contrast, Nancy Ward, a powerful Cherokee leader, attempted to secure diplomatic agreements with whites in the late 1700s. Gradually, frontier women focused less on daily survival and more on improving the quality of their lives by adapting indigenous materials. In 1715 frontier Pennsylvania, Sybilla Masters invented a machine to crush and dry Indian corn. In the south, Eliza Lucas Pinckney utilized the frontier to experiment with cultivating indigo. See also: Captivity Narratives; Indentured Servitude; Property Rights; Slavery.

FURTHER READING

Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Z., ed. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin, 1998. Ekberg, Carl J. French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Merrill, James H. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999. Nobles, Gregory H. American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. Vaughan, Alden T., ed. New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans ca. 1600–1850: Essays Drawn from The New England Quarterly. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Woloch, Nancy. Early American Women: A Documentary History, 1600–1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.


FULLER, MARGARET See volume 2

G
GAGE, MARGARET KEMBLE

(1734–1824) Revolutionary War “mole,” and wife of General Thomas Gage. On April 18, 1775, the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride, an informer passed information about the movement of British troops to Continental partisans. The information allowed American troops to gather in Lexington, where they met the British troops and fired the first shots of the American Revolution. Historians now believe the “mole” was Margaret Kemble Gage, the American-born wife of the British general Thomas Gage. Margaret Kemble was born in New York in 1734. Her father was one of the richest men in the colonies, and her mother was of Dutch descent. Margaret married Thomas in 1758, and the couple had ten children. They were prominent figures in New York society, where Margaret was referred to as “the Duchess.” In 1774 Thomas returned to England, but almost immediately dispatched back to the colonies to serve as governor of Massachusetts. As tensions grew between Britain and the colonists, Margaret reportedly had divided loyalties and hoped to be able to avoid a war. She is thought to have been the “mole” based on just a few scraps of information. William Gordon, a Massachusetts

clergyman, described the informant as a woman who was “a daughter of liberty unequally yoked in the point of politics.” When Thomas learned that the colonists knew about his troops’ movements, he was said to have cried out, as if in pain, saying that “his confidence had been betrayed, for he had communicated his design to one person only.” Margaret spent the last years of her life in England, and died in 1824 at the age of 90. She is the subject of a famous portrait by American painter John Singleton Copley. FURTHER READING

Diamant, Lincoln, ed. Revolutionary Women in the War for American Independence. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

GALLOWAY, GRACE
GROWDON

(c. 1733–1782) Diarist during the American Revolution. Grace Growdon’s father, Lawrence Growdon, owned large tracts of land in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When he died in 1770, his will gave Grace and her sister Elizabeth title to the land. When Grace married Joseph Galloway in 1753, he became the legal owner of her property under

GAMES

the law of coverture. Joseph Galloway supported the British during the Revolution. When war broke out in 1776, he joined the forces of the British General William Howe as an adviser. Shortly thereafter, the Continental Congress placed his name on a list of persons suspected of treason, which meant that the government could confiscate all his property. When Continental troops recaptured Philadelphia from the British in 1778, Joseph fled the city with the couple’s 20-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, leaving Grace to protect both her land holdings and the couple’s home in Philadelphia. The diary Grace kept from 1778 to 1781 records her attempts to protect her property and describes her growing realization that her husband had not protected her interests during their marriage. When she finds that the deed for her property at Durham, Pennsylvania, is in her husband’s name, for example, she writes I am now truly set against him. . . . Was it not for my dearest child I would embrace poverty much sooner than live with a man who would grasp all I have, and treat me much worse than a slave.

Grace’s diary also details how American soldiers forcibly removed her from her home, and the difficult circumstances of her life in rented lodgings. Despite her best efforts, Grace never regained her property. When she died in 1782, never having seen her husband or daughter again, Grace willed the property, no longer legally hers, to her daughter. Elizabeth made several attempts to regain her inheritance, with little success. Only after Joseph died in 1803 did the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared that the Galloway’s treason should not have been resulted in the confiscation of his wife’s property. The family holdings were returned to Elizabeth. FURTHER READING

Diamant, Lincoln, ed. Revolutionary Women in the War for American Independence. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. Evans, Elizabeth. Weathering the Storm: Women of the American Revolution. New York: Scribner’s, 1975. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

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around the house or on the farm. Still, as children carded wool or carried wood, many turned these chores into games to see who could do the most or finish the job first. When they did have some free time, young children in colonial America played many of the same games children play today—tag, hide-and-seek, and Blindman’s Buff. Boys spun tops, shot marbles, flew kites, and went swimming, skating, or sledding. Girls tended to play indoors with dolls that they or their parents made from cornhusks or rags. They also sewed samplers, which allowed them to practice a variety of stitches. As children grew older, they might play checkers, backgammon, cards, or dominoes. Older boys might engage in team sports such as rounders (an early version of baseball) or cricket. Men enjoyed a version of bowling called ninepins. This game became so popular that Connecticut banned it, believing that people were placing bets on the outcome of matches. The colonists circumvented the ban by making a very simple change: they added a tenth pin—turning ninepins into something very similar to modern bowling. Men also played quoits, which is a version of horseshoes. Several cruel sports, such as bullbaiting and cockfighting, were popular among the colonists. Just as girls were not encouraged to play outdoors, adult women were considered too frail to bowl or play quoits, so they confined themselves to organizing dances, dinner parties, or home theatricals. Native Americans enjoyed all sorts of competition and especially liked gambling games. Those in the Northeast played lacrosse and a game called shinny, which is similar to hockey. Women and children played several outdoor games, such as double ball and snow snakes. In double ball, a curved stick is used to throw and catch a ball. Snow snakes involved oiling a stick and throwing it down a track made in the snow to see which stick would travel the farthest. Enslaved people had little time for games but did enjoy dancing, telling stories, and playing musical instruments. FURTHER READING


GAMES

Colonial children did not have much time for playing, since many of them were needed to help

Costa, D. Margaret, and Sharon R. Gutherie, eds. Women and Sport: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994. Warner, John F. Colonial American Home Life. New York: Franklin Watts, 1993.

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GENDER AND ENGLISH IDENTITY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

GANNETT, DEBORAH
SAMPSON See American Revolution

GENDER AND ENGLISH
IDENTITY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Gender is sexual identity in relation to social or cultural roles. The settlers who came from England to America in the seventeenth century left a society in which the roles of men and women were both clearly defined and sometimes debated. While Elizabethan writers published pamphlets and poems about the true natures of men and women, most people believed that a well-ordered society and a well-ordered home depended on clearly defined, divinely sanctioned sexual roles. Men were superior to women and should rule over women just as kings ruled over nations and God ruled over all creation. A good wife was submissive to her husband, modest in appearance, and a skillful manager of the husband’s property. Women who did not submit to husbands and fathers undermined the social order and were considered dangerous. Women who defied gender expectations were regarded as “wenches” or “witches” and were assumed to threaten the carefully constructed hierarchy of English society. In Elizabethan society, women were often associated with nature and natural phenomena. Just as men were expected to tame nature by plowing the land and growing crops or fencing the land to pasture livestock, there were also expected to “tame” women, to keep them in line and prevent them from going astray. Women were thought to be weak, both physically and morally. Because this patriarchal society depended on the inheritance of land, men were particularly interested in controlling women’s sexuality to be sure that the children born during the marriage were in fact the issue of the fathers. They were equally interested in controlling women’s property rights—including their rights to control their own children—in order to avoid breaking up large land holdings. These ideas came to define what it meant to be English and male in the seventeenth century. Just as men had to keep their wives and children in line, so too English men had not only a right but a duty to conquer and civilize “subordinate” races, which were actually referred to in gendered lan-

guage. America was the “virgin land”—a wild country waiting to be subdued and tamed by English men. English men of the seventeenth century regarded domination of one nation by another, more “civilized” nation as their patriarchal duty and destiny. This same gendered language was applied to the Native American populations that the English settlers encountered in America. To the extent that Native American society and gender roles differed from English social structure, colonists perceived Native Americans as deficient. If Native Americans were organized in matrilineal clans, that merely demonstrated how uncivilized they were. If their women could bear children with little pain, that only showed how much more delicate and “normal” English women were. The fact that Native American men did not wear beards merely demonstrated that they were not “real” men. Such attitudes allowed settlers to justify everything from cutting down trees to slaughtering indigenous peoples. FURTHER READING

Brown, Kathleen M. “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier.” In Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. . Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

GENDER AND RACIAL
DIFFERENCES Gender roles have often been used as part of the conceptual structure set up to justify racism. Contrary to popular opinion, slavery was not a result of racism. Racism was actually constructed to justify slavery. As Southern planters became more and more dependent on slave labor to grow tobacco and rice, they established a legal and social system that emphasized differences between the races and thus justified domination by one race over the other. Initially in colonial America, people saw little difference between white and African-American indentured servants. Intermarriage, while not common, did occur in the early years of the seventeenth century without much comment. But as the need for slave labor increased, colonists developed a conceptual framework to justify the practice of slavery, which included the idea that African people were inferior. The same set of ideas that

GENDER FRONTIERS

justified patriarchal authority over women was used to justify the authority of master over slave. Just as men believed that they were inherently superior to women and destined to dominate them, they also came to believe that people with white skins were inherently superior to people with black skins. In general, English men in Virginia did not consider field work to be appropriate for women. Nevertheless, they set African women, both slaves and indentured servants, to work in the fields. The women themselves did not mind because field work was considered appropriate for women in West Africa, but their attitude may have made it easier for their masters to exploit them. In 1643, the idea that African women were completely different from English women found its way into the law, becoming the first obviously discriminatory law in Virginia. Typically, Virginia planters paid taxes on their male field laborers, white or black. Beginning in 1643, they were required to pay taxes on women who worked in the field. But the tax was never levied on white women, even if they did help their husbands with the agricultural work. Ironically, even free African women had to pay tax on their own work. From this small beginning, other laws were enacted that codified the idea that African Americans were different from, and inferior to, Anglo Americans. These included laws against marriage between people of different races and laws that allowed slaveholders to “own” the children of enslaved women, even if the father was free. See also: Anti-miscegenation Laws; Gender and English Identity in the Seventeenth Century; Gender Frontiers. FURTHER READING

Brown, Kathleen M. “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier.” In Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. . Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.


GENDER FRONTIERS

The meeting of two cultures that have different ideas about gender and nature. When English settlers encountered Native Americans, each society perceived the other through the lens of its own social organization. Neither society could appreciate the strengths of the other because their ideas

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As settlers began conquering the frontier, gender roles began to change.

about social structure, including gender roles, were so different. For example, English colonists came from a society in which “women’s work” took place “within” the house, while men’s work took place “without.” Women’s work was domestic, and included spinning, dairy production, and child rearing. Men, on the other hand, worked the land and were responsible for agricultural production. They also took on public and political roles. The private ownership, development, and protection of the land were male prerogatives. These ideas were, of course, ideals. There were many individual women who helped on the land and even some who took public, political roles. But the role of woman was strongly felt to be domestic; the role of men strongly felt to be public. When English settlers encountered the Algonquian peoples in Virginia, they noticed sharp differences in women’s work and the roles of men. For example, in Algonquian society, women were primarily responsible for agriculture and land was not owned by individuals or fenced to keep others

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GENTILITY

because he felt “the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman.” Not everyone agreed with “Molly Pitcher” was the nickname given to Mary Ludwig Franklin, though, and from the beginHays McCauley because she carried pitchers of water to the ning of the eighteenth century on, American soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth on June many Americans strove to become 28, 1778, during the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. She accompagentlemen and gentlewomen as they nied her husband to the battle. According to some accounts, acquired improved educations and McCauley fought in her husband’s place when he was luxury items for the home. wounded and unable to fight. To be genteel, one needs both In 1822, the Pennsylvania legislature passed an act “for money and leisure time, commodities the relief of Molly McKolly, for her services during the revothat were rare in the early days of collutionary war.” She was awarded $40, and was to be paid onization. But as some families accu$40 annually until her death. mulated wealth and moved intocities and towns, they began to aspire toward a more refined existence. For women, gentility began with the off. Because each society felt its ways were divinely proper education in dancing, drawordained, they perceived the other as inferior. In ing, and fancy needlework. Genteel housewives beparticular English men regarded Native Americans gan to acquire “teapots, cutlery, and other as childlike, not manly. This perception is what jus- consumer goods not considered essential for surtified conquest. And the language of conquest was vival,” according to Carol Berkin in First Generagendered. English settlers regarded it as their duty tions. A table that 50 years earlier might have held to take the land and mold it to their uses. a common cup and trencher (a wooden platter), Tragically, Native Americans were so certain of and no utensils to speak of, now might be set with the inferiority of the settlers that they were slow to fine china and silver forks. People had more leidefend themselves or their ways of life. Interest- sure time to read, and they became more cosmoingly, Algonquian culture became more patriar- politan in their attitudes and tastes. Young ladies chal as a result of its contact with English society. might gather at each other’s homes to sew, as one of their number read aloud. Sons of well-to-do famSee also: Algonquian Domestic Economy; Gender and ilies might be sent to study in Europe. English Identity in the Seventeenth Century; Gender Houses changed. People no longer slept on and Racial Differences. benches in the kitchen but began to demand the privacy of separate bed chambers. Parlors were FURTHER READING added and comfortably furnished so families might Brown, Kathleen M. “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender entertain guests. People began to acquire books and Frontier.” In Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of build home libraries. Family portraits adorned the Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, walls. Clothing changed. Homespun and leather New York: Routledge, 1995. . Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: were replaced by silver buckles, lace, and silks. Social Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Chapel conventions changed. People began to “mind their Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. manners” and to give fancy balls and tea parties. Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Negotiators of Change: Historical The impact of the rise of gentility was to make Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: life in some ways easier and in some ways more Routledge, 1995. narrow for many women. While colonial women might help their husbands on the farm or with the family business, genteel ladies were more and GENTILITY more confined to the domestic sphere. While fine An attempt to convey and maintain the appear- china and silver might be regarded as preferable ance of refinement and elegance. When Benjamin to crude trenchers, women were increasingly tied Franklin thought about a wedding present to send to their possessions—polishing the silver and his sister Jane, he was torn between a tea table and pressing the linen tablecloths. While the colonial a spinning wheel. He settled on the spinning wheel housewife might throw together a stew from what-

TRAILBLAZERS




GOSSIP

ever she had around the house, the genteel lady had to collect recipes, shop for increasingly exotic ingredients, and ensure an elegant presentation. While upper-class women were increasingly freed from the demands of manual labor, the perception that they were too refined and delicate to work limited opportunities for many who wanted to live lives in the larger world. On the other hand, leisure time may have allowed women to define themselves as individuals in a way they never had before; they were better educated and more cosmopolitan. While marriages in the seventeenth century were usually economic arrangements, genteel young women began to have more romantic expectations of their suitors. If they did not marry just for love, they certainly had new ideas of what a good marriage was and expected their husbands to be good friends and pleasant companions. See also: Marriages, Companionate; Novels and Romantic Love. FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Knopf, 1980.

GERMAN HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY At the end of the seventeenth century, large numbers of German immigrants came to British North America. They tended to come as families, borrowing money for the passage. On arrival, one or more of the family would enter into an indentured servitude agreement with the family’s creditors, and work under that arrangement until the debt was paid. The goal of most German families, once they could be reunited, was to establish farms. They settled for the most part in Pennsylvania and on the western frontier, raising crops and keeping livestock. The Germans were also known as being skilled craftsmen: some German craftsmen were brought to the James River area to build a sawmill in the late 1600s. German families followed the traditional European patriarchal pattern of social arrangement. Males were the heads of households and held positions of leadership in the community. Property was passed down through the father’s bloodline after death.

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Women had very few rights or liberties in German households in early British North America. Viewed as the property of their husbands, wives could do little without the permission or approval of their husbands. It was viewed as a weakness for husbands to be challenged or controlled by their wives. Children were raised for the most part by mothers, but the fathers had the last word.


GILMAN, CAROLINE See diaries and journals

GODDARD, MARY
KATHERINE See Declaration of Independence


GODDARD,

SARAH UPDIKE

(c. 1700–1770) Printer and publisher. Sarah Updike was born in Rhode Island to Lodowick and Abigail Updike. Sarah received a better education than many girls of the era; her father even engaged a tutor to teach her Latin and French. In 1735, Sarah married Dr. Giles Goddard; they had four children, only two of whom, Mary Katherine and William, survived to adulthood. Giles died in 1757, and in 1762 William started a newspaper, The Providence Gazette, in Providence, Rhode Island. Sarah and Mary Katherine both worked in the printing shop. William stopped publishing The Gazette in 1765, but it appeared the next year with Sarah as its publisher. Sarah printed the paper and managed a bookstore until 1768. She is remembered for printing the first American edition of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, an English feminist and poet who also introduced smallpox vaccine in Britain in 1718. When William established the Pennsylvania Chronicle in 1768, Sarah helped him financially and occasionally even worked in the shop. She died in 1770.


GOSSIP

Informal exchange of information about other people. While sometimes considered “small talk,”

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GOULD, HANNAH FLAGG

gossip can be a potent means of social control or a vicious political weapon. Before daily newspapers were available, meeting notices and newly passed laws would be posted in colonial taverns, where travelers exchanged gossip with locals. In 1739, the Pennsylvania Gazette published the first gossip column in the British colonies, written by Benjamin Franklin. Although gossip was a common pastime, men and women who indulged too freely could be fined or given a shaming punishment. “Babbling women” who “scandalized” their neighbors might be dipped in a pond with the dunking stool. Personal and political gossip enforced commonly accepted standards of behavior. After the American Revolution, when some people feared that the new government could become too strong, George Washington was criticized for any behavior that seemed too “court-like.” Small talk also provided early American women with one of their few sources of power: shaping a person’s reputation. Although they had no formal vote in church decisions, women often influenced the selection of a minister by spreading favorable or unfavorable gossip about the candidate. In the early nineteenth century, as more men became eligible to vote, gossip became a political weapon. Andrew Jackson believed that slurs spread by his political enemies hastened the death of his wife, Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson.

ture poems, and poems for children. Although her poems were not distinguished by originality in thought or language, her work was often witty and always sincere and charming. Initially Gould published primarily in magazines, but in 1832, friends collected a number of her efforts in a volume entitled Poems. The work was an immediate success and was republished in 1833, 1835, and 1836. Dozens of other volumes followed, including A Gift for the Young (1843), The Mother’s Dream, and Other Poems (1853), and Poems for Little Ones (1863). Gould died in 1865, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she had lived since 1808.

GRAHAM, ISABELLA
MARSHALL

(1742–1814) Educator and philanthropist. Isabella Marshall was born in Scotland, the daughter of John and Janet Marshall. The Marshalls were devout Presbyterians, and Isabella was deeply interested in religion from her earliest days. She was formally educated, having attended boarding school for seven years. In 1765, Isabella married John Graham; two years later, the couple emigrated to Canada, where

See also: Slander. FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Collins, Gail. Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics. New York: Morrow, 1998. Rosnow, Ralph L., and Gary Alan Fine. Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay. New York: Elsevier, 1976.


GOULD, HANNAH FLAGG

(1789–1865) Poet. Hannah Flagg Gould was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the daughter of Benjamin and Griselda Gould. Benjamin Gould was a Revolutionary War hero who fought at the battle of Bunker Hill. Gould never married. She lived with and cared for her father until his death and did not begin to write poetry until she was in her thirties. She wrote religious and patriotic poems, including some that memorialized her father. She also wrote hymns, na-

Isabella Marshall Graham founded one of the first charitable organizations in the United States.

GREAT AWAKENINGS

John was a physician assigned to the Royal Americans, a British Army regiment. Isabella had five children, an infant son, whom she left in Scotland and who died within a year of her departure, and four other children born after the couple settled in North America. After her husband’s death in 1773, Isabella returned with her children to Scotland, where she founded a successful boarding school. She was also active in many charities. In 1789, Isabella left Scotland for New York City, where she opened another school. This enterprise, too, was a success. After all three of her daughters were married, Isabella retired from teaching and spent the rest of her life organizing and directing various charities. In 1797, with her daughter Joanna (see Joanna Graham Bethune) and friends Sarah Hoffman and Elizabeth Seton, Isabella founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, one of the first charitable organizations in the United States and one of the first examples in America of women founding an organization on their own. Isabella was chosen to head the society. In all of the charities founded by Isabella and her daughter, women managed the organizations and were granted legal powers unusual for the time period. From 1797 to 1798, the Society helped nearly one hundred widows and more than two hundred children. In 1802, the Society received a charter from the State of New York leading to legislative grants that allowed the society to purchase food for even more needy women. The society also helped women find work and opened Sabbath schools for adults. Graham taught in one of those schools. Isabella’s charitable work also included visits to the sick and to women confined to prisons and lunatic asylums. When Joanna Bethune founded the Orphan Asylum Society in 1806, Isabella was appointed as a trustee and taught at the Asylum’s school. She also helped to found the Society for the Promotion of Industry Among the Poor and was appointed president of the Ladies Board of the Magdalen Society, a position she held from 1811 until her death in 1814. In 1816, Joanna published a biography of her mother: The Power of Faith: Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the late Mrs. Isabella Graham of New-York. FURTHER READING

McHenry, Robert, ed. Liberty’s Women. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1980.

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GRATZ, REBECCA See Jews and Judaism


GREAT AWAKENINGS

Series of religious revivals that swept the colonies during the 1740s and the young republic from the 1790s to the 1830s. Ministers called people to a personal experience of salvation by preaching powerful sermons evoking the terrors of divine punishment and the joys of obeying God’s will. Some historians consider that the first Great Awakening began in 1726 with the impassioned preaching of Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus J. Frelinghuysen, who believed that strong emotion was a sign of a true relationship with God. Others date its beginning from 1739, when George Whitefield’s theatrical sermons inspired numerous conversions. Whitefield’s career began in Britain, but he made seven tours of America, preaching in fields when he was banned from New England pulpits. Other prominent preachers included William and George Tennent and Jonathan Edwards. Their evangelistic sermons often moved people to cry out, faint, or move about. This emotionalism and emphasis on personal experience provoked opposition from conservative clergy known as the Old Lights, who believed that churches should be led by ministers well trained in theology. In contrast, the New Lights considered a believer’s personal experience of grace to be the most important source of spiritual authority. The minsters’ heated debates about whether the revivals were the work of God or the work of the devil eroded public trust in the clergy. Even as increasing numbers of people joined established churches, Americans began to take increasing personal responsibility for their faith. Some historians believe that this democratization and distrust of authority prepared the way for the American Revolution. The first wave of revivals was ended by the fight for independence. During the Second Great Awakening, traveling preachers conducted camp meetings along the frontier. At these meetings, women often prayed aloud and gave testimonials to their conversions. They also worked to overcome sin and spread the Christian message by forming associations that organized revivals, studied the Bible, and supported mission work. As revivals spread throughout the country, Americans developed a sense of national identity

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based on shared beliefs and a sense of common destiny decreed by God. The emphasis on preaching led to the foundation of several colleges and intensified missionary activity, particularly among Native Americans. The idea that Christians should work toward a just and equal society attracted many African-American converts. And the expanding role of women within the churches laid the foundation for their emergence into public roles. See also: Benevolent Associations, Women’s; Edwards, Sarah Pierpont. FURTHER READING

Benowitz, June Melby. “Great Awakening” and “Second Great Awakening.” In Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Berkin, Carol, and Leslie Horowitz, eds. “Religion.” In Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: Documents in Early American History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Hudson, Winthrop S. Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life. 3rd ed. New York: Scribner’s, 1981.


GREEN, ANNE HOOF

(c. 1720–1775) Printer and publisher. Little is known of Anne Green’s personal life. She was probably born in the Netherlands and came to the United States as a child. In 1738, she married Jonas Green, a printer who had once worked for Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia. The couple had 14 children. Jonas and Anne moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 1739, and Jonas served as printer for the Province of Maryland. He also published the weekly Maryland Gazette, one of the earliest newspapers. Anne Green must have been involved in the printing business before 1767, because even though her husband died that year, the paper never missed an issue and subsequent publications came out on time. With her son William, Anne continued to print the Gazette. After William’s death in 1770, Anne continued Jonas’s work as the official printer for the province but was not officially appointed to his position or paid for the work for years. The Gazette was a significant force in keeping Marylanders aware of the political events leading up to the American Revolution. Anne also published John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer in 1774. Anne Green died in 1775.

GREENE, CATHARINE
LITTLEFIELD

(1753–c. 1814) Catharine Littlefield was born in Rhode Island in 1753 to John and Phoebe Littlefield. Catharine, like most of her contemporaries, had little formal education, but had a lively wit and was considered a great beauty. In 1774 she married Nathanael Greene, son of the governor of Rhode Island, who served in the American Revolution as brigadier general of the Rhode Island forces. Catharine traveled with her husband whenever she could, even spending the dismal winter of 1777 at Valley Forge. Eventually, Nathanael Greene was appointed commander of the Southern army and was instrumental in defeating the British forces there. After the war, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia rewarded Nathanael for his courage by granting him title to several estates, including Mulberry Grove on the Savannah River in Georgia, where he retired. After Nathanael’s death in 1788, Greene continued to live at Mulberry Grove, and this is where she made her most notable contribution to American history. Greene invited a young law student from Massachusetts to stay with her on the plantation. It is said that when a group of other visitors complained that there was no efficient way to separate cotton from the seed of the plant, Greene praised the mechanical genius of her young friend and suggested that he might be able to find a solution. The young friend was Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin. Greene gave Whitney and a neighbor, Phineas Miller, a room in her basement in which to work on their machine, which was completed in the spring of 1793. Catherine later married Phineas Miller. She died just before the close of the War of 1812.


GREENLEAF, ANNA

(1767–1845) Printer. Anna Quackenbos, also known as Ritsana Quackenbos, was born in 1767, probably in New York City. In 1791, she married a printer and journalist named Thomas Greenleaf, who was the owner of a newspaper called the New-York Journal. The couple had one son and three daughters. In 1795, Thomas Greenleaf began another newspaper, the Argus. For three years he ran both the Argus and the Journal. However, in 1798 he died of yellow fever. After his death, Anna Greenleaf took over both newspapers; according to standard practice of the time in the printing trade, widows kept

GYNECOLOGY

up their husbands’ businesses. Anna Greenleaf ran both newspapers until March of 1800, when she folded the Argus and sold the New-York Journal. That year marked the end of her journalism career.


GYNECOLOGY

The medical speciality involving health care for women. Most women in colonial America relied on midwives to help them deliver their babies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, physicians were scarce and often knew less about childbirth than midwives did. If doctors were called in to help with a delivery, it was usually because of obstructed labor, which included breech births and a variety of other problems. While midwives used herbal and other mild remedies, doctors of the era practiced “heroic medicine,” which included bleeding, purging, and vomiting, as well as such addictive medications as digitalis and opium. Throughout the eighteenth century, the treatments doctors offered often did more harm than good. When a woman’s labor was unproductive, doctors or barbers (who were the colonial equivalent of surgeons) sometimes cut the child’s limbs off while it was still in the womb. Cesarean sections were rare, though there is the record of a doctor living in the backwoods of Virginia who performed a successful one on his own wife. This operation, like all performed in those days, was done without anesthetic. When doctors began using chloroform in the middle of the nineteenth century to help women through painful childbirths and surgeries, some clergy objected, saying that God had decreed that women should bring forth children in sorrow and suffering. Forceps were first used to help with obstructed labor in 1650, and came into wider use in the middle years of the eighteenth century. The earliest forceps were made of wood or steel and padded with leather. Puerperal fever, a bacterial infection that appeared a few days after a birth, was a complication of pregnancy that was caused in large measure by doctors. Doctors knew nothing about the importance of a sterile environment and would deliver one woman after another without changing clothes or washing their hands or instruments. Although puerperal fever could occur with any delivery, women who delivered in hospitals were particularly susceptible because of the unsanitary habits of doctors. Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, wrote in 1842:

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If one case of puerperal fever arises in a physician’s practice there is an increased risk of a second, two cases suggest that the physician should do no obstetrics for at least a month and three prima facie evidence that he is the source of the contagion. The time has come when the existence of a private pestilence in the sphere of a single physician should be looked upon not as a misfortune, but as a crime.

Because of difficult deliveries or damage inflicted by forceps, women could get tears in their bladders or rectums, resulting in a lifetime of incontinence. Tears in the vaginal wall or cervix might result in painful intercourse or problems with future pregnancies and deliveries. The most common complaint as a result of childbirth was a prolapsed uterus, a condition in which the uterus drops, sometimes so far that it protrudes from the vaginal opening. To counteract this problem, women used pessaries, devices designed to support the uterus—which often caused more problems than they cured. Infection, inflammation, and ulceration often resulted from the use of the pessary, leaving women permanently ill and in pain. Menstruation was regarded by seventeenthand eighteenth-century doctors as a disability. According to Richard and Dorothy Wertz in Lying-In, “Doctors quite commonly believed that during menstruation women’s limited bodily energy was diverted from the brain, rendering them, as doctors phrased it, idiotic.” From the beginning of the nineteenth century doctors began to replace midwives in caring for women’s reproductive health. Male members of the medical profession began to suggest that women were incapable of the level of professionalism that male doctors could attain (partly because of the “draining” effects of menstruation). At first, it was difficult for male doctors to learn about childbirth and other purely female health issues because women were trained to be extremely modest and did not want to allow men to examine them. As these attitudes gradually changed, the gynecological profession became dominated by male doctors rather than female midwives. See also: Midwifery. FURTHER READING

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Knopf, 1990. Wertz, Richard W., and Dorothy C. Wertz. Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

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HALL, THOMAS/THOMASINE

H
HALE, SARAH See volume 2

HALL, THOMAS/
THOMASINE

(c. 1605– ?) Early colonist to Virginia who faced discrimination for being transgendered. Born in Newcastle-uponTyne, England, Hall had lived at different times as a woman and as a man. In 1627, Hall relocated to the colony of Virginia as a man. The colonists soon became suspicious of Hall’s true gender identity after noting Hall’s great skill at traditionally female tasks such as cooking and sewing. Both men and women consequently began forcibly undressing and examining Hall’s genitalia to determine whether Hall was male or female. Though satisfied that Hall was physically male, the colonists remained troubled by Hall’s gender-shifting activities. Eventually, the colonists brought Hall before the Great Court of Virginia. After hearing the evidence, the court determined that Hall was both male and female, and ruled that Hall would henceforth have to abandon gender switching in favor of a dual-sex status marked by wearing both male and female clothing. Unable to fit Hall into the existing gender dichotomy, in sum, the court created a new gender—complete with socially constructed rules and behavioral codes.


HALLAM, MRS. LEWIS

(?–1773?) First professional actress in America. “The Queen Mother of the American Stage” played leading roles in a traveling acting company that pioneered performances of serious drama in North America. Hallam’s birth date and maiden name are unknown, as is the date of her marriage to Lewis Hallam, an actor in his brother William’s London theater. After William went bankrupt, he formed a 12-member acting company to tour North America under Lewis’s direction. Lewis and his wife were to play the principal roles, while their children Lewis Jr., Adam, and Helen learned the business. Another daughter, Isabella, remained in England and became a famous singer and comic.

Three months after sailing to Virginia in 1752, the Hallams presented Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in Williamsburg. On tour, they had to find or build a theater in each new city. They also countered opposition from those who considered plays immoral by including epilogues and highlighting their respectable leading lady’s personal example. In 1754, Lewis Hallam took the troupe to Jamaica. There he died of yellow fever. His widow married David Douglass, who became the company’s manager. Renamed the American Company, the troupe returned to the colonies in 1758. By 1763, Lewis Hallam Jr. and his cousin Nancy Hallam were playing leading roles. Mrs. Hallam continued to play character parts until shortly before her death. Her personal popularity and famous roles such as Juliet, Jane Shore, and Desdemona built an audience for American theater.

HAMILTON, ELIZABETH
SCHUYLER

(1757–1854) The wife of Alexander Hamilton. Elizabeth Schuyler was born on August 9, 1757, in Albany, New York, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and politician. In 1780 she married Hamilton, whom she had met the previous winter. Though Hamilton was poor and did not come from an upper-class family, Elizabeth’s father admired his intelligence and enthusiasm and approved of the marriage. In 1789, Hamilton was appointed secretary of the treasury of the United States, and his wife became an important member of a social group consisting of government officials and their wives. In 1804, Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, leaving his wife and children nearly penniless. Mrs. Hamilton used funds from friends and family to keep her home and to educate her sons. She spent most of her time, however, gathering and publishing her husband’s papers and working to improve his reputation. In particular, she helped establish his contributions to George Washington’s Farewell Address. She also served on the board of the New York Orphan Asylum Society. She died in Washington on November 9, 1854, and was buried next to her husband in New York City.

HEALTH


HARRISON,

ANNA SYMMES

(1775–1864) The wife of William Henry Harrison. Anna Symmes was born on July 25, 1775, in Flatbrook, New Jersey. Her mother died young and her father was in the military, so Symmes was raised primarily by her grandparents. In 1794, she traveled with her father to Ohio, where he planned to make a new home. On the way she met William Henry Harrison, then an army officer, and fell in love with him. Although her father did not want his daughter to marry a military man, Symmes and Harrison decided to marry nonetheless; they were married in her father’s home, but without his presence or blessing on the marriage. Anna Harrison kept a low profile through much of her husband’s military and political career. William Harrison served as governor of the Indiana Territory as well as commander of the Army of the Northwest during the War of 1812, and Anna Harrison accompanied him to these and other postings. She was known as an outstanding household manager, often under trying frontier circumstances in Ohio and Indiana. She was also known as a gracious hostess, though she disliked high society. The couple had ten children, of whom nine survived infancy. In 1840, William Henry Harrison was elected president of the United States. Anna Harrison, however, was too ill to attend the inauguration. A month later, while she was preparing to travel to Washington, her husband died. She remained at her home in North Bend, Ohio, and died there on February 25, 1864, at the age of 88.


HART, NANCY

(c. 1735–1830) Revolutionary War heroine. Nancy Morgan was born about 1735, probably in either Pennsylvania or North Carolina. Little is known about her early life. By 1771, she had married Benjamin Hart and the couple had moved to Wilkes County, Georgia. Nancy Hart came to fame through her exploits during the Revolutionary War, although there is no clear evidence that she actually did any of the things she is said to have done. According to legend, however, Hart was a dedicated spy in the cause of the rebels, and she was known for her shooting ability. Her most celebrated adventure involved a group of five British soldiers who came to Hart’s home and ordered her to cook them a meal. Hart turned the tables on them, however; when the

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meal was ready, she unexpectedly seized a rifle, killed one soldier, wounded another, and kept the others prisoner until other rebels arrived to help. Hart has been the subject of a number of literary works, and many people have drawn inspiration from her story. During the Civil War, for example, a group of women in LaGrange, Georgia, formed an all-female militia designed to guard their town from Federal troops; they called their group the “Nancy Harts” in honor of her. Hart died in 1830 near Henderson, Kentucky.


HEALTH

Half of all the original colonists who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 died in the first few months. Although Native American populations were quite healthy before Europeans arrived, many groups were devastated by diseases the newcomers brought, such as smallpox. African Americans, although they had some immunity to smallpox and malaria, died in large numbers of respiratory infections and other illnesses. In general, health during the colonial period was not good, especially for children. One in three children died before the age of two, and half of all children died before their tenth birthdays. By 1789, according to Susan Terkel in Colonial American Medicine, in the South, those who survived to their twentieth birthday could expect to live another twenty to twenty-five years. In the North, where the climate was healthier and there was less disease, twenty year olds could expect to live another thirty or so years.

As grim as these statistics seem, however, even the earliest settlers lived longer than their European counterparts because food was more plentiful in the colonies and because there were fewer overpopulated urban areas where disease could spread. Still, colonists succumbed to diseases such as typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis. Many were seriously weakened by bouts of malaria and influenza. Epidemics of measles, smallpox, whooping cough, and yellow fever carried off entire populations. And as many as one in 200 young women died in childbirth. Little was known about the cause of many diseases, so little could be done to prevent their occurrence. A woman dying of diphtheria might kiss her children goodbye, not realizing that she had,

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the disease. Lead pipes used for distilling rum and cider were eliminated. All these developments led to an increased life expectancy. See also: Infancy; Gynecology; Medicine; Midwifery; Old Age. FURTHER READING

Terkel, Susan Neiburg. Colonial American Medicine. New York: Franklin Watts, 1993.

Poor hygiene contributed to high mortality rates among the colonists.

in her last moments, probably infected them. Colonists seldom bathed or washed their clothing, and they often dumped human waste near wells and other water supplies. It was believed, in fact, that the oils that accumulated on skin as a result of not bathing protected people from disease. What the colonists ate—and did not eat—also threatened their health. Because they could store only a limited variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, their diets often lacked essential nutrients, and since salt was used to preserve meat, their diets were very high in sodium. The same foods were eaten day in and day out, so their diet lacked the variety necessary for good health. Water was considered unhealthy, so the colonists—including young children—drank with large quantities of alcohol, some of which was distilled in lead pipes and which may have contributed to lead poisoning. An inadequate diet also led to serious dental problems; in fact, European visitors often commented on the sorry state of American teeth. “The first thing that struck every visitor to early America,” remarked John Josslyn, “was the bad teeth of the people. The women are pitifully tooth-shaken.” By the eighteenth century, the health of Americans was gradually improving. People began to understand the beneficial effects of fresh fruits and vegetables. Swamps and marshes that bred mosquitoes were drained, reducing incidences of malaria. People began to move outdoor toilets farther from houses and wells and to keep city streets cleaner. In the 1720s, Cotton Mather, a Congregationalist minister, introduced the practice of inoculating people against smallpox. This innovation alone saved many lives, even though it took time to convince many people that they could protect themselves from smallpox by deliberately injecting themselves with


HECK, BARBARA RUCKLE

(1734–1804) One of the founders of American Methodism. A second-generation Protestant German refugee, Barbara Ruckle was born in County Limerick, Ireland, in 1734. At the age of 18, she experienced a conversion and joined a new evangelical group the Methodists. In 1760, high rents and scarce land led a group including Heck, her husband, and her cousin, the Methodist preacher Philip Embury, to leave Ireland for New York City. The move tried the group’s faith. Over the next few years, several members began to stray from their strict Methodist beliefs. One evening in 1766, Heck discovered some of them violating the tenets of Methodism by playing cards. Incensed, she flung the cards into a nearby fire and persuaded Embury to begin preaching again. Embury started a Methodist revival and, with Heck’s assistance, established in New York City the Wesley Chapel, the first Methodist congregation in the colonies. Though the chapel endures to this day, Heck would not long remain in the colonies. Heeding the teachings of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, she was loyal to England during the Revolution and was forced to flee with her family to Canada during the war. Nonetheless, by helping to found the first Methodist congregation in the United States, Heck had a lasting impact on the nation’s religious development and made clear the important role that women had in the evangelical movements of the era.


HEMINGS, SALLY

(1773–1835) Enslaved woman intimately connected to Thomas Jefferson. Hemings was born on the Virginia plantation of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, who, it is generally acknowledged, was her father. After Wayles’s death and the division of his estate

HEMINGS, SALLY

in 1774, she became Jefferson’s property and was brought to Monticello along with her mother, Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, and her siblings. She became the nursemaid of Jefferson’s daughter Mary, whom she accompanied to France at the age of 13 or 14 in 1787. Jefferson’s wife had died in 1782. For two years Sally Hemings lived in Paris, probably in Jefferson’s household; she may have stayed with his daughters, Martha and Mary, in their convent school. By 1789, when Martha Jefferson was entering Parisian society and the city was shaken by the first turbulent events of the French Revolution, Hemings was acting as lady’s maid to both daughters. After her return to Monticello at the end of 1789, she worked as a household servant, taking jobs such as personal attendant, chambermaid, and seamstress. The anonymity of Sally Hemings’s life on a Virginia plantation came to a sudden end in September 1802, a year after Jefferson became president. Richmond newspaper editor James T. Callender published the assertion that Jefferson “keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally.” This allegation, which included the report that Jefferson and Hemings had several children, was immediately taken up by journalists allied with the antiJefferson Federalist party. Printing presses from Virginia to Massachusetts produced satirical verses, stories, and prints on the topic for months afterward. An illicit relationship with a slave was only one of the misdeeds for which Jefferson was denounced by his political opponents. This charge was, however, the most enduring. It was carried through the nineteenth century by Northern abolitionists and British critics of American society. As a slaveholding president whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” Jefferson was a vivid personification of the contradictions of a republic founded on principles of liberty yet inhabited by nearly 1 million people in bondage. Callender’s revelations only heightened a paradox memorably expressed by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who in 1806 described a president who “dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace.” Jefferson maintained his customary public silence in the face of attacks on his character. There is no record that he discussed the issue with friends or family. His daughter Martha and her children made their denials privately. While no comment by Sally Hemings survives, her son Madison stated in 1873 that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson and

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his descendants continue to pass on this account of their ancestry. Most historians of Jefferson were unwilling to accept the truth of such a relationship until 1998, when a genetic test gave scientific support to strong circumstantial evidence and the testimony of Madison Hemings and his descendants. In 2000, the organization that operates Monticello as a national historic site issued a report stating that there was a “high probability” that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, born in 1808, and “most likely” of her other children as well. Sally Hemings had six known children, two of whom died in infancy, born between 1795 and 1808. Jefferson allowed the two oldest, son Beverly and daughter Harriet, to leave Monticello after they reached the age of 21. According to their brother Madison, they went to Washington, where they lived as members of the white community. After Jefferson’s death in 1826, the youngest sons, Madison and Eston Hemings, also became free according to the terms of Jefferson’s will. While Sally Hemings was not officially freed, Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph allowed her to leave Monticello with Madison and Eston, to live in the neighboring town of Charlottesville. In the censuses of 1830 and 1833, she and her sons are listed as free. There is no known portrait of Sally Hemings, who, by all accounts, was beautiful and “mighty near white,” as one former Monticello slave, Isaac Jefferson, recalled. Her individuality was ignored over two centuries, however, as she became a convenient symbol in an ongoing debate about American institutions and society. The crude verses of Federalists used vicious racial stereotypes to portray her in 1802. Antebellum enemies of slavery made her the mute victim of slaveholder exploitation. For many African Americans, Hemings stood for the countless enslaved women whose sexual integrity was violated by white men. The longstanding denial of her connection to Jefferson echoed white America’s denial not only of the mixing of races under slavery but also of AfricanAmerican contributions to the formation of the nation. The general acceptance of the existence of a long-term relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has fostered a more open discussion of master-slave relations and race mixing as well as an expanded understanding of a social world that included Sally Hemings as well as Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings’s recollections, which included

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HIBBINS, ANN

Jefferson’s promise to free Sally Hemings’s children by the age of 21, suggest that his mother was at least to some degree the agent of her own fortunes, motivated by concern for the welfare of her family. She achieved what no other enslaved woman at Monticello did—the freedom of all her children in the prime of life. Four of her grandsons served in the Union Army in the Civil War, one dying in a Confederate prison. Her descendants speak of her as a woman of strength and intelligence. Her name forever linked to Jefferson’s, Hemings will continue to be at the center of discussion of the potent historical issues of sex, race, and slavery. Lucia Stanton FURTHER READING

Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Stanton, Lucia. Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000. Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000.


HIBBINS, ANN

(?–1656) Convicted of witchcraft. Ann Hibbins’s date and place of birth, the names of her parents, and her own maiden name are unknown. She arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s with her husband, William Hibbins, during the Great Puritan Migration, along with others who were escaping religious persecution in Britain. The Hibbinses settled in Boston. Ann Hibbins was excommunicated from the Church of Boston in 1640 because of a dispute with a local carpenter. She accused him of overcharging her for work done to her house. A fellow church member, called in to settle the dispute, claimed that the carpenter had charged a fair price. Although Hibbins’s husband tried to get her to admit her error, she refused. She was therefore accused of acting in “ways unbecoming of a woman.” Because of the dispute with the carpenter and its subsequent events, Hibbins was accused of witchcraft in 1654, a year after her husband died (until then, his political power had protected her from such an indictment). The Upper House of the General Court of Massachusetts, on which her

husband had sat, refused to convict her. However, the Lower House outvoted them and she was hanged on June 19, 1656. FURTHER READING

Garraty, John Arthur. ‘‘Hibbins, Ann.’’ American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.


HOMOSEXUAL See lesbians

HUME, SOPHIA
WIGINGTON

(1702–1774) Minister and writer who worked to revive Quakerism in Charleston, South Carolina. Raised as an Anglican lady of fashion, Hume campaigned against vanity after she became a Quaker. Hume was born to Henry and Susanna (Bayley) Wigington in Charleston. As the daughter of a wealthy colonial official, she enjoyed books, balls, plays, and fine clothes. In 1731, she married lawyer Robert Hume, with whom she had a son and a daughter. After two serious illnesses and her husband’s death in 1737, Hume became convinced that luxury was a danger to her soul. In 1740, she sold many of her possessions and began to live simply. A year later, she joined her daugher in London and became a member of the Society of Friends. In 1747, despite her belief that women should concern themselves with home and family, Hume felt called to preach repentance in Charleston. Reluctant to “become a fool” among her former friends, she nevertheless obeyed the call. Her message, printed in An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina, went through five editions. After her return to England in 1748, Hume continued to preach and write. To help Friends resist worldliness, she collected several writings from early Quaker leaders. Despite her growing frailty, Hume tried to raise money to rebuild the Charleston meetinghouse in 1767. A year later, she retired. Among the bestknown preachers of her time, Hume is remembered for her devotion to simplicity and the inner light. See also: Preaching; Quakers.

HUTCHINSON, ANNE MARBURY

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HUTCHINSON, ANNE
MARBURY

(1591–1643) Religious dissenter expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging Puritan orthodoxy. Now considered a courageous woman ahead of her time, Hutchinson was vilified by the governor who banished her as an “American Jezabel.” When Bridget Marbury gave birth to her daughter Anne, her husband Francis was in prison for criticizing the poor training given his fellow Anglican ministers. (Since Elizabeth I was head of the Church of England, criticism of the church was considered criticism of the queen.) Fourteen years later, the family moved from Alford, England, to London.

“You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul, and assure yourselves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from you, and if you go on in this course you begin you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity.” —Anne Hutchinson, spoken at her trial for heresy

In 1612, Anne Hutchinson returned to Alford with her husband, William, a prosperous farmer and cloth merchant. Both Hutchinsons became followers of John Cotton, a Puritan preacher who taught that the saved and the damned had been predestined and that those who did good works and felt a personal relationship with God could know they had been saved. When Anglican authorities banished Cotton to Massachusetts, the Hutchinsons and their 14 children followed in 1634. William Hutchinson found new business opportunities in Boston. His wife was soon recognized for her skill as a nurse and midwife. The first signs of conflict came when Anne Hutchinson, who had claimed to receive personal revelations during the voyage, had to confess to error before being allowed to join Cotton’s congregation. Then, at Cotton’s suggestion, she and a few women began to discuss his sermons in the Hutchinsons’ home. Eventually more than 60 men and women gathered regularly to discuss religion, the Bible, and the issue of whether faith was more important than good works. Hutchinson and her followers

Anne Marbury Hutchinson’s preaching led Governor John Winthrop to charge her with heresy.

became increasingly critical of ministers who emphasized a “covenant of works,” based on doing good and following the law, instead of a “covenant of grace,” based on a personal experience of God’s spirit. They even began walking out of church during the sermons. By 1636, Hutchinson’s views were debated throughout Boston. She and her followers became known as Antinomians, from a term meaning “against the law.” The following year, her supporters refused to participate in a war against the Pequot Indians. Infuriated, Governor John Winthrop charged Hutchinson with heresy. The trial was moved to Cambridge because Hutchinson had so many supporters in Boston. The vague charges against her included “troubling the peace of the commonwealth,” “reproaching” most of the ministers, and holding meetings “not fitting to her sex.” Hutchinson went on trial November 7, 1637, and defended herself skillfully

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ILLEGITIMACY

against 49 male ministers and magistrates. However, she was banished after claiming to have received divine revelations that she would be persecuted in New England. The Puritans believed that direct revelations had ended with the Apostles. Hutchinson went on trial again in 1638, but with the same verdict. John Cotton withdrew his support from Hutchinson, claiming she had taken his views too far. However, he could not bring himself to expel her and asked Reverend John Wilson to cast her out. When Hutchinson was expelled from the congregation, she was pregnant with her sixteenth child. With her family and several followers, she moved to Rhode Island and settled in Portsmouth, where her child was stillborn and deformed. Detractors claimed the birth of this “monster” proved the error of Hutchinson’s views. However, she continued to teach, despite attempts by Boston authorities to stop her. Widowed in 1642 and concerned that Rhode Island would come under Puritan control, Hutchinson moved to Long Island with her unmarried children. She and all but her youngest child Susanna were killed during a Native American raid. Susanna was later ransomed. Some historians believe that Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts for her religious views. Others argue that she threatened the unity of a colony fighting to maintain its original charter, that

authorities considered her a safer target than the unorthodox but popular John Cotton, or that male ministers feared her ability to organize formerly submissive women. Whether banished for religious or political reasons, outspoken Anne Hutchinson has come to symbolize freedom of conscience and courage in the face of intolerance. See also: Documents. FURTHER READING

Benowitz, June Melby. “Hutchinson, Ann Marbury.” Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Bumsted, J. M. “Hutchinson, Anne Marbury.” Encyclopedia of American Biography. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Hutchinson, Thomas. “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown.” The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay. Vol. 2. Ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. IlgenFritz, Elizabeth. Anne Hutchinson. New York: Chelsea House, 1991. “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown.” Quoted in Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Ed. Barabara J. MacHaffie. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976. . Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1981.

I
ILLEGITIMACY

The condition of children born when the mother is unmarried. In both the colonial and the early national periods, a woman who had a child out of wedlock faced social censure. A young woman with an illegitimate child might ruin more than her own prospects; her behavior might make it harder for her sisters to find husbands. There was also considerable social pressure on the child’s father to marry the mother. Recent research indicates that fully one-third of all brides in New England were pregnant at the time of their marriage. It is not known in how many of these cases the men were pressured to marry. There is some speculation that once engaged, many couples would experiment with sex knowing that they would soon marry. In addition, the practice of bun-

dling may have led to more sexual activity than was intended. Although children born less than nine months after the wedding were considered legitimate, most people disapproved of premarital sex. One Virginia woman whose daughter had a child seven months after her marriage, for example, refused to visit her daughter when the child was born.

IMMIGRATION AND
NATURALIZATION Many women were less inclined than men to leave European settled society, with its goods and services that made family life comfortable. Moreover, young women were usually in some stage of preg-

INDENTURED SERVITUDE

nancy or nursing, which made the transatlantic passage, often lasting for months, seem very dangerous. As a result, throughout North American demographic inequality existed between the sexes. Even at the end of the colonial period, only one in four immigrants was female, and the imbalance was always greater in the Southern colonies than in the Northern. Many women, like men, left for America only out of economic necessity, as indentured servants, or involuntarily as transported convicts. If New England was settled primarily by whole immigrant families, in the long run many women immigrants in other colonies did not arrive with families, and few were farmers. By the 1770s, most were skilled only in the production of textiles. Many immigrant women faced the trials of the naturalization period—when they were residents awaiting citizenship—without much support from either immediate family or social relief agencies. As for citizenship, they enjoyed an improvement over the colonial situation, in which women became citizens only through husbands or fathers. The first United States Immigration Act, in 1790, specified that “free white persons” became citizens after fulfilling residency requirements. However, women faced (along with men) a lengthening of the U.S. naturalization period—from two years in 1790, to five years in 1795, to 14 years in 1798. Congress reduced the naturalization period to five years once again in 1802. Over the next two decades, the population of women immigrants became somewhat more voluntary in character, as the number of economically distressed servants and political refugees declined. They included a number of British and French women of some special skills or distinctions, including actors and artists, and the skills of ordinary women became more diverse that in the past.


INDENTURED SERVITUDE

One of the three forms of bound labor, which also included slavery and apprenticeships. Indentured servants were bound by contract to work for a period of time in exchange for passage to America; food, shelter, and clothing; and “freedom dues,” which might include land, at the end of service. Unlike slaves, they served limited terms, usually ranging from four to seven years. Their contracts could be sold to new masters and terms of service could be extended for violations of contract, which included running away or becoming pregnant.

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In the seventeenth century, three out of every five immigrants to the British colonies were indentured servants. About 80 percent were young men between the ages of 18 and 25. Female indentured servants often married their masters soon after their arrival. Those who became indentured voluntarily hoped to earn their passage to America and eventually own land. Skilled tradesmen could negotiate for wages as well as maintenance; “redemptioners,” who often brought their families with them, worked only long enough to pay the cost of passage. Not all indentees served voluntarily. Approximately 30,000 ex-convicts, including petty thieves and political prisoners, chose transport to America instead of death by hanging. Although released prisoners could be troublemakers, they served for twice as long at about half the price of redemptioners. Other involuntarily bound laborers were victims of trading company agents who resorted to unscrupulous recruiting practices or outright kidnapping to meet colonial demand for labor. As the pool of available free workers grew, the Northern colonies began to pay wages to servants instead of relying on indentured labor. However, tobacco-growing colonies continued to import indentured servants. In Maryland and Virginia, both male and female indentees often worked long hours in the fields for masters who fed them poorly, beat them, and even gambled them away in card games. Richard Frethorne wrote that a week’s rations from his master were less than what he used to eat in one day in England. Elizabeth Sprigs complained of having to sleep on the ground and begged her family to send clothes. If indentees survived the Southern climate and became free, the shortage of available land often forced them back into servitude. In the late seventeeth century, fewer English people were willing to emigrate, and planters began using enslaved blacks. By the 1800s, indentured servitude was no longer a major source of labor in America. FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Smith, Barbara Clark. After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

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INFANCY


INDIANS

See family life, Native American; Native Americans; and names of individuals and tribes


INFANCY

Infancy was perilous in colonial America. As many as 50 percent of children born in the colonies did not survive their first year. Some children died as a result of particularly difficult births, and epidemics of measles and diphtheria carried away many children. An infant who did not succumb to disease might inadvertently succumb to the misguided ministrations of its mother. Some mothers believed that babies should be regularly submerged in icy water and made to wear thin-soled shoes that allowed water to leak in. Those mothers who followed the recommendations of philosopher John Locke withheld meat, fruit, and water from their babies—but allowed them to drink warm beer. The few babies whose mothers could not nurse them might be fed from a lead-based pewter bottle. Given these facts, it is probably fortunate that most mothers nursed their babies for a year to a year and a half. Because of the high probability that a child might die within the first weeks of life, parents tended to remain aloof from newborns until they felt they had a chance of survival. One colonist summed up the prevailing attitude: “To lose a Child when first brought into Life is very hard but it is a Tax we must pay.” Parents suffered quite a bit more at the loss of an older child, one whose character and personality were beginning to emerge. Another parent, upon the loss of an 18-month-old child, wrote, “No event in my Life had ever before taught me the genuine agonies of Grief. My whole Soul seemed to be buried along with my child.”

IROQUOIS HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Iroquois settled in the northeastern section of North America in present-day New York State. The Iroquois lived in matrilineal clans, meaning that property and power was passed down through the mother. They built longhouses that not only served as dwellings, but also functioned as a social symbol of rank and status. They held annual longhouse festivals, and their religion was based on oral tradition in which gifted speakers prayed, gave speeches, and invocations. The Iroquois built their barrel-roofed longhouses out of bark, with the women completing much of the work. The length of these longhouses could be up to 400 feet and was determined by the number of family members living there. Tall fences were built to surround a compound of longhouses. Custom required members of the same matrilineal lines to live together in the same house; therefore several generations lived under the same roof. Longhouses were covered with elm bark saplings that were bent around vertical upright posts. Totems hung above the doorways. These dwellings could be expanded when a new husband married into the longhouse’s matrilineal social unit. Inside, bunklike structures lined the sides of the building, with several communal fires placed through the middle. Cooking pots of food left on the fires tended by women and children throughout the day were available to anyone living in the longhouse. Women planted, gathered, harvested, and cooked food while the men hunted. The Iroquois inhabited these dwellings year-round, and some large villages contained dozens of these structures.

J JACKSON, RACHEL
DONELSON ROBARDS

(1767–1828) Frontier woman who married Andrew Jackson. Born in Virginia, Rachel Donelson was one of 11 children born to John and Rachel (Stockley) Donelson. When she was 12, the family moved to Tennessee. Floods and conflict with Native Americans prompted another move to Kentucky.

At age 17, Rachel Donelson married Lewis Robards, a violent and jealous man. In 1790, her mother asked a boarder, Andrew Jackson, to escort her daughter to safety in Tennessee. Robards petitioned the Virginia legislature for divorce. Assuming the marriage was ended, Jackson married Rachel Robards in 1791. Dismayed to learn that the divorce did not become final until 1793, the Jacksons exchanged vows again.

JEMISON, MARY

Andrew Jackson became a successful lawyer and plantation owner. In 1819, he built the Hermitage for his wife. As her husband’s reputation grew, Jackson preferred running the mansion and caring for orphaned children and slaves to politics. Though childless, she raised 13 children. Many loved “Aunt Rachel” for her kindness and hospitality. However, her husband’s political enemies called her a “fat dumpling” and an illiterate adulteress. When Jackson became president-elect in 1828, she refused to move to Washington. Shortly afterward, she died of a heart attack. She was buried in the Hermitage garden in her inaugural gown. Jackson, who had fought a duel to defend her honor, mourned a “gentle” and “virtuous” woman whom “slander might wound, but could not dishonor.” See also: Divorce Laws; Gossip.


JAY, SARAH LIVINGSTON

(1756–1802) Wife of John Jay; political and social leader. Sarah Van Brugh Livingston was the daughter of William Livingston, an important figure in the Revolutionary War who later became the first governor of New Jersey. She came of age before the war and was deeply affected by the political ideas she heard at the time. As a young woman, Sarah Livingston married John Jay, a New York political leader who was strongly supportive of American independence. Sarah Jay took her husband’s part in the conflict, standing by him as he served the nation in various posts throughout the war and beyond. In 1779, she accompanied him to Spain, where he had been sent as foreign minister. She kept a close eye on Spanish society as well as on the other American politicians who had also been sent to Spain. Her letters home were full of witty and insightful remarks. After the war, the Jays returned to the United States, where John became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. Sarah Jay became a social leader in the New York society, entertaining widely. She created a list of 160 families she considered particularly deserving of social notice. In 1801, the Jays retired to a farmhouse north of New York City. Sarah Jay died the following year. She and her husband had six children, one of whom died during infancy.

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JEFFERSON, MARTHA
WAYLES SKELTON

(1748–1782) Wife of Thomas Jefferson. She died before he was elected president. Though her husband destroyed most of her correspondence after her death, his writings bear witness to the happiness they shared. Martha Wayles was probably born on a Virginia plantation to John and Martha (Eppes) Wayles. Her mother and two stepmothers all died before she was 13. At 18, she married Bathurst Skelton, a planter who died two years later. Thomas Jefferson began courting the lively, good-natured young widow when she was 22. They shared a love of music, and Jefferson ordered a pianoforte for his future wife. He planned to become her son’s guardian, but John Skelton died before their marriage. In 1772, Jefferson brought his bride to Monticello, where the household now included 83 slaves she inherited from her father. The couple had five children, but only Martha and Mary lived to adulthood. Jefferson refused an appointment as commissioner to France to be near his wife, whose health was weakened by frequent pregnancies and two flights from invading British troops during the American Revolution. She never recovered from the birth of her last child, Lucy. Jefferson nursed her devotedly during her final four-month illness. In his Autobiography, Jefferson remembered his wife as “the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I had lived the last ten years in unchequered happiness.” See also: Childbirth. FURTHER READING

Jefferson, Thomas. Autobiography. New York: Capricorn, 1959.


JEMISON, MARY

(1743–1833) European captive who chose to remain with her Native American family. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison chronicles her life among the Seneca. Mary Jemison was born to Thomas and Jane (Irwin) Jemison during their voyage from Ireland to Pennsylvania. She was about 15 when the French and Shawnees raided the Jemison farm and killed most of the family. Two Seneca women adopted Mary to replace a brother lost in battle.

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In 1760, Jemison married Sheninjee, a Delaware. He died in 1762 while taking his family to the Genesee River. Jemison carried her infant son 700 miles to Sheninjee’s homeland. In 1765, Jemison married the Seneca warrior Hiotaktoo, with whom she had six children. Settlers moved into their area, bringing alcohol and increasing tension. All three of Jemison’s sons died violently. Jemison lost her husband in 1811. After the American Revolution, Jemison chose to stay with the Seneca. She liked their way of life and feared that her relatives would not accept her children. The elders gave her a tract of land, which she protected from settlers. Jemison continued to raise crops and tend her cattle well into her eighties. She then moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation to live with her daughters. In 1823, she told her story to James E. Seaver. His account of her life became one of the most popular captivity narratives, making “The White Woman of the Genesee” a legendary frontier heroine. See also: Captivity Narratives. FURTHER READING

Rebecca Gratz may have been the inspiration for the character Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison, Dehe-wa¨-mis, the White Woman of the Genesee. New York: G. P. Putnams’ Sons, 1910.


JEWS AND JUDAISM

The first Jews to settle in America arrived in New York (then known as New Amsterdam) in 1654. By 1663, however, only one Jew remained there. The others left because of conquest by the British, who were not tolerant of Judaism. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, the new British government of New York had lifted many of its original restrictions against Jews—which included forbidding Jews to vote or hold public office—and a new influx of immigrants began to arrive in the city. By 1730, the small Jewish community had erected its first synagogue and gained the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to worship openly. Few Jews settled in New England, because they were not welcomed by the Puritan colonists there. However, the Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania were more tolerant, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, more than 300 Jews lived in Philadelphia.

South Carolina’s constitution, written by the liberal political philosopher John Locke, extended considerable religious liberty to everyone but Catholics. From the time the first Jews arrived in 1680, they were free to worship as they chose. Georgia was similarly tolerant.

“Is it not too much to hope—too much to expect from the daughters of a noble race that they will be foremost in the work of charity—provided their young hearts are impressed with its sacred duties.” —Rebecca Gratz, from a report to the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society

By 1776, there were about 2,000 Jews in America. Though they lived under various political restrictions, they were, according to Howard M. Sachar

JONES, REBECCA

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in A History of Jews in America, “the freTRAILBLAZERS est Jews on earth.” The role of women in Judaism is governed by Jewish law. Because of Rebecca Gratz was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Philatheir roles as wives and mothers, Jewdelphia in 1781. From the time she was in her early twenties, ish women were exempted from many Gratz was involved in charitable work. In 1801, she founded of the 613 commandments, or mitzthe Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children vot, Jewish men had to obey. This exin Reduced Circumstances and was selected as its first emption led some Jews to question secretary. She also helped to found the Philadelphia Orphan whether women were actually inAsylum and served as its secretary for more than 40 years cluded in the covenant, or promise, acted as its secretary. Gratz later established the Female Hethat the Jews believe exists between brew Benevolent Society, the Jewish Foster Home and OrGod and the Jewish people. Because phan Society, the Fuel Society, and the Sewing Society. they were exempt from certain mitzThrough all this, she raised her sister Rachel’s nine children vot, women could not be counted after her death in 1823. among the ten Jews needed to say One of Gratz’s primary interests was the religious educapublic prayers and could not say the tion of Jewish children. As a result of her friendship with kaddish, or prayer for the dead, for some Protestant ministers, Gratz learned about the Christian their own parents. Women were seSunday School movement and decided to develop something cluded in the synagogue, in a place far similar for Jewish children. In 1838, she organized the Hefrom where the men prayed, so as not brew Sunday School Society of Philadelphia, an organization to distract them from their worship. she headed until 1864. The school was free to both boys and Married women were required to girls from the Jewish community of Philadelphia. Because of wear wigs to hide their own hair, in her achievements in charity and education, Gratz has been order to make them less attractive. Although they were excluded from called “the foremost American Jewess of her day.” some traditions, Jewish women had Gratz is also known as the model for the character of Retheir own rituals. “Women’s mitzvot” becca in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe. The American included lighting Sabbath candles, ritwriter Washington Irving knew both Gratz and Scott. He deual bathing, and observing dietary rescribed Gratz, who was a noted beauty as well as a philanstrictions (keeping kosher). thropist, to the novelist. When Ivanhoe was published, Scott Perhaps the greatest difficulty wrote to Irving “How do you like your Rebecca? Does the Refaced by Jews in America was preservbecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given?” ing their cultural and religious idenGratz never married. It was rumored that she was in love with tity. Because their population was Samuel Ewing, the son of the president of the University of comparatively small, many Jews marPennsylvania, but would not marry outside her religion. ried outside of their religion, particularly on the frontier. When Jewish men married non-Jews, the children were lost to the faith, since to be Jewish, one must It was not until 1838 that Rebecca Gratz opened have a Jewish mother. Jewish children were edu- the first Jewish Sabbath schools in Philadelphia. cated in public schools and received little or no religious education. In the 1790s, Rebecca Samuel JOHNSTON, HENRIETTA of Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to her parents in the See painting and sculpting old country: There are here ten or twelve Jews, and they are not worthy of being called Jews. . . . I crave to see a synagogue to which I can go. The way we live now is not life at all. We do not know what the Sabbath and holidays are. On the Sabbath all the shops are open. . . . My children cannot learn anything here, nothing Jewish, nothing of the general culture.



JONES, REBECCA

(1739–1818) The best-known woman minister of her generation. Revered for her straightforward delivery and “sanctified common sense,” Jones infused traditional Quaker ideals with an evangelical sense of a personal savior. Born in Philadelphia, Jones was raised by her

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mother, Mary (Porter) Jones, after her father, William, died at sea. Her mother ran a girls’ school in their home. Though raised an Anglican, Jones attended Quaker meetings when she was in her teens. Despite her family’s opposition, she began speaking at meetings when she was 19. In 1760, the elders recognized her gift for preaching and “acknowledged” her as a minister. Besides preaching, Jones taught at her mother’s school. In 1761, she took over the enterprise. With the help of another Quaker minister, Hannah Cathrall, she taught both girls and boys. In 1784, Jones felt called to visit Quakers in England. As a traveling minister, she preached and visited schools throughout Britain and helped win approval for a yearly women’s meeting. After returning to Philadelphia in 1788, Jones opened a fabric shop. She corresponded with English Friends, helped found a Quaker boarding school, and assisted the poor. A widow she had taken in, Bernice Chattin, cared for Jones after typhus fever left her an invalid in 1813. Jones continued to provide religious counsel until her death. Her example promoted social action, revived enthusiasm for Quaker ideals, and maintained the Friends’ tradition of female spiritual leadership.


JUDSON,

The couple were married in 1812. They left for India with Samuel Newell and Harriet Atwell Newell two weeks later. As “assistant missionaries,” the wives were to support their husbands’ preaching and educate women and children. According to an early biographer, Judson’s contemporaries considered her decision to go to India “wild and romantic in the extreme.” Women like Anne Eliot had worked with their husbands in missions to Native Americans. However, no American woman had ever served on a foreign mission. During the voyage to Calcutta, the Judsons’ study of the Bible and several books on theology led them to become Baptists. The decision cost them the support of the ABCFM; however, American Baptists organized a society to finance their work. The War of 1812 prompted the British East India Company, which did not welcome missionaries, to order the Judsons’ deportation. The couple got to Mauritius Island, where they hoped to meet the Newells. However, Harriet Newell had died in childbirth and Samuel Newell was en route to Cey-

ANN HASSELTINE

(1789–1826) First American woman foreign missionary. Her work as a teacher and evangelist in Burma inspired women to undertake roles previously reserved for men. She was the fourth daughter among the seven children born to John and Rebecca (Burton) Hasseltine, evangelical Congregationalists. Her father, a farmer, was also a town official and church deacon in Bradford, Massachusetts. At Bradford Academy, Hasseltine was studious, lively, and devout. At 15, her teacher Abraham Burnham inspired her to think seriously about personal salvation. After a conversion experience in 1806, she joined the Congregational church and prayed that God would use her in His service. At 18, Hasseltine became a teacher. Three years later, her father had a meeting of seminary students who wanted support to become foreign missionaries. One result was the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. A second was Adoniram Judson’s proposal to his host’s daughter. Hasseltine considered Judson’s proposal for a month before her sense of duty overcame her reluctance to undertake mission work abroad.

Ann Hasseltine Judson was the first American woman to fill the role of foreign missionary.

KAAHUMANU

lon. The Judsons then decided to work in Burma. On the voyage to Rangoon, Judson nearly died delivering a stillborn child. Her second child, born in 1815, lived only eight months. From 1813 to 1823, the Judsons learned Burmese and Siamese, worked on translating the Bible into the native languages, and taught children. Their first convert was baptized in 1819. That year, Ann Judson began holding services for women. She also wrote several catechisms and managed the mission when her husband was away. In 1820, Judson went to Calcutta to recover from a liver ailment. When it recurred a year later, she returned to the United States to recuperate. She raised funds for the mission by making personal appearances throughout New England and writing A Particular Relation of the American Baptist Mission to the Burman Empire. Her celebrity inspired new enthusiasm for missionary work and convinced many of the need for female missionaries. When she sailed back to Burma in 1823, the British and Burmese were on the verge of war. Judson traveled 350 miles to Ava, where her husband and a medical missionary were working. A year later, the local ruler imprisoned Adoniram because he suspected the missionaries were spying for Britain. Despite her fears that her husband would be executed and she would be enslaved, Ann Judson worked for Adoniram’s release, nursed her daughter, Maria, through smallpox, and later cared for her husband, whose health was poor. After 21 months in prison, Adoniram Judson was released in 1825 to serve as a translator for the Burmese emperor during peace negotiations. The family settled in the new capital of Amherst, where Ann died of a fever. Her two-year-old daughter died a few months later. Adoniram Judson continued his mission work until his death in 1850. By

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that time, Burma had 163 Christian missionaries, many of whom had been inspired by Ann Hasseltine Judson’s pioneering example.

JUDSON, SARAH HALL
BOARDMAN

(1803–1845) Missionary to Burma. After her first husband’s death, Boardman maintained the schools they had established and preached to the Karen, a people living in the Burmese jungle. Later she became the second wife of the pioneer American missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson. Born at Alstead, New Hampshire, Sarah Hall was the oldest of Ralph and Abiah Hall’s 13 children. After poverty forced her to leave her studies at a local female seminary, Hall studied at home. In 1820, she became a member of Salem’s First Baptist Church. Her interest in mission work was encouraged by her pastor and by meeting Ann Hasseltine Judson in 1823. Two years later, she married George Dana Boardman and went to India. The newlyweds planned to join the Judsons in Burma. However, the Anglo-Burmese war kept them in Calcutta for more than a year. Boardman gave birth to a daughter there and learned Burmese. The Boardmans began their service in Burma in 1827. A revolt in 1829 forced them to flee. A lung disease claimed George Boardman in 1831. Sarah Boardman continued to work among the Karen, supported by Adoniram Judson, whom she married in 1834. An expert in Burmese, she translated the New Testament and Pilgrim’s Progess into native languages. In 1845, she died en route to the United States to regain her health. Among her six surviving children, George Dana Boardman, Jr., and Edward Judson became prominent ministers. Her example inspired other women to serve in foreign missions.

K
KAAHUMANU

(1772?–1832) First coruler of Hawaii. Kaahumanu promoted the spread of Christianity and established Hawaii’s first legal code. Born on Maui to Keeaumoko, a noted warrior, and Namahana, a king’s widow, Kaahumanu became a wife of King Kamehameha in her early teens. As the king’s favorite wife, Kaahumanu advised him during his conquest of the Hawaiian Islands

and served on the council of his united kingdom. Childless herself, she served as guardian to Kamehameha’s heir, Prince Liholiho. The king’s death in 1819 lifted strict religious taboos, or prohibitions, until the new ruler assumed power. The council of chiefs supported Kaahumanu’s claim that her husband wanted her to share in Liholiho’s reign by making her kuhina noi, or coruler. In another break with tradition, Kaa-

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KING PHILIP’S WAR

humanu and Liholiho’s mother invited him to eat with them. The new king’s acceptance of the invitation abolished the old taboos against men and women eating together. By the time American Protestant missionaries arrived in 1820, the two rulers had destroyed the old religion. Kaahumanu eventually embraced Christianity and encouraged its spread by building churches and schools. In 1823, Kaahumanu became sole regent for the young Kamehameha III, whom she protected by marrying his two chief rivals. The following year, she promulgated Hawaii’s first code of laws, ordered that all her people should learn to read and write, and suppressed a rebellion on Kauai. In 1825, she presided over Hawaii’s first trial by jury. The Queen Regent negotiated the first trade agreement between Hawaii and the United States in 1826.


KING PHILIP’S WAR

In this devastating war between Native Americans and British colonists, women played no direct role but they were often victims of the brutality of soldiers on both sides. Metacomet, known as King Philip by the Puritans, became chief of the Wampanoags of Massachusetts in 1662. In 1671, Metacomet was interrogated by Puritan officials who suspected him of planning attacks against English settlements. The chief was forced to surrender some guns and to promise to obey English laws. Although he agreed, Metacomet was angry with the Puritan leaders. In 1675, three Wampanoags were accused of murder by the Puritans and hanged. In retaliation, the Wampanoags, led by Metacomet, began attacking English settlements. They were joined by other tribes, including the Nipmucks of Massachusetts and the Narragansetts of Rhode Island. The colonists formed an army and attacked the Narragansetts’s fortified village near Kingston, Rhode Island. About 1,000 Native Americans were killed, including many women and children. In 1676, Metacomet and his allies continued raiding English settlements, including Medfield, Massachusetts, which was attacked on February 21. Men and women in the town were killed and 32 homes were destroyed. Gradually, the power of the Native American alliance began to decline as disease and famine struck their villages. Their supplies of weapons were also running short. Metacomet was

unsuccessful in gaining more allies among other tribes. In 1676, the Narragansetts were defeated, Metacomet was killed, and the war ended. The war was devastating for both sides. More than one half the Puritan settlements had been attacked. Among the colonists, approximately 600 men and 2,000 women and children were killed. The Native Americans lost over 3,000 men, and many more women and children. Most of their settlements were destroyed by the colonists.


KNIGHT, SARAH KEMBLE

(1666–1727) Author and businesswoman. The Journal of Madam Knight, a diary of an unchaperoned journey from Boston to New York in 1704, provides a vivid account of travel in eighteenth-century North America. Knight was also a respected shopkeeper, innkeeper, owner of a boarding house, and landlord. She amassed a sizable estate. Born in Boston, Sarah Kemble Knight was the eldest girl among Thomas and Elizabeth Kemble’s five or six children. Shortly before her father’s death in 1689, she married Richard Knight, who may have been a ship’s captain or a publican. They had one daughter, Elizabeth. By 1707, Knight was a widow. She supported herself by running her father’s shop, taking in boarders, and copying legal documents. She is also said to have taught such well-known pupils as Benjamin Franklin and preachers Cotton and Increase Mather. However, no solid evidence supports this claim. In 1713, Knight’s daughter, Elizabeth, married and moved to Connecticut. Knight also moved to New London, where she opened not only a shop but also a tavern and inn on the Norwich road. In addition, she purchased land that had once belonged to her son-in-law’s family and leased it to tenants. Five years later, she was one of several businesspeople fined for selling liquor to local Native Americans. She said her maid was responsible, and the incident did not affect her good reputation. In fact, she was so well respected that people called her “Madam” Knight. While she was known as an influential businesswoman during her life, Sarah Kemble Knight is best known today for her diary. Discovered after her death, the 40-page journal is a witty account of her difficult—and sometimes dangerous—trip to New York in 1704. Knight seems to have undertaken

LAW, ELIZABETH CUSTIS

the journey to help settle an estate. She made the trip alone, on horseback, along roads that were little better than unmarked trails. During the five-month ordeal, she encountered “tippy canoes,” rude innkeepers, inedible meals, and forests so dense that she often lost sight of her guide. Published in 1825, Knight’s account was thought to be either fictitious or the work of a man until 1858. Critics view Knight as a writer in the picaresque style. She writes in the first person, describes her journey vividly, comments on morals and manners, and combines humor and seriousness.

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See also: Diaries and Journals. FURTHER READING

Knight, Sarah Kemble. The Journal of Madam Knight, with an introductory note by George Parkes Winship, and a new preface by Kenneth Silverman. New York: Garrett Press, 1970. Stanford, Ann. “Three Puritan Women: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Sarah Kemble Knight.” In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, eds. Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.

L
LALOR, ALICE

(Mother Theresa) (c. 1766–1846) Roman Catholic nun, educator. Alice Lalor was born in Ireland. The exact year of her birth is unknown, but it is usually assumed that she was born around 1766. As a child, she was deeply religious and would have joined a Catholic convent in Kilkenny if her parents had not suggested that she accompany her older sister to America. On the voyage to America, Lalor met Maria Sharpe and Maria McDermott, widows who shared her devotion to religion. Upon their arrival in Philadelphia in 1795, the women established a small school and religious community. There they met Father Leonard Neale, who became their spiritual adviser. In 1798, when Father Neale was named president of Georgetown College (now University) in Washington, D.C., he asked the women, who were known as “the Pious Ladies,” to come to Washington to found a school for girls. They accepted his invitation. In 1799 Lalor and her companions founded the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, the first Catholic school for young women in America. They also founded a free school for students who could not pay tuition as well as a school for African Americans. In 1816 Lalor and her community became part of the Visitation order, recognized by Pope Pius VII as the first American Sisters of the Visitation. As the Mother Superior of the order, Lalor was called Mother Theresa. Lalor retired in 1819, but continued to live in the Georgetown convent until her death in 1846.


LAW, THE

See marriage laws; poor laws


LAW, ELIZABETH CUSTIS

(1776–1832) Step-granddaughter of George Washington. Elizabeth was born in 1776 to Martha Washington’s son John Custis and his wife Elizabeth Calvert Curtis, granddaughter of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore. When John died at Yorktown of camp fever, two of the children, Nelly (Eleanor Parke Custis) and George, went to live with their grandparents and were eventually adopted by them. Elizabeth, or Eliza as she was called, and her sister Martha continued to live with their mother, who, in 1778, married Dr. David Stuart. When she was 19, Eliza married Thomas Law. Law was a wealthy Englishman, 20 years older than Eliza, and the father of three boys. Washington gave his blessing to the marriage, although privately he was concerned about the difference in age. Eliza and Thomas lived in Washington, D.C., and Thomas invested much of his fortune in construction projects in the city. They had one daughter, Eliza, born in 1797. In 1803, Law went to England for a year and left Eliza behind. When he returned in 1804, the couple separated, perhaps because Eliza felt neglected, or perhaps the differences in age and temperament had begun to put a strain on the marriage. As was the usual practice, the daughter

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remained in the custody of her father. Eliza was awarded an annuity of fifteen hundred dollars a year, but Law was never prompt and regular in his payments. The couple divorced in 1810. Eliza began to call herself “Mrs. Custis,” and lived primarily in Washington. A biographer of her grandfather, Charles Moore, described Eliza as “a restless, wandering spirit . . .[who was] noted for her wit, vivacity, charm, and devotion to the memory of George Washington.” She was devoted to her daughter as well and saw her as often as she was able. She once wrote to a friend, “You saw the misery I endured when she was taken from me. I fear’d then it was separation forever.” When her daughter died in 1822, Eliza then devoted herself to her grandchildren. She died in Richmond, Virginia, on January 1, 1832. See also: Child Custody.

Lee had better luck with her next venture, a nonfiction book called Three Experiments in Living. Appearing in 1838, the book included information about financial matters and lifestyles. It was an instant success. The book went through at least 30 editions in the United States and proved popular in Europe as well. From 1838 on, Lee’s literary career is easier to trace. She now wrote full-time to general critical and popular acclaim. Over the next 20 years she produced a number of books on historical, biographical, and religious topics, including an account of the life of Martin Luther and several group biographies of artists. Lee remained a successful and respected writer for the rest of her life. Several of her later works were apparently commissioned by publishers, so Lee knew she would have a ready-made market for her work. She was noted by critics for the strong sense of morality that pervaded her writings. She died in Boston on December 27, 1865.

FURTHER READING

Moore, Charles. The Family Life of George Washington. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1926.


LEE, JARENA See preaching


LEE, ANN See religious sects


LEE, ELIZA BUCKMINSTER See volume 2

LEE, HANNAH FARNHAM
SAWYER

(1780–1865) Author. Hannah Farnham Sawyer was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1780. In 1807, she married a Bostonian named George Lee. He died nine years later, leaving her with three daughters to rear. At some point in the next two decades, Hannah Lee began to write. Just when is unclear, partly because her name rarely appeared on her works early in her career. Her first known work, a short contribution to a book edited by another author, appeared in 1832, but it is entirely possible that she had already been published. In 1835, Lee completed her first novel, which she called Grace Seymour. The book was published, but virtually the entire print run was burned in a fire, and Lee seems not to have tried to bring it out again.


LESBIANS

Female homosexuals. The existence of lesbianism was never acknowledged in early America. Although male homosexuality was punishable by severe penalties, even execution, statutes did not even mention female homosexuality. That reflected the attitude of men that women’s sexuality was of little importance, except in heterosexual fornication and adultery. Eighteenth-century advice books published in English, such as The Ladies’ Dispensatory (1740), categorized lesbian sex with masturbation and warned that its consequences could be fatal. John Cleland’s notorious novel, Fanny Hill (1749), featured lesbian sexual acts merely as a way some women were trained for heterosexual intercourse. In short, descriptions of lesbian sex were designed only to titillate male readers or to caution female readers. Positive imagery of self-identified lesbians or documentary evidence of their romantic relationships simply did not exist, although male homosexuality is abundantly documented for the period. Cases of female transvestism were reported, however, and had overtones of lesbianism. Deborah Sampson, the famous soldier of the American

LITERACY

Revolution, was a transvestite before she became a soldier. Although transvestism might be punished by authorities, lesbianism offended patriarchy less than male homosexuality because homosexual women were assumed to aspire to be like men, which was honorable, whereas homosexual men were subject to reprisal because they were assumed to be like women, which brought all men into contempt. Lesbian behavior was probably more common than the documentary record suggests, for it attracted little notice from men, who wrote the great majority of the documents. The American novelist Charles Brockden Brown describes a powerful romantic relationship between two women in his novel, Ormond, or The Secret Witness (1789). Surprisingly, although he does not suggest that their relationship was sexual, he presents it as passionate, and the heroine remains unmarried, highly unusual for a fictional account in that era. The story foreshadows a remarkable acceptance of deeply involved female friendship in nineteenth-century America.

LEWIS, ELEANOR PARKE
CUSTIS

(1779–1852) Step-granddaughter of George Washington. Eleanor Parke Custis, or “Nelly,” as she was known, was the daughter of Martha Washington’s son John Parke Custis, nicknamed Jacky. During the American Revolution, Jacky served as an aide to Washington but died of camp fever only a few days after his enlistment. His widow, Eleanor Calvert Custis, was left with six children, including a set of twins who died in infancy. Two of the surviving children, George Washington Parke Custis, known as “Wash,” and Nelly, were sent to live with their grandparents. Nelly Custis was a lively and beautiful child, a great favorite of Washington’s. She married Washington’s nephew, Lawrence Lewis, and lived at Woodlawn Plantation, in view of Mount Vernon. George Washington gave her the land for the house as a wedding gift because he did not want to live far from his adopted granddaughter. Nelly had eight children, seven of whom died before their mother. Lawrence also preceded Nelly in death, dying in 1839 at the age of 72. In her later years, Nelly was the devoted grandmother to 12 children. She died in 1852. For most of her life, Nelly corresponded with her friend Elizabeth Bordley Gibson. These letters

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offer a detailed portrait of the early years of the United States, as well as a glimpse into a lifelong friendship. In 1839, Nelly wrote to Elizabeth, “In more than 40 years, my truest, kindest friend, you have rejoiced in my joy, & mourned with me in grief, & never have I found the slightest change in your heart since we first loved each other.”


LITERACY

The ability to read and write. Many of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were literate, and their ministers were graduates of Cambridge University in England. The Puritans were committed to literacy because they believed that everyone needed to be able to read the Bible. Puritan ministers preached that it was the sacred duty of parents to teach their children to read. It soon became clear that parents did not all have equal ability, time, or talent when it came to reading instruction. Several New England colonies responded to a decline in literacy by passing laws requiring parents to teach their children to read and by establishing schools to ensure that parents could comply with this requirement. Laws were also passed to ensure that poor and orphaned children who were apprenticed to masters learned the basic skills of reading, writing, and “ciphering.” Evening schools were established to meet the needs of this population. Rates of literacy rose and fell throughout the colonial and Revolutionary War periods depending on the percentage of the population that lived in cities. Not surprisingly, the rate of literacy was much higher in urban areas—where there were schools—than in more sparsely populated areas— where the entire burden of teaching was left to the parents. Each move westward and each new wave of immigrants tended to lower the overall literacy rate. Since records of who could read were not kept, literacy in the colonial period is measured today by determining the percentage of people who signed wills and petitions with an “X” versus those who were able to sign their names. This method appears to be valid, because children were almost always taught to read before they learned to write. As women seldom signed wills or petitions there is little data about female literacy. What data there are tend to suggest that levels of literacy for women remained unchanged until after the American Revolution, while the rates for men rose in the

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17TH

CENTURY

same period. Male literacy in both the North and South increased throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with women’s literacy rising but lagging behind men’s. In general, literacy rates in the North were higher than in the South. After the Revolution there was much public concern about literacy. Many writers and educational reformers stressed that a republican form of government depended on a literate population. A writer who signed himself “Academicus” wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1797, that it was “a matter of the highest importance to republican government to disseminate knowledge and to keep the evenness of access to it open to all and especially to the middle or even the lower classes of people.” Thus, religious reasons for encouraging literacy were supplemented by political motives. During this period, many writers, some of them women, pointed out that literate mothers were necessary to preserve the Republic, since they were the first teachers of the children. The number of primary schools, academies, and colleges grew in response to these concerns. See also: Dame Schools; Republican Motherhood. FURTHER READING

Soltow, Lee, and Edward Stevens. The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

LITERATURE, 17
CENTURY

TH

American literature in the seventeenth century primarily featured histories and religious writings, as the first settlers tried to map out both their place in the world and their spiritual identity. The earliest American writings were, in essence, works of discovery—discovery of place and discovery of self. Notable historians include Captain John Smith, who in 1616 published A Description of New England, Governor William Bradford, who wrote History of Plymouth Plantation, and John Winthrop, who wrote History of New England from 1630 to 1649. Sermons by John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, and Increase and Cotton Mather were widely read in the colonies, but a woman, Anne Bradstreet, became America’s first poet. Her volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung

Up in America, published in England in 1650, does not have a distinctly American voice. The forms and styles of the poems are reminiscent of English works of the period. The content, however, reflects the hardships of life in the colonies, and especially the hardships experienced by women. Bradstreet writes about her fears for her children, the love she feels for her husband, and the sorrow of losing her home to fire. Cotton Mather not only wrote sermons, he also wrote on witchcraft in Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions, and the Salem trials in The Wonders of the Invisible World. Overwhelmingly, the stories Mather tells of witches feature women as both the accused and the victims. While there were neither histories nor sermons written by women in the period, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson combines a little of both genres. Published in 1682, the story of a Puritan woman captured by the Native American forces of Metacomet serves as a history of Mary Rowlandson’s capture and survival and of King Philip’s War. It is also, to some degree, a sermon. Like all good Puritans, Rowlandson was anxious to interpret what happened to her in terms of God’s plan and to use the experience to grow in knowledge and faith. Thus, her narrative is peppered with biblical references and prayers. FURTHER READING

Hensley, Jeannie, ed. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Salisbury, Neal, ed. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: with Related Documents. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

LITERATURE, 18
CENTURY

TH

American literature in the eighteenth century can be divided into three periods: late colonial (1700– 1760), revolutionary (1760–1787), and early national (1788–1820). Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin are the best-known writers of the late colonial period. Edwards is known for his spiritual autobiography, for his theological works, and for his sermons, especially “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). Franklin is best remembered for his autobiography and for Poor Richard’s Almanac. Women writers of the period also wrote primarily autobio-

LITIGATION

graphical works. Sarah Kemble Knight, a businesswoman from Boston, is remembered today for a travel diary. The Journal of Mme Knight tells the story of a trip Knight took by herself from Boston to New York in 1704. It is a lively and often humorous account of colonial life. Elizabeth Ashbridge’s spiritual autobiography, Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge. . . , chronicles the life and religious conversions of a young woman who was born in England in 1713 and emigrated to America at the age of 19. Ashbridge left the Church of England and, against her husband’s will, joined the Quakers. She tells the story of her attempts to practice her religion despite her husband’s objections, which were less theological than purely personal. When Elizabeth turned Quaker, she gave up singing and dancing, which were among the talents that attracted her husband to her in the first place. American literature in the Revolutionary period included journals, histories, travel narratives, letters, and various kinds of political writing, including poems and ballads. The best-known political writers of the period include Thomas Paine, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. Hector St. Jean Cre`vecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer portrayed rural life in America as an idyllic return to nature. Philip Freneau wrote patriotic poems, such as “On the Rising Glory of America,” and later wrote more lyrical verse. Foremost among women writers of the period is Abigail Adams, whose diaries and letters reveal a woman of uncommon intelligence and political astuteness. In one of her most famous letters to her husband, John, Abigail urged him to “Remember the Ladies”—to enact new laws in the new republic that did not allow husbands to tyrannize their wives. Phillis Wheatley was America’s first AfricanAmerican poet. In 1770 she published a volume of 39 poems that demonstrated not only her poetic talent but her considerable education. At the age of 12, Wheatley was able to read both Greek and Latin. Although she seldom wrote about themes of race or inequality, at least one of her poems addresses the question of social justice. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic dye.” Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.

The early national period saw the beginnings of the American novel. The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown is regarded by many

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as the first American novel. Charles Brockden Brown was America’s first professional novelist, and his novel Wieland anticipates the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Women writing in the same era include Susanna Rowson, whose novel Charlotte Temple (1791), was the first best-seller in America. This story of the seduction of a young woman was aimed primarily at a female audience and designed as a warning to girls about the dangers of dalliance and disobedience. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), told the story of the seduction and abandonment of an older woman. Foster’s novel focused on the social issues that made life so difficult for women who strayed from the “path of virtue.” Judith Sargent Murray wrote essays, poetry, and drama. She was the author of a very popular column entitled “The Gleaner,” which appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine from 1792 to 1794. Murray advocated women’s rights and was a staunch supporter of education for women. The most important woman poet of the period was Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton. Her poems, written about distinctively American topics, appeared in dozens of magazines. Her first long poem, Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature (1790), was a Native American tale in four parts. Few of these writers’ works appeared in anthologies of American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they were almost lost to history until feminist critics in the 1970s began to rediscover them and publish their works. FURTHER READING

DePauw, Linda Grant, and Conover Hunt. Remember the Ladies: Women in America 1750–1815. New York: Viking, 1976.


LITIGATION

The act of bringing legal proceedings. Because of the legal status of women under English common law, it was difficult for a married woman in the colonial or early national period to file a lawsuit on her own behalf. If a married woman was owed a debt, the case would be brought before the court by her husband. Such lawsuits were not uncommon. Even though women did not work outside the home in the modern sense, many women supplemented the family income by doing laundry, caring for sick neighbors, or working as a midwife or wet nurse; others did domestic service or helped with farm work. If their employers failed to pay,

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these women, if they were married, had to rely on their husbands to recover their earnings. Unfortunately, husbands did not always have their wives’ best interests at heart. Some husbands would not make the effort to sue on behalf of their wives, and others failed to return the money won in the lawsuit to the wife who had earned it. While husbands had an interest in pursuing money owed their wives, some may not have been as ready to defend their wives’ names in court. In “Women’s Legal Inequality,” Mary Beth Norton cites the case of Joan Mitchell, a Maryland widow, who filed four lawsuits against neighbors who had called her a witch. While her husband was alive, he had given some depositions in similar situations but chose not to take the cases to court. The record seems to indicate that Joan harbored some resentment against her husband for not having been more active in pursuing her case. While married women seldom brought cases to court, many women expected to come before a judge at least once in their lives—as widows in the probate of their husbands’ estates. Husbands were required to leave their wives at least one-third of their property in their wills; many widows went to court to claim their “thirds” if their husbands failed to leave them their portion. Even though unmarried women had the right to appear in court on their own behalf, few did except as victims of crimes.

family in Philadelphia on October 19, 1761. Welleducated by the standards of the time, she was especially interested in history and government. At the age of 14, she attended the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. In 1781, she married George Logan, a doctor and farmer who later became involved in politics. The couple had three children. Deborah Logan did not always agree with her husband politically; he was a Republican, while she had grown up a Federalist. His political leanings, however, caused her to lose some of her Federalist friends. Perhaps in response, she turned to the study of earlier political debates. She came across a number of letters written by colonial Pennsylvania leaders William Penn and James Logan, transcribed them, and presented them to the American Philosophical Society. Later, she transcribed the recollections of Charles Thomson, who had served as secretary of the Continental Congress. Logan also wrote a biography of her husband, a work that included letters and reminiscences of many of the great figures of the colonial era and the early national period. Her diary, too, became a valuable historical source. In appreciation of her efforts, Deborah Logan was made the first woman member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She died at her Philadelphia house on February 2, 1839.

See also: Coverture; Dower Rights. FURTHER READING

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pestana, Carla Gardina, and Sharon V. Salinger, eds. Inequality in Early America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.


LIVERMORE, HARRIET See volume 2

LIVINGSTON, ANNE
(NANCY) SHIPPEN See Shippen, Anne (Nancy)


LOGAN, DEBORAH NORRIS

(1761–1839) An early historian and preserver of colonial records. Deborah Norris was born into a Quaker


LOGAN, MARTHA DANIELL

(1704–1779) A teacher and gardener. Martha Daniell was born in St. Thomas Parish, South Carolina, on December 29, 1704. At the age of 14 she married George Logan. The couple lived first on a South Carolina plantation and then in Charleston. They had eight children. In 1742, when her youngest child was six, Logan opened a small boarding school. Although during the time most women who opened schools were poor or widowed, neither of these conditions applied to Logan; she and her husband owned land, and he did not die until 1764. Her reasons for opening the school are unknown. As was typical for the time, Logan taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and drawing, as well as embroidery and needlework. However, Logan is most clearly remembered today for her work with plants. She was an enthu-

MADISON, DOLLEY PAYNE TODD

siastic and knowledgeable gardener. She corresponded with the botanist John Bartram, wrote an unsigned gardener’s column for almanacs of the time, and ran a nursery business selling seeds, roots, and plants. After her death in 1779, her writings were expanded and published in several other almanacs, this time giving Logan credit as author.

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LOVE, ROMANTIC See novels and romantic love


LYON, MARY See volume 2

M M CAULEY, MARY
(MOLLY PITCHER) C

See Gender Frontiers




MCCREA, JANE (c. 1750–1777) A martyr of the American Revolution. Jane McCrea was born about 1752 in Somerset County, New Jersey. Her mother died within a year of her birth, and her father in 1769. McCrea then lived with her eldest brother near Fort Edward, New York, north of Albany. In the summer of 1777, Fort Edward was a potential battleground between the British and the colonists. McCrea’s brother and others evacuated the area, but McCrea stayed behind, perhaps because a suitor in the British army had promised to meet her there. On July 27, she was captured by Native Americans in the pay of the advancing British army. The next day, her body was found near Fort Edward. The evidence of a supposed eyewitness suggests that the Native Americans were responsible, although some historians believe that she may have been killed accidentally by rebel soldiers. There is a good deal of uncertainty surrounding Jane McCrea’s death. Whatever the details, however, the event became a rallying cry for patriots. It fueled anger against the British for their use of Native Americans as allies. In northern New York, many who were previously neutral now began to side with the revolutionaries. New soldiers joined the American army, and the British in the area surrendered three months after McCrea’s death. McCrea’s story became the subject of novels, poems, and at least one play. She is buried near Fort Edward.

MADISON, DOLLEY PAYNE
TODD

(1768–1849) Dolley Payne was born on May 20, 1768, and raised in the Quaker faith. One of eight children, she grew up in comfort in Hanover County, in rural eastern Virginia. In 1783, her father, John Payne, emancipated his slaves, moved his family to Phila-

First Lady Dolley Madison was celebrated for her charm and courage.

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delphia, and went into business as a starch merchant. He soon failed, and died a broken man in 1792. In 1790 Dolley married a young Quaker lawyer named John Todd. The couple produced two boys in rapid succession, John Payne Todd in 1790 and William Temple Todd in 1792, but in the fall of 1793 yellow fever struck Philadelphia, claiming among its many victims John Todd and their younger son, William Temple. In May 1794, James Madison met Dolley Todd. Seventeen years her senior, and a confirmed bachelor, he was a member of a Virginia planter family who in 1787 had created the Virginia Plan, a draft framework for the federal constitution. His plans and intellectual energy had defined the agenda for the Constitutional Convention, and his influence as a delegate had been great. Subsequently he became the leader of the emerging Democratic-Republican Party, which was later led by Thomas Jefferson. The Madisons were a good match. He was charming and witty among friends, but shy and remote in public; she was outgoing, warm, and a charming hostess. He was brilliant and successful, she brought a family to his childless life. They were married on September 15, 1794, and lived in Philadelphia for the next three years, after which the couple returned to Montpelier, the 5,000-acre Madison family estate in Orange County, Virginia, with her son and her younger sister Anna. They remained there until 1800, when Thomas Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States, and asked James Madison if he would serve as secretary of state. In June 1801 the Madison family moved to Washington, D.C., a raw town of halffinished buildings set amid forests and swamps. As wife of the secretary of state, Dolley Madison had no official duties, but she did assume a special position. Jefferson was a widower whose daughters lived with their families in central Virginia. Determined to create a new kind of republican society that reflected his principles of equality, Jefferson often entertained congressmen without their wives. For these small, informal, all-male events he needed no hostess; but on the occasions when he did, he most often turned to Dolley Madison. She became the most prominent woman in Washington society. In 1809 she became more important when her husband succeeded Jefferson as president and she became first lady. Mrs. Madison’s historical reputation rests upon three of her accomplishments during those years: decorating the White House,

her role as hostess, and her courage during the War of 1812. Jefferson had furnished the executive mansion with his own possessions. Dolley Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Latrobe to decorate the White House. They made the mansion appropriate for a republic: elegant enough to entertain foreign ministers; simple enough to please republican congressmen who feared that excessive refinement would display monarchical principles. Dolley Madison also invented the role of first lady as republican hostess, establishing new ceremonies as she had created public spaces. She managed to be elegant in a simple and unaffected way. The administration’s enemies personally attacked her, but her public response was to reach out to people and work to make them all feel comfortable. Finally, she faced the British invasion of Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1814 with bravery and dignity. By the third week of August, invasion was imminent and the city in a state of chaos. On August 22 James Madison left town to review the troops, while Dolley Madison remained in the city. As the British troops moved forward the next day Mrs. Madison packed government papers into trunks. The next day, with the president off with the army, Dolley Madison found herself guarding the gates of the executive mansion. After filling a wagon with silver and other valuables and sending them off for safekeeping, she set herself one last task: saving the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, lest the British burn it, or worse yet capture and bring it back to England. She had the canvas cut from the frame as the enemy closed in, and she fled at once. The British burned the White House.

“The profusion of my table is the result of the prosperity of my country. . . . I shall continue to prefer Virginian liberality to European elegance.” —Dolley Madison, spoken to the wife of a foreign minister

In 1817, with the war over and her husband’s second term of office finished, with her son grown and her sister Anna long married, Dolley and

MAGIC AND ASTROLOGY

James Madison retired to Montpelier. There the world came to them. They had streams of visitors, including not only their families but also leaders of American politics and European dignitaries. By the early 1830s, however, James Madison became seriously ill. Dolley Madison spent the next several years busily nursing him, until he died in 1836. A year later Dolley Madison returned to Washington. Distinguished visitors would first call on the president of the United States, and then pay their respects to her. The driving force of her last years was to keep her husband’s work and memory alive. Meanwhile, she grew poorer and poorer. Her son was an alcholic and gambler who drained her of resources. In 1844 she sold her home. “No one I think can appreciate my feelings of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home,” she wrote the buyer. She fell ill in July 1849, and after lingering for five days, died on July 12. She was 81 years old and had known every president from George Washington to Zachary Taylor. Her funeral was a state occasion. As one Washington newspaper noted: “All of our country and thousands in other lands will need no language of Eulogy to inspire a deep and sincere regret when they learn the demise of one who touched all hearts by her goodness and won the admiration of all by the charms of dignity and grace.” Holly C. Shulman FURTHER READING

Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Anthony, Katherine. Dolly Madison: Her Life and Times. Garden City: Doubleday, 1949. Clark, Allen C. The Life and Letters of Dolly Madison. Washington, D.C.: Press of W. F. Roberts Co., 1914. Shulman, Holly C. “Dolley Madison.” In American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy. Lewis L. Gould, ed. New York: Garland, 1996.


MAGIC AND ASTROLOGY

Magic is the use of divination to make predictions and attempt to control future events. Often it involves the use of astrology, a pseudoscience that utilizes the placement of the stars and planets to harness cosmic energy for human use. In British colonial America, the use of divination was frowned upon by religious groups such as the

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Quakers and Puritans, who believed that anyone who could perform magic was in league with the devil. Despite Christian condemnation, belief in magic and astrology persisted. New England occult organizations like the Astrologer’s Society of Pennsylvania offered lessons in the magical arts in the late seventeenth century. Proponents of occult spirituality claimed the ability to harness supernatural powers through casting horoscope charts and other forms of fortune-telling, some of which were extremely peculiar. For example, in 1690 a woman from Rhode Island made urine cakes and asserted that they aided her prophetic abilities. Magic was often present in folk medicine, especially among Africans. Many consulted magicians and used traditional African magic and medicine to cure diseases and to harm their enemies. For example, in the early 1700s two blacks were recognized for being able to cure diseases and snake bites. In another case a “sorcerer” used magic to shield the Africans from European weapons during a 1712 revolt in New York. The Africans were not alone in trusting the power of medicinal plants. Because early professional medical practices were often dangerous, many European colonists felt safer using occult remedies. Astrology was used to diagnose diseases of certain parts of the body, because the placement of the heavenly bodies at the time of a person’s birth was believed to control certain physiological matters. For example, a woman born with the sun in Pisces would be expected to have foot problems, since the constellation of Pisces was believed to “rule” the feet. In addition, British colonists used herbal remedies and spells to ward off or cure illness. Such practices were so common that the prominent minister Cotton Mather called the number of cases “disturbing.” The use of magic and astrology in the midAtlantic colonies was in high demand despite condemnation by the Quakers. In 1726, the Virginia courts investigated the magical acts of Goodwife Wright, who used magic to help her neighbors overturn hexes, to predict deaths, and to make people sick. Although the claims were unprovable, people were frightened. In cases where the colonists suspected that evil magic was being used, they nailed horseshoes over their doors to protect themselves from witches and sorcerers. Ironically, the use of such good luck charms was a form of invocation in itself. Colonists also enjoyed collect-

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ing “fortune books,” collections of magical and astrological lore, which supposedly brought the owner good luck. See also: Witch Trials, Salem. FURTHER READING

Butler, John. “The Dark Ages of American Occultism, 1760–1848,” in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.


MARRIAGE CEREMONIES

Marriage ceremonies differed from colony to colony in the early years of settlement. A Quaker couple in Pennsylvania might gather with friends in a meetinghouse and marry with no clergy present, using vows they wrote themselves. In the Chesapeake region, because people lived so far apart, the English custom of publishing the banns— announcing the intention of a couple to marry to fellow church members—was not a useful way to of notifying friends and relatives. Instead, the county clerk issued a marriage license that could be examined by interested parties. Anglican couples in the South followed the practice of the Anglican Church of England, using the ceremony as outlined in the Book of Common Prayer. The minister asked the groom, Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor her, and keep her in sickness and health, and, forsaking all other keep thee only to her, so long as ye both shall live?

The bride’s vow was different: Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?

The wedding was often held in the home, rather than in a church, with a minister officiating. Dancing and dinner followed. The Puritans of New England did not believe that a marriage was a religious matter, so they enacted laws making marriage a civil ceremony, conducted by a magistrate. In rejecting Roman Catholicism, Puritans rejected the idea of marriage as a sacrament. They also wanted to avoid difficulties with bigamous and clandestine marriages, which sometimes occurred as a result of the laws

governing marriage in the Church of England. Also, as Governor William Bradford of Plymouth wrote shortly after arriving in 1621, marriage “is a civil thing, upon which many questions about inheritance do depend . . . and nowhere in the Gospel to be laid on the ministers as a part of their office.” Since the ceremony was more in the nature of a contract than a sacred ritual, the event was usually not followed by a celebration. Historians do not know the nature of the vows couples exchanged, but in a letter to his daughter around 1700, Judge Sewell asks her to be sure she can pledge “to love and honor and obey” her fiance´. Because of the movement toward more egalitarian relationships after the American Revolution some women began to omit the word “obey” from the vows. Enslaved peoples were not generally married in a religious or civil ceremony at all. Many followed the tradition of “jumping the broomstick” to signify their entrance into a new kind of life and the “sweeping away” of their old lives. Holding hands, the couple leapt over a broom or stick on the ground. This tradition, which may be either Celtic or African in origin, often thought to have originated among slaves as a way to declare a marriage, was also practiced among Southern whites. FURTHER READING

Hawke, David Freeman. Everyday Life in Early America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

MARRIAGE,
COMPANIONATE A shift within marriage relationships between 1780 and 1830, in which women achieved more equality. The old patriarchal type of marriage in which all authority rested with the husband began to be replaced by a relationship in which wives held a higher status. Historians believe that the shift to companionate marriage occurred as men and women sought more than economic security in marriage. Gradually, they began to also expect romantic love and self-fulfillment from a marital relationship. As a result, men became more concerned about making the women they loved happy in marriage. Men wanted women to be genuinely pleased with a mar-

MARRIAGE LAWS

ital relationship rather than meekly submit to the power imposed on them by their husbands. Since males still controlled most of the economic resources, it would have been easy for them to insist on dominance over women. However, many men realized that they could not make a woman love them, and this robbed the relationship of much satisfaction. Historians are not sure why the shift in marital relationships occurred. One reason may have been that women began to receive more education. In addition, the American Revolution had been fought for the ideas of liberty and equality. Many people believed that these same values should be applied in marital relationships. Finally, the role of children and motherhood began to increase in importance. For centuries, children had been viewed simply as small adults who were expected to go to work before they reached adolescence. No formal upbringing seemed necessary for them. However, the work of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasized that children needed love, education, and special training. These were primarily the responsibilities of women who filled an essential role as mothers, nurturing and teaching their children while they grew. Nevertheless, the change in marital relationships was only gradual. Men still retained much of their dominance because of their earning power. It would not be until later in the nineteenth century that women would begin attending college, filling more jobs, such as teachers, and taking over the control of households as more and more men left the farms and went to work in offices and factories.


MARRIAGE LAWS

Marriage laws in colonial America were drawn largely from English common law. The impact of marriage on a woman’s life was tremendous; with marriage, she virtually ceased to exist as an independent entity. “Marriage,” observed one English writer, “draws a broad line of discrimination, separating the female sex into two classes.” Although marriage laws were not significantly changed after the Revolution, the egalitarian philosophy of the new nation led to more equality in marriage. Under English and colonial common law, a married woman was known as a feme covert, or covered woman. The concept of coverture held that a woman’s legal identity ceased with marriage;

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she was “covered” by her husband. Thus, married women could not sue, be sued, make wills or contracts, or buy and sell property. Any property owned by a woman before marriage belonged to her husband after marriage. Even children were considered property belonging to the husband. Married women had few protections under the law. Two notable exceptions were dower rights and the right to be “separately examined” before real estate could be sold. Dower rights ensured that a wife inherited at least a third of her deceased husband’s estate if there were children, half if there were no children. The right to be separately examined was related to a woman’s dower rights. A husband needed his wife’s explicit consent to sell real estate. If a woman was separately examined— asked for her opinion without her husband’s presence—she would presumably be free to give or withhold her consent without risk of intimidation. In reality, few women were actually consulted before the sale of real estate. Women could also protect some of the property they brought to marriage through the drafting of prenuptial agreements, but most women either did not know about such protections or did not invoke them. Marriages were considered permanent and divorces were very difficult to obtain. Divorce a vinculo (absolute divorce), which allowed remarriage, was permitted only if the marriage itself was invalid because of impotence or a prior marriage. Divorce a mensa et thoro (limited divorce) was more common. This kind of divorce was essentially a legal separation, often granted in cases involving abuse or adultery. In the rare case in which a divorce was secured, the woman was usually at a disadvantage, because she had no right to either property or children. Occasionally a woman whose husband had acted particularly badly might be granted support. After the Revolution, according to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “If one word could be said to epitomize the republican conception of matrimony, that word would be ‘mutual.’” Although many magazines of the day published essays advocating female subordination in marriage, other writers advocated greater equality. In July 1792, the Lady’s Magazine published an essay by a woman who identified herself as “Matrimonial Republican.” “I object to the word ‘obey’ in the marriage service,” she said: it made the wife a “slave” to the husband. She described marriage as a “partnership” and urged that all decisions be made by collaboration. Just as marriage was more egalitar-

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ian, so divorce became more common and easier to obtain. See also: Divorce Laws; Feme Sole Trader Acts; Marriage, Companionate.


MARRIAGES, SLAVE

Slave marriages were not considered lawful in the United States, although they were legal in Brazil. Though not “legally” married, African-American enslaved couples did form family units. Despite the brutal terrors of bondage, African Americans found cultural strength and resistance in wedding ceremonies and cherished their family relations. During slave weddings, African Americans celebrated their African cultural heritage. Following African tribal rituals, brides and grooms would pledge themselves in a ceremony called “jumping over the broomstick.” One slave described it in this way: “de woman put her broom front de man and he put his broom front de woman. Dey face one another and step ‘cross de brooms at de same time . . . and takes hold of hands and dat marry dem.” Jumping the broomstick symbolized the transition from unmarried to married. During the 1800s, more formal and solemn exercises displaced the older traditions. Although illegal in some states, slaves desired African-American or white ministers to perform wedding ceremonies in which the groom and bride would exchange vows. One young slave girl boasted of her parents “formal” marriage, where, “They had a . . . preacher to read out of a book to them. They didn’t jump over no broom.” Since slaves had no legal protection, their marriages were constantly threatened. Some couples were allowed to share the same homes; most were not. Even worse, masters could ruthlessly tear apart slave families at any moment. As one North Carolina judge commented, slave marriages “may be dissolved . . . by the sale of one or both, depending on the [whim] or necessity of the owner.” Some slaves defied this cruel system. Louisiana’s Stephen Jordon became so enraged when his master forbade him to visit his wife that he escaped. When he was eventually captured, Jordon was callously sold away from his wife. Later, Jordon lamented, they both remarried “during the long years of our enforced and hopeless situation.” Bethany Veney, a female slave in Virginia, believed in the sanctity of marriage but did not want to wed, because “I

knew that at any time our masters could compel us to break” our wedding vows. After the Civil War, many freed people strove to legalize their marriages. Previously separated wives and husbands traveled hundreds of miles to reunite. In Louisiana, for instance, the Freedmen’s Bureau conducted over 2,888 marriages for former slaves in less than one year. As Union officers all over the South noted, African-American freed people made “superhuman efforts” to find their loved ones and become, by law, wife and husband. FURTHER READING

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Vantage Books, 1980. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.


MASTERS, SYBILLA See entrepreneurs


MATHEWS, ANN TERESA

(1732–1800) Cofounder of the first convent in the United States. Ann Teresa Mathews was born a Catholic in Charles County, Maryland. Although the colony had been established years earlier as a haven for Catholics, most settlers were Protestants by the time of Mathews’s birth. When Mathews chose a religious vocation, she had to travel to Belgium for training. There she joined a Carmelite order; in 1774, she became prioress of her convent. She was known as Mother Bernardina. The American Revolution removed some of the laws restricting Catholicism, such as those preventing Catholics from holding a public mass. Mathews decided to establish a religious order in America. In 1790, with the encouragement of several prominent American Catholics, she traveled to Maryland with two of her nieces, both nuns, and another American nun named Frances Dickinson. Together, they set up a convent near Mathews’s childhood home and devoted themselves to prayer and contemplation. By the time of Mother Bernardina’s death in 1800, the original group had grown to include 14 nuns. Many of the Carmelite orders in other parts of the United States can trace

MEDICINE

their origins to nuns who trained at Mathews’s convent.


MAYFLOWER COMPACT

An agreement to create a government in what is now Massachusetts, signed by the male heads of household on the Mayflower in 1620. When the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth Rock, they faced a dilemma. Since they had not landed, as planned, in Virginia, their charter was not valid. They needed to find some way to ensure the rule of law. So they made a compact, or agreement, in which they created a government and pledged loyalty to the king. The document they produced has come to be known as the Mayflower Compact. Signed on November 11, 1620, by 41 male heads of households, the Mayflower Compact bound the group as a “civill Body Politick” and allowed them to “enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equall Laws, ordinances, Acts, Constititions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the Generall Good of the Colonie.” The compact was signed only by the males aboard the Mayflower because women were not considered part of the government and had no say in developing the laws by which they were to live. The Mayflower Compact is an excellent example of the British philosopher John Locke’s idea of a social contract in which individuals willingly give up some of their personal freedoms in exchange for the benefits of social order. The Mayflower Compact foreshadows the democratic ideas embodied in the United States Constitution.


MECOM, JANE FRANKLIN

(1712–1794) Sister of Benjamin Franklin, with whom she maintained a lifelong correspondence. Near the end of a life in which she lost 11 children and fled Boston during the Revolution, she wrote: “I am still cheerful for that is my natural temper.” The last-born of Josiah and Abiah (Folger) Franklin’s ten children, Jane Franklin was six years younger than Benjamin. Their father was a Boston tallow chandler. After marrying saddler Edward Mecom at 15, Jane cared for her aging parents and took in boarders. Only three of her 12 children lived into middle age, and two of those died insane. Widowed in 1765, Mecom started a business making artificial flowers that failed when a boycott

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of imported goods cut off her supplies. Franklin, by now a successful printer, provided some financial assistance. He also offered a place to stay when Mecom fled Boston during the 1775 siege. In 1784 she returned to Boston, where she lived until her death. Mecom and her favorite brother remained close, despite what he called her “miffy temper” and their differences over religion. Franklin became a deist, while Mecom was a devout Christian. “Sorrows roll upon me like the waves of the sea,” she wrote after the death of her favorite child, “but . . . God is sovereign, and I submit.” Correspondence with her brother was one of the great joys of Mecom’s difficult life. Their letters are now part of Franklin’s papers.


MEDICINE

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the medicine practiced by American doctors was based on a theory of medicine developed by the Greek physician Galen, who believed that the body was made up of four basic elements, called humors. According to Galen, illness was caused by an imbalance in the humors. To restore balance, he recommended bleeding, purging, and inducing vomiting. Bleeding was done with a small knife, called a lancet, or by the application of leeches, parasites found in rivers and streams that attach themselves to skin and suck blood. Enemas, called clysters, were used to purge the bowels, and vomiting was induced by the use of medications that were themselves often poisonous. Another theory of illness popular in the early years of settlement was that the body could only contain one disease at a time. This belief led to blistering as a treatment; doctors thought that if they caused the patient’s skin to blister by the application of heat or ground beetles, the original illness would leave the body. The causes of most diseases were unknown, and early doctors tended to diagnose based primarily on the most obvious symptoms. Fevers, whatever the cause, were diagnosed as “distempers,” and diarrhea was always “the flux” or “the bloody flux.” Fevers were treated by encouraging patients to sweat, and flux was treated with enemas. Neither doctors nor the colonists themselves understood how disease was transmitted, nor were they aware of the need for basic sanitation. People did not bathe often, clothes were cleaned infre-

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quently, and human waste was dumped near wells and houses. While women were not called “doctors,” they took care of most of the illness and administered most of the medicine during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Midwives did not merely deliver babies; they also cared for the sick, often using herbal remedies from plants grown in their own gardens. Midwives and mothers prepared and administered infusions, swabbed infected tonsils, applied various kinds of plasters, and sat with feverish patients. Women shared recipes for remedies with one another and handed them down to their daughters. Those women who could read studied many of the medical books available at the time so that they could care for their families, friends, and neighbors. While many herbal remedies used by colonists did work and are still used today, patients were dosed with some unappetizing concoctions. Dr. Ball of Northboro, Massachusetts, for example, recommended drinking a mixture of fish worms, hog’s lard, turpentine, and brandy to cure itching. In general, herbs were classified as either benefits or simples. Benefits were supposed to prevent disease, while simples were supposed to effect cures. Sometimes doctors and midwives prescribed a plant or herb because it looked like the body part it was supposed to cure. Because a walnut looks like a brain, for example, people thought it could cure brain diseases. In addition to folk medicines and doctors’ concoctions, colonists could buy patent medicines with names like Daffy’s Elixir, Dutch Drops, and Seignettes Salts. These “secret recipes” usually contained large quantities of alcohol and opium and so did make patients feel better. Unfortunately, people also became addicted. Surgery, performed without anesthetic, was used to treat ulcers and broken bones. Because colonial doctors did not know how to set compound fractures, badly broken limbs were amputated. Many surgical patients died of shock, blood loss, or infections. Doctors in early America were not trained or licensed as they are today. In fact, because of cultural prohibitions against dissection, most doctors learned medicine not from studying the body but from reading medical texts and working as apprentices to practicing physicians. It was only in 1768 that America’s first medical school graduated its first class. By the time of the Revolution only 400 of the 3,500 doctors practicing in the colonies had university educations. Eventually,

university-educated doctors displaced midwives as healers, and women relied less on traditional remedies and more on the advice of physicians. See also: Midwifery; Health. FURTHER READING

Terkel, Susan Neiburg. Colonial American Medicine. New York: Franklin Watts, 1993.


MERRY, ANN BRUNTON

(1769–1808) Leading actress and manager who brought professionalism to the developing American theater. Acclaimed for her performances in tragic roles, Merry won respect for herself and for her profession. Born in London, Ann Brunton was the daughter of actor and manager John Brunton. Her mother, whose maiden name was Friend, educated her, but her father encouraged her to memorize Shakespeare. At 15, she made her stage debut and was quickly offered a contract to play at London’s Covent Garden. In 1791, she married poet Robert Merry. His liberal political views made it difficult for her to find acting jobs until she joined Thomas Wignell’s Chestnut Street Theatre and moved to Philadelphia. Merry made her American debut in 1796 as the female lead in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. By the time her husband died two years later, she had achieved stardom. She remained at Chestnut Street, eventually marrying Wignall in 1803. Seven weeks later, he died, and Merry took over management of the company. After taking a short break for the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, she continued to perform leading roles. In 1806, the widow married actor William Warren, with whom she toured and managed the company. She died two years later, after delivering a stillborn child. Reviewers praised Merry’s natural portrayal of emotions, her expressive features, and her “sweetness of voice [that] struck every ear like a charm.” Considered the finest tragic actress in America, she was respected for her artistic gifts, professional discipline, and personal integrity.


METHODISTS

Followers of a religious movement originating in the late 1730s in England under John Wesley, an

METHODISTS

Anglican minister, and his younger brother Charles. Both men were strongly influenced by their mother, Susanna Wesley, who believed she had a calling to preach to her neighbors and children. In contrast to the Anglicans, the Wesley brothers taught the primacy of religious experience, which they called the “heart-work,” over book learning and sacraments. Among John Wesley’s most important innovations was the formation of a fraternity of unordained traveling missionaries, called itinerant preachers, who popularized his evangelical teachings at large public revival meetings throughout Great Britain and Ireland.

American Methodist Women Among the first American Methodists was Barbara Ruckle Heck, often called the “Mother of American Methodism,” who emigrated with her family from Ireland to New York City in the early 1760s. Around the same time, the Irish Methodist preacher Robert Strawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Piper Strawbridge settled in Maryland and recruited members in and around Baltimore City. The first Methodist congregations were often no more than “class meetings” (the Methodist term for prayer groups) or religious societies that gathered in local households. Despite this informality and the disruptions of the American Revolution, the movement soon expanded into every part of the new nation. Women and girls played key roles in this early period. As central figures in their families, or working as servants or slaves, they extended hospitality to and cared for the preachers who traveled into their communities. A number of affluent women supported the movement without joining it. Others, like Rebecca Dorsey Ridgely and her sister Priscilla Dorsey Ridgely, born into a wealthy Maryland family, became lifelong members. Francis Asbury, bishop of the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church, maintained strong friendships with female followers, including Rebecca Ridgely, whom he affectionately referred to as “my Benefactoress.” Another of Asbury’s supporters, Margaret Beekman Livingston of the prominent New York family, never joined the church, but her daughter, Catherine Livingston Garrettson, became a leading Methodist figure in the Hudson River Valley. Women formed the majority in the American Methodist congregations for which information has survived. In various years between 1786 and

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1801, for example, approximately two-thirds of the Methodists in New York City and Baltimore were female. Many were teenagers and young women, probably between the ages of 16 and 24, a time of critical transition as girls prepared to marry. They joined alone or with their sisters and mothers. At the same time, a young person’s decision to become a Methodist could lead to deep family divisions: the itinerants, one disconsolate mother exclaimed, “have bereaved me of my Children.” African American girls and women, still bound to slavery or part of new free black communities, were also drawn to the Methodists by the itinerants’ powerful evangelical preaching. Like women in general, black women formed significant proportions of Methodist church membership at the end of the eighteenth century: between approximately one-fifth of the women members in New York City, for example, and one-third of the women members in Baltimore. Methodism’s appeal to slave girls and women, in part, accounts for its spectacular success in the South. The Methodists’ efforts to reach out to diverse communities of Americans served them well, and their numbers continued to climb after 1800. Methodist women lived in every part of the United States, and their denomination became a significant player in frontier life.

Preaching and Domesticity The Methodist Episcopal Church recognized women’s contributions to the movement by awarding preachers’ wives the same salaries as their husbands; but the church also adhered to biblical injunctions against public speaking by women. Unlike the Quakers, Methodist women rarely traveled or preached in public. Their main official outlet was as leaders of all-female class meetings. At one small working-class society in Baltimore, women made up more than half of the class leaders in 1800. As Methodist congregations grew in size, and American men began to be ordained as ministers in the new church, women were less often appointed as leaders or asked to speak. Instead, Methodist women directed their energies toward their domestic households, as missionaries in the home. Nineteenth-century Methodist women subscribed to the popular belief that mothers should serve as pious role models for their children. The deathbed scenes of devout Methodist women, young and old, were printed in The Methodist Magazine for church members’ emulation. In

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MIDWIFERY


MIDWIFERY

The first Methodist Conference in America was held in Philadelphia in 1773.

time, Methodism would become associated with middle-class values and the private sanctity of the home. Methodist and Methodist-inspired women could not entirely resist speaking out or otherwise publicly espousing their faith. These included Peggy Dow, wife of the itinerant Lorenzo Dow, as well as “primitive” preacher Nancy Towle and African Methodist preachers Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw. And while Methodism produced fewer prominent women than other denominations in the United States, Wesley’s “heart religion,” through its tremendous popularity, would come to shape the lives and world view of more girls and women than any other American church in the years before and after the Civil War. Dee E. Andrews See also: Adolescence; The Bible and the Subordination of Women; Church Membership; Denominationalism; Frontier Life; Great Awakenings. FURTHER READING

Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1769–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Appleby, Joyce O. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1779–1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Schneider, A. Gregory. The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993.

The techniques and practices of midwives, people trained to help women in childbirth. Midwifery is one of the oldest professions, and for most of its history it was an exclusively female one. From biblical times onward, most women gave birth at home attended by a midwife, usually an older woman who had devoted many years to learning herbal remedies and simple manual techniques for relieving some of the difficulties of labor. Midwives, like modern doctors, were on call 24 hours a day. Women would send for assistance when the pangs of labor began, and the midwife would make the sometimes arduous journey to await the birth of the child. Midwives tended to be “noninterventionist.” They offered herbal remedies and concoctions of rum or fortified wine when contractions became frequent. As the time neared for the child to be born, the midwife would usually call for other women to help her. If necessary, the midwife knew how to turn an unborn child in the womb in order to make delivery easier. When the child was born, the midwife and her helpers cleaned up the mother and baby. The father, who would not have been allowed in the birthing room, was then permitted to see his wife and child. The midwife and her helpers would often join the family for a celebratory dinner and, if the hour was late, spend the night. If the mother or child died, the midwife and her helpers would wash the infant and prepare the body for burial. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, it was rare to find a doctor in a birthing room. Doctors were without exception male, and women considered it immodest to allow a man to see them unclothed. This idea changed gradually over the years as male doctors became more common. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, doctors were generally called only in situations of “obstructed labor,” when the baby became stuck in the mother’s pelvis. Their job in such cases was usually to dismember the fetus and remove it from the womb. Doctors might also use forceps, a tool generally not used by midwives. The training of doctors and midwives differed considerably. Midwives were self-selected and selftaught. They were usually mothers themselves and had often attended births of relatives and friends. They learned their craft by participation and observation. Doctors often had little practical training and learned what they knew about childbirth

MISSIONARIES

from books. The first formal training for midwives in America was a series of lectures delivered in Philadelphia in 1762 by Dr. William Shippen. Although Shippen initially trained both men and women, before long he limited his instruction to men. Believing that doctors could ease pain more effectively and ensure safety better than midwives, wealthy women were among the first to turn to doctors in addition to, and later instead of, midwives. Although doctors eventually did learn enough about sterile procedures and female anatomy to begin to improve childbirth practices, initially death rates at doctor-assisted deliveries were no better than, and in many cases were worse than, those of midwives. According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812, midwife Martha Ballard actually had fewer maternal deaths and complications than contemporary doctors. “In fact,” says Ulrich, ”many historians believe that the routine employment of physicians in the nineteenth century probably increased rather than decreased mortality.” Most advances in obstetrical safety have come since the 1920s. As medical doctors attempted to take over the field of obstetrics, they began a public campaign to discredit midwives by suggesting that they were incompetent and dangerous. By 1820, the profession of midwifery was on the wane, and the era of “social childbirth” gave way to the era of “medical childbirth.” FURTHER READING

Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.


MISSIONARIES

Believers who participate in an organized effort to spread their faith. Missionary activity may include preaching, teaching, and providing medical care. In North America, European immigrants felt a duty to bring Christianity and civilization to the native peoples they considered “ignorant savages.” The early nineteenth-century religious revivals inspired widespread enthusiasm for missionary work abroad and on the frontier. The pioneering work of female missionaries broadened the traditional female role and prepared the way for women to enter other professions.

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English Colonial Missionaries Christian missionary activity in the Americas began with the first explorers, who included missionaries on their expeditions. The first colonial charters obliged English settlers to convert Native Americans and so save them from “ignorance” and “the devil.” Conversion to the established Puritan or Anglican religions had the additional advantage of saving them from the French Catholics who were competing with the British for furs and indigenous allies. In the 1670s, John Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian and established 14 “praying villages” intended to become self-sufficient Puritan towns. Eliot was known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” and his wife Ann shared his missionary zeal. George Wheelock, a Congregationalist minister, took a different approach, establishing a school to train Native American missionaries. One graduate, Samson Occum, became a famous preacher, but Wheelock’s other students were not effective because their people considered them “too European.”

French Colonial Missions In 1727, Mother Marie Tranchepain, an Ursuline nun, fulfilled her dream of becoming a missionary by establishing a hospital and school in New Orleans. She and other members of her Catholic religious order taught orphan girls how to earn their living. Sister of the Sacred Heart Rose Philippine Duchesne, known by Potawatomi children as “woman-who-prays-always,” opened the first free school west of the Mississippi River in 1818. Her religious community was one of several that established frontier schools to educate Catholics, nonCatholics, and Native Americans.

American Foreign Missions From 1720 to 1835, revival preachers encouraged Americans to deepen their personal experience of faith and express their faith in action. One consequence was a growing interest in missionary work in foreign countries and on the American frontier. Beginning in 1800, women formed foreign missionary societies to support the work of ministers. They raised funds, studied foreign cultures, and provided moral support through correspondence with ministers in the field. By 1915, the movement had grown to include more than 3 million women across 40 denominations.

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The first American women appointed as Protestant foreign missionaries were Ann Hasseltine Judson and Harriet Atwell Newell. Both were named “assistant missionaries” to their husbands in 1812. Believing that male ministers would not be allowed to teach women in Asia, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) took the unprecedented step of sending female missionaries abroad. Although Newell died of consumption before she could begin her work, her pioneering zeal made her a Christian heroine. Judson’s dedicated work in Burma convinced Americans that female missionaries had a unique and irreplaceable role. Schools founded by Frances Mulligan Hill and Sarah Hall Boardman shaped the education systems of Greece and Burma. Until 1827, Protestant women who wanted to do mission work had to marry a missionary. Educator Cynthia Farrar, sent by the ABCFM to India, was the first single woman to serve. Missionary work, though at first seen as an extension of women’s traditional roles, created new opportunities for women. Volunteers learned organizational and public-speaking skills. Missionaries in the field expanded their roles from starting schools in the home to establishing school systems, from running households to running missions, and from teaching to preaching and conducting services. Several did pioneering work translating the Bible into native languages. Their example created a new profession for women who wanted to serve the church and eventually made it possible for women to become professionals in other fields once reserved for men. FURTHER READING

Appleby, Joyce O. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Conway, Jill K. The Female Experience in Eighteenth- and Ninteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women. New York: Garland, 1982. Hill, Patricia R. The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1879–1920. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.

MONROE, ELIZABETH
KORTRIGHT

(1763?–1830) The wife of President James Monroe. Elizabeth Kortright was born about 1763, probably in New

York City. Although her family lost much of its wealth during the American Revolution, Kortright nevertheless was an important member of New York society. In 1785, she met Virginia politician James Monroe, who was visiting New York as a delegate to the Confederation Congress; they were married the following year. The couple had three children. By all accounts she and her husband were well suited to each other. Despite the demands of James Monroe’s political career, the two were seldom separated for long. Elizabeth Monroe was not universally admired as a political wife. She succeeded Dolley Payne Madison as first lady, and suffered much by comparison to her predecessor. Monroe was formal and reserved; some called her haughty. She announced that she would neither make nor receive social visits, and she often did not attend White House dinners. During her husband’s second term, Monroe’s health declined. She died in Loudoun County, Virginia, on September 23, 1830, about five years after her husband left the presidency.


MONTOUR, MADAME

(1684?–1752?) An interpreter whose fluency in French and five Native American languages helped maintain peace between the English and the Iroquois. Montour was probably born in Canada to Louis Couc Montour, a French immigrant trapper, and his Algonquian wife Mitewamegwakwe. Her given name and date of birth are unknown. When Montour was about ten, she is said to have been captured by the Iroquois and taken to New York. In 1711 she married Carandowana, who later became the leader of the Shawnee. They had at least four children. Montour’s family lived near the Great Lakes, a region where France and Britain competed for allies. In 1711, Montour helped Governor Hunter and the Iroquois plan a military campaign against Canada. A year later, she persuaded the northern Iroquois to remain neutral when the Tuscarora fought English settlers in North Carolina. When the French tried to recruit her, Governor Thomas Hunter offered her the same pay as a male interpreter. Montour’s loyalty to the British was shared by her son Andrew, who commanded Native American troops during the French and Indian War.

MORTON, SARAH WENTWORTH APTHORP

In 1727, Montour moved to a less densely settled region of Pennsylvania. Two years later, her husband was killed in the Catawba War. After surviving a smallpox epidemic, Montour became blind in her old age. She died near Pittsburgh not long before the British won the battle for North America in 1763. A town, a county, and a mountain bear her name. FURTHER READING

“Montour, Madame.” The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America. New York: Facts on File, 1990. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

MOODY, LADY DEBORAH
DUNCH

(?–c. 1659) The founder of a religious colony. Deborah Dunch grew up in England where in 1606 she married Henry Moody, a political leader and member of the nobility. After her husband’s death in 1629, Lady Moody was given a permit by the government to travel to London. Before long, however, the government ordered her to return to her husband’s estate; she had overstayed the length of time allowed according to her permit. As a matter of conscience, she refused and sailed instead for Massachusetts. Once in America, Moody became disenchanted with the religious options available to her. She was attracted to the doctrine of Anabaptism, a radical movement that held that only adult baptisms were valid. Massachusetts Bay Colony, however, was dominated by Puritans who disapproved of this notion. Moody was widely condemned for her views. In 1643 she moved again, this time to Long Island, New York, then under the control of the Dutch. There Moody established an Anabaptist colony, the first English settlement in the area and the first American settlement to be founded by a woman. Moody’s leadership of the new community was strong and lasting. Her town, called Gravesend, guaranteed freedom of religion and set up rules of self-government. Over time, Moody became interested in Quakerism. Some historians believed that she eventually converted. Certainly the area became a haven for Quakers as well as for disaffected Protestants. Moody died in Gravesend around 1659, remembered for having worked to establish religious freedom in the colonies.

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MORRIS, ELIZABETH
CARRINGTON

(1753?–1826) Actress. Elizabeth Morris was probably born in England, but little is known of her early life. She married Owen Morris, a comedic actor, about 1768; the following year she appeared on the stage in Philadelphia. By the time of the American Revolution, Morris had developed a reputation as a fine and capable actress, appearing in leading roles in popular plays of the time. In 1792, the Morrises decided to present plays in Boston. Local laws, however, forbade theatrical events. After several productions, the authorities intervened and arrested both husband and wife in the middle of a performance. Morris returned to Philadelphia, which she used as a base of operations; she also performed frequently in nearby cities, such as Baltimore and New York, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Besides attracting attention as a perfomer, Morris was well known in her early years for her personality. She dressed eccentrically and was considered reserved, even a woman of mystery. Before 1800, she was regarded as one of the best actresses in North America. Her early success, however, did not continue throughout her career. Over time, her classical style of acting fell out of favor in preference for a more romantic ideal. Nevertheless, she continued to perform successfully until at least 1818, and some sources suggest she was still appearing on the stage as late as 1825. Certainly she was one of the first well-known actresses in American history.

MORTON, SARAH
WENTWORTH APTHORP (1759–1846) Poet. Sarah Apthorp was born in Boston in August 1759, and grew up in nearby Braintree. In 1781, she married a lawyer named Perez Morton and moved easily into Boston upper-class society. She and her husband entertained frequently; they also had five children. Morton was best known, however, for her contributions to American poetry. She began writing verse as a child. By 1789, she was a contributor to Massachusetts Magazine, most often using the pseudonym Philenia. Over the next three decades she wrote and published many poems, using both long narratives as well as shorter verse forms. Many of her topics were quintessentially American in their

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themes and outlooks. Her first long poem, for example, was entitled Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature ; it romanticized Native Americans. She also wrote two well-known patriotic poems about the American Revolution and its effect on Boston society. The first of these was called Beacon Hill. A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive. The other was known as The Virtues of Society. A Tale, Founded on Fact. For a time Morton was credited with writing the first American novel, the anonymously published The Power of Sympathy (1789). Later scholarship, however, has determined that she did not write it. She did write and publish one book of essays, called My Mind and Its Thoughts. Morton died in Quincy, Massachusetts, on May 14, 1846.


MOTHERHOOD

See republican motherhood


MOTT, LUCRETIA See volume 2


MOUNT HOLYOKE See volume 2

MURRAY, JUDITH SARGENT
STEVENS

(1751–1820) Writer. Judith Sargent was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May 1, 1751. She was an unusually curious and academically gifted child. Young women of her time were not typically encouraged to pursue academic interests, but when Sargent’s brother began studying college preparatory work, her parents allowed her to study the same lessons as well. Sargent was married in 1769 to John Stevens, a sea captain. After several years of marriage, Judith Stevens began writing. At first, she restricted herself to poetry, but soon became interested in essays instead. She used the ideas expressed in the American Revolution to examine the place of women in society. Her earliest essays, written under the pen name Constantia, urged more equality for women and favored women’s education. Stevens was also very interested in religion, especially the doctrine of Universalism. In 1774, she convinced a young pastor named John Murray to

settle in Gloucester. Two years after her husband died in 1786, she married Murray. The couple had two children. Judith Stevens Murray continued to write. She produced a number of further essays, including a monthly series that appeared in a literary journal, the Massachusetts Magazine. Called “The Gleaner,” this column discussed Murray’s views on a number of important subjects of the time, including politics, manners, and religion as well as women’s rights. Murray wrote from the perspective of a fictional “Mr. Vigillius”; her work was fresh, funny, and topical. The proper education of girls and women was a major theme in these essays. Murray believed wholeheartedly that it was a shame to waste academic talent just because the owner of that talent was female. She also thought that an educated man needed an educated wife. More controversially, she argued that education could help a woman become independent, even find a job for herself—a radical and unpopular idea at the time. Although there was much she did not like about the world’s treatment of girls and women, Murray was optimistic. In the long run, she wrote, the concept of women’s rights would take hold in the United States, and she had hopes for the new generation of girls. Although she was best known for “The Gleaner,” Murray also wrote poetry. Her rhymed verses were published in Massachusetts Magazine and other periodicals. When Murray and her husband moved to Boston in 1793, she took up writing for the stage; Boston had recently legalized theatrical performances. Her plays, however, were not well reviewed, nor were they financial successes. In 1798, Murray published her “Gleaner” essays in three volumes (see Documents). Her husband was ill and the family was suffering financial distress. Today Murray’s literary fame rests primarily on these three volumes, although a few of her poems are still read. In 1815, Murray’s husband died; the following year, she moved to Natchez, Mississippi, to live with her daughter. She died in Natchez on July 6, 1820. FURTHER READING

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.


MUSGROVE, MARY See trade and retailing

NATIVE AMERICANS

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NATIVE AMERICANS

While there was no one pattern of life for women in Native American societies during the colonial era, scholars are certain that members of these societies organized gender relations, sex roles, kinship, and marriage patterns in very different ways from the early modern Europeans who came to the Americas. The hunter-gatherer societies to the north of the present U.S.–Canadian border tended to place prestige on male activities such as hunting big game, an emphasis that only expanded as French and English traders provided a ready market for furs beginning in the sixteenth century. Spanish colonists in the Southwest encountered Pueblo societies that placed great value on women, reckoning family membership through the mother’s, rather than the father’s, line. Woodland peoples along the Atlantic seaboard (Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan speakers) mixed a reliance on maize agriculture with seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering activities. Women in these societies were usually the main support of the community. As much as 80 percent of the nutrients consumed by individuals came from fields tended by women and children. Early English visitors to the Atlantic coast also frequently praised the modesty of the coastal Algonquian women they met while trading other commodities. The elite classes in these societies often practiced polygamy, with one prestigious man taking several wives over the course of his lifetime. In his 1643 account of life in Rhode Island, Roger Williams explained, “Two causes they generally alledge for their many Wives. First desire of Riches, because the Women bring in all the increase of the Field. . . . Secondly, their long sequestring themselves [sexually] from their wives after conception, untill the child be weaned, which with some is long after a yeare old.” Yet Williams agreed with other eyewitnesses that most men and women lived monogamously, and he claimed “I know many Couples that have lived twenty, thirty, forty yeares together.” It was in the daily lives of woodland peoples that the extent of differences between the lives of Indian and English women became apparent. Such difference has been called the “gender frontier,” to call attention to the centrality of sex roles in early modern understandings of cultural differ-

After Pocahontas married John Rolfe she traveled to London and became a celebrity there.

ence. Native women labored in the fields, carried household possessions and wigwam coverings on their backs during seasonal migrations, and bore relatively fewer children than their English counterparts, mainly due to sophisticated measures to control population density. All these things struck European observers as strange and often downright unwomanly. These unique combinations of sex roles, marital relations, and ideals of femininity and masculinity constituted a gender system substantially different from that of Europeans. While colonists were horrified by the arduous physical labor Native women undertook, there is considerable evidence that life may have been somewhat more satisfying for Native American women than it was for their Euro-American counterparts. Mary Jemison, a teenager captured in raiding along the Pennsylvania frontier in the mideighteenth century, spent the rest of her life living as an adopted member of a Seneca (Iroquoian) community. In her nineteenth-century memoir, Jemison recalled, “Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women . . . and their cares certainly are not half as numerous, nor as great.” She explained that in summer, “we planted,

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TRAILBLAZERS Pocahontas was a nickname for an Algonquian woman named Matoaka. She was the daughter of Powhatan, a powerful Algonquian werowance (paramount chief). Pocahontas remains known in American history for the part she is assigned in the early days of the English settlement in Virginia and for romanticized stories of her relationship with Captain John Smith. Smith, the leader of the Jamestown Colony, credited Pocahontas with saving his life after Powhatan’s warriors took him captive in 1607. In the ongoing struggle between the English and Algonquians, the English took Pocahontas hostage in 1613 in retaliation for Powhatan’s seizure of several English settlers. In captivity she agreed to marry John Rolfe, an English colonist. Powhatan may have welcomed this marriage as a tactical and political connection with the English. Pocahontas transformed herself into an English woman, taking the name Rebecca and accepting the Christian faith. With Rolfe, she traveled to England, wore English women’s clothing, ate like the English, and met the English king and queen. As Rebecca, she offered proof to many English that Native Americans could be transformed from “barbaric savages” to genteel English. Pocahontas died in 1617 as she and Rolfe with their infant son prepared to return to America.

tended and harvested our corn, and generally had all our children with us; but had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased. . . . As our cooking and eating utensils consisted of a [mortar] and pestle [for grinding corn], a small kettle, a knife or two, and a few vessels of bark or wood, it required but little time to keep them in order for use.” Native women like Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) of Virginia are remembered in popular mythology for their innate deference to supposedly superior Europeans. In fact, most exchanges between Native women and male colonists were somewhat more reciprocal and much more pragmatic. In Canada, European men prized connections with Native women because they provided links to inland kinsmen who might provide furs, because they themselves labored to process furs for shipping, and because they offered companionship, both emotional and physical. Such “country marriages” were typical of colonial border regions where few European women chose to venture. Pocahontas herself was just a girl of 12 or 13 when

she “rescued” a captive John Smith from execution by Powhatan, the paramount “sachem” or ruler of a large confederacy in coastal Virginia. Too young to be swept off her feet by the bearded adventurer (as the gregarious Smith claimed), Pocahontas ought to be remembered as a skilled diplomat. She lived among the first colonists at the English colony of Jamestown for a significant period in her teens, married another prominent Englishman, John Rolfe, in 1614, and traveled with him to England, where she died and was buried in March 1617. Native American women played a number of roles in colonial North America. No single description can capture the variety of gender, sexual, and familial life for American Indians at the time of European contact with the Americas. FURTHER READING

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Gutie´rrez, Ramo´n A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Plane, Ann Marie. Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, 1824. Reprint, with an introduction by June Namias. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

NEWELL, HARRIET
ATWOOD

(1793–1812) Missionary. Harriet Atwood was born October 10, 1793, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Her family was quite devout, and young Harriet was no different. By the age of 14, she had distanced herself from

NOVELS AND ROMANTIC LOVE

novels, parties, dancing, and other sign of the secular world and began to explore the possibility of devoting her life to a religious cause. In 1810, Harriet Atwood met a young seminarian named Samuel Newell. With several of his friends, Newell had resolved to travel to India and spread Christian ideas there. Atwood was intrigued by these plans. Before long, she agreed to marry him and accompany him on his travels. Despite concerns for her health, and fears that the job and climate might prove stressful for her, she was eager to join Newell in his missionary work. The couple married in February 1812, and left for Calcutta ten days later. Finding a place to carry out their work proved difficult. The Newells arrived in India in June, but were not permitted to carry out their plans. The British East India Company, which controlled much of the area at the time, did not support efforts to convert Indians to Christianity. After less than two months, Newell, her husband, and the rest of the party were told to leave. The company would have preferred to send them home to the United States, but Newell and her husband chose to travel instead to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. On that island, they believed, they could carry on their missionary work. In early August, they set sail. The journey was long and complicated, and Newell became ill, a condition no doubt made worse by the late stages of pregnancy. Before the ship landed, she had delivered a baby prematurely; the infant, named Harriet, died five days later. Newell arrived in Mauritius at the end of October and died there on November 30, 1812. The memoir of her life, written by a friend and originally read at her memorial service, became a popular piece of inspirational literature.

NOVELS AND ROMANTIC
LOVE In the last half of the eighteenth century, print culture expanded, making publications more affordable for middle-class households. One new form this print culture took was the novel. The novel had vast implications for women as readers and writers. These new novels explored everyday life, relationships, and class differences. The novel also focused on a new concept of marriage based on romantic love instead of economic necessity. However, while many novels presented romantic love as ideal, in most, the ideal lost out to the evils of lust and seduction.

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The first novels consumed by an AngloAmerican reading audience were British. In 1740, the British author Samuel Richardson changed the face of fiction with his epistolary novel Pamela. In 1747–48, Richardson published Clarissa. Both of these novels received wide readership in the AngloAmerican colonies. Richardson imitators immediately sprang up throughout Europe. Richardson claimed these novels were instructive. As he wrote in his introduction to Clarissa, he hoped his work would serve as a caution to young women “against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity, upon that dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband.” As such, both of these early novels focused on the trials of young women determined to maintain their virtue. In Pamela the young woman resists Mr. B’s immodest advances and eventually uses her influence to change his character. Mr. B becomes so virtuous that he proposes marriage to Pamela, ending his campaign of seduction. Pamela does accept this proposal, marrying the “reformed rake” after all. By way of contrast, in Clarissa, Robert Lovelace rapes Clarissa Harlowe. Having lost her virtue, Clarissa dies. Despite the sordid subjects of both novels, Richardson made women central characters and portrayed them positively. American imitators of Richardson arose by the end of the century. The distinction of writing the first American novel goes to William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789. In this novel, the central story was one of romantic love, albeit a love doomed to failure. Harriot Fawcet and Harrington fall in love over the course of the novel. In one of the letters from Harrington to a friend, he exclaims, “She loves!—I say to myself, Harriot loves me, and I reverence myself. . . . I may say I have not lived in vain,—for all my heart holds dear is mine.” For a short period in the novel, Brown examined romantic love through these two characters, and lulled the reader into believing that these two were ideally suited. At first, The Power of Sympathy seemed to reflect the growing belief that romantic love had supplanted economic necessity as the reason for marriage. In public and private writings many women hoped that they would enter companionate marriages based on natural attraction and affection. In The Power of Sympathy, this new ideal of companionate marriage could not be fulfilled. In the end, Harriot and Harrington cannot marry be-

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cause they discover they are brother and sister; the elder Mr. Harrington was father to them both. When this information is revealed, the would-be spouses commit suicide. Characters in these eighteenth-century novels acted out their passions in excessively dramatic ways. Perhaps because of these overblown emotions, many people cautioned young women against reading novels. In the ideal of companionate marriage, reading and education would turn women into the perfect spouses—intellectually equal to their husbands, even though contemporaries still debated whether women needed advanced education. Critics of novel reading maintained that American women could read as long as they read works that supported morality and virtue, and they could read as long as reading did not interfere with their motherly household duties. First and foremost women were supposed to be good mothers and wives. Those who worried about reading interfering with women’s work charged that romance novels led to immorality and idleness. Romances could make women yearn for what they could not have. They often focused on transgressive behavior that could arouse passions that were better left dormant. As one church pastor wrote, “The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth.” If women spent precious time and energy reading novels, many swore that they would be lesser mothers and wives. Novels posed other issues as well. Since the writing in novels did not follow strict rules, women did not need classical education in order to write them. Because of this, by the end of the eighteenth century, women had started moving into the field of novel writing. The fact that novel writing opened up a potential profession for some women caused even greater concern. Traditionally, the print world had been limited to men. There were always exceptions made for some, but most women who wrote for publication aroused suspicion. When women placed themselves in public spaces and gave themselves public voices, they crossed the boundary of acceptable female behavior and received criticism simply for being female and for daring to write. Nonetheless, women did write. Among the first female novelists was Susannah Haswell Rowson, an immigrant to the American colonies and later a permanent resident of the United States.

She published Charlotte Temple in 1794, and some claim this as the first American novel written by a woman. This is disputed, however, as Rowson and her family were living in Britain at the time, having left America shortly after the onset of the Revolutionary War. For those who dispute Rowson’s status, the first native-born American female novelist was Hannah Webster Foster, who published The Coquette in 1797. Following these women’s lead, women throughout Anglo-America and Europe picked up their pens and made forays into this medium of expression. Sarah Swedberg See also: Printing and Publishing. FURTHER READING

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Brown, William Hill, The Power of Sympathy. intro. Carla Mulford. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Davidson, Cathy N., ed. Reading in America: Literature & Social History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. . Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Hayes, Kevin J. A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady. ed. Angus Ross. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.


NURSE, REBECCA

(1621–1692) Accused during the Salem Witch Trials. Rebecca Nurse was born in February 1621 in England and emigrated to Massachusetts around the age of 20. She settled in Salem, where she married woodworker Francis Nurse; she and her husband raised eight children. In 1678, the couple moved to Danvers, then called Salem Village. By all accounts, the Nurses led relatively calm and happy lives; certainly they were well-respected members of the community.

OLD AGE AND MORTALITY

Rebecca Nurse’s quiet life came to an abrupt end in 1692. That year a number of young women and teenage girls in the area accused community members of witchcraft. Puritanism, the dominant religious strain in the region, held that witches and devils were quite real; thus, the accusations were not dismissed out of hand. Instead, authorities arrested some of the accused. Nurse was not among this first group of villagers, but she did speak mildly against the hysteria. Some of the accused, she said, were innocent. Perhaps in response to her words, the accusations soon broadened to include Nurse herself. In March 1692, Nurse was arrested. She proclaimed her innocence, but was nevertheless put in jail. Her husband and many friends and family members stood by her during this time. Forty members of the community signed a petition urging that the charges against her be dropped. When she was brought to trial at the end of June, the accusers described in detail how Nurse’s spirit had supposedly tortured them. However, the jury found her not guilty. Unfortunately for Nurse, the verdict provoked an enormous outcry among the accusers in attendance. They screamed, howled, and jerked their bodies painfully, all the while urging the jurors to reconsider. One of the judges echoed this request. The jurors decided to repeat one of the questions

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they had asked Nurse. She had lost most of her hearing and did not respond to their question, since she had not heard it. The jurors took this lack of response as a sign that Nurse really was a witch, and they revised their verdict. This time, they found Nurse guilty and sentenced her to death by hanging. Nurse’s family tried twice to set aside the verdict. They appealed to the governor of Massachusetts, who at first granted Nurse a reprieve. Before long, however, he had changed his mind, evidently influenced by the opinions of several men of Salem. Nurse’s family also pointed out Nurse’s deafness to the court, hoping to explain the innocent reasons behind her silence. This request, too, was refused. On July 3, 1692, Nurse was formally excommunicated from her church, and on July 19, she was hanged. Even after her death, Nurse’s family continued to try to clear her name. They won a measure of redemption for her in 1706 when Ann Putnam, one of the accusers, officially recanted her stories. Putnam singled out Nurse as one about whom she had told particular lies. In 1711, the Massachusetts legislature reversed Nurse’s conviction, and the following year her church overturned her excommunication. Twenty years after her death, Nurse had finally been cleared of the charges against her.

O
OLD AGE AND MORTALITY

People living in the American colonies lived longer than their counterparts in Europe, and New Englanders lived longer than people in the Southern colonies. It has been said, in fact, that New England invented grandparents, since it was there that people began to live long enough to see their children into adulthood and to hold their grandchildren in their arms. Despite the fact that many women died in childbirth, women still outlived men in the colonial period. Americans did not perceive old age as a time of pleasant retirement. In general, growing old was regarded as a time of decline, both physical and mental. Some doctors believed that the ailments of old age were caused by the body’s drying up. Others thought that old age brought about an excess of liquid in the body, a state that they called

“plethora.” Although medical discussions of aging women were rare, one writer, John Scudder, in Inaugural Dissertation on the Diseases of Old Age (1815), suggested that women were particularly apt to suffer from plethora after menopause, since they no longer had monthly periods, which had formerly allowed them to get rid of excess fluids. To avoid some of the physical problems associated with aging, many doctors prescribed better nutrition, exercise, moderate use of alcohol and tobacco, and intellectual stimulation. Bleeding and purging were also recommended. Doctors in the early national period also regarded old age as a time of mental decline. Benjamin Rush, one of the most noted physicians of the era, said that “The memory is the first faculty of the mind which fails in the decline of life.” The religious view of aging was perhaps even

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PAINTING AND SCULPTING

more bleak than the medical view, and ministers regularly preached sermons urging the elderly to wean themselves from life and direct their thoughts toward death. For example, the Reverend Caleb Tenny preached a funeral sermon in 1821 in which he reminded his elderly listeners that “the time of your departure is at hand. Truly, your sun is disappearing; the graves are ready for you.” For many elderly, and especially for women, old age also brought poverty. When a man died, his wealth would usually be divided among his heirs, leaving the widow with much less to live on than she had before her husband’s death. Because women tended to bear children throughout their fertile years, a comparatively “elderly” widow might still have an adolescent child to care for. Since there were few ways that women could earn money,

many elderly widows were forced to depend on charity. Although old age was regarded as quite negative, many contemporary accounts of family life indicate that grandparents were often rewarded with warm and loving relationships with their grandchildren, making old age more a blessing than a curse. FURTHER READING

Scott, Paula A. Growing Old in the Early Republic: Spiritual, Social, and Economic Issues, 1790–1830. New York: Garland, 1997.


O’NEALE, MARGARET L. See volume 2

P
PAINTING AND SCULPTING

The earliest works of art created by women in America were the baskets and ceramics made by Native Americans. Among colonists, the earliest art was created from cloth. Fabric pieces, such as samplers and quilts, not only had practical purposes, they were also works of art that served as creative outlets for women who had little time for other artistic pursuits. It was only in the twentieth century that much of this early work began to be collected and appreciated for its aesthetic worth. Despite the fact that few women had any training in the arts in the colonial period, the first professional painter in America was a woman, Henrietta Deering Johnston (1670–c.1728), who supplemented the family income by doing pastel portraits of her neighbors. Hetty Sage Benbridge, whose dates are unknown but who was a student of painter Charles Willson Peale (1741– 1827), painted miniature portraits in watercolor on ivory. The influence of Peale can be detected in the long oval faces of her subjects. After the American Revolution, the daughters of well-to-do parents received instruction in drawing and painting, accomplishments that were considered necessary for young ladies. Stencil or theorem painting was popular. Young women would

compose paintings using ready-made stencils, often on satin or velvet backgrounds. Women also painted memorials, paintings that showed mourners gathered around the grave of a family member or national hero. Several untrained artists, often referred to as primitive or folk painters, were active in the period after the Revolution. Eunice Griswold Pinney (1770–1849) painted bold watercolors with literary subjects and dramatic composition. Mary Ann Willson, whose paintings appeared between 1810 and 1825, also used bright colors to create her paintings of biblical and historical subjects. Both artists used strong contours and shapes, paying little attention to perspective. Ellen Wallace Sharples (1769–1849), Ann Hall (1792–1863), and Sarah Perkins (1771–1831) were more sophisticated in their styles and subjects; each had the opportunity to study art. Sharples painted formal watercolor portraits of such notable Americans as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Hall, a miniaturist, was the first woman to be accepted as a full member of the National Academy of Design. Historian Elizabeth Ellet wrote that Hall’s “soft colors seemed breathed on ivory, rather than applied with a brush.” She was particularly adept at painting flowers and often included flowers in her por-

PATRIARCHY

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Henrietta Deering Johnston is considered the first woman painter in what is now the United States. She was also one of the first artists in the world to use pastels as a medium. The body of her work includes approximately 40 portraits done on paper in colored chalk. Most of the portraits are 9 by 12 inches with a few measuring 14 by 16 inches. Johnston was probably self-taught and learned to paint by studying the work of other artists. Little is known about Johnston’s early years, but a 1995 article in the magazine Antiques suggests that Johnston was born Henrietta de Beaulieu in Quintin, France. After the death of her first husband, Irishman John Deering (or Daring), she married the Reverend Gideon Johnston in Dublin in 1705. Financial troubles prompted the Johnstons to emigrate to North America in 1707. There Gideon served as the rector of St. Philip’s church in Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina. The couple did not prosper in Charles Town mainly because Gideon was ill for many years before his death in 1716. Throughout their marriage, Henrietta supplemented the family’s income by creating pastel renderings of wealthy neighbors. After her husband’s death, Johnston earned her living entirely by her craft. She probably stayed temporarily with the people she painted. Although most of her work was done in the South, she may have lived for a while in New York City in the late 1720s, since several paintings done there have been attributed to her. Johnston’s work is generally classified as primitive, in that the heads of her subjects are enlarged and the hands are not well drawn. Still, her work is prized as direct, innocent, and charming. Most of her paintings are still owned by the descendants of her original subjects. Johnston died in 1728 or 1729 and is buried in St. Philip’s churchyard in Charleston.

traits. Sarah Perkins painted pastel portraits, primarily of family members. America’s first woman sculptor was Patience Lovell Wright, a bold, brash character who created extraordinarily realistic wax likenesses of famous people. When she moved to England in 1772, Wright did portraits in wax of the king and queen, whom she called by their first names, “George,” and “Charlotte.” One of her few surviving works is a wax model of William Pitt.

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Rachel Atkins did wood carvings from 1802–1804, primarily elaborately carved picture and mirror frames. Frances Platt Townsend Lupton sculpted portrait busts of clay and was named “Artist of the Academy” at the National Academy of Design in 1827. After mid-century, more women sculptors began to follow the lead of male sculptors, who learned their craft in Europe. FURTHER READING

Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Artists from Early Indian Times to the Present. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. . American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.


PARRISH, ANNE

(1760–1800) Philanthropist. Anne Parrish was born in Philadelphia on October 17, 1760, to Isaac Parrish and Sarah (Mitchell) Parrish. She was the oldest in a Quaker family of 11 children. When her parents contracted yellow fever, she promised to devote her life to charity. Parrish founded the Philadelphia House of Industry. Opened in 1795, the House of Industry employed underprivileged women and was the first charitable organization for women in America. In 1796, Parrish founded the Aimwell School for Girls. The students were educated in traditional studies and domestic science. Parrish died in Philadelphia on December 26, 1800, only four years after the school’s founding. It remained open until 1923.


PATRIARCHY

Social organization in which men head a clan or family of dependents, and property is inherited through the male line. Colonial law followed the English tradition of coverture, which recognized a man as the high-

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est authority within his family and gave him control of his wife’s property. A married woman became feme covert; legally she was considered the same person as her husband. However, women conducted independent business under the Feme Sole Trader Acts. The Puritans, who founded a commonwealth based on divine law, spoke of the family as a “little commonwealth,” ruled by the husband as the larger commonwealth was ruled by God. Colonial American women had more freedom than women in England. The Puritans made marriage a civil contract, which implied an agreement between two separate individuals. Laws restricting women’s activities were not strictly interpreted until the 1750s, when the need for labor and the shortage of women eased. All colonies gave widows dower rights to onethird of their husbands’ estates during their lifetimes. In the Chesapeake region, planters often tried to keep their land intact by willing an entire plantation to their widows and then to their sons. After the Revolution, women remained subject to the laws of coverture, but the crime of killing a husband became murder instead of petit treason (an act analogous to killing a king). While the ideal of republicanism encouraged women to submit to their husbands and confine their influence to domestic affairs, “Liberty rhetoric” expressed their growing aspirations for equality. FURTHER READING

Andermahr, Sonya, Terry Lovell, and Carol Wolkowitz. “Patriarchy.” A Concise Glossary of Feminist Theory. London: Arnold, 1997. Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. DePauw, Linda Grant. Founding Mothers: Women in America in the Revolutionary Era. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Ferguson, Kathy E. “Patriarchy.” In Helen Tierney, ed. Women’s Studies Encyclopedia. Edited by Helen Tierney. Rev. ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligation of Citizenship. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

PAWNEE HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Pawnee of the central plains in North America lived along the 50-mile stretch of the Loup and

Platte rivers in Kansas and Nebraska beginning in the seventeenth century. They lived in earth-lodge villages, gathering wild foods, growing crops, and hunting buffalo. Although men moved into their wife’s household upon marriage, leadership within the Pawnee was usually along male lines in a family. The position of chief was a male hereditary position, as were the positions of subchiefs, leading warriors, and religious leaders. These male leaders determined tribal matters, warfare, important ceremony times, farm-plot assignments, and foreign relations. Women’s roles within the Pawnee included gathering wild roots and berries; raising crops, such as corn, squash, beans, and pumpkins; and food preparation. Women also built the earthen lodges in which families lived. Women’s most important role was motherhood, which was viewed as sacred. Women also prepared for elaborate annual ceremonies that were believed to maintain balance between the tribe and Mother Earth.


PEALE, ANNA AND SARAH See arts, patrons of the

PELHAM, MARY
SINGLETON COPLEY (c. 1710–1789) Businesswoman and mother of the painter John Singleton Copley. Mary Singleton was born in Ireland about 1710. With her first husband, Richard Copley, she moved to Boston about 1738. Richard Copley opened and ran a tobacco shop in the harbor district. When he died, probably about ten years after emigrating, Mary took over the shop. Before long she remarried, this time to an engraver and painter named Peter Pelham. Although the custom was for a woman to give up a business once she married, Pelham nevertheless continued to run her tobacco shop. Pelham had several children. The most notable was her first child, a son named John. John Singleton Copley became one of the greatest of all colonial painters. How she influenced his artistic development is unclear; his stepfather’s occupation certainly played an important role. In any case, Pelham was extremely proud of her son’s success within the art world. She died in Boston on April 29, 1789.

PHILANTHROPY

PENN, HANNAH
CALLOWHILL

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and wine, and she made a comfortable living from her business efforts. The outbreak of the American Revolution threatened to interfere with the smooth running of her business, but Perkins kept her store open; indeed, the war years were financially successful for her. She added to her income when she inherited real estate holdings from her father. As Perkins’s income rose, so did her gifts to charity and other causes. She contributed to the upkeep of the Continental Army during the war. She also gave extensively to religious organizations in and around Boston, and she helped found the Boston Female Asylum for the mentally ill. She died in Boston on May 24, 1807.

(1671–1726) Second wife of William Penn. Born in England on February 11, 1671, Hannah Callowhill was given a thorough training in business by her Quaker parents. In 1696, she married William Penn, a widower with children close to her own age. Over the next 12 years Penn gave birth to eight children and made one extended trip to her husband’s colony of Pennsylvania. There she managed her husband’s farm, got to know colonial officials, and learned much about life in North America. Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony, given by government consent to one man designated as proprietor. That man was William Penn, who governed the colony and owned much of the land. In 1703, faced with financial problems, Penn offered to sell the governmental rights back to England. PHILANTHROPY At the same time, he mortgaged many of his land The effort to increase the well-being of people holdings. When he died in 1718, he willed his wife through monetary gifts and charitable efforts. most of his remaining land and appointed her ex- Since colonial times, women have been active phiecutrix of his estate. His will, however, was con- lanthropists, in the sense that they helped one antested by his oldest son by his first wife, who other, and founded volunteer organizations, claimed both the land and government as his own, charitable services, and benevolent associabased on his status as oldest surviving son. tions that provided assistance to the needy in Hannah Penn decided to fight back. She wanted American society. But philanthropy is a broader to keep the land for her own children and was re- concept than charity—its purpose, in the words of luctant to pass on governmental authority to her Robert H. Bremner in American Philanthropy, is to stepson or to England. The court case dragged on for several years. In 1726, TRAILBLAZERS a week before her death on December 20, Penn learned that she had won. Esther De Berdt Reed started the largest women’s volunteer Pennsylvania remained governed by organization during the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Reed was her heirs until the Revolution.




PERKINS,
ELIZABETH PECK (1735–1807) Business leader and philanthropist. Elizabeth Peck was born in Boston on February 14, 1735. In 1754, she married a merchant named James Perkins. He died in 1773, leaving behind his wife and eight children who survived infancy. Elizabeth Perkins responded to this disaster by opening a store of her own to keep the family financially afloat. She sold many different types of important goods, including china

married to Joseph Reed, governor of Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War. The Continental soldiers were in dire need of supplies, including clothing and food. So Esther Reed started the Ladies Association of Philadelphia in 1780. Reed’s organization spread from Pennsylvania to Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Delaware, and Virginia. Association members went door-to-door, collecting money to send to MARTHA WASHINGTON for General George Washington’s troops. Within a few months, Reed and her members had collected what was equivalent to $7,500 in gold. By contrast, prominent businessmen were able to collect only a few hundred dollars more in their efforts to establish the Bank of the United States. Reed died suddenly the same year she started the Association. Others continued her work, including Benjamin Franklin’s daughter SARAH FRANKLIN BACHE.

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“promote the welfare, happiness, and culture of mankind.” Thus philanthropists do not confine themselves to helping the poor. In this larger sense, the term tends to be associated with those who give money rather than time, and with those who found or support institutions that benefit the whole society. In this latter sense, women in the colonial and early national periods were limited in their ability to engage in philanthropy. Although women’s benevolent associations did in fact do more than merely help the poor, their initial focus was on assistance to the needy rather than on building institutions that served the general welfare. The primary reason for this is that women controlled so little of the real wealth of the nation. While a wealthy man might leave his entire fortune to found a college, as John Harvard did in 1638, women seldom had fortunes to leave. Even a wealthy widow was usually left only a lifetime interest in a property, so that its disposition after her death was already determined by her husband’s will.

“I glory in all which my sex has done great and commendable. I call to mind with enthusiasm and with admiration, all those acts of courage, of constancy and patriotism, which history has transmitted to us.” —Esther De Berdt Reed, from the broadside The Sentiments of an American Woman

Even when women did have money to leave, according to Kathleen McCarthy in The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, they “tended to reserve their largest monetary donations for institutions that bolstered the professional aspirations of men.” For example, Harvard’s first scholarship was established by a bequest from a woman, Ann Radcliffe Mowlson, in 1643. Though the women’s college, Radcliffe, was named for her, it was not established until 1894, so her bequest actually benefited only men. While women tended to do their philanthropic or charitable work through organizations, men, according to Anne Firor Scott, “were more likely . . . to operate as individuals.” Men were also more likely to give gifts to large institutions or found institutions that would bear their names. Women, on the other hand were “more apt to . . . to direct

their efforts toward other women.” They were also more likely to be directly involved with the recipients of their gifts, visiting the homes of the poor and presenting gifts personally. American philanthropy can be traced as far back as the Puritans, who believed, in Cotton Mather’s words, that people should perpetually “endeavor to do good in the world.” Those who had more than they needed were duty bound to care for those who did not have enough. Benjamin Franklin, also influential in developing the character of American philanthropy, said, “I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation.” He hoped the new republic would be a society in which there was no poverty and little need for charity, and in which everyone had the tools to be “industrious and free.” Thus he dedicated himself to civic projects that he hoped would make life better for all citizens, such as founding libraries and organizing volunteer fire departments. The religious revival of the 1740s, the first of the great awakenings, encouraged more people to become involved in charitable works and transformed “do-goodism from a predominantly upper- and middle-class activity . . . into a broadly shared, genuinely popular avocation,” according to Bremner. Even if ordinary Americans did not have large fortunes to bequeath, they could still put a penny in the collection box, enabling congregations to help the needy. Beginning in the 1790s middle-class and elite women formed benevolent associations, such as the Boston Fragment Society, which to some extent took over and expanded the charitable work once done primarily by religious organizations. See also: Benevolent Associations, Women’s; Property Rights. FURTHER READING

Bremner, Robert H. American Philanthropy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

PHILIPSE, MARGARET
HARDENBROOK

(?–c. 1690) Colonial businesswoman. The circumstances of Margaret Hardenbrook’s early life are unknown.

PINCKNEY, ELIZA

Born in Europe, she arrived in New Amsterdam, present-day New York, in 1659 or earlier; that year, she married her first husband in New Amsterdam. By 1660 she was established as a merchant, acting as an agent for several Dutch firms doing business in the colonies. A year later, after her husband’s death, Hardenbrook ran his business as well as her own. She bought a merchant ship, exported furs to the Netherlands, and imported Dutch goods to sell in the colonies. In 1662, Hardenbrook married Frederick Philipse, a wealthy trader. Her money and resources helped him to become one of the most influential merchants in New Netherland. As in her previous marriage, she also maintained her own business interests. This was a rarity for a married woman in colonial America, and the fact that she was married was such a curiosity that it was referred to in many of her business dealings. She traveled frequently between Europe and New Netherland, keeping careful track of her business interests. While many people admired her financial skills, other observers complained that she was greedy and overly obsessed with money. Margaret Philipse had several children, most of whom followed her into shipping and other business endeavors. She seems to have retired from business about 1680—why is unknown—and she died in New York City ten years later.


PIERCE, SARAH

(1767–1852) Teacher. Sarah Pierce was born on June 26, 1767, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Trained from an early age for the teaching profession, Pierce began her own school in 1792. Known variously as Miss Pierce’s and the Litchfield Female Academy, the school’s fame and significance rose quickly. In its early days, Pierce took on only two or three students and taught them in her own house. By the 1820s, in contrast, enrollment had ballooned to well over a hundred pupils, and they met in a large public building. Pierce’s curriculum was not far different from the standard courses offered by girls’ schools of the time. She emphasized reading, arithmetic, needlework, and a mix of other academic and nonacademic subjects; when she found existing history textbooks insufficient, she wrote her own. Pierce had a particular interest in physical fitness, and she wrote short plays for her students to perform with townspeople.

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Pierce ran the school more or less on her own until 1814, served as principal until 1825, and taught regularly until her retirement in 1833. The school folded several years afterwards, but Pierce was hailed as an innovator in the field of women’s education. She died in Litchfield on January 18, 1852. See also: Schools; Textbook Writing.


PINCKNEY, ELIZA

(c. 1722–1793) Plantation manager and agricultural innovator. Elizabeth Lucas, generally nicknamed Eliza, was born around 1722 in the West Indies, the eldest of four children. In 1738, she and her family moved to South Carolina, where her father, an English soldier named George Lucas, had inherited the Wappoo Plantation not far from Charleston. The following year war broke out between Spain and England, and Lucas’s father had to return to the West Indies. Although Eliza Lucas was only about 17, he left her in charge of Wappoo and several other nearby properties. By all accounts, Lucas enjoyed her responsibilities and took them seriously. Well-read and accomplished in the arts, she could have moved easily within Charleston’s high society, but chose instead to devote herself primarily to the upkeep of the plantation. She is not known to have questioned the system of slavery on which the plantation’s wealth depended, but she was concerned enough for the slaves’ welfare to teach two of the plantation’s young enslaved women to read. She also experimented with the planting of different crops and took careful notes on what she learned. Among the crops she tried out were cotton, rice, and other standards of the time and place, but she also experimented with ginger and many other plants as well. Her discoveries would prove helpful to local planters for many years. Lucas’s most successful experiments involved indigo, a valuable source of blue dye. The indigo plant had been cultivated in Charleston early in the community’s history, but growers had found it difficult to raise and unprofitable to sell. Production of indigo had instead fallen to planters on French islands in the West Indies. Lucas determined to try to raise indigo at Wappoo, thereby adding an extra valuable crop to South Carolina’s agricultural output and at the same time giving English and colonial manufacturers a chance to buy indigo domestically.

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The fact that Lucas knew little or nothing about indigo cultivation did not deter her. She experimented constantly with growing conditions and methods of turning the plant into dye. She also had help from two West Indian brothers with extensive experience in growing indigo; although one was mostly interested in sabotaging her crop and leaving the French with a monopoly, the other proved useful in helping her adapt West Indian growing methods to South Carolina’s different soil and weather conditions. By 1744, Lucas’s crop was ready for marketing. English manufacturers found her indigo better than that produced by the French, and Lucas quickly distributed seeds to her neighbors. Within three years South Carolina was exporting 100,000 pounds of indigo. Lucas had married a lawyer named Charles Pinckney in 1744, and they had four children, two of whom—Charles and Thomas—would play important roles in the American Revolution. During her marriage and child-rearing, Eliza Pinckney nevertheless found time for further experiments involving indigo, other crops, and silkworms. In 1753, however, her husband was appointed a colonial commissioner, which required him to leave South Carolina for England; they did not return until the spring of 1758. Pinckney’s husband died later that summer, leaving her in charge of the family’s seven plantations. After the Revolutionary War, Pinckney settled into semiretirement at the South Carolina home of her daughter Harriott. There she helped raise a number of grandchildren. Pinckney contracted cancer in 1791. In an attempt to defeat the disease, she traveled to Philadelphia to see a medical specialist. Her treatments were unsuccessful, and she died in Philadelphia on May 26, 1793.

Her figures were typically two-dimensional, and she had difficulty painting faces. Some paintings contain literary references. Pinney’s paintings are especially noted for their use of strong patterns, interesting colors, and dramatic and creative subjects. Pinney died in Connecticut in 1849. About 50 paintings remain that have been definitely identified as her work. These paintings are generally considered to represent some of the best of early– eighteenth-century American folk art.


PITCHER, MOLLY See gender frontiers


POCAHONTAS See Native Americans


POETRY

In seventeenth-century America, the most prominent poet was Anne Bradstreet. While there were many didactic poems and rhymed obituaries and

PINNEY, EUNICE
GRISWOLD

(1770–1849) Folk artist. Eunice Griswold was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, on February 9, 1770. Her first marriage, to Oliver Holcombe, left her a widow at a young age; she married Butler Pinney in 1797. Although Eunice Pinney is remembered for her watercolor paintings, she had very little artistic instruction as a child or young adult; indeed, she was almost 40 and the mother of five children, three by Butler Pinney, before she began to paint. Pinney was known for painting a variety of scenes and subjects, from landscapes to scenes of daily life.

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American poet.

POETRY

epitaphs, only Bradstreet wrote poems that were comparable in quality to the poetry written in England at the time. (See Documents.) The first book of poetry printed in America was The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1640), better known as the Bay Psalm Book. Written by three Puritan ministers, the Bay Psalm Book placed a much greater value on accurately paraphrasing the psalms than on the beauty of the verse. This led to some rather bad poetry, such as this from Psalm 78: Give listening ear unto my law, ye people that are mine, Unto the sayings of my mouth do ye your ear incline.

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WOMEN’S FIRSTS Phillis Wheatley was the first American of African descent to have her poetry published. At a time when it was generally believed that Africans lacked the capacity to attain higher learning, Wheatley proved that they, like Europeans, could benefit from a formal education. The exact date of Wheatley’s birth is unknown but is thought to be around 1753. She was brought to North America on the slave ship Phillis when she was about seven years old. Once in Boston, a wealthy merchant named John Wheatley and his wife Susannah bought the young girl and renamed her Phillis after the ship on which she came. Wheatley’s genteel demeanor and precocity impressed her new owners. She was permitted many freedoms not granted to others in SLAVERY, such as eating with the family and having her own room. The Wheatleys taught her English and Latin. While in her teens, she wrote one of her first pieces of verse, “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” which celebrates learning, virtue, and redemption through Christ, topics that would dominate her writing. During the late 1760s and early 1770s, Wheatley’s poems attracted the attention of many people of wealth and distinction, such as George Washington. Guests came to the Wheatley household in Boston to meet the young poet. In 1773, Wheatley traveled to London as the guest of the Countess of Huntingdon, a patron who subsidized the printing of some of Wheatley’s work, including her only book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. As proof that an African did indeed write the collection, 18 well-respected men, including John Hancock, signed a foreword attesting to her authorship. Wheatley rarely addressed the issue of slavery and did not seem overly concerned with the plight of slaves. Instead, her writings stressed the importance of religion and morality. Her poem entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America” actually praises those who brought her from her “Pagan land” and taught her “to understand that there’s a God.” In the last lines of the poem, she writes, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain / May be refined, and join th’ angelic train.” Wheatley returned to America later in 1773 and, after the death in 1774 of her former mistress, she lived the remainder of her life in poverty and relative obscurity until her death in 1784. (See Documents.)

In both England and America in the eighteenth century, prose fiction eclipsed poetry as the most popular literary form. Probably the best-known woman poet of the era is also America’s first African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley, whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in 1773. (See Documents.) Unfortunately, the idea of a poet who was both black and female was too much for some of Wheatley’s contemporaries. Thomas Jefferson refused to consider her work poetry, and others, although they praised her work, seemed to regard her as an anomaly. Her work was largely focused on morality and piety. During the American Revolution, verse satires and ballads were popular. Since many were published anonymously, some were certainly written by women. Mercy Otis Warren wrote some poetry, though she is best remembered for her historical work. (See Documents.) The best-known poets of the period were John Trumball, Joel Barlow, and Timothy Dwight, now collectively known as “the Hartford Wits.” Trumball is remembered now for his humorous epic McFingal, Barlow for his mock epic Hasty Pudding, and Dwight for his religious epic The Conquest of Canaan. Philip Freneau, called the “poet of the revolution” for his patriotic poems such as “The Rising

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POOR LAWS

Glory of America,” actually did some of his best work in the 1780s. “The Indian Burying Ground” and “The Wild Honey Suckle” are lovely lyric poems that prefigure the work of American Romantic poets. FURTHER READING

Bloom, Harold, ed. American Women Poets. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Kaplan, Cora. Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets. New York: Paddington Press, 1975.


POOR LAWS

A system establishing public responsibility for the poor. From the beginning, poor laws in British colonial America were modeled on the English system, which was instituted in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and based on a division of the poor into two groups—the deserving and the undeserving. The “deserving” poor were those people who were unable to work because of age or disability. The “undeserving” poor were those who were considered able to work but could not or would not find work. For those who could not work, the poor laws provided what was called “indoor relief,” cash or other forms of direct help. Those who could work were given “outdoor relief,” employment provided by the government, often in workhouses. From their inception, poor laws were subject to criticism because many people felt that they encouraged able-bodied people to become dependent on government assistance. In general, poor women in both the colonial and early national periods, according to Carol Berkin in First Generations, “began in need [and] ended in desperation.” Because of social limitations on the work that women could do, women could not easily extricate themselves from poverty. Poor women and their children were often “bound over,” or indentured, to employers and forced to work as servants. One of the few protections women had against poverty were dower rights, which attempted to ensure that widows were not left destitute by forcing husbands to leave their wives at least one-third of their property in their wills. Dower rights were strictly enforced in British North America because communities did not want to have to care for impoverished widows. Poor laws in some colonies provided that people who received public relief wear a badge marked

with a P; those who refused could be sent to prison or whipped. Thus, to the pain of poverty, the burden of humiliation was added. FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996.


PREACHING

Women were barred from ordination and preaching in all Christian sects in early America, but many had religious responsibilities akin to preaching. Their maternal role, which was universally seen as central to their lives, included a particular duty to inculcate practical godliness, or morality, in family members and friends. This moral guidance could amount to a kind of preaching in evangelical sects—those marked by a strong impulse to spread their religious message and recruit church members. One of these, the Quakers, rejected ritual ordination of clergy, and allowed a number of women to be ministers along with men. Women in evangelical sects like Puritan Congregationalism in New England could hold meetings in their homes to discuss Christian doctrine. A few individuals tried to enlarge the purpose of these meetings, like Anne Hutchinson, who addressed large gatherings at her home in Boston in the 1630s. The colony of Massachusetts Bay banished her in part because she affected to have biblical authority equal to that of an ordained preacher. Quakers were more tolerant, and one of them, Mary Coffyn Starbuck, was a powerful preacher who made Nantucket a Quaker stronghold early in the eighteenth century. Other notable female Quaker preachers include Sophia Wigington Hume of South Carolina and Rebecca Jones of Pennsylvania. The First Great Awakening in the 1740s inspired many women to be more assertive in their churches, and again, some New England Congregationalists got into trouble. Bathsheba Kingsley was disciplined by her church for preaching in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1741 and 1743. Sarah Osborn provoked authorities by leading a revival in her home in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1766, attended by people of both sexes, white and black. In the era of the American Revolution, some women breached old boundaries, although they still could not be ordained in any mainstream church. The immigrant Ann Lee brought her own sect, the Shakers, to America from England on the

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eve of the Revolution. An American-born Quaker named Jemima Wilkinson established her own sect and traveled extensively, preaching, prophesying, and healing. Freewill Baptist Nancy Towle began preaching in New England in the mid-1810s. The trend reached a pinnacle in 1827, when New Hampshire’s Harriet Livermore preached to a large crowd in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nothing is known about preaching by black women slaves in the early period. Free black women like Jarena Lee also faced male resistance to their preaching. In the early national era, women were more active as missionaries, in which role they often preached. Hannah Jenkins Barnard was a controversial Quaker missionary in England in 1800. Ann Hasseltine Judson, a Baptist, and Harriet Newell, a Congregationalist, were the first female missionaries from the United States to East Asia in 1812, and Newell was the first woman to die in foreign missionary service.


PREGNANCY

During the colonial period, most women were pregnant from five to ten times in their lives and had from three to eight surviving children. The average period between pregnancies was 28 months. In fact, according to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “the general pattern of a birth every two or Jarena Lee was the first recorded black woman preacher. three years was accepted as a rhythmic part of colonial Americans’ everyday existence.” Women planned their lives around anticipated pregnancies. Though accepted, a pregnancy was WOMEN’S FIRSTS not always celebrated. Since many women died in childbirth, news of Jarena Lee (1783-c.1850) was the first recorded black woman a pregnancy was often greeted with preacher. Born into a free African-American family in New mixed emotions. Nearly every women Jersey, she converted to Christianity in the African Method- had friends and relatives who had ist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1804. She expressed a desire died from complications of pregto preach in 1811, but was rebuffed by AME founder Rev- nancy, and most women had to face erend Richard Allen. In 1819, however, she interrupted a the fact that each pregnancy could be sermon in his Bethel Church in Philadelphia to exhort the life-threatening. Women comforted congregation extemporaneously, and Allen then gave her per- each other and offered support durmission to preach. She traveled in all sections of the country ing pregnancy, urging their friends to for many years, sometimes preaching to audiences of both keep their spirits up because “anxiety blacks and whites. She published her spiritual autobiography is bad for health.” The medical care of pregnant in 1836 and was probably involved in a movement in 1850 by women usually fell to female relatives black women preachers to demand the right to be ordained and midwives. Just before delivery, a in the AME Church. woman would call in the local midwife and female friends and relatives. Gen-

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erally, doctors would be called only if there were complications, such as breech deliveries. Midwives treated most complications of pregnancy with herbal remedies, while doctors often resorted to bloodletting, which itself caused many complications and even deaths. Husbands were seldom in the room during a delivery but were usually at home. After the birth of a child, women would avoid strenuous activity for as long as their circumstances would allow. This period was called the “lying in” period. A month was usually the recommended time, but few women had the luxury of resting for so long. Many were back in their kitchens within a day or two. FURTHER READING

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.


PRINCE, LUCY TERRY

(1730?–1821) Probably the first African-American poet. Lucy Terry was born in Africa and was kidnapped into slavery at a young age. Brought to Rhode Island, she was purchased by Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and worked in his household. By 1746, she had been in the United States long enough to have learned English and to have showed a definite interest in poetry. That year, at the age of 16 or so, she composed an original poem, “Bars Fight,” which told the story of a Native American raid on a New England village. Although she was a slave, her sympathies as a poet lay with the whites who were attacked rather than with the native attackers. “Bars Fight” was not published immediately, but there is no doubt that Terry wrote it. “Bars Fight” is the only poem Terry is known to have written. The historical record on her is sketchy. In 1756 she married Abijah Prince, a free black who purchased her liberty. Prince and her husband helped found Sunderland, Vermont. The couple had six children. Prince died in Sunderland in 1821, 27 years after her husband’s death. “Bars Fight,” however, was not published until 1855, when it appeared in a historical account of western Massachusetts. Today, Lucy Terry Prince’s work is recognized as the oldest example of a poem written by an African American.

PRINTING AND
PUBLISHING A remarkable number of women worked in the printing and publishing business in America during the colonial and early national periods. In a pioneering study published in 1978, Early American Women Printers, Leona M. Hudak provides 25 detailed case studies of women who ran newspapers and presses. She discusses 26 additional cases in the appendix to the book. She concludes that in America, women “worked alongside men in the endless effort to disseminate information.” Of the 25 women she studies, only one—Sarah Updike Goddard—founded a firm with her own money. Most of the other women worked in family businesses and continued to run them after their husbands died. Benjamin Franklin mentions his wife’s involvement in his printing business in his Autobiography: She assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing linen rags for the papermakers, etc., etc.

Like Deborah Read Franklin, many wives had substantial experience in the printing business and could easily take over when their husbands died. The first printing press in America, established in 1638, was owned by a woman, Elizabeth Glover of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anna Zenger, wife of John Peter Zenger—whose trial for libel in 1734 helped to establish the principle of freedom of the press—ran his paper for a year while he was in prison and again after his death. Anne Hoof Green and Clementina Rind both published newspapers and became the official printers for Maryland and Virginia, respectively. Mary Katherine Goddard was chosen to issue the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence to include the names of the signers. The first magazines published in America were issued in 1741, one by Andrew Bradford, whose wife, Cornelia Smith Bradford, took over his newspaper when he died in 1742, and one by Benjamin Franklin. Both of these publications were short-lived. After the Revolution, a number of publishers established magazines and journals that specifically addressed themselves to women as well as men, selecting articles that would be of interest to women and rejecting articles that might offend. Some published admiring biographies of famous women, aware that such stories would appeal to a female readership. Among these were the Colum-

PROPERTY RIGHTS

bian Magazine, American Magazine, United States Magazine, Lady and Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine of Literature and Polite Amusement, and Farmer’s Magazine. The first American journal published exclusively for women, The Lady’s Magazine, and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, appeared in 1792. According to Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters, “the pages of these journals constituted the single most important public forum for the voicing of radical opinions on women’s status and role.” Many who wrote in these magazines advocated educational opportunities and wider spheres of influence for women. FURTHER READING

Hudak, Leona M. Early American Women Printers and Publishers: 1638–1820. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

PRIOR, MARGARET
BARRETT ALLEN

(1773–1842) Humanitarian. Margaret Barrett was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1773. In 1814 she married William Prior, a New York merchant. Over the next few years Margaret Prior began to devote herself to charitable work. In 1818, she established a soup kitchen; four years later, she opened a school for impoverished children. Having lost most of her biological children in infancy, she also adopted a disabled orphan, who lived only to the age of ten. She served as a board member of the New York Orphan Society. Prior’s charitable work centered mainly on the New York Female Moral Reform Society. This organization tried to improve the lives of single mothers, prostitutes, and other poor women in New York City. Prior and other volunteers also visited prisoners and the sick, helped people find jobs, and fought alcoholism. She offered prayer, moral support, and material goods such as food and money when they were available. Much of Prior’s work came from a religious zeal: a kind of urban missionary, she hoped to bring Christianity to the poor. For many years she visited an average of 50 poor families a week. She died on April 7, 1842, in New York City.


PROPERTY RIGHTS

The legal rights of an individual to own property. The property rights of women in British colonial

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America were initially determined by English common law, which held that married women had no identity separate from their husbands and thus no legal right to any of the property within the marriage. Widows were entitled to dower rights, which meant that, by law, husbands had to leave their wives at least one-third of their personal property and a life interest in at least one-third of the family real estate. A life interest meant that income from property belonged to the widow during her life, but she could not dispose of the property. After her death, the property transferred to the children, as specified in her husband’s will. If a husband died without a will or did not leave a wife her “thirds,” she could sue to be granted her share. In New Amsterdam before British rule, husbands and wives typically left all property to one another, trusting the surviving spouse to care for the children. But in the British colonies, widows, even if they were comfortably off, had little or no control over property. And although single women could own property, they made up only a tiny minority of the female population. While there were married women who held personal property in trusts, and while the law provided that women could hold property specified in prenuptial agreements, few women took advantage of these “loopholes.” The idea that men should hold the rights to property was almost universally accepted in both pre- and postrevolutionary America. Women in colonial America, then, had little control over the total wealth of the nation. Studies of probate records, according to Carole Shammas in “Early American Women and Control over Capital,” consistently show that women controlled less than 10 percent of all the nation’s wealth. Even though some laws of inheritance were changed after the American Revolution, the impact on the amount of capital controlled by women was quite minor. Some of the changes included eliminating laws that favored sons over daughters in inheritance and eliminating double shares to eldest sons. Thus daughters were in a position to inherit more property after the Revolution than before. But this change had little impact on the total wealth of women because most women only came into their inheritances after they were married, so the property ended up belonging to their husbands. While a few states made laws that were more favorable to women, radical changes in property rights that increased the real wealth of women were not widespread until the 1830s and 1840s.

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See also: Coverture; Feme Sole Trader Acts. FURTHER READING

Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.


PROPHESYING

Speaking under the influence of divine inspiration. In the Christian tradition, prophecy is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Biblical prophets received a special call to speak God’s word to their people. They condemned oppression, called sinners to repentance, and shared visions of the future. The Puritans believed that the biblical prophets were divinely inspired, but held that God no longer spoke directly to individuals. Dissenter Anne Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony after claiming to receive personal revelations from the Lord. In contrast, the Quakers believed that God chose both men and women as “instruments” for His messages. Since preaching and prophecy were gifts, Quakers did not train ministers but “acknowledged” their calling. Signs of a true calling included premonitions, visions, and prophetic warnings. Quakers also performed what they called prophetic acts to challenge injustice. In 1662, Deborah Wilson protested the public whipping of women stripped to the waist by walking naked through Salem. Visions inspired two women to become “missionary prophets” who founded their own American sects. In 1770, Englishwoman Ann Lee had a revelation that Shakers should live in celibacy. In 1774, she and her followers moved to New York in accordance with another prophetic vision of Lee’s. Jemima Wilkinson, after recovering from a serious illness, believed she had been given a second life to be God’s special messenger. Her followers became known as “Universal Friends.”


PROSTITUTION

The exchange of sexual acts for money. Religious leaders in both Europe and America taught that sex was immoral outside of marriage. Early American laws reflected that belief. Before 1750, prostitution was uncommon. Women married young and most lived with their

families. However, records mention six “bawds” working in New England ports around 1672. By 1800, prostitutes were established in centers of trade, such as Boston and Philadelphia. Sometimes their businesses were disguised as taverns or hat shops. While laws against prostitution were not always strictly enforced, prerevolutionary punishments could be painful. In Virginia, penalties for sexual acts between people who were not married included fines or whippings for both the woman and the man. In New York, convicted prostitutes were whipped or branded. Prostitution did not become a formal trade until around the time of the Revolution, when camp followers traveled with the army and many women were impoverished by war. For poor women, prostitution became an alternative to low-paying jobs. Different classes of prostitutes emerged, ranging from streetwalkers to kept women. Public opinion considered these “fallen women” a danger to the virtuous ideals of the new Republic. During periodic public outcries against vice, brothels in New York and Boston were attacked by mobs. Typically public indignation and law enforcement efforts focused on the women, not their clients. Despite occasional crackdowns, the trade continued. See also: Fornication; Sexuality, Regulation of.

PUEBLO HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Pueblo represented several diverse groups of Native Americans, including the Hopi, Tewa, Zuni, Tano, and Piro. Beginning around 1500, Spanish explorers in the region of present-day New Mexico called these peoples “pueblo” after the type of stucco housing in which they lived. Prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries and the influences of Catholicism, the Pueblo divided themselves into family groups called lineages. These lineages were grouped according to matriarchal lines, which meant that family power and property passed down through the mother. Households were organized around the senior women who owned and controlled family property. Several generations of a family lived together. A man moved into his wife’s family’s house upon marriage. A Pueblo woman’s role as “nurturer” and provider of sustenance was highly revered, as was her

PURITANS

role as a mother. She gathered and prepared food, built and maintained housing, and supervised family affairs. The men tended corn, traded with outsiders, and protected the village against attacks.


PURITANS

169

TRAILBLAZERS Priscilla Alden is remembered today primarily because of her courtship by John Alden, a story that was retold by the poet Henry Wadwsorth Longfellow. Priscilla Mullins was born in Surrey, England, to William, a shoemaker, and his wife, Mary. In 1620, the family sailed to America with the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts. During the first terrible winter in America, almost half of the settlers died, among them both Priscilla’s parents and her younger brother. Some time between 1621 and 1623, Priscilla married John Alden, a cooper or barrel maker. Theirs was one of the first marriages in the new colony. It later became one of the most famous marriages in all of American history, thanks to the 1858 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” According to the poem, Miles Standish, one of the leaders of the colony who had been recently widowed, wanted to ask Priscilla to marry him but was too shy to ask her. Instead, he sent the young John Alden to propose for him. Alden, who himself was in love with Priscilla, put his feelings aside in favor of loyalty to his friend. But when Alden asked Priscilla to marry Standish, she uttered her famous response, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” Alden, only briefly taken aback, took the hint and asked for Priscilla’s hand himself. Priscilla Alden, with her spirited and direct response, has come to represent a romantic ideal of life in America, a place where people marry for love and live happily ever after. Longfellow took the idea for his poem from a book by Timothy Alden, a descendent of John and Priscilla. Although the story is probably not true, it has become a well-known part of American folklore. Not much is known about Priscilla Alden after her marriage. She and John moved from Plymouth to Duxbury, Massachusetts, where they were among the founders of that settlement. Priscilla had 11 children, according to Governor William Bradford, but the names of only eight children are known. John Alden died in 1687 and it is assumed that Priscilla preceded him in death.

A group of individuals who wanted to “purify” the practice of Christianity. Puritanism began in the sixteenth century as an attempt to cleanse the Church of England, which had broken from the Catholic Church in 1534, of “all taint of popery.” Some Puritans rejected the whole idea of a centrally established church and believed that religious practice should be governed by independent groups or congregations of believers. Under James I and Charles I of England Puritans were persecuted, and many chose to emigrate to America. In 1630, 17 ships carried a thousand immigrants, many of them Puritans, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Just before landing in America, John Winthrop, later the first governor of the colony, delivered a sermon in which he declared that the settlement would be “as a City upon a hill, the eyes of all people are on us.” Their new community was to be a theocracy, a state governed by religious principles. Puritans dominated Massachusetts and other parts of New England for most of the seventeenth century. Women were considered intellectually and spiritually inferior in the Puritan faith. Just as Eve tempted Adam into sin in the biblical story, so too Puritan men had to be on their guard against the temptations of women who refused to submit to their husbands and fathers. Thus the preservation of male authority was an important goal of Puritan society. The family was patriarchal, and wives were expected to submit to their husbands in all aspects of their lives. A woman’s place was in the home, and her duty was, according to John Cotton “to keep at home, educating of her children, keeping

and improving what is got by the industry of the man.” In both church and town meetings, women were seated separately from men. When it came to the subject of religion, it was a man’s duty to instruct his wife and daughters, but he was expected to simplify difficult theological concepts so they could understand them. Puritans cited the story of Ann Hopkins, wife of Governor

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have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.

Priscilla Mullins Alden’s marriage to John Alden inspired a poem, illustrated here, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Edward Hopkins, who went mad trying to study religion on her own. According to John Winthrop’s journal (published in the nineteenth century as The History of New England from 1630 to 1649): if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might

When Anne Hutchinson was tried for heresy in 1637 (see Documents), it is clear from the transcripts of the trial that her gender was as much at issue as her unorthodox religious views. She was sentenced in part, said Governor Winthrop, “as being a woman not fit for our society.” Her banishment served as a clear message to other women that dissent, especially by women, would not be tolerated. While wives were expected to submit to husbands, Puritans valued the married state and felt that love was essential to marriage. According to Edmund Morgan in The Puritan Family, “If a husband and wife failed to love each other above all the world, they not only wronged each other, they disobeyed God.” The letters exchanged by many Puritan couples reveal a deep and genuine affection. Although men had broad authority, it was not without limits. Husbands could not hit their wives or demand that they go against the laws of God. And husbands and wives were expected to share authority over children and servants. FURTHER READING

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Q
QUAKERS

The Society of Friends was founded in England by George Fox in the mid-seventeenth century, a period of great religious and political turmoil. The sect became known as Quakers when Fox told a judge who was about to sentence him for blasphemy that he should “tremble at the word of the Lord.” One of the central tenets of Quakerism is the concept of the “inner light,” or “Christ within”—the idea that each individual could find the truth within him or herself, without the help of formal religion or religious texts. Quakers rejected authority and hierarchies of all kinds. Their use of “plain speech,” which used the informal “thee,” as opposed to the more formal “you,” emphasized their sense of the equality of all persons. Quakers rejected a formal set of beliefs and believed that any member could preach the word of God.

“I came to keep bloodguiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust laws of banishment upon pain of death made against the innocent servants of the Lord. Therefore, my blood will be required at your hands who wilfully do it. But, for those who do it in the simplicity of their hearts, I desire the Lord to forgive them. I came to do the will of my father, and in obedience to this will I stand even to death.” —Mary Dyer, speaking just before her execution

QUAKERS

171

The Quaker belief in equality TRAILBLAZERS extended to women. Fox’s wife, Margaret, wrote ingenious reinterpretations of biblical passages that Mary Dyer and her husband William were followers of ANNE appeared to forbid women to preach, HUTCHINSON, a Puritan woman who questioned the religious and she herself traveled extensively authority of Massachusetts leaders. Hutchinson maintained carrying the message of this new rethat salvation was a personal experience between an individligion throughout England. She was ual and God. Fearing her influence, Puritan officials tried arrested and imprisoned several Hutchinson for heresy and excommunicated her on March times for blasphemy and proselytiz22, 1638. As Hutchinson left the church after the verdict, ing, as was her husband. Dyer and her husband walked out beside her. When Quakers came to North For their support of Hutchinson, the Dyers were excomAmerica, they were considered heremunicated and banished. They moved to Rhode Island, a tics, especially by the Puritans of colony founded on the tenet of religious freedom. Settling in Massachusetts Bay. The first Quakers Newport, Mary raised five sons, and William became a posettled in Rhode Island because of its litical leader in the colony. policy of religious toleration. Quaker In 1652, the Dyers traveled to England on political busiWilliam Penn founded colonies in ness. After several months, William went back to Rhode IsWest New Jersey and Pennsylvania land, while Mary stayed behind. In England, she joined the that were noted for their toleration of Society of Friends, also known as QUAKERS. Like Hutchinall religious groups. son, the Quakers stressed personal spirituality. Quaker women in colonial America Mary Dyer sailed back to Massachusetts in 1657. The year were accorded more freedom and a before, the colony had passed a law designed to suppress greater range of opportunities than Quakerism. After Dyer disembarked in Boston, Massachuwomen of other religions, although setts, authorities arrested her. She was released from prison they were still constrained by the only after her husband paid a large bond. norms of the larger society around After returning to Rhode Island, Dyer learned that sevthem. Marriage among Quakers was eral Quakers were being held in a Massachusetts prison. much more a partnership between equals than the more hierarchical reWhen she traveled to Boston to visit them in the spring of lationship supported by other reli1659, she was imprisoned for two months. Dyer and her gions. The ceremony itself emphasized friends were then released, banished, and threatened with the unique nature of the Quaker undeath if they returned to Massachusetts. All but two men ion, in that the woman did not vow to obeyed. The pair refused to leave because they wanted to “obey” her husband. Despite the protest the colony’s oppressive laws. Dyer returned to Rhode Quaker belief in equality in marriage, Island but came back within a month to join them. All three Quaker women were as domestic in were taken to the gallows. The men were hanged. Dyer was their concerns as other women at the given a last-minute reprieve, but the experience did little to time. They still saw woman’s proper dampen her resolve. Although she left Boston, after the exesphere of influence as the home, but cution, she returned in 1660. Once again, she was arrested women’s roles as homemakers and and sentenced to death. Despite her husband’s impassioned mothers were more respected and valplea for mercy, she was hanged the next day. A martyr to the ued by Quakers than they were by cause of religious freedom, Dyer is today honored by a statue members of other religions. on the grounds of Boston’s State House. Quaker women could and did travel extensively as missionaries and preachers. In 1659, Mary Dyer, a Quaker preacher, was executed in Puritan Boston. Although all she had done was Quaker girls were educated separately from boys preach, she was accused of inciting a rebellion. and studied needlepoint and sewing along with acQuakers held that women should be educated ademic subjects, they were much better educated so that they could effectively manage their house- than most other women in the colonial era. Quaker women held meetings separate from holds and understand religion more fully. While

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men, which allowed women to take on leadership roles such as Elder. Although the women’s meetings were not equal to men’s meetings in every way, their separate nature gave Quaker women social status and organizational and speaking experience available to very few other women of the era. It is perhaps no surprise that many of the early advocates of women’s rights were Quaker women. Quakers were also among the first to call for the abolition of slavery. In 1688, a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, spoke out against

slavery. Such calls for abolition increased among Quakers in the eighteenth century. See also: Bible, the, and the Subordination of Women. FURTHER READING

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986. Larson, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775. New York: Knopf, 1999.

R
RAMSAY, MARTHA LAURENS (1759–1811) Advocate of traditional women’s roles. Martha Laurens was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 3, 1759. She was eager to learn throughout her childhood and adolescence and read voluminously in history, science, and especially religion. Her father, however, taught her that housewifely skills were of primary importance for a woman. In 1787, Martha Laurens married a Charleston doctor and political figure named David Ramsay. The marriage produced 11 children, of whom eight survived childhood. Ramsay eagerly taught them at home, introducing her sons to Latin and Greek and instructing her daughters according to the standard ideas of her time. Although Ramsay moved in high social circles and was related to a number of important government leaders of the time, she preferred the private realm to the public. She believed that her mission was to lend strength to her husband and other men in her life. In this, she saw herself as a model of womanhood and hoped that other wives would follow her example. She died in Charleston on June 10, 1811. The following year her husband published a popular biographical sketch of her life, a work which emphasized the delight she took in her role as a woman.

This devoted mother and well-educated hostess embodied the new Republic’s feminine ideal. Martha was the first of six children born to Thomas and Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, and one of only two who survived their childhood. Her mother died when she was ten. In 1784 she accompanied her father to Paris, where he served as ambassador to France. Jefferson encouraged her education, writing her that the more she learned, the more he loved her. The family returned to Virginia in 1789. “Patsy” fell in love with her second cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., whom she married in 1790. The Randolphs eventually moved to a plantation near Monticello, where Martha Randolph established a school for their 12 children. Their son James Madison Randolph was the first child born in the White House. Another son, George Wythe Randolph, became the first secretary of war in the Confederacy. A third son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, shared his mother’s belief in the injustice of slavery and promoted gradual emancipation. Randolph supported her father’s political career by answering his correspondence and serving as hostess at the White House from 1802 to 1803 and from 1805 to 1806. Her husband served in the United States Congress and as Virginia’s governor from 1819 to 1822. However, debt and mental illness led to his complete estrangement from his family. He died bankrupt in 1828. His widow lived with various children until her death eight years later.

RANDOLPH, MARTHA
JEFFERSON


RANDOLPH, MARY

(1772–1836) Daughter and confidante of Thomas Jefferson, who served as his first lady during his presidency.

(1762–1828) Author of the first Southern cookbook in America. Mary Randolph was born in Virginia on August 9,

RELIGIOUS SECTS

1762. Her cookbook was titled The Virginia Housewife. Randolph intended her book to be “sufficiently clear and concise to impart knowledge to a tyro.” A tyro is an amateur or a beginner in a particular field—a novice. Hers was one of the first cookbooks in North America to provide clear, precise measurements that could easily be replicated. Randolph gained experience for writing her cookbook by operating a boardinghouse in Richmond, Virginia. She was considered an exceptional hostess and cook. Her cookbook was first published in 1824, and by 1850 it had gone through seven editions. It remains in print today. Mary Randolph died on January 23, 1828, in Washington, D.C.

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WOMEN’S FIRSTS Ann Lee was the first leader of the SHAKERS in America. Lee was born in Manchester, England, in 1736. She was an illiterate cotton millworker and a cook. After marrying, Lee had four children, all of whom died at an early age. Around 1758 she joined the Shakers, a small sect of former Quakers in England. Lee embraced celibacy, had religious visions, and experienced “awakenings” that led her to bring the first group of Shakers to America in 1774. Lee and her followers first formed Shaker communities at Mount Lebanon and Watervliet in New York. Eventually the Shakers established 18 societies in seven states. Lee’s followers called her “Mother Ann” and viewed her as a prophetess and leader. The Shakers also thought Lee was a female embodiment of the Christ spirit. Shaker communities flourished under Lee’s leadership, welcoming in anyone willing to abandon traditional family structures and share common property. The Shaker movement peaked in the nineteenth century. One community still persists in Sabbath Day Lake, Maine.


RANDOLPH, NANCY

(1774–1837) A Virginia aristocrat who was at the center of several eighteenth-century scandals. Ann Cary Randolph (who went by the name Nancy) was charged with murdering her newborn child and was defended by Patrick Henry and John Marshall. Randolph’s problems began when she was 18. She lived with her cousins, Judith and Richard Randolph, on their plantation in Virginia. In 1793, Nancy and her brother-in-law were charged with having a baby in an adulterous affair and then killing the child. After a slave reported the deed, Nancy and Richard were arrested and tried for murder. The pair could afford the best in legal defense in Virginia, and they hired Patrick Henry to argue their case. John Marshall, who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, provided the closing arguments in their defense. They were found not guilty. Gossip continued to surround Nancy Randolph. Some people believed she poisoned Richard, who died suddenly in 1796. Richard Randolph’s brother Jack and Nancy’s sister Judith spread rumors that Nancy had a love affair with one of Jack’s slaves, Billy Ellis. The rumors were never substantiated. In 1808, Jack Randolph forced Nancy to leave

the family plantation. She moved to New York and for a while tried to support herself, it is believed, through prostitution. Later the same year, she married. Nancy Randolph died in 1837.


RAPE

See crimes against women


REED, ESTHER See philanthropy


RELIGIOUS SECTS

The number and variety of religious sects throughout colonial America grew as groups emigrated to North America. Religious sects were not established by law and did not have the full power of an established church. Sects in early North American included the Moravians, Quakers, Shakers, and Baptists. There was a proliferation of religious sects after the American Revolution. A few religious sects in colonial America did allow women leaders. The Moravians had women el-

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ders. Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, and Jemima Wilkinson started religious communities of their own. The Quakers allowed women to preach to other women; the men and women held separate meetings. The most numerous sects in colonial America were Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Baptists in Rhode Island. The majority of the colonial sects were influenced by Calvinist beliefs, which perpetuated the Catholic view that, due to Eve’s falling to temptation, men should rule over women. Mankind was doomed because of a woman’s weaknesses, and, therefore, women could not be entrusted with any form of power or leadership. These beliefs and the

established patriarchal family structure controlled the everyday activities of women within and outside their families in colonial America.


REPUBLICANISM

Sympathy toward a republican form of government. The American Revolution raised new questions about the civic role of women in a free society, a society that was no longer a colony. Before the Revolutionary War, women had little or no civic role in their communities. The end of the war brought with it new opportunities and expectations for women to act politically not only within their homes but also in the larger community. People’s rights were no TRAILBLAZERS longer inherited through wealth or by social position. Rather, ancient theoMercy Otis Warren, one of the first patriots to push for sepa- ries of republicanism were enlisted, ration from Britain, mocked the British government in the col- where a government’s legitimacy onies through her plays, most of which were published anony- rested on the consent of the govmously to avoid arrest. She corresponded with John and erned. The ideal of republican ABIGAIL SMITH ADAMS in publicized letters that expounded motherhood, though it sprang from a world view that saw the importance on the virtues of a republic free from British tyranny. Warren was born in 1728 in Barnstable, Massachusetts, of a mother’s intelligence and educaone of 13 children of James and Mary Allyne Otis. Mercy tion as resting primarily in benefits Otis grew up close to political affairs. Her father was a jus- they could bring to the society run by tice of the peace and her brother James was an advocate for her male children, demanded awarethe British king until he resigned his royal appointment to ness from women and inevitably brought them into a larger sphere. speak out against the British government. Historians disagree as to whether In 1754 Mercy Otis married James Warren, a farmer and this new role of women in the ideal of Harvard graduate who later became a representative in the republicanism was the creation of Massachusetts legislature. Warren became active in her hus- women themselves or of the political band’s work and hosted political meetings at their home for leaders of the day. There were beneguests like John Adams and Samuel Adams. Warren was of- fits to both women and to political ten criticized as being too brazen for a colonial woman. Her leaders. The obvious benefit to a new reply was, “Be it known unto Britain even American daugh- struggling country was that republiters are politicians and patriots, and will aid the good work canism enlisted the efforts now of enwith their female efforts.” tire families rather than just husbands Warren’s published works include plays of political satire and fathers. The benefits to women that she intended to be read rather than performed, such as were that they now had a more active The Adulateur and The Group. Her writing quickly became role in the political ideology of the day and they gained some respect for popular among the colonists. Warren’s political popularity began to wane when she op- their contributions. Women now had posed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in Observa- an opportunity to prove their abilities tions on the New Constitution. She also spoke out against her as thinkers, organizers, and as leaders. The new political theories of the old friend John Adams in her three-volume History of the Revolution raised questions about Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. women. Europe’s Enlightenment was See also: Documents. influencing thought in America. Enlightenment thinkers questioned the

REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD

175

subordination of women and began to value the otism to her children and inspire them to love and education of women as well as men. Educated cit- service of their country. The virtues of republican motherhood were izens, they believed, could make a greater contribution to a rational social order. One federalist also expressed in speeches. The following is an exsaid, “All power is derived from the people. Liberty cerpt from a late eighteenth-century commenceis everyone’s birthright. Since all cannot govern or ment address by Miss P. W. Jackson at Mrs. deliberate individually, it is just that they should Rowson’s Academy (the school founded by Suelect their representatives. That everyone should sanna Haswell Rowson): “A woman who is possess, indirectly, and through the medium of his skilled in every useful art, who practices every dorepresentatives, a voice in public councils, and mestic virtue . . . may, by her precept and example, should yield to no will but that of an actual or vir- inspire her brothers, her husband, or her sons, tual majority.” Still, “the governed” pertained with such a love of virtue, such just ideas of the true value of civil liberty . . . that future heroes and mainly to men. Republicanism encouraged women’s participa- statesmen, who arrive at the summit of military or tion and allowed women in public activities in political fame, shall exaltingly declare, it is to my greater numbers. By the 1780s women were orga- mother I owe this election.” Such sentiments nizing their own voluntary associations and charitable organizations. WOMEN’S FIRSTS The benefits of women’s involvement in civic matters were becoming obviMartha Washington was America’s original first lady. She ous to women themselves and to the political and social leaders of the new was the wife of the first American president, George Washrepublic. In addition, educational opington. She was also the first woman in America to have her portunities for women expanded, as picture on paper money and on a stamp. women took on a more active role in Martha Washington was born in Virginia in 1731 and grew society at large. up in a wealthy plantation family. In 1749 she married DanSee also: Civic Life. FURTHER READING

DePauw, Linda Grant. Founding Mothers: Women in America in the Revolutionary Era. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

REPUBLICAN
MOTHERHOOD The American Revolution added a new dimension to women’s roles. Besides being a helpmate to her husband, a wife was now expected to teach her children citizenship skills. A woman’s helpmate role of primarily managing the household economy was extended to raising children who understood their role as citizens. Postrevolutionary America required a new ideology. Propaganda in magazines and speeches pushed the virtues of patriotism in women and in their children. The republican mother’s purpose was to teach the new patri-

iel Parke Custis, another wealthy plantation owner who was 20 years her senior. Together they had four children, but two died in infancy. Martha became a wealthy widow when Daniel Custis died in 1757. She owned two mansions, 18,000 acres of land, many enslaved Africans, and nearly $30,000. George Washington began courting Martha when he was a plantation owner and commander of the Virginia forces in the French and Indian War. They were married in Martha’s plantation home in Virginia on January 6, 1759. She and her two children then moved to Mount Vernon, Washington’s plantation on the Potomac River. Martha spent time with George Washington at his various military quarters during the AMERICAN REVOLUTION. After the war the Washingtons returned to Mount Vernon, where they raised two of Martha’s grandchildren. Martha Washington became first lady in 1789 when George Washington became the new nation’s first president. At that time the nation’s capital was in New York City. The Washingtons moved to Philadelphia in 1790 when the capital was relocated. At their house on High Street, Martha Washington hosted elaborate parties with ABIGAIL SMITH ADAMS, the vice president’s wife. Martha Washington was often criticized for spending too much money and entertaining on a scale too extravagant for a new republican government.

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helped to further the idea of republican motherhood and its important role in the survival of the new Republic.




RIND, CLEMENTINA (?–1774) Publisher, editor, and entrepreneur. Clementina Rind was one of the first woman publishers and entrepreneurs in America. Rind operated the Virginia Gazette from the printing office in her Williamsburg home after her husband died in 1773, leaving her five children to raise on her own. Rind’s hand-pulled press was the first to publish Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about American freedom. Jefferson had written his ideas at his home in Monticello, but the House of Burgesses felt that his writings were too radical to publish. Rind agreed and published in pamphlet form Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America in August 1774. Rind continued to publish controversial materials, and in May 1774 she was named official public printer of Williamsburg. Rind died a few months later. See also: Printing and Publishing.


ROLFE, REBECCA See Native Americans


ROSS, BETSY See domestic arts


ROWLANDSON, MARY See captivity narratives

ROWSON, SUSANNA
HASWELL

(c. 1762–1824) Educator, author, and actress. Susanna Haswell Rowson believed most books and schools were too male-oriented and offered little that would interest or instruct women, so she established a prestigious women’s academy in Boston. She wrote novels aimed at young women and textbooks such as An Abridgment of Universal Geography for her female students. Rowson’s most successful novel, Charlotte, A Tale of Truth (1794), went through more than 200 editions. It is considered the first American bestseller.

Famed for writing the first American best-seller, Susanna Haswell Rowson was also a schoolteacher, actress, and playwright. Her novel, Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, was still popular in the 1870s.

Rowson was born in England around 1762. Her mother died ten days after her birth. Rowson’s father, a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, brought Rowson to America when she was five. Their voyage to America was beset with stormy seas and a shipwreck in Boston Harbor. Twenty-five years later, Rowson incorporated this terrifying experience into her novel Rebecca: or The Fille de Chambre. Rowson grew up on the Nantasket Peninsula and studied classic literature from her father’s library. During the American Revolution, Rowson’s family was arrested and their estate was confiscated due to her father’s loyalty to the king of England. Three years later, when Rowson was 16, the family was released. Rowson married hardware merchant and part-

RURAL LIFE

time musician William Rowson in 1786, shortly after the publication of her first novel, Victoria. In her writing and teaching, Rowson extolled the virtues of morality, humility, obedience to authority, and patriotism. Her Christian beliefs were reflected in her works. Rowson believed that through intellect, virtue, and character, women are neither inferior nor subservient to men. Besides writing novels and textbooks, Rowson wrote song lyrics, poetry, and plays. She and her husband acted on both the British and American stages. When the theater she was working for closed in 1797, Rowson opened Mrs. Rowson’s Young Ladies’ Academy in Boston. Rowson’s school became extremely successful and employed several teachers. Rowson taught history, geography, reading, writing, and Bible studies. Her geography lectures had become so famous that in 1805 Rowson’s An Abridgment of Universal Geography was published. She also wrote Youth’s First Steps in Geography for her younger female students in 1818. Rowson died in 1824. She had no children of her own, but, after she became ill, was cared for by devoted former pupils. See also: Textbook Writing.


ROYALL,

ANNE NEWPORT

(1769–1854) Author and newspaper editor. Anne Newport Royall traveled extensively across the United States and wrote of her travels in ten volumes published between 1826 and 1831. Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States, by a Traveller is considered her best volume of travel writing. Generally believed to be the first newspaperwoman in North America, Royall went on to own and edit the independent Washington, D.C., newspapers Paul Pry (1831–1836) and The Huntress (1836–1854). Anne Newport was born in Maryland in June 1769. Her childhood was spent mainly on the Pennsylvania frontier. When her father died, she moved to Virginia at the age of 16 to work in the household of William Royall, a scholar, farmer, and Revolutionary War veteran. William Royall taught Anne to read from his extensive library and was impressed with her abilities. In 1797, when Anne Newport was 28 years old, they married. Sixteen years later, William Royall died, leaving his wife the bulk of his estate. Ten years later, however, his other heirs succeeded in

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breaking the will, leaving Anne Newport Royall penniless at the age of 54. Represented by John Quincy Adams, Royall struggled for years to gain a government pension as the widow of a Revolutionary War officer. She was finally awarded a pension in 1848, but had very little left after she paid various fees. Between 1826 and 1831, Royall published descriptive travel volumes about the many towns she visited across the United States. She was considered a shrewd observer and a reliable author. Along with Sketches of History, Royall published her travel observations in The Black Book, or a Continuation of Travels in the United States, Mrs. Royall’s Pennsylvania, Mrs. Royall’s Southern Tour, and Letters from Alabama. After settling in Washington, D.C., and starting her newspaper business with longtime friend Sarah Stack, Royall became a talented editor and journalist. Her newspaper Paul Pry was noted for its sharp editorials and local gossip. Royall was known for her skill at researching and reporting government scandals in her paper The Huntress. She had a sharp tongue and freely offered her opinions and observations. Royall’s work was always credible; she was a careful verifier of facts. Royall was also outspoken on religious matters; she pushed for tolerance of Catholics and railed against evangelicals. Royall spoke out in support of territorial expansion and pushed for states’ rights on the matter of slavery. Royall’s other writings include a novel, The Tennessean (1827), and a play, The Cabinet, or Large Parties in Washington. Both were considered failures. The play was presented just once in the Masonic Hall in Washington, D.C. In October 1854, Royall died in poverty at her home on B Street, now part of the grounds of the Library of Congress. According to records, she died with just 31 cents to her name and was buried in a pauper’s grave without a headstone in the Congressional Cemetery. See also: Widowhood.


RURAL LIFE

From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, rural life in America was extremely harsh. From lack of food and supplies to lack of communication and appropriate medical care, settlers coming to North America soon learned of the many difficulties of life outside towns and villages.

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SACAGAWEA

Most families that moved to rural areas in colonial North America did so to stake claim to large tracts of land. The colonists had a very different approach to land from the Native Americans they met. Europeans, including those emigrating to North America, felt that males could buy or secure land and own it. Native Americans regarded land ownership as a matter of borrowing the land, rather than actually owning it; and some Native Americans passed land down through maternal lines. White women rarely had any property rights. Although they usually did not have any claim to land ownership, colonial women had many responsibilities. Often the children of the household were enlisted to help. Rural families normally lived in crude one-room shelters with wood or dirt floors. Some houses had an overhead loft that served as a bedroom. Most families had an outside lean-to or shed used for housing supplies, keeping hens, washing, and storing milk. Women used a fireplace to warm the house and to cook meals. It was usually the woman’s responsibility to keep the fire going all day long in cold weather. Maintaining the fire and preparing meals were endless tasks for women. In between stoking the fire, setting out dough to rise, and boiling meat, wives would do tasks that varied with the season. For example, gathering eggs, feeding chickens, dairying (milking the cows and making cheese and butter), slaughtering, making bacon, shearing sheep, and tending the vegetable garden were all a woman’s responsibility. Women also spun cloth, made the family’s clothing and quilts, and ground wheat for flour. Sometimes women would take their surplus goods to the nearest village to sell or trade for items such as candles, soap, and pewter ware. Female labor was a necessity on the outer edges of white settlement. Families were basically selfsufficient, producing and manufacturing nearly everything they needed. Distance and lack of money

left them with little choice. Besides performing household chores, many women toiled in the fields as well. Rural tenant families sometimes worked the land for large plantation owners. Although there were clearly understood divisions of labor, the importance of a woman’s labor was recognized in various ways. For example, in one contract signed by a tenant farmer, the husband wrote that he and a servant would work the land and that his wife would “dresse the victuals, milk the cowes, wash for the servants, and do all things necessary for a women to do upon the said plantation.” Women were often pregnant or nursing while doing their daily round of chores. Childbirth was even more difficult in rural areas due to distance and lack of contact with other women. Lower-class and middle-class women rarely saw a doctor either in towns or in rural areas. In towns and villages, women gathered together during childbirth, providing support for one another. They might be attended by midwives such as Martha Ballard. Rural women often had to suffer through childbirth with little help or comfort, and many women died both on farms and in villages during childbirth or soon after due to postnatal complications. Distance, lack of medical knowledge, and the absence of doctors presented another problem for women and their families in rural areas. The infant mortality rates during this period were extremely high. For example, Elizabeth Rogers Appleton (1665–1754) had nine children, but only five lived to adulthood. Almost half of her 40 grandchildren died before reaching adulthood. See also: Midwifery. FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Jensen, Joan. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

S


SACAGAWEA

(1787–1812) Native American guide and interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition. Sacagawea served as an invaluable resource to the expedition headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804 to 1806. President Thomas Jefferson appointed

them to explore the Louisiana Territory, which the United States had purchased from France in 1803. He wanted maps made of the vast area and hoped to find a water route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Sacagawea served as navigator, translator, and the only woman member of the expedition.

SACAGAWEA

Sacagawea made vital contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Alice Cooper’s 1912 statue of Sacagawea and her baby stands in Portland, Oregon.

Sacagawea was born in 1787 to the chief of a Shoshone village in Idaho. Her birth name was Boinaiv, which means “Grass Maiden.” When she was about 12 years old, Hidatsa warriors captured Boinaiv and the Shoshones with whom she was traveling. At the Hidatsa camp, Boinav was renamed Sacagawea, or “Bird Woman.” When she was about 15 years old, the Hidatsas sold Sacagawea and another young woman to FrenchCanadian trader Toussiant Charbonneau, who eventually married both girls. In 1804, Charbonneau was hired on as an interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition. Charbonneau chose Sacagawea, 15 years old and six months pregnant, to accompany them on the expedition. Sacagawea gave birth to their first child, a son named Jean Baptiste, in February 1805. Less than two months later the expedition began, with the infant strapped to Sacagawea’s back. Without the help Sacagawea obtained from the Shoshones, the expedition might not have continued past the Salmon River in central Idaho. She also supplied the party with edible plants on numerous occasions. Lewis wrote in his travel journal that Sacagawea “busied herself in search for the wild artichokes. . . . This operation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stick about some collection of driftwood. Her labors soon proved successful and she procured a good

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quantity of these roots.” During their journey Sacagawea gathered, stored, and prepared wild edible food such as a root called Year-pah by the Shoshones. Sacagawea also came to the rescue of the expedition after an abrupt storm tossed over a canoe, spilling out irreplaceable charts, instruments, notes, and supplies. Lewis wrote “the Indian woman, to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board at the time of the accident, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.” Lewis later recorded that he and Clark had named a river in Sacagawea’s honor. Sacagawea and her husband remained friends with William Clark after the expedition. Clark had become fond of their son, Jean Baptiste, whom Clark had nicknamed “Pomp.” He offered to adopt and educate the boy. Around 1809, when Jean Baptiste was about four years old, Sacagawea and Charbonneau left their son in Clark’s care while they continued to work as interpreters to fur traders throughout the region. Sacagawea gave birth to a daughter named Lizette in 1812. Lizette, too, was left in Clark’s care after Sacagawea’s death later that year. There is still some controversy as to the exact date of Sacagawea’s death. However, most scholars adhere to an account written by John Luttig, an employee of the Missouri Fur Company. Luttig wrote on December 20, 1812, “this Evening the Wife of Charbonneau, a Snake [Shoshone] Squaw died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best Woman in the fort aged abt 25 years she left a fine infant girl.” Sacagawea was buried on the grounds at Fort Manuel, South Dakota in an unmarked grave. Years later, William Clark published an account book for the years 1825–1828 in which he listed the members of the expedition and indicated whether they were still alive. He identified Sacagawea as deceased. Sacagawea is one of the most memorialized women in American history. There are many statues and landmarks named in her honor. In 2000, the U.S. Mint produced a gold dollar coin imprinted with Sacagawea’s image. See also: Family Life, Native American; Frontier Life. FURTHER READING

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

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SANDERS, ELIZABETH ELKINS


SAMPSON, DEBORAH See American Revolution

SANDERS, ELIZABETH
ELKINS

(1762–1851) Social critic and early political reformer. Elizabeth Elkins Sanders published one of the first books praising Native American culture and condemning the treatment of Native Americans by the United States government. She went on to speak out against Christian missionaries who carried “the appalling dogmas of Calvinism” to foreign lands. Sanders was a staunch Unitarian who argued the value of maintaining native cultures. Elizabeth Elkins was born in 1762 to Thomas and Elizabeth (White) Elkins in Salem, Massachusetts. She lived in Salem her entire life. In 1782 she married Thomas Sanders, who became one of the most successful businessmen in the town. Together, they had five children. Elizabeth Sanders gave generously to the poor and oppressed and took an active role in the cause of Native Americans, whom she called “the dethroned monarchs of the land.” She wrote about her views on the government’s lack of justice and humanity toward Native Americans in Conversations Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828). Sanders’s other major contention was that Americans should not be spending vast sums of money to maintain missionaries in foreign lands while problems within the nation remained unsolved. Sanders published her controversial arguments in A Tract on Missions, The Second Part of the Tract on Missions, and Remarks on the “Tour Around Hawaii” by the Missionaries, Messrs. Ellis, Thurston, Bishop, and Goodrich in 1823.


SAY, LUCY SISTARE See volume 2


SCHOOLS

From the 1500s through the 1800s, women entered private homes and classrooms to teach. Teaching at this time required no formal training. Few women had the opportunity to attend college; teaching was a career in which women could earn money without a long period of training. Some women served as governesses to wealthy families. In this role, they would educatinge the

Cherry Valley Female Academy in Cherry Valley, New York, was one of many educational institutions for women that started in the early years of the republic.

children of the household. Governesses usually taught reading, writing, arithmetic, French, needlework, and music. The governess most often lived with the family and received little monetary compensation for her work. Other women opened schools of their own or were hired by a community to serve as its teacher. In some instances, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, or sisters started schools and shared the teaching responsibilities. In the case of couples, the wife would most often teach subjects considered “feminine,” such as reading, writing, needlework, and Bible studies, while her husband instructed students in arithmetic, science, and civics. In 1647, in an attempt to curtail idleness, to instill discipline, and to promote the economy, the Massachusetts General Court mandated that any town of 50 families or more must have a school. Literacy became a priority in the Puritan community, which founded both a printing press and Harvard College in its first decade. Stephen Day and his son Matthew printed the first book in North America, The Whole Book of Psalms, Faithfully Translated into English Meter. People were eager to read such devotional literature as it became more readily available. Puritans believed that salvation was aided by a personal encounter with the Word of God, the Bible. Pious families encouraged both their sons and their daughters to learn to read religious works. While girls were not encouraged to attend school, by learning to read, they obtained a skill they could use to teach to others. Literate women had some independence. Schoolteaching was the first career open to educated women in colonial America. For example, in

SCHUYLER, CATHERINE VAN RENSSELAER

TRAILBLAZERS In 1825 Julia Hieronymous Tevis founded the Science Hill Academy in Shelbyville, Kentucky, the second girls’ boarding school established west of the Appalachians. She chose a name that would announce her goal of offering a serious education to young women. With 230 students, the selfsupporting academy became a lifework for Tevis, who presided over its fortunes for the next 50 years while bringing up seven children of her own. Tevis acquired very advanced views of women’s need for education through her German-born father, who moved his family back from frontier Kentucky to Washington, D.C., in 1813 in order to secure proper schooling for his three children. There she attended a private academy and led a rather glamorous life, going to the many balls and receptions that enlivened the capital when Congress was in session. In her memoirs, Sixty Years in a School Room, Tevis described the great “illumination” in celebration of General William Henry Harrison’s victory over the Indian confederation led by Tecumseh. She barely escaped the city in 1814 when the British troops reduced the capital’s public buildings to ashes. When Tevis turned 20 in 1819, her father lost his money, pulled down by a bankrupt friend whose note he had cosigned. The family’s house and goods were sold at auction, and Julia left home to take up a teaching job in Virginia. When her father died, she became the virtual head of her family, bringing her mother and younger sister to the small town in Virginia where she was flourishing as a school teacher and after-hours art instructor. Her conversion to Methodism brought her into contact with John Tevis, a young circuit rider, whom she married after a short courtship in 1824. Like many women educators in the early nineteenth century, Tevis greatly admired EMMA WILLARD (see Volume 2), whose 1819 petition to the New York legislature for support of female education had been widely publicized. On the couple’s honeymoon trip to Kentucky, Tevis talked her husband into converting a house, presented as a wedding gift from his father, into a boarding school. Thus began the Science Hill Academy, which lasted into the twentieth century.

Springfield, Massachusetts, Pentecost Mathews was hired for “worke schooling” the children of the elite Pynchon and Holyoke families in 1653. She was paid eight pounds thirty-five shillings for her work. Hannah Beaman became nearby Deerfield’s first schoolteacher. In 1651, a New Haven teacher

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earned 40 pounds for instructing young males in reading, writing, and Latin. In 1717, Sarah Stiles began work as a schoolmistress in Windsor, Connecticut. She was hired to teach only reading, leaving the teaching of arithmetic to a male instructor who would teach only in the winter. Teachers often had apprentices working under them, who were most often women. If the master teacher failed to instruct her young charges properly, she could be sued for nonperformance and fired. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, women began taking on greater roles in the establishment and administration of schools. In 1819 educator Emma Willard (see Volume 2) wrote An Address to the Public: Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education, which was warmly received by President James Monroe and former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In 1821, Willard opened her Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, with $4,000 raised through taxation by the Troy Common Council. Willard introduced advanced science for her female students and began instructing her girls to become teachers, scientists, artists, geographers, historians, mathematicians, and writers. Among its other professionals, Troy Female Seminary turned out 200 teachers within a few years. See also: Civic Life; Dame Schools; Textbook Writing.

SCHUYLER,
CATHERINE VAN

RENSSELAER (1734–1803) Colonial hostess and Revolutionary War patriot. Catherine Schuyler, under instructions from her husband, General Philip Schuyler, who was away serving in the American Revolution under General George Washington, set fire to their vast corn and wheat fields so that the British could not harvest them for their own use.

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SCIENCE

Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler sets her cornfield ablaze to ward off invading British troops.

to women. A “learned lady” was unbecoming. A woman who was as well-educated as a man was thought to be unnatural. Scriptural readings and Bible studies were acceptable for women, but advanced learning was thought to cause brain damage to “delicate minds.” One book sold in the colonies urged women not to study such things as science because they “lie out of a Lady’s way; they fly up to the Head, and not only intoxicate weak Brains, but turn them.” After the Revolution, more women attended school, but still, few were offered instruction in science. Judith Sargent Stevens Murray wrote a series of essays criticizing the ornamental education of women learning to be “ladies of fashion.” She stated, “As their years increase, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowery paths of science.”

In 1777, British General John Burgoyne’s troops were advancing into the Hudson River Valley. Schuyler left her Albany estate to save what she could of the family’s summer estate in Saratoga, which lay in the path of the approaching British TRAILBLAZERS troops. Schuyler met panic-stricken refugees on the way who begged her Jane Colden was the first American woman to become a botnot to proceed. Schuyler replied, anist. Using the Linnaean system of classification, she cata“The General’s wife must not be loged over 300 species of plants. afraid.” She continued to set fields Colden was born in New York City in 1724. Her father afire and encouraged other landownwas the lieutenant governor of New York and a close friend ers in the area to do the same. of Benjamin Franklin. Colden’s parents stressed the imporAfter General Burgoyne’s surrentance of education for all of their ten children—their daughder, Schuyler and her husband enterters as well as their sons. Colden learned the principles of tained Burgoyne and his staff. During botany using a textbook that her father made for her. the war, Burgoyne’s troops had deBecause there were no scientific journals in the early stroyed the Schuyler’s Saratoga man1700s, Colden gathered information by corresponding with sion. Burgoyne commented, “You are leading scientists of the day, including Carolus Linnaeus as too kind to me, who has done so well as Alexander Garden, for whom she wanted to name a much injury to you!” Catherine discovery of hers, Hypericum virginicum (but the name garSchuyler replied, “Such is the fate of denia had already been claimed by John Ellis, another friend war; let us not dwell upon the of Garden’s). subject.” In the 1750s Colden classified the flora of the Hudson


SCIENCE

Before the American Revolution, a large number of men, and women like Abigail Smith Adams, supported educational opportunities for women. However, rarely did these improvements include the teaching of science

River Valley, and by 1757, she had identified over 300 species of plants. In addition to cataloging species, Colden sketched plants and made leaf impressions. Her work, which contributed greatly to the field of botany, is on display in the British Museum in London. Despite her enthusiasm for her work, Colden discontinued her botany studies after her marriage to Scottish physician William Farquhar in 1759. She died in 1766.

SERVANTS, DOMESTIC

Women who did learn anything of science, such as Jane Colden, were exceptions before the 1800s. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, educators like Emma Willard (see Volume 2) and Julia Tevis began offering the study of science for women. Others, like author and scientist Priscilla Bell Wakefield, who in 1811 wrote An Introduction to Botany, began to challenge the assumption that women could not consider a career in science. FURTHER READING

Ogilvie, Marilyn B. Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

SEMINOLE HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Seminole group of Native Americans (originally from Alabama and Georgia) formed out of the Creek nation around 1770. Living mainly in Florida, the Seminoles still subsisted mainly on hunting and fishing during the colonial period. The foods they prepared included sofkee—hot soup that women and children of the household kept warm on the fire all day—and taal-holelke—boiled swamp cabbage sweetened with cane syrup or sugar. Flour was made from wild coontie (zamia) roots. From their earliest beginnings, the Seminole were a matriarchal society. Children were born into the clan of their mother and did not marry within their own clan. A new bride and her husband lived with the bride’s mother and were under her rule. She owned all property, including land, household items, and livestock. These items were passed down to her female children. Women also held control over their children. If there were marital problems, the male would leave the household.


SERVANTS, DOMESTIC

Domestic service from the 1500s to the early 1800s in America was dominated by women. From the 1500s to the mid 1700s, most domestic servants were unmarried white women who had come from Europe, mostly from England, Ireland, and Germany, searching for a better life and for a way to make a living.

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Tasks and Compensation Domestic servants performed the household chores of cooking, cleaning, sewing, spinning, dairying, and sometimes looking after the children of the household. Domestic work was considered unskilled labor. Pay for domestic service usually consisted of room and board; domestic servants received little or no monetary rewards for their work.

Changes in the Workforce By the mid-1700s, with the increase in AfricanAmerican slave labor, the majority of domestic servants in the South were African-American women. They continued to perform the same household chores that white females had performed prior to an increase in the American slave trade. White plantation owners and even mid-income households could now have slaves perform their domestic duties for little or no money. In replacing servants with slaves, plantation owners and even some Northern farmsteads and urban households could focus their monetary resources and skilled labor on being more productive. Therefore, domestic servants during this period contributed greatly in an indirect manner to the success and expansion of many businesses and private household incomes. The women servants themselves, however, continued to receive little or no reward for their contributions. Female African-American slaves not only served as domestic servants, but were often still expected to work in the fields part of the time. Sojourner Truth (see Volume 2) worked as a domestic servant and said that she had “plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me,” which meant “no man could get ahead of me.” Another female former slave said women “do double duty, a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s part at home. They do any kind of field work, even ploughing, and at home the cooking, washing, milking, and gardening.” Along with their work in the fields and households, some African-American women still had their own families and children to care for, that is, if they had not been separated through slave trade. See also: Slave Family Structure.


SETON, ELIZABETH ANN See Catholics

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SEXTON, LYDIA CADAS COX


SEXTON, LYDIA CADAS COX (1799–1894) First woman to be elected pulpit speaker in the United Brethren Church, the first Christian denomination to begin in the United States. Sexton’s fellow members of the United Brethren Church— both male and female—repeatedly recommended that Sexton be licensed as a preacher, but she repeatedly refused the licensing and continued speaking in the church. Lydia Cadas was born in Rockport, New Jersey, on April 12, 1799, to Baptist preacher Thomas Cadas and his wife Abigail Tingley Cadas. At age 20, Lydia Cadas married Isaac Cox and moved to the frontier of Ohio. She was twice widowed and had two sons when she married for the third and last time, to Joseph Sexton, in September 1829. Together, they had three sons and moved from the frontier in Ohio to Indiana, to Illinois, and finally to Kansas. After hearing Sexton speak at a church service, an elder in the church first offered her a preaching license. Finally, in 1851, church elders voted to license her and presented their decision to the meeting of the United Brethren Illinois Conference. After preaching and renewing her license for seven years, the General Conference decided in 1859 that no women could be licensed to preach in the church, but they continued to recognize Sexton as a gifted speaker and approved her work as a “pulpit speaker.” At the age of 70, Sexton became the first woman chaplain at the Kansas State Prison.

SEXUALITY,
REGULATION OF Although lower-class women sometimes ignored church law and common law regulations, women of the middle and upper class were expected to “act like ladies.” They found the sexual freedom of the lower classes to be appalling. Upper- and middle-class ladies had no sexual freedom, and if they were in an unhappy marriage, they could do little about it. Husbands who wanted out of a marriage could hire lawyers to gain custody of the children and leave the “disgraced” woman in poverty. Such a woman would be left homeless and humiliated. Just before the American Revolution, two new books guided the sexual and social behavior

of “ladies” of the day. Dr. Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) and Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) guided the elite class of women to set themselves apart from the lower, ordinary classes of women by being totally obedient and submissive to their husband’s wishes. According to these practices, a woman had no say in her own and her husband’s sexual practices; her sexual will and desires were to be nonexistent. A lady’s only desire should be for her husband to be happy in every way. To some men, the ideal woman remained passionless and had no desire. Such rigid views of sexuality stemmed from the Christian church’s teachings based on the Bible. According to this Christian dogma, Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden led to the downfall of all humankind. Therefore, women should remain under the domination of men. This especially pertained to the sexual practices of men and women. Western frontier settlers, however, sometimes abandoned established European views of marriage and patterned their sexual behaviors after the Native American model. In this arrangement, a man and a woman simply agreed to stay together. There was rarely a formal, written agreement and sometimes no ceremony. On the frontier, preachers were hard to come by; couples often had several children before a minister would arrive to “officially” marry the couple and baptize the children. Such a lifestyle was usually not viewed as fornication by members of the lower class. These “commoner” couples separated and formed new relationships by mutual consent. Christian missionaries to the frontier were horrified to find white people practicing unrestrained sexual freedom. One complaint to the South Carolina Assembly said men were “swapping away their wives and children, as they would horses or cattle.” However, the courts did not interfere unless a “sinful” couple’s behavior disturbed their neighbors or if “illegitimate” children were abandoned and left in the care of the community. After the Revolution, lower-class women began adopting the sexual practices of upper-class women. In their quest to be viewed as “ladies,” women abandoned their former beliefs about sexual freedom and began to abstain from sexual activity until after marriage. In the early 1800s, a change occurred in the definition of “true womanhood.” The motherchild relationship was seen as more important than

SHAKERS

sexual relations. Women wrote frankly that they had no sexual desire, but, instead, focused all of their attentions upon their children. They were devoted to the mother-child relationship and found this more rewarding and fulfilling than sexual relationships. Ideas surrounding manhood, however, continued to support the ethic that encouraged men to engage in sexual activity regardless of a woman’s desires or wishes. See also: Marriage Ceremonies; Marriage, Companionate. FURTHER READING

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.


SHAKERS

A religious sect that had its origins in Britain in the 1750s as an outgrowth of the Quakers. Their distinctive religious expression included a commitment to communal living, productive labor, and celibacy. Their spiritual practice involved a ritual noted for its dancing and “shaking.” Hence the name “Shakers.” Writer James Thacher reported in his diary around 1750 that “we have the particulars from eye witnesses, who have been admitted to their midnight orgies. They spend whole nights in their revels, and exhibit the most unbecoming scenes, violating all rules of propriety and decency. Both sexes, nearly divest of clothing, fall to dancing in extravagant postures, and frequently whirl themselves round on one leg with inconceivable rapidity, till they fall apparently lifeless on the floor.” There is little doubt that this account is exaggerated, but it shows the kind of suspicion the Shakers aroused. The leader who brought the Shakers to America, was Ann Lee, a sect member from Manchester. “Mother Ann” was a powerful preacher; she claimed to have visions from God and the gift of prophesying. Her followers believed that she was the personification of Christ in female form. The established churches in England considered Lee a heretic, and she was imprisoned for her preaching. While in prison for two weeks, she nearly starved to death, but claimed to have survived through divine providence. When released, Lee and her followers left for North America in 1774. Lee had married Abraham Standerim in 1762

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and had borne him four children, all of whom died in infancy. She came to believe that sexuality was a distraction from a life of worship, and to demand a strict celibacy, enforced by sexual segregation, in the sect’s communities. The Shakers found it difficult to gain support for their sect when they first arrived in North America. Lee took a job as a washerwoman and lived in a sparse room with only a cold stone to sit upon. Lee’s husband left her in 1775 for another woman. Eventually, the sect gained some monetary backing and established a settlement in presentday Watervliet, New York, in 1776. The Shakers named their community Niskeyuna. Over the next three years, however, they were able to convert only one person to their faith. In Niskeyuna, the Shakers became known for the simplicity of their lives and their talent in furniture making and needlework. The men of the community turned out fine furniture, the style of which is still in demand today. The women created beautiful works of art with their needles. The division of labor between men and women was standard for the time. The males farmed and tended livestock; the females performed domestic duties and cared for the children. The community was distinguished, however, for the equal recognition accorded to women’s and men’s work. Administration of the community was shared equally by male “elders” and female “eldresses.” Children often came into the community when their parents converted. Many converts were married couples who chose to adopt the Shakers’ communal, celibate way of life. The Shakers also made a practice of adopting orphans. All children were given a choice when they reached adulthood of remaining in the community or entering “the world.” By 1780 the Shakers were gaining popularity, and again their leader, Ann Lee, was arrested. This time, Lee and several Shakers, including her close friend Mary Partherton, were suspected of conspiracies against the American Revolution. The Shakers preached pacifism, and Lee urged New Yorkers to avoid taking up arms against the British. Some officials thought the Shakers were British agents sent to thwart the American’s struggle for independence. Several Shakers, including Ann Lee, were arrested and held for nearly five months. Public outrage led to their release; many Americans were sympathetic to the Shakers’ pacifist sentiments.

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After their release, these Shakers were considered martyrs, and converts flocked to their services. The Shakers established a new community at New Lebanon, New York. By 1826, 18 Shaker communities existed with a church membership of nearly 6,000. However, after 1860 the number of Shakers diminished. Today a few Shakers remain at a community in Maine. FURTHER READING

Brewer, Priscilla J. Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986. Proctor-Smith, Marjorie. Women in Shaker Community and Worship: A Feminist Analysis of the Uses of Religious Symbolism. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1985.

SHAWNEE HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY The Shawnee were originally settled in the Savannah River area in present-day South Carolina. Beginning in the 1670s, colonial growth pushed the Shawnee from their lands to areas in Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Prior to European contact, the Shawnee organized themselves into a five-member confederacy. Each group functioned in independent villages built around patrilineal divisions. Authority was passed down through the male generations of each group. Even though the Shawnee maintained a patriarchal society, women were accorded great respect. Female war and civil chiefs were recognized, such as Tecumseh’s sister, Tecumapease. The Creator (“Waashaa Monetoo”) was believed to have been helped by an old Shawnee woman. Subordinate deities were also female: Earth Mother, Corn Woman, and Pumpkin Woman contributed to the Shawnee harvest. Women’s major roles included planting and harvesting crops and preparing food. In 1824, the Shawnee elevated the tribe’s eldest Grandmother (“Kokomthena”) to a position of supreme deity. It was believed that from her the tribe received its laws, skills, and blessings.


SHIPPEN, ANNE (NANCY)

(1763–1841) A member of early North American aristocracy and one of the first women in the new republic to seek a divorce. Nancy Shippen wrote of her life and particularly of her unhappy marriage to Henry

“Harry” Beekman Livingston in her memoirs, published in 1935 as Nancy Shippen: Her Journal Book. Anne “Nancy” Shippen was born into a family of wealth and priviledge. Her father, Dr. William Shippen of Philadelphia, served as general of the Continental Army’s military hospitals, laying the groundwork for the future Medical Corps of the United States Army. Her mother was Alice Lee of the Lee family of Stratford Hall in Virginia. Nancy grew up in Shippen House, a center of political and social activity during the American Revolution. Peggy Shippen Arnold, who married Benedict Arnold, was one of Nancy’s cousins. Shippen House in Philadelphia had frequent visits from dignitaries such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Although Nancy, a belle of Philadelphia society, had many suitors, she was in love with the French diplomat Louis Guillaume Otto, Comte de Mosloy. During the nearly 12 years he was in America assisting the Marquis de Lafayette, Otto visited Nancy Shippen on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Nancy’s father insisted that she marry Harry Livingston, then a colonel in the Continental Army and heir to the Livingston family’s great fortune. Dr. Shippen chose Livingston in order to repair his family’s fortunes, prevailing over his daughter’s wishes. From the beginning, the marriage was an unhappy one, in large part because of Livingston’s bad character. When her only child, Margaret, was but 17 months old, Nancy began writing advice to her daughter in her journal. Otto, who later negotiated the Peace of Amiens and the marriage of Napolean to Marie-Louise, appeared in her journal as the romantic figure named Leander. In 1789 she tried to divorce her husband, with little success. Her choices were to remain with him so that she could see her child, or to formally end the marriage, lose custody of her daughter, and never see her. The Livingston family actively intervened in the custody battle, rarely allowing Nancy to see her child. A divorce was secured when Henry sought one through the Connecticut courts. Nancy Shippen later regained custody of her daughter. Because of Nancy’s failing health and what some at the time called “religious melancholia,” she and her daughter lived for nearly 40 years as recluses. Nancy Shippen died in the summer of 1841 and is buried alongside her daughter at Woodlands cemetery on the estate of Alexander Hamilton, the resting place of the Lees, Shippens, and Livingstons.

SLAVERY

See also: Divorce Laws. FURTHER READING

Livingston, Anne Home Shippen. Nancy Shippen, Her Journal Book: The International Romance of a Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia with Letters to Her and About Her. Compiled and edited by Ethel Armes. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935.


SHIPPEN, PEGGY See Arnold, Peggy Shippen




SIGOURNEY, LYDIA HOWARD HUNTLEY

See volume 2


SLANDER

Misrepresenting and damaging someone’s reputation. More women than men were accused and found guilty of slander in the colonial period. If the accused woman’s husband refused to pay damages, a “double-tongued naughty woman” was punished with a ducking: she was tied to a chair and then “ducked” into a river or pond. It was thought that the water would have a cooling effect on hot tempers and the embarrassment of being publicly drenched would humble pride. The ducking stool, a machine especially made for this purpose, was considered necessary equipment of many county courthouses, along with branding irons, stocks, pillories, and whipping posts. A Virginia act of 1662 ordered each county to erect ducking stools because “brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbors for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suites, and cast in greate damages.” See also: Gossip.

SLAVE FAMILY
STRUCTURE Intact slave families were either short-lived or nonexistent in colonial North America. Male African Americans were often sold or traded for their labor, while females able to bear children were rarely traded. Therefore, most slave families consisted of a mother and several children. Later, her grown sons would be traded or sold and her daughters expected to bear more children.

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Marriage between slaves was rarely recognized by slaveholders and was not legally binding. However, some slaveholders allowed nuclear families to exist if they bore many children, were productive, and were an asset to the slaveholders. This emphasis on childbearing put great burdens on the female slave to have many children so that her family could stay together. Even though a slave family might live together, the husband and wife still were not permitted to make independent decisions for their family. The couple could do nothing to protect one another or children. See also: Slavery.


SLAVERY

Soon after European colonization began in America in the sixteenth century, those Europeans engaged in trade with Africa began to buy men, women, and children from West African ports and ship them to the new colonies that the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English were carving out. A Dutch merchant ship brought enslaved Africans to Jamestown in Virginia in 1619. Since there was no slavery in England, the status of these new arrivals was left ambiguous for several decades. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that planters in the Southern colonies began to be dependent upon slave labor to produce the crops that they exported to Europe. They then codified laws establishing and regulating slavery in British North America. After American independence, the Northern states of the new United States embarked on a program of gradual emancipation, leaving the Southern states with their “peculiar institution.” The great demand for cotton in the early nineteenth century promoted the expansion of slavery through the South and generated the tensions between the free and slave states that led to the Civil War (see Volume 2). Although both African-American men and women were held as slaves in the United States, black men and women experienced slavery in very different ways. Both were held captive for their ability to work, and female slaves were also kept for their reproductive abilities. They were sexually exploited by their slaveholders and often bore their children. White slaveholders viewed enslaved women as sensual and promiscuous. White women dressed in

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layers of clothes and physical appearance of piety and propriety demanded respect. Slave women, however, wore light clothing as they labored. They often had to pull up their long skirts to their knees as they worked in the fields. These differences led to stereotypes about African-American women. The rape of a slave woman was not recognized as a crime. Afer the foreign slave trade was abolished in 1808, slaveholders needed to replenish their supply of slaves. They often raped their female slaves and forced them to have children who would later work on their plantations. Every year from 1750 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, more than one-fifth of African-American women between the ages of 15 and 44 bore a child. The average slave woman began motherhood two years before the average white Southern woman. This added to the “promiscuous” stereotype attached to slave women. Men and women slaveholders alike encouraged their female slaves to bear children frequently. Pregnant slaves were often given more food and less work. Some were rewarded with material items, such as clothing or money. If these incentives did not work, the female slaves were threatened with beatings or warned that they would be sold and separated from any children or family they did have. Motherhood then produced new difficulties for the female slave. If the plantation on which she worked did not have a nursery—and most did not—the mother would have to take her babies and small children to the fields with her as she worked, often with a baby on her back. She was expected to produce as much as the other slaves and was punished if she did not. House servants had to tend to their labors as they kept an eye on their own children along with those of the slaveholder. They risked a whipping if they attended to their own children frequently. Slave women who tried to escape took on more risk than did male slaves because they almost always took their children with them. For example, all of the 150 fugitive slave women advertised for in the 1850 New Orleans newspapers ran away with their children. Most slave women between the ages of 15 and 35—the ages of those most likely to escape—were either pregnant, nursing, or caring for young children. Besides the added risk of escaping with children, female slaves were also less likely to run away because they were not familiar with the surrounding countryside and nearby towns. Female slaves

rarely were permitted to leave the plantation. Male slaves, on the other hand, helped transport crops to market and were often traded to other farms for their skilled labor. Female slaves were rarely traded; they were not trained as artisans or craftsmen as male slaves often were and they were kept for their childbearing abilities. Female slaves performed duties regarded as unskilled, but they worked as hard as men. They were lumberjacks and turpentine producers in Georgia and the Carolinas. In every other slave state they plowed using mule and ox teams, hauled logs by leather straps attached to their shoulders, dug ditches, and spread manure fertilizer. Women slaves cultivated crops such as tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, corn, and rice. Those who did not work in the fields were expected to perform household duties and to care for the plantation’s children. In some cases, slaves were even legally owned by the children they cared for. FURTHER READING

Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Wood, Peter H. Strange New Land: African Americans, 1617–1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.


SLOCUM, FRANCES

(1773–1847) Captive and adoptee of Native Americans. Frances Slocum was captured by the Delaware on November 2, 1778 when she was five years old. Her father, Jonathan Slocum, was killed by Native Americans six weeks later. The child’s mother, Ruth Tripp Slocum, escaped and lived to care for her nine remaining children. Frances’s brothers continued to search for their sister for the next 59 years. Frances Slocum was born in Rhode Island to Quaker parents. After her capture by Native Americans, she was taken to Niagara Falls and adopted by a Native American couple. They gave her the name Weletawash. Her new family moved west during the American Revolution and settled near present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana. Around 1794 Slocum married Shepancanah of the Miami. She gave birth to two sons, who died very young, and to two daughters who survived her. Slocum was well esteemed by the Miami and grew to love her Native American family. In 1837 Slocum’s brother, Joseph Slocum, fi-

SPANISH HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

nally located her. Two of her brothers and a sister visited Slocum, who at the time was 64. Slocum, however, decided to continue living with her Miami family. A nephew, George Slocum, and his family came to stay with Frances Slocum and helped her manage her farm and livestock. Slocum petitioned Congress and was granted permission to remain on her land after the removal of the Miami from Indiana to Kansas in 1840. She died of pneumonia in 1847.

SMITH, MARGARET
BAYARD

(1778–1844) Author and early chronicler of Washington society. Margaret Bayard was married to the founder of the Washington newspaper the National Intelligencer. In 1815 she helped establish the Washington Female Orphan Asylum. Margaret Bayard was reared on a farm in Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of Colonel John Bubenheim Bayard and Margaret Hodge. Her father was a prominent Philadelphia merchant before the British occupation of the city. He served as a colonel in the American army during the American Revolution and was with General George Washington at Valley Forge. Margaret’s mother died when she was two; her stepmother died when she was ten. Bayard was then sent to the noted Moravian boarding school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1792, when she was 14, Margaret moved in with her sister Jane and Jane’s husband, Andrew Kirkpatrick, a lawyer and later judge. It was at the Kirkpatrick’s home in New Jersey that Margaret received an extensive education, reading everything from Isaac Newton to Sophocles. In 1800 Margaret Bayard married her second cousin Samuel Harrison Smith. The couple moved to Washington just as the nation’s capital was moving from Philadelphia. The Smiths played an active role in Washington society, often entertaining prominent men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The Smiths were in a particularly esteemed position and could gather information easily for their National Intelligencer. In 1810, after Samuel Smith was appointed by President Madison as the first Commissioner of the Revenue, he sold the National Intelligencer to a business associate, Joseph Gales. Margaret concentrated on raising their three daughters and a son. For the next five years, she devoted herself to her

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household, her family, and to entertaining in a growing Washington society. She also spent long hours writing letters and entries in her journals. In 1815 Margaret Smith joined with others to establish the Washington Female Orphan Asylum, which was later renamed the Washington City Orphan Asylum when the institution began accepting boys. Smith wrote extensive journals and letters while her children were growing up. In 1824 Smith’s first novel was published. A Winter in Washington, or Memoirs of the Seymour Family was based on real events. The proceeds from her next novel, What Is Gentility?, were donated to the orphan asylum. Smith’s most notable work is about the Washington society she dearly loved. The First Forty Years of Washington Society (1906) contains Smith’s journals and notes written from 1800 to 1841. It still serves as a valuable source for the social and political history of the United States from Jefferson’s to Jackson’s presidencies. This work contains many personal anecdotes about Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay, and other national figures. It also includes a vivid account of the burning of Washington by the British in 1814 and an account of the capital’s rebuilding. Smith is considered a perceptive and talented chronicler of Washington history. She died at the age of 66 and is buried in Washington at Rock Creek Cemetery. FURTHER READING

Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

SPANISH HOUSEHOLD
ECONOMY Spanish missionaries and explorers began settling in North America in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the areas of present-day New Mexico and Florida, where the Spaniards sought to bring Catholicism to the Pueblo Indians. The patriarchal (meaning power and property was passed through the father) Spaniards greatly changed the Pueblo way of life, which was originally a matrilineal society. Many Spaniards hired Pueblo women as domestic servants. Spanish women were astonished to find Pueblo women building houses and sought to change what they thought was inappropriate behavior for women.

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SPORTS

By the start of the eighteenth century, several thousand Spanish settlers lived in the areas of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, which was referred to as “New Spain.” Spanish women maintained the household and tended to domestic duties, such as keeping a small garden, preparing food, and caring for the children. The Spanish established a social hierarchy in which the Spanish were the social elite and Native Americans became part of a lower class. There developed an obsession with social status and family reputation. For example, a 1752 law forbade a man from the respected Spanish classes from seducing or marrying a girl from a lower social class. Such action would bring dishonor to his family. Men were the heads of Spanish households throughout early America. Women served as supportive wives and mothers. The majority of Spanish households continued to be Catholic: the man was the head of his house, just as God is the Father of the Church, and the priesthood is entirely male. Women were seen as having little value aside from their role as mothers. Just as the Virgin Mary was esteemed in childbirth, Spanish women were highly honored in motherhood. See also: Pueblo Household Economy.


SPORTS

A source of diversion or recreation. Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native American women were participating in activities that are today considered sport. They sometimes danced for hours at a time. The rites of passage from childhood to womanhood included physical displays and tests. The outcomes could affect one’s status in the family and village. When Europeans arrived in North America, they found that there was little time for the recreation or the social pastimes that were prevalent in their homeland. The animals and much of the equipment used in European recreations were not available in America. Instead, women labored for long periods of time and often went for months in isolation or with the company of just one or two other people. Beginning around 1670, settlers began establishing distinctive communal and social events. For example, weddings, elections, and militia training afforded women the opportunity to gather, sing, and dance, and to compete in games and races that today would be considered sport. Women

were rarely permitted to participate in organized sports or competitions in which men participated. An even greater variety of recreations ranging from races to fistfights emerged in the 1700s and 1800s, especially in the urban centers along the Atlantic coast. The Philadelphia Gazette announced in 1724 the “slack rope and tight rope dancing by men and women” as a commercial display of physical abilities in which men and women walked across a rope tied tightly between buildings or other structures. Women were participants in what became the most common public sport of the eighteenth century, horse racing. In the early 1800s, one German visitor to Pennsylvania, Gottlieb Mittleberger, observed that women were not only riding in a race, but were competing “with the best male riders for a wager.” See also: Entertainment.


STARBUCK,

MARY COFFYN

(1644–1717) Quaker minister and community leader. Mary Coffyn Starbuck was the first recognized minister in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Starbuck, herself a convert to the Society of Friends, headed a community-wide movement that resulted in the conversion of most of the colonists on Nantucket Island to Quakerism. Mary Coffyn was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Tristram Coffyn and Dionis Stevens. She married Nathaniel Starbuck shortly after moving to Nantucket around 1660. She and Nathaniel had ten children. Starbuck conducted most of the community’s commercial business and earned the nickname “The Great Merchant.” She was known for her quick wit, intellect, and administrative skills. Public business was so often conducted in the Starbuck home that it was named “Parliament House.” John Richardson observed in his journal in 1701 that Starbuck was “esteemed as a Judge” by the islanders and that “little of Moment was done there without her.” Starbuck lived her entire life on Nantucket, reportedly ministering and advising whalers and trading with Native Americans. She died at the age of 72 and was buried in the Quaker burial grounds next to the meetinghouse on land donated by her son Nathaniel Starbuck and the original Nantucket proprietors. See also: Preaching.

TEKAKWITHA, CATHERINE


STONEMAN, ABIGAIL

(c. 1740–c. 1777?) Owner of taverns in colonial Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. Abigail Stoneman was the first person to obtain a license to operate a tavern in Newport. Although her actual birth and death dates and her maiden name are unknown, Abigail Stoneman was born sometime around 1740. Her first husband was Samuel Stoneman, a lieutenant and adjutant of the Rhode Island regiment in the French and Indian War. She was a widow by 1760. Stoneman opened “The Merchant’s Coffee House” in 1767. Here she offered drinks, dancing, and lodging to local gentlemen. The following year she purchased a house and land in Middletown, Rhode Island, to use as an inn to entertain summer visitors. Stoneman advertised that her establishments offered “Board and Lodging for Gentlemen.” In 1770, Stoneman expanded her businesses by opening a tavern and inn named the “Royal Exchange” in Boston. Stoneman married Sir John Treville, Knight of Malta, in 1774. Stoneman sold her Middletown business, and she and Treville moved to New York. It is not known whether Treville was killed in the American Revolution or whether he abandoned Stoneman after spending most of her money. Now alone, Stoneman opened another tavern and dance hall called “The London Coffee-House” in Manhattan in 1777. Nothing more is known of Stoneman after she opened this establishment, which served many British military officers. See also: Feme Sole Trader Acts; Widowhood.

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SUFFRAGE, WOMAN

The right of women to vote. Before any organized movement for woman suffrage began, some women were demanding equal access to the political process. They saw the right to vote as the first stage in becoming citizens and in having some control over their own lives. It was educated, independent women who began demanding the right to vote. Margaret Brent was the first woman in North America to demand the vote. Brent owned extensive property in Maryland and in 1647 insisted on two votes in the colonial assembly, one for herself and one for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose power of attorney she held. The governor denied her request, and Brent boycotted the assembly. Women had greater legal rights in some early state constitutions than they had later in the nation. For example, in the late 1700s a widow or spinster who owned property in New Jersey could vote. This was, however, the exception; it was more a legal loophole than the intentional granting of suffrage. New Jersey granted the vote to “all inhabitants” who satisfied certain property and residence requirements. Property-owning women took advantage of the constitution’s vague wording. Then, in 1807 a state legislator who was almost defeated by women voters helped pass a bill to disenfranchise the state’s women and black men. In the new United States, suffrage was decided by the states, not the federal government. Most restricted voting to white males, and some further required that voters be property owners and Protestants.

T


TEACHING/TEACHERS

See colleges; dame schools; schools.


TEKAKWITHA,

CATHERINE

(1656–1680) Native American convert to Catholicism and the first Native American eligible for sainthood. The Catholic Church beatified Catherine, or “Kateri” in her Mohawk language, in 1980. Her devotion to the Church’s teachings, her piety, and her volun-

tary virginity were some of Tekakwitha’s most memorable accomplishments. Tekakwitha’s father was a Mohawk chief and her mother a Catholic Algonquian. They lived in what is now New York State. In 1660, when Tekakwitha was only four years old, a smallpox epidemic swept through her village, killing her immediate family. The disease left Tekakwitha nearly blind and very frail for the remainder of her short life. She was taken in by her aunt and uncle, who frequently mistreated her. When she was 20 years old, Tekakwitha met Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit missionary who

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christened her “Catherine.” She became extremely devout, attending Mass daily, praying for long hours in solitude, and completing many works of mercy in her community. Her family and village opposed her faith and, after 18 months of harassment, Tekakwitha left her people and moved to the Christian Mohawk community of Kahnawake at Sault St. Louis, near Montreal, Canada. In Canada, Tekakwitha refused to marry, stating that she would have “no other spouse but Jesus Christ.” She continued her devout worship, performing acts of penance, such as walking barefoot in the snow, fasting, sleeping on a bed of thorns, and burning herself with hot coals. Her already frail body grew weaker, and she died of a fever at the age of 24. See also: Catholics.


TENNEY, TABITHA GILMAN (1762–1837) American satirical novelist. Tabitha Gilman Tenney is best known for her two-volume novel Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801). This work is a clever satire about a foolish young woman easily deceived by romantic nonsense. Tabitha Gilman was the first of seven children born in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Samuel Gilman and Lydia Robinson Gilman. In 1788 Tabitha married Dr. Samuel Tenney, who served as a doctor in the American Revolution and later as a congressman. Tenney’s first published work was The New Pleasing Instructor (1799), an anthology of classical poetry intended for young ladies of Tenney’s day. When her husband was elected to Congress, the Tenneys moved to Washington. It was there that Tenney wrote her famous novel. After her husband’s death in 1816, Tenney moved back to her hometown of Exeter. She died there at the age of 75 and was buried in the Winter Street Cemetery.


TEVIS, JULIA See schools


TEXTBOOK WRITING

In the colonial era textbooks, primarily religious in nature, were aimed at a male audience, as

most young girls were not provided a formal education. In the late 1700s textbooks began focusing on subjects other than religion, such as science, geography, mathematics, and instruction in various languages. Girls who received a formal education were expected to acquire only a superficial knowledge of such subjects. Girls were usually taught in separate rooms or in separate schools from boys. Some of the textbooks aimed at instructing young women were Lady’s Geography, The Female Academy, The Ladies Compleat Letter Writer, and The Female Miscellany. The last book, according to booksellers’ advertisements, was divided into two sections, the first being “a Sketch of English Grammar, an Abridgement of the Holy History, a small Collection of Fables, etc.,” and the other being “a Series of Letters addressed to a young lady who had made some progress in Reading.” Another popular textbook, An Accidence to the English Tongue, was a simplified grammar text prepared for boys who did not know Latin and “for the benefit of the Female Sex.” Its bias was evident in that it provided females with a “simplified” text. One female educator and author, Susanna Haswell Rowson, was not satisfied with the maledirected textbooks publishers provided. In the early 1800s Rowson wrote several textbooks specifically for her female students. This, however, was the exception, as most textbook publishers continued to publish books aimed at young men.

THOMPSON, SARAH,
COUNTESS OF RUMFORD (1774–1852) Philanthropist and first American to be called a countess. Sarah Thompson was the daughter of Count Rumford, Benjamin Thompson, a prestigious scientist from Massachusetts. Benjamin Thompson had been given the title Count of Rumford in 1790 by the vicar-general of the Holy Roman Empire. Benjamin chose the name Rumford to honor the town in New Hampshire where he married. Sarah Thompson was received by the Bavarian elector in 1797 and permitted one half of her father’s pension with the privilege of living wherever she chose. Upon her father’s death in 1814, Thompson divided her time between London, Paris, and New Hampshire. Thompson helped establish the Rolfe and Rum-

TITUBA

ford asylums for the poor and needy, particularly orphaned girls. She bequeathed $15,000 to the New Hampshire asylum for the insane and $2,000 each to the Concord Female Charitable Society, the Boston Children’s Friend Society, and the Fatherless and Widow’s Society of Boston. See also: Benevolent Associations, Women’s.


TIMOTHY,

ANN DONOVAN

(1727?–1792) Printer and newspaper publisher. Together with her husband, Peter Timothy, Ann Timothy published the South-Carolina Gazette, the colony’s first permanent newspaper. Ann Donovan was probably born in Charleston, South Carolina around 1727. Little is known of her life. She married Peter Timothy, a publisher who took over South Carolina’s first permanent newspaper from his mother, Elizabeth Timothy, in 1746. It is believed that Ann and Peter Timothy had as many as 15 children, of whom seven died in infancy. In 1782 Peter Timothy embarked with two of his daughters for Santo Domingo, and they were lost at sea. Ann Timothy then became sole proprietor of their newspaper and printing business. Ann Timothy continued to publish the paper until her death in 1792. Timothy was the first woman named to the official post of “Printer to the State” of South Carolina, which she held from 1785 to 1792. See also: Feme Sole Trader Acts; Printing and Publishing.


TIMOTHY, ELIZABETH ANN

(?–1757) Printer and newspaper publisher. Elizabeth Timothy was the first female printer and newspaper publisher in North America. She took over the operation of the South-Carolina Gazette after her husband’s death. Her close friend and former business partner, Benjamin Franklin, noted that Mrs. Timothy was far superior to her husband in the operation of the business. Elizabeth Timothy was born in the Netherlands to a Huguenot family. Her maiden name is not known. She married Lewis Timothy, an Englishman, in Holland and they came to South Carolina with their four children in 1731. The couple later

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had three more children in America. Lewis Timothy moved his family to Charleston at the request of Benjamin Franklin. Lewis was to take over the one-year-old weekly South-Carolina Gazette after the editor died of yellow fever. Upon her husband’s unexpected death in 1738, Elizabeth took over the operation of the newspaper without missing an issue. She continued to run the paper until about 1746, when her son Peter and his wife Ann Donovan Timothy took over the business. Elizabeth Timothy was a shrewd business manager. Franklin writes that she “manag’d the Business with such Success that she not only brought up reputably a Family of Children, but at the Expiration of the Term was able to purchase of me the Printing House and establish her Son in it.” Upon her death in 1757, Timothy owned a large amount of land, three houses, and eight slaves. See also: Feme Sole Trader Acts; Printing and Publishing.


TITUBA

(seventeenth century) An enslaved Caribbean Indian woman whose stories of magic spells and devils led to the hysteria of the witch trials of Salem. Tituba was born in a small village in South America and was captured and taken to Barbados as a young child. There she was sold to merchant Samuel Parris, who later became the town parson in Salem Village. First, Parris took Tituba and another slave, John Indian, to New England with his family and then to Boston in 1680. Tituba married John Indian in 1689, and they were taken with the Parris family to Salem Village the same year. Tituba cared for the three Parris children, Thomas, Betty, and Susahanna. In 1692, Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams became hysterical after listening to stories told by Tituba. The girls fell into a series of fits and accused Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburn of casting spells on them. Tituba and the other two women were arrested on February 29, 1692. At the trials, the three women accused each other of practicing witchcraft. The magistrates agreed to free the accused only if they would confess to practicing witchcraft. At first, Tituba proclaimed her innocence, but then described “four women and one man [who] . . . tell me, if I will not hurt the children, they will hurt me.” The town’s hysteria led to the execution of 14 women and six men. Tituba escaped execution by

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TRADE AND RETAILING

confessing to practicing witchcraft, but was imprisoned for 13 months and eventually sold by Reverend Parris.


TRADE AND RETAILING

Peddlers and tradespeople were common in British North America. With the advent of towns and port cities, artisans took their wares to town on market days to sell. Women sold the goods they had made with their hands. The first woman to have acted as a business agent in the North American colonies was Margaret Hardenbrook Philipse. In 1661, after her husband’s death, Philipse began working for Dutch merchants in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. However, rarely were women entitled to the income from their hard work. If a woman was married, her income from trade or retailing usually went to her husband. As port cities developed, shops, taverns, and general stores opened. Few married women could legally own a business before the early 1700s, but widowed and single women called “she merchants” could trade and own businesses in most colonies. In 1733 a petition by a group of female traders to New York newspaper editor John Peter Zenger made readers aware of women’s contributions to a developing urban economy: “We, the widows of this city, have had a Meeting, and as our case is something Deplorable, we beg you will give [our petition a] Place in your Weekly Journal. . . . it is as follows: We are House keepers, Pay our Taxes, carry on Trade, and most of us are she Merchants, and as we in some measure contribute to the Support of Government, we ought to be Intitled to some of the Sweets of it; but we find ourselves entirely neglected, while the Husbands that live in our Neighborhood are daily invited to Dine at Court.” Although it made a powerful statement, the petition failed to bring about any direct positive results for women merchants. The feme sole trader acts of South Carolina in 1712 and 1744, and of Pennsylvania in 1718, allowed married women to engage in trade and retailing and own their business separate from their husbands. They could run their businesses on their own, and they were liable for any debt incurred in doing business. Their husbands were not legally responsible for any debts from the businesses. Women began opening retail stores, seamstress shops, and taverns. Many used their skills in the domestic arts to establish successful busi-

nesses. From the 1720s to the early 1800s, colonial newspapers advertised goods ranging from farm equipment to fine wines sold by these women. For example, Agnes Lind advertised in the SouthCarolina Gazette. Her shop in Charleston offered milliner goods, such as hats, shoes, Irish linen, and fine lace.


TURELL, JANE COLMAN

(1708–1735) Poet and hymn writer. Besides writing poetry and religious hymns, Jane Colman Turell was a prodigy in her knowledge of the Bible. By the time she was two years old, she knew the alphabet and could recite stories from the Scriptures before such honored guests as Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley. Through extensive Bible studies with her father, a minister, Jane Colman memorized many Psalms and Bible verses. Colman’s parents were Benjamin and Jane Clark Colman. Her father’s insistence on his children’s religious education led Jane to her study of religious verse and an interest in classical and British poetry. She wrote her first hymn when she was 11 and paraphrased the Psalms in rhyme. Her studies of British poets led Colman to write such poems as “Encomium on Sir Richard Blackmore’s Poetical Works” and “On the Incomparable Mr. Edmund Waller.” In 1726 Colman married minister Ebenezer Turell of Medford, Massachusetts. She continued to write verse until her death nine years later. Most of her poems that have come down to us were included in her husband’s tribute to her after her death, printed with her father’s two funeral sermons for her. Regrettably, though Ebenezer Turell mentions in his memoir “Some Pieces of Wit and Humour,” he chose not to include any, preferring to remember her through her more serious works. See also: Literature, Eighteenth-Century.


TUTHILL, LOUISA See childhood

TYLER, MARY HUNT
PALMER

(1775–1821) Teacher and writer. Mary Hunt Palmer Tyler wrote a popular guide to children’s health called The Ma-

VAN BUREN, HANNAH HOES

ternal Physician; A Treatise on the Nurture and Management of Infants. Her book was published in 1811 and was one of the first to advise parents on behavior, illnesses, and care. Among her recommendations she urged parents to allow daughters to run and enjoy themselves for a few hours a day. Tyler made clear distinctions in gender roles. She encouraged mothers “to reflect upon what manner of men you will wish to see your sons become,” warning that their sons could become too effeminate if mothers instilled “into their tender minds the love of dress and show.”

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Tyler was married to playwright Royall Tyler, who wrote The Contrast, widely honored as the first play written by an American-born playwright. Royall Tyler also served in the colonial army, was active in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion, became an attorney in 1780, and served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Vermont. The Tylers had seven children. Tyler and her daughter Amelia set up a “dame school” in their home. Amelia’s six other siblings and children from the community attended the school, which provided basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

U
URBAN LIFE

Beginning in the late 1700s, urban environments in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia both enhanced and constricted women’s lives. Cities created opportunities for women to embrace non-traditional roles, but at the same time, failed to meet many of women’s particular needs and interests. Urban areas developed from small towns in which land was parceled out to groups of settlers, usually 30 or 40 families, who banded together to form these small communities, sharing farmland and community greens. Settlers who formed these towns usually knew one another from previous settlements or from England. Towns usually formed along a central street and later expanded outward, as in present-day Boston. As people began to settle in the Middle and Southern colonies, large port towns formed in present-day New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. These settlements had ports that

were used to transport goods and people. The port cities became centers of trade and marketplaces where craftspeople of various trades could sell their goods. For example, women often opened seamstress and milliner shops. Although not considered urban by today’s standards, villages, towns, and later port cities distinguished themselves from the outlying rural areas of early America. Life in these more developed areas was less arduous: land was easier to settle, more goods were available for purchase, and families had the close support of those in the nearby community. Women, for example, had the support of doctors and midwives during childbirth, while those in rural areas had little support or medical care. See also: Midwifery; Rural Life; Trade and Retailing. FURTHER READING

Warner, Sam Bass. The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

V
VAN BUREN, HANNAH HOES (1783–1819) Wife of President Martin Van Buren. Hannah Hoes (pronounced “Hoose”) was born in Kinderhook, New York, on March 8, 1783. In 1807, she married Martin Van Buren, a neighbor and relative; both were members of the extensive Dutch community that had settled between New York City and Albany.

Together the Van Burens had four children who survived infancy, all of them boys. Martin Van Buren soon began a successful political career. Hannah Van Buren was not comfortable around politics and politicians. Shy and withdrawn, she stayed out of sight whenever possible; contemporaries described her as small, calm, and gentle. Her health was poor, too, which pushed her further into the background. She died

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VAN RENSSELAER, MARIA VAN CORTLANDT

in Albany on February 5, 1819. Her marriage was said to be a happy one, and Martin Van Buren never remarried. However, Martin never mentioned her in his autobiography, and he eliminated all letters to or from her when he donated his family records to the Library of Congress.

tells a story of marriage and sets up a dichotomy between good and poor choices for husbands. The tragic character Mrs. Henderson dies by an abusive, alcoholic husband. Vickery’s works provided structure, albeit fictional, to help women make decisions about marriage and relationships.

VAN RENSSELAER, MARIA
VAN CORTLANDT

VIRGINIA COMPANY
BRIDES

(1645–1688) Administrator of the Dutch patroonship of Rensselaerswyck in what is now New York State. After her husband’s death, Maria Van Rensselaer managed to gain for her six children the richest land patent in the colony. Her alliances with many powerful groups established the Van Rensselaers as one of the most important families of early New York. Maria Van Cortlandt was born in New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) to Oloffe and Anna Loockermans Van Cortlandt, both from wealthy Dutch merchant families. In 1662 Maria married Jeremias Van Rensselaer, son of the first proprietor of Rensselaerswyck near Albany, New York. When her husband died in 1674, control of the vast estate went to Maria Van Rensselaer. She managed to gain clear title of the Van Rensselaer land holdings despite subsequent Dutch and British invasions in 1673 and 1674. The birth of her last child left Van Rensselaer lame, and she used crutches until her death at the age of 43.

See also: Widowhood.


VICKERY, SUKEY

(1779–1821) Novelist. Sukey Vickery wrote mostly epistolary novels, or those that are written in the form of letters. Letter writing was a popular practice during her time, not just for entertainment, but also as a major form of communication. Her most famous novel, Emily Hamilton: A Novel Founded on Incidents in Real Life, was published in 1803. Like most of her works, it provided stories about moral and social issues of the time. Her writing has been compared to works such as Charlotte, a Tale of Truth by Susanna Haswell Rowson. Sometimes seen as didactic, or “preachy,” Vickery’s works provide characters who struggle with good and evil and either suffer or flourish because of the consequences of their choices. Emily Hamilton

In the early 1600s, the Virginia Company of London realized that its colonial settlements would become more self-sufficient and profitable if they were permanent. In order to keep male laborers, the company decided to bring women from England and make them available as wives. (See Documents.) In negotiations with the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Virginia Company, in 1621, agreed to pay for the women’s passage to America if they married shareholders of the Company or tenant farmers. The Company placed the enormous price of 120 pounds of tobacco on each woman. The Virginia Company said this requirement was to protect the women: only freemen or tenants that “had the means to maintain them” would be able to afford the price. Virginia Company “tobacco brides” were brought from England to Jamestown, Virginia, with the promise of a better life. Once she arrived, a woman could accept or refuse a husband. Many were leaving unemployment, homelessness, and hunger. Most, however, suffered greater hardships once in North America. Of the 144 “brides” brought to Jamestown by the Virginia Company, only 35 survived their first six years. See also: Marriage Laws.

VOLUNTARY
ASSOCIATIONS Political clubs, benevolent organizations, and cultural associations or societies to which men and women belonged in British North America. Men and women usually joined separate associations. Some women began their own chapters, clubs, or volunteer groups when they were denied membership into men’s organizations. These groups served a social function; they provided a way for women to make connections within

VOTERS, WOMEN

the community. Women might come together to discuss novels, but more often they sought to tend to the needs of others. Often churches organized benevolent associations. During the Great Awakenings, which began in 1739, a revived interest in religion led to the creation of many groups that evangelized while providing help to the needy. Besides providing food, shelter, education, and clothing, these organizations set out to bring Christianity to those they were helping. For example, a 1751 advertisement appeared in Talbot, Maryland, soliciting gifts and volunteers to build a “Charity-working School” in which children “after being brought up in the Knowledge and Fear of GOD, and learning,” were to be “put out to Apprenticeships or Service, as may best tend to the Good of the Public and Benefits of the Children.” Other benevolent groups included the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas (1793), the Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes (1800), and the African Female Benevolent Society of Newport (1809). Giving of oneself to the needs of others was considered honorable for women and girls in British North America. In the early 1800s, the “Juvenile Band,” 18 young women from Philadelphia, met to make garments for poor children. They also studied botany and collected herbs for the poor. Voluntary political associations were important to women during the American Revolution. The Daughters of Liberty is recognized as the first national American women’s organization. In this group, women helped the cause of the Revolutionary War by supporting the national boycott of imported goods from England. They recycled and reused items that would normally have been imported. They raised sheep and made their own cloth called “homespun”; they made their own tea from herbs, flowers, and fruit; and they helped convince others to support the boycott and harass British Loyalists. Women actively supported the Revolution by joining or creating organizations that sewed clothing and blankets and provided food for soldiers. See also: Bache, Sarah Franklin.


VOTERS, WOMEN

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A few women in North America had demanded voting rights and equal access to the political process before 1848, when an organized movement began to win women’s right to vote. However, these women were the exception. Puritan women, for example, did not consider voting as a woman’s duty, but was instead a man’s responsibility. One notable exception, Margaret Brent, was the first woman in North America to demand the vote. Brent owned extensive property in Maryland and in 1647 insisted on two votes in the colonial assembly, one for herself and one for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose power of attorney she held. The governor denied her request, and Brent boycotted the assembly. Women had greater legal rights in some colonial governments than they had later in the nation’s history. This was due more to oversight than intentional granting of woman suffrage. However, few women took advantage of these legal loopholes. A widow or spinster who owned property in New Jersey could vote. New Jersey granted the vote to “all inhabitants” who satisfied certain property and residence requirements. A few propertyowning women took advantage of the state constitution’s vague wording. In 1807 a state legislator who was outraged by the number of women voters helped pass a bill to disenfranchise the state’s women and black men. After the Revolutionary War, voting was decided by the states, not the federal government. Most restricted voting to white males who were property owners, and some further required that voters be Protestants. After the American Revolution, some educated, independent women began demanding the right to vote. Women began seeing the right to vote as the first stage in becoming recognized as full citizens and in having some control over their own lives. By the mid-1800s, an organized effort began to win the right to vote for women. See also: Woman Suffrage.

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WAGE EARNERS

W
WAGE EARNERS

One of the first ways for women in early America to earn wages was as domestic servants. Women could earn a salary and were provided room and board for performing household tasks, which required little if any training. The hours were long, with domestics preparing meals, cleaning the house, bringing in firewood, and even caring for children. Women also could make money through skills in midwifery. As companies began to manufacture goods at the beginning of the 1800s, women took jobs that drew on their skills in the domestic arts. For example, women in New England labored in textile factories where they earned wages. They took in “outwork,” sewing together pieces of cloth into whole garments in their own homes. Women were paid less than men and were often much better at jobs requiring dexterity. Employers, therefore, often preferred to hire women. Whatever the work, it was a common practice to pay women less than men for the same job. Because men usually had entire families to support and women’s work was seen as temporary, people accepted differences in pay as fair. Women were not seen as the “breadwinners” in a family and their work was commonly seen as unimportant.


WARD, NANCY

See Cherokee household economy


WARREN, MERCY OTIS See republicanism


WASHINGTON,

MARY BALL

(1713?–1789) Mother of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Born in Virginia and orphaned at 13, she lived as a girl with a succession of relatives. She was tall and athletic and loved horses. At age 22 she married Augustine Washing-

ton, a widowed plantation owner with four children. She bore him six children in rapid succession, George being the oldest, before Augustine died in 1743. She never remarried, but managed her children, her slaves, and the estate with an almost military discipline. She was an attentive, possessive, and demanding mother, who did not like her children to be away from her. George’s elder half-brothers had been sent to England for their education, but she kept George by her, proudly preserving all his schoolboy exercises. She refused permission for the 14-year-old George to take up a midshipman’s warrant in Britain’s Royal Navy that had been offered him. It appears that there was conflict between mother and son in later years, when she resented the demands of his public career and sometimes embarrassed him with pleas for money. Yet in her will she left most of her wealth to George. She died in 1789, a few months after his first inauguration as president.


WASHINGTON, MARTHA See republican motherhood

WATTEVILLE, HENRIETTA
BENIGNA JUSTINE ZINZENDORF VON (1725–1789) Educator. Henrietta Watteville was instrumental in establishing the Moravian Seminary and College for Women in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Moravians are a Protestant denomination that arose from a fifteenth-century religious reform movement in Moravia and Bohemia. Henrietta Zinzendorf was born in Berthelsdorf, Saxony, to Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and Countess Erdmuthe Dorothea von Reuss. She traveled extensively throughout her life, coming to North America for the first time with her father when she was 16. At her father’s insistence, Watteville opened the first boarding school for girls in the British colonies in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1742. Female students were offered instruction in reading, writ-

WIDOWHOOD

ing, religion, and household arts. The school later moved to Bethlehem, the center of the Moravian Church in North America. In 1746 Henrietta married Baron Johann von Watteville at a Moravian settlement in Holland. After her husband was consecrated a bishop, the couple returned temporarily to North America in 1748. On this and subsequent trips, Watteville was instrumental in expanding the school curriculum and in consolidating the school with outlying Moravian congregations. The school was later opened to pupils outside the Moravian Church. Over the years, the name changed several times. Known for a time as the Bethlehem Female Seminary, it finally became the Moravian College at Bethlehem. Watteville and her husband had four children. She died in her birthplace at the age of 63. See also: Schools.


WEETAMOO

(1600s) Sachem, or leader, of the Wampanoags during King Philip’s War. Weetamoo arranged for the attack of white settlers on Lancaster, Massachusetts, during King Philip’s War in 1676. In her captivity narrative, Mary White Rowlandson describes Weetamoo at length, portraying her as “severe and proud,” a woman lacking in mercy and gentleness. Weetamoo married Wamsutta, eldest son of Wampanoag sachem Massasoit. Upon his father’s death in 1662, Wamsutta became leader. His village of Pokanoket rested on land the English settlers later called Rhode Island. Tensions mounted as English settlements grew and the newcomers to America demanded more land from Native Americans. In 1664, Wamsutta was killed while being questioned about land rights by white leaders at Plymouth. Weetamoo then became the new sachem of the Wampanoag village of Pocasset. She managed to keep peace with white settlers for over ten years. However, when her husband’s successor Metacomet (called Philip by the English) chose battle over diplomacy, Weetamoo followed suit. Weetamoo abandoned her second husband, Petananuet, because he refused to fight the English. Weetamoo and the Narragansett sachem Quanopin raided Mary Rowlandson’s town of Lancaster, destroying it, killing many white settlers, and capturing 24 others, including Rowlandson and her

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children. Later Quanopin was captured and shot. It is believed that Weetamoo drowned during the war. According to an account by Puritan minister Increase Mather, after her drowning, Puritans cut off her head, impaled it on a stick, and displayed it in the town of Taunton.


WELLS, RACHEL LOVELL

(1735?–1796?) Wax sculptor and financial contributor to the American Revolution. When she was about 65 years old, Rachel Lovell Wells wrote to Congress, trying to get back some of the 300 pounds of gold that she had loaned the nation during the Revolutionary War. Money from her wax sculpting had allowed her to buy loan office certificates from the state of New Jersey, which were supposed to be returned with interest at the end of the war. During the war Wells moved to Philadelphia in search of work because British soldiers had robbed her of most of her property. After the war, Wells moved back to New Jersey. At the time of her petition, May 18, 1786, Wells was widowed and living in poverty. The New Jersey legislature decided that only state residents could make a claim on principal and interest payments from the loan certificates. Wells’s claim was denied because she had not lived in New Jersey at the end of the war. Wells appealed to the Continental Congress, but her petition was again denied. Wells stated in her petition that even though she did not fight in the war, she loaned money that provided food, clothing, and blankets for soldiers. Although it was unsuccessful, the petition remains a rare and interesting document about the contributions made to the Revolution by a woman.


WHEATLEY, PHILLIS See poetry


WIDOWHOOD

As the American colonies were being formed, women were becoming widows at a younger age than had previously been seen in England. Dangers faced by the new settlers made young widows especially common in Virginia. Young widows were encouraged to remarry as quickly as possible be-

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cause marriage and reproduction were valued over celibacy. A woman’s ability to reproduce was highly valued not only because of religious beliefs, but also because infant mortality rates were so high. In Virginia, women were in such short supply that widows often married immediately. North of Virginia, life expectancy was higher than in Europe; therefore, women sometimes took longer to remarry. During their period of mourning, before they remarried, and sometimes even after they remarried, widows had to support themselves and often several children. Many worked as domestic servants or took in sewing and laundry for others. Some became indentured servants: in Wareham, Massachusetts, there was an annual auction of indigent widows. If a widow’s late husband had been in business with a partner, the widow might be cheated out of any interest in the business. Court records attest to numerous cases in which business partners took advantage of the fact that few husbands shared business accounting information with their wives. The American Revolution left more women and children in poverty than any other national conflict except the Civil War (see Volume 2). Women widowed by war were among the first to seek pensions from Congress and state legislatures. The bulk of aid to widows came from local charities and groups such as the Quaker women who made the care of widows a priority. Not all widows were left in complete poverty. According to the 1672 “Act concerning the Dowry of Widows,” each widow was guaranteed one-third of her husband’s property. She could take over and manage her third of the remaining property after debts existing at the time of her husband’s death were cleared. The remaining two-thirds went to the children, the state, or other relatives. Sometimes women inherited and took over operations of their husband’s businesses. For example, Ann Donovan Timothy successfully operated South Carolina’s first permanent newspaper, the South-Carolina Gazette, after her husband’s death in 1782. Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer took control of her family’s vast estate in New York after her husband’s death in 1674. She managed to gain clear title of the Van Rensselaer land holdings despite subsequent Dutch and British invasions in 1673 and 1674. Another widow, Margaret Hardenbrook Philipse, traded her former role as farmwife for one in commerce: she

developed the first regularly scheduled ship passages across the Atlantic. Affluent widows became a prominent feature of many colonial towns. Usually women who ran businesses on their own were widows. Records show that most towns had some widows who were among the most prominent taxpayers. Men often sought out these wealthy widows for marriage. In 1692, Cotton Mather cautioned widows against marrying a man who was more concerned with the woman’s property than with her. Widows who owned property had more legal rights than did married women during this period. A married woman had feme covert status, which meant that her legal identity was “covered” by her husband’s. Although inconsistently enforced, the English common law, adopted by most colonies, stated that once a woman was married, she could not be a witness in court, could not decide where she would live, could not control property, and could not even keep the wages she earned. Widows, on the other hand, had many legal rights. Single women over 21 and widows could apply for feme sole status. They could own and control property and see to their own legal affairs. In some cases, therefore, widowhood, for all the dread it inspired, brought about independence for women. See also: Coverture; Dower Rights; Feme Sole Trader Acts. FURTHER READING

Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.


WILKINSON,

ELIZA YONGE

(1757–1813) Patriot whose eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution are preserved in Letters of Eliza Wilkinson. Wilkinson was the daughter of a wealthy Welsh immigrant who settled on Yonge’s Island near Charleston, South Carolina. During the British siege of Charleston in 1779, she was a young widow whose husband had died six months after their marriage. Her two brothers fought for independence. Despite British raids on her home and the surrender of Charleston, Wilkinson remained a firm patriot. On a visit to a prison ship, she refused a British officer’s request that she play the guitar,

WINTHROP, ELIZABETH FONES

telling him that she would not feel like making music until her countrymen were freed and the colonists won the war. During the British occupation, she and her friends smuggled supplies to American forces, concealing them under their clothes and headdresses. In 1839, a descendant, Caroline Howard Gilman, published the letters Wilkinson wrote during the siege. These eyewitness accounts give a woman’s perspective on the hardships of the war. They also express her feminist views. Wilkinson’s assertions that women are capable of holding public office and her desire for “liberty of thought” are characteristic of the rhetoric popular in the early Republic.


WILKINSON, JEMIMA

(1752–1819) Religious leader of one of North America’s shortlived religious sects. In 1776, during a serious illness, Jemima Wilkinson believed that she had died and been revived by Jesus so that she could teach and lead a religious awakening. Wilkinson preached celibacy, pacifism, repentance, salvation for all, and the abolition of slavery. Wilkinson was raised a Quaker in Cumberland, Rhode Island. She was one of 12 children born to Jeremiah and Amey Whipple Wilkinson. She showed early signs of an interest in theology and memorized large sections of the King James Bible. The Quakers, however, dismissed Wilkinson because she attended a New Light Baptist meeting. After her illness and religious transformation, Wilkinson began preaching and attracting followers throughout New England. She dropped her birth name and answered only to the name “Publick Universal Friend.” Wilkinson experimented with faith healing and dream interpretation and portrayed herself as a messianic prophet. When she was 39, Wilkinson and nearly 300 followers founded the religious community of Jerusalem in the Yates County wilderness of western New York state. Wilkinson is often compared to Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, although Wilkinson was less rigid in her religious teachings. Wilkinson preached at Jerusalem to the faithful until her death at the age of 67. Within two decades of her death, her sect and its Jerusalem community had all but disappeared.

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WILSON, SARAH

(1750–?) Imposter and self-proclaimed sister of the Queen of England. Calling herself the Marchioness de Waldegrave, Wilson traveled throughout the American colonies, enjoying the hospitality of elite members of society. A convicted criminal and escaped indentured servant, she thus propelled herself into the highest echelons of colonial North America. Sarah Wilson was born in Staffordshire, England. While in her teens, she became a servant to Caroline Vernon, a maid of honor to Queen Charlotte. In 1771, Wilson stole from the queen’s bedroom a gown, a diamond necklace, and a miniature figurine. She was apprehended and sentenced to death. After Vernon and the Queen intervened, Wilson’s sentence was reduced to indentured servitude in the American colonies. In the autumn of 1771, Sarah Wilson was sold to William Devall of Frederick County. She escaped and spent the next 18 months displaying the queen’s gown, the necklace, and the figurine, which she somehow retained from the burglary. Wilson assumed the name Susanna (or Sophia) Carolina Matilda, Marchioness de Waldegrave, sister of the Queen of England. In exchange for a fee, Wilson promised government posts or even commissions in the British army to her hosts in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Around 1773, Devall hired an attorney to track down Wilson and offered a reward for her return. Accounts of Wilson’s life after this point differ. Some say she was apprehended but then escaped a second time. Others claim that she made her way to Canada where she married William Talbot, a captain in the British army.

WINTHROP, ELIZABETH
FONES

(1617–1655) Rebel against the Puritan code and niece and daughter-in-law of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop and his wife Margaret Winthrop. Elizabeth Fones was born in England to Anne (Winthrop) Fones and Thomas Fones, an apothecary in London. She married Henry Winthrop, Jr., the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Henry died in 1630 at age 23 in a drowning accident, leaving Elizabeth a widow with a baby in England. She married Robert

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Feake, with whom she had two children, and came to America on the Lyon in 1632 along with Margaret Winthrop. Winthrop is known for her stance against the strict Puritan rules that governed her life and that of most early settlers to America. In 1649, she left Massachusetts because on May 17 of that year a warrant was issued for her arrest and that of William Hallett on a charge that they were unmarried and “living in sin,” having had a child, William. Winthrop later married Hallett. Her three marriages left her in charge of vast properties in Connecticut and New Netherland. Winthrop is the subject of a twentieth-century historical novel by Anya Seton, The Winthrop Woman.


WITCH TRIALS, SALEM

In January 1692, a group of girls in Salem Village, a community in Puritan Massachusetts, began to exhibit strange behavior—screaming, seizures, and trances—that doctors concluded revealed the influence of Satan. So began the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials. Before it was over, more than 100 people had been accused of practicing witchcraft—that is, of having made agreements with the devil in exchange for special powers. Of those charged, 58 were indicted and 29 were convicted in five separate trials that took place over a period of five months. Six of the convicted women escaped execution by “confessing” to being witches; the confessions were used to intimidate those who maintained their innocence, and they often implicated others. Of the

WINTHROP, MARGARET
TYNDAL

(c. 1590–1647) Letter-writer and wife of the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Margaret Winthrop’s husband, Governor John Winthrop, was among the founders of Massachusetts and the town of Boston. Margaret was born in England to Sir John and Lady Ann Egerton Tyndal of Essex, England. She married John Winthrop in 1618 and moved to his father’s estate of Groton Manor. The bride cared for John’s four children by his two former wives, both of whom had died. During the first 12 years of their marriage, John Winthrop often traveled to London, where he served as an attorney at one of the national courts. In his absence, Margaret would care for their estate and children, who eventually numbered 12. Much can be learned about the Winthrops’ daily lives from the personal letters and diaries of Margaret Winthrop. She wrote to her husband often. Her writings have come to be called “Puritan Letters” and also reveal much about England and the beginnings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Winthrop settled in Massachusetts in 1630, taking a leading role in the establishment of the colony. He was elected to a one-year term as governor 16 times. Margaret Winthrop remained in England until she gave birth to another child and was able to settle the family estate. She sailed for Boston in 1632 with her child, but the infant died at sea. The Winthrops settled on Beacon Hill in Boston. Margaret Winthop served as hostess at many political and religious meetings at the Winthrop home and, according to her husband’s accounts, was a supportive wife and dutiful mother.

The title page of Cotton Mather’s best-selling book on witchcraft, a copy of which was in Samuel Parris’s library in 1692

WOMEN, STATUS OF

remaining 23, 19 were hanged, three died in jail, and one was pressed to death with rocks during his interrogation. Eighty percent of those convicted and executed were women. Elizabeth Parris, nine-year-old daughter of the village parson, and Abigail Williams, her 11-year-old cousin, were fascinated by the tales of devils told by Elizabeth’s father’s West Indian slave Tituba. Their fascination seems to have led to their hysterical behavior and eventually to accusations that drew the attention of the entire town. When asked to name the supernatural tormentors who were causing their seizures, the girls, for no apparent reason, implicated Tituba and local residents Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn. On February 29, 1692, Good, Osburn, and Tituba were arrested. Others began to make accusations, and the arrests continued through the spring. The “witches” were blamed for bringing every kind of misfortune to their victims, from sickness and fire to arguments with neighbors and the deaths of livestock and babies. At first, the accusations were investigated by town magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Then, as the numbers increased, Governor William Phips set up a special court with seven additional judges. The first trial was held in June, and on June 10 Bridget Bishop was the first to be hanged. The proceedings of the trials were carefully written down, and many have been preserved. From them it appears that the accusers repeatedly “fell into fits” on the arrival of the accused, and that the fits or seizures themselves were considered evidence. In accordance with legal practice of the time, the accused, though not represented by lawyers, were allowed to speak for themselves and to question their accusers and other witnesses. But there was little defense possible against spectral evidence—evidence about mischief performed by the “specters” of the accused, which could not be corroborated and against which there could be no alibi. Among the 19 who were hanged was Rebecca Nurse. She was a 70-year-old mother of eight. Even though she had a spotless reputation and 40 prominent citizens of Salem vouched for her innocence, she was executed on July 19. One of Rebecca Nurse’s sisters was hanged on September 22. The Nurse family tried to convince the town elders to stop the executions. After the executions were finally halted, the family saw to it that the clergymen who led the trials resigned from the ministry. Governor Phips disbanded the special court in October, replacing it with a superior court that did not admit spectral evidence. The trials resumed

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the following year, but without spectral evidence, no further convictions were made. The Salem Witch Trials have been blamed on everything from a hallucinogenic fungus present in rye flour to the hysterical need of girls for attention. Some scholars think the “witches” served as scapegoats during a time of social and economic upheaval, when Salem was experiencing a change from a deeply religious, agrarian community to a more secular, commercial society. Perhaps people needed someone or something to blame for problems over which they had no control. Most of the women accused did not represent Puritan ideals of womanhood. Some were strong, independent, and spirited women who would rather die than confess to shameful crimes they had not committed. FURTHER READING

Hill, Frances, ed. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Williams, Selma R., and Pamela Williams Adelman. Riding the Nightmare: Women and Witchcraft from the Old World to Colonial Salem. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.


WIVES

See coverture; family life, colonial; family life, republican; feme sole trading acts; marriage laws


WOMEN, STATUS OF

A woman’s status in early British America depended upon multiple elements: gender; race and ethnicity; age; family occupation, income, and wealth; religious affiliation; and social ranking. Disentangling the various components is not always easy. The reader should also keep in mind that a woman might have low social status in one environment but enjoy relatively high status where she lived.

Status of African-American Women Over 15 percent of American women were enslaved in 1790. Their lives, bodies, and children were the property of other Americans, sometimes their own blood relatives. As individuals, they had no legal status whatsoever. Free African-American women represented roughly 2 percent of the population. Excluded from the social life of other free women, many preferred to live in a society of their own. There were several successful free African-American farming communities in southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island;

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free African Americans also created towns within the larger metropolises such as Philadelphia and New York City. Within these enclaves, a woman’s status depended upon that of her household, but she also had a great deal of freedom to develop her own reputation, and hence social status, among her friends and neighbors.

Status of Women in Native American Nations Another large segment of American women, uncounted in the census, lived in national groups within the region that became the “United States” in 1783, but still physically belonged to Native American nations. Within their own borders, Cherokee, Iroquois, Shawnee, Creek, and Choctaw women lived within societies organized into status relationships somewhat different from those of British America.

Status of European Women For the remaining American women, the first determinant of status would be family—her father’s family until marriage, and later her husband’s family and the household of which she became mistress. All women were constrained by legal status similar to that of an underage child today. Through most of her life, a woman would be considered feme covert, Old French for “covered woman,” a woman “hidden” within the household. The male head of the household was the only person legally empowered to conduct transactions in her name. Although the property she brought into marriage was legally hers, all income or property accumulated during marriage belonged to her husband to dispose of as he wished. Widows were exempt from this restriction and functioned freely in the financial world, yet they were generally excluded from voting, serving on juries, or holding office. The law granted married women little or no freedom, but practice differed greatly from family to family, and region to region. As stated in the marriage vows and reinforced throughout the culture, a woman’s first duty was to obey her husband. Both legally and socially, she was his servant; his needs came before hers. Yet virtually all of the religions practiced in British America taught that women had as much access as men to piety, sainthood, or heaven. Even the most masculine-centered religions permitted women to learn to read the Bible. Hence, the culture had built within it a contradiction: as citizens or house-

holders, women were expected to be subservient to the men in their lives; as individuals with souls, they were independent in the eyes of their Maker. Seventeenth-century New England preachers regularly sermonized about women’s natural moral weakness. The husband was the moral head of the family, charged with religious instruction and enforcement in his household. At the same time, a woman who had undergone the deeply personal experience of conversion could be admitted to full membership in the congregation, while her husband remained outside the covenant. Though the culture was patriarchal, there were still avenues through which a woman could gain status independently. The Society of Friends (Quakers) believed in the “inner light” of every individual and permitted women to be lay ministers and traveling missionaries. William Penn’s first Charter for the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania explicitly referred in all cases to both “men and women”; unfortunately, the Board of Trade removed all references to women. The Society was governed by monthly meetings, one for women and one for men. Their duties reflected a clear gender division of responsibilities, but the women’s meeting had a great deal of authority. Since the Friends handled all disputes internally, including business debts and contracts, women were not as constrained by feme covert as in the outside world. For most free American women, the level of attainable respect and decision-making powers fell somewhere between seventeenth-century Puritan culture and the eighteenth-century Society of Friends. The most critical decision of a woman’s life would be the choice of a marriage partner. Though free to make that choice herself, she usually received guidance from family members and friends. There was no way to perfectly predict the outcome, however, and there was little recourse in a bad marriage. If a woman had a strong network of family or friends, she might get them to try to persuade an abuser to change his behavior; she might also move back with her family. Most of the time, however, there was little to do but suffer. Alcoholic, lazy, adulterous husbands and deserters doomed their wives to dependence upon others. Mariners’ wives were the one exception: they were permitted to operate as if they were widows during their husbands’ absence. It is no wonder that those sufficiently wealthy to remain independent in widowhood proved reluctant to risk their independence by remarrying.

WOOD, SALLY SAYWARD BARRELL KEATING

A successful marriage operated as a partnership, if for no other reason than the organizational need to have the women’s productivity coordinated with the men’s. Over 90 percent of Americans lived on farms as late as the 1820s, and most of the women in cities or towns worked together with their husbands in artisanal, shopkeeping, or tavernkeeping households. The wealthy in every region held the highest status, but most communities consisted of small farmers of roughly equal rank. A woman’s social status usually derived first from her father’s family; if they were well known in the region as productive, honest, and hardworking, she would begin with a higher status than someone coming in unknown to the community. When she married, her status derived from her husband’s station in life and his family’s status. Families went to great lengths to match up comparable partners; marriage among cousins occurred not merely because of proximity, but also security. On a farm, a woman made and repaired clothes; prepared food; tended a garden with chickens and geese, pigs, and milk cows; made butter and cheese, sausages, and salted meat; and cared for small children and invalids. As long as the husband kept the male side functioning, a woman’s success in her arena was necessary to maintaining or improving the status of the family—and thus her own. Since most of men’s work was also unpaid, women received recognition for productivity on a level nonfarming women would lose in the nineteenth century. A woman could also achieve individual respect in her role as a networker: being good at mediating disputes; helping families in trouble; and sharing skills and information about household tasks and medicine with younger women. After the Revolution, women gained significant educational opportunities and recognition for their intelligence. However, as firms and men’s professional organizations took over the organization of the economy, women lost economic choices previously available to them. On balance, it is difficult to determine whether women’s status improved or worsened by the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the status of women in early British America was ambiguous. Women were constrained by a legal system that rendered them invisible and by a culture that expected a daughter’s obedience and a wife’s submission. At the same time, the roles most women played in society and the economy required a level of independence incompatible with total subservience to men. Religion preached both

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inferiority and equality. When a strong woman’s network was present, women were awarded levels of status among each other, which may have been the most important to a woman. Nevertheless, it was a very different life from that offered to men. Mary M. Schweitzer See also: Church Membership; Coverture; Divorce Laws; Feme Sole Trader Acts; Widowhood. FURTHER READING

Amott, Teresa, and Julie Matthaei. Race, Gender and Work. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Eldridge, Larry D., ed. Women and Freedom in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Hoff-Wilson, Joan. “The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution.” In Alfred E. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1976. Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. . Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Knopf, 1996. Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Schweitzer, Mary M. Custom and Contract: Households, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Smith, Merrill D. Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730–1830. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Wulf, Karin A. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

WOOD, SALLY SAYWARD
BARRELL KEATING

(1759–1855) Maine’s first female novelist. Sally Wood published four novels anonymously, each characterized by strong moralizing enlivened with small bits of gothic horror. One novel was later published un-

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der her name. Better known as Madame Wood, Keating continued to write in the style of sentimental fiction established earlier by novelist Susanna Haswell Rowson. Sally Barrell was born in York, Maine, to Lieutenant Nathaniel Barrell and Sally Sayward Barrell. The oldest of 11 children, she grew up in relative comfort in the mansion of her grandfather (a successful seaman and judge) in York Harbor, Maine. Her father became a leading merchant and sympathized with the British during the American Revolution. Sally, on the other hand, supported the patriots. She married Richard Keating in 1778, and they had three children. Her husband died five years later from a fever. Sally Keating spent the next 21 years in widowhood, raising her children and writing four novels. In 1804, Keating married General Abiel Wood, a prominent citizen of Wiscasset, Maine. After her husband’s death in 1811, Wood wrote what is considered her best novel, Tales of the Night. In this work, Wood describes the people, climate, and scenery of Maine. Wood later lived with her son Richard Keating in New York City and then with a granddaughter in Kennebunk, Maine, until her death at the age of 95.


WRIGHT, LUCY

(1760–1821) Shaker leader. In 1787 Lucy Wright was named successor to Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. Wright led the sect during its period of greatest growth, from 1787 until her death in 1821. Wright was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to John and Mary Robbins Wright. At the age of 19, she married Elizur Goodrich, a merchant from the neighboring town of Richmond. Wright and her husband became Shakers and decided to remain celibate. They moved to Ann Lee’s Shaker Watervliet settlement and were housed in separate men’s and women’s quarters. Wright chose to use only her maiden name. Upon Ann Lee’s death, Wright began sharing leadership of the Shakers with Father Joseph Meacham. Wright and Meacham gathered Shaker believers into one community at New Lebanon. This new church community became the model for ten other Shaker communities in New England and New York. Meacham died in 1796, and Wright continued as the sole leader of the Shakers. She sent out mis-

sionaries, which led to the establishment of seven Shaker communities in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Wright also authorized the publication of the primary book on Shaker theology, Benjamin S. Young’s The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing (1808). Wright introduced new, livelier songs and more animated dances into Shaker worship. Schools that Wright established for the Children’s Order became highly respected even outside the Shaker community. Wright died at the age of 61 and was buried beside the grave of Ann Lee at the Shaker Cemetery near Albany, New York.

WRIGHT, PATIENCE
LOVELL

(1725–1786) North America’s first professional sculptor. Patience Lovell Wright sculpted mainly in wax, creating likenesses of well-known living people. Her work predates that of Madame Tussaud, the famous French wax sculptor. Wright was also interested in politics and aided the Americans by passing secret information hidden in her wax figures during the American Revolution. Patience Lovell was born in Bordentown, New Jersey to John and Patience Townsend Lovell. John Lovell was a prosperous farmer, a principled Quaker, and a vegetarian. He insisted that his seven children dress in white from head to toe. In her early twenties, Lovell left her family to move to Philadelphia. There she married a cooper named Joseph Wright in 1748. The couple had five children. Joseph died while Patience was pregnant with their last child. Facing widowhood alone with five children, Wright took stock of her assets and talents. While working with pastry in her kitchen, she realized she had a talent for sculpting. She began working with wax, a cheap and easily available material. Her work quickly gained popularity. By 1772 Wright had created a traveling wax sculpture exhibit. Wright’s sister, Rachel Wells, helped Wright with her growing business. Wright created likenesses of well-known living people, such as the king and queen of England, rather than focus on dead historical, criminal, or literary figures as other sculptors were doing at the time. Wright’s work was especially popular in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. In 1771 a fire destroyed much of Wright’s New York exhibit. Shortly thereafter, she decided to ex-

WRIGHT, SUSANNA

Patience Lovell Wright’s wax sculptures were famous for their lifelike quality.

pand her business to England. She sailed for London in February 1772. Wright received acclaim for her wax works in London from many famous people, such as Benjamin Franklin and King George III and Queen Charlotte of England, whom Wright, in Quaker style, called simply “George” and “Charlotte.” Franklin introduced Wright to other eminent people, including historian Catherine Macaulay, political leader John Sawbridge, and painter Benjamin West. Wright created their likenesses in wax, along with those of noblemen, actors, and scholars. Wright’s talent for novelty and her unusual technique made her sculptures far superior to those of her London competitor, Mrs. Salmon. Besides being a noted artist, Wright was an American patriot. She developed many friendships with British and colonial leaders. During the Revolutionary War, she passed along secret information to members of Congress. John Hancock commended Wright for her efforts. Wright concealed information helpful to the Americans inside a wax sculpture of Lord North that she sent to her sister who was operating Wright’s wax museum in Philadelphia. Wright also opened her London house to American prisoners of war.

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In 1780 a scandal arose when Wright’s son Joseph exhibited his artwork at the Royal Academy. One of his portraits depicted his mother modeling a wax head. Spectators were shocked when they discovered that the wax head she was working on was that of Charles I and the two onlookers in the painting were the current king and queen. England’s King Charles I had been beheaded in 1649. Amidst the scandal, Wright traveled to Paris to introduce her sculptures, but her work never found an audience in the city where Philippe Curtius, uncle of Madame Tussaud, had already established a successful wax museum. Wright returned to London in 1781, only to discover that her popularity there had waned. She made preparations to move back to North America, commenting that she could not be “content to have her bones laid in London.” However, Wright died suddenly in 1786 after a serious fall. Wright’s sister continued to exhibit Wright’s sculptures until her own death ten years later. One of Wright’s most famous wax figures, that of Lord Chatham, was the first American work to be displayed in Westminster Abbey, where it still stands. FURTHER READING

Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.


WRIGHT, SUSANNA

(1697–1784) Poet, amateur physician, clerk, and silk farmer. Dubbed a “Renaissance Woman,” Susanna Wright accumulated a large library, spoke fluent French, wrote poetry, and treated her neighbors’ ills with medicinal herbs and remedies. In 1771 Wright won ten pounds for raising the largest number of silkworms in America. Susanna Wright was born to John Wright and Patience Gibson Wright in Manchester, England. John Wright, a Quaker, brought his family of nine to Pennsylvania in 1714. After Susanna’s mother died in 1722, she helped run her father’s ferry boats on the Susquehanna. Wright’s Ferry was a major frontier crossing and later became Columbia, Pennsylvania. Wright worked in her father’s business until 1745 when she was bequeathed a large home by a

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neighbor, Samuel Blunston. Although they never married, it is believed that Wright and Blunston were in love. Wright began producing silk from the silkworms she raised in mulberry trees on her farm. She produced the first pair of silk stockings in the province. Benjamin Franklin presented a dress spun from Wright’s silk to Queen Charlotte of England.

Wright was well known for her intellectual abilities. She accumulated a large library from books supplied by prominent Pennsylvanians like James Logan, Benjamin Franklin, and Isaac Norris. Wright served as clerk in her community, writing out wills, deeds, and indentures. She also helped settle land disputes and other legal matters, serving as arbiter and magistrate until her death in 1784.

Z
ZANE, ELIZABETH ‘‘BETTY’’

(1766?–1831?) Hero of the American Revolution. Betty Zane carried gunpowder to replenish supplies during an attack by Native Americans on Fort Henry in 1782, near the end of the Revolutionary War. While others took cover in the fort, Zane ran nearly 50 yards through gunfire to the home of her brother Colonel Ebenezer Zane to get more ammunition. Zane’s exact birthplace and birth date are uncertain. It is believed she was reared in Hardy County in present-day West Virginia. Her father, William Zane, also had four sons. Nothing is known about her mother.

According to several accounts, including the book Betty Zane by descendant Zane Grey, as Betty ran from Fort Henry to her brother’s house, Native American warriors yelled “Squaw, squaw” and they stopped shooting. However, when she returned to the fort with the gunpowder tied to her waist in a tablecloth, they opened fire on her. Zane’s clothes were pierced, but she was unharmed. With more gunpowder, the fort was able to hold out until help arrived three days later. Zane had five daughters with her first husband, John McGloughlin. After his death, she married Jacob Clark, with whom she had two children. She lived on a farm in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, until her death at about the age of 65.

Part 3 Documents

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Excerpts from

Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London (1619– 1624) Jamestown was initially settled in 1607 by men. Families would be important in the new Jamestown colony, not only for the propagation of the people but also for economic and labor division. Although there were some women living in Jamestown, the Virginia Company of London sought to provide wives for the mostly male population. According to the members, the settlement could not thrive until families were “ planted” on the soil. About 1619 the Virginia Company sent the first “ bride ship” to Jamestown. After the introduction of women, children soon followed. The following excerpts, which are from recorded minutes of a meeting held by the Virginia Company of London, present contemporary thoughts of the early colonists about the women and children.



The third roll was for sending of maids to Virginia to be made wives, which the planters there did very much desire, by the want of whom have sprang the greatest hindrances of the encrease of the plantation, in that most of them esteeming Virginia not as a place of habitation, but only of a short sojourning, have applyed themselves and their labours wholly to the raising of present profi t, and utterly neglected, not only staple commodities, but even the very necessities of man’s life, in regard whereof, and to prevent so great an inconveniency hereafter, whereby the planters’ mind may by fast tyed to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children, care has been taken to provide them young, handsome and honestly educated maids, whereof sixty are already sent to Virginia, being such as were specially recommended unto the Company for their good bringing up by their parents or friends of good worth; which maids are to be disposed in marriage to the most honest and industrious planters, who are to defray and satisfye, to the adventurers the charge of their passages and provisions at such rates as they and the adventurers’ agents there shall agree; and in case any of them fail through mortality it is ordered that a proportionate addition shall be made upon the rest. In furtherance of which Christian action, divers of the said adventurers had underwrit divers good sums of money, none under 8, whereby the whole sum of that roll did already amount to 800, as may appear by the subscriptions. The demand of the city, read the last court, concerning the hundred children, being much distasted of this Company, being such as were repugnant to the standing orders, which could no way be dispensed with, therefore the committees have rectifi ed and corrected the copy so far forth as may stand with the orders to

In the 1600s, distasted was a common way of expressing displeasure or even disgust.

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admit, and have written a letter to the Lord Mayor from the chief of the Council, agreeing to send the letter and return the altered copy to-morrow morning to the court of Aldermen, requiring Sir Thomas Wroth and Mr. Gibbs to deliver them, and require their speedy resolutions, because the speedy departure of the ship will suffer no delay, this following being the true copy. Whereas, The number of one hundred children, whose names are hereafter mentioned, were the last spring sent and transported by the Virginia Company from the city of London unto Virginia, and towards the charge for the transportation and appareling of the same one hundred children a collection of the sum of fi ve hundred pounds was made of divers well and godly disposed persons, charitably minded towards the plantation in Virginia, dwelling within the city of London and suburbs thereof, and thereupon the said fi ve hundred pounds was paid unto the said Company for the purpose aforesaid. And thereupon, for the good of the same children, and in consideration of the premises, it is fully concluded, ordered and decreed by and at a general quarter-court, this day holden by the Treasurer, Council and Company of Virginia, that every of the same children which are now living at the charges, and by the provision of the said Virginia Company, shall be educated and brought up in some good trade and profession, whereby they may be enable to get their living, and maintain themselves when they shall attain their several ages of four-and-twenty years, or be out of their apprenticeships, which shall endure at the least seven years if they so long live. And further, that every of the same children that is to say, the boys at their ages of one-and-twenty years or upwards, and the maids or girls at their age of one-and-twenty years, or day of marriage, which shall fi rst happen, shall have freely given and allotted unto them fi fty acres of land apiece in Virginia aforesaid within the limits of the English plantation, the said acres to be appointed according to the statute de terris mesurandis in England, and that in convenient place or places to hold in fee simple by socage tenure to every of them and their heirs forever, freely at the rent of 12d. by the year, in full of all rents or other payment or service due unto the Lord, therefore to be rendered or done. If the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council shall not be satisfi ed with the Company’s reasons (who desire that some of themselves may be admitted to alledge them), that it is better for the former children to have the same conditions with these latter, the Company will let it pass for this time, yet, with this protestation, that as it is not benefi cial to the children, so it is the extreme wrong and prejudice of the whole plantation. And whereas, also, it is intended and fully resolved that this next spring the number of one hundred children more, whose names are likewise hereafter mentioned, shall be sent and transported by the said Virginia Company out of the city of London unto Virginia aforesaid, and that towards the charge of transporting and appareling the same children, the like collection of fi ve hundred pounds, of men godly and charitably disposed towards the said plantation,

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Appareling meant that a sufficient supply of clothing would be provided for and shipped with the children.

De terris mesurandis is Latin for about measuring land. Socage tenure refers to an agreement between a lord and a tenant in which the tenant is allowed to hold land in exchange for services to the lord of the land. d. stands for denarium, which is Latin for penny.

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which do reside within the said city and the suburbs thereof, is to be made, and, upon collecting thereof, the same shall be paid to the Virginia Company for the purpose aforesaid: Now, therefore, for the good of the same children, and in consideration of the premises, it is fully concluded and ordered and decreed at a great and general quarter-court, this day holden by the Treasurer, Council and Company of Virginia, that the said hundred children last mentioned shall be sent at the Virginia Company’s charge, and during their voyage shall have their provision sweet and good and well appareled, and all other things necessary for the voyage, and that every of the same children shall be there placed apprentices with honest and good masters that is to say, the boys for the term of seven years or more, so as their apprenticeships may expire at their several ages of one-and-twenty years or upwards, and the maids or girls for the term of seven years, or until they shall attain their several ages of one-and-twenty years, or be married, to be by the same masters during that time educated and brought up in some good crafts, trades or husbandry, whereby they may be enabled to get their living and maintain themselves when they shall attain their several ages or be out of their apprenticeships, and during their apprenticeships shall have all things provided for them as shall be fi t and requisite, as meat, drink, apparel, and other necessaries. And further, that at the expiration of their several apprenticeships, every of the said children shall have freely given unto them and provided for them at the said Company’s charge provision of corn for victuals for one whole year, and shall also have a house ready built to dwell in, and be placed as a tenant in some convenient place upon so much land as they can manage; and shall have one cow and as much corn as he or she will plant, and forty shillings to apparel them, or apparel to that value; and shall also have convenient weapons, munition and armour for defence, and necessary implements and utensils for household, and sufficient working tools and instruments for their trades, labour and husbandry in such sort as other tenants’ are provided for. Moreover, that every of the said children last mentioned which shall have thus served their apprenticeships, and be placed and provided for as aforesaid, shall be tied to be tenants or farmers in manner and form aforesaid for the space of seven years after their apprenticeships ended, and during that time of their labour and pains therein they shall have half of all the increase, profi t and benefi t that shall arise, grow and increase by the management thereof, as well the fruits of the earth, the increased of the cattle as otherwise, and the other moiety thereof, to go and remain to the owners of the land, in lieu and satisfaction of a rent to be paid for the same land so by them to be occupied, and that at the expiration of the same last seven years every of the said children to be at liberty either to continue tenants or farmers of the Company upon the same lands, if they will, at the same rates and in the manner aforesaid, or else provide for themselves elsewhere. And lastly, that either of the same children, at the end of the last seven years, shall have moreover fi ve-and-twenty acres of land,

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Husbandry refers to the skill, usually performed by women, of managing a household to ensure that the household resources are used as efficiently as possible.

Victuals: food. This was a serious concern among people in the Virginia plantation. Most of the original inhabitants died of famine.

Moiety: a portion of something that will be divided, such as an estate, the profits of the estate, the goods produced on the estate, or the animals born on the estate.

A N E X A M I N AT I O N O F M R S . A N N E H U T C H I N S O N (1637)

to be given and allotted to them in some convenient place or places within English plantations in Virginia aforesaid, to hold in fee simple by socage tenure to every of them and their heirs forever freely, for the rent of 6d. for every fi ve-and-twenty acres by way of quit rent in lieu of all the services in regard of the tenure; all which premises we, the said Treasurer, Council and Company, do order and decree, and faithfully promise shall be justly and truly performed towards the said children according to the true intent and meaning thereof. After the letter the city yielded.”

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Library of Congress. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, 1619– 1624 (pp. 39– 42, 158– 159). Prepared by Conway Robinson. R. A. Brock, ed. Richmond, VA: Virginia Historical Society, 1888.

An excerpt from

An Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson (1637) In November 1637, ANNE HUTCHINSON (c.1591–1643) was “ examined” by John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, and a court of more than 45 ministers and magistrates— all men. They accused her of various “ radical” behaviors, including criticizing church doctrine and questioning the superiority men presumed to derive over women based purely on their gender. In the excerpt that follows from the trial of Anne Hutchinson, note how she matches wits with the church and governmental officials and presents her knowledge of scriptures as equal or nearly so to the religious authorities. Following the trial, she was banished from the Massachusetts colony. She moved her family to Rhode Island and then to New Amsterdam, where she and all but one of her children were killed by Native Americans.



November 1637 The examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson at the court at Newtown. Mr. Winthrop, governor. Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the common wealth and the churches here; you are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are causes of this trouble, and to be nearly joined not only in affinity and affection with some of those the court has taken notice of and passed census upon, but you have spoken divers things as we have been informed very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fi tting for your sex, and notwithstanding that was

Passed census upon: The phrase refers to others already condemned. Census was an early form of the word “ censure” (to find fault or condemn). Comely means pleasing in appearance.

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cried down you have continued the same, therefore we have thought good to send for you to understand how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we may reduce you that so you may become a profi table member here among us, otherwise if you be obstinate in your course that then the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further, therefore I would entreat you to express whether you do not hold and assent in practice to those opinions and factions that have been handled in court already, that is to say, whether you do not justify Mr. Wheelwright’s sermon and the petition. Mrs. Hutchinson. I am called here to answer before you but I hear no things laid to my charge. Gov. I have told you some already and more I can tell you. (Mrs. H.) Name one Sir. Gov. Have I not named some already? Mrs. H. What have I said or done? Gov. Why for your doings, this you did harbour and countenance those that are parties in this faction that you have heard of. (Mrs. H.) That is a matter of conscience, Sir. Gov. Your conscience you must keep or it must be kept for you. Mrs. H. Must not I then entertain the saints because I must keep my conscience. Gov. Say that one brother should commit felony or treason and come to his other brother’s house, if he knows him guilty and conceals him he is guilty of the same. It is his conscience to entertain him, but if his conscience comes into act in giving countenance and entertainment to him that hath broken the law he is guilty too. So if you do countenance those that are transgressors of the law you are in the same fact. Mrs. H. What law do they transgress? Gov. The law of God and of the state. Mrs. H. In what particular? Gov. Why in this among the rest, whereas the Lord doth say honour thy father and thy mother. Mrs. H. Ey Sir in the Lord. Gov. This honour you have broke in giving countenance to them. Mrs. H. In entertaining those did I entertain them against any act (for there is the thing) or what God hath appointed? Gov. You knew that Mr. Wheelwright did preach this sermon and those that countenance him in this do break a law. Mrs. H. What law have I broken? Gov. Why the fi fth commandment. Mrs. H. I deny that for he saith in the Lord. Gov. You have joined with them in the faction. Mrs. H. In what faction have I joined with them? Gov. In presenting the petition. Mrs. H. Suppose I had set my hand to the petition what then? Gov. You saw that case tried before. Mrs. H. But I had not my hand in the petition. Gov. You have counseled them.

Cried down was a phrase that meant decried, officially denounced, or held up to reprobation.

Countenance means to express approval or sanction. Wheelwright had preached a sermon that was deemed Antinomian (against the law) and heretical to Puritan doctrine.

Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt honor thy mother and father.

A N E X A M I N AT I O N O F M R S . A N N E H U T C H I N S O N (1637)

Mrs. H. Wherein? Gov. Why in entertaining them. Mrs. H. What breach of Law is that Sir? Gov. Why dishonouring parents. Mrs. H. But put the case Sir that I do fear the Lord and my parents, may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave? Gov. If they be the fathers of the commonwealth, and they of another religion, if you entertain them then you dishonour your parents and are justifi ably punishable. Mrs. H. If I entertain them, as they have dishonoured their parents I do. Gov. No but you by countenancing them above others put honor upon them. Mrs. H. I may put honor upon them as the children of God and as they do honor the Lord. Gov. We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex but only this; you do adhere unto them and do endeavor to set forward this faction and so you do dishonour us. Mrs. H. I do acknowledge no such thing? neither do I think that I ever put any dishonour upon you. Gov. Why do you keep such a meeting at your house as you do every week upon a set day? Mrs. H. It is lawful for me so to do, as it is all your practices and can you find a warrant for yourself and condemn me for the same thing? The ground of my taking it up was, when I first came to this land because I did not go to such meetings as those were, it was presently reported that I did not allow of such meetings but held them unlawful and therefore in that regard they said I was proud and did despise all ordinances, upon that a friend came unto me and told me of it and I to prevent such aspersions took it up, but it was in practice before I came therefore I was not the first. Dept. Gov. I would go a little higher with Mrs. Hutchinson. About three years ago we were all in peace. Mrs. Hutchinson from that time she came hath made a disturbance, and some that came over with her in the ship did inform me what she was as soon as she was landed. I being then in place dealt with the pastor and teacher of Boston and desired them to enquire of her, and then I was satisfi ed that she held nothing different from us, but within half a year after, she had vented divers of her strange opinions and had made parties in the country, and at length it comes that Mr. Cotton and Mr. Vane were of her judgement, but Mr. Cotton hath cleared himself that he was not of that mind, but now it appears by this woman’s meetings that Mrs. Hutchinson hath so forestalled the minds of many by their resort to her meetings that now she hath a potent party in the country. Now if all these things have endangered us as from that foundation and if she in particular hath disparage all our ministers in the land that they have preached a covenant of works, and only Mr. Cotton a covenant of grace, why this is not to

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Vented divers of her strange opinions meant that she had expressed various unusual ideas. Hutchinson had claimed a personal revelation of God during the voyage to Massachusetts.

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be suffered, and therefore being driven to the foundation and it being found that Mrs. Hutchinson is she that hath depraved all the ministers and hath been the cause of what is fallen out, why we must take away the foundation and the building will fall. Mrs. H. I pray Sir prove it that I said they preached nothing but a covenant of works. Dept. Gov. Nothing but a covenant of works, why a Jesuit may preach truth sometimes. Mrs. H. Did I ever say they preached a covenant of works then? Dept. Gov. If they do not preach a covenant of grace clearly, then they preach a covenant of works. Mrs. H. No Sir, one may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another so I said. D. Gov. We are not upon that now but upon position. Mrs. H. Prove this then Sir that you say I said. D. Gov. When they do preach a covenant of works do they preach truth? Mrs. H. Yes Sir, but when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth. D. Gov. I do but ask you this, when the ministers do preach a covenant of works do they preach a way of salvation? Mrs. H. I did not come hither to answer to questions of that sort. D. Gov. Because you will deny the thing. Mrs. H. Ey, but that is to be proved fi rst. D. Gov. I will make it plain that you did say that the ministers did preach a covenant of works. Mrs. H. I deny that. D. Gov. And that you said they were not able ministers of the new testament, but Mr. Cotton only. Mrs. H. If ever I spake that I proved it by God’s word. Court. Very well, very well. Mrs. H. If one shall come unto me in private, and desire me seriously to tell them what I thought of such an one. I must either speak false or true in my answer. D. Gov. Likewise I will prove this that you said the gospel in the letter and words holds forth nothing but a covenant of works. Mrs. H. I deny this for if I should so say I should speak against my own judgement. Mr. Endicot. I desire to speak seeing Mrs. Hutchinson seems to lay something against them that are to witness against her. Gov. Only I would add this. It is well discerned to the court that Mrs. Hutchinson can tell when to speak and when to hold her tongue. Upon the answering of a question which we desire her to tell her thoughts of she desires to be pardoned. Mrs. H. It is one thing for me to come before a public magistracy and there to speak what they would have me to speak and another when a man comes to me in a way of friendship privately there is difference in that. Gov. What if the matter be all one. Mr. Hugh Peters. That which concerns us to speak unto as yet we are sparing in unless the court command us to speak, then we shall

Mr. Cotton refers to John Cotton, a Puritan preacher whom the Hutchinson family had followed to Massachusetts.

A N E X A M I N AT I O N O F M R S . A N N E H U T C H I N S O N (1637)

answer to Mrs. Hutchinson notwithstanding our brethren are very unwilling to answer. Gov. This speech was not spoken in a corner but in a public assembly, and though things were spoken in private yet now coming to us, we are able to deal with them as public . . . Mrs. H. If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true. Being much troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the church of England, I had like to have turned separatist; whereupon I kept a day of solemn humiliation and pondering of the thing; this scripture was brought unto me- he that denies Jesus Christ to be come in the fl esh in antichrist— This I consider of and in considering found that the papists did not deny him to be come in the fl esh, nor we did not deny him-who then was the antichrist? Was the Turk antichrist only? The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfi ed in the thing, the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. He that denies the testament denies the testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of antichrist, and upon did this he discover the ministry unto me and ever since. I bless the Lord he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong. Since that time I confess I have been more choice and he hath let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist and the voice of antichrist, for all those voices are spoken of in scripture. Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord. . . . Mr. Cotton. I should desire to know whether the sentence of the court will bring her to any calamity, and then I would know of her whether she expects to be delivered from that calamity by a miracle or providence of God. Mrs. H. By a providence of God I say I expect to be delivered from some calamity that shall come to me. Gov. The case is altered and will not stand with us now, but I see a marvelous providence of God to bring things to this pass that they are. We have been hearkening about the trial of this thing and now the mercy of God by a providence hath answered our desires and made her to lay open herself and the ground of all these disturbances to be by revelations . . . but all this while there is no use of ministry of the word nor of any clear call of God by his word, but the ground work of her revelations is the immediate revelation of the spirit and not by the ministry of the word, and that is the means by which she hath very much abused the country that they shall look for revelations and are not bound to the ministry of the word, but God will teach them by immediate revelations and this hath been the grounds of all these tumults and troubles, and I would that those were all cut off from us that trouble us, for this is the thing that hath been the root of all the mischief.

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Papists: Roman Catholics

Choice meant worthy of being chosen.

Hutchinson, Thomas. The History of the Province of Massachusets-Bay, from the Charter of King William and Queen Mary in 1691 until the Year 1750. Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1767.

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Excerpts from

Selected Poetry of Anne Bradstreet (1650) Anne Bradstreet’s poems were first published in England in 1650 by her brother-in-law in a volume titled The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. She wrote the poems as personal refl ections on family and religion, intending that they would be shared only with her family— her husband and children. As can be seen in the following selections, she was especially concerned with and anguished over the wellbeing of her children and the hardships of home life in colonial New England. In “ Before the Birth of One of My Children,” Bradstreet reveals inner fears that permeate her verses: Life is precarious and precious; death is inevitable. Bradstreet gives life to her children and leaves them her poetry as her legacy.



TO THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR AND EVER HONOURED FATHER THOMAS DUDLEY, ESQUIRE, WHO DECEASED JULY 31, 1653, AND OF HIS AGE, 77

By duty bound, and not by custom led To celebrate the praises of the dead, My mournful mind, sore pressed, in trembling verse Presents my lamentations at his hearse, Who was my father, guide, instructor too, To whom I ought whatever I could do; Nor is’t relation near by hand shall tie, For who more cause to boast his worth than I? Who heard or saw, observed or knew him better? Or who alive than I, a greater debtor? Let malice bite, and envy know its fi ll, He was my father, and I’ll praise him still; Nor was his name, or life lead so obscure That pity might some trumpeters procure, Who after death might make him falsely seem Such as in life, no man could justly deem; Well known and loved, where e’er he lived, by most Both in his native, and in foreign coast, These to the world his merits could make known, So needs to testimonial from his own; But now or never I must pay my sum; While others tell his worth, I’ll not be dumb; One of thy founders, him New England know, Who stayed thy feeble sides when thou wast low, Who spent his state, his strength, and years with care

Bradstreet’ s father, Thomas Dudley (1576– 1653) was a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He took the family to New England in 1630, founded Cambridge in 1631, and lived for many years in Roxbury. He was elected colonial governor four times and deputygovernor thirteen times.

SELECTED POETRY OF ANNE BR ADSTREET (1650)

That after-comers in them might have share; True patriot of this little commonweal, Who is’t can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal? Truth’s friend thou wert, to errors still a foe, Which caused apostates to malign so; My father’s God, be God of me and mine; Upon the earth he did not build his nest, But as a pilgrim, what he had, possessed; High thoughts he gave no harbor in his heart, Nor honours puffed him up, when he had part: Those titles loathed, which some too much do love, For truly his ambition lay above; His humble mind so loved humility, He left it to his race for legacy: And oft and oft, with speeches mild and wise, Gave his in charge, that jewel rich to prize; No ostentation seen in all his ways, As in the mean ones, of our foolish days, Which all they have, and more still set to view, Their greatness may be judged by what they shew; His thoughts were more sublime, his actions wise, Such vanities he justly did despise; Nor wonder ’twas, low things ne’er much did move For he a mansion had, prepared above, For which he sighed and prayed and longed full sore He might be cloathed upon, for evermore; Oft spake of death, and with a smiling cheer He did exult his end was drawing near, Now fully ripe, as shock of wheat that’s grown, Death as a sickle hath him timely mown, And in celestial barn hath housed him high, Where storms, nor show’rs, nor ought can damnify; His generation served, his labours cease; And to his fathers gathered is in peace; Ah, happy soul, ’mongst saints and angels blest, Who after all his toil, is now at rest; His hoary head in righteousness was found, As joy in Heaven on earth let praise resound; Forgotten never be his memory, His blessing rest on his posterity; His pious footsteps followed by his race, At last will bring us to that happy place Where we with joy each other’s face shall see, And parted more by death shall never be.

BEFORE THE BIRTH OF ONE OF MY CHILDREN All things within this fading world hath end, Adversity doth still our joys attend;

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Apostates are those who renounce or abandon their faith in God.

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No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet, But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet. The sentence past is most irrevocable, A common thing, yet oh inevitable; How soon, my dear, death may my steps attend, How soon it may be thy lot to lose thy friend, We both are ignorant, yet love bids me These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when the knot’s untied that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none; And if I see not half my days that’s due, What nature would, God grant to yours and you; The many faults that well you know I have, Let be interred in my oblivious grave; If any worth or virtue were in me, Let that live freshly in thy memory And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms, Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms: And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains, Look to my little babes my dear remains; And if thou love thy self, or loved’st me These O protect from step dame’s injury; And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse, With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse; And kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake, Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.

TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND If ever two were one, then surely we; If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye women if you can; I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold; My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense; Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold I pray; Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere, That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Bradstreet’ s husband was Simon Bradstreet (1603– 1697), whom she married in England in 1628. As the poem indicates, it was an exceptionally happy marriage.

IN REFERENCE TO MY CHILDREN, 23 JUNE, 1659 I had eight birds hatched in one nest, Four cocks there were, and hens the rest, I nursed them up with pain and care, Nor cost, nor labour did I spare,

Eight birds . . . four cocks . . . and hens the rest refer to Bradstreet’ s eight children, four boys and four girls.

SELECTED POETRY OF ANNE BR ADSTREET (1650)

Till at the last they felt their wing; Mounted the trees and learned to sing; Chief of the brood then took his fl ight, To regions far, and left me quite: My mournful chirps I after send, Till he return, or I do end, Leave not thy nest, thy dam and sire, Fly back and sing amidst this choir; My second bird did take her fl ight, And with her mate fl ew out of sight; Southward they both their course did bend, And seasons twain they there did spend: Till after blown by southern gales, They northward steered with fi lled sails; A prettier bird was no where seen, Along the beach among the treen; I have a third of color white, On whom I place no small delight; Coupled with mate loving and true, Hath also bid her dam adieu: And where Aurora fi rst appears, She now hath perched, to spend her years; One to the Academy fl ew To chat among the learned crew: Ambition moves still in his breast That he might chant above the rest, Striving for more than to do well, That nightingales he might excel; My fi fth, whose down is yet scarce gone Is ’mongst the shrubs and bushes fl own, And as his wings increase in strength, On higher boughs he’ll perch at length; My other three, still with me nest, Until they’re grown, then as the rest, Or here or there, they’ll take their fl ight, As is ordained, so shall they light; If birds could weep, then would my tears Let others know what are my fears Lest this my brood some harm should catch, And be surprised for want of watch, Whilst pecking corn, and void of care They fall un’wares in fowler’s snare: Or whilst on trees they sit and sing, Some untoward boy at them do fl ing: Or whilst allured with bell and glass, The net be spread, and caught, alas; Or least by lime twigs they be foiled, Or by some greedy hawks be spoiled; O would my young, ye saw my breast, And knew what thoughts there sadly rest, Great was my pain when I you bred, Great was my care, when I you fed,

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Chief of the brood refers to the eldest child, Samuel.

Dam is an old spelling of dame, or lady. Second bird refers to daughter Dorothy.

Treen is the old plural form of “ tree” . A third was daughter Sarah Aurora was the Greek goddess of the dawn. The location referred to, therefore, is somewhere to the east. One to the Academy refers to Simon, Jr. My fi fth was son Dudley.

My other three were Hannah, Mercy, and John.

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Long did I keep you soft and warm, And with my wings kept off all harm, My cares are more, and fears than ever, My throbs such now, ’fore were never: Alas my birds, you wisdom want, Of perils you are ignorant, Oft times in grass, on trees, in fl ight, Sore accidents on you may light; O to your safety have an eye So happy may you live and die: Meanwhile my days in tunes I’ll spend Till my weak lays with me shall end; In shady woods I’ll sit and sing, And things that past, to mind I’ll bring; Once young and pleasant, as you are, But former toys (no joys) adieu; My age I will not once lament, But sing, my time so near is spent; And from the top bough take my fl ight, Into a country beyond sight, Where old ones, instantly grow young, And there with seraphims set song: No seasons cold, nor storms they see; But spring lasts to eternity, When each of you shall in your nest Among your young ones take your rest, In chirping language, oft them tell, You had a dam that loved you well, That did what could be done for young, And nursed you up till you were strong, And ’fore she once would let you fl y, She showed you joy and misery; Taught what was good, and what was ill, What would save life, and what would kill? Thus gone, amongst you I may live, And dead, yet speak, and counsel give: Farewell my birds, farewell adieu, I happy am, if well with you.

HERE FOLLOWS SOME VERSES UPON THE BURNING OF MY HOUSE, JULY 10, 1666 COPIED OUT OF A LOOSE PAPER In silent night when rest I took For sorrow near I did not look I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shreiks of dreadful voice;

SELECTED POETRY OF ANNE BR ADSTREET (1650)

That fearful sound of fi re and fi re, Let no man know is my desire. I starting up the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To strengthen me in my distress And not to leave me succourless; Then coming out beheld a space The fl ame consume my dwelling place; And when I could not longer look I blest his Name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust, Yea so it was, and so ’twas just; It was his own, it was not mine; Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft, And yet sufficient for us left; When by the ruins oft I passed My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sat and long did lie: Here stood that trunk, there that chest, There lay that store I counted best; My pleasant things in ashes lie, And them behold no more shall I; Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy table eat a bit; No pleasant tale shall e’er be told Nor things recounted done of old; No candle e’er shall shine in thee Nor bridegroom’s voice e’er heard shall be; In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu; all’s vanity; Then straight I ’gin my heart to chide And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fi x thy hope on mould’ring dust, The arm of fl esh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fl y. Thou hast a house on high erect Framed by that almight Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fl ed; It’s purchased and paid for too By him who hath enough to do; A prize so vast as is unknown Yet by his gift is made thine own; There’s wealth enough I need no more, Farewell my pelf, farewell my store; The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.

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Pelf means wealth or riches. Reprinted from A Woman’s Inner World: Selected Poetry and Prose of Anne Bradstreet (pp. 3– 4, 23, 24– 25 29– 31, 83– 84). Adelaide P. Amore, ed. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982.

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Excerpts from

The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1773) Education, religion, and virtue are common themes in the poems of Phillis Wheatley (c.1753–1784). Brought to America as a small child, she was a first-generation, African slave who received outstanding educational opportunities. “ On Being Brought from Africa to America” refl ects not only her appreciation but also the hope, faith, and religious ideals developed in her New England home. “ To the University of Cambridge” was written when she was only about 13 years old. It celebrates the educational world from science, history, and current events to the religious themes that pervade her verses; it also encourages the “ blooming plants” (students) to beware transgressions and evil. Companion poems “ An Hymn to Morning” and “ An Hymn to Evening” are written in a classical and traditional style. Morning awakes, but the poet regrets the day is so short. Night is soothing and replenishing. The poems are circular, beginning and ending with an address to Aurora (the goddess of the dawn). Wheatley’s only book of poetry was published in 1773.



TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, IN NEW-ENGLAND.1

While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, The muses promise to assist my pen; ’Twas not long since I left my native shore The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom: Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes. Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights Above, to traverse the ethereal space, And mark the systems of revolving worlds. Still more, ye sons of science ye receive The blissful news by messengers from heav’n, How Jesus’ blood for your redemption fl ows. See him with the hands out-stretcht upon the cross; Immense compassion in his bosom glows; He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn: What matchless mercy in the Son of God! When the whole human race by sin had fall’n, He deign’d to die that they might rise again, And share with him in the sublimest skies, Life without death, and glory without end.

1

According to Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge Mass., 1936), pp. 101-32, the students at Harvard during this period had a reputation for boisterousness.

T H E P O E M S O F P H I L L I S W H E AT L E Y (1773)

Improve your privileges while they stay, Ye pupils, and each hour redeem, that bears Or good or bad report of you to heav’n. Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul, By you be shunn’d, nor once remit your guard; Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg. Ye blooming plants of human race devine, An Ethiop tells you ’tis your greatest foe; Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain, And in immense perdition sinks the soul.

ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “ Their colour is a diabolic die.” Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refi n’d, and join th’ angelic train. On yon blest regions fi x thy longing view, Mindless of sublunary scenes below; Ascend the sacred mount, in thought arise, And seek substantial and immortal joys; Where hope receives, where faith to vision springs, And raptur’d seraphs tune th’ immortal strings To strains extatic. Thou the chorus join, And to thy father tune the praise divine.

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Ethiop is an archaic term for Ethiopian, used generically for dark-skinned Africans. Wheatley here is referring to herself, the author of the poem.

Sable here means black.

AN HYMN TO THE MORNING Attend my lays, ye ever honour’d nine, Assist my labours, and my strains refi ne; In smoothest numbers pour the notes along, For bright Aurora now demands my song. Aurora hail, and all the thousand dies, Which deck thy progress through the vaulted skies: The morn awakes, and wide extends her rays, On ev’ry leaf the gentle zephyr plays; Harmonious lays the feather’d race resume, Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted plume. Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display To shield your poet from the burning day: Calliope awake the sacred lyre, While thy fair sisters fan the pleasing fi re: The bow’rs, the gales, the variegated skies In all their pleasures in my bosom rise.

Lays are songs, ballads, or narrative verse. Honour’d nine refers to the classical Greek muses. Aurora was the Greek goddess of the dawn. Dies is a plural form of “ dado,” here referring to the decorations on the lower part of an interior wall. Deck means to bedeck or adorn. Calliope was the muse of epic or lyric poetry.

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See in the east th’ illustriuos king of day! His rising radiance drives the shades away— But Oh! I feel his fervid beams too strong, And scarce begun, concludes th’ abortive song.

AN HYMN TO THE EVENING Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music fl oats. Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dies are spread! But the west glories in the deepest red: So may our breasts with ev’ry virtue glow, The living temples of our God below! Fill’d with the praise of him who gives the light, And draws the sable curtains of the night, Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind, At morn to wake more heav’nly, more refi n’d; So shall the labours of the day begin More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin. Night’s leaden sceptre seals my drousy eyes, Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY GENERAL WASHINGTON

The following LETTER and VERSES, were written by the famous Phillis Wheatly, the African Poetess, and presented to his Excellency Gen. Washington. SIR, I Have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in. I am, Your Excellency’s most obedient humble servant, Phillis Wheatley.

Purl means to embroider with gold or silver thread.

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Providence Oct. 26, 1775. His Excellency Gen. Washington. Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write. While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms, She fl ashes dreadful in refulgent arms, See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan, And nations gaze at scenes before unknown! See the bright beems of heaven’s revolving light Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!

Columbia, from Christopher Columbus, is an exalted term for the United States.

The goddess comes, and she moves divinely fair, Olive and laurel binds her golden hair: Wherever shines this native of the skies, Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise. Muse! bow propitious while my pen relates How pour her armies through a thousand gates: As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms, Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms; Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar, The refl uent surges beat the sounding shore. Or thick as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign, Such, and so many, move the warrior’s train. In bright array they seek the work of war, Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air. Shall I to Washington their praise to recite? Enough thou know’st them in the fi elds of fi ght. Thee, fi rst in the place and honours,—we demand The grace and glory of thy martial band. Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more, Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore! One century scarce preform’d its destin’d round, When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found; And so may you, whoever dares disgrace The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race! Fix’d are the eyes of the nations on the scales, For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails. Anon Britannia droops the pensive head, While round increase the rising hills of dead. Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state! Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. Proceed, great chief, with the virtue on thy side, Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.

Eolus, or Aeolus, was the Greek god of the winds and ruler of the Aeolian Islands.

Reprinted from The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (pp. 52, 73– 75, 164– 165). Julian D. Mason, Jr., ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

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Excerpts from

Selected Letters of the Adams Family (1775– 1776) ABIGAIL ADAMS (1744–1818), a prolific letter-writer and a dedicated wife and mother, was acutely conscious of the great changes taking place in the social and political world in which she lived. Her husband, John Adams (1735–1826), was particularly concerned about declaring independence from England, forming a new government, and drafting its new laws. Following are several letters written at the beginning of the American Revolution that refl ect the sentiment of the times. John, a leading delegate to the Continental Congress, was in Philadelphia, and Abigail was at their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. Of particular interest is Abigail’s suggestion that the government of the newly united colonies be fair and equal to all and that the laws of the new government represent all the people. Abigail urges her husband to “ Remember the Ladies” when working to create the new Republic, to modify the existing English laws that empowered men so that they were also fair to women. It is a foreshadowing of the women’s movement to follow.



Abigail Adams to John Adams

November 27, 1775

. . . I wish I knew what mighty things were fabricating. If a form of Goverment is to be established here what one will be assumed? Will it be left to our assemblies to chuse one? and will not many men have many minds? and shall we not run into Dissentions among ourselves? I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature and that power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give. The great fi sh swallow up the small, and he who is most strenuous for the Rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the perogatives of Goverment. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances. The Building up a Great Empire, which was only hinted at by my correspondent may now I suppose be realized even by the unbelievers. Yet will not ten thousand Difficulties arise in the formation of it? The Reigns of Goverment have been so long slakned, that I fear the people will not quietly submit to those restraints which are necessary for the peace, and security, of the community; if we seperate from Brittain, what Code of Laws will be established. How shall we be governd so as to retain our Liberties? Can any goverment be free which is not admistred by general stated Laws? Who shall frame these Laws? Who will give them force and en-

Fabricating is used here to mean “ taking shape.”

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ergy? Tis true your Resolution[s] as a Body have heithertoo had the force of Laws. But will they continue to have? When I consider these things and the prejudices of people in favour of Ancient customs and Regulations, I feel anxious for the fate of our Monarchy or Democracy or what ever is to take place. I soon get lost in a Labyrinth of perplexities, but whatever occurs, may justice and righteousness be the Stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted, by patience and perseverance . . .

Abigail Adams to John Adams

Braintree, March 31, 1776

. . . I feel very differently at the approach of spring to what I did a month ago. We knew not then whether we could plant or sow with safety, whether when we had toild we could reap the fruits of our own industery, whether we could rest in our own Cottages, or whether we should not be driven from the sea coasts to seek shelter in the wilderness, but now we feel as if we might sit under our own vine and eat the good of the land . . . . . . —I long to hear that you have declared an independancy— and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thouroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

John Adams to Abigail Adams

April 14, 1776

. . . As to Declarations of Independency, be patient . . . As to your extraodinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the fi rst Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown dis-

Vassals were persons under the protection of, and subservient to, a feudal lord.

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contented. —This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out. Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go far, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fi ght. Abigail Adams to John Adams

May 7, 1776

I can not say that I think you very generous to the ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipation to all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken (and notwithstanding all you wise laws and maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.

The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762– 1784 (pp. 111, 120– 123). L. H. Butterfield, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

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The Gleaner (1798) As the laws for the newly formed country were being created, men’s rights were more and more favored over women’s. Early advocates of women’s rights often focused on education and equality. Reading the essay of JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY (1751–1820) reveals a highly literate woman with a pronounced understanding of history and an eloquent command of language. Murray has been referred to as a “ true historian of women.” In her writing, she stresses the talents of women above and beyond domestic arts and obligations. The following excerpt from The Gleaner (1798) presents some accomplishments of women and the urgent message to readers to persevere in the “ establishment of the female intellect . . . equal to men.”



And, fi rst, by way of exordium, I take leave to congratulate my fair country-women, on the happy revolution which the few past years has made in their favour; that in these infant republics, where, within my remembrance, the use of the needle was the principal attainment which was thought necessary for a woman, the lovely profi cient is now permitted to appropriate a moiety of her time to studies of a more elevated and elevating nature. Female academies are every where establishing, and right pleasant is the appellation to my ear. Yes, in this younger world, “ the Right of Women” begin to be understood; we seem, at length, determined to do justice to THE SEX; and, improving on the opinions of a Wollstonecraft, we are ready to contend for the quantity, as well as quality, of mind. The younger part of the female world have now an inestimable prize put into their hands; and it depends on the rising generation to refute a sentiment, which, still retaining its advocates, grounds its arguments on the incompatibility of the present enlarged plan of female education, with those necessary occupations, that must ever be considered as proper to the department and comprised in the duties of a judiciously instructed and elegant woman; and, if our daughters will combine their efforts, converts to the regulations will every day multiply among us. To argue against facts, is indeed contending with both wind and tide; and, borne down by accumulating examples, conviction of the utility of the present plans will pervade the public mind, and not a dissenting voice will be heard. I may be accused of enthusiasm; but such is my confi dence in THE SEX, that I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history. They will oppose themselves to every trivial and unworthy monopolizer of time; and it will be apparent, that the adoring their person is not with them a primary object. They will know how to appreciate personal advantages; and, considering them as bestowed by Nature, or Nature’s God, they will hold them in due estimation: Yet, conscious that they confer no intrinsic

An exordium is the introduction to a discourse or essay.

Moiety is a portion roughly equal to half.

Wollstonecraft refers to the English writer and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759– 1797).

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excellence on the temporary possessor, their admeasurement of real virtue will be entirely divested of all those prepossessing ideas, which originate in a beautiful exterior. The noble expansion conferred by a liberal education will teach them humility, for it will give them a glance of those vast tracts of knowledge which they can never explore, until they are accommodated with far other powers than those at present assigned them; and they will contemplate their removal to a higher order of beings, as desirable event. Mild benignity, with all the modest virtues, and every sexual grace—these they will carefully cultivate; for they will have learned, that in no character they can so effectually charm, as in that in which nature designed them the pre-eminence. They will accustom themselves to refl ection; they will investigate accurately, and reason will point their conclusions: Yet they will not be assuming; the characteristic trait will still remain; and retiring sweetness will insure them that consideration and respect, which they do not presume to demand. Thinking justly will not only enlarge their minds, and refi ne their ideas; but it will correct their dispositions, humanize their feelings, and present them the friends of theirs species. The beauteous bosom will no more become a lurking-place for invidious and rancorous passions; but the mild temperature of the soul will be evinced by the benign and equal tenour of their lives. Their manners will be unembarassed; and, studious to shun even the semblance of pedantry, they will be careful to give to their most systematic arguments and deductions, an unaffected and natural appearance. They will rather question than assert; and they will make their communications on a supposition, that the point in discussion has rather escaped the memory of those with whom they converse, than that it was never imprinted there. It is true, that every faculty of their minds will be occasionally engrossed by the most momentous concerns; but as often as necessity or propriety shall render it incumbent on them, they will cheerfully accommodate themselves to the more humble duties which their situation imposes. When their sphere of action is enlarged, when they become wives and mothers, they will fi ll with honour the parts allotted them. . . . They will be primarily solicitous to fulfi l, in every instance, whatever can justly be denominated duty; and those intervals, which have heretofore been devoted to frivolity, will be appropriated to pursuits, calculated to inform, enlarge, and sublime the soul—to contemplations, which will ameliorate the heart, unfold and illumine the understanding, and gradually render the human being an eligible candidate for the society of angels. Such, I predict, will be the daughters of Columbia; and my gladdened spirit rejoices in the prospect. A sensible and informed woman—companionable and serious—possessing also a facility of temper, and united to a congenial mind—blest with competency— and rearing to maturity a promising family of children—Surely, the wide globe cannot produce a scene more truly interesting. See! the virtues are embodied—the domestic duties appear in their place, and they are all fulfi lled—morality is systematized by religion, and sublimed by devotion—every movement is the offspring of elegance,

Daughters of Columbia means women of the United States.

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and their manners have received the highest polish. . . . Such is the family of reason—of reason, cultivated and adorned by literature. The idea of the incapability of women, is we conceive, in this enlightened age, totally inadmissible; and we have concluded, that establishing the expediency of admitting them to share the blessings of equality, will remove every obstacle to their advancement. In proportion as nations have progressed in the arts of civilization, the value of THE SEX hath been understood, their rank in the scale of being ascertained, and their consequence in society acknowledged. But if prejudice still fortifi es itself in the bosom of any; if it yet enlisteth its votaries against the said despot and its followers, we produce, instead of arguments, a number of well attested facts, which the student of female annals hath carefully compiled. Women, circumscribed in their education within very narrow limits, and constantly depressed by their occupations, have, nevertheless, tinged the cheek of manhood with a guilty suffusion, for a pusillanimous capitulation with the enemies of their country. Quitting the loom and the distaff, they have beheld, with indignation, their husbands and their sons fl ee in battle: With clasped hands, and determined resolution, they have placed themselves in their paths, obstructing their passage, and insisting, with heroic fi rmness, on their immediate return to death or conquest! . . . Women, in the heat of action, have mounted the rampart with undaunted courage, arrested the progress of the foe, and bravely rescued their besieged dwellings! They have successfully opposed themselves to tyranny and the galling yoke of oppression! Assembling in crowds, they have armed themselves for the combat—they have mingled amid the battling ranks—they have sought heroically— and their well-timed and well-concerted measures have emancipated their country! They have hazarded the stroke of death in its most frightful form, and they have submitted to bonds and imprisonment, for the redemption of their captive husbands! . . . Women have publickly harangued on religion—they have presented themselves as disputants—they have boldly supported their tenets—they have been raised to the chair of philosophy, and of law—they have written fl uently in Greek, and have read with great facility the Hebrew language. Youth and beauty, adorned with every feminine grace, and possessing eminently the powers of rhetoric, have pathetically conjured the mitred fathers and the Christian monarchs to arm themselves for the utter extirpation of the enemies of their holy religion. In the days of knight-errantry, females, elevated by the importance with which they were invested, discriminated unerringly between the virtues and the vices, studiously cultivating the one, and endeavouring to exterminate the other; and their attainments equalled the heroism of there admirers; their bosoms glowed with sentiments as sublime as those they originated; generosity marked their elections; the impassioned feelings, the burst of tenderness, were invariably blended with honour; and every expression, every movement, was descriptive of the general enthusiasm. Pride, heroism, extravagant attachments; these were common to both sexes. Great enterprizes, bold adventures,

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Votaries: adherents or devotees.

A distaff is a stick used to hold flax or wool for spinning. The term came to be synonymous with the work of women. Used as an adjective, it refers to the maternal or feminine.

Mitred fathers refers to patriarchs of the church. The miter (or mitre), a liturgical cap worn by popes and bishops, is a classic symbol of the power of the church.

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incridible bravery—in every thing the women partook the colour of the times; and their taste and their judgment were exactly conformed. Thus the sexes are congenial; they are copyists of each other; and their opinions and their habits are elevated or degraded, animated or depressed, by precisely the same circumstances. The Northern nations have generally been in the habit of venerating the Female Sex. Constantly employed in bending the bow, in exploring the haunts of those animals, who were the victims of their pleasures and their passions, or of urging against their species the missive shafts of death, they nevertheless banished their ferocity, and assumed the mildest manners, when associating with their mothers, their sisters, their mistresses, or their wives. In their ample forests, their athletic frames and sinewy arms were nerved for battle, while the smiles of some lovely woman were the meed of valour; and the hero who aspired to the approbation of the beautiful arbitress of his fate, authorized his wishes, and established his pretensions, by eminent virtue, and a long series of unbroken attention. A persuasion, that the common Father of the universe manifests himself more readily to females than to males, has, at one period or another, obtained, more or less, in every division of the globe. The Germans, the Britons, and the Scandinavians—from these the supposition received an early credence. The Grecian women delivered oracles—the Romans venerated the Sibyls—among the people of God, the Jewish women prophesied—the predictions of the Egyptian matron were much respected—and we were assured, that the most barbarous nations referred to their females, whatever they fancied beyond the reach of human efforts: And hence we fi nd women in possession of the mysteries of religion, the arcana of physic, and the ceremonies of incantation. Writers assert, that several nations have ascribed to women the gift of prescience, conceiveing that they possessed qualities approximating to divinity; and the ferocious German, embosomed in his native woods, renders a kind of devotional reverence to the Female Sex. Such is the character of those periods, when women were invested with undue elevation; and the reverse presents THE SEX in a state of humiliation, altogether as unwarrantable. The females among the savages of our country, are represented as submitting to the most melancholy and distressing oppression; slaves to the ferocious passions and irregular appetites of those tyrannical usurpers, who brutally and cruelly outrage their feelings. They encounter for their support, incredible hardships and toils. Thus have THE SEX continued the sport of contingencies; unnnaturally subjected to extremes; alternately in the mount of exaltation, and in the valley of unmerited degradation. Is it wonderful, then, that they evince so little stability of character? Rather, is it not astonishing, that their attainments are so numerous, and so considerable? Turning over the annals of different ages, we have selected a number of names, which we purpose, . . . as vouchers of THE SEX’S merit; nor can we doubt, that their united suffrages will, on a candid investigation, effectually establish the female right to that equality with their brethren, which, it is conceived, is assigned them in the Order of Nature.

Meed is an archaic term for reward or payment. Arbitress: feminized form of “ arbiter,” a person who decides or determines.

Sibyls, in classical mythology, were female prophets originally inspired by Apollo. In the 6th century B.C., they were said to have offered nine books of prophecy on the destiny of Rome.

Murray, Judith Sargent. The Gleaner. Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798.

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An excerpt from

History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) believed that a new historical review of the American struggle for independence was due. She began the task in the 1770s and in 1805 she published her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. This three-volume work provides valuable, firsthand accounts of events and people who played significant roles in the cause of independence. In her introduction to Volume 1, Warren was hesitant about her ability to write an adequate history, but she nevertheless believed it was her duty to undertake the momentous task.



History, the deposite of crimes, and the record of every thing disgraceful or honorary to mankind, requires a just knowledge of character, to investigate the sources of action; a clear comprehension, to review the combination of causes; and precision of language, to detail the events that have produced the most remarkable revolutions. To analyze the secret springs that have effected the progressive changes in society; to trace the origin of the various modes of government, the consequent improvements in science, in morality, or the national tincture that marks the manners of the people under despotic or more liberal forms, is a bold and adventureous work . . . The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid, and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated. Many who fi rst stepped forth in vindication of the rights of human nature are forgotten, and the causes which involved the thirteen colonies in confusion and blood are scarcely known, amidst the rage of accumulation and the taste for expensive pleasures that have since prevailed; a taste that has abolished that mediocrity which once satisfi ed, and that contentment which long smiled in every countenance. Luxury, the companion of young acquired wealth, is usually the consequence of opposition to, or close connexion with, opulent commercial states. Thus the hurry of spirits, that ever attends the eager pursuit of fortune and a passion for splendid enjoyment, leads to the forgetfulness; and thus the inhabitants of America cease to look back with due gratitude and respect on the fortitude and virtue of their ancestors, who, through difficulties almost insurmountable, planted them in a happy soil. But the historian and the philosopher will ever venerate the memory of those pious and independent gentlemen, who, after suffering innumerable impositions, restrictions, and penalties, less for political, than

Tincture is an old term for dye, ink, or coloring substance. It came to mean a characteristic quality or active principle.

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theological opions, left England, not as adventurers for wealth or fame, but for the quiet enjoyment of religion and liberty. The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations, and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization. They have been equally conspicious in the decline of Roman virtue, and in the dark pages of British story. It was there principles that overtuned that ancient republic. It was these principles that frequently involved England in civil feuds. It was the resistance to them that brought one of their monarchs to the block, and struck another from his throne. It was the prevalence of them that drove the fi rst settlers of America from elegant habitations and affluent circumstances, to seek an asylum in the cold and uncultivated regions of the western world. Oppressed in Britain by despotic kings, and persecuted by prelatic fury, they fl ed to a distant country, where the desires of men were bounded by the wants of nature; where civilization had not created those artifi cial cravings which too frequently break over every moral and religious tie for their gratifi cation. . . . The independency with which these colonists acted; the high promise of future advantage from the beauty and fertility of the country; and, as was observed soon after, “ the prosperoius state of their settlements, made it to be considered by the heads of the puritan party in England, many of whom were men of the fi rst rank, fortune and abilities, as the sanctuary of liberty.” The order above alluded to, indeed prevented the embarkation of the Lords Say and Brook, the Earl of Warwick, of Hampden, Pym, and many others, who, despairing of recovering their civil and religious liberty on their native shore, had determined to secure it by a retreat to the New World, as it was then called. Patents were purchased by others, within a short period after the present, who planted the thirteen American colonies with a successful hand. Many circumstances concurred to awaken the spirit of adventure, and to draw out men, inured to softer habits, to encounter the difficulties and dangers of planting themselves and families in the wilderness. After a long and hazardous voyage, they landed on the borders of inhospitable wilderness, in the dreary month of December, amidst the horrors of a North America winter. They were at fi rst received by the savage inhabitants of the country with a degree of simple humanity: They smoked with them the calumet of peace; purchased a tract of the uncultivated waste; hutted on the frozen shore, sheltered only by the lofty forest, that had been left for ages to thicken under the rude hand of time. From this small beginning was laid the stable foundations of those extensive settlements, that have since spread over the fairest quarter of the globe. It is natural to suppose a society of men who had suffered so much from a spirit of religious bigotry, would have stretched a lenient hand towards any who might differ from themselves, either in mode or opinion, with regard to the worship of the Deity. But from a strange propensity in human nature to reduce every thing within the vortex of their own ideas, the same intolerant and persecuting spirit, from which they had so recently fl ed, discovered itself in those bold ad-

Prelatic fury: the anger of prelates, or high church officials.

This passage refers to English nobles and parliamentarians who opposed Charles I in the 1630s and took refuge in America. Later, back in England, they became key figures in the English civil war.

The calumet was a long peace pipe, with a wooden stem and stone bowl, used by North American Indians.

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venturers, who had braved the dangers of the ocean and planted themselves in a wilderness, for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. In the cool moments of refl ection, both humanity and philosophy revolt at the diabolical disposition, that has prevailed in almost every country, to persecute such as either from education or principle, from caprice or custom, refuse to subscribe to the religious creed of those, who, by various adventitious circumstances, have acquired a degree of superiority or power. It is rational to believe that the benevolent Author of nature designed universal happiness as the basis of his works. Nor is it unphilosophical to suppose the difference in human sentiment, and the variety of opinions among mankind, may conduce to this end. They may be permitted, in order to improve the faculty of thinking, to draw out the powers of the mind, to exercise the principles of candor, and learn us to wait, in a becoming manner, the full disclosure of the system of divine government. Thus, probably, the variety in the formation of the human soul may appear to be such, as to have rendered it impossible for mankind to think exactly in the same channel. The contemplative and liberal minded man must, therefore, blush for the weakness of his own species, when he sees any of them endeavouring to circumscribe the limits of virtue and happiness within his own contracted sphere, too often darkened by superstition and bigotry. The modern improvements in society, and the cultivation of reason, which has spread its benign infl uence over both the European and the American world, have nearly eradicated this persecuting spirit; and we look back, in both countries, mortifi ed and ashamed of the illiberality of our ancestors . . . The religious bigotry of the fi rst planters, and the temporary ferments it had occasioned, subsided, and a spirit of candor and forbearance every where took place. They seemed, previous to the rupture with Britain, to have acquired that just and happy medium between the ferocity of a state of nature, and those high stages of civilization and refi nement, that at once corrupt the heart and sap the foundation of happiness. The sobriety of their manners and the purity of their morals were exemplary; their piety and hospitality engaging; and the equal and lenient administration of their government secured authority, subordination, justice, regularity and peace. A well-informed yeomanry and an enlightened peasantry evinced the early attention of the fi rst settlers to domestic education. Public schools were established in every town, particularly in the eastern provinces, and as early as one thousand six hundred and thirty-eight, Harvard College was founded at Cambridge. In the southern colonies, it is true, there was not that general attention to early instruction; the children of the opulent planters only were educated in England, while the less affluent were neglected, and the common class of whites had little education above their slaves. Both knowledge and property were more equally divided in the colder regions of the north; consequently a spirit of more equal liberty was diffused. . . .

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HISTORY OF THE AMERIC AN REVOLUTION

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Yet all America, from the fi rst emigrants to the present generation, felt an attachment to the inhabitants, a regard to the interest, and a reverence for the laws and government of England. Those writers who have observed, that “ these principles had scarcely an existence in the colonies at the commencement of the late war,” have certainly mistaken the character of the country . . . What still heightened the resentment of the Americans, in the beginning of the great contest, was the refl ection, that they had not only always supported their own internal government with little expense to Great Britain; but while a friendly union existed, they had, on all occasions, exerted their utmost ability to comply with every constitutional requisition from the parent state. We need not here revert further back. . . . to prove this, though earlier instances might be adduced . . . A revolution emancipated the colonies from the domination of the sceptre of Britain. This is a story of so much interest to the minds of every son and daughter of America, endowed with the ability of refl ecting, that they will not reluctantly hasten to the detail of transactions, that have awakened the attention and expectation of the millions among the nations beyond the Atlantic.

Warren, Mercy. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (chap. 1). New York: AMS Press, 1805.

Part 1 Essays



Women and Nineteenth-Century America INTRODUCTION The nineteenth century was a time of dramatic change for the United States. This was a time when the nation made the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and from a society based on slave labor to one based on wage labor. This was also the time when a political system based on deference to the elites gave way to democratic party politics, and when Americans turned from communal values to values based on individualism and the ideal of the “self-made” man. During this century, the nation expanded from a collection of states clustered along the Eastern seaboard to a transcontinental nation that extended to the Pacific and beyond. This was also the time when the country dissolved into a destructive Civil War, only to reunite and solidify national bonds. In sum, the nineteenth century was the period when the United States made the transition to a modern nation. Looking at women can illuminate the causes and effects of this transformation, for women both influenced and were influenced by all of the major developments of the nineteenth century.

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE MARKET REVOLUTION During the early nineteenth century, the United States went through a series of changes that have become known as the MARKET REVOLUTION. This transformation involved the shift to a market economy—that is, the transition to a capitalist economy based on free enterprise. In this system, individuals produced goods to sell for profit in an impersonal market, rather than producing just for subsistence. This transformation also involved improvements in transportation, which facilitated commerce and trade. In turn, the growing emphasis on trade and production for profit encouraged industrialization—the mass production of manufactured items by mechanical means. Conversely, the increased productivity brought about by industrialization furthered the market revolution by promoting trade and commerce.

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These economic changes affected women in many ways. As increasing numbers of people left the home to work in FACTORIES, an ideology that distinguished sharply between home and work emerged to reflect this change. This ideology, known as the IDEOLOGY OF SEPARATE SPHERES (see p. 7) was premised on the belief that there were natural and essential differences between men and women, and it assigned roles to women and men that corresponded to those differences. The public arena of work and politics was the male realm, whereas women’s special piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity fitted them for the private sphere of the home. In turn, this ideology facilitated the shift to an industrial economy. Most important, it helped ease the transition from a republic based on civic virtue to a capitalist society based on individual self-interest. By making women responsible for maintaining virtue, it freed men to behave in self-interested ways without completely abandoning the ideal of a virtuous society. Women also contributed more directly to the process of industrialization. First of all, not all women could afford to stay at home as the ideology of separate spheres prescribed. And so, women constituted an important source of labor in the Industrial Revolution. Even those women who did not work as paid laborers contributed to industrialization. By performing HOUSEWORK, they freed men from domestic tasks such as cleaning and cooking. As a result, men could devote more time and energy to industrial production.

POLITICAL CHANGES: THE ADVENT OF “JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY” The early nineteenth century was also a time of great political transformation. Although the nation had been founded on republican principles, in the years immediately after the AMERICAN REVOLUTION most states still restricted the vote to white men who owned property. By the 1820s this had changed, as most states eliminated property requirements and enacted universal white

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male suffrage. This was part of a process of democratization that gave primacy to the “common man,” rather than the elites, as the ultimate source of authority and legitimacy in politics. Achieving popular appeal became increasingly important for politicians in this period. Because of his popular success, Andrew Jackson came to embody the ascendancy of the “common man” in politics, and his election to the presidency in 1828 marked the shift to what has been termed “Jacksonian democracy.” Although women were excluded from this transformation, they played an important role in the process of democratization. The rise of Jacksonian democracy went hand-in-hand with the emergence of the ideology of separate spheres. As democracy undermined traditional distinctions among men, the subordination of women became all the more necessary to maintain a sense of social order and hierarchy. In this way, the consolidation of gender distinctions through the ideology of separate spheres contributed to greater egalitarianism among white men.

WESTERN EXPANSION The exclusionary character of Jacksonian democracy was especially evident in the process of Western expansion, which accelerated rapidly during the first half of the nineteenth century. (See p. 25.) Living up to Jacksonian ideals of democracy, more and more Americans began to move west in this period, in search of greater opportunities for themselves. Yet the movement of white settlers into Western territories also entailed the dispossession of NATIVE AMERICANS from their lands. Native Americans were in many cases removed from their lands by force or by fraud, revealing that the greater equality and opportunity promised by Jacksonian democracy did not extend to them. Indeed, the dispossession of Native Americans to open up lands and opportunity for white settlers demonstrated again how democracy for white men depended on the subordination and oppression of other groups.

RELIGIOUS UPHEAVALS: THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING All of these social and political changes inspired both optimism and anxiety. One way in which Americans of this time coped with such anxieties was through RELIGION. Religion was a powerful force in the early nineteenth century, as this pe-

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riod witnessed a series of evangelical revivals known as the SECOND GREAT AWAKENING. The first of these revivals took place as early as the 1790s, and they reached their peak in the 1830s. Although religious revivals took place all over the country, evangelical fervor was especially strong in the West and in upstate New York. While these revivals differed in character, they were alike in emphasizing the individual’s ability to achieve salvation without the intervention of others. Revivalists believed that the individual would achieve salvation by going through an emotional conversion experience. Because women were considered more emotional and pious than men, women were especially active and prominent participants in these revivals. The heightened importance of religion in this period gave women increased authority, while in turn, women helped further and spread the influence of evangelical religion. (See p. 21.)

REPRESSION AND REFORM The antebellum period also brought with it an outburst of reform activity, inspired partly by evangelical religion. Reformers took on a wide range of social issues. While these reform movements were in some ways liberating and individualistic, they could also be repressive in character. The repressive side of antebellum reform could be seen in one of the most influential reform movements of this period—the TEMPERANCE movement—which sought to restrict the use and consumption of alcohol. (See p. 16.)

PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: SLAVERY AND SECTIONAL CONFLICT Another offshoot of evangelical religion was the ABOLITION movement, which illustrated the liberating and subversive side of antebellum reform. Opposition to SLAVERY was not new to the 1830s, but the abolition movement that formed in the 1830s differed from earlier antislavery activities both in scope and character. The publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator in 1831 symbolized the beginning of this phase of the antislavery movement. Garrison and his followers used militant tactics and rhetoric to organize mass opposition to slavery. Condemning slavery as a sin, abolitionists argued for the immediate emancipation of slaves. Thus they

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forced Americans to confront slavery as a moral issue. Abolitionists also provoked sharp opposition, and one effect of the abolition movement was to incite a stronger defense of slavery by Southern slaveholders. Before the 1830s, at least some slaveholders admitted that slavery was wrong, justifying it only as a necessary evil. After 1830, however, slaveholders reacted to abolitionist condemnations by defending slavery as a positive good that benefited all of society. Women were active on both sides of this debate. Not only did many women join the abolitionist movement; abolitionists also drew a direct connection between the status of women and the status of slaves. Some reformers took this analogy to its logical conclusion and began to advocate greater equality for women. Holding its first convention in 1848, at SENECA FALLS, New York, the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT demanded rights such as property rights in marriage, more liberal DIVORCE laws, and the right to vote. At the same time, many Southern white women defended slavery as staunchly as male slaveholders—especially those women who came from the slaveholding elite. Sharing the racial prejudices of white men, such women did not see any similarity between themselves and their slaves. Instead, they identified with the men of their class, recognizing that their status as SOUTHERN LADIES depended on slavery. As a result of the growing conflict over slavery, sectional tensions between North and South escalated in this period. Further exacerbating these tensions was the annexation of new Western territories during the 1840s, as Northerners and Southerners divided over whether these new territories should be admitted as free or slave states. These sectional tensions culminated in the CIVIL WAR, which began with the firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. Although slavery played an important role in bringing about the Civil War, it did not begin as a war to emancipate slaves. Even with the rise of the abolitionist movement, most Northern whites had little interest in the welfare of African-American slaves, for many of them shared Southern white prejudices against AFRICAN AMERICANS. They opposed slavery only because it seemed to threaten their way of life. In particular, slavery threatened the free labor ideal so important to the Northern political and economic system. “Free labor” meant that the individual had to be free to keep his earnings

(this ideal assumed that the individual was male) and that the individual had to be free to choose his employer. Such freedom would enable the individual to improve his economic status. With hard work, the individual would eventually save enough money to establish a farm or business of his own. The individual would then be independent and self-sufficient—the ultimate goal of free labor. This ideal thus exalted the individual, hard work, and social mobility. Many Northern whites feared that if slavery were allowed to expand, slaveowners would take over Western lands, making it impossible for non-slaveowning whites to achieve land ownership or the self-sufficiency that went with it. On the other side, Southerners were adamant in their defense of slavery because it had come to symbolize their way of life. In fact, a majority of white Southerners did not own slaves. Many of them supported the slave system, however, because they believed that the independence and freedom of white men depended on slavery. By identifying slavery with a vision of society that gave primacy to order and community, Southern whites criticized the materialism and self-interest of Northern society. Thus, the Civil War was not just a conflict over slavery; it was also a conflict between two different ways of viewing the world.

THE CIVIL WAR Women played a crucial role in the character and outcome of the Civil War. Women served the war effort as NURSES, as SPIES, as volunteers for military relief associations, and even, in a few cases, as soldiers. While women on both sides of the conflict participated in these activities, the Union was more successful in mobilizing women. By the last years of the war, Confederate women had become increasingly disenchanted with the conflict. Instead of helping with the war effort, more and more women encouraged their husbands and brothers to desert. Thus, in order to understand why the Confederacy lost the war, we need to look not just at the military and political decisions of men, or at the Union’s industrial, technological, and numerical advantages. It is also important to consider how the disaffection of Confederate women contributed to this defeat. Women’s participation in providing relief and medical aid was indispensable to the physical and psychological well-being of the soldiers, and the loss of these services could have seriously weakened the Confederate Army. Women’s growing criticism of the

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war may have undermined the morale of the soldiers, while their role in encouraging desertion would have had an even more tangible effect on the army’s military effectiveness.

RECONSTRUCTION AND THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. The war left a lasting legacy, however. While the Civil War resulted in a radical transformation of American society, it also provoked a conservative reaction against the reform impulses of the early nineteenth century. The extent and limits of this transformation were especially apparent in RECONSTRUCTION, the period when the federal government sought to reintegrate the South into the Union. Reconstruction brought about a radical change in the legal status of African Americans. Although Abraham Lincoln had not initially defined the Civil War as a struggle to emancipate slaves, one important consequence of the war was the abolition of slavery. Lincoln took the first step toward abolition when he issued the EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION on January 1, 1863. While the Emancipation Proclamation turned the Civil War into a war against slavery, it only freed slaves in areas that were not under Union control at the time. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, however, the Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States. The next step in establishing the legal and political equality of African Americans came with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which recognized African Americans as citizens and granted black men the right to vote. The effect of these amendments on women reveals the limits to Reconstruction. Even while granting black men the right to vote, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments underlined the exclusion of women, both black and white, from that right. Hence woman SUFFRAGE activists divided sharply over whether to support ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. In turn, the arguments used by some supporters of woman suffrage to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment revealed the influence of traditional racial prejudices on even some of the most militant reformers of the time. The limits of Reconstruction were most apparent in the unwillingness of the federal government to redistribute land and property in the

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South. As a result, land remained under the control of Southern whites, making it difficult for African Americans freed from slavery to achieve economic independence. Freed people often ended up working for Southern whites under a SHARECROPPING system. Although this provided black sharecroppers with some day-to-day control over their labor, it made them vulnerable to economic exploitation by Southern whites.

FRAGMENTATION AND CONSOLIDATION The Civil War also brought about dramatic social changes in the North, which again had mixed effects. Most important, the Civil War helped speed up the process of industrialization, as the need to produce and transport military supplies stimulated the development of manufacturing and railroads in the North. This process continued after the war, as the United States went through the “Second Industrial Revolution,” in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Both technological developments and the growth of railroads contributed to the rapid industrial expansion of this period. An equally important part of this transformation was the emergence of large corporations that centralized control of the production and distribution of manufactured goods. Through their control of corporations, a small number of individuals, nicknamed the “Robber Barons,” were able to amass vast wealth for themselves. Men like Andrew Carnegie claimed that they had achieved their wealth through their own efforts and abilities. Consequently, the free labor ideal of the “self-made man” took even stronger hold in American society. Ironically, however, this ideal took hold just as it became increasingly difficult for most Americans to achieve it. With the centralization of manufacturing in the hands of large corporations, it became harder for Americans to achieve economic mobility or self-sufficiency. Instead, more and more Americans turned to wage labor to make a living, working as employees of the factory system, with little opportunity for advancement. In the years after the Civil War, then, industrialization further fragmented Americans even as it brought them closer together. The migration of growing numbers of people to CITIES in search of factory jobs brought Americans in closer physical proximity to one another. Yet within those cities, disparities of wealth deepened class divisions and tensions. Women played a crucial role in the

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consolidation of class distinctions. Reflecting the conservative climate of this time, upper- and middle-class white women who took part in BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES increasingly saw these activities as a way of controlling the working classes rather than of reforming society. The simultaneous process of fragmentation and consolidation occurred in the South as well, though it took a different form there. After the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877 brought Reconstruction to an end, a legalized system segregating whites from African Americans, which would become known as Jim Crow, gradually took hold in that region. White Southerners used force and intimidation to undermine the legal and political rights of African Americans. They turned, in particular, to LYNCHING as a method of intimidation. Conventional assumptions about gender were crucial to lynching, as white Southerners justified this practice by claiming that they were protecting the virtue of white women from the threat of rape by AfricanAmerican men—a fear that grew out of white prejudices, not reality. Revealing the conservatism of this period, the federal government abetted in this retreat from the limited achievements of Reconstruction. The Supreme Court upheld segregation in 1896, with its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson affirming the doctrine of “separate but

equal.” Realizing that federal authority did not threaten white supremacy, white Southerners reconciled themselves to the restoration of the Union. In this way, the reunification of North and South went hand-in-hand with the separation of white and black in the South. Eileen Ka-May Cheng FURTHER READING

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brekus, Catherine. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Clinton, Catherine, and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Faust, Drew. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. New York: Vintage, 1997. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Class and Sex in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

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Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres In the early-nineteenth-century United States there was a marked DIVISION OF LABOR within MIDDLE-CLASS households: Women’s sphere or special area was the domestic space, the home and children, while men’s sphere was the outside world. At least among the Northeastern urban middle class the idea that men went “out” to work and that “woman’s place was in the home” was dominant. In an unspoken bargain a woman’s status rose in tandem with her husband’s wealth and public prominence. It could also fall with changes in fortune or the death of her partner. According to this belief system, “true” women were pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. “True” men were more more worldly and potentially more sinful, but it was part of women’s responsibility to reform or at least to improve them. Although women were dependent on men as providers many were able to exert their own authority. Much social, moral, and educational reform depended on the work of these “domestic” females. While some women chafed at the limitations of domesticity, others enjoyed the experience of MOTHERHOOD and also the opportunities for women’s community that emerged. The ideology of separate spheres was also comforting for many men. While they were pursuing private gain, an individualistic goal that seemed to some to contradict the republican, communal virtues they had grown up with, domestic women seemed to hark back to a simpler, more moral life. Men, according to this argument, could be competitive, rational, and amoral in their pursuit of advancement while women would provide an emotional haven. It should be remembered, however, that separate spheres was an ideology, and did not always correspond to the reality of women’s lives. Any shift in beliefs has many causes. In this case they include social changes connected with the emergence of a MIDDLE CLASS. The 1830s, a key period in the development of the ideology of domesticity, was also a time of economic upheaval with a major depression starting in 1837. Political changes associated with the rise of Jacksonian democracy gave suffrage to most white men, and elections were often accompanied by

drunkenness, which made the hustings seem to be an unsuitable place for women. There were also changes in the patterns of FAMILY LIFE with the growth of the companionate family and a falling birth rate. In addition there were cultural factors such as the surge in evangelical religion, as well as the popularity of sentimental NOVELS and ADVICE BOOKS and changes in print technology which enabled women’s MAGAZINES to reach a broad middle-class readership. When most families lived on farms they had worked together as a unit. With INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, and the growth of mills and factories, population shifted to the towns, and the middleclass home became a refuge rather than a center of production. This was less true of white working-class families, or Native American and African-American families, whose women worked in mills and as servants, and were thus denied the luxury of domesticity. Social change is often accompanied by tension, and the rise of the middle class was no exception. The United States went through an enormous transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century as the white population, which up to the Revolution had been concentrated on the Eastern seaboard, spread from rural to urban areas, from east to west, and from farm to factory. The rise of the middle class was accompanied by a shift in family patterns. Middle-class men entered business, or took up a profession such as the church or the law, while their wives stayed home and became the “angel in the house.” In towns and cities from Rochester, New York, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the nature of women’s work changed. They no longer needed to churn butter or weave cloth, nor did they do as much HOUSEWORK, as free black women, the daughters of IRISH IMMIGRANTS, and farm girls wishing to move to the city were available as DOMESTIC SERVANTS. Middle-class women were instead responsible for organizing the home, rearing the children, and instilling morality into their families and sometimes into the wider community. Changes in the composition of the middle- class family contributed to a shift of authority toward

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the mother. There was a slow but steady fall in the birth rate from an average of over seven to less than six children per family between 1800 and 1850 and a change in the value of children, who were no longer expected to contribute to the family income. Instead the mother was expected to inculcate values and skills that would keep the children in the middle class. The importance of the mother was even reflected in some DIVORCE cases where the father was denied the custody of young children, a reversal of the usual practice. Observers at the time were well aware of the potential for women’s power in her separate maternal sphere. “How entire and perfect is this dominion over the unformed character of your infant,” wrote LYDIA SIGOURNEY in 1838 in her book Letters to Mothers, while a minister wrote in the Ladies Magazine that a mother’s “character is felt through the intricate workings of society.” Female converts outnumbered men in the ratio of three to two in the religious revivals of the early nineteenth century (known as the SECOND GREAT AWAKENING) and though religion was seen as a “safe” place outside the home it was nevertheless a place where women wielded some authority. Religion was regarded as especially suited to women, which was problematic for some ministers who were, by definition, male, but did not quite fit the acquisitive, aggressively materialist model of “true men.” Some Protestant clergymen thus saw women as their natural allies in a corrupt, materialist world, and preached sermons praising female piety and moral superiority, which both created and reinforced the ideology of separate spheres. Literature was another factor. By the 1850s four-fifths of the reading public were women, according to an estimate in Harpers’ Magazine. Midnineteenth-century women were an avid audience for long tales of virtuous females who overcome terrible obstacles—usually created by men—to rise to moral authority. These stories reinforced the separate spheres idea on several levels. SUSAN WARNER’S Wide, Wide World (1850), which sold a million copies, depicted the horrors of the world outside the safety of home, while Bertha Oakes Smith’s Bertha and Lily (1854) stressed women’s moral superiority. Some of the women authors of these books made a handsome living, but they did it without leaving home—they simultaneously popularized and profited from the idea of women’s sphere while apparently adhering to it. Purveyors of advice to women included William Alcott, a physician, whose book The Young

Wife (1836), advised new wives on how to submit to their husband while at the same time exerting a moral authority. The most influential housekeeping manual was probably CATHARINE BEECHER’S Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in 1841. Although Beecher is best remembered now as the sister of HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the 1840s she was much more famous than any member of her family, and this was mainly due to the success of her encyclopedic book. Although Beecher never had a home of her own, let alone a husband or children, she was prepared to instruct housewives in cooking, efficient home management, and child care. She saw the female role as one of energetic and cheerful selfsacrifice, of service to home and children. She also created a new profession, the home economist, which took domesticity out of the realm of the uninitiated into the sphere of the expert. MAGAZINES AND PERIODICALS also played a role. Although other women’s magazines existed, the Ladies Magazine was one of the first written by a woman. Founded in 1828, it was edited and largely written by SARAH JOSEPHA HALE, who believed firmly in EDUCATION for girls. These views were a continuation of the REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD ideals popular in her youth (see Volume 1), but she also featured educators such as Catharine Beecher, EMMA WILLARD, and MARY LYON—three women who promoted separate spheres without embracing domesticity for themselves. She promoted women’s activism to help the less fortunate, as in the Boston Society for Widows and Orphans. Women benefited from religious commitment by associating with other women in missionary and charitable societies and thereby finding an outlet for their energies. Organizations such as sewing circles, Sunday school unions, and moral reform societies sprang up in the Northeast and spread west with the population. Such groups, often led by women, stressed female domestic and maternal roles as the source of their authority. Just as within middle-class MARRIAGE, however, there was an implicit bargain between women and their ministers: as long as women understood the limits of their influence and did not try to appear in public roles such as PREACHING or leading revivals they might exert as much private influence as they wished. Even here women had to keep to their “proper place.” The emphasis on female purity meant both gains and losses for women. Purity had several meanings,

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one of which was “PASSIONLESSNESS” or the idea that women had no sexual feelings. This differentiated them both from men and from previous generations of women who were assumed to have at least as strong a sex drive as men. COURTSHIP patterns changed; premarital chastity became important and the number of pregnant brides dropped from about 30 percent in the late eighteenth century to about 10 percent 50 years later. Women who violated the new norms risked disgrace. A second meaning of purity denoted middleclass women’s power to say no, the ability to demand sexual restraint in their husbands. In the days before reliable CONTRACEPTION was available this helped limit family size, which had advantages for the women, men, and children of the new middle-class family. One possible consequence of the separate worlds inhabited by women and men was the rise of especially intense women’s friendships. Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg examined middle-class women’s letters and DIARIES and found a very private world. She called it “the female world of love and ritual” and described the ways in which women gave each other emotional support. Partly the relationships between mothers and daughters, partly girls’ friendships, some of these friendships were very loving and continued even after one or both women married. The 1850s may have been a little like the 1950s in that domesticity was highly valued, and that many new gadgets and appliances were available to make the housewife’s life easier. In 1850, for example, a Philadelphia hardware store offered its customers over 250 different kitchen tools. The cast-iron stove started to replace the open hearth, and meals and recipes became more complicated as cookbooks proliferated and ingredients became more varied. Many products, such as cloth and soap, were now factory made. This gave women more time for the craft and decorative aspects of housewifery such as baking a cake or embroidering a tablecloth, while servants did the less pleasant tasks like laundry or cleaning out fireplaces. In law married women were still subordinate to men though the 1830s saw the first laws to guarantee women the right to control property they brought into the marriage. On an informal basis many contemporary writers saw women as wielding enormous power—as long as they pretended to be submissive.

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No ideology convinces everybody. There are always rebels. While many women, including some reformers, used the notion of separate spheres to their own advantage others challenged it indirectly or directly. Antislavery activists SARAH GRIMKÉ and her sister ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD used the Bible to support their claim that men and women were created equal and whatever it was right for men to do, it was right for women to do, but their appearance before mixed audiences was highly controversial. Some religious sects also challenged traditional gender relations. Ann Lee, the Englishwoman who founded the Shakers, saw herself as the mouthpiece of Christ and advocated celibacy to save women from the dangers of childbearing. Members of the Oneida Community in upstate New York rejected monogamy in favor of multiple marriages in which both women and men could choose their sexual partners; the children were reared communally. The Society of Friends, or at least the more radical Hicksite QUAKERS among them, welcomed women as equal members and as public speakers.

CONCLUSION The cult of domesticity and the ideology of separate spheres confined many (but by no means all) white middle-class women to the home. At the same time it gave them considerable moral authority which they used both within their family and in the wider community, sometimes using it to demand a role in the public sphere. It was important from the 1820s to the Civil War, though remnants of the ideology persisted into the twentieth century. Jane Lancaster See also: Benevolent Societies; Child Custody; Friendships, Female; Market Revolution; Second Great Awakening; Sexuality, Regulation of. FURTHER READING

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England 1778–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Matthews, Glenna. “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Family, Marriage, and Sexuality

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n 1820, women’s social identities were almost entirely derived from their family roles. The AMERICAN REVOLUTION had done little to alter women’s immediate legal status; for example, the colonial COMMON LAW system of COVERTURE (see Volume 1), under which a husband’s rights subsumed or “covered over” his wife’s, remained intact in state laws in the early nineteenth century. Certain social shifts had already begun in the eighteenth century, however: declining birthrates and mortality rates, rising marriage ages, increased divorce petitions, and a growing sense of the family as primarily an emotional (versus economic) unit. The increasing cultural authority of “Republican mothers” soon combined with the pressures of emergent industrial capitalism to change the structure and experience of American families further. Social forces including industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of consumerism, all exerted additional pressures. By 1900, sexuality and the family were defined by palpably different assumptions than a century beforehand.

THE NEW MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY In the early nineteenth century, the rise of an American MIDDLE CLASS with a distinct ideology brought with it a redefinition of the family, from a unit of production to a loving, civilizing haven in which to raise children. The new model was more isolated and inwardly focused on the nuclear family (parents and children) than the colonial household, which had often counted servants and apprentices as family members. These changes had especially radical implications for women. No longer was the mother merely the inferior parent, dependent upon the more powerful patriarch in a hierarchical family structure. The “cult of true womanhood” idealized the female sex as the embodiment of purity, piety, obedience, and domesticity. Purity denoted sexual purity in particular, and with piety formed the foundation of women’s claim to a superior morality. In accord with the mid-

dle-class ideology of separate spheres, women assumed primary responsibility for maintaining the private sphere of the home as a moral refuge from the world where children could be properly nurtured. Mothers gained cultural authority through their new roles as nurturers and moral guardians of the family. The bond between mother and child came to be seen as the core of the family as child rearing superseded economic production as the family’s central purpose. One middle-class woman articulated the challenge of such expectations in raising her first two children: “It requires great wisdom and tact to direct aright these different dispositions and I often fear I shall commit some error that shall affect them for life and forever.” By contrast, the husband and father was the one who braved the worldly, unstable, market-driven public sphere in order to provide for his family. He continued to be the ultimate authority and “governor” of his family but simultaneously a loving parent. The advent of this more democratic family depended on the success of companionate marriage, which in turn relied upon concepts of ROMANTIC LOVE—not status or property exchange—as the basis of a good match. Correspondingly, for the middle class COURTSHIP became an intensely emotional, private, and ritualized process during which individuals explored their compatibility and their feelings for one another, developing an intimate relationship while exercising sexual restraint. Thus love letters and visits more frequently went unsupervised, but pressure increased to maintain sexual innocence until marriage. True love was the only force that could bridge the cultural chasm between men and women (whose daily lives felt more different and apart, in their separate spheres) and, through marriage, could finally allow sexual intercourse to take place without violating a woman’s innate purity. Moral women were expected to exhibit a natural PASSIONLESSNESS; sexual desire would come only as a result of pure love and within the honorable state of marriage.

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Fertility Rates* for White Women in the United States, 1800–1900 1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900

7.04 6.73 6.14 5.21 4.24 3.56

*Average number of births. Women in 1800 bore an average of 7.04 children in their lifetimes; by 1900, the figure fell to 3.56 births. Source: Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), p. 48.

OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM The new ideology of family and sexuality was not available equally to all Americans. Living the new family ideal was impossible for African Americans under SLAVERY. Slaves instead adapted both African and European beliefs and practices to the circumstances of their enslavement. When slaveholders deliberately separated nuclear families, slaves developed networks of extended families; slave children called all adult slaves “aunt” and “uncle,” and all younger slaves “brother” and “sister.” As Frederick Douglass remembered: “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. . . . She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise.” In recognition of the oppression of slavery and the reality of rape, slaves did not stigmatize children born out of wedlock. Despite the illegality of slave marriages, many slaves established lifelong unions, marking their vows with a ceremony. They recognized harsh truths by frequently amending the usual phrase to “until death or distance do you part.” Even when not separated by sale, slave husbands and wives often resided on separate farms and plantations, owned by different individuals. Slaves risked severe punishment to find or visit loved ones. After emancipation, African Americans sought out lost family members and legitimated marital unions. In the words of one black soldier: “The Marriage Covenant is at the foundation of all our rights.” Yet they encountered hardened stereotypes and violence in both North and South, including LYNCHINGS. A new sexual myth arose in the South, that without slavery to contain their supposedly bestial nature, black men would rape white women, and that this rampant problem

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could only be solved by torturing, hanging, and burning the accused. As journalist IDA B. WELLS BARNETT documented in the 1890s, lynchings really represented a use of sexual fears to reassert white political and economic control in the South. Other racial groups, including Asians and Mexican Americans, were also victimized by lynchings. The rape myth remained so strong that nineteenth-century attempts to pass federal antilynching legislation failed repeatedly. Class was a more subtle barrier than race to achieving the new family ideal. Though many in the WORKING CLASS dreamed of upward mobility and the chance to live out middle-class ideals, working-class families did not experience same revolution in family life that the middle class did. Indeed, domesticity became a marker of a family’s middle-class status. To meet the costs of daily life, most working-class families needed not only parents but also their children to contribute wages. Coping strategies differed among ethnic groups. Mothers were more likely to labor outside the home in Jewish families than in Italian-American families, for instance, but Italian-American children started work at much younger ages, often interrupting their education to contribute their wages to the family, and their mothers might perform PIECEWORK at home. In most working-class households, the wife was not insulated from the public world of commerce, but rather acted as the family’s financial manager. Out of necessity, single immigrant women performed wage work, albeit as low-paid DOMESTIC SERVANTS or industrial workers. Daughters’ earnings gave them more independence within the family. As children “Americanized,” they often rejected their parents’ cultural values and restrictions. The Mexican custom of chaperoning girls during courtship, for example, faded over time. Working-class youth typically did not court in parlors—tenements did not have such luxuries—but in public, urban spaces and at new commercial amusements like dance halls. Meanwhile, hundreds of religious and secular communities from Massachusetts to Texas engaged in utopian experiments that challenged sex roles, family arrangements, and sexual practices. Some integrated “traditional” families into their communities but allowed divorce and practiced communal child rearing. Others, such as the SHAKERS, advocated celibacy, while still other groups experimented with communal forms of marriage. MORMONISM turned to plural marriage to reestablish the patriarchal family model from

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the Old Testament. Middle-class Americans found this deviation particularly shocking; religious persecution convinced Mormons to leave Illinois for Utah, and later delayed Utah statehood as Congress debated the morality of polygamy.

EFFECTS Even for those who could not live according to it, however, the new ideal of the affectionate, democratic family had real effects. It shaped individuals’ expectations; MARRIAGE, for example, loomed larger in popular consciousness as a momentous life decision, rather than a practical inevitability. Middle-class ideology particularly influenced procreation. While historians debate the extent to which the declining birthrate was the result of deliberate family limitation, in an industrializing economy children were no longer assets but investments that required education. In addition, CHILDBIRTH carried a substantial risk of maternal death. Women seem to have relied increasingly on various forms of CONTRACEPTION. The stigma on women’s sexual activity outside marriage was so strong that some women chose ABORTION rather than bear an illegitimate child. In response to sensational cases and pressure from physicians, states began to pass antiabortion statutes in the mid-nineteenth century, criminalizing a practice that had been tolerated previously. By the 1890s, the continued decline of fertility led to alarms of race suicide—fears that the white, educated middle class would be out-reproduced, and therefore overrun, by other Americans. Educated women were especially criticized for neglecting their maternal duties. A second effect of nineteenth-century family ideology was gradual but fundamental legal change in women’s favor. Faced with the destitution of wives and widows who could not protect any property independently of their debtor husbands, states passed the first married women’s property rights acts in the 1830s. The acceptance of companionate marriage led many states to expand the grounds for DIVORCE when marriages did not meet those high standards in the eyes of both parties. Similarly, laws concerning child custody were affected by the popular image of women as the sex better suited for raising children. English common law gave almost unlimited custody rights to fathers, a tradition that the United States followed until the nineteenth century, when courts began to consider the “happi-

ness and welfare” of the child, as measured against the “fitness” and “competence” of parents. By 1860, several states had adopted the “tender year” rule, dictating that courts place children below puberty in their mother’s care unless she proved unworthy of that responsibility. Nineteenth-century Americans were not content to let outside forces shape the family; the middle class engaged in deliberate attempts to effect change through legislation, education, philanthropy, and sociopolitical activism. Various antebellum reform movements used the new image and language of the family to identify social evils. Women helped lead the effort to promote temperance and end prostitution. The reform impulse only intensified after the Civil War when the search for moral order explicitly included the REGULATION OF SEXUALITY. One branch of reform mobilized against obscenity, regarding censorship as a useful tool for social change. This movement culminated in the COMSTOCK LAW (1873) which, though largely ineffective in practice, outlawed the mailing of “obscene” images, including contraceptive information and devices. In sharp contrast, the social hygiene and free love movements sought to end the sexual double standard through frank and open discussion rather than through censorship. For example, The Word, a free love periodical edited by Ezra and Angela Heywood, promoted the liberating potential of sexual passion. Likewise, VICTORIA WOODHULL criticized marriage as stifling and too similar to prostitution because of its basis in property. Lastly, one may also measure the power of middle-class ideology in terms of the cost to women who transgressed. Feminine purity required constant vigilance. Once lost, it could not be regained; according to convention, a fallen woman had denatured and unsexed herself, and renounced all claim to respectability. The urban penny press, with its wide working-class readership, publicized the tragic fates of “fallen” women like HELEN JEWETT whose lost innocence invariably led them into prostitution, then suicide or murder. Furthermore, sexuality was strongly linked to cultural prescriptions and definitions of gender. Accusations of sexual misconduct functioned as a convenient, concrete focus from which to attack women’s “unwomanliness.” This was a common tactic used to discredit female public speakers, from free love advocates to abolitionists. The press labeled FRANCES WRIGHT, for example,

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the “red harlot of infidelity” for her approval of miscegenation. Thus, even though middle-class ideology could give women the moral authority to become publicly involved and achieve reform, it could also function to discredit and silence women who ventured too far beyond their prescribed familial and sexual roles. Laura R. Prieto See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7; “Public Life: Citizenship and Women’s Rights,” p. 13; “Women and Reform,” p. 16. FURTHER READING

Cott, Nancy. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001. Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1997.

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Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex 1790–1920. New York: Norton, 1994. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press, 1988. Peiss, Kathy, and Christina Simmons, eds. Passion and Power: Sexuality in History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Rosenzweig, Linda. The Anchor of My life: Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880–1920. New York: New York University, 1993. Ryan, Mary. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Public Life: Citizenship and Women’s Rights he ninteenth century has often been thought of as a time when women were caught up in domestic life and in observing the dicates of convention. Although true for many women, this impression is contradicted by many others. VICTORIA WOODHULL ran for president of the United States. HARRIET TUBMAN escaped from slavery and returned 19 times to lead others to safety, and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and other leaders launched a WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT that continues to this day. These remarkable women defied traditional gender roles that strictly prescribed appropriate behavior for both men and women. During the nineteenth century, most Americans agreed that women’s proper place was in the home, taking care of the family, while men attended to more public affairs such as government and business. This division of “private” life from “public” life— and the assignment of women to one realm and men to the other—is frequently called the ideology of “separate spheres.” (See “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7) By acting in such public ways, women like Victoria Woodhull and SOJOURNER TRUTH directly challenged this notion of separate spheres and claimed for women a role in public life.

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A BLURRY LINE Most people in the nineteenth century would have agreed that the public sphere was a man’s world: men held elected offices, ran businesses, and spoke out at community meetings. But the distinction between this “masculine” public life and a “feminine” private life was not always clear. Indeed, much of what we now consider part of the public realm was carried out within the family, where women had considerable influence. For instance, until well into the nineteenth century when public schooling was made available (and mandated), children received much of their education at home. In more remote parts of the country this pattern of home education persisted even longer. Like EDUCATION during the early part of the century, the practice of

MEDICINE,

social welfare, and even most business transactions also took place at home. In this context, women had control over many of the things now considered public. Women also maintained a great deal of influence over public life through gossip networks. Exchanging information, ideas, and news about neighbors, women formed their own opinions about public issues and could exert pressure on their husbands and fathers who then made formal decisions on such matters through community meetings and voting. Gossip networks alone could change local politics and individual behavior through public shame and humiliation. Acting through their roles in the private or domestic sphere, women in fact participated in the public sphere, influencing civil and political affairs within the family where much of what we now consider “public business” was conducted.

WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE Despite the ideology of separate spheres, many women in the nineteenth century crossed that blurry line from private to public and more directly occupied roles traditionally reserved for men. The women listed earlier provide good examples. Not only did Victoria Woodhull run for president of the United States (in 1872 and 1876), she also founded the first stock brokerage firm for women, edited and published her own newspaper, and was the first woman to address a joint session of Congress. HARRIET TUBMAN, after escaping from slavery in Maryland, became a legendary figure on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, bravely returning to the South time and again to rescue other slaves and lead them to safety. Despite a $40,000 bounty on her head she continued her dangerous work and eventually served as a spy for the Union Army during the CIVIL WAR. During the nineteenth century, women also expanded the very notion of private roles, building on domestic ideology and extending their family roles to the public. MIDDLE-CLASS women, in particular, launched very public PHILANTHROPIC enterprises in the name of domestic ide-

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ology. As women, they reasoned, they had a particular ability and responsibility to bring their feminine virtues to bear on social problems. At the same time, middle-class women professionalized occupations such as TEACHING and social work, directly extending women’s domestic roles into the public sphere. These women also joined VOLUNTARY AND BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATIONS and actively participated in reform movements such as antivice crusades, ABOLITION, and TEMPERANCE (see “Women and Reform,” p. 16). With industrialization at the beginning of the century, WORKING-CLASS women began to participate in wage labor outside the home in growing numbers. These women also joined voluntary and benevolent associations and organized around issues of workers’ rights, leading to the formation of labor unions. Women of all classes, then, developed distinct public roles in the 1800s, just as they expanded the very notion of the public sphere and their place in it.

FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS Perhaps most dramatically, the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the women’s rights movement as women began struggling for the right to participate in public life on many levels as citizens of the United States. During the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (see Volume 1), white women actively fought for independence only to find that they were explicitly excluded from many of the basic tenets of citizenship. Under the traditional laws of COVERTURE (see Volume 1), women could not own or inherit PROPERTY, divorce, serve on juries, keep their own wages, hold public office, or, significantly, vote. Indeed, the new nation also excluded from voting enslaved and free African Americans, Native Americans, and men who did not own property, leaving the full exercise of citizenship to relatively few elite, white men. The issue of citizenship would frame the struggle for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, women were encouraged to be good “REPUBLICAN MOTHERS,” contributing to the fragile new government by raising virtuous children—particularly sons—who would become good citizens. For much of the nineteenth century, women used that role to rationalize expanding their rights as citizens. For instance, increased educational opportunities for women, like those advocated by CATHARINE BEECHER, could be justified on

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the grounds that educated women would produce better sons for the republic. Middle- and upperclass women also used their position as republican mothers to expand their roles into the public realm, especially through voluntary associations. By the middle of the century, these women built on their newly acquired skills and experiences to begin demanding full citizenship rights. In 1840, a young bride, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, honeymooned in England with her husband, the abolitionist Henry Stanton. There she attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention and met LUCRETIA MOTT, an active member of the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. As the two of them sat in the convention, forced to remain silent behind a screen shielding them from the action on the main floor, they stewed with indignation and later began to talk. As Stanton recalled, “they agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America, as the men to whom they had just listened had manifested their great need of some education on that question.” Indeed, eight years later, in 1848, Stanton and Mott succeeded in organizing the first Women’s Rights Convention. Held in SENECA FALLS, New York, the convention attracted over 300 men and women. Over two days of meetings, the group ratified the Declaration of Sentiments (see Documents), which Stanton and Mott and others had drafted. The document demanded that women “have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” The conventioneers understood that women had been denied a wide variety of fundamental citizenship rights, from holding property to earning wages, obtaining custody of children after divorce, and receiving an education. Men, they agreed, had established “an absolute tyranny” over women, preventing them from participating in the legislative or judicial processes. Echoing the famous words of ABIGAIL ADAMS (see Volume 1) to her husband over 50 years earlier, they stated, “he has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.” The Declaration of Sentiments, then, proved to be a truly revolutionary document. But just what rights women could claim as citizens remained highly contested. At the Seneca Falls Convention, controversy swirled around the issue of women and access to the vote. The organizers of the convention disagreed sharply over including a demand for voting rights in the Declaration of Sentiments, some fearing it would

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prevent the entire document from passing. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband, Henry, himself a radical abolitionist, could not understand his wife’s insistence on the inclusion of voting rights and threatened to leave town if it remained in the document. Stanton persisted, the SUFFRAGE resolution remained, and Henry made good on his word. It took two days of heated debate before the convention agreed with Stanton, eventually calling suffrage an “inalienable right” for women and the “first right of a citizen.” This inalienable right of citizenship was finally extended to African-American men in the wake of the Civil War with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Significantly, this was the first time African-American women were considered citizens of the United States (although what they would be allowed to do with their citizenship was narrowly defined). Ironically, the very amendment which granted African Americans citizenship, effectively excluded women altogether from the vote by introducing the distinction of gender into the Constitution for the first time: only “male inhabitants” were specifically guaranteed the right to vote. This was a bitter disappointment to many women who had fought alongside their male colleagues in the abolition movement. Still others believed that the RECONSTRUCTION amendments never would have passed had women’s rights been linked with suffrage for freedmen. These women agreed with Frederick Douglass, the former slave, great orator, and strong supporter of women’s rights, who now argued that it was the “Negro’s hour” and that women would have to wait their turn. The issue of suffrage for freedmen eventually splintered the women’s movement. Already suffering from growing philosophical differences over issues such as free love, the movement split into two separate organizations. Arguing that women would have to fight for their own rights without men, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the all-female NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (NWSA). Their use of racist language and politics to demand rights for women, however, deeply alienated other leaders, including LUCY STONE, who founded the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (AWSA). Racism played a substantial role in the debate over citizenship rights throughout the nineteenth century. Native American women during this period, for instance, were never considered

citizens. In fact, white reformers established agencies such as the Women’s National Indian Association to “civilize” the “savage” customs of native peoples and assimilate them into American culture. Children were taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools like the Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania (see “Women and Western Expansion,” p. 25). At the same time, Chinese women (and men) were excluded from becoming citizens under the 1882 CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT. Later, the United States declared that any white woman who married a Chinese man would lose her citizenship (see “Immigration and Urbanization,” p. 36). And with the collapse of RECONSTRUCTION in the South, African-American women lost nearly all hope of claiming any rights as citizens. As IDA B. WELLS BARNETT made clear, African-American men and women stood to lose their very lives for exercising their citizenship rights. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, then, women remained divided along class and race lines and contended with regional differences as well as deep disagreement over the most pressing women’s rights issues. However, women in all corners of the country had begun the struggle for rights and, more and more often, they framed that struggle in terms of their rights as citizens of the United States. After 1890, the suffrage movement in particular moved mainstream into the nation’s consciousness as large numbers of women (and men) pushed for voting rights. It would be another 30 years, though, before women would finally receive this right with the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 3) in 1920. Jessie B. Ramey FURTHER READING

Cott, Nancy F., ed. No Small Courage: The History of Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Evans, Sara. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: the Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Hunter, Tera W. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Women and Reform he topic of American women and reform movements in the nineteenth century is vast: The era truly was unlike any other for its largely nonviolent, vitally important social change. Innovative ideas ran the alphabetical gamut from abolitionism to utopianism, with dozens of issues in between. Never before, anywhere, did so many people develop so many creative concepts to improve life for masses of people—and more than that, devote themselves to implementing these ideas. This was particularly true of women, who moved in large numbers from their home-based lives into the public arena. Fundamental to any reform, of course, is the right to speak about the issue, and women had to begin at that basic point. Four decades into the century, for example, SARAH GRIMKÉ and ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD—who, as members of a South Carolina slave-owning family, were uniquely qualified to speak about ABOLITION—still had to defend their right to participate in the debate on slavery. In 1837, after the Grimkés attracted thousands of New Englanders to their speeches on the evils of slavery, Massachusetts clergymen denounced public speaking by women as “unnatural.” It was in that context that LUCRETIA MOTT, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, and other women were banned from the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London because of their gender. Although they were elected delegates from their antislavery societies, the women were forced to listen to the debate from behind a curtain. In response, they began to devise the reform issues that developed into the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Yet long before the first women’s rights meeting occurred in 1848, women led reforms. At the century’s beginning, for instance, in 1801, Philadelphia women founded the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances; it was unusual in that it included both Christian and Jewish women. In 1803, the mother/daughter team of ISABELLA GRAHAM and JOANNA GRAHAM BETHUNE (see Volume 1) organized New York’s first Sunday school.

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The missionary movement began at the start of the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, the most probable—and often the only—organization that an average American woman might join would be a ladies’ missionary society. Although largely conservative in nature, these societies nonetheless offered women the opportunity to learn parliamentary procedure and other necessary skills for broader activism. Moreover, the women who supported MISSIONARIES thought of themselves as reformers, firmly believing that they were bringing a better life to benighted people abroad. Along with reformist religious ideas, secular education was fundamental to providing the tools that reformers needed, and it is hard to overstate the importance of the century’s milestone admission of women to higher education. America’s oldest college, Harvard, was founded in 1636, but almost two centuries passed before women were admitted to any American college. Nor did women speak in public, and so the New York legislature received EMMA WILLARD’s 1818 Address . . . Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education in written form. Shocked by her intention to teach anatomy along with other sciences, they turned her down—but the town of Troy raised taxes to build her school. It was immediately clear that young women wanted EDUCATION, as the TROY FEMALE SEMINARY was successful from the beginning. Others emulated the model, and Georgia Female College in Macon (now Wesleyan) claims the distinction of being the first higher educational institution for women daring enough to use “college” in its name. It was founded in 1836—three years after the opening of Ohio’s OBERLIN COLLEGE, which was the first in the world to admit both blacks and women. Even in this most liberal of institutions, however, reform came gradually, and Oberlin’s female students initially were limited to a “Ladies Curriculum.” The taboo on female public speaking remained so strong that LUCY STONE turned down the “honor” of writing a speech for her 1847 graduation that would be read by a man. Such issues

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continued to merit attention from reformers for the rest of the century, especially in the more conservative east. Iowa, for example, was the first state to admit women to a public university (1858); Missouri was first to include female students in a law school (1868). On the other end of the educational spectrum, kindergarten was a popular idea imported from Germany and promoted by reformer Elizabeth Peabody and others. One of the first recognitions of the need for organized child care occurred early in the century, when Boston’s Caroline Healey opened a nursery for working mothers in 1837, the year of the nation’s first serious depression. Many more women joined the informal education movement through “study clubs”; most were toward the century’s end, but some existed as early as the 1840s. Despite ridicule or history, they joined together to learn academic subjects from which they had been excluded in their youth. Invariably, women in these clubs also worked for educational reform to give their daughters the opportunities they did not enjoy. Women also were the mainstay of the first educational opportunities for free blacks: PRUDENCE CRANDALL, for instance, suffered attacks from her Connecticut neighbors when she began a school for black girls in 1833. After the Civil War, hundreds of women endured ostracism in the South when they went there to teach in FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS, and thousands of Northern women donated to those schools. No reform cause was more important than abolition, and women worked in this cause from the beginning—even though initially they were excluded from membership in the American AntiSlavery Society, founded in 1833. The previous year, Maria Weston Chapman had founded the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and LUCRETIA MOTT, a Quaker minister, formed a similar group in Philadelphia. Chapman endured a physical attack because of her abolitionism in 1836. So did Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, who was assaulted by a mob when she held an abolitionist meeting in her home in Utica, New York. Another radical reform movement of the 1830s focused on the effort to end PROSTITUTION. Women formed Female Moral Reform Societies to battle “the sin of licentiousness, in all its forms and horrors.” They attempted to persuade “fallen women” to leave their profession, offering “rehabilitation” in the form of vocational training, such as instruction in sewing. More daringly,

women in some towns stationed themselves outside of brothels and publicized the names of men seen entering the buildings. Although both the aim and the techniques of Female Moral Reform Societies were uncommonly radical, these women nonetheless were essentially conservative in their desire to protect families and foster traditional views of morality. This contradiction between their conservative philosophy and their radical behavior was a strong factor in the demise of these societies. Among the contradictions was the issue of speech: It was hard to publicize the names of brothel patrons without speaking in public, and yet most of these women were unwilling to mount public platforms with men in the audience. That sort of speaking remained taboo, and when DOROTHEA DIX began her great unprecedented reforms in mental health, she also used the written, not spoken, word. Her lifelong work began in 1841, when she went to teach Sunday school in a jail in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and found that most of the hungry women freezing in an unheated room were not guilty of any crime, but were mentally ill. Dix spent the next two years traveling the state and then presented the legislature with a report that is considered America’s first sociological study. The legislature responded positively, and Dix moved on to other states. The 1848 women’s rights convention was indeed the singular focal point of all the century’s reforms—even including abolitionism, for the end of slavery doubtless would have come later had women not insisted on their right to participate. When Lucretia Mott, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, and others decided to call a meeting on women’s rights, they expected relatively few to understand the issues that so distressed them. To their surprise, some 300 women and men turned up in SENECA FALLS, New York, where Stanton lived. For two days they discussed her proposed Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence that promoted women’s rights (see Documents). The Declaration of Sentiments called for reform in education, religion, and especially in law. One of its major demands called for reform of MARRIAGE LAWS: In most states a married woman was not even legally entitled to her own wages. Many state laws considered married women “civilly dead” and barred them from owning property. DIVORCE and guardianship laws also were a tremendously important reform goal:

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Women could not sue for divorce in any state, and everywhere men were entitled to CHILD CUSTODY no matter what the circumstances of the divorce. In many states, a father even could will the custody of his children after his death to someone other than their mother. The only one of the Declaration’s 12 resolutions that generated long debate and a close vote was, ironically, the issue of the vote itself. The demand for SUFFRAGE passed only by a narrow margin. Those who voted against it were not philosophically opposed, but feared that such a radical idea would make them look ridiculous and jeopardize the other reforms. Indeed, the women’s rights movement did not truly evolve into the suffrage movement until after the Civil War. In 1869, both the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION and the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION were formed. That same year that the Wyoming Territory granted women the vote. Although obviously bold women, the organizers of the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION were still so timorous about public speaking that they called on Lucretia Mott’s husband to preside. Other women had set earlier precedents, however, including a group of working-class women led by SARAH G. BAGLEY, who spoke to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature in 1845. The Lowell Female LABOR REFORM ASSOCIATION testified on the long hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions in textile mills, and they successfully organized to defeat a local legislator who opposed them. Beginning with the nation’s first industrial strike in 1824, women went on STRIKE throughout the century—with and without male coworkers. Seldom, however, were women included as officers in labor unions; as a result, they formed their own associations and worked for PROTECTIVE LABOR LAWS. The era’s most visibly radical idea was that of DRESS REFORM. Although often treated as merely fashion whimsy, the movement represented a hugely important issue that did not succeed until the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century attention to dress reform began in Seneca Falls in the year after the great meeting there, when Elizabeth Smith Miller appeared in “turkish trousers.” These voluminous pants were styled after a costume worn by the actress FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, and Miller’s cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton soon adopted the garment—not because of fashion, but because of the practicality of wearing pants while mothering seven children.

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AMELIA BLOOMER included a pattern for this “American costume” in her newspaper, The Lily, and soon discovered that more readers were interested in dress reform than in the paper’s presumed theme of temperance. Her name became permanently associated with feminine pants, but although she and other women clearly preferred this more practical clothing, the women’s rights leadership abandoned dress reform as an issue within a few years because they felt it distracted from the more important legal issues of property rights, divorce, guardianship, and others. Dress reform often was tied directly to health reform, especially because confining corsets cut off circulation and induced fainting; some physicians believed that the era’s demand for a tiny waist also damaged reproductive organs. Although this particular aspect of health reform was not successful—indeed, women’s clothing became more restrictive by the century’s end instead of less so—other areas of alternative health developed large followings. Women joined men in promoting causes that ranged from vegetarianism to “water cures” and much more. The TEMPERANCE movement influenced the sale of alcohol. Later termed “prohibition,” this movement probably included more women than any other of the century’s reforms. It was seen as less radical than abolitionism or women’s rights because most temperance societies were led by male clergy, but nonetheless the movement included many revolutionary elements, especially as women moved from genteel reading of publications like The Lily to street activism similar to that of the Female Moral Reform Association. The WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU) formed in Cincinnati in 1873, after women in several midwestern states began embarrassing men by singing and praying in front of saloons. These women understood that being married to an alcoholic was a very serious matter in an era when divorce was virtually impossible and when women had almost no occupational opportunities. Although the WCTU was easily caricatured, especially after Carry Nation’s hatchet attacks on saloons at the turn of the century, the millions of women who joined the WCTU correctly perceived a situation badly in need of reform. The WCTU was more than merely anti-alcohol. President FRANCES WILLARD’s “Do Everything” agenda in the 1880s and 1890s included such items as raising the age of consent: In

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many states, the age at which a man could legally claim that a girl had willingly consented to sex was ten. The WCTU also worked on a number of reforms not directly related either to alcohol abuse or to women, including labor law, prison reform, and world peace. The great decades-long reforms of temperance, women’s rights, and more were put on hold during the CIVIL WAR, when the abolitionism became the central cause of all reformers. Its success was only the most obvious of many that the war hastened: The taboo on female speaking, for instance, disappeared so quickly that orator 21year-old Anna Dickinson addressed Congress, with Abraham Lincoln in the audience. Prior to the war, a woman risked her reputation if she traveled without male escort, but wartime needs were such that a woman now could board a train as freely as a man. No wartime reform, however, was as great as that which grew out of the U.S. SANITARY COMMISSION: For the first time in history, civilians— largely women—went to battlefields and saved lives in an organized fashion. Women formed hundreds of units of the Sanitary Commission to provide medical supplies and staff temporary hospitals. The International Red Cross sprang directly from those roots. Its founder, CLARA BARTON, is also remembered for developing the world’s first systems for postwar identification of the missing and dead. These women and the Red Cross that followed revolutionized the way that war is conducted, but women also were present at the creation of the peace movement. JULIA WARD HOWE founded a Women’s International Peace Association in 1870 and followed up with meetings in Paris. The International Council of Women, the first body to make the point that women’s rights are human rights, grew out of an 1883 Liverpool reception for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Beyond the work for newly freed African Americans that women did in the postwar decades, they also were leaders in attempts to reform the way that Native Americans were treated. LYDIA MARIA CHILD had made this the theme of one of her first books, published in 1824, but HELEN HUNT JACKSON’s 1881 Century of Dishonor was the most important of any such

work. Women sponsored speaking tours by Indians, including SUSETTE LA FLESCHE TIBBLES of the Omaha tribe and Sarah Winnemucca of the Paiute. Public sympathy for the plight of America’s natives resulted in legislation that was intended to protect their rights, and women, especially Alice Cunningham Fletcher, were both lobbyists for and administrators of those reforms. Although women lacked suffrage and many other rights in the nineteenth century, they played a central role in every reform movement of the period. Working both separately by themselves and together with male colleagues, women galvanized the nation to end slavery, extend political and civil rights to more people, promote labor reform, and effect change in countless areas. Women’s contributions to these efforts transformed American society and laid the groundwork for new social movements in the twentieth century. Doris Weatherford FURTHER READING

Berkin, Carol R., and Mary Beth Norton. Women of America: A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Chafe, William. The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Dubois, Ellen. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Evans, Sarah M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: The Free Press, 1989. Hewitt, Nancy A. Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, NY, 1822-1872. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Black Women in United States History. 16 volumes. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990. Klaw, Spencer. Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Rothman, Sheila M. Woman’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Scott, Anne F., and Andrew M. Scott. One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975. Weatherford, Doris. American Women’s History. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994. ———. History of the American Suffragist Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998. ———. Milestones: A Chronology of American Women’s History. New York: Facts On File, 1997.

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Women and Religion n the nineteenth-century United States, religion and religious affiliation played an instrumental role in every aspect of a woman’s life. Religion helped her to understand and cope with economic changes. It connected her with others at a time when group identity was paramount. It was the basis for the explosion of reform work that took place during the 1800s. It helped to define her role within the family and the community. It provided her with emotional and spiritual support, in a time marked by high infant and adult mortality. The concept of female moral authority was central to nineteenth-century women’s lives, no matter if they were urban or rural, conservative or radical. The popular consensus, especially among Protestant women, was that a woman possessed a special responsibility in her family and in society for instilling Christian beliefs and behaviors. Ideally, her husband and sons would go into the world and act morally and her daughters would perpetuate the cycle with their own children. When the “evils” of business or politics threatened to lead her husband down the wrong path, it was her role to gently guide him back to the right way through her influence. Women seized upon this ideal in the eighteenth century, calling it REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD (see Volume 1), and carried it throughout the nineteenth century, calling it “true womanhood.” What she believed to be moral and the behaviors she chose to influence were, of course, directly related to her religion and its teachings. Whatever her denomination, whatever her religious upbringing, a woman of the nineteenth century used her authority as a moral leader to determine how she would live her faith. This essay covers three periods in the nineteenth century. Beginning with the SECOND GREAT AWAKENING in the first decades of the 1800s, it explores the causes and effects of religious upheaval. It then discusses the prelude to the CIVIL WAR and the effect of the Civil War on the Northern and Southern religious experiences, paying particular attention to those of African Americans during and after SLAVERY. Finally, it examines the late nine-

I

teenth century to explore missionary work in the new Western territories. The other major theme of this essay is how religion worked when two disparate communities— black and white, CATHOLIC and Protestant, affluent and poor—come into contact with each other. The question often arose of who would hold economic, social, or political power in this new relationship. Each group used religion to gain or exert power over the other. For example, in the antebellum South, plantation owners used religion to reinforce their right to hold slaves, as well to reinforce the slaves’ subservience to them. African Americans practiced their own religions in secret, blending African traditions with Christian beliefs to bolster morale and create networks for escape.

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING Beginning around 1795 and continuing through the 1830s, Protestant churches in the North and South experienced rapid growth and the increased evangelical fervor known as the Second Great Awakening. Like the GREAT AWAKENING of the 1740s (see Volume 1), these revivals changed the makeup of church congregations, the way those congregations worshipped, and what those congregations believed. The Second Great Awakening was experienced differently in urban and rural settings but was usually characterized by tent revivals—multiday services held outside, both to accommodate the throngs of people and to entice others with the loud and ecstatic preaching of itinerant ministers. These revivals swelled the number of members in local congregations enormously. Women were frequent participants in revival meetings and later brought their husbands, families, and friends. Though the leadership of congregations remained male, women, by their numbers and commitment, quickly came to play a vital role in the work of the church, both on committees within the churches and in further church evangelism. With this renewed spiritual fervor came a change in how Protestant congregations wor-

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shipped. Some communities experienced a split in the traditional denominations, with the more evangelical members forming new churches under the same name; others, such as the MORMONS, or Church of Latter Day Saints, founded near Rochester, New York, the MILLERITES, also called Seventh-Day Adventists, the Congregational QUAKERS, the SHAKERS, and the Oneida Perfectionists or Utopians, expressed their newfound beliefs through religious experimentation. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Finger Lakes region of New York, often called the “Burned Over District” for the “religious fires” that swept through the area, was popular with such groups; this frontier region typified the ways that the traditional religious leadership and structure crumbled in the face of new ideas and new practices. People’s beliefs also changed drastically during this period. Casting off the Puritan belief that admission into heaven was predetermined, these believers now looked to the possibility of perfection in all humankind, and believed that perfection could come within their lifetimes. No longer subscribing to a strict hierarchy of sinners and saved, people became more concerned with doing good works and helping others to achieve a better life. This period, in the early and midnineteenth century, is often characterized as one of great optimism, which some trace to this renewed belief in salvation. Among those who embraced the optimism of this period most fervently were the new denominations: Mormons, Shakers, and Utopians. These groups established separate communities which experimented with new ways of living: communal homes, open marriages, celibate lifestyles, or shared resources. Additionally, many of these religious communities chose to include reform work—on behalf of slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, and WOMEN’S RIGHTS—in the practice of their religion. Some radical Quakers, called Hicksite Quakers, also considered religious and political work as inseparable.

Society’s Changes Some of the contributing causes of the Second Great Awakening were economic and demographic. Other factors can be found in the churches themselves. In the postcolonial period, the hierarchy of the church faced a great challenge in the Constitutional provision for the separation of church and state; governmental support for churches was withdrawn. Could churches sur-

vive as voluntary associations among people, rather than as an institutional obligation? Also contributing to the rapid changes of this era was the process of expansion and industrialization. Small family farms began harvesting cash crops, as canals and upgraded roads, and eventually railways, allowed farmers to send their crops to be sold in cities. Previously only the eastern seaboard boasted urban areas of any size; now quickly growing cities began springing up in what had been frontier land only a decade earlier. The change in farming families and the expansion of cities radically changed the role of women and altered how they could and would use their time. Among poorer or rural families, women no longer were needed for as much heavy labor in the fields to help raise crops. Assuming a new kind of caretaker role, a woman moved from partner in the fields to leader within the home. Along with other household tasks—cooking, cleaning, making and mending clothes—women also now took on the spiritual and emotional care of their families with renewed vigor. If unmarried, some young women were recruited to live and work in new towns created by mill owners. These businessmen would recruit young women from around the region to work for them by promising their families that they would look after the women’s spiritual and moral well-being. In return these young women would earn money to send home to their families. Because conditions in these mill towns were often very poor, and because these women found themselves among others from communities all over the region, religion provided comfort for their hardships and a unifying force among different groups. In poor, rural areas, both farming women and mill girls looked to religion as a way to strengthen the family, create bonds of community, and solidify their standing within society. In urban settings, affluent women found themselves able to spend more time on benevolence and church-based projects. Perhaps newly in charge of small domestic staffs, they were in close proximity to the plight of poorer women and their families. The urban middle-class woman may have been drawn to the evangelical movement as a way to help uplift those around her, bolster her sense of herself as worthy of her new wealth, and bring some order to what she saw as social chaos around her. In especially large cities along the eastern seaboard, people were not able to agree about

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community standards. These cities were marked by the entry of large groups of Irish, Germans, and eastern Europeans. Because many of these immigrants were Catholic or Jewish, they often found themselves rejected by the aid societies formed by wealthy Protestant women, some of whom required immigrants to convert to get aid. At the same time, the drive to completely assimilate was lessened in these cities because many immigrants found communities of other Catholics or JEWS already established in their neighborhoods. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic and Jewish women had established reform and aid networks parallel to, but separate from, the Protestant ones they were rejected by at the beginning of the century. From the desire of upper-class women to uplift the less fortunate, to educate children in proper Christian living, to agree on or impose social customs and behaviors, to seize upon the tremendous promise of perfection, women in record numbers merged their religious lives with work on reform movements. Their evangelical churches provided the backdrop for going out into the world—if not to preach, at least to do work which would put their faith into practice. The zealous spiritual fervor of the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the largest reform movements of the nineteenth century: SUFFRAGE, TEMPERANCE, and ABOLITION.

A COUNTRY AT ODDS WITH ITSELF Though the early mid-nineteenth century was marked with great optimism about the future of the country—and, in fact, of all humankind— the reform movements which emerged in this period point to some of the fundamental disagreements within the nation. While the new faith of personal salvation led some to work toward ending the abuse of the less powerful, others used their religious convictions to justify and bolster the ownership of slaves and the institution of slavery. In Southern slave states, two distinct worlds of religious practice existed: a world controlled by slaveholders with services for white families and separate, sanctioned services for slaves, and the world of independent, secret slave-controlled worship. Though both the slaves and their owners participated in the revival movement, they used their faiths for distinctly different ends.

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The message whites wanted to hear and preached to the slave population was, not surprisingly, one of servitude for African Americans and redemption in the afterlife. Reacting to the growing abolitionist criticism of slavery, slaveowners used select Biblical passages to justify their behavior and define it as Christian in three ways: their “benevolent” protection of the slaves on their plantations was a form of positive, Christian outreach; their removal of the slaves from “heathen” Africa helped save the slaves from certain damnation; and, taken together, their education of their slaves in proper living and in Christian morals served to uplift the entire race. Though it is difficult now to believe this racist rhetoric, one can see the same central tenets of religious evangelism in these arguments. The same desire to help those less fortunate and lead others to salvation that spurred Northern women to join reform movements urged Southern women to work to preserve slavery and their way of life. Covertly, enslaved Americans formed and practiced their own religious beliefs. Blending some traditions from African faiths with BAPTIST or METHODIST beliefs, black preachers led congregations in hopes for freedom not just in heaven but also in this life. In small groups, African Americans from a single plantation or neighboring plantations would meet together under the cover of night, in the attics of slave quarters or in wooded areas far from the slaveholders’ home. This separate community of believers was kept quiet by slaves because it served as a way to organize a society and culture of their own, which many slaveholders would not allow. Information and planning for escape could be shared, sermons about freedom could be preached, and resistance to daily acts of oppression could be planned.

Reconstruction and Religion After the Civil War, the practice of religion along separate racial lines continued, as Southern whites migrated toward Presbyterian and Episcopal, and to a lesser extent Baptist and Methodist, churches, while freed African Americans largely joined the AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL or African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches as they spread from the North. As efforts during RECONSTRUCTION to build a fairer and more equitable society in the South quickly crumbled, these churches provided the backbone for African-American communities. Freed blacks

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could find not only spiritual guidance but also economic aid, political organization, educational programs, and the basis for reform activity to address the ongoing racial issues of the day.

MISSIONS IN THE WESTERN TERRITORIES Many women journeying to the West found life rough and immoral. In her ground-breaking work, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939, historian Peggy Pascoe details the mission work and faith-based programs white women created in the West. These areas were fertile ground for religious proselytizing: a large transient population, many cultures encountering each other for the first time, rapid growth and industrialization, and the absence of a traditionally recognized power hierarchy. Women used their power as accepted moral judges to establish social stability and control. The white women who went west were generally there for two reasons: they went with their husbands to help them strike it rich in the gold, silver, timber, or land rushes or they were single women—often working in PROSTITUTION— looking for adventure and profit in boom towns where single men outnumbered women greatly. Needless to say, prostitutes drew scorn and dismay from married women. Once there, married women, especially those whose husbands had prospered and taken up positions of local authority, were in a position to establish rules of conduct and were driven to clean up the rowdy reputation and moral degeneracy of some Western settlements. However, prostitutes did not receive universal reproach. Many women saw the complexities contributing to the immorality of Western cities. A mix of quick money and unmarried men, with no family obligations to temper them, contributed to increased consumption of alcohol. This led to a greater demand for prostitutes and a rise in “unChristian” behavior. Because, by and large, prostitutes were seen as “fallen women,” they were unsuitable for marriage and, unless someone in-

terrupted this vicious circle, the region would continue to be plagued by immorality.

The Colorado Cottage Home One example of the Western missionary movement, and among the most successful ventures in curbing both lawlessness and “un-Christian” behavior, was the Colorado Cottage Home. Organized by the Colorado WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU), this group provided services that far exceeded merely the rehabilitation of prostitutes. Their efforts provided training for poor women—often new immigrants from Europe or Asia—to do domestic work; education and supervision for children; and ultimately a home for “friendless” women.

CONCLUSION In the nineteenth century, religious beliefs provided women with a way to understand, to justify, and to celebrate their role as leaders in Christian morals. The church organization was the foundation for women’s drive to live out their beliefs on a large scale. By joining groups and doing “good works,” women gave voice and action to their faith. Laura A. Goodwin See also: “Women, Work, and Industrialization” (p. 33) and “Immigration and Urbanization” (p. 36). FURTHER READING

Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ———. Women and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Foster, Lawrence. Women, Family and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community and the Mormons. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Lindley, Susan Hill. “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Wacker, Grant. Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Women and Western Expansion, 1820–1900 he story of women and Westward expansion is one of conquest, settlement, resilience and resistance. Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, European immigrants and native-born white women are all part of that story. Some already lived in the West, some moved willingly, and others were forced Westward. In the early nineteenth century, population growth, the expanding cotton market, and increased trade between Mexican territories and the United States accelerated expansion. The Gold Rush, beginning in 1849, and “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that the United States was destined to increase its boundaries, further contributed to expansionist tendencies. By 1850, the country had acquired most of the territory that makes up the contiguous United States. By the end of the century, the country included Alaska and islands of the Pacific Ocean. Women were both agents and victims of these changes. The settlement of some women caused the displacement of others. Expansion disrupted the lives of women who moved west as well as those of the women they encountered along the way

T

THE NATIVE AMERICAN WEST Indian women in North America often enjoyed significant status within highly developed civilizations that thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Iroquois women, for example, cared for the land, controlled distribution of food, and older women nominated and deposed chiefs. Efforts to remove Indians intensified with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the passage of the INDIAN REMOVAL Act in 1830. The high status of women in the “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, in western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, was permanently disrupted when these settled agricultural societies were forced West to what became Oklahoma. Cherokee women resisted Westward removal, refusing to accept a treaty signed by an unautho-

rized faction of Cherokee men. President Jackson sent in troops who dragged women away from their homes, often separating them from their children. Many were forced to drink liquor. Some were raped. About 1,000 Cherokee fled to North Carolina. Fifteen thousand began a 1,000 mile trek to Oklahoma. Some women gave birth on the trail and others were among the over 4,000 Cherokee people who died along the way. The traditionally high status of women among NATIVE AMERICANS clashed with the gender hierarchy within European culture. Indian women of the Midwestern Plains served as healers, herbalists, spiritual advisers, and chieftains. Within distinct gender roles, women were respected and exerted great influence. Many Native American nations were matrilineal, the line of descent moving through female members, and matrilocal, the husband living with the wife’s family after marriage, like the Zuni of the Southwest and the Iroquois of the East. Between 1820 and 1840, white population doubled on the Great Plains, Indian resources were drained, and the traditional ways of Indian life were challenged. To provide for their families, Sioux women traded moccasins and beads for bread and Dakota women held onto traditional agricultural and construction roles, but added domestic tasks formerly done by their men to comply with white gender norms. The California Gold Rush further threatened Indian hunting and fur trading economies. Women could no longer cultivate crops. Without hides they traditionally made into clothing and bedding, Dakota women turned to needlework taught by missionaries and used traditional designs in crafts such as quilting. By 1862, the Dakota were forced out of Minnesota onto reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota. Most Western tribes tried to resist acculturation, conversion, and Victorian gender roles, but with the migration of large numbers of non-Indian settlers, their economies and sexual division of labor suffered. Intermittent warfare erupted from the 1860s until the late nineteenth century. In 1861,

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militiamen surprised a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians killing 270 Indian women, children, and men. United States citizens demanded that the Indians of the West be stopped when, in 1876, Native Americans annihilated General George Custer’s regiment that was protecting the Northern Pacific Railway. The last of the Plains Wars ended in the late 1870s, but the bloodshed did not end until the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. United States troops machine-gunned two hundred cold, starving Sioux men, women and children in December 1890. Even before the massacre at Wounded Knee, the federal government set out to annihilate tribal culture and “Americanize” the Indians. HELEN HUNT JACKSON’s A Century of Dishonor critiqued the unfair treatment of Indians which led to the supposedly humane DAWES ACT of 1887. The true intention was to break down the collective, communal structure of Native American life on the reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs moved families onto individual tracts of land and sent Indian children away to boarding schools. Indians were pressured to convert to Christianity. Girls and women were losing their traditional status and entering into cultural behaviors that mirrored the gender roles of white society. During the periods of mass migration West, Native American women struggled to survive economically and to maintain their cultures and identities, in the midst of disease; war; economic, social, cultural, and political expansion; and disruption, recurring forced migration into unknown territory, and the efforts of missionaries and reformers to “improve” their lives.

THE HISPANIC WEST HISPANIC culture developed from the marriages between Spanish conquerors and Native American women beginning in the sixteenth century. Hispanic peoples journeyed north from Mexico into what became New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and part of California. They developed a culture based on a combination of private and shared property. Women worked cooperatively on many tasks including plastering houses and baking bread. They controlled individual gardens and tilled communal fields. Daughters and sons inherited equally, though women generally inherited movable goods, such as livestock, furniture, and household products, while men inherited land.

1820–1900 From 1820 to 1853, the Spanish Empire crumbled; Mexico became independent; Texas became a republic; and the Mexican territories of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico became part of the United States. Intercultural contact was common. In 1820, about one-third of the land that would be the United States was under Spanish-Mexican control. Trappers and traders had already begun trespassing on these borderlands by 1790, especially in what would be New Mexico. Their Indian and Hispanic wives served as guides and partners in trade. An American-Mexican trade route developed along the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. Hispanic women of New Mexico exhibited a unique level of independence. Because many women did not conform to the white middleclass ideology of separate spheres, Anglos often commented on their “immorality.” Gertrudis Barcelo of Santa Fe, for example, was considered a loose woman by Euro-American standards. However, as the town’s leading businesswoman, and owner of a gambling house and saloon, she succeeded within the changing economy and cultural values of the Mexican borderlands. After the United States took over the SpanishMexican frontier, Mexicans were dispossessed of their lands and rights. Many Mexican-American women resisted the constant exploitation by Anglo settlers. In 1863, Doña Chepita Rodriguez fought off the advances of two Anglos who forced their way into her home. She was accused of murdering one of them and was hanged. By 1850, when California was admitted to the Union, nearly one-third of its inhabitants were gold miners. This population explosion and the social changes that ensued produced opportunities for some women and misfortune for others. Indian and Hispanic women suffered most from the violence and disorder in these places. Josefa Segovia was lynched for stabbing a drunken miner who broke down her door and called her a whore when she and her common-law husband demanded payment for the damage. White miners looked down on working-class Hispanic women and saw them as fair targets for their abuses. Hispanic village life still existed in areas of New Mexico in the 1870s though men already worked for cash outside of their villages. The newly completed Santa Fe Railroad, in the 1880s, brought more non-Hispanic settlers. By the late nineteenth century, the encroachment of non-

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Hispanic populations destroyed Hispanic village life. Hispanic women now worked for white settlers as domestics, seamstresses, laundresses, hotel keepers, and sometimes prostitutes.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE WEST The movement of cotton production westward to Alabama, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, was devastating for slave women. The AFRICAN-AMERICAN culture that they had developed faced destruction. Kinship networks were compromised; mothers, fathers, and children were separated from each other, and the sale of slaves to the Southwest became a large part of the cotton boom. The forced removal of Southern tribes made twenty-five million acres of land available for cultivation. These tribes held hundreds of slaves who were forcibly removed with them. After 1821, the migration of free blacks to Texas increased because of greater opportunity and less prejudice under Spanish and Mexican governments. Runaway slaves from Louisiana also fled to Texas. The conditions for African Americans deteriorated when Mexico opened Texas’s borders to slave-owning colonists from the United States. Nonetheless, black people still entered. Women raised livestock; worked as domestic servants, artisans, and laborers; and some became professionals. While white settlers who supported SLAVERY and racist ideas fought for independence from Mexico in Texas, black settlers supported a Mexican victory. The largest number of black women headed west from 1878 to 1880, when hundreds of men and women, known as Exodusters, headed for Kansas seeking relief from the growing brutality of the Jim Crow South, economic opportunity, and a better life overall. Fifteen thousand African Americans worked as farmers and laborers in Kansas by 1880. Other African Americans moved along the overland trail to the West. Sarah Gammon Bickford, an ex-slave, arrived in the mining community of Virginia City, Montana, in 1871. She worked as a chambermaid and by 1900 was the sole owner of the Virginia City water system. Biddy Mason was the first black woman to own property in Los Angeles. She walked from Mississippi to California as a slave with a caravan of Mormons on a religious pilgrimage west. She won her freedom in a California court in 1856.

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In the West as elsewhere, a larger percentage of black women than white worked outside their homes as DOMESTIC SERVANTS, washerwomen, cooks, dressmakers, and nursemaids. Others ran boardinghouses or taught school. The move west on the part of African-American women during the nineteenth century was often a result of a quest for freedom from slavery and prejudice, as well as a search for a livelihood and a place to start over.

WOMEN MOVE WEST ON THE OVERLAND TRAIL In the early part of the nineteenth century, the moves westward had been predominantly to the areas between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. A great number of the women in the Midwest lived and worked on isolated farms. This rural farm economy replicated the social world of many white women in the United States during much of the nineteenth century where, generally, men frequented the public world outside the family and women the private world within the family. Women did, however, develop their own culture, sharing experiences of childbirth, childrearing, and nursing. Sometimes women came together at work bees, such as cabin raisings, and congregated in the kitchen, solidifying their female social networks. In the 1840s, women began traveling further west on the overland trail. The majority were married and single white native-born Christians. Recent European immigrants also fanned out across the nation. Their reasons for moving varied, and though not all wanted to move, they had little choice if their husbands insisted. Many went willingly, in search of adventure, to start a new life, to follow friends or family, but most went in search of economic opportunities. A few missionaries went to Christianize Indians and to uplift the lives of these “heathens.” Others, like the MORMONS, moved to escape persecution. Most chose the least expensive, most difficult way to travel: over land in wagons. Women’s duties on the trail were typical of conventional gender roles, but roles broke down out of necessity. Women did all of the usual female household tasks, made tougher on the rustic trail. They also drove cattle, gathered buffalo dung as fuel, drove the wagons when men were incapacitated, and did anything that was necessary regardless of

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normal gender prescriptions. Women often did traditionally men’s work but men almost never did women’s work. In spite of the work, women made friendships, shared household duties, and visited each other at night. They became confidantes and shared their hopes and fears with one another. At times these friendships ended suddenly when a friend died or a family went out on its own. The trip was often frightening. Beset with exaggerated tales of marauding Indians, women feared for their lives. The climate could be changeable, the days hot, the nights in the mountains bitter cold. The landscape evoked dread and awe. It was a journey of contradictions. Once off the trail, setting up housekeeping was difficult. Some wound up living in log cabins with dirt floors, in soddies—homes dug out of hardpacked soil that leaked or dissolved in the rain with snakes, worms, and centipedes living in the walls and ceilings—or in tents or wagons until they could build permanent shelters. They sold baked goods to bring in cash and built religious, cultural, social, and educational institutions that contributed to the development of communities. White women, like black, sometimes worked outside their homes. They prepared meals, did laundry, sold cloth, sewed, took in boarders, and worked as waitresses and chambermaids. Others taught school, wrote fiction, and worked on newspapers. Some were prostitutes or ran brothels. Overall, white women who traveled on the overland trail west expressed prejudice, fear, and condescension toward Native Americans and Hispanics. Occasionally white women and Native American women developed friendships, but culture clash was the norm. Indian women found white materialism and disregard for nature and Native American culture and society distasteful. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino women moved to the West coast at about the same time as women from the United States headed west. These immigrants were discriminated against and generally lived within separate communities. CHINESE IMMIGRANTS on the West coast faced virulent prejudice. A large number of the Chinese women were kidnapped in China and sold as prostitutes. Destitute parents sold others. Smugglers tricked some with the promise of marriage in America. Female missionaries protected some but pressured them into unfortunate and often unhappy marriages. As late as 1880, nearly half of the Chinese women in California were

1820–1900 prostitutes, but as the number of Chinese women grew, and the sex ratio evened out, fewer men sought companionship outside the family. Japanese immigrants established significant communities in California and were more evenly divided between men and women than other Asian communities. Asian women were an integral part of their communities, but tended to be more isolated than the men. Many Asian women moved to farms in central California where they labored in the field by day and took care of their families by night. A good number tried to assimilate quickly, for example, dressing in American clothes. The growing cities of the West attracted single women and widows who made their way to Denver, Salt Lake, San Francisco, and Seattle. They worked in myriad jobs from domestic service to running their own small businesses. They were teachers, professional women, and many prostitutes.

THE FARTHEST WEST The idea that the United States had the right and obligation to interfere with the external and internal politics of nations beyond its shores accelerated in the latter part of the nineteenth century, affecting Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, and other areas. However, Christian MISSIONARIES, including many women, began settling in the Hawaiian Islands in the early nineteenth century. By the 1830s, American traders began buying land and establishing sugar plantations. As the century progressed, Americans wrested power away from the leaders of an ancient, highly developed civilization. Merchants and missionaries undermined the traditional social, economic, cultural, and political structure. Hawaiian women were pressured to emulate the model of the patriarchal, nuclear family and to give up such freedoms as that to divorce freely. In 1893, the last Hawaiian ruler, Queen LILIUOKALANI was deposed by influential American inhabitants and, in 1898, Hawaii was formally annexed by the United States. American imperialism swept throughout the islands of the Pacific and disrupted the lives of the women who lived and worked there. The lives of women in the West were extremely varied. Cultures clashed, women encroached on other women’s terrain, and lives changed. The culture of the American West be-

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came an amalgam of cultures whose treatment and understanding of women’s place varied. By 1890, women’s place in society was defined by the Euro-American tradition. Yet the impact of diverse cultures, the necessity for women to play multiple roles in the harsh realities of Western life, and the laws set down earlier by Mexicans who once ruled the West gave many women of the West greater independence than their Eastern sisters. FURTHER READING

Bartley, Paul, and Cathy Loxton. Plains Women: Women in the American West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cott, Nancy, ed. No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987. Riley, Glenda. Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. ARTICLES

Norton, Mary Beth, and Ruth M. Alexander, eds. Major Problems in American Women’s History: Documents and Essays. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1989. Ruiz, Vicki, and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Race and Slavery ace and SLAVERY left African-American women in the antebellum period (1820– 1860) vulnerable to flagrant abuses. Most were able to survive their enslavement and preserve their dignity and culture. Some did not. At times, women were so damaged by slavery that they preferred death to survival. Slavery was a system of coerced, unpaid labor. The founders of the United States embraced the Enlightenment concept of the social contract—in which the individual gives up certain rights to the state in return for protection of life, liberty, and property. Within this paradigm, slaves were considered property, not persons deserving protection of law. Slave owners held arbitrary power over their human property. For this reason, slavery was never uniform; it differed from plantation to plantation and from master to master. Because of the arbitrary power of the master, slaves experienced a dangerous and uncertain existence. They could be wrenched away from family and community by mere whim. They had only their power of personality and intelligence to counter the slave owner’s authority. Women were in even greater danger than men were because they were sexually abused and used for the reproduction of more slaves. Historians have argued over the role of race in slavery for decades. In White Over Black, historian Winthrop Jordan argued that racism originated in cultural beliefs that the English brought with them to Africa in the 1600s, which allowed them to think of Africans as less than human. Such a view legitimized engaging in the slave trade. Others consider racial attitudes and racism to be the result of slavery. As white INDENTURED SERVITUDE (see Volume 1) was replaced with African slavery, gradually color became a mark of inferior status. This racism was reinforced after the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (see Volume 1) when ideals of equality led to gradual emancipation in the Northern states. In response to this threat to the slave system, Southerners constructed a theory of racism to justify their continued holding of slaves. For women slaves who could be categorized by race or gender, race was the determinative cat-

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egory. The cultural ideals of European Americans in the antebellum years placed women on a pedestal as wives and mothers. This confined them to inequality, but offered some protection and advantages. Middle- and upper-class men revered white women for their presumed gender characteristics of delicacy, purity and maternal love. Women slaves were categorized as “other than women” because of their race. Slave owners conferred no benefits or advantages of womanhood on slave women; because they were Africans and slaves, they were not exempted from hard labor on the grounds of fragility. Rather than being characterized as chaste and virtuous, female slaves were portrayed by white society as the opposite—Jezebels who tempted their masters and his sons. Women slaves were required to care for their masters’ children, while their own children were left in the care of others. Within this slave system, women did nearly every kind of work, no matter how difficult. The perception of women as slaves only in the household—as cooks, nurses, or domestic servants—is inaccurate: Most women worked in hard agricultural labor, plowing, planting, hoeing, cultivating, and picking crops of tobacco, rice, sugar, grain and, most importantly in this period, cotton. Women did all agricultural jobs that men did, though fewer women plowed and more women hoed. The small percentage of women who pursued other work did female-defined work such as cooking, domestic service, child rearing, and manufacture of textiles. Even those women who worked in the master’s house were called out to the fields at harvest time. Often midwives were African-American women while men held the skilled crafts jobs that existed on larger plantations. At first glance, one might conclude that it would be better to work in the “Big House.” There were advantages: opportunities for better food and clothing, work that was not as backbreaking as field work, and perhaps a chance to influence the master or mistress in their decisions. There were also major drawbacks. Domestic work

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could be as physically demanding as field labor at times. A woman might be kept on duty around the clock to attend to the family’s needs. Many slave women had to sleep at the doors of their masters and mistresses in order to be on call at any time. There was little concern on the part of a master for a slave woman’s family. In addition, constant exposure to the changing moods of the master and mistress might bring a woman into danger. Sexual abuse was common. In the slave system, there was no incentive to work except the threat of violence, which the owner had to be willing to employ in order for it to be effective. A plantation where there was no physical punishment was rare. Women were punished just as men were: lashed, tortured, maimed, and even killed. Even when they were pregnant, they were whipped. Pregnant women were told to lie on the ground with their stomachs in a hole dug to protect the fetus, and then beaten. Though their pregnancies did not free them from work or punishment, women slaves were valued for their ability to produce more slaves, which added to their masters’ wealth. Consequently, masters had a great deal of interest in the sexual lives of their slaves. They might take control over the choice of mates to attempt to breed strong slave children. How much selective breeding was actually carried on is contested among historians, but anecdotal evidence indicates that there were crude attempts toward this goal. Masters held the right to determine whether and whom a slave could marry. As Josephine Howard reported to a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer in the 1930s, quoted in Ira Berlin’s Remembering Slavery, “[P]apa and mammy wasn’t married like folks now, ’cause dem times de white folks jes’ put slave men and women together like hosses or cattle.” Sometimes masters were quite lax in exercising their authority, and at other times, they might deny a couple permission to marry if it would cause inconvenience or loss of progeny—for instance, if a male slave wished to marry a woman from another plantation, the children of that union would belong to the owner of the woman. Though slaves and masters used the word marriage, marriage between slaves was never legally recognized. Accordingly, the union was not until “death do you part,” but rather until “your master or distance do you part.” One of the most heinous wrongs against women slaves was the sexual violation they en-

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dured. HARRIET JACOBS, who wrote her narrative in 1857, described her master’s attempted seduction. “I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. . . . He peopled my young mind with unclean images.” Jacobs defied her master and ended up living in her grandmother’s attic for seven years to escape the master’s obsession with her. Another slave, Celia, who was purchased in 1850 at the age of 14, was raped by her master on the way to her new home. He continued to rape her for years until she finally became so desperate that she struck him with a heavy piece of wood. After the second blow, he was dead. A trial followed; Celia was found guilty and hanged. These cases stand out because they were examples of remarkable resistance. More often women were sexually abused and lived with the agony of their abuse. According to the 1860 census, 10 percent of African Americans were born as the result of unions with whites, but as historian Jacqueline Jones points out, these are likely to be undercounted. Master-slave sexual relationships were well known by the slaveowning gentry, and children of the unions often knew who their fathers were, but that the master was willing to acknowledge these unions to the censustaker is unlikely. Pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, which depleted women’s energy, were in direct conflict with their role as workers. Many slave women demanded lighter work and time off during these periods. The master had to make a choice between the number of hours of work a woman slave could perform and the safe delivery of valuable future workers. It was common for slave owners to give women time off during late pregnancy and just after childbirth, but a short time later, women had to return to work. One of the main stresses on slave women was concern for their children, which began as soon as they were born. Conditions of work demanded that mothers nurse their babies whenever there was a lull in the work—rather than when the baby needed to be fed. Often field hands would bring their babies out to the fields, put them in the safest place they could find, and when there was a water or food break, hasten to nurse them. Child mortality rates were high. Up to one-third of slave children did not live to age ten in the 1850s— twice the mortality rate of white children.

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Usually a mother could be safe in the belief that her child would not be sold away from her during breastfeeding, but that was not always the case. The slave mother had many fears for her child—apprehension over the child’s safety while she went to work in the fields or house, dread that her child would be beaten, and greatest of all, constant anxiety about whether the child would be sold away from her. Masters did not usually want to separate families, because it lowered the morale of their slaves, but if financial considerations dictated a sale, they hardened their hearts to the suffering that sale would bring to family members. The sale of a child was one of the greatest horrors a mother endured. Sometimes children would be given as a gift to a relative, or a master’s death might result in the dispersal of slaves because of a bequest. During the period from 1820 to 1860, the opening of new cotton lands to the west resulted in a large-scale migration to new plantations and meant more family breakups. Enslaved women resisted their masters as much as men did, but in different ways. Men were more likely to run away for good, while a woman was more likely to run away for a short time, in order to make a point to her master concerning her treatment. Negotiations would ensue and eventually an accommodation would be made. This difference may be accounted for by the fact that children were usually with the mother and therefore escape would be more difficult to accomplish. In addition to running away, women pitted themselves against masters and mistresses. A woman slave might sabotage the cooking if she were unhappy or wanted a transfer to the fields. She might stand up physically to master or mistress as Celia did. On the other hand, she might

use any number of stratagems such as “Puttin on Ole Massa,” that is, outwitting the master. Atrocities abounded in slavery, but success against powerful forces outweighed failure. If one out of three children died by the age of ten in 1850, two out of three survived—an outstanding record given the poverty of the environment into which babies were born, with mothers who routinely worked 16-hour days. This is due to maternal concern and the power of the extended family that existed on most plantations. Historian Darlene Clark Hine has shown that women knew how to build communities to support one another during enslavement. Others credit religion as essential to successful survival. Ex-slaves like SOJOURNER TRUTH agitated for the downfall of the slave system, and her struggle and that of her sisters in slavery begot strength and emancipation. Bonnie L. Ford See also: African-American Women. FURTHER READING

Berlin, Ira, et al., eds. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. New York: Norton, 1977. White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

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Women, Work, and Industrialization n the 4th of July 1845, SARAH BAGLEY, a longtime Lowell mill worker, stood before a group of workers in Woburn, Massachusetts, to demand better working conditions and a ten-hour workday. The founder and president of the newly formed Lowell Female LABOR REFORM ASSOCIATION, one of the first labor unions organized by women in America, Bagley went on to edit the Voice of Industry, a journal affiliated with the New England Workingman’s Association. The ten-hour movement collapsed less than a year later, but women continued to participate in the growing industrial workforce and in labor organizing. Throughout the nineteenth century, WAGE EARNERS replaced small town merchants and artisans as the modern WORKING CLASS and MIDDLE CLASS emerged in the cities. In the 1820s and 1830s, as the number of factories grew in the Northeast, young women from farm families found employment in the TEXTILE INDUSTRY. As artisanal production shifted to factory manufacturing, poor and working-class women took in more home contract work. With the increase in public grammar schools, middle-class white women were able to find TEACHING positions, a profession previously limited to men. Although women worked outside the home in increasing numbers, the ideology of separate spheres remained intact. This had particular impact on women’s roles in labor organizing. The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ushered in the move from agricultural to factory manufacturing systems, which transformed both wage work and HOUSEWORK and redefined the meaning of work for men and women. Home contract work, such as cigar rolling, flower making, and garment finishing remained a staple of women’s labor throughout the nineteenth century. In the garment industry, for example, women and their children took unfinished factory-produced clothing and completed it at home, hemming and sewing buttons and buttonholes for low wages. The invention of the sewing machine centralized the garment industry and, while home contract work remained an important source of income for women, by the turn of the century, the new

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technology had taken women out of their homes and forced them into tenement sweatshops. Beginning in the 1840s, the first wave of immigrants flowed from Ireland. A large portion of them were young, single women who found jobs, mostly as DOMESTIC SERVANTS, to support themselves and their extended families. Over the next decades, immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia began to arrive in greater numbers. Women from these regions usually settled with their families in the Midwest and worked in agriculture on family farms rather than in the paid labor force. In the 1880s and 1890s, Italian women were also more likely to immigrate as part of a family group. Faced with cultural restrictions on their employment possibilities, they worked in industries that did not employ men, such as candy factories. Slavic and Bohemian women who left their homes in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia often found work in the metal industries or cigar making. Immigration continued to increase, and by the time the 1924 restrictive immigration laws were passed over 35 million immigrants had arrived from Europe alone. A third of these new Americans were women. The CIVIL WAR and industrialization, as well as immigration, changed the face of the American workforce. The dramatic industrial growth that followed in the wake of the Civil War marked the shift from RURAL, FARM, AND RANCH LIFE to the concentration of the labor force in urban areas, and, in 1869, the newly completed transcontinental railroad resulted in improved access to markets across America. New technologies and greater demands for goods drew women into the wage workforce in larger numbers in the agricultural fields and the factories. Although the Civil War brought about the ABOLITION of SLAVERY, the daily lives of most African Americans in the South failed to improve under the conditions of SHARECROPPING, which replaced the slave system. Throughout the nineteenth century, most free black women earned meager wages as laundresses, seamstresses, or domestic servants. During RECONSTRUCTION, African-American women struggled to move out of sharecropping into wage work. Prevented from working in

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Southern textile mills, African-American women held only 3 percent of textile jobs, even though they represented 30 percent of the workforce in the South. By 1900, most employed AfricanAmerican women worked in either agriculture or domestic service. In the cities, for example, they made up 23 percent of all domestic servants. The lack of job opportunities for African Americans led more black women than any other group to work for wages. In 1880, for example, 73 percent of single and 35.4 percent of married AfricanAmerican women participated in wage labor, compared to 23 percent single and 7.3 percent married white native-born women. By the late nineteenth century, the United States was the world’s leading industrial power, but capitalism’s boom and bust cycles had resulted in several economic recessions and depressions. During economic downturns, women provided a cheap labor supply, and beginning in the 1870s, more women joined the labor workforce as national employment levels and new technologies displaced many male skilled laborers. By 1900, excluding agricultural labor, almost 20 percent of all women worked for wages; of these, 15 percent were African-American women, 35 percent were white and native-born, and 50 percent were first or second generation immigrants. Region, race, ethnicity, and class all played a part in the types of jobs available to women.

WOMEN’S WORK: AT HOME AND ON THE JOB Throughout the nineteenth century, most women drifted in and out of the workforce as their family’s circumstances dictated, but their labor at home was just as essential to the family’s survival. Mass production and mechanized labor profoundly altered women’s domestic roles and the nature of consumption. For many women, new inventions and production technology radically changed the nature of the work they performed at home. The proliferation of consumer goods, factory-produced canned food and readymade clothing, for example, drastically cut the amount of time most women dedicated to household tasks and homemade goods. Rural and poor women, however, continued to produce most of their family’s food and clothing needs at home. Many urban as well as rural households lacked running water and depended on women’s physical labor for maintaining the home. Furthermore, most families, unable to rely

on only one worker’s wages, had to send women to work in the paid labor force to be able to afford newly available consumer goods, as what they could not produce at home had to be purchased. The sexual division of labor, which relegated women to the domestic sphere, defined the jobs and tasks that women performed more often than men as less skilled. Furthermore, the FAMILY WAGE SYSTEM, based on the ideology that men would earn a sufficient income to support their families, devalued women’s work in the home and considered all of women’s labor secondary to the earnings of the male breadwinner. For example, the concentration of women in factories that produced household consumer goods created a gendered hierarchy in manufacturing. Although women in these jobs often used similar machinery to that of men in other factories, they were paid less wages because they were women and because they were producing goods that were used in the domestic sphere. White native-born women began to enter the industrial labor force in the early nineteenth century. As manufactured cloth became cheaper, clothing production moved out of the home and into the factory. With the weaving and sewing skills they had learned on the family farm, many young women could supplement the family income with the wages they earned in textile mills. Touted as a model industrial city, Lowell, Massachusetts was one of the centers of the textile industry and of labor unrest. The Lowell mill, one of the first factories to rely on a primarily female labor force, opened in 1821. By the 1840s, although only 10 percent of all women worked as wage laborers, 50 percent of the mill workers were women. The LOWELL MILL WORKERS, mostly young, single, native-born and white, played an important role in early labor organizing, fighting against wage cuts and production speedups, but immigrant women arriving on American shores soon replaced them on the factory floor. White native-born women also dominated the growing number of teaching, clerical, and service jobs. The rise of private education for women in the 1820s coincided with the increased need for public school teachers, and by the 1830s, almost one fifth of all white, native-born women in Massachusetts had at one point in their lives been schoolteachers. The ideology of REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD (see Volume 1), which assigned to women the responsibility of training children to be good citizens of the republic, allowed some women to venture into the public sphere as teachers.

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White “working girls” took jobs in the burgeoning service industries of clerical and department store sales work. The invention of the typewriter in 1850, and the rise of the department store—Macy’s opened in 1860—led to increased opportunities for white women in urban centers in the United States. Although many of these jobs afforded better pay than factory labor, they still required women to remain on their feet for 10 to 12 hours at a time and offered little in terms of job security or benefits. In 1870 only 4.5 percent of office stenographers and typists were women; this number grew to 40 percent in just ten years. Compared to other types of work, office employment was more steady and paid higher wages, but it was available only to single, white, native-born women. The high turnover rate in these positions, caused by women leaving the workforce when they married, kept wages relatively low and decreased the possibilities for union organizing. Immigration and naturalization supplied manufacturers with a cheap labor force, but race and ethnicity limited most the job opportunities. For example, Irish and Scandinavian women entered domestic service; Jews found positions in the garment industry; and Czechoslovakian women who had often already learned cigarrolling skills in their homeland joined the tobacco industry. What these groups had in common were the horrific conditions under which they worked for wages and the inevitable unpaid labor they performed at home. Some single women rented rooms in all female boardinghouses, but most lived at home with their parents and contributed to the family’s subsistence. Poor women’s earning power was necessary to their family’s survival, whether they were daughters bringing home factory wage packets, mothers taking in OUTWORK, or grandmothers scrimping to prepare meals to feed the entire family.

BREAD AND ROSES: WOMEN’S LABOR ORGANIZING Whether they performed their jobs in the home, the factory, or the department store, most working women in the nineteenth century worked an exhausting six or seven days a week, 12 to16 hours a day, for minuscule wages and under dangerous conditions. Although some women found their way into local and national labor politics, most working women were excluded from trade unions and had to organize on their own behalf.

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Women had to defy ideas that working outside of the home and on behalf of their rights as workers was unwomanly. In 1834, for example, when the LYNN FACTORY WORKERS organized a strike, they were attacked for stepping out of the domestic sphere and for labor organizing. Some craft unions supported women workers during strikes in the 1830s and 1840s, but they prevented women from joining their organizations because many male workers wanted to protect men’s role as the family’s breadwinner and considered women to be temporary rather than permanent wage laborers. However, there were exceptions. In an expression of solidarity, the New England Workingman’s Association did affliate with several women’s unions, including the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Several decades later, the KNIGHTS OF LABOR, founded in 1869, opened its membership to women. Promoting equal pay for equal work and endorsing female suffrage, the Knights of Labor formally admitted women in 1882, and four years later women constituted ten percent of its national membership. In the late 1800s the numbers of wage-earning women rose to unprecedented levels. Some working women joined forces with middle-class women to fight for PROTECTIVE LABOR LAWS. Founded in 1888, the ILLINOIS WOMEN’S ALLIANCE, for example, called for legislation against child labor and sweatshops. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, working women were poised to take militant action against capitalists to demand improved working conditions and respect for their rights as laborers. Mary Reynolds See also: Clerical Work; Irish Immigrants; Jewish Americans. FURTHER READING

Amott, Teresa L., and Julie A. Matthaei. Race, Gender & Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Baron, Ava. Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Wertheimer, Barbara. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

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Immigration and Urbanization s the United States entered the nineteenth century, it continued to grow both in population and in area. Americans migrated west and explore the young nation’s seemingly endless frontier, even as people from other countries proceeded to immigrate to the United States in search of freedom, prosperity, or a chance for a new life. Both immigration and migration occurred in waves, dictated often by war, territorial holdings, or the economy. As people moved both within and to the United States, new cities sprang up and existing ones grew substantially. Regardless of reasons for immigration or migration, job opportunities were an important consideration. The development and emergence of industry in the United States profoundly affected where and which cities grew, and what people in those cities did to earn a living. Some of the earliest examples of urbanization in the United States occurred as a result of industrialization and internal migration, rather than immigration. The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in this country took off with the production of cloth in the Merrimack Valley in the 1820s. Textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts made use of the inexpensive and abundant labor of Yankee “farm girls” who lived nearby and had time prior to marriage to work outside the home. Within a fairly short period, however, these Yankee “mill girls” were replaced by an even cheaper source of labor— Irish and, later, Italian immigrants. Whole families worked for the mills, with women and children earning a fraction of what men earned; furthermore, the families did not require the housing and supervision that the “mill girls” had. Even as these young New England women were moving to Lowell to work in the mills, political and agricultural problems abroad were driving many people to American shores. Political unrest in western Europe, particularly a series of revolutions in 1848, coupled with a potato famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, proved more than adequate incentive for people to leave their homes and try their luck elsewhere. At the same time, rumors of gold in California in 1849 provided an extra incentive to migrate. These new

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immigrants, largely German and Irish, faced many problems. Many immigrants were CATHOLIC, which put them at a decided disadvantage in the heavily Protestant New England states. Many were from poor rural areas, yet settled in industrializing cities. Many had different attitudes towards alcohol at a time when the country going through a TEMPERANCE movement. Lastly, even though many of these immigrants were from the same countries as earlier settlers, they looked or sounded different enough, because of their rural roots, because of their religion, to stand out and be different from the established “native-born” Americans. In this large wave of immigration, the average GERMAN or IRISH IMMIGRANT was young and typically traveled unaccompanied by family. For young Irish women, this was especially liberating: the structure and strictures of community standards and parental oversight disappeared overnight, to be replaced by a new community and new values. Typically, immigrants settled in a port city or sought out cities with others from their homeland. Although these immigrants looked like other Americans, they were different enough in their customs, religious beliefs, and habits to arouse deep-seated suspicion and antagonism. Many businesses hung signs reading “Irish Need Not Apply” and young Irishwomen who sought positions as domestics were turned away with the explanation that they were dirty, did not know how to clean properly, or some similar excuse. New York City and Boston, two port cities, swelled with recent Irish and German immigrants; St. Louis, a point of departure for western adventurers, became a city with a large German community. Cities grew larger, or sprang into existence, because of their location on a river, at a junction between two (or more) railroad lines, or because of the proximity of a commodity. Sometimes cities would appear, thrive, and then disappear when their reason for existence was gone. Ghost towns in the West, particularly in Montana, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, stood as empty reminders of a once-thriving mining

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economy: once the mine “went dry” and there was no more copper or silver or other ore to extract, the mining company left, the workers left, and so did the supporting industries that employed women, such as dining establishments. Other cities expanded because factories were built, taking advantage of the pool of available workers. In time, this fed on itself: people migrated or immigrated to cities because were there jobs, and more jobs were created because people were there to fill them. By the end of the nineteenth century, according to census data, more people lived in rural than urban areas, by a slim margin. Women who arrived with families often did not settle in ports but traveled west. The lure of abundant and inexpensive land proved irresistible to many who journeyed to this new land explicitly to own their own property. As people migrated into the Northwestern Territory and the Great Plains, towns sprang up at crossroads of paths, railroad lines, or river ports. Specific industries aided town stability, and made them become a center of population, just as they had done in the east. Cattle, hogs, and meat processing contributed to the growth of Cincinnati, Kansas City, Omaha, and Chicago. The availability of jobs was a powerful incentive, and letters “back home” often helped propagate the myth that the streets of America were paved with gold. Not everyone had to move to become an “immigrant.” After the war between the United States and Mexico ended in 1848, many Mexican citizens suddenly were no longer living in Mexico; territory ceded to the United States included Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Like the Irish and German immigrants, these women were Catholic. A majority in Mexico, CATHOLICS were a minority in the United States: not everyone was Protestant, but many laws in society were based on the assumption that everyone was. One interesting result of this “new” Catholic population was that many Mexican men married Irish women, with Catholicism bridging the cultural gap. The “new” boundaries of the expanding country presented new challenges. NATIVE AMERICANS were suddenly subjected to different rules and policies than they had been earlier. Following long-established and official government policy, Native Americans tribes were treated as foreign countries, and treaties were negotiated through representatives from various nations. As

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the country pushed and expanded west, treaties with Native American tribes were broken, replaced, and constructed to limit the land they would live on, and increase the land available for whites. Native Americans shared many of the experiences of the immigrants: they migrated far from their native lands (typically under duress); their family structure and cultural patterns were under assault from outside forces which deemed their traditions and customs “primitive” and inferior to white Christian traditions; they were pressured to “Americanize” and abandon their old ways. In an effort to help the new country continue to grow, some companies and states sent recruiters to other countries to encourage migration to the United States. Families from Scandinavia migrated to Wisconsin and Minnesota to become farmers, on fertile and inexpensive land. The work that these new immigrants did was quite different from that which they had formerly done. As happened elsewhere, ethnic enclaves of Norwegians and Swedes arose in these states. For many of these women, spread out across the great distances necessary for farming, the networks formed through women’s clubs or church groups were critical to their sense of community. In some instances, the recruiting technique for workers was targeted at one sex only: men from China migrated to California in larger numbers, encouraged by abundant work on the rail roads in the 1860s. Chinese men immigrated alone, and when they began to consider marriage, the most obvious solution was to import women for them to marry. Thus, the population of Chinatown in San Francisco and Seattle in the 1870s suddenly became younger as small children were born subsequent to an increase in the female population. With the transcontinental railroad completed, many people who had supported importing cheap labor became suddenly concerned that Chinese would steal jobs from Americans. The federal CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT, passed in 1882, limited what jobs Chinese immigrants could perform and how many would be admitted to the United States each year. When the law expired in 1892, Congress passed a new one that further limited the number of Chinese immigrants and their rights as residents of the United States. Despite these many laws, however, the Chinese community repeatedly used the legal system to preserve the rights due them as

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American citizens, or as “resident aliens” in the United States by going to court to challenge the constitutionality of certain restrictive laws. Patterns of immigration are affected by two forces, the impetus to leave one’s own country and the opportunities to be found in a new country. If neither force is very compelling, immigration decreases. A secondary factor is a high return rate: 30 percent of all immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century returned to their country of origin after a few years in the United States. For some, the decision to return had been made before they ever left, for others lack of success or homesickness or any number of other factors impelled people to return to their native countries. Using the CIVIL WAR as an example is instructive. Even as immigration from Asia increased, immigration on the East Coast slowed to a trickle during the Civil War, in large part because the Southern ports were blockaded by Northern ships. Trade at Northern ports also slowed down, as many European countries were hesitant to get involved in an internal dispute. After the war, the rates of migration rebounded. Job opportunities and immigration abounded in the South and the West. The steady stream of immigration changed quite dramatically in the 1880s. A combination of more unrest, including the reunification process in Italy and religious persecution of Jews in parts of Poland and Russia prompted heavy immigration from these areas. Unlike earlier waves of migration, such as the second wave in the 1840s, whole families were immigrating, not just single people. For many of the people in this third wave of immigration, returning to “the old country,” as one-third of all immigrants did, was not a possibility, for reasons of religious persecution or economic opportunity. These immigrants were quite different from previous immigrants: they arrived in larger numbers than ever seen before; they looked different from “native-born” Americans because they were primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe rather than Northern and Western Europe; and many of them were Catholic or Jewish, rather than Protestant. This group of immigrants, the largest to immigrate to the United States, often lived in ethnic enclaves and maintained some “Old World” customs. The resistance

to assimilation collided with a late nineteenth-century American movement of reform and “Americanization.” Often, neither side was happy with the results, as children might embrace new customs and clothing while their parents sought to retain their traditions and culture. This final wave of immigrants in the nineteenth century were more comfortable living in urban rather than in rural environments, as many of them had lived in cities prior to their departure. Cities with industry, or a hub for regional transportation, often grew in direct proportion to the numbers of immigrants arriving. The large numbers of immigrants made it possible for ethnic enclaves to spring up, thus making it less imperative to learn English and assimilate immediately. As one ethnic group learned English and got better jobs, they moved out of the slums, only to be replaced by the next immigrant group. Chicago soon expanded in large part because immigrants had been lured over to this country to work in the meat-packing industry. St. Louis, with its large German population from the last great wave, and its position on the Mississippi River and railroads, continued to grow. Atlanta and Birmingham, cities central to the revitalization of the New South, received their share of immigrants as well; still more immigrants remained in or close to the original cities of debarkation, including Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco. For each group of immigrants, the United States offered a chance to start anew. Gwen Kay See also: Jewish Americans. FURTHER READING

Barth, Gunther Paul. Instant Cities:Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Gabaccia, Donna. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the United States, 1820–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Zunz, Olivier. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Part 2 Articles

A  ABOLITION

A movement to end the practice of slaveholding and free all slaves in the United States. It was but one of the remedies suggested for ending the “peculiar institution,” as SLAVERY was called. Other solutions included ending the slave trade (the importation of new slaves from Africa) but not the practice of slavery, limiting the spread of slavery in the territories, prohibiting slavery in any new state joining the Union, and repatriating the existing slaves to a new country in Africa or elsewhere. Although QUAKERS opened a debate about slave owning in the United States in the eighteenth century, a formal abolitionist movement did not begin until the 1830s in the United States. Membership grew during the 1840s and 1850s and continued throughout the CIVIL WAR. The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century was comprised of international organizations dealing with the question of slavery on economic, political, moral, and religious terms. Within this network of diverse groups, men and women had different ideas about how to end slavery. Some groups of abolitionists believed that the best way to end slavery was through political means; these groups formed the Liberty Party or joined a wing of the Republican Party. Other groups followed the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison; they believed that slavery would be ended only when slave owners saw that slavery was wrong, and some even argued that the North should secede from the Union. After the Civil War, many of these organizations took up related causes—including civil rights issues.

The Moral Suasion Argument Women organized some abolition groups on their own. These groups did not always correspond to a men’s group, nor did their beliefs about the slavery question always match the men’s ideas. Despite political differences, most radical, liberal, and conservative women believed that their antislavery work expressed the core

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ideal of “true womanhood.” Because women’s roles beyond the home and family were severely circumscribed in the early nineteenth century, some women justified their abolition activities as an extension of their religious and domestic roles. Though many were, in fact, working extensively outside of the home in the political arena, most women relied on the use of “moral suasion,” the practice of convincing people that slavery was morally or religiously wrong. These women hoped to persuade slaveholders and proponents of slavery to renounce their belief in slavery, as well as the practice of slaveholding. The moral suasion tactic differed from other ways to end slavery: judicial—declaring slaveholding unconstitutional—or legislative—outlawing slavery or creating a constitutional amendment against it, as ultimately happened. Many women believed that moral suasion was most effective when practiced within the family. Antislavery appeals praised not only the family but also the mothers in particular for teaching their children proper moral behavior and bolstering proper morals in their husbands through Bible lessons, religious instruction, and “womanly influence.” Women were perceived to be the family leaders in religious and moral matters, and they could exercise significant leadership roles on the matter of slavery. Women used conventional assumptions about their domestic roles not only to justify their ability to speak out against slavery but also to strengthen their argument against slavery itself. As a way to make Northern women understand the horrors of slavery, many abolitionist women spoke about the institution of slavery as an assault on the family and particularly on women’s role as mothers. Because enslaved people could be bought and sold, slavery broke up families for the sake of a slaveholder’s pocketbook and undermined the domestic ideal of “true womanhood.” Women often began working publicly and politically within their churches. From these congregations, women branched out and began organizing public speaking engagements, holding lecture

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were affluent, evangelical church-goers, often the wives or daughters of prominent church leaders. They were not usually employed outside the home but were active in BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES before becoming active in abolition. Similar conservative groups existed up and down the East Coast and in the more western settlements. More radical groups, such as the Female AntiSlavery Societies in Boston and Philadelphia and the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, took public stands against slavery. Though their members too believed in moral suasion, they were more likely to make public speeches, rather than work Conservative and individually in the home or church. Liberal groups Women Abolitionists sent national and international lecturers to the terConservative abolitionists, such as members of the ritories, sent ANTISLAVERY PETITIONS to Congress, Ladies New York Anti-Slavery Society, subscribed and supported numerous abolition newspapers to the idea of true womanhood but believed that that circulated nationally. These liberal groups their moral and religious work should be done ex- aligned themselves with William Lloyd Garrison, clusively in the home. They also did not believe who also was a strong proponent of women’s rights that freedom for the enslaved entailed giving and supported women as leaders of his national orwomen the right to vote. Overall, these women ganization, the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. After the Civil War, as Congress was drafting and voting on the RECONSTRUCTION Amendments, the WOMEN’S FIRSTS Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth, which would end slavery in Maria Miller Stewart was the first AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN to the United States and secure political speak in public. Born in 1803, Maria Miller married James rights for African-American men, Stewart, a Boston shipping agent, in 1826. Three years later, he some women active in the abolition died. After his death, a group of white businessmen claimed movement seemed to abandon their James Stewart’s estate as their own, and although Maria took beliefs in the rights of freed slaves. them through a two-year legal battle, as an African-American Laura A. Goodwin woman, she had little recourse against them, and lost. tours of their own, holding fairs and bazaars where antislavery goods were sold, fund-raising, and supporting local and national abolition newspapers. Among the many notable abolitionists to emerge from church-based organizations were LYDIA MARIA CHILD, PRUDENCE CRANDALL, Maria Stewart, ANGELINA GRIMKÉ, and SARAH GRIMKÉ. Though better known for their work on women’s rights issues, Quakers LUCRETIA MOTT, AMY POST, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, and SUSAN B. ANTHONY also began their reform work as abolitionists.

Stewart began writing in 1830; her first essay, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” was published in pamphlet form by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831. In 1832 and 1833 she gave four public speeches on such issues as abolition, the social and economic standing of free African Americans, and gender. In a speech delivered in Boston on September 21, 1832, she said, “And such is the powerful force of prejudice. Let our girls possess what amiable qualities of soul they may . . . it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants.” Stewart delivered her last speech in 1833. Although it is unclear why she stopped public speaking, she hinted that the opposition she had received discouraged her. She then left Boston for New York where she worked as a teacher until the CIVIL WAR. During the war, she nursed the sick and wounded in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; she remained a nurse after the war ended.

See also: Harriet Jacobs; Sojourner Truth; Underground Railroad. FURTHER READING

Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. Venet, Wendy H. Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Yellin, Jean Fagan, and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

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ABORTION

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and capture an audience for their services, physicians led the crusade for the total criminalization of abortion, including the prosecution of any woman who sought or had an abortion. In so doing, doctors affiliated with the American Medical Association made significant inroads into monopolizing women’s health care and putting competitors, like midwives, out of business. By 1873 public opinion regarding abortion had changed so much that the COMSTOCK LAWS, which primarily intended to curb the pornography trade, prohibited selling or advertising “any article or medicine . . . for causing abortion.” This legislative trend established official abortion policies in the United States for the next 100 years.

In the decades before 1800, the United States had no legislation on abortion, though American women did have what we would recognize today as abortions. American and British common law did not recognize gestation as we do today but associated legitimate pregnancy with “quickening.” Quickening took place at the moment a woman first felt fetal movement, usually in the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. Before quickening occurred, both the law and society acknowledged only that a woman had a stoppage of menses that might or might not be rectified with medications or surgical intervention. Not until after quickening, when the fetus had exhibited the animal characteristic of movement, could the destruction of a fetus be considered a common law offense. Historical studies have strongly suggested that a large number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women did TRAILBLAZERS abort, by either internal interventions or abortion-inducing herbs, to avoid the stigma of an extramarital Though Madame Restell numbers among a multitude of aborpreganacy and as a means of family tion specialists, she was undoubtedly the most flamboyant and size limiting. well known of the group. Restell, whose real name was Ann The first wave of legislation to Lohman, immigrated to New York from England and began percriminalize abortion came in the years forming abortions in the 1830s. Restell’s fame lies with both her 1821–1841. This first wave of laws public resistance to abortion law and the widely advertised sale aimed more at regulating the activiof “Madame Restell’s Female Monthly Pills,” which claimed to ties of physicians than at preventing treat “complaints arising from female irregularity.” She also adwomen from obtaining abortions. vertised and sold a “preventative powder” that women purThese laws, in effect, primarily punchasedthroughthemails,mixedwithwater,andusedtoinduce“an ished those who harmed either a efficacious remedy for married ladies whose health forbids a too woman or a fetus in the performance rapid increase of the family.” Restell spent an estimated $60,000 of an abortion. By the mid-nineteenth in 1871 to advertise her patent abortifacient pills, suggesting the century, as increasing numbers of extremely large market for such products. middle-class, white, married, ProtesAs abortion laws began to change, and as American women tant women sought to delay or limit began to avail themselves more frequently of abortion, practitheir childbearing, the numbers of tioners like Restell came increasingly under the watchful eye of abortion practitioners and those sellthe law. She was arrested in 1841 and again in 1845, though the ing commercial abortifacients also free publicity these arrests brought her appear to have outrose. Research suggests there was one weighed the legal nuisance. In fact, her infamy may have abortion for every 25 to 30 live births prompted her to open branch offices in Boston and Philadelfrom 1800 to 1830, with the number increasing to one abortion for every phia, and to increase her staff of traveling salesmen. five or six live births by the 1860s. In 1878 Anthony Comstock (of the Comstock laws) arIn fact, abortion represents one of rested Restell after buying abortifacients from her. She comthe first fields of medical specializamitted suicide the day before her trial was scheduled to begin. tion. As the number of abortion Though Restell’s techniques brought her notoriety, her signifiproviders increased, they created cance actually lies in her unique application of modern business competition with “regular,” or medprinciples to commercialize abortion. ical school trained doctors. Seeking to professionalize medical practice

ADAMS, MARIAN HOOPER

Abortion advocate and practitioner Madame Restell found a large market for her patented abortion pills.

FURTHER READING

Brodie, Janet. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1978.

 ACCULTURATION

The process whereby customs and beliefs change as a result of contact with cultures that have different customs and beliefs. Generally, acculturation has two main categories. The first occurs when there is and interchange between different groups without any military domination of one group by the other. Protestant missionary women’s efforts to Christianize and otherwise “rescue” Chinese prostitutes at the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME in late nineteenth century San Francisco falls under this heading of acculturation, as does the work by the INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN HOME with bigamous Mormon wives in Salt Lake City. Both Chinese and Mormon women borrowed from Christian mission workers, adopting some Protestant, middle-class customs and values, but they retained those parts of their cultures they deemed important. Thus, while the

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relationship between Protestant missionary women and Chinese or Mormon women was inherently unequal, both groups experienced a measure of control over their cultural choices. The second type of acculturation, sometimes referred to as directed change, takes place when one group of people conquers another set of people, usually through military conflict and political oppression. Certainly, the importation of Africans as an unfree, unwaged laboring population comes under this heading. African slaves, taken in bondage in Africa and shipped to America had to learn new languages, customs, ways of working, dressing, and living in ways that affected every facet of their lives. While this type of acculturation involves significantly less control by one group than another even forced acculturation involves a complex process of give and take by both the conquering and the conquered cultures. The result can range from a near replacement of one culture by another to the creation of a new, synthetic social system based on elements of both or all the involved cultures. Slave folk life, for example developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America from the interaction between African cultural patterns and the realities of American slavery. “Gullah,” the language of many south Carolina slaves was the result of the mixing of English with African languages. African-American religions were also a mix of Christianity and a variety of tribal religions, resulting in a particular brand of Protestantism unique to African Americans This kind of acculturation is often called creolization. New Orlean’s unique Creole culture, for example, resulted from the mixture of French, Spanish and African cultures.

 ADAMS, MARIAN HOOPER

(1843–1885) Socialite and pioneering woman photographer. Known as “Clover,” Adams was born in Boston in 1843 into an upper-class Brahmin family. Her mother died in 1848, after which she became very close to her doting father. Following an excellent private education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she volunteered for service in the SANITARY COMMISSION during the CIVIL WAR. In 1866, Hooper took a lengthy trip abroad. While she was overseas, she met the historian Henry Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great grandson of President John Adams), whom she married in 1872.

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On their return to Boston, Marian Hooper Adams and her husband turned their home into an intellectual salon that soon became the center of the city’s scholarly and cultural life. They did the same in the nation’s capital after moving to a new residence on Lafayette Square across from the White House in 1877. Integrated in this way into Washington’s intellectual and political elite, Adams enjoyed unparallelled insight into the nation’s power structure. In fact, her letters to her father, posthumously published as The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883 (1936), have provided historians with a valuable perspective on elite culture in the 1870s. Adams was also one of the first women to become a serious photographer. She took and later developed technically advanced photographs of the era’s leading figures, including future secretary of state John Hay and historian George Bancroft. Although Adams enjoyed her life in Washington immensely, the death of her father in 1885 emotionally traumatized her. Severely depressed, she took her own life on December 6 of that same year by swallowing chemicals used for developing film.

 ADDAMS, JANE

(1860–1935) Founder of the settlement house movement, suffragist, and first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. Her mother died when she was two years old, and Addams was devoted to her father, a successful businessman and a member of the Illinois state legislature for 16 years. Addams entered the Rockford Female Seminary in 1877. She was such an excellent student that she became valedictorian of her class. Addams wanted to attend medical school and become a doctor, but very few women entered this career. Her father and stepmother feared that a medical career would jeopardize her chances of finding a husband. Instead, in 1881 after she graduated from college, they decided to take her on a trip, hoping she would forget about her aspirations. That same year, her father died suddenly. Addams became depressed, grew sicker and refused to leave the house. Eventually, she was treated for a curvature of the spine which had afflicted her since childhood. Following her recovery, Addams decided to travel to Europe with some friends. In 1888, she visited Toynbee Hall,

a settlement house in London devoted to helping the poor. Here she found university graduates dedicated to providing an education for those who lived in the slums so they could improve their lives. As Addams wrote, it was “so unaffectdly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries . . . that it seems perfectly ideal.” Addams had traveled to Toynbee Hall with a close friend named Ellen Starr. Once Addams and Starr returned to the United States, they decided to open a settlement house in Chicago modelled on Toynbee Hall. Eventually, they found an old mansion on Polk and Halstead Streets and moved into it on September 18, 1889. This would become HULL HOUSE, the first settlement house in the United States. According to its charter, the two women intended “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.” Addams came from a wealthy family and knew many influential people, so she was able to secure large donations to support Hull House. Gradually, the settlement house included a variety of facilities, such as an art gallery, a music school, a theater, a public kitchen, a gym and swimming pool, and even an employment agency. These facilities opened doors to new ideas and new opportunities for factory workers and their children. By the 1890s, more than 2,000 people a week gathered at Hull House for education, recreation, and a variety of services. But Addams’s work did not stop there. She also worked to improve the housing and working conditions of the poor in Chicago. She campaigned for factory inspections, laws to reduce working hours for women, and laws requiring all children to attend school. In the late 1800s, young people who had committed crimes were tried in adult courts, but Addams believed that this was unfair. In 1899, she helped develop a juvenile court system in Illinois. The aim of juvenile court was to reform young people rather than send them to prison. Addams was also instrumental in persuading Illinois to appoint juvenile probation officers. Their role was to work with young people and help them improve their lives. In 1910, Addams published Twenty Years at Hull House, which became a best-seller and

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Deegan, Mary Jo. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986.

 ADULTERY

Jane Addams (center) founded the settlement house movement with Hull House in Chicago in 1889.

earned her a substantial income. Meanwhile, she was also campaigning for woman suffrage and became a vice president for the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911. In 1915, after World War I had begun, Addams helped organize the Woman’s Peace Party, which opposed American involvement in the war. Her efforts to improve society continued. In 1920, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1931, she was recognized for her outstanding work by becoming the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Chicago on May 21, 1935. FURTHER READING

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Nineteenth-century marital fidelity rested on a gendered double standard. Although both women and men were theoretically expected to be true to their marriage vows, women suffered much greater social condemnation than men when caught in an adulterous affair. This is not to say that nineteenth-century Americans encouraged male adultery but only that women were far more likely to suffer the repercussions of adultery. By midcentury most states considered adultery, or “extreme cruelty” and “gross misbehavior and wickedness in either parties repugnant to and in violation of the marriage covenant,” grounds for DIVORCE. Indeed, so many Victorian women divorced their husbands for adultery, rather than vice versa, that historians called divorce in the nineteenth century “a woman’s remedy.” Nonetheless, divorced women were far more likely to live in poverty than their male counterparts. Men also understood that courts, knowing the damage an adultery charge could do to a woman, assumed protective roles. Judges virtually believed a woman was innocent of adultery in the absence of direct, irrefutable evidence. Women, though, understood that society had extralegal ways of punishing adulterous women.

 ADVICE BOOKS

Advice books were an important literary genre in the nineteenth-century United States. Novels and magazine stories featuring exemplary heroines were particularly popular, but American women and girls also read religious classics, such as The Whole Duty of Man. Girls’ academies often assigned didactic literature, which discussed and illustrated correct behavior, and middle-class parents encouraged girls to read improvement books and essays on their own. Early national advice literature focused on women’s family roles and argued that women had great power to form their children’s character and influence their husbands’ moral and political choices. In this way, advice literature at once upheld women’s domestic roles and acknowledged their social authority. Not all advice books dwelt on moral and spiritual matters, however. Guides to housekeeping,

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child rearing, and other pragmatic matters proliferated in the United States before the CIVIL WAR. The Frugal Housewife (1829) by LYDIA MARIA CHILD was one of the most popular housekeeping guides. A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) by CATHERINE BEECHER (see Documents) was a much more ambitious work. Beecher argued that housewifery was not mere drudgery but rather a demanding profession. Some late nineteenth-century advice literature reflected changing attitudes toward homemaking (many middle-class women came to see homemaking as a professional career) as well as advances in women’s education. At the same time, however, it continued to stress the centrality of women’s family roles. See also: Magazines and Periodicals.

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Charlotte E. Ray was the first African-American woman to become a practicing lawyer. Ray was born in New York City on January 13, 1850. Her father was a minister and abolitionist, who was active in the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. He encouraged his children to get a formal education. The intellectual environment he stimulated encouraged her to pursue a higher education. As an African-American woman interested in studying law in the nineteenth century, Ray was aware of the challenges before her. On her application to the law school at the prestigious Howard University for African-American men, she gave only her initials. While Howard admitted women, Ray knew that they were discouraged from studying law. She successfully gained entry and excelled as a student. An inductee into the honor society, both professors and classmates were impressed with her intellectual abilities and her achievements. Ray developed a strong interest in commercial law and pursued this specialized field during her schooling. She graduated in 1872 and subsequently passed the bar for the District of Columbia. She was admitted to the bar on April 23, 1872, in the same year that the landmark decision Bradwell v. Illinois barred MYRA BRADWELL from practicing law in Illinois. Ray opened a practice in Washington, D.C. Although she was regarded as an expert on corporation law by her contemporaries, gender and race prejudice were still powerful obstacles to her success. Ray was unable to sustain her practice because of a lack of business. She was politically active for a short time in the women’s suffrage movement and the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN but soon retreated from public life. Returning to New York City, she worked in the Brooklyn public school system and married. At the time of her death on January 4, 1911, little was known about the woman who had been a legal pioneer.

African-American women made many advances in the nineteenth century, despite facing both racial and gender discrimination. Starkly affected by the events of the century, their particular struggles were highlighted by the failures of RECONSTRUCTION to grant them suffrage and civil rights. AfricanAmerican women in the South before the end of SLAVERY certainly lived differently from their Northern counterparts, but also shared commonalities. Both Northern and Southern women had to work very hard, either as slaves or as free wage earners. They had to toil for others and then contend with the usual challenges of tending to their families. Slave women and freed women tenant farmers often had to perform hard manual labor, such as chopping wood, building roads, or digging ditches. In cities, freedwomen were often employed as domestic help, or worked in domestic trades such as needlework or dressmaking.

Women pursued careers in sectors other than education to professional trades, such as law or medicine, challenging traditional race and gender conventions of work. In terms of EDUCATION, limited opportunities presented themselves after the Civil War. Special primary and secondary schools for free African Americans opened, but higher education was far less accessible. Then in 1833, OBERLIN COLLEGE began admitting both African Americans and women. For the first time, black women able to

AH TSUN

pay the tuition could attend college. Still by the end of the century, only a handful of degrees had been awarded to African-American women. While the ABOLITIONIST movement certainly provided support for African Americans, the notion of self-help was instrumental in the progress of African-American women. They began organizing mutual aid societies as early as the late eighteenth century by contributing portions of their limited incomes to redistribute to others in times of hardship. They also were able to find community in African-American churches, where they served the church in social offices. There were even women who were preachers, such as ZILPHA ELAW. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the most prominent African-American churches. Doubly disadvantaged because of their race and their gender, African-American women mobilized politically to assert their rights. They formed their own antislavery groups and literary societies, but also joined mainstream organizations that were open to them, such as the KNIGHTS OF LABOR. Their activities ranged from fundraising to lecturing against slavery, as SOJOURNER TRUTH did. The Civil War provided an added impetus towards active political roles as in the case of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who published newspapers to aid fugitive slaves. FURTHER READING

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1997.

AFRICAN METHODIST  EPISCOPAL CHURCH In the years after the American Revolution, the northern free black population grew from a few hundred to over 30,000. As this population, consisting primarily of family-based households, increased, black churches like the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) emerged as pivotal fixtures of black community life. Women figured prominently in the creation and continuance of AME. After the Revolution, large numbers of free blacks had joined integrated METHODIST and BAPTIST congregations, drawn by the antislavery positions of these evangelical

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religions. Eventually, though, many free blacks found themselves isolated in their congregations, segregated to church galleries, excluded from leadership roles, and sometimes even denied communion. In 1794 a small group of Philadelphia black Methodists broke away from their biracial church and founded the Bethel Methodist Church. In 1816 it joined a similar congregation in Baltimore, rejected oversight by white Methodist leadership, and became the first independent black religious denomination in the United States. These churches provided women an important site where they might worship in safety, celebrate marriages and births, support abolitionism, and escape from the racism that was a reality of black life in the nineteenth century. The AME Church experienced a period of great expansion in the late nineteenth century, fueled both by the economic difficulties of black Americans during the period of segregation and by the rise of a black middle class.

 AH TSUN

(1860–1910?) Missionary and teacher. Sold into slavery in China, Ah Tsun was taken to the United States to be sold again as a prostitute. Unwilling to accept this fate, she escaped to San Francisco’s PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME, a refuge run by Donaldina Cameron specifically for Chinese women victimized by the Chinese slave trade. Once at the home, her former owner accused Ah Tsun of theft and had her arrested, demonstrating the manner in which both Chinese and American men perpetuated and enforced the practice of keeping women in bondage. With the help of the Mission Home, however, Ah Tsun fought for her freedom in two court battles and won. Quickly immersing herself in the life and culture of the Mission Home, she gained an education. She learned how to teach and assisted as an interpreter. With the help of the Mission Home, Ah Tsun married a Chinese Christian immigrant named Wing. When their home was attacked during anti-Chinese riots in 1885, they moved back to Canton, China, where she taught in a Bible school. After the death of her husband, Ah Tsun returned to San Francisco and worked in the Mission Home until her death.

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 ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY

(1832–1888) Novelist whose best-known work was Little Women. Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters born to Bronson and Abigail Alcott, who were both committed to educational and social reform. When Louisa was born they were trying to start a school based on their educational and social reform theories. When the effort proved unsuccessful, they tried again, this time in Boston, Massachusetts. Again the effort was a failure, and Bronson Alcott was forced to support the family by doing odd jobs in Concord, Massachusetts. As a girl, Louisa Alcott knew that she would have to contribute to the support of her family. When she was in her twenties, she worked at various jobs, including teaching, social work, needlework, and domestic service. She also became committed to social and educational reform and equal rights for women. During these years Alcott began to write short stories, and although they paid well, they did not bring her any artistic satisfaction. When the CIVIL WAR broke out in 1861, she volunteered as a nurse in an army hospital, but the job was cut short when she contracted typhoid fever. Her first book, Hospital Sketches, is a collection of short stories based on letters she had written home during the war. Alcott gained fame after the editor of Hospital Sketches asked her to write a novel. The result was her most famous book, Little Women, published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The novel, based heavily on Alcott’s early life, follows the adventures of the March family, focusing on the mother and her four daughters; the father, an army chaplain in the Civil War, is absent for most of the book. Almost overnight the book became enormously popular with readers, who responded to the message that women could resist stereotypes and take an active role in shaping their own destinies. After Little Women Alcott tried to satisfy the reading public’s demand for similar books based on family life. Later titles included Little Men (1871) and its sequel, Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out (1886). In 1873, she also published Work: A Story of Experience, a semiautobiographical novel about a young woman who struggles to support herself in various occupations in the years before and after the Civil War. During the later years of her life, Alcott was in constant pain made worse by her grief at the

Louisa May Alcott wrote such beloved books as Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys.

deaths of her mother and sister. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888. FURTHER READING

Burke, Kathleen. Louis May Alcott. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Saxton, Martha. Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY  SOCIETY American abolitionist organization. The American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1833. It was the result of a merger between a religious group in New York City led by Lewis Tappan and a Boston-based abolitionist group led by William Lloyd Garrison—groups that shared the belief that slavery was a violation of God’s will. During the 1830s, the society organized a large petition campaign against slavery and distributed volumes of abolitionist literature through the mails. The society endorsed nonviolence, opposed racial prejudice, condemned efforts to urge emancipated African

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Americans to emigrate, and urged Congress to end federal support for slavery. In its early years the society was dominated by males. In 1840, though, Abby Kelly was elected to the society’s governing committee, prompting Tappan to state, “To put a woman on the committee with men is contrary to the usages of civilized society.” Other women who were elected to the committee, over great opposition, included LYDIA MARIA FRANCIS CHILD, LUCRETIA MOTT, and MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN. Among other women who later joined the committee were Margret Jones Burleigh, Mary Grew, and Sarah Pugh. Thus, the American Anti-Slavery Society represented an early success on the part of women in gaining leadership positions in a large organization that had previously been dominated by men. The result was that the society split: A faction led by Tappan, who believed that equal rights for women were contrary to traditional Christian values, withdrew to form another organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. Garrison assumed control of the American AntiSlavery Society, which continued its work until Congress ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, extending voting rights to African Americans.

AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS  ASSOCIATION American civil rights organization. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the ABOLITION movement and the woman SUFFRAGE movement were closely bound together. Many women who were active in the fight against slavery were also active in campaigns to extend equal rights, particularly the right to vote, to women. From a legal perspective, they saw the condition of women and that of slaves as essentially similar. The American Equal Rights Association grew out of the links between women’s rights and the rights of African Americans. Formed in 1866, the association held its first meeting on May 9–10, 1867, at the Church of the Puritans in New York City. Its president was LUCRETIA MOTT, and the corresponding secretary was SUSAN B. ANTHONY. The speakers at the first meeting were a “who’s who” of persons active in the women’s rights and abolitionist movements. Pointing out that “the black man is still denied the crowning right of citizenship” and that

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“half our population are disfranchised [sic] on the ground of sex,” the American Equal Rights Association stated its goal: to “secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the Right of Suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.” The organization collapsed in 1869. In that year Stanton and Anthony broke away to form a new group, the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (NWSA). What divided the organization was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, extending the franchise to all men regardless of color. The NWSA, which was open only to women, refused to support the amendment because it did not grant similar voting rights to women. A few months after the NWSA was formed, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, formed the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION out of the remnants of the American Equal Rights Association.

AMERICAN WOMAN  SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION Founded in Boston in 1869 by LUCY STONE, Henry Blackwell, JULIA WARD HOWE, and others as a result of a split in the woman SUFFRAGE movement over differences. The founders of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) believed that the best strategy for securing women’s right to vote was on a state-by-state basis. Its supporters felt that there were fewer obstacles at the state level. The NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (NWSA) led by SUSAN B. ANTHONY and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON held a different view. They sought a federal constitutional amendment, advocated divorce rights, and fought against inequalities in the work force. The AWSA published the weekly Women’s Journal, edited by Lucy Stone. In the 1880s, the two groups began to see that it was in their best interest to consolidate the efforts of the suffrage movement. In 1890, the AWSA and the NWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Together, under the direction of CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, the NAWSA was able to successfully combine the strategies and goals of the two groups. The new group helped secure the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 3) through aggressive state and federal campaigns

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for suffrage rights. In states where the prospects for woman suffrage seemed promising, campaigns were launched at full force. In those states where victory was unlikely, the NAWSA sought only limited suffrage rights. At the same time Catt and others worked aggressively to obtain the right to vote on the federal level by putting direct pressure on President Woodrow Wilson. When the United States entered WORLD WAR I (see Voume 3), the suffragists supported the war effort. This endorsement led many, including Wilson, to support the suffrage movement. Through successes at the state level, and the help of Wilson, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. With women’s right to vote realized, the NAWSA was renamed the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS (see Volume 3).

 ANTHONY, SUSAN B.

(1820–1906) Woman SUFFRAGE leader, abolitionist, educational reformer, and temperance worker. Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She learned to read and write when she was only three years old. In 1826, the Anthony family moved to Battensville, New York, where Susan attended a school established by her father. In 1839, at the age of 19, she became a teacher at a Quaker seminary in New Rochelle, New York. The family moved to Rochester, New York, in 1845, where they became involved in the antislavery movement. At her family’s home, Anthony met such leading abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Anthony became the director of the girl’s department at the Canajoharie Academy in New York, where she earned only $110 per year. Anthony addressed the New York state teacher’s convention in 1853, urging members to campaign for the admission of women to the professions, such as law and medicine, and to improve the salaries for woman teachers, who were paid less than men. She believed that because women were equal to men in terms of intellect, they should be paid the same and permitted to enter the same careers. Anthony also became active in the TEMPERANCE movement. Raised a Quaker, she was opposed to drinking. In 1848, she delivered a

Susan B. Anthony, a “founding mother” of the women’s rights movement in the United States.

speech to a meeting of the Daughters of Temperance, and the following year she was elected president of the Rochester, New York, branch. In 1853, along with her close friend, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, she founded the Women’s State Temperance Society. She tried to effect the passage of new laws to restrict the sale of alcohol. Anthony also remained active in the abolitionist movement and joined the AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY in 1856. She became widely known for making speeches and distributing leaflets in support of abolition. As a result, she earned the enmity of people opposed to abolition, and her effigy was dragged through the streets of Syracuse, New York. From her work in the temperance and ABOLITION movements, Anthony became a firm believer in the fact that women could only change laws if they had the same political and financial power as men. For the rest of their lives, Anthony and Stanton devoted themselves to the cause of

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woman suffrage and equal rights. In 1860, Anthony successfully campaigned for new laws in New York allowing married women to own property, retain any wages they earned from working, and have custody of their children following a divorce. In 1866, Anthony and Stanton founded the AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION. Two years later, they started their newspaper The Revolution in New York. On the masthead was the statement, “Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” During the CIVIL WAR, Anthony and Stanton served the abolitionist cause by organizing the Women’s Loyal National League, which obtained hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition that called for emancipation. After the war, Anthony hoped that the Fifteenth Amendment would not only give voting rights to AfricanAmerican men but also to women. However, women were excluded from the amendment, and the dispute over whether to support the amendment split the suffrage movement in 1869. While Anthony and Stanton formed the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION to lobby for a constituitonal amendment to give women the vote, other suffrage leaders formed the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION. Members believed that women should work at the state level, achieving the vote state by state. In 1872, Anthony cast a ballot in the presidential election and was arrested for illegally voting. (See Documents.) But she claimed that the U.S. Constitution gave everyone—“We, the people”— the right to vote. As she said, “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; not yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.”

“We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civicl and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.” —Susan B. Anthony, “Declaration of Rights for Women,” Philadelphia, July 4, 1876

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At her trial in 1873, the judge found Anthony guilty and fined her $100. Anthony never paid the fine. Between 1869 and 1906, Anthony annually went before Congress and pleaded for the right of women to vote. During this period, she coauthored The History of Woman Suffrage. In 1890, Anthony became vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This group was formed after the associations that had split in 1869 finally came back together. In 1892, she became president of the organization, a position she held until 1900. She died on March 13, 1906, in Rochester, New York. It was not until 1920 that women finally received the right to vote with the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 3), also known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment. FURTHER READING

Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Sherr, Lynn. Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. New York: Times Books, 1995.

ANTI-MISCEGENATION  LAWS

Statutes outlawing miscegenation, or interracial sex, were passed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. An act passed in 1717, for example, established that “any white woman, whether free or servant, that shall suffer herself to be got with a child by a negro or other slave or free negro . . . shall be made a servant for seven years.” The law added that if the man was a free black, he too would be subjected to seven years of indentured servitude. Anti-miscegenation laws are remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is clear regulation of white women’s sexuality over white men’s. AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN were especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation in a system that failed to recognize the racial and gendered double standard of anti-miscegenation laws. The racial anxieties that engendered antimiscegenation laws also suggest that sometimes, contrary to myth, white women had consensual physical relationships with men of color. Certainly, nineteenth-century Americans understood the realities of interracial sex. By 1850, almost 40 percent of the free AfricanAmerican population had white relatives. One

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nineteenth-century Mississippi man claimed, “Hybridism is heinous. Mulattos are monsters.” Slaveholding states made a number of laws to prevent such “heinous” activity, but few of the laws attacked the real problem of interracial sex—the predations of white masters on enslaved women. Anti-miscegenation laws were originally intended to control the labor of white indentured females, but as American society increasingly replaced white indentured labor with black enslaved labor, the laws changed as well.

 ANTISLAVERY PETITIONS

Early nineteenth-century American abolitionists believed that slavery was normally wrong and that immediate emacipation should be their goal. The antislavery movement drew a large number of women, both black and white, whose position as disenfranchised citizens required alternative routes of political expression. The antislavery petition represents one such method of moral reform agitation. Women who signed petitions often worked either in abolitionist organizations run by men, or in separate women’s groups affiliated with men. Other women signed petitions because it was an acceptable form of protest, particularly in an era when the simple act of a female speaking in public could cause consternation and disapprobation. Signing a petition required private, rather than public, behavior and respectable nineteenth-century women were not supposed to engage in public protest. Petitioning became so popular that a virtual flood of petitions inundated lawmakers across the country. These petitions were sufficiently threatening to slave-owning Southern Democrats that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives resolved that all antislavery petitions should be “laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.” Former president John Quincy Adams, then a Massachusetts congressman, devoted several years to the appeal of the “gag rule.” The gag rule remained in effect until December 1844, limiting abolitionists’ ability to appeal to the federal government on matters concerning ABOLITION.

ARTHUR, ELLEN LEWIS  HERNDON

(1837–1880) Wife of Chester A. Arthur, twenty-first president of the United States. Ellen Herndon was born in

Culpeper Court House, Virginia. Her father, William Lewis Herndon, moved the family to Washington, D.C., in the 1840s to help establish a naval observatory. In 1856, the family moved to New York City, when her father became commander of a mail steamer. That year Ellen was introduced to Chester Arthur, who had opened a law firm on Wall Street. They became engaged in 1857, but her father died at sea that year and the couple did not marry until 1859. The Arthurs had three children—a son born in 1860, who died at the age of two, another son in 1864, and a daughter in 1871. In 1880, she was attending a concert and developed a cold while waiting for her carriage after the performance. She developed pneumonia and died at the age of 42. Arthur was elected vice-president on a Republican ticket led by James Garfield in 1880. When Garfield was assassinated in 1881, Arthur became president. He was so distraught at the death of his wife that he did not marry again, and his sister served as his hostess in the White House.

ATLANTA BAPTIST FEMALE  SEMINARY A school founded in 1881 for AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN and girls in Georgia. Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles founded the Atlanta Female Baptist Seminary in a damp church basement. Originally both from Massachusetts, Packard and Giles had been New England school teachers until they toured the South in 1880. That experience convinced them that African-American women and girls needed a school in Georgia. The life-long companions elicited funding from the Women’s American Baptist Home Mission and began offering educational opportunities to freedwomen. The seminary began with eleven students in an Atlanta basement. Black women, Packard and Giles reported, wanted enough education to be able to read the Bible and write letters to their familes. The school would offer class levels from grade school to college, and offer courses in practical topics such as home economics, nursing, sewing, cooking, and millinery. These course reflected nineteenth-century ideas about a woman’s proper place in society but were radicalizing in that they were offered to black women, whom many white Americans considered outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood.

BAPTISTS

The year after it opened the school moved to its permanent site. Impressed with the school’s vision, John D. Rockefeller paid the balance due on the new school’s grounds and building. In gratitude, Packard and Giles renamed the school Spelman Seminary, after Rockefeller’s wife’s family, who had been committed abolitionists. The

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newly named seminary added Rockefeller Hall in 1886 and Packard Hall in 1888. Packard acted as the treasurer of the board of trustees and president of the school until her death in 1891. In 1924, Spelman Seminary became Spelman College, and five years later affiliated itself with Atlanta University.

B



BAGLEY, SARAH G. (?–1847?) Labor organizer. Sarah Bagley was probably born in Meredith, New Hampshire. Little is known about her childhood. But by 1836, she was working at a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the largest of the many factory towns that were spreading across the Northeast as the United States began to industrialize. In the mills, women operated the looms; they worked 12 to 14 hours a day, often under unsafe conditions. In 1844, Bagley founded and became president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which was committed to improving working conditions and achieving a ten-hour workday in the mills. As part of that effort, Bagley brought the plight of mill workers to the attention of the Massachusetts legislature. She led a petition drive and testified before the legislators. However, the lawmakers were unwilling to pass a law reducing the workday to ten hours. In 1845, Bagley left Lowell and tried to organize branches of the association in Manchester, Nashua, and Dover, New Hampshire. She wrote articles criticizing the working conditions in factories. That year, she joined the New England Working Men’s Association and became corresponding secretary. She also served as editor of its publication, Voice of Industry, and developed a column titled “As Is Woman, So Is the Race.” The early efforts of labor organizing were not successful because of strong opposition from business owners, and Bagley left the movement. She eventually became a supporter of utopian socialism, which advocated setting up communities based on equal rights for all members. Bagley later became a telegraph operator, possibly the first woman to hold that job. After 1847, there is no record of her life. Nevertheless, she stands as

a forerunner of later, more successful attempts to organized working women. See also: Industrial Revolution; Lowell Mill Workers; Lynn Shoe Workers; Wage Earners; Working Class.

 BAPTISTS

Religion born of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and founded in the United States by Puritan dissident Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1637. Gaining adherents in the Great Awakening of the seventeenth century, the Baptist churches became a training ground, especially among blacks and women, for moral reform movements. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were 4,700 Baptists in the United States, in 72 churches. Early in the century, Primitive Baptists split from the General Convention of Baptist Denomination, rejecting the organization’s missionary efforts. The General Convention also supported abolition of slavery, a stance that became increasingly problematic for many Southern Baptists. In 1845 the Baptist split again, as pro-slavery Baptists formed the Southern Baptist convention. African Americans began organizing churches in 1773, particularly in the South, and by the 1890s they made up two of the largest Baptist denominations. Like northern revivalists, Southern Baptists focused on the conversion experience. Unlike northern evangelical sects, the Baptists called themselves “Christ’s poor” and believed that heaven contained within it more poor people than rich. Baptists, in opposing Southern gentry and gentry values, also encouraged opposition to authority. Like northern evangelical religions, Baptist converts were at least half women.

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 BARNETT, IDA B. WELLS

(1862–1931) African-American journalist and reformer. Ida Bell Wells was born on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the daughter of slaves. She attended the local FREEDMEN’S SCHOOL, Rust University, until age 14, when her parents and three siblings died of yellow fever. Claiming to be 18, she got a job TEACHING at a country school to support herself and her four surviving siblings. Wells later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she taught in the city’s African-American schools, attending summer classes at Fisk University in Nashville. Upset by racial violence and discrimination, she sought justice and civil rights for African Americans throughout her life. Wells began her crusade against segregation with a legal challenge to the South’s Jim Crow laws. In 1884, after being physically removed from a train seat because she refused to ride in the car designated for African-American passengers, Barnett sued the Chesapeake and Ohio

Jounalist Ida B. Wells Barnett spearheaded the effort to abolish lynching in the United States.

Railroad. Based on the railroad’s failure to provide separate but equal facilities for African Americans, the legal action was decided in her favor in circuit court but reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court in April 1887. The Supreme Court’s decision only intensified Wells’s quest for justice. The newspaper article she wrote about her experiences initiated a long career in JOURNALISM. As editor of the AfricanAmerican church newspapers The Evening Star and The Living Way, Barnett began writing about the many racial issues she found troubling. Her hard-hitting articles, which appeared under the pen name “Iola,” earned the respect of her peers, and in 1887 she was elected secretary of the African-American National Press Association. In 1891, after criticizing the poor quality of education for African-American children in segregated Memphis schools, Wells was fired from her teaching position. Devoting herself full time to journalism, she bought a share in a local newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. The paper demanded equal rights for African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta. Wells’s most notable journalistic campaign began in 1892 after the lynching of three friends in Memphis. Her friends were grocers who had become business rivals of white storekeepers. Wells wrote a series of editorials expressing her outrage against the persecution and LYNCHING of African Americans, urging the African-American community of Memphis to boycott white-owned businesses and segregated transportation. She also charged that white women sometimes initiated sexual relationships with African-American men who were then falsely accused of RAPE. In May 1892, in the wake of her articles, the newspaper offices were attacked by vandals and destroyed. A determined Wells moved north and persevered in her antilynching crusade, writing for the New York Age, organizing antilynching societies, and lecturing throughout the United States and Great Britain in 1893 and 1894. Her pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases argued that lynchers usually targeted African-American achievers and economic rivals to whites. In 1895, Wells married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney and editor. The couple had four children. Barnett wrote for her husband’s newspaper, the Chicago Conservator and other regional periodicals. She encouraged AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN in the Chicago area to join in reform efforts, including the antilynching

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and SUFFRAGE movements. And in 1913, she organized Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage club, probably the first African-American women’s SUFFRAGE group. In 1895, Barnett published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, the first detailed statistical compilation about lynching in America. (See Documents.) In 1898 she traveled to the White House to ask President William McKinley for a federal investigation of the lynching of an African-American South Carolina postmaster. Barnett’s civic achievements include the Negro Fellowship League, which she established in 1910 to assist Southern migrants moving to Chicago to escape racism and poverty; she served as the league’s first president. Barnett also was a probation officer for the Chicago municipal court from 1913 to 1916, and she organized a community house for African Americans in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Barnett argued consistently that African Americans needed to become self-reliant and not to depend on others to achieve societal change. She criticized the less militant philosophy of accommodation endorsed by some AfricanAmerican leaders, such as Booker T. Washington. Risking violence, Barnett documented race riots in East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Arkansas in 1922. She integrated suffrage parades and assisted JANE ADDAMS’s fight against segregation in Chicago schools. Barnett died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago. See also: Crimes Against Women; Slavery. FURTHER READING

Duster, Alfreda M., ed. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Harris, Trudier, comp. Selected Works of Ida B. WellsBarnett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. McMurry, Linda O. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

 BARRY, LEONORA MARIE

(1849–1930) Labor organizer. Leonora Barry was born on August 13, 1849, in Kearney, County Cork, Ireland. Three years later, because of the potato famine in Ireland, her family moved to the United States. She grew up in Pierrepont, New York, on a potato farm.

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At 15, Barry passed a certificate examination and become a teacher. She continued teaching until she married William E. Barry at the age of 22. They had three children: a daughter and two sons. When her husband died suddenly in 1880, Barry went to work in a clothing factory in Amsterdam, New York. Workers were so poorly paid that Barry could barely support her family. In 1884, she joined the KNIGHTS OF LABOR, a large national labor union that was trying to improve working conditions in factories. Several years later, Barry had achieved the position of master workman, a union official in charge of 1,000 women at her local branch of the Knights. She later became a General Investigator, the first woman to achieve this position, organizing new branches of the union. Barry wrote articles, issued reports, and tried to motivate female workers to join the union. She used her TEACHING experience to educate women about the injustices of the factory system to women and children. In addition to describing the appalling conditions and abuses to which women were subjected, she bolstered her argument with extensive statistics on the plight of female workers in America. Barry was among the very first to compile such statistics. Her work led to the passage of factory inspection laws aimed at improving working conditions. She resigned from the union in 1890 after marrying Obadiah R. Lake, a newspaper printer. She continued lecturing until 1928 and died on July 15, 1930.



BARTON, CLARA (1821–1912) Nurse, reformer, and humanitarian who organized the American Red Cross. Clara Harlowe Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, the daughter of farmers. Her four brothers and sisters, all much older, played an important role in her education. At age 11 she began two years of devoted nursing care and companionship for her ailing brother David. Beginning at age 15, Barton taught for 18 years in Massachusetts and New Jersey, where she established a free public school and became interested in social reform. Barton is best known for her philanthropic leadership in providing comfort and medical care during crises in both war and peace. Her volunteerism, however, did not begin until she was 40 years old. At that time, Barton initiated the relief work for which she would become fa-

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Clara Barton was known as the “angel of the battlefield” during the Civil War.

mous, and she remained dedicated to public service for the rest of her life. In the winter of 1854, Barton resigned from the New Jersey school she established and moved to Washington, D.C. She found employment there as a copy clerk for the U.S. Patent Office, perhaps the first appointed civil service position granted to a woman. Her insistence on receiving wages equal to those of male employees and her mere presence in an all-male institution made the situation uncomfortable, and she found refuge in charity work during off hours. In the early days of the CIVIL WAR, Barton cooked meals and gathered supplies for Massachusetts soldiers stationed in the capital. Securing War Department passes in the summer of 1862, Barton traveled to the warfront and witnessed the fighting firsthand. She decided that the best way she could assist Union soldiers was by raising funds to purchase medical supplies and food, and by establishing a system for distributing them efficiently. Despite the dangers, Barton ventured courageously onto the battlefields to nurse wounded soldiers. She accompanied medical transports and assisted surgeons performing amputations and suturing wounds. In the final year of the war, Barton served as supervisor of nurses for the Army of the James. Admired for her calmness,

resourcefulness, and attentiveness, Barton became known as the “angel of the battlefield.” After the war, Barton traveled to Andersonville, Georgia, to mark the Union soldier’s graves at the Confederate prison. She determined the whereabouts of 22,000 soldiers for The Missing Soldier’s Office. Now a figure of national prominence, Barton lectured extensively about her wartime experiences and actively supported campaigns for SUFFRAGE and civil rights for African Americans. In 1870–71, as a volunteer for the International Red Cross, Barton aided civilian refugees of the Franco-Prussian War. Inspired by her experiences, she founded the American Association of the Red Cross in May 1881. She also lobbied for international protocols on the conduct of war. Barton served as president of the American Red Cross from 1882 to 1904 and participated in relief expeditions to aid victims of natural disasters and war. She is credited with developing the idea of first aid, and her legacy includes several books about her life and work. Barton died on April 12, 1912, at Glen Echo, Maryland. See also: Health; Nursing. FURTHER READING

Hutchinson, John F. Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Oates, Stephen B. A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War. New York: Free Press, 1994. Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

BEECHER, CATHARINE  ESTHER

(1800–1878) Educator and author. Catharine Beecher was born in East Hampton, New York, on September 6, 1800. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the most prominent religious leaders in the United States. Although Beecher was educated at home, like most women of her time, she believed that females should receive a formal EDUCATION. In 1821, she became a teacher and two years later established the Hartford Female Seminary in Connecticut. One of the instructors was her sister, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. The primary role of the seminary was to train women to be mothers and teachers. With the expansion of the population during the nineteenth century, more

BENEVOLENT S OCIETIES

teachers became necessary. Men were leaving the teaching profession to enter business because it paid better, so there were many positions available for women. In 1829, Beecher published Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education. She emphasized that women made excellent teachers but that training was essential. As she put it, “It is to mothers and to teachers that the world is to look for the character which is to be enstamped on each succeeding generation, for it is to them that the great business of education is almost exclusively committed. And will it not appear by examination that neither mothers nor teachers have ever been properly educated for their profession?” In 1832, when her father moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, Beecher went with him. There she opened the Western Female Institute to train teachers on the frontier and to open schools for the children of settlers who were moving west. In 1852, she founded the American Women’s Educational Association to increase the number of teachers who would be available to teach at frontier settlements. In 1841, Beecher published the work for which she is best known, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. (See Documents.) Over the next three decades, it would have 15 separate printings and become a national best-seller. The book was a how-to manual on managing a home and rearing children. Several chapters were devoted to health. These included “On the Care of Health,” “On Healthful Food,” “On Healthful Drinks,” “On Cleanliness,” and “On Health of Mind.” Beecher also devoted sections of the book to the physical layout of a home, including diagrams of how rooms should be arranged. Although Beecher never married and had no children, she became the nation’s leading expert on how to raise a family. Beecher believed strongly that a woman’s sphere was in the home and that it was a woman’s responsibility to impart virtue and character to her children. Beecher believed that women, like herself, who did not marry belonged in the classroom. Teaching provided single women with the income they needed to survive. Beecher’s later books include The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845), Common Sense Applied to Religion (1857), and The American Woman’s Home (1869), written with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher died on May 12, 1878.

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FURTHER READING

Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: Norton, 1976.

 BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES

The adjective benevolent means wishing to do good for others. Thus, a benevolent society is a group of people who get together for charitable purposes. In early-nineteenth-century America, benevolence became particularly the work of women, and specifically middle- and upper-middle-class white Protestant women. These women, though they were in theory confined to “separate spheres” of their homes and families, were involved in a wide range of activities. Some ran employment schemes for middle-class women who had fallen on hard times; others campaigned against the evil of drink; some created training programs to teach poor women new skills; others founded homes for orphaned children; and still others, especially after about 1830, worked for the ABOLITION of slavery. Women’s benevolent societies have been important in the development of social policy. Some organizations founded in the nineteenth century still exist, while others have been absorbed and transformed into social service agencies. In Rhode Island, for example, the Providence Female Charitable Society (founded in 1801) still exists, as does the Providence Shelter for Colored Children (founded in 1837). The Irrepressibles, created as a women’s sewing group during the CIVIL WAR, merged in 1929 with the Bureau of the Handicapped and continues into the twenty-first century as part of Goodwill Industries. In the early nineteenth century, many people believed that women were especially religious and moral, and, therefore, it was part of their nature to help others. It was not long, however, before many of the women who were involved in charitable enterprises discovered that they had to be businesslike to serve their chosen clients. One of the more extraordinary elements of women’s benevolent societies was the way the women gained corporate charters, enabling them to sue (and be sued), make contracts, and buy and sell real estate—all at a time when married women had no separate legal identity from their husbands. To keep their money really safe,

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however, many societies required that the treasurer be an unmarried woman over the age of 21 and thus independent of father or husband. Many of these benevolent women spent long hours writing reports, attending meetings, and raising funds. Most of them received no pay, although there were exceptions. LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, the author of Little Women, described in a memorable passage the glow of satisfaction of the March girls when they gave their Christmas breakfasts to a poor family. Alcott’s mother “Abba” (Abigail) May Alcott, however, worked from 1848 to 1850 for a Boston ladies’ charitable society. She distributed money and Bibles, collected clothes, and taught African-American children, all for $500 a year. Many middle-class women made a lifelong career of charity work, disguising their businesslike behavior with the rhetoric of female morality. By the 1850s, however, some concluded that “moral suasion” (persuasion of male policy makers) was not enough and that they had to get involved in politics. The language of women’s rights was in the air, especially after the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION of 1848. Many of the benevolent women who came of age in the decade before the CIVIL WAR recognized that their mothers’ indirect approach to political influence was insufficient. Many, but not all, believed that woman SUFFRAGE would enable them to get reform laws passed. The more conservative benevolent women of this era doubted whether their work would lead to a moral transformation of American society. Instead, they started building homes for orphans or prostitutes, hoping to isolate some of the needy from the viciousness of the city. They also created industrial schools to provide housing, work, and training for a small fraction of the poor. As women’s benevolence began taking on a more institutionalized form, women began losing some of their power over charitable societies, and mixed boards and male advisory groups became more common. As the population moved west, women’s benevolent societies emerged wherever there was a perceived need. The Civil War gave some women the opportunity to establish careers; this changed the whole notion of benevolence. They emerged from wartime work as professionals (regardless of whether paid) with a passion for efficiency. Notable examples include JOSEPHINE SHAW LOWELL (1843–1905), MARY LIVERMORE (1820–1905), and Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806–1899). Low-

ell, who was widowed at 20 when her husband was killed in battle, spent the rest of her life organizing relief work, first in the South and later among New York’s urban poor. She was influential in the change from philanthropy to preventive social work. Mary Livermore, wife of a Universalist minister, inspected military hospitals; ran the Chicago office of the SANITARY COMMISSION with great efficiency; and organized a ladies’ fair in 1863, which raised more than $70,000 for the SANITARY COMMISSION. After the war she became an ardent suffragist, a TEMPERANCE worker, and a very popular lecturer, traveling from coast to coast averaging 150 lectures a year. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, a former Quaker and long-time abolitionist, insisted after the war that women had to have official positions, and she became a member of the Board of Visitors to Rhode Island prisons. Jane Lancaster See also: Property Rights, Married Women; Rescue Homes; Suffrage; Voluntary Associations. FURTHER READING

Ginzburg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pascoe, Peggy. The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

 BLACKWELL, ELIZABETH

(1821–1910) The first woman who was graduated from medical school and licensed as a physician in the United States. Blackwell was born in England in 1821. Her family moved to the United States in 1832. Blackwell began teaching after the death of her father, Samuel Blackwell, in 1837. Unhappy with teaching, she began to study medicine privately and in 1847 applied to medical schools for continued training. Only Geneva Medical College in western New York accepted her. Most of the faculty at that institution opposed her admission, but nevertheless submitted the question to the students for a vote. The story about why the students unanimously accepted her varies, but all sources say they regarded her admission as a joke. Whatever the reason, Blackwell began her

BLAKE, LILLIE DEVEREUX

studies in 1848, facing hostility from faculty and students. Nevertheless, she excelled and was graduated first in her class. After graduation, Blackwell continued her medical education in Europe, returning to New York City in 1851. Because no one would hire her or rent her space, in 1853 she resorted to purchasing a house in order to open a private practice. By 1856, with the help of Dr. Marie Zakrzewska and her sister, EMILY BLACKWELL, this practice became the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. In 1868 the three established a women’s medical college. Blackwell returned to England permanently in 1869 where she worked as a physician and continued as a women’s rights advocate until her death in 1910.

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TRAILBLAZERS Emily Blackwell was one of the first woman physicians in the United States. She began her medical study at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1852. Illinois physicians were reluctant to allow women to join their profession, however, and pressured Rush Medical College to drop her from their enrollment. Despite her achievements, the college refused to accept Blackwell for a second year. She continued at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, graduating in 1854. In 1856, Emily joined her sister, Elizabeth, and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska in establishing the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and a medical school. When Elizabeth Blackwell moved to England in 1869, Emily ran the hospital and college alone, continuing in both roles until the turn of the century. By her retirement in 1899, she had trained more than 350 physicians and the infirmary had treated 7,000 patients a year.

 BLAKE, LILLIE DEVEREUX

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school and become licensed as a physician in the United States.

(1833–1913) Writer and suffragist. Elizabeth Johnson Devereux, known during her life as Lillie, was born on August 12, 1833, in Raleigh, North Carolina. When she was still a child, her family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. In 1855, she was married briefly to a lawyer, but he died in 1859. Having already published a story in Harper’s Weekly in 1857, Devereux increased her writing output to support herself. In 1859, she wrote a novel, Southwold, which became a literary success. Four additional novels were published over the next several years as well as many articles. In 1866, she married Grinfill Blake. Shortly afterward, she became interested in the woman SUFFRAGE movement. Blake’s stories reflect her involvement in the movement, and she published a collection of them in 1892, titled A Daring Experiment. From 1879 to 1890, she served as president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. From 1886 to 1900, she also served as president of the New York City Woman Suffrage League. Although Blake failed to win the vote for women in political elections, she was successful in winning other rights for them. These included legislation requiring women physicians to be in attendance at

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mental institutions for female patients, that women be allowed to become census takers, and that CIVIL WAR nurses receive pensions. Blake’s health began to fail in 1905, and she died on December 30, 1913.

 BLOOMER, AMELIA JENKS

(1818–1894) A suffragist who promoted DRESS REFORM. Amelia Jenks was born on May 27, 1818, at Homer, New York, the daughter of a clothier. She had a limited formal education but was accepted for a TEACHING position at age 17 in the village of Clyde, New York. In 1840, Jenks married an attorney and editor, Dexter Chamberlain Bloomer, of Seneca Falls. Bloomer began writing articles on social issues for her husband’s newspaper and became involved in the Ladies’ Temperance Society. In 1848, she attended the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION on women’s rights but did not actively participate. Early the following year, she launched a small newspaper, The Lily, initially dedicated to the cause of TEMPERANCE. Bloomer thus became one of the first women in America to own, manage, and edit a newspaper. On the advice of contributor ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, however, Bloomer began focusing her attention on women’s rights issues. The Lily thereafter provided a valuable forum for leaders and supporters of the SUFFRAGE movement. Although she did not design the outfit herself, Bloomer popularized a loose tunic and pantaloons sported by progressive women in the pages of The Lily and in articles reprinted in the New York Tribune. So closely associated was she with the outfit that it became known as “bloomers.” She later stopped supporting the fashion, because she felt that people were paying too much attention to suffragist clothing and too little attention to the real issues. In 1855, the Bloomers settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where Amelia continued to promote the cause of woman suffrage. In 1871, she was elected president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society, which advocated a state law to protect property rights for married women. In 1876, citing her First Amendment right to petition the government, she asked Congress for a reprieve on taxes until she was granted equal rights with men. Bloomer died on December 30, 1894, at Council Bluffs. See also: Journalism; Suffrage.



BLY, NELLIE (1867–1922) A pioneering investigative reporter. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was born on May 5, 1867, in Cochrane Mills, Pennsylvania, the daughter of wealthy parents. Her father died when she was still a child, and her mother moved the impoverished family to Pittsburgh. Despite only a meager formal education, Cochrane began her career in journalism at age 19 as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She took the pen name “Nellie Bly” from a popular song by Stephen Foster. In the winter of 1886–87, Bly was expelled from Mexico for reporting on poverty and political corruption. She moved to New York, the unofficial capital of American JOURNALISM, where she landed a position with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. She sometimes wore disguises to get the truth of a story, and in interviews she asked daring, provocative questions. On assignment for the World in 1887, she feigned insanity to gain admittance into a New York City asylum. Written from an inmate’s point of view, her firsthand account exposed incompetence among physicians and staff, leading to reforms in mental health care. As a result of her many successes and her popularity with readers, other newspapers hired women to follow Bly’s formula. Bly became internationally famous for her solo trip around the world in 1889–90, surpassing the feat of Jules Verne’s fictional hero in Around the World in 80 Days. Bly recounted her voyage in Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in 72 Days. In the years after her journey, Bly achieved such journalistic coups as an interview with the anarchist and labor agitator Emma Goldman and an inside view of the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894. The following year, Bly married the New York industrialist Robert Seaman. After his death in 1910, Bly managed his iron manufacturing plants, but a series of business reversals consumed her fortune. She was traveling in Europe when WORLD WAR I broke out, and Bly became the first woman correspondent on the Serbian front. She died on January 27, 1922, in New York City.

 BOYD, BELLE

(1844–1900) Confederate spy. The daughter of a merchant and tobacco plantation manager, Isabelle Boyd was born on May 9, 1844, at Martinsburg, Virginia. She was sent to Baltimore at age 12 to attend the Mount Washington Female College but returned home to Martinsburg with the outbreak

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of the CIVIL WAR in 1861. Fiercely loyal to the Confederate cause, Boyd raised funds for the Virginia militia. Some time after the occupation of Martinsburg in July 1861, she shot and killed a Union officer who had insulted her mother and intruded on the family home. On several occasions, the 17-year-old Boyd overheard Union guards outside her house exchange military secrets and she sent the information to Confederate officers. In late 1861, she was appointed a courier for the Confederate intelligence service in the Shenandoah Valley. With her superior horsemanship and knowledge of the land, she rode undetected through the woods and across battlefields to delivery details of Union troop strength and movements. She also carried vital supplies and nursed wounded soldiers. In May 1862, as General Stonewall Jackson and his Confederate troops planned an attack on the Union-occupied town of Front Royal, Virginia, Boyd was staying with an aunt who owned a nearby hotel. Eavesdropping on a conversation between Union officers, Boyd picked up a crucial piece of military strategy. Crossing between the two armies, she delivered the information to a Confederate officer. As a result, Jackson and his forces were able to save some bridges that the retreating Union forces had planned to destroy. Boyd’s exploits, which both challenged and took advantage of conventional assumptions about the SOUTHERN LADY, earned the young woman a national reputation for her courage and savvy. Captured, imprisoned, and released in 1862 and 1863, Boyd contracted typhoid and was debilitated until March 1864, when she set out on her final mission. Carrying Confederate dispatches, she set sail on a blockade runner bound for England. The ship was intercepted, and Boyd was banished to Canada. In August 1864 she married Samuel Wylde Harding, Jr., the Union officer who had taken command of the Rebel steamer on which she had been captured. The couple had one daughter, and Harding died barely a year after her birth. To earn money, Boyd performed in theatrical productions and wrote Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison (1865). In 1869, she married John Swainston Hammond, another former Union officer, and they had four children before divorcing in 1884. The following year, she married actor Nathaniel Rue High, Jr. Belle Boyd died on June 11, 1900, at Kilbourn, Wisconsin. See also: Spies, Civil War.

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(1816–1908) Businesswoman and philanthropist. Lydia Moss was born on July 21, 1816, in Vevay, Indiana. She married sawmill proprietor and landowner Tobias Bradley in 1837 and moved to Peoria, Illinois, where they raised six children. On her husband’s death in 1867, Bradley inherited $500,000. Managing this money changed her from a wife and mother to a successful businesswoman. Bradley increased her sizable estate by four times with such innovations as financing research on unarable soil, hence improving crop growth and farm production. She was eager to establish a foundation for her children in accordance with Tobias’s wishes. Her will and codicils included founding a technical college that emphasized practical skills and was open to men and women after her death. However, on the encouragement of her friend William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, she chartered the 28-acre Bradley Polytechnic Institute in 1876 with an endowment of $2 million. Although the first buildings were not erected until 1897, Bradley was able to witness her legacy before she died in 1908.

 BRADWELL, MYRA COLBY

(1831–1894) Suffragist and one of the first woman lawyers in the United States. Born February 12, 1831, in Manchester, Vermont, Myra Colby grew up in New York and Illinois. After finishing school, she became a teacher. Colby married James B. Bradwell in 1852, and together they operated a private school in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Illinois, where Myra gave birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy. In 1855, James was admitted to the Illinois bar. Myra, who had studied law informally with James, followed suit and passed the Illinois bar exam in 1869 with high honors. Later that year, however, she was denied entry to the bar, and a state court denied her appeal. The Illinois state legislature did pass and enact a bill she drafted that allowed women full rights to their earnings from employment. Suffragists, including ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, lobbied alongside Bradwell for the bill. In 1872, the U.S. Supreme Court heard her case in Bradwell v. Illinois but upheld the state’s decision on Myra’s bar entry.

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Despite this setback in court, Bradwell continued to play an active role in the legal community. In 1868, she founded the Chicago Legal News. Serving as both publisher and editor, she established herself as a legal expert and women’s rights advocate. She published three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage in her paper. In addition, she championed women’s employment rights, surely in reaction to her own struggles to be recognized as an attorney. Bradwell also supported other causes, such as reform of the court system and railroad regulation. As an active proponent of woman suffrage, Bradwell also helped to found the American Woman Suffrage Association’s Cleveland branch with James during a midwestern campaign. She served as the representative for Illinois at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and helped Chicago win the bid for the WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION in 1893. Bradwell was finally admitted to the Illinois bar in 1890, when the state court reopened her case. In 1892, she was allowed to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. After her death, her daughter, Bessie Bradwell Helmer, followed in her footsteps as a lawyer and editor of the Chicago Legal News. FURTHER READING

Friedman, Jane M. America’s First Woman Lawyer: The Biography of Myra Colby Bradwell. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.

BROWN, CHARLOTTE  HAWKINS

(1882–1961) School founder and reformer. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in Henderson, North Carolina, one of nineteen children. The daughter of slaves, Charlotte went to high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Hawkins had moved after her father abandoned the family. There she attracted the attention of Alice Freeman Palmer, president of Wellesley College, while pushing a baby carriage down the street and reading Virgil. Freeman encouraged the young woman to attend Wellesley College. In 1901, after she graduated from Wellesley, Brown returned to North Carolina as a teacher. In 1902 she founded the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute at Sedalia, a school designed as an agricultural and manual training facility.

Brown believed that black women needed to be trained as teachers so that they might teach other black women. During the 50 years of her presidency, the institute graduated more than one thousand students. Brown supported desegregation reforms, anti-lynching campaigns, and woman suffrage. Brown died in North Carolina in 1961, and the Palmer Institute closed ten years later. Her dynamic writing and speaking style remains the cornerstone of her legacy. Though generally considered a socially conservative reformer who did not identify with the problems of poor black women, Brown stands at the forefront of early twentieth-century black leaders. Her school is now a North Carolina Historical Site.

 BROWN, OLYMPIA

(1835–1926) One of the first ordained woman ministers in the United States. Born January 5, 1835, in Kalamazoo County, Michican, Olympia Brown grew up under her family’s strong Universalist faith. She attended the MOUNT HOLYOKE Female Seminary for one year but transferred in 1855 to Antioch College. At Antioch, Brown was considered a radical because she was always pressing for greater freedoms and rights for women. On June 25, 1853, Brown was ordained by the St. Lawrence Universalist Association and went on to serve churches in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. In 1873, she married newspaper publisher John Henry Willis, who was on the board of trustees of her Weymouth congregation. Although she headed her own parish in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Brown temporarily left her congregation for a SUFFRAGE tour in Kansas in 1867. Later, Brown established her own suffragist newspaper, the Wisconsin Citizen. After the death of her husband, she bought out his partners and took over his paper, the Racine Times-Call. She later moved to Baltimore and voted for the first time, after the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. She died six years later on October 23, 1926.

 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

One of the Seven Sisters colleges, located outside of Philadelphia, founded in 1885. Quaker and Haverford College trustee Joseph Wright Taylor, concerned with the issue of Quaker women’s ed-

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH

ucation, included plans for establishing a Quaker women’s college in his 1877 will. At first, Taylor wanted to build a women’s school with Haverford, which would share certain facilities and faculty with the male college. However, on advice that the two schools would flourish better separately, he decided on a separate campus, five miles from Haverford, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He then consulted SMITH COLLEGE president L. Clark Seelye, who advocated a mixed faculty of men and women and a liberal arts curriculum without a preparatory track, which he believed lowered the overall quality of a college-level education. When Taylor died in 1880, an advisory board of Quaker men was created according to his will to set up the college. In 1883, M. Carey Thomas, a

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Quaker woman with a Ph.D., applied for the position of president. The board decided against her but appointed her dean and the first faculty member. After her appointment, Thomas toured other women’s colleges, ruthlessly dissecting every aspect of student education, lifestyle, and philosophy. Ultimately, Thomas emulated what she liked from other schools, including WELLESLEY’S emphasis on female community. She wanted to provide only the highest level of education and recruited the most prominent scholars as professors. Thomas also developed a program that included an intensive preparatory course, including nontraditional offerings for women’s colleges, such as classical languages and rigorous exams, similar to Harvard’s. In 1885, 36 women entered the Bryn Mawr of Thomas’s vision.

C

CABRINI, ST. FRANCES  XAVIER

(1850–1917) Missionary and first American saint. Cabrini was born Francesca Maria Cabrini in Lombardy, Italy, in 1850. A faithful woman of great drive, she dreamed from an early age of becoming a nun. Her efforts to be admitted to the sisterhood in 1880 failed because of her poor health, and she instead took a position as a lay teacher in an orphanage. Undeterred by her failure to become a nun, Cabrini took religious vows in 1889. She soon established a new order and began caring for children in hospitals and orphanages. Cabrini’s path from Lombardy to America was a circuitous one. Her success with the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart helped rekindle a dream she had long harbored of doing missionary work in China. In 1888, she traveled to Rome to win Pope Leo XIII’s blessings for her to relocate the order to China. Impressed by Cabrini’s success and organizational skills, the Pope instead called on her to minister to the thousands of Italians who had recently emigrated to America. Cabrini consequently arrived in New York’s Little Italy in 1889 where, with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, she established a convent, orphanage, and hospital. Cabrini became a U.S. citizen in 1909, but did not limit her efforts to the United States. Until

her death in Chicago in 1917, this tireless woman established more than 70 schools, orphanages, and hospitals throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. In 1946, Pope Pius XII canonized Cabrini, making her the first American saint.

 CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH

Massive migration to California that began after the discovery of gold there in 1848. Women from diverse socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds took part in the gold rush in a variety of roles. Most gold rush women were anonymous. Exact statistics on the number of women taking part in the gold rush are not known, but gold rush migrants were disproportionately male. Women’s experiences in the gold rush are described in DIARIES AND JOURNALS written by both women and men. Land claims, property and court records, and census enumerations occasionally listed women’s names and provided some personal information about their ages, birthplaces, financial statuses, and occupations. Some memoirs and newspaper articles about pioneers were written by or mentioned women who had participated in the gold rush. Only a few, such as “Dame Shirley” (pen name of Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp), were at all well known.

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TRAILBLAZERS Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819–1906) documented the California gold rush in 23 letters she wrote to her sister in Massachusetts. Using the pen name “Dame Shirley,” Clapp published her accounts in a column for Pioneer Magazine, called “Letters from the California Mines,” in 1854 and 1855. A New Jersey native, Clapp sailed to San Francisco with her husband, Dr. Fayette Clapp, in 1849. Tired of coastal fog and humidity, they moved one year later to Rich Bar, a chaotic mining town by the Feather River where Clapp described the rigors of everyday life and her husband administered medical care. In her profiles, Clapp painted compelling portraits of gold rush women. She told of a hotelkeeper’s eccentric daughter who, wearing miner’s boots, carried heavy sacks and dried dishes with her apron. And she told the story of a woman named Luzena Wilson, who discovered how to profit from baking bread. She also recounted the strenuous work and drunken behavior of miners, and described the natural landscape and wildlife around Rich Bar. Divorcing her husband in 1856, Clapp taught briefly in San Francisco and then returned East. Historians consider her letters among the best, most thorough depictions of the California gold rush. Her columns were a particular inspiration to the Western writer Bret Harte.

Some women, primarily Native Americans and Mexican Americans, already lived in California at the time gold was discovered. In the East, females of all ages left the comforts of home and traveled westward with their families or husbands. Some single women, including former slaves, also went to California to seek their fortunes. Crossing the continent was a rigorous journey that only foreshadowed the dangers women were to face in California: fires, floods, DISEASES, greed, and crime. Despite their sacrifices and suffering, many women considered the gold rush an exhilarating adventure. Gender roles were less rigid than they were in more settled regions of the East, providing women with uncommon economic opportunities. Skills were more valued than social status, and many women attained financial autonomy by providing services to miners. Because so few women migrated to California when the gold rush began, the ones who did could charge higher fees for their services. Cooking, laundering, and other domestic services that were minimally compen-

sated in the East could bring in thousands of dollars per year in the West. Women who established boarding houses and restaurants made more money than most miners. More women migrated to California as the gold rush intensified, including Asian, European, and South American immigrants. A few women lived in MINING CAMPS and prospected for gold, while others settled in nearby towns to peddle wares and services. Some women were entertainers and gamblers. Others earned money in PROSTITUTION or, disguised as men, got odd jobs as barbers, photographers, or stagecoach drivers. Still others, empowered with new riches, settled in San Francisco and indulged in luxurious lifestyles. See also: Native American Family Life; Oregon Trail.

 CARLISLE SCHOOL

Boarding school in Pennsylvania for Native Americans. The Carlisle School was founded by Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, a military officer who had worked in Native American territories in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1879, Pratt persuaded the U.S. War Department to allow him to house a school for Native Americans at the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. In the decades that followed, the Carlisle School’s enrollment grew to more than 1,000 students representing more than 70 tribes. The school closed in 1918. Women played a major role at the Carlisle School. Anne Ely, for example, directed the program that placed students with families away from the school, where they could earn money and learn skills. However, many observers, then and now, have noted that the school stripped Native Americans of their identities, leaving them caught between white and Native American cultures. Most lost contact with the traditions and languages of their tribes, making it difficult to return to their communities and families. One faculty member in the late 1800s, a Dakota woman named Zitka-la Sa, openly criticized Pratt’s methods for this reason. She became an accomplished

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writer, best known for her short story “The SoftHearted Sioux.”

 CASSATT, MARY

(1844–1926) Painter. Mary Stevenson Cassatt was born May 22, 1844, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To the dismay of her family, who considered art an impractical pursuit, she entered Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1861. After graduation she traveled to Paris to continue her studies. Except for a brief return to the United States in 1870, Cassatt remained in France until her death on June 14, 1926. During the 1870s, Cassatt was inspired by the Impressionist school, which captured natural subjects in fleeting moments and emphasized the play of light and color. By 1877, she had developed her work to such a degree that Edgar Degas, one of the movement leaders, invited her to join an exhibition as the sole American and woman artist. Even within the inner circle of the Impressionists, she carved out her own niche. Her style was influenced both by Degas and Japanese prints, while her subject matter reflected a unique commitment and sensitivity to women. Often, she painted scenes of women in daily life, but she is perhaps best known for her paintings of mothers and children. Cassatt suffered from poor eyesight later in life and stopped painting in 1914.

 CATHOLICS

The United States has always been a predominantly Protestant country. Catholics have been a small minority of the population. In 1632, English nobleman George Calvert established Maryland as a colony for oppressed English Catholics. New Englanders generally had a hostile relationship with Catholics, whom they saw as pawns of Catholic royal power and minions of Rome. Catholics also played a dominant role in the Spanish Southwest in the decades before and through the nineteenth century. In the 1840s and 1850s, Irish and German immigrants greatly increased the number of Catholics in the United States. By 1850 there were three million Catholics in the nation, or 15 percent of the population. Many Protestant Americans viewed these newcomers with alarm. Protestants

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were suspicious of the Catholic religion, in part because of the long tradition of religious hostility in Europe between the two types of Christianity. Indeed the most virulent anti-Catholics were Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Welsh Methodists, and English Methodists, who transferred their hostility from the years of struggle in England. Catholic immigrants were generally unskilled laborers who settled in the Northeast, becoming a visible population of the poor. Protestants disapproved of Irish and German drinking habits, their desire to establish Catholic schools, and their tendency to vote for Democrats, a party dominated by Southern slaveholders. In the early 1850s, the American or Know-Nothing Party sprang from this anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment. The American party opposed immigration, supported temperance and suggested repeatedly that American Catholics could not be real citizens because their highest allegiance was to the Pope. By 1856, the American party had been largely absorbed into the new Republican Party, which in most places retianed its anti-Catholic flavor. Catholic missions were a prominent feature of the American West and Spanish-American Southwest. Federal- and state-supported elementary and secondary schools did not become a regular feature of American life until after the CIVIL WAR. Thus, Catholic and Protestant schools provided for all formal Native American education before 1870. Between 1791 and 1900, Catholics established more than 100 Indian schools, many of which still exist. Priests and nuns from the Jesuit, Benedictine, and Franciscan orders worked at and ran these schools. Catholic missions and schools existed in every western state, from Minnesota to California. Catholic nuns such as Sister Agatha O’Brien in mid-century Chicago tended to the poor, established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. Catholic nuns also provided invaluable nursing services during the Civil War. Of the 3,200 official Civil War nurses, 640 were nuns. Abraham Lincoln himself greatly admired the nuns’ nursing work, describing them as “gentle and womanly but with the courage of soldiers.” Nuns also made significant contributions to the care and feeding of orphans and neglected children in an age when the federal government took no part in social welfare. FURTHER READING

Catholic University of America. New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw Hill, 1989.

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McPherson, James. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1982.

CATT, CARRIE CLINTON  LANE CHAPMAN

(1859–1947) The reformer whose SUFFRAGE strategy contributed to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Carrie Clinton Lane was born on January 9, 1859, in Ripon, Wisconsin, the daughter of farmers. When she was seven, her family moved near Charles City, Iowa. She attended Iowa State College, where she became interested in oratory and received a B.S. with honors in 1880. Three years later, she became the first woman superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa. In 1885 she married Leo Chapman, the owner and editor of a newspaper in Mason City. He died the following year in San Francisco, where she briefly worked as that city’s first female reporter. Chapman was dedicated to political reform. A pioneering feminist and political activist, she stated that her civic awareness began when she realized it was unfair that her mother could not vote in the 1872 presidential election. In 1887, she joined the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association and lectured publicly. In 1890, she married George W. Catt, a construction engineer whom she had known in college. Because of her political skills, Catt was selected for important leadership positions in the suffrage movement. She spoke at the 1890 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) convention in Washington, D.C., and campaigned for a woman suffrage constitutional amendment. SUSAN B. ANTHONY asked Catt to address Congress in 1892 about the proposed legislation. Known for her skill in organizing state campaigns for suffrage, Catt both contributed to and inspired the efforts of her contemporaries. Elected to succeed Anthony as president of the NAWSA, Catt served in that position from 1900 to 1904. She also established the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), of which she was president from 1904 to 1923. A pacifist during World War I, Catt helped JANE ADDAMS create the Woman’s Peace Party. During her second term as NAWSA president, from 1915 to 1920, Catt introduced her “Winning Plan” strategy for attaining woman suffrage: Congress and state legislatures should be lobbied simultaneously. Catt convinced members of the U.S. House and Senate and several state legisla-

tures to consider ratifying a Constitutional amendment. Two important turning points came when New York passed a statewide woman suffrage referendum in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson came out in favor of a constitutional amendment. On August 26, 1919, Catt celebrated passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which assured women the right to vote. She then encouraged the formation of the nonpartisan National League of Women Voters to educate women about political issues so they would be informed voters. Catt and Nettie R. Shuler published Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement in 1923. Catt died on March 9, 1947, in New Rochelle, New York. See also: American Equal Rights Association; Women’s Rights Movement.

CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION  OF 1876 Celebration held in Philadelphia to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The exhibition is best known for its 13-acre “Machinery Hall,” which housed hundreds of Gilded Age inventions. The centennial offered women an opportunity to highlight both their technological capabilities and their struggle for greater political freedom. Although barred from displaying their innovations in the main hall, a group of female inventors led by Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, created a “Woman’s Pavilion.” The pavilion contained more than 85 exhibits. While half of the displays dealt with clothing and domestic products, many were marvels of medical, nautical, and industrial innovation. While female inventors showcased women’s ingenuity, female suffragists such as ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE used the centennial exhibition to champion gender equality. On July 4, these women marched into Independence Hall, interrupted the ongoing meeting, and unrolled a three-foot-scroll declaring the rights of women. Before being forced out of the hall, Anthony proceeded to read the declaration as the other women passed out pamphlets. The declaration proclaimed women’s right to vote, to control their bodies, and to enjoy full equality with men.

CHICAGO WOMEN’S CLUB

 CHAPMAN, MARIA WESTON

(1806–1885) Abolitionist. Maria Weston was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, on July 25, 1806. She received much of her education in England, where she lived with an uncle and his family. In 1830, she married Henry Chapman and quickly became active in Boston’s ABOLITION circles. In 1832, she cofounded the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and soon became one of the movement leaders, working as the chief assistant to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s most prominent leader, William Lloyd Garrison. She edited two of his publications, The Liberator and The Non-Resistant, and helped to found a third, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, which she coedited. Chapman was elected to the society’s executive committee in 1839. Along with the GRIMKÉ sisters and LYDIA MARIA FRANCIS CHILD, she fought against sexism without splitting from the Garrisonian abolitionist movement, which suffered a division in its membership because of its position on women’s rights. She organized antislavery fairs throughout New England and boldly fought prejudice, confronting threatening and angry mobs. In 1835, ordered by the mayor to vacate a building where the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was meeting, she led the women, African-American and white, hand in hand to her home. Chapman was a prolific writer. Among her many works was Songs of the Free and Hymns of Christian Freedom, published in 1836. She spent a number of years abroad in Paris writing. After the CIVIL WAR, Chapman sided with Garrison to disband the antislavery societies while continuing to fight prejudice. She died on July 12, 1885.

CHESNUT, MARY BOYKIN  MILLER

(1823–1886) Author of Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, a diary of her experiences as a white Southerner during the CIVIL WAR. Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, in Pleasant Hill, South Carolina. Her father, Stephen Miller, was a U.S. congressman and later senator, and in 1826 he was elected governor of South Carolina. She was educated at home on the family’s cotton plantation until age 13, when she was sent to a boarding school in Charleston. In 1840, she married James Chesnut, the only son of one of the state’s largest landowners. For most of the next two decades she lived on her husband’s family plantation near Camden.

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When James Chesnut became a U.S. senator in 1858, Mary moved with him to Washington, D.C. There she used her wit to charm many of the future leaders of the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina. As the Civil War approached, James resigned from the Senate and returned to South Carolina, where he led the state’s effort to secede from the Union. When war broke out, he joined the Confederate Army, served as an aide to Jefferson Davis and General P. G. T. Beauregard, and eventually rose to the rank of general. During the Civil War, Mary Chesnut wrote the one work for which she is remembered: a diary of her experiences on the home front. As she accompanied her husband to Charleston and Columbia in South Carolina and other postings in Montgomery, Alabama, and Richmond, Virginia, her elegant drawing rooms were frequently gathering places for many of the Confederacy’s most important figures. On February 15, 1861, she began to record her witty, intelligent, irreverent, and ironic observations about the war in a diary, which she closed on August 2, 1865. The book provides modern readers with a full portrait of life in the South during the war. It describes the loves, lives, and griefs of individuals against the larger backdrop of the war, and it exposes both the similarities and differences of life before the war and in the war’s immediate aftermath. After the war, the Chesnuts were in debt. Mary Chesnut hoped to help pay off the debt by publishing her diary, but her efforts to turn it into a publishable form were unsuccessful. She then tried her hand at novel writing, but her three completed novels were never published. The diary, in highly altered form, was finally published in 1905 under the title A Diary from Dixie. Today the work is known as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. Recently there have been scholarly publications of Chesnut’s actual diary. Mary Chesnut died in Camden, South Carolina, on November 22, 1886. FURTHER READING

Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

 CHICAGO WOMEN’S CLUB

Founded in 1876, the Chicago Women’s Club (CWC) began as a branch of Fortnightly, an intellectual society formed three years earlier. A prominent member of the WOMEN’S CLUB MOVEMENT, the

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CWC formed to take a more active role in solving social problems than Fortnightly. The CWC kept its membership exclusive and upper class and took a relatively conservative approach to reform. For example, members did not embrace SUFFRAGE until 1891. In 1876, Hannah Greenbaum Solomon and her sister Henriette were the first Jewish women elected to the CWC. Solomon credited her idea for founding the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN to her experiences in the CWC. In 1894 the CWC nominated its first black member: social worker, reformer, and reporter for the Women’s Era, FRANCES BARRIER WILLIAMS. Williams’s admission to the CWC one year later caused some members to resign in protest. In 1899 the CWC established the Chicago Political Equality League to work for woman suffrage but required all League members also to be members of the CWC. This move effectively limited membership to elite women. The club emphasized philanthropy and education, and promoted a course of study for members said to be as rigorous as any college curriculum. The club continued in its philanthropic mission and elite position in Chicago society until well into the twentieth century.

CHILD, LYDIA MARIA  FRANCIS

(1802–1880) Writer and abolitionist. Born on February 11, 1802, Francis spent her formative years living with her sister in Maine, where she encountered local Native American tribes. This experience influenced her first novel, Hobomok, an unprecedented story of a mixed-race marriage, published in 1824. That year, she met her future husband, David Lee Child. David introduced her to William Lloyd Garrison, the notable reformer and abolitionist, in 1830. That meeting changed the course of her life and work. In 1833, she published a comprehensive treatise calling for an end to slavery entitled An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. The book garnered harsh criticism. Many reacted to it by canceling subscriptions to her children’s magazine, Juvenile Miscellany. Child was deeply involved in the abolitionist movement and edited Garrison’s National AntiSlavery Standard. As she worked alongside other abolitionist women, such as MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN, her antislavery beliefs became closely linked to a growing concern with women’s rights. Child also addressed other issues in her work, including religious intolerance and Native Amer-

ican rights, as well as writing ADVICE BOOKS for women. As an activist, Child corresponded with John Brown after his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and worked on behalf of freed people after the CIVIL WAR.

CHILDBIRTH AND  PREGNANCY In 1800, the United States had one of the highest birthrates in the world: 7.04 children per woman. The birthrate fell to 5.92 children per woman by 1850 and further to 3.56 children per woman by 1900, but pregnancy and childbirth remained central to American women’s experiences. Until the late eighteenth century, pregnant women received little or no prenatal care and seldom consulted physicians. When labor began, they relied on midwives, women who were experienced in attending births and caring for babies. As physicians’ training and medical knowledge improved in the late eighteenth century, however, some affluent women began to hire trained male physicians to attend them in childbirth. Physicians, unlike midwives, used forceps to deliver babies; although forceps could injure the baby if not used skillfully, they made childbirth quicker and less painful. By the mid-nineteenth century, physicians attended most urban, middle-class births, while midwives continued to assist rural, immigrant, and AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. In the 1860s, physicians began to give women in labor anesthetics such as chloroform to ease the pain of childbirth. Most babies were born at home; women feared catching puerperal fever, a dangerous infection that could kill both mother and child, in dirty, disease-ridden hospitals. Unfortunately, physicians’ attendance did not make childbirth safer, because their interventionist approach to childbirth often injured mothers and babies. Prenatal care remained minimal throughout the century, though most white women stayed at home and rested for a month or more after childbirth. See also: Abortion; Contraception; Diseases.

 CHILD CUSTODY

The legal ruling of entitlement of a parent to the care of his or her children in cases of divorce or separation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, children were considered personal property under the

CHILDHOOD, CHILDREN

law. Because married women could not own personal property in most states, custody of children generally was awarded to fathers. Early colonial-period literature portrayed the father as the most important figure in child rearing. This began to change in the eighteenth century with the development of the ideal of Republican motherhood. Women became praised for raising republican citizens and their primary roles became mothers. As such, society expected them to instill morals and inculcate values to both sons and daughters. As women came to be seen as primarily mothers and rulers of the domestic sphere, state laws began to reflect this new ideology. In a landmark 1842 New York State case, Mercein v. People, the justices ruled, “The law of nature has given to [the mother] an attachment for her infant offspring which no other relative will be likely to possess in an equal degree.” Reflecting the prevalent ideology of womanhood, the justices believed that mothers had a greater bond with their children than did fathers or other relatives. After this ruling, many states began to award infants, young children, and female children to their mothers. By the end of the nineteenth century, mothers received custody of all children in cases of divorce or separation unless the mothers were considered unfit. With an ideology in place that made women the rearers of children, the courts had developed a “special bond doctrine” that established mothers’ custodial rights.

 CHILDHOOD, CHILDREN

The nineteenth century saw the flowering of the cult of motherhood, the glorification of the mother–child bond, and the recognition of childhood as a separate human developmental stage. Many colonial women spent much of their time combining child rearing and household and farm work, and shared responsibility for raising children with fathers, older children, extended family members, and neighbors. Early Americans saw child rearing as an exercise in disciplining children to curb their innate sinfulness. By the early nineteenth century, women, particularly middle-class white women, became increasingly responsible for the physical and psychological well-being of their children. Fathers distanced themselves from both aspects of child care as their place of work shifted outside the household and into the public sphere.

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By the late 1800s, middle-class children enjoyed a prolonged childhood that included expensive toys and parties.

As concerns about child rearing intensified from the beginning to the end of the century, birthrates among white, native-born women dropped from 7.04 to 3.56 children per family. Child rearing, not childbearing, became the focus of many women’s lives. New ideas about children also suggested that women were better suited for the role of parent than were men. Discipline shifted from corporal punishment to moral suasion and guilt-provoking techniques, and social theory held that women were better suited for the latter. Childhood and adolescence also became more distinct stages of growth as the century progressed. Instead of sending children as young as eight or nine away to apprentice or work with another family, parents in the early 1800s began to keep their sons and daughters home, sometimes into their twenties. Children’s roles within the family shifted from responsible coproducer to consumer in need of parental protection and supervision. Many children were kept in school longer where, conveniently, they learned skills that would help them succeed in an industrializing society. Not all children fit this mold, particularly children of working-class families in which women and children’s wage labor was crucial to the family economy. A protracted childhood and increased education also did not inform the lives of slave children and mothers. Slave children went to work when they were fairly young. Female slaves

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had their first child much earlier and had much higher birthrates than their white counterparts. Most importantly, slave families lived in constant danger of being separated by sale. FURTHER READING

Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1986. Mintz, Stephen, and Susan Kellog. Domestic Revolution: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press, 1988.

 CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT

Law passed by Congress in 1882 prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers. When Chinese males first came to the United States in the mid-1800s after the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH, they did not encounter any legal barriers. However, as early as 1854, a California law was enacted that limited the immigration of Chinese women. The situation for all Chinese immigrants worsened when the economy suffered a downturn and anti-Chinese sentiment escalated. The PAGE ACT of 1875 was another attempt to curb Chinese immigration. In the Sino-American Treaty of 1880, China agreed to restrictions and regulations on immigration, but not an outright ban. In return, the United States agreed to protect Chinese immigrants already in the nation. On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned almost all Chinese immigration to the United States for ten years. This was the first law in U.S. history that barred a group’s entry on the basis of race or ethnicity. The law was renewed in 1892, 1902, and 1904. The Chinese Exclusion Act dramatically curtailed immigration to the United States. In 1887 only ten Chinese immigrants were permitted entry. Of those that came in the following years, the vast majority were men. As a result, most Chinese-American communities were overwhelmingly male. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until 1943.

 CHINESE IMMIGRANTS

The nineteenth century brought a wave of immigrants from China lured by the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH. Largely employed as laborers and servants, they experienced legislative impediments to their entry and rights shortly after they began to emigrate.

This photograph of Chen Chong, a Seattle merchant, and his wife was taken on their wedding day in 1866. Three months later she was kidnapped, presumably for sale into prostitution. Chen Chong never saw her again.

Initial Chinese immigrants were men seeking their fortunes in gold. Most of them did not find the wealth they sought and could not afford to pay for wives and daughters to follow. Chinese women wished to immigrate to reunite with their husbands or families, although a few came seeking their own fortunes, or even an education. It is thought that the first Chinese woman to arrive in the United States was Afong Moy, in 1834, who was exhibited as a curiosity in New York theaters. Whatever the case, Chinese women found both entry into the United States and life afterward difficult. One such woman was Mary Tape, who lived in San Francisco. She sued her local school board in 1885 when her daughter was denied entry into the neighborhood school. While it was certainly not easy or inexpensive for men to emigrate to the United States, restrictions upon women were far greater. For one, there were restrictions imposed by Chinese society, which disapproved of women immigrating. Also, U.S. laws held women to higher standards than men and subjected them to highly detailed and unnecessary interrogations, making it difficult for women to settle with their families already in the country. As a result of these restrictions, the sex ratio among Chinese immigrants was greatly unbalanced in favor of men. Even before the CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT was signed in 1882, Chinese women were effectively prohibited from entering the United States. Many of the women who came to the United States were bought by Chinese American men, and then sold into servitude or PROSTITUTION. This

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WOMEN’S FIRSTS Ah Choi (1829–1928) was one of the first Chinese women to arrive in the United States. She arrived in San Francisco in 1849, just a year after the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH brought the first wave of CHINESE IMMIGRANTS to the United States. She paid for her own passage and arrived as an independent woman seeking her fortune. At the time, the United States offered few opportunities to Chinese women, and PROSTITUTION was the most common of available professions. Since there were few Chinese women living in the United States during the nineteenth century, accurate and confirmed depictions of their stories are rare. While Ah Choi comes to life in many accounts, the stories vary greatly. In fact, her name itself is widely disputed. The more popular alternate spellings include: Ah Choy, Achoi, and Ah Toy. Because Ah Choi was economically independent, she was able to turn a normally oppressive and frequently life-threatening occupation into a lucrative business. She charged one ounce of pure gold per customer, and by the end of her second year, had earned enough money to travel to Hong Kong to recruit more women. She opened her own brothel in San Francisco, which became known for its upscale, non-Chinese clientele while Ah Choi became known more as an entertainer than a madam. In a time when most Chinese women lived invisible lives, Ah Choi lived in the public eye. She frequently went to court to settle personal and professional disputes, and even once served as counsel for a young prostitute. Her clientele included men of influence and rank in the city, and when she was investigated in 1851, she won a minor victory when the judge refused to deport her on the basis of her race.

slave trade was very profitable for the men who brokered the transactions. While some women were enslaved as prostitutes, others were sold under bogus work contracts with exorbitant freedom fees. Furthermore, they were mistreated and often physically abused. In 1870, most estimates place the percentage of Chinese women in the United States who were prostitutes at around 70 percent. The remainder were servant women, although a few were wage laborers, such as seamstresses. After 1870, restrictions on immigration drove prostitution down, particularly with the PAGE ACT of 1875, which banned immigration of any prostitutes. Also, religious and social institutions began to fight against the ills of prostitution, such as the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME, which saved Chinese women from the prostitution trade.

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The lives of the early Chinese Americans were characterized by racial prejudice, abuse, and exploitation. They suffered under prejudicial legislation, and women disproportionately so. These laws and trends would not be reversed until well into the twentieth century.

CHOPIN, KATE  O’FLAHERTY

(1851–1904) Regional author whose fiction often deals with the role of women. Katherine O’Flaherty was born on February 8, 1851, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, an Irish immigrant, became a wealthy retailer. After his death when she was five, Kate was raised by her mother, a Creole, or a descendant of the French and Spanish who had colonized Louisiana. Kate O’Flaherty was educated in a convent school. At age 19 she married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton broker from New Orleans, Louisiana. After Oscar Chopin’s death in 1883, Kate, with six children to support, plunged herself into writing. She gained a reputation as a “local colorist,” writing primarily about her Creole, Cajun, and AfricanAmerican neighbors. She wrote more than a hundred short stories, which appeared in two collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). At least two of these short stories, “Désirée’s Baby” and “Madame Celestin’s Divorce,” are still widely reprinted. Chopin is best known for her short novel The Awakening (1899). The novel created a scandal when it was published, for it explores the artistic and sexual “awakening” of a woman who abandons her family and later commits suicide. Because of the scandal, she was unable to find publishers for her later work. She died in St. Louis on August 22, 1904.

 CIVIL WAR

From April 1861 to April 1865 the Northern and Southern sections of the United States fought the Civil War. Northern victory led to the

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that the conflict had a number of causes, from states’ rights to economic sectionalism, the root issue Emily Lyles Harris (b. ca. 1828) was born in tiny Spartanwas indisputably slavery. This is not burg, South Carolina, to a family of modest means. Growing to say that the majority of Northernup, Harris had little education or opportunity. In 1846 she ers or Union soldiers were abolitionmarried farmer David Harris. The Harrises had nine children ists, but Northern citizens did unite over the next 15 years. Harris worked in the house, taking against the South’s right to secede and slave owners’ attempts to concare of children and overseeing domestic tasks, while David trol the federal government. managed and worked the rest of the farm. Their family econThe Civil War and emancipation omy ran on a standard mid-nineteenth century gendered divialso remade the federal government, sion of labor. expanding and solidifying its role in In late 1861, when Harris was 33 years old, her husband American life. Previous to the war the joined the Confederate Army. After his departure Harris United States had struggled with the managed the family, the slaves, and the farm. She kept a daily role of the federal government in a journal, one that her husband had begun in 1855. From Harunion of states. Particularly at issue ris’s personal writing we know how difficult she found her new was whether or not the federal govlife with its double burden. Indeed, she found her life so diffiernment could impose its policies on cult that by mid-war she came to hate the farm and everything individual states, and whether states for which it stood. could declare null and void, or “nulHarris also came to dislike fellow South Carolinians’ attilify,” federal laws or secede from the tudes toward slaves. Spartanburg slaves, like slaves throughUnion. The Civil War settled the quesout the Confederacy, resisted work and ran away. In her diary tion of federal supremacy and at the Harris recorded what happened to one group of slaves caught same time gave birth to a new Ameriattempting escape. Spartanburg authorities had ordered the can freedom with the end of slavery. slaves whipped without establishing their guilt, which Harris Though ostensibly the war began found a repugnant contradiction to local law. on April 12, 1861, when Confederate In 1865, at the war’s end, David Harris returned to the General Pierre Beauregard fired on family farm and took up his life as the head of the farm and Union forces at Fort Sumter, South family. He also resumed writing in the journal and took little Carolina, the roots of the conflict go notice of his wife’s efforts to maintain the family and farm in much deeper. In the first five decades his absence. Emily Harris died in 1899, unsung and unappreof the nineteenth century increasing ciated for her valorous efforts to fulfill a role for which she sectionalism, fueled by Southern slavery, created a series of conflicts had little training and even less affinity. between North and South. In the Nullification crisis of 1832 South Caremancipation of four million African-American olina threatened secession over a tariff dispute slaves. The war also remade politics and policy, that had more to do with Southern politicians’ beand changed social and cultural institutions in lief that the federal government could not impose ways that transcended antislavery issues. The upon a state measures odious to that state. The Civil War, like so many wars, challenged tradi- importance of nullification theory lie in the reality tional nineteenth-century female roles and ideas that if the federal government could impose tarof womanhood. For both black and white iffs it could also impose abolition. Both female and women the conflict and its aftermath changed male abolitionists kept the issue of slavery at the the way women thought of themselves. The war forefront of the political discourse. provided an opportunity for women like Emily The 1850s saw the division of the nation’s Lyles Harris to discover potential that might two political parties, as both Democrats and otherwise have remained untapped. Whigs struggled over the contest between “slave The Civil War has been called America’s Sec- power” and abolitionism. The creation of the ond Revolution and in many ways the war did Republican Party in 1854, born from the demise settle questions of sovereignty and SLAVERY that of the Whig party, set the stage for the 1860 the founding fathers had failed to address. While presidential election. Republican Abraham Linthe historiography of the Civil War may suggest coln’s election so alarmed proslavery politicians

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that by the time Lincoln took office seven Southern states had seceded. While people often think about the Civil War as primarily a male-centered matter, women played a significant role in the prosecution, success, and failure of the conflict. Much of the war was fought literally in women’s backyards. Photographs and newspaper accounts brought the war home to thousands more far away from the front. Families and entire communities were affected by the war. Women sewed flags, rolled bandages, raised money for military supplies, formed voluntary associations, and provided faraway soldiers with significant emotional support. One soldier’s death could change a woman’s life forever, forcing her to change her economic role in the family, support children alone, change homes, and in many other ways adjust her life to single parenthood. Though undoubtedly these less tangible efforts represent Northern and Southern women’s largest contributions to the war, women contributed to the war effort in a variety of other ways. Over six thousand Northern women volunteered as nurses under the aegis of the U.S. SANITARY COMMISSION or DOROTHEA DIX’s Army Nurse Corps. Some women even took up nursing independent of these official groups. CLARA BARTON, who would go on to found the American Red Cross, stands as the most famous of these independent nurses. Though it might seem obvious to modern observers that women would work as war nurses, the Civil War actually provided American NURSING its first opportunity to create a sustained female work force based on virtuous and motherly caring. Previous to the Civil War most nursing had been done by men, or by women of dubious reputation. Many Americans, at least previous to the war, believed sexual interest motivated women’s desire to care for infirm men. Women’s exemplary service during the war established a precedent for female nurses that allowed the profession to develop. Though their numbers are small, a significant number of women acted as SPIES during the war. Some, like Southerner BELLE BOYD, were more flamboyant than successful, undoubtedly attracted to espionage by the adventure and excitement of seditious activity. Early in the Civil War ROSE GREENHOW provided valuable information on Union troop locations and activities to Confederate forces. Her intelligence gathering from loose-lipped Northerners may have contributed to the Union’s stunning loss at the First Battle of Bull Run. E. H. Baker worked as a Pinkerton

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agent gathering Confederate Naval intelligence, while Elizabeth Van Lew, a Virginia aristocrat, ran the Richmond underground, organizing, gathering, and transmitting information directly to Abraham Lincoln and later to General Ulysses S. Grant’s intelligence officer. All of these women took advantage of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women that failed to consider women capable of espionage. Nineteenth-century Americans also considered women incapable of fighting the war, but approximately 400 women enlisted in either the Union or Confederate armies as male impersonators. S. EMMA EDMONDS enlisted under the sobriquet of Frank Thompson and worked as a male nurse and spy. Ironically, “Frank Thompson” sometimes impersonated a black woman to infiltrate Confederate pickets. Late in 1862 Edmonds became ill and had to reclaim her female identity to check herself into a private hospital. By the time she recovered Private Frank Thompson’s name appeared on a list of deserters, effectively ending Edmonds’s career as a Union soldier. White Southern women may have been, in part, responsible for the end of the war. As the war went increasingly poorly for the Confederacy evidence suggests that many white women became unwilling to support the war effort, instead urging their soldiering men to desert and return home to care for their families. Slave women also undermined the Southern effort when they resisted work, slowed down agricultural production, and ran away from their masters. HARRIET TUBMAN and women like her worked the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD to steal slaves away from the South and assist Union soldiers in espionage activities. It is difficult to know how many women really fought or spied or ran away during the war, in part because the activities of successful women were not recorded. Women’s contributions to the Civil War effort must be considered remarkable and suggest the vast capabilities of nineteenthcentury women of all colors. FURTHER READING

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Forbes, Ella. African American Women During the Civil War. New York: Garland, 1998. Markle, Donald E. Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994. Reverby, Susan M. Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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CLERICAL WORK

 CLERICAL WORK

Many nineteenth-century women could be found in the ranks of waged employment. In the last three decades of the nineteenth-century, nativeborn women began to find employment in clerical work. Before the Civil War these jobs had generally been done by young men, who considered their work the first step in a businessman’s apprenticeship. As American business became increasingly large and complex, the need for clerks increased and a number of businesses began hiring women as clerical workers. As businesses switched from male to female clerks, clerical work ceased being a step on the business ladder to success and became a permanently nonprofessional job. The mass production of typewriters by companies such as the gun manufacturer E. Remington and Sons in the 1870s further undermined the status of clerical work. By 1900, one third of all clerical workers were women. As clerical work became women’s work, it also underwent economic devaluation. Female clerical workers had little opportunity to advance their careers and earned approximately half as much as men. By the late 1880s, the average urban female clerical worker earned $5.24 per week, while her average weekly expenses hovered around $5.50. Still, poor though these wages may have been, they were more than female industrial workers earned. When the New York YOUNG WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION offered typing classes for women in 1881, it was swamped with applicants, most of them white, American-born women. There were few clerical jobs for black and immigrant women, a reality caused as much by racism

as by the limited education of women of color. By the 1890s, 19 percent of women over 16 years old were in the waged labor force, and though clerical workers may have constituted a relatively elite portion of this population, they continued to work long hours for poor wages.

CLEVELAND, FRANCES  FOLSOM

(1864–1947) First lady of the United States and wife of Grover Cleveland. Frances Folsom was born in Buffalo, New York. Her father, Oscar Folsom, was Grover Cleveland’s law partner. Frances Folsom attended Wells College in New York. While there she began writing to Cleveland, although he was 27 years older. Their correspondence developed into a deep affection, and they married in 1886. Cleveland, who had been elected president of the United States two years earlier, was the only president to be married in the White House. Frances was the youngest first lady at 21. Frances Cleveland was known for holding receptions on Saturday afternoons so working women could attend. She was the subject of newspaper articles, and her clothing styles were copied by women of the period. Although President Cleveland’s popularity declined during his term and he lost reelection, Frances Cleveland remained very popular. In 1888, after Cleveland was defeated for a second term, the couple moved to New York City, where Ruth, their first child, was born in 1891. The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after her. A year later, Cleveland was reelected president, and Mrs. Cleveland became first lady once again. The Cleveland’s second child, Esther, was born in 1893—the only president’s child born in the White House. Cleveland left office in 1897. He died in 1908. Frances Cleveland married Thomas J. Preston, Jr., in 1913. She died on October 29, 1947.

 COLLEGES

In the late 1800s, clerical work became a major employment opportunity—albeit a low-paying one—for American women.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, women were eager for higher education opportunities beyond finishing schools that taught manners and “feminine” arts. Supporters of WOMEN’S RIGHTS pushed for the admission of women to existing men’s colleges. They believed higher education and, particularly, coeducation would help break down the notion of separate spheres that confined women to duties of the

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“college” connoted a multi-building campus, a degree program, and a president, rather than a headMarion Talbot broke ground with her arguments for educamistress. tional equality, her creation of an organization for college The creation of Troy led to the forwomen, her research in a new scientific discipline, and her mation of similar institutions. Among service as one of the first women university administrators. the first to be established were While attending Boston University, Marion Talbot challenged Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1835; MARY a popular book by Edward Clarke, which asserted that the reLYON’s MOUNT HOLYOKE in South productive systems of young women would be damaged by the Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837; and rigors of attending college. She desinged, executed, and preWestern Female Institute in Cincinsented a comprehensive survey that debunked Clarke’s thenati, Ohio, in 1832. Opportunities for ory, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1880. single-sex education continued to After graduation, Talbot decided to create a sisterhood for grow throughout the nineteenth cencollege women and provide assistance and support to those tury, including the formation of the who wanted to attend college. In 1881, she founded the Associfamous Seven Sisters colleges. VASSAR ation of Collegiate Alumnae, later known as the American Aswas chartered in 1865, WELLESLEY sociation of University Women. At the same time, she continwas chartered in 1870, SMITH in 1871, ued her own education by enrolling at the Massachusetts BRYN MAWR in 1880, and Barnard in Institute of Technology. There, she pioneered a branch of 1889. RADCLIFFE offered classes to study which applied science to sanitation issues. In 1884, she women as an annex school to Harvard received a bachelor’s of science degree. in 1879 and chartered as a college for Talbot then edited Home Sanitation: A Manual for Housewomen in 1894, while Mount Holykeepers, which was published in 1887. In 1890, she became an oke Seminary became Mount instructor in domestic science at WELLESLEY COLLEGE, but Holyoke College in 1895. found academic study in her discipline too conservative in the Coeducation was introduced northeast. So she moved west. when OBERLIN COLLEGE in Ohio was Talbot was named dean of undergraduate women at the chartered in 1833 and opened to all University of Chicago in 1892, and in 1899, the dean of unistudents, including women and versity women. A strong proponent of co-education and equal AFRICAN AMERICANS. Several state opportunity, she successfully fought an internal proposal duruniversities also admitted women being her tenure that sought to separate the women students into fore the CIVIL WAR: the University of a separate junior college. Wisconsin, University of Michigan, and Ohio State University. By the middle of the nineteenth century, women had both their own colleges and had broken the admisprivate home sphere. After women were denied admission to men’s colleges, separate institutions sions barrier with coeducation at a number of colleges. However, they still faced discrimination and for women were established. In 1821, EMMA WILLARD, who had been denied further challenges. Many still opposed women’s entry to Middlebury College in Vermont, founded higher education and believed that women were TROY FEMALE SEMINARY in Troy, New York. It was not intellectually capable of meeting the chalthe first institution for women that challenged the lenges of a college education or that college enviconventional curricula in finishing schools. How- ronments were not intended for women and that ever, it was called a seminary, not a college. The dis- college life might degrade the moral purity of tinction between the two terms was usually slight, women students. A man named Edward Clarke but occasionally significant. Generally, seminaries claimed in an 1873 book that higher education was offered a more traditional course of general study, harmful to a woman’s reproductive organs. Even often with an emphasis on religious instruction, schools with liberal admissions policies subjected while colleges adopted a more classical college aca- women to inequalities, such as harsher grading demic curricula, similar to curricula at men’s col- standards, and prevented them from study in cerleges. Eventually, the terms grew more distinct, as tain disciplines. For instance, Antoinette Brown

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Blackwell received an undergraduate degree from Oberlin in 1847 but did not receive a graduate degree although she completed the theological study program. The limitations to the quality of women’s higher education became a major social issue. Reformers such as AMELIA BLOOMER, the editor of the suffragist magazine Lily, and PAULINA WRIGHT DAVIS, the editor of Una, pushed for continued progress and urged women toward the pursuit of higher education. This became easier after the Civil War, when the number of higher education opportunities for women exploded. This was due in part to two land grant acts which greatly increased access to higher education. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and the Second Morrill Act of 1890 specified that admissions would be granted to qualified applicants regardless of race, but also increased opportunities for women. Another reason for the growth of opportunities was the continued breakdown of the idea of “women’s sphere” as a result of the war. While men were fighting, women often entered the public sphere to contribute to war efforts and to occupy the spaces vacated by men. By 1870, 11,000 women were enrolled in colleges across the nation. This number jumped to 56,000 by 1890 and 85,000 by 1900. Women were greatly influenced not just by classes, but by college life. As more schools opened to women, more women began to experience life on a campus, in a college community. Particularly at women’s colleges, they formed close friendships and bonds with each other. Early social life at colleges included cooking together, tea parties, and studying in groups. Later, sports and clubs and outings became increasingly common. Institutions also provided important arenas for developing feminist thought, whether through direct coursework or through the college experience itself. Many women leaders developed ideas and formed important contacts at college, such as JANE ADDAMS and ELLEN GATES STARR the reformers and founders of HULL HOUSE, who attended Rockford Female Seminary, started in 1852 by Anna Peck Sill. And suffragist LUCY STONE developed many of her feminist ideas on marriage and education while at Oberlin, likely in direct reaction to the discrimination she and others faced while enrolled there.

FURTHER READING

Faragher, John Mack & Florence Howe, eds. Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.



COLLINS, JENNIE (1828–1887) Labor reformer and humanitarian. Jennie Collins was born in Amoskeag, New Hampshire. Her parents died when she was young, and she was reared by her grandmother. As an adolescent and young adult she worked in New England cotton mills and served as a domestic. Collins was deeply interested in social causes. A staunch antislavery activist, she volunteered her time in soldiers’ hospitals during the CIVIL WAR. Another interest of hers was EDUCATION; she taught the children of Union soldiers during the day and gave free history classes at night for women who were employed outside the home. At the end of the Civil War, Collins was drawn into the labor movement. In 1869, she supported a textile workers’ strike in New Hampshire and spoke at rallies in favor of a boycott against the company. Her efforts on behalf of the strikers came to the attention of SUSAN B. ANTHONY, among others. Anthony brought Collins to speak at a woman SUFFRAGE convention in 1870. Her speech was well received. Although strikes and suffrage interested Collins, her main focus was always on more general social reform. In 1870, she founded Boffin’s Bower, a Boston social center for working girls and women. Boffin’s Bower provided recreational opportunities as well as food, shelter, and clothing for those in need of it. Collins also helped find jobs for women who were out of work. Although Collins worked closely with hospitals and other relief agencies, she was always eager to keep her independence. Boffin’s Bower was a great success, mainly because of Collins’s tireless efforts. She canvassed businesses and friends and contributed most of the proceeds from her book Nature’s Aristocracy to the center. Boffin’s Bower remained open for several years after Collins’s death on July 20, 1887.

CONTRACEPTION

COLORED WOMEN’S  LEAGUE Precursor to national women’s clubs for African Americans. The Colored Women’s League was formed in 1892. Its formation came out of a growing sentiment for AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN to mobilize socially and politically in communities. When African-American activist Hallie Q. Brown tried to join the Women’s Board of Managers for the WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION in Chicago in 1893, she was told that she had to represent a group in order to participate, so she went to Washington, D.C., where a strong community of African-American women were based. Brown, along with MARY CHURCH TERRELL, ANNA JULIA HAYWOOD COOPER, and MARY JANE PATTERSON, formed the Colored Women’s League. Helen A. Cook was elected president. The organization strove to bring AfricanAmerican women together to overcome problems of race and gender. Its members were committed to community service, leading sewing circles, a kindergarten training class, and mothers’ clubs, where they addressed aspects of child care and child rearing. In other areas of the country, chapters held literary and cultural meetings and other educational programs. The league quickly spread outside of Washington, D.C., into the South and West. In 1896, it joined with one of its former competitors, the National Federation of Afro-American Women, to form the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN.

 COMSTOCK LAW

Federal legislation passed in 1873 outlawing circulation of “immoral materials” in the United States. Anthony Comstock, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, lobbied Congress to pass an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and the Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Under this law, ratified in 1873, advertising, publishing, selling, transporting, or even possessing “obscene materials” was a misdemeanor punishable by up to ten years in prison with hard labor, and/or a fine of up to $5,000. CONTRACEPTION and ABORTION were included in the definition of obscene materials because they allegedly promoted sexual promiscuity. It was no longer legal to sell or possess contraceptives of any

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kind. However, the illegal sale and use of contraceptives did not completely stop, even though enforcers went so far as to prevent doctors from publishing their research about abortion and contraception. Anthony Comstock was appointed a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service and had the power to inspect and seize illegal materials sent through the mail. His efforts led to the arrests of obscenity offenders such as Madame Restell. Although the Comstock Law is generally no longer enforced, remnants of it still remain on the books.

 CONTRACEPTION

The prevention of conception; birth control. In the 1800s, birth control rose in popularity in the United States. There were many reasons for the declining birthrate. The Victorian belief in women’s sexual purity contributed to the decline by giving women more sexual control within marriage. Although many women relied on abstinence or natural birth control methods, some used contraceptive devices. Before the creation of synthetic contraceptives, women relied on herbal abortifacients and infanticide to control family size. In the midnineteenth century, alternate birth control methods became widely available. The first rubber condoms were manufactured in 1850, but because of their cost—$5.00 per dozen, a considerable sum at the time—people often used animal intestines instead. Some also washed and reused condoms, making them rather ineffective. In addition, their inconvenience and association with prostitution made them undesirable. Wealthy women could use a “womb veil” (diaphragm), a rubber shield used to block entry to the uterus. In addition to the expense, this method required regular douching and a visit to a doctor for fitting. At a time when contraceptives were being advertised in newspapers, sold in pharmacies, and peddled door to door, the diaphragm was costly and bothersome. There were cheaper and more convenient methods of contraception. Some women tied a ribbon around a wet sponge and inserted the sponge into the vagina to absorb the male’s sperm. Others used acidic powders or jellies to block or kill the sperm. Some women made douches by mixing water with household items

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such as lye, opium, iodine, baking soda, and strychnine for use after sexual intercourse to “wash away” the sperm. Many of these douches were dangerous to a woman’s health. As it rose in popularity, contraception became the subject of debate. Moralists argued that it promoted promiscuity and defied the Christian belief that sex was sinful unless its goal was procreation. Moral zealots, such as Anthony Comstock, lobbied for legislation against contraception. As the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, Comstock supported the anti-birth-control laws that were passed at the state and federal levels. Other debates focused on whether certain contraceptives prevented conception or aborted the fetus. Because of the fine line between contraception and abortion, doctors often advocated coitus interruptus (withdrawal before ejaculation) and the rhythm method (abstaining from sexual activity during ovulation). Both methods proved unreliable, mainly because physicians could not agree on exactly when ovulation occurred. By the end of the 1800s, contraception was criminalized. Traditionally, women were expected to fulfill the role of the mother, and moralists believed that contraception allowed women to shirk this duty. However, women who desired sexual and economic freedom continued to use it regardless of social or legal ramifications. See also: Comstock Law. FURTHER READING

Tone, Andrea. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001.

COOPER, ANNA JULIA  HAYWOOD

(1858–1964) Educator and writer. Anna Julia Haywood was born a slave in 1858 in Florida, and at age nine she was sent to St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute for free blacks. In 1877, she married another graduate, George Cooper, who died two years later. Cooper attended OBERLIN COLLEGE, where she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. In 1887, she began TEACHING at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C., becoming its principal in 1902. This coeducational school was the only high school for African Americans in the nation’s capitol.

Meanwhile, Cooper published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South (1892), criticizing a system that denied women the same educational opportunities as men. Cooper also campaigned to end the practice of racial segregation in the United States. In 1900, Cooper was a speaker at the Pan-African Congress Conference in London. Five years later, she was a founder of the Colored Women’s YWCA, and in 1912, she was among the founders of the YWCA for AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN in Washington, D.C. Segregation prevented African-American women from attending the same YWCAs as white women. Nevertheless, Cooper believed strongly that African-American women should have leadership roles in their communities and work to improve the lives of poor African-American females. In her fifties, Cooper began studying for a doctorate and eventually received her degree from the University of Paris in 1925. She was only the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctorate. She continued her writing career into the 1940s.

 COURTSHIP

All of the formal and informal activies that allow men and women to acquaint themselves with one another prior to marriage. Although MARRIAGE was still the preferred route for a woman to take, advancements opened women’s sphere beyond the home, giving women options other than marriage. As a result, romantic love became increasingly important as an ideal for marriage. Discovering the absence or presence of love was the object of courtship. However, traditional gender roles still influenced the ideas and activities of courtship. The idea of “separate spheres,” that men belong to the outside world and that women belong to the inside, domestic world, informed most individuals’ search for a mate. Courtship included activities in which young people of both sexes socialized together, such as picnics, dances, berry-picking, or informal visits to each other’s homes. Often, closer relationships developed from these group outings. A popular form of one-on-one courtship, particularly in the early 1800s, was correspondence, in which young people would discuss their feelings toward one another. For couples who lived far apart, writing letters was the only way to develop their relationships.

C R O L Y, J A N E C U N N I N G H A M

Couples able to see each other in person enjoyed quite a bit of privacy and were allowed to go for private walks and outings. Young women entertained suitors alone in their homes, where they could talk and share intimate moments, often until very late at night. Chaperones were common only in the later part of the 1800s in upper-class families. Because of the level of privacy, intimate physical contact was common, although intercourse was not. The taboo on premarital sex was deeply ingrained in most individuals. From 1800 to 1840, premarital pregnancies declined to less than 6 percent, but they increased again after 1850. However, across ethnic groups and classes, premarital pregnancy rates remained low through the nineteenth century, hovering around 10 percent. Although exciting, romantic love and courtship were also the source of anxiety and heartache. Separation from lovers, anxiety about lovers’ faithfulness, the desire to marry a strong match, and other trials of romantic love were common fears.

 CRANDALL, PRUDENCE

(1803–1890) Abolitionist and educator who established the first private secondary school for African-American girls. Prudence Crandall was born on September 3, 1803, in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, the daughter of QUAKERS. Educated at the New England Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, she became a teacher in Plainfield, Connecticut. In 1831, at the request of area residents, Crandall established the Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut. During the school’s second year, Crandall admitted Sarah Harris, an African-American girl who aspired to become a teacher. The citizens of the town angrily demanded that Crandall expel the girl, but Crandall refused. The state legislature responded by passing a series of “black laws,” which made it a crime to educate African Americans who were not residents of the state. Crandall, still refusing to expel Sarah Harris, was arrested, convicted, and sent to jail in 1833. Her story was publicized across the nation. The state supreme court overturned the charge, declaring that the prosecution had provided insufficient evidence. Crandall suffered harassment by town residents, and the school was vandalized. In 1834 she moved with her new husband, the

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Reverend Calvin Philleo, to rural Illinois, where Crandall taught school and assisted in the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT and the TEMPERANCE movement. After her husband’s death in 1874, Crandall moved to Elk Falls, Illinois. Twelve years later, the Connecticut legislature awarded her a pension as compensation for unjust prosecution. She died on January 28, 1890, at Elk Falls. In its historic school desegregation ruling of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court cited arguments from Crandall’s defense against Connecticut’s “black laws.” See also: Abolition; Education.

 CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN See RAPE; “VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN”

(VOLUME 3).

 CROLY, JANE CUNNINGHAM

(1829–1901) Journalist and pioneer of the WOMEN’S CLUB MOVEMENT in the United States. Born in Leicestershire, England, on December 19, 1829, Cunningham moved with her family to Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1841. She moved to New York City in 1855 to pursue a career in JOURNALISM. Cunningham quickly secured a job at a newspaper, writing a column entitled “Parlor and Sidewalk Gossip.” By 1857, it was syndicated under her pen name, Jennie June. In 1856, she married another journalist, David Croly. By 1860, both were working for a New York paper, The World. She managed the women’s department, while he served as managing editor. Croly was barred entry as a woman to a New York Press Club event in 1868 for visiting English novelist Charles Dickens. In response, she established a literary club for women called SOROSIS that same year. On April 23, 1890, Croly invited other women’s organizations to a meeting to discuss political and social reform issues. The result was the GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS. In 1891, when Congress chartered the organization, she also became the first president of the Women’s Press Club of New York. In 1892, Croly became a professor of journalism and literature at Rutgers University. She authored a history of the women’s club movement and served as part owner and editor of the popular women’s magazine, GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK. Jennie June soon published her own cookbook, a

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volume on women’s topics, and a collection of columns. In 1875, she wrote a marriage ADVICE BOOK, and in 1891, an advice book for working women called Thrown on Her Own Resources. This book most likely was inspired by her own difficulties resulting from debt incurred by her financially irresponsible husband. Despite Croly’s pioneering efforts for women in journalism and the club movement, she was

not involved in the SUFFRAGE movement. She emphasized economic and social change over political change, and believed that the vote would follow strides made by women in the workplace and economic sphere. Croly died on December 23, 1901.

D

 DALL, CAROLINE HEALEY

(1822–1912) Transcendentalist writer and women’s rights advocate. Caroline Healey was born on June 22, 1822, in Washington, D.C. Taught by her father from an early age, she became the principal of a girls school in Georgetown and a strong proponent of education for all, without regard to race or gender. In 1844, Healey married Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Unitarian minister. In 1855, he left for India as the first American Unitarian emissary. He remained there until his death in 1886. Dall, now a single mother, had to earn her own living. She became active in the women’s rights movement. Dall promoted her beliefs about education through her writing. She contributed to PAULINA WRIGHT DAVIS’s woman suffrage journal, Una, as well as to the antislavery journal, The Liberty Bell. Much of her work was devoted to the economic, legal, and educational rights of women, rather than to SUFFRAGE rights. Dall’s other interests included Transcendentalism and social science. Deeply impressed by MARGARET FULLER and egalitarian aspects of transcendentalist thought, Dall wrote a series entitled “Conversations” based on Fuller’s transcendentalist group meetings. She was also a founding member of the American Social Science Association, serving both as vice president and executive committee member. She died on December 17, 1912.

DAUGHTERS OF  ST. CRISPIN Female shoe-industry workers in Lynn, Massachusetts, formed the Daughters of St. Crispin

(DOSC) in 1868 as an auxiliary group to the Knights of Saint Crispin (KOSC), a large, national union. Carrie Wilson, a 25-year-old shoe stitcher, became their first “directress”. The DOSC was composed mostly of young, female factory workers, both married and single, who originally saw their role as providing assistance to female newcomers to the industrial world and sponsoring leisure time activities. DOSC leaders did debate the group’s role in women’s and workers’ rights, but failed to create a sustained labor reform presence. Nineteenth-century female industrial workers faced a number of obstacles, not the least of which was resistance from male workers. In response to the 1873 depression, shoe factories cut wages, and KOSC and DOSC members went on strike in response. When the strikes were defeated, the DOSC became a union in name only and by 1874 the organization, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist. In 1878, in response to a new round of strikes and lockouts, women attempted to recreate the organization, but faced considerable resistance. Any worker who identified herself as a DOSC member or protested wage cuts faced the loss of her job. This effectively proved the end of the organization.

DAVIS, PAULINA KELLOGG  WRIGHT

(1813–1876) Suffragist and editor of Una, a woman SUFFRAGE newspaper. Paulina Kellogg was born on August 7, 1813, in Bloomfield, New York. She married merchant Francis Wright in 1833, who worked with her in promoting women’s rights, ABOLITION, and TEMPERANCE issues. He died two years later. In 1849, she married Rhode Island politician Thomas Davis.

D E N O M I N AT I O N A L I S M

Paulina Davis was extremely active in the reform movement. A temperance advocate, suffragist, and abolitionist, she wrote and lectured extensively. In 1844, she gave a series of lectures on anatomy and physiology, subjects that she taught herself. These lectures helped open the field of MEDICINE to women and to promote awareness of their own health. Davis was also active as a suffragist. In 1850, she organized and presided over the National Women’s Rights Convention in Worchester, Massachusetts. She also helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association and presided over the Rhode Island Suffrage Association. When the suffrage movement split in 1869, Davis followed SUSAN B. ANTHONY into the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (NWSA). Her husband, Thomas, was elected to the Rhode Island legislature in 1853. Shortly thereafter, Paulina founded Una, the first women’s rights paper in the United States. She published it at her own expense and offered it as an antidote to the women’s magazines of that time, most of which were devoted to fashion and women’s traditional household duties. Una focused on political matters, including women’s rights, and published articles on issues such as the socioeconomic status of women. Davis continued to write and promote the causes of women until she died on August 24, 1876, in Providence, Rhode Island.

 DAVIS, REBECCA HARDING

(1831–1910) Writer. Rebecca Harding was born on June 24, 1831, in Washington, Pennsylvania, and educated at the Washington Female Seminary during the 1840s. In 1848, Harding began writing editorials, reviews, and poetry for the Intelligencer, in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she had lived for several years with her family. Her long story “Life in the Iron Mills” was published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. Like much of her work, it was written in a style known as American realism. This type of fiction was designed to expose many of the social problems in the United States. Harding was trying to publicize the harsh life of immigrant factory workers so legislation would be passed to improve their working conditions. A year later, she published her first novel, Margaret Howth, another story about mill workers. In 1863, while visiting Philadelphia, Harding married Clarke Davis, a lawyer. They had three

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children, including Richard Harding Davis, who also became a novelist. Over the next two decades, Davis continued publishing novels that dealt with topics such as racism, political corruption, and women’s issues. She believed strongly that women needed not only satisfying home lives but also fulfillment in their careers. In 1904, she published her autobiography, Bits of Gossip. Davis died on September 29, 1910, after suffering a stroke. Her work disappeared after her death but was rediscovered during the 1970s and her novel was praised as a pioneer in American realism.

 DAWES ACT

An 1887 federal act (named after its sponsor, Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts) that allotted land to Native Americans. The purpose of the Dawes Act, also called the Dawes Severalty Act and the General Allotment Act, was to provide small farms to Native Americans. Under the terms of the act, each Native American head of household was given 160 acres of land; each minor child was given 80 acres. The land was to be held in trust by the U.S. government for 25 years. After 25 years, the Native Americans were to be given title to the land, and any unclaimed land would be sold to white settlers. Proponents of the Dawes Act believed that imposing on Native Americans the U.S. legal system’s concept of land ownership and use, and transforming Native American women into “proper” farm wives, was the only way to assimilate them into white culture. See also: Native-American Family Life.

 DENOMINATIONALISM

The division of Protestant churches into sects. The major Protestant denominations grew more distinct and divided in the nineteenth century. Churches played an important role in shaping and determining social legislation and policies, which often pitted denominations against each other outside of the religious arena. While religion already played a sizable role in U.S. life, it expanded in the nineteenth century. The beginning of the nineteenth century coincided with the Second Great Awakening, a period of growth in religious sentiment that revitalized traditional churches. The Second Great Awakening grew out of the evangelical reaction to increasing liberal sentiment in U.S. religion. The Protestant churches especially strove to increase their

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increasingly evangelical denominations, they were attracted to the emotional outpourings of faith. Antoinette Brown Blackwell is widely held to be the very first Many women were also drawn to the woman ordained minister. As a student of theology at OBERLIN growing trend within many denomiCOLLEGE from 1846–1850, she met LUCY STONE, the suffragist nations to emphasize good work, and they brought with them a reand abolitionist. Stone convinced her to give a speech on the newed vigor and involvement to Biblical argument that women should not speak in public at their churches. the National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1850, which was Another reason for denominationhighly regarded. alism was the social and political enviShortly thereafter, Blackwell was invited by the Congregaronment. The Presbyterian, BAPTIST, tional Church to head a parish in South Butler, New York. She and METHODIST churches all split accepted, and was ordained as a Congregational minister on over politics and the issue of slavery September 15, 1853. However, her personal religious beliefs during the Civil War. Other denomicame into conflict with the Congregational denomination’s strict nations also found the integrity of Calvinist views and she resigned from the ministry a year later. their churches threatened. Aside Blackwell entered a period of reflection and spiritual crifrom intra-denominational strife, sis. She worked with the poor in prisons and hospitals in New however, there was also a competition York City and tried to reconcile her beliefs with those of the and disagreement among the denomchurch. When she returned to religious work, she turned to inations. Protestantism, as the most Unitarianism, which more closely emphasized the good works, prevalent religion, was able to affect social justice, and morality she sympathized with. social policy through its churches. In Blackwell’s struggle to reconcile her religious beliefs with doing so, however, they found themthose of her religious institution was representative of the selves clamoring with other denomioverarching religious crisis facing nineteenth-century woman nations for dominance. For instance, reformers. Seeking to combine the spirituality on which many in the FREEDMEN’S AID SOCIETIES, were raised with the egalitarian social reforms they promoted, churches vied not only for the oppormany women felt poorly represented by the denominational tunity to provide relief and education churches and their more conservative dogmas. As a religious for African Americans, but also for role model for women hoping to serve as representatives of converts. Often, denominations atthe clergy, Blackwell’s dedication to finding the true nature of tached themselves to a particular issue, such as how certain denominaher religion set a model for rethinking women’s religious affiltions were assigned guardianship iations and beliefs. over particular Native American RESERVATIONS. With the spike in membership of membership and the role of churches in U.S. life women in churches, the idea now termed “the and began to emphasize their divergent views in cult of domesticity” was reinforced. Women were order to articulate their individual characters to generally seen as keepers of the home and one of converts. An evangelical spirit prevailed in the re- their feminine duties was to provide for and tend ligious movement. to the moral and spiritual constitution of their The Second Great Awakening affected women families. Women tended to actively participate in disproportionately. Women particularly joined the social offices of their churches, performing churches in greater numbers, at nearly one and a missionary work at home and abroad, teaching half times the rate at which men joined. The in- Sunday school, and fulfilling other volunteer dudustrialization of the household economy drew ties. Women felt closely tied to their church commany younger women away from their homes to munities as a result of the frequency and depth work in industry, such as in a textile mill. Sepa- of their participation. However, the views of rated from their families, and faced with the women church members were often not reflected growing ambiguity of the role of MARRIAGE, these in these stances, particularly in conservative dewomen found an increased need to join a com- nominations, and some women began to leave munity. When they attended the revivals of the these denominations.

TRAILBLAZERS

DICKINSON, ANNA ELIZABETH

One problem was women’s restricted roles within their churches. For example, some women traveled abroad and others ran local missions that provided for charity and relief, such as Donaldina Cameron did at the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME in San Francisco. While missionary work was extremely important and women were highly mobilized and empowered by their churches to serve in such capacities, there were women who wanted to preach on a pulpit and serve as church leaders alongside men, and most Protestant denominations were not open to this possibility. Antoinette Brown Blackwell was one of the few women to be ordained and headed a Congregationalist parish in 1847. Yet she left the church shortly thereafter and eventually became a Unitarian, drawn to its more liberal doctrine. Another issue in particular led many prominent women leaders to defect from the denominations of their childhood: the Calvinist idea of infant damnation that influenced Baptists and Methodists particularly. In an age when infant deaths were common, many women were troubled by the harshness and severity of the idea. Many preferred church doctrines that emphasized God’s love and mercy, rather than fire and brimstone tenets. Although many women were not troubled by these more modern ideas and held closely the traditional views of their churches, early feminists tended to support churches which valued rationality over spirituality and advocated egalitarianism and free will. These women turned to more liberal and even marginal denominations, where they found ideological and spiritual openness and opportunities to preach and practice freely. The liberal and egalitarian tenets of TRANSCEDENTALISM, for instance, resonated with women who were suffragists. Transcendentalists include MARGARET FULLER and CAROLINE DALL, who was a proponent of anti-nominalism and believed that all should be equal before God. Many women also converted to the Universalist and Unitarian churches or practiced a branch of Unitarianism under the Free Religious Association.

FURTHER READING

VanderMeer, Philip R., and Robert P. Swierenga. Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

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 DIARIES AND JOURNALS

Nineteenth-century women and men were great diary and journal keepers. Often these personal chronicles were kept with a specific eye to future readers, though just as often people kept them strictly for personal reasons. In either case, the diaries and journals of Victorian Americans have been preserved by families, libraries, museums, and other archives, and have served as a rich historical source. Diaries and journals, then, have been used as source material to put women back into history and tell a larger story. The midwife Martha Ballard kept a diary from 1785 until her death in 1812, and its catalog of daily activities has proven an exceptionally illuminating document. The Ballard diary, though, had long been dismissed as trivial and repetitious, but it was this detail which allowed one historian to closely describe and analyze life in the early republic. MARY BOYKIN CHESNUT is perhaps most famous nineteenth-century diarist, and her story illuminates the problems of life in the South during the Civil War. Sarah Morgan’s diary also helps us to understand the intimate lives of Southern white women during the Civil War. Diaries kept by women in the trans-Mississippi West serve much the same purpose for frontier women. While these journals and diaries play a significant historical role, they also served an important function in diarist’s lives. Early nineteenthcentury women, such as Ballard, used journals as record-keeping devices, recording transactions and work. As the century, progressed diaries became more personal and emotional, wherein women wrote the stories of their lives. Chesnut revealed, among other things, her great pleasure at having three admirers at a dinner party, her pride in her social skills, and her dislike of slavery. Thus, diaries powerfully evoke the richness of the larger historical narrative and vastly expand our understanding of history.

DICKINSON, ANNA  ELIZABETH

(1842–1932) Abolitionist, women’s rights activist. Anna Dickinson was born in Philadelphia to a Quaker family. Her father, John Dickinson, died suddenly in 1844 after delivering a speech against SLAVERY. As a child, Anna was a voracious reader, an accomplished writer, and interested in public speaking.

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DICKINSON, EMILY

In 1856, one of Dickinson’s articles was published in the abolitionist periodical, the Liberator. In 1860, she addressed the Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society and gave a speech on “Woman’s Rights and Wrongs” to the Association of Progressive Friends (QUAKERS). She spoke on the inequality of women as well as ABOLITION. Her success as a speaker led Dickinson to begin lecturing in many parts of the United States. In 1863, she was asked by the Republican Party to campaign for its local candidates. After the CIVIL WAR ended, Dickinson continued lecturing on women’s issues and the need to protect the rights of African Americans. She also published several books, including A Paying Investment (1876), which urged the improvement of the treatment of prisoners and the need to help the poor. Gradually, her popularity as a speaker declined and she moved from social activism to the stage, she had little success as an actress. Eventually, Dickinson suffered a mental collapse and was briefly forced into a state hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania, in 1891. Afterward, she successfully sued those who had put her in the hospital. She died on October 22, 1932.



DICKINSON, EMILY

(1830–1886) Poet. Though only a handful of her 1,775 poems were published during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the major poets of the nineteenth century. She was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of Edward and Emily Dickinson. Her father, an attorney, was a well-known local figure who served as a U.S. congressman in 1854 and 1855. As a child Emily attended Amherst Academy, founded by her grandfather, Samuel D. Fowler. After a year (1847–48) at the MOUNT HOLYOKE Female Seminary, she returned home to live a quiet, uneventful life in Amherst. She never married. Dickinson began to write poems about 1850. Her early work was fairly conventional, but after 1860 or so she began to experiment with the language and rhythm of her verse, which she collected in tiny hand-sewn booklets. She is particularly known as an innovator, freely altering the rhythm of her lines, playing with the rules of conventional sentence structure, and using common words in unconventional and surprising ways. Readers of her poems are often struck by how she made every word count.

Emily Dickinson is considered one of America’s major nineteenth-century poets.

A significant part of Dickinson’s life was her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic. They began writing to one another in 1862. Higginson recognized the genius of her work and remained her “preceptor,” or adviser, throughout her life. Though friends urged her to publish her poems, she resisted, and only seven were published during her lifetime, five in the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican newspaper. Chronic eye trouble caused Dickinson to leave Amherst in 1864 and 1865 to seek medical treatment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When she returned to Amherst, she became increasingly reclusive. By the late 1860s, she was dressing entirely in white and never venturing beyond the boundaries of her family’s property. She saw few callers. Her devoted sister Lavinia jealously guarded her privacy until Emily’s death in Amherst on May 15, 1886. After Dickinson’s death, Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems and was determined to publish them. In 1890, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited and published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, and in the years that followed, as additional poems were discovered and edited, new volumes were brought out. It was not until 1955

DIX, DOROTHEA LYNDE

that Thomas Johnson edited and published the last of Dickinson’s surviving poems, firmly establishing her as a major American author. FURTHER READING

Sewall, Richard Benson. The Life of Emily Dickinson Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

 DISEASES

In the nineteenth century, infectious diseases killed many people. It was possible to be vaccinated for smallpox, but few other vaccinations existed, and early-nineteenth-century physicians did not know how to treat many common diseases. Young and old alike contracted malaria, yellow fever, and tuberculosis; children were particularly susceptible to measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. Most infectious diseases afflicted both men and women, but women faced several gender-specific health threats. Some women contracted puerperal fever, a potentially deadly infection, during childbirth. In the 1880s, better hygiene began to lower the incidence of puerperal fever. Venereal disease was also a common problem in the nineteenth century, not only among prostitutes and their patrons but also among married women who contracted the disease from their husbands and passed it on to their children. Most diseases were spread by infected food, water, and air. The professionalization of NURSING improved the care available to hospital patients. Women’s entry into MEDICINE also helped reduce the incidence of disease, because many early women physicians promoted preventive medicine, the idea that a moderate diet, combined with fresh air, exercise, and good sanitary habits, prevented the spread of infectious diseases. See also: Childbirth and Pregnancy; Health.

DIVISION OF LABOR,  SEXUAL

divorce. Traditional Christian beliefs prohibited divorce under any circumstances. Christian values also supported the common attitudes that women were inferior to men, that wives should be subservient to their husbands, and that every woman’s primary duty was to be a good wife and mother. A divorced woman neglected her primary obligations to the family. Furthermore, because wives were considered the property of their husbands, men could mistreat their wives without social or legal repercussions. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a woman could be granted a divorce only if her husband deserted her, committed adultery, or failed to provide for her and the children. However, in some states a wife could divorce her husband for physical cruelty or for “committing an infamous crime,” such as sodomy, rape, or adultery. She could also divorce him if he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although divorces became progressively easier for women to obtain in the early part of the century, by the mid-1800s they were banned in many states because of the belief that they were becoming too common, that the practice was “anti-Christian,” and that divorce promoted sexual promiscuity. Even in states that allowed divorces, many women avoided them, fearing they would be stigmatized. In addition to shame, a divorced woman suffered serious economic repercussions. Alimony, if it was awarded at all, was usually approved only if the woman was innocent of committing a “marital crime,” such as adultery or failure to perform her wifely or motherly duties. Thus, men were likely to make false allegations against their wives in order to avoid paying alimony. Also, a married woman had no legal right to her husband’s property. Because she gave up the legal right to her own property when she was married, that property was usually lost to the husband. Furthermore, women guilty of marital crimes were not always granted permission to remarry, preventing them from getting financial support from a new husband.

See DOMESTIC ARTS; HOUSEWORK; INDUSTRIAL

See also: Marriage Laws.

REVOLUTION; WAGE EARNERS; WORKING CLASS; “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7; and entries on individual industries and organizations.

 DIX, DOROTHEA LYNDE

 DIVORCE

The legal dissolution of a marriage. Prior to the CIVIL WAR, it was difficult for married couples to

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(1802–1887) Activist for the mentally ill. Dorothea Dix was born April 4, 1802, in Hampden, Maine, to Joseph Dix and Mary Bigelow. Sent to live with her grandparents in Boston, the introverted child watched her grandfather practice medicine.

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In 1816, at the age of 14, Dix began teaching in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1821, she opened her own school for girls in Boston. Later she opened the Hopewell Mansion School, a program for poor girls who would not otherwise be able to attend school. Although she was a gifted teacher, Dix retired in 1836 because of an attack of tuberculosis. While recuperating in England, Dix studied the work of French physician Philippe Pinnel, who spearheaded prison reform in Europe. Inspired by Pinnel, Dix returned to the United States and began her own crusade to improve prison conditions, particularly for the mentally ill who were kept in prisons and poorhouses. Dix traveled extensively and visited hundreds of prisons, where she found the mentally ill chained to walls, caged, or otherwise restrained. Conditions were filthy, and cells were often unheated and poorly ventilated. Because guards were not educated in humane ways of dealing with the “insane,” they often beat the mentally ill or doused the prisoners in ice water. Sedatives were also widely used. With the knowledge she gained in Europe, Dix advocated more humane methods of dealing with the mentally ill. She lobbied for the creation of insane asylums in several states. She also sought federal support for the care of the mentally ill by proposing that property tax funds be used to pay for mental health facilities. Although her bill passed in both houses of Congress on April 19, 1854, it was vetoed the following May by President Franklin Pierce who argued that such legislation would make the federal government responsible for the poor and insane. With the outbreak of the CIVIL WAR, Dix temporarily set aside her efforts for the mentally ill so that she could take part in the war effort. President Abraham Lincoln appointed her superintendent of U.S. Army Nurses in 1861. Her work included organizing military hospitals, supervising nurses, disbursing supplies, and tending to soldiers. After the war, Dix returned to her humanitarian activities and helped to open more than 120 mental health facilities in the United States alone (she worked extensively in Europe as well). On July 17, 1887, Dix died in Trenton, New Jersey— the city where she founded the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, the first of the asylums she helped establish. See also: Insanity.

FURTHER READING

Brown, Thomas J. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gollaher, David. Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. New York: Free Press, 1995.

 DOMESTIC ARTS

The elevation of women’s role as housewives and mothers began in the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century HOUSEWORK was taken for granted, and power within the home was hierarchical and male dominated. As nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization increasingly divided life into separate realms of private and public, women became linked to the private and domestic sphere. Within this sphere women, particularly white, middle-class women, became the locus of moral authority in American society. They did this through intensely emotional mothering and strict attention to the domestic arts, which, or so the theory went, provided a safe harbor for men from the rigors of public life, inculcating morality in children and men, and promoted the general good of American society. Women such as CATHARINE BEECHER helped to change social attitudes toward domestic work. Beecher’s emphasis on domestic work as central to the country’s political economy elevated the moral value given to women’s unwaged domestic work. Simultaneously, industrializing society increasingly defined work as waged work. While domestic work continued to be central to household economies, its unwaged status meant it became less recognizable as work. Thus the concept of do-

Between 1830 and 1880, many Americans purchased castiron stoves fired by wood or coal, greatly improving domestic life.

DOUGLASS, SARAH MAPPS

mestic arts helped to elevate the importance of housework in a culture that had redefined productive labor to exclude housework. The concept of domestic arts, or sciences, grew from the elevation of domesticity. Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) explained every aspect of domestic life, combining home building, child care, cleaning, laundry and cookery into one coherent volume. Before Beecher’s work, an American woman interested in any of these either relied on oral instructions from other women or had to seek out separate books on each topic. As the nineteenth century progressed, housework became increasingly “scientific.” In her Treatise, for example, Beecher listed over 20 steps, filling 11 pages, for ironing clothes. Women became responsible for the perfect hygiene of the family, complicated cooking techniques, and higher and higher standards of cleanliness. Household appliances, from washing machines to vacuum cleaners, while ostensibly labor-saving, actually increased women’s labor by further raising domestic standards. By the turn of the century, colleges began offering courses and degrees in HOME ECONOMICS (see Volume 3). It was in the practice of the domestic arts that Victorian women became the moral center of the home, creating an ethos of female authority that justified their entry into the public sphere though moral reform movements. Thus, while seemingly a constrictive ideology, the elevation of domestic arts actually laid some of the groundwork for the nineteenth-century women’s movement. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres” (p. 7). FURTHER READING

Matthews, Glenna. Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

 DOMESTIC SERVANTS

Adults who did housework for pay in upperclass and middle-class homes. In the nineteenthcentury United States, most domestic servants were immigrant and AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. They cooked, cleaned, sewed, and minded children; few other jobs were open to women without secondary education. Domestic servants were poorly paid, and, because they usually

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lived with their employers, they enjoyed little privacy or personal freedom. But before the CIVIL WAR, domestic service was one of the very few occupations open to women. In the antebellum South, most domestic servants were slave women and children; in Northern cities, many were Irish immigrants. White servants were often called “help” or “hired girls,” because the term servant was considered too servile for the democratic United States. After the Civil War, many newly emancipated African-American women continued to work as domestic servants. Young immigrant women from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia also flooded the field; indeed, many employers saw domestic service as an opportunity to train immigrant women in middle-class American customs and values. In the late nineteenth century, some employers tried to professionalize domestic service (and distinguish employees from family members) by requiring servants to wear uniforms and segregating their working and living spaces from the rest of the household. Many immigrant women found domestic service degrading, however, and sought industrial jobs instead. See also: Housework.

 DOUGLASS, SARAH MAPPS

(1806–1882) Abolitionist, writer, educator. Sarah Douglass was born in Philadelphia to Robert Douglass and Grace Bustill Douglass, free African Americans and ardent abolitionists. Her mother was a founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In the 1820s, Douglass began a school for African-American children, which was supported by the Society. In 1831, she became the secretary of the new Female Literary Association for free AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. Douglass spoke against slavery and racism. From 1837 to 1839, she attended the Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women and wrote articles for the Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison. As she wrote, she not only “detested” the slaveholder, she could also “pity and pray for him.” Douglass married Episcopal clergyman William Douglass in 1855. Through much of her marriage she worked as an instructor at the Institute of Colored Youth in Philadelphia—a position she held until retiring in 1877. The institute

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DRESS REFORM

trained young people to teach at African-American public schools. Douglass was one of the early leaders devoted to improving education for African Americans. She died in 1882.

 DRESS REFORM

Nineteenth-century movement for change in women’s clothing. A fashionable woman in the 1800s wore ankle-length skirts that required up to nine pounds worth of petticoat support with skirt hems that soaked up mud and dirt from the street. She also used corsets that caused broken ribs, abdominal problems, and other injuries. Women’s fashion was uncomfortable and physically limiting. In response, in 1851 women’s rights activists ELIZABETH CADY STANTON and AMELIA JENKS BLOOMER advocated “Rational Dress.” Bloomer argued that traditional women’s garments symbolized subordination to men and that women could begin to free themselves from servitude by changing their clothing. Rational Dress tightened the gender gap and allowed greater freedom of movement. “Bloomers,” as the outfit came to be called after Amelia Bloomer promoted it in her

magazine, The Lily, consisted of a pair of Turkish trousers worn with a calf-length tunic. The tunic fell halfway between the knee and the ankle, and the trousers were cut full and gathered just above the footwear. Bloomers never gained popular approval for a couple of reasons. First, prudish Victorian ideals dictated that a woman’s body should be covered—in skirts—from head to toe, because the sight of a woman’s skin could stimulate men. Because the tunic of the Bloomer outfit fell short of the appropriate length, it was considered unladylike. Second, opponents of Rational Dress objected to women wearing trousers. Trousers were a symbol of male domination over women. The idea that women could wear men’s clothing challenged traditional gender roles and threatened the social structure. By 1860, bloomers were basically forgotten in the United States. Men despised the idea of women wearing trousers, and “proper” Victorian women thought bloomers were morally unacceptable. Later in the nineteenth century, as it became more common for women to participate in sporting events, skirts were shortened and tight corsets went out of style.

E

 EDDY, MARY BAKER

(1821–1910) Founder of the religion Christian Science. Born and raised in Bow, New Hampshire, Mary Baker was plagued with illness and disease throughout her childhood and early adult life. Because frequent sickness made it impossible for her to attend school, she was educated at home by her brother. As a young girl, she showed remarkable interest in the Bible. In the 1860s, Eddy became frustrated with her illnesses, especially because they pained her back and made it nearly impossible for her to walk. She sought out Phineas Quimby, a famous healer who believed that the human mind had the power to cure physical ailments. Quimby’s treatment appeared to work, and Eddy’s health improved dramatically. She did not, however, follow Quimby’s healing methods. Unlike Quimby’s emphasis on the power of the human mind, Eddy stressed the

power of God and of religious faith to cure sickness. From this belief came Christian Science. Eddy taught that the physical world did not truly exist; rather, it was a creation of sinful human minds. The only realm which really existed, she maintained, was the spiritual one. Eddy’s Christian Science thus taught that physical diseases, ailments, and pains were illusions created by sin and lack of faith. If, however, humanity truly believed in God’s power, it would be healed. In the 1880s and 1890s, Eddy’s Christian Science became enormously popular in the United States, especially with middle-class white women in New England who had often been illtreated by Gilded Age doctors. To propagate this new faith, Eddy lectured, built churches, edited several Christian Science journals, and wrote pamphlets and books. At various times between 1870 and 1910, she edited the Christian Science Journal and the Christian Sci-

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ence Sentinel. In 1908, at the age of 89, she founded the Christian Science Monitor, a highly regarded newspaper that today boasts an international readership. In 1879, Eddy started the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Lynn, Massachusetts, and shortly thereafter began a new congregation in Boston. In both churches, she preached the tenets of Christian Science. She published her most important book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, in 1875 and followed this with several others, including Christian Healing (1886), the Unity of Good (1887), and her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891). By the time of her death, Christian Science had an extensive following not only in the United States but throughout the world.

 EDMONDS, S. EMMA

(1841–1898) A woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the CIVIL WAR. The daughter of devout Anglican farmers, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, Canada. As a teenager, she fled home when her father ordered her to marry. Dressed as a man and taking the name Franklin Thompson, she got a job selling Bibles in eastern Canada. Edmonds was living in Flint, Michigan, when the war began. Seeking adventure, she enlisted as a private in Company F of the Second Michigan Infantry on May 25, 1861. Disguised as a man, she participated in the first Battle of Bull Run and other notable engaements in Virginia. In addition to being a soldier, Edmonds also acted as a nurse and mail carrier for the Union army. Wearing a wig and applying silver nitrate to darken her skin, she disguised herself as a slave to spy behind Confederate lines at Yorktown. Contracting malaria in 1863, Edmonds deserted the army rather than risk exposure in a medical examination. The young woman managed to conceal her gender throughout her years of service. After the war, Edmonds resumed her life as a woman and worked as a military nurse for the U.S. Christian Commission. In 1865 she published Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, still not revealing the secret of her gender. Two years later, she married Linus H. Seelye, a carpenter from New Brunswick, Canada. They had three children, two of whom died in childhood, and adopted two more.

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Her secret finally was revealed in 1882, when Edmonds applied for veteran’s pension. Enlisting the support of fellow soldiers, she contacted other members of Company F, who submitted affidavits testifying to her service and character. In 1886, Congress awarded Edmonds an honorable discharge and the pension. She died on September 5, 1898, at La Porte, Texas. See also: Spies, Civil War.

 EDUCATION

Between 1820 and 1900, educational opportunities for American women improved at every level: elementary, secondary, and higher education. Not all women benefited equally, however. White, middle-class women in New England and other northern states had the best chance of receiving secondary and even higher education. Few AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN received any academic education at all. In the early nineteenth century, the spread of common schools in New England and the Midwest made elementary education widely available for the first time. Common schools were often little more than one-room schoolhouses that offered basic instruction in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic to boys and girls of all ages. Some girls attended private elementary schools or studied at home with their parents. In the rural South, schools were few, and most girls learned only what their parents could teach them. Slave women were seldom literate. Indeed, some states prohibited whites from teaching slaves to read or write. Until the late eighteenth century, the only secondary schools open to girls were finishing schools, where affluent teenagers might practice elegant handwriting, music, dancing, and embroidery as they prepared to enter the marriage market. After the American Revolution, however, Americans’ attitude toward women’s education changed; many Americans came to believe that women needed a good education so that they could teach their sons and daughters to be virtuous citizens. In the early nineteenth century, many secondary schools and academies for girls opened throughout the United States. These academies often combined polite accomplishments, such as music and embroidery, with academic courses in foreign languages, history, and botany. Some academies even taught Latin, algebra, and geometry, subjects traditionally reserved

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TRAILBLAZERS Helen Magill White (1853–1944) was the first American woman to earn a doctorate. The daughter of QUAKERS who believed deeply in women’s rights to higher education, she studied at the Boston Latin School, a public school at which she was the only female student. In 1869, she entered Swarthmore College, where her father was president. After earning her B.A., Magill did graduate work in classics at Swarthmore and Boston University. In 1877, she received a Ph.D. in Greek from Boston University. She studied at Cambridge University in England from 1877 until 1881, but she fell ill toward the end of her course and did poorly on her final exams. After returning to the United States, Magill taught at several colleges and seminaries, including the English Classical Academy in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the Howard Collegiate Institute in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and Evelyn College, the women’s branch of Princeton University. As a teacher and administrator, Magill strove to open colleges and universities to women; she strongly supported coeducation. But Magill’s career floundered, in part because of her continuing ill health and in part because of administrators’ disapproval of her assertive leadership style. In 1890, she married Andrew Dickson White, a prominent educator and diplomat, and retired from academia. Her career illustrates the paradoxical position of women scholars in the nineteenth-century United States: Even those who achieved high intellectual honors often found that conventional academic career paths were closed to them.

tion became more common. The Morrill Act (1862) paved the way for coeducational public universities. By 1870, 30 percent of American colleges were coeducational. Many cities, especially in the Midwest and West, also established coeducational public high schools. Even when men and women studied at the same schools and universities, however, they did not necessarily study the same subjects. Many schools and universities had separate tracks for men and women; women studied humanities, modern languages, biology, and domestic science, whereas men devoted more time to classical languages, mathematics, and the physical sciences. Most elite private universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, did not admit women undergraduates, although some founded affiliated colleges for women and several began admitting women graduate students in the late nineteenth century. See also: Catharine Esther Beecher; Teaching. FURTHER READING

for men. Their primary purpose, however, was to prepare girls for marriage and motherhood. By the 1830s and 1840s, some girls’ academies had begun to evolve into full-fledged COLLEGES. TROY FEMALE SEMINARY, founded by EMMA WILLARD in 1821, was one of the first academies that aspired to offer women college-level educations in subjects such as classical languages, history, math, and science. MOUNT HOLYOKE female seminary, founded by MARY LYON in 1837, also offered women rigorous, college-level educations. Although these seminaries offered advanced courses, they did not grant college degrees. Some, like Mount Holyoke, later became fully qualified, degree-granting institutions; others evolved into normal schools (teacher-training colleges). Coeducational high schools and colleges were rare before the CIVIL WAR, but there were a few: OBERLIN COLLEGE admitted both men and women from 1837. After the Civil War, coeduca-

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Solomon, Barbara M. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

 ELAW, ZILPHA

(1790–?) Zilpha Elaw was an African American who was born in freedom in Philadelphia. After Jesus Christ appeared to her in several visions, she joined the church of the METHODISTS. In 1817, at a Methodist revival meeting, she fell into a trance and offered prayers aloud. Encouraged by those who had witnessed the powers of her preaching, she gave her first public sermon before the Methodist Society of Burlington, New Jersey. Elaw believed she was ordained to preach by God and did so against popular

E M A N C I PAT I O N P R O C L A M AT I O N

convention and the protests of her husband, Joseph. After her husband’s death in 1823, she took on domestic work and opened a school for African-American children. However, unable to relinquish her duty to God, she gave up the school and her only child to relatives and started an itinerant preaching career, speaking to African Americans and whites alike. Elaw performed her missionary work without the sponsorship of a particular church, and even traveled to slaveholding states in 1828, despite obvious dangers. In 1840, her independent spirit, bold and eloquent speech, and dedication to her vocation took her to sermonize in London. Whether she returned to the United States and other details about her life, including her family life and the date of her death, remain unknown.

ELLET, ELIZABETH FRIES  LUMMIS

(1812?–1894) Historian and author. Elizabeth Fries Lummis is believed to have been born in October 1812 (or 1813, according to some sources) in Sodus Point, New York. The daughter of a doctor, she attended the Female Seminary at Aurora, New York, where she became interested in history and foreign languages. She was married in 1835 to William Henry Ellet, a chemistry professor. Her first published work was a translation from the Italian of Silvio Pellico’s Euphemio of Messina in 1834. The first two volumes of her most notable publication, Women of the American Revolution, appeared in 1848. Ellet’s history was based on research into primary sources and personal interviews. Including the third volume, published in 1850, Women of the American Revolution contained approximately 160 essays about women who had participated in the war in various ways. Unlike other Revolutionary War histories of her time, which focused on the exploits of men, Ellet’s work told of women who had acted as observers, nurses, spies, and combatants. Ellet’s three-volume history was considered the most important source for the study of women in the Revolution until the appearance of more scholarly, analytical works in the twentieth century. Women of the American Revolution itself was an essential source for those later studies. Motivated by the success of her military history, Ellet produced Domestic History of the American Rev-

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olution in 1850. In both works, Ellet recognized the contribution of women without abandoning her belief in the nineteenth-century ideology of “separate spheres.” In 1852, Ellet published Pioneer Women of the West, a biographical study of women who had endured the hardships of the frontier. Later works included studies of women artists, women of high society, and “leading Ladies” under eighteen presidents. She died on June 3, 1877, in New York City. See also: Writers.

EMANCIPATION  PROCLAMATION Edict issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declaring that all slaves living within Confederate territories not currently occupied by Union forces free. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation followed a preliminary statement made on September 22, 1862, promising that if the Confederate states did not return to the Union, he would free their slaves. When the Confederacy ignored the statement, he issued the Proclamation. The proclamation actually freed very few slaves. In 1863, Lincoln had no control of or jurisdiction over Confederate territory. Moreover, the proclamation did not emancipate slaves living in Union states that permitted slavery, such as Kentucky, or those residing in Confederate territories controlled by Union forces, such as portions of Louisiana. Although it did not fully abolish slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation was perhaps the most important document of the CIVIL WAR and the nineteenth century. In parts of Florida and in South Carolina’s sea islands, the proclamation did free the slaves. It also made ABOLITION a Northern war aim; it rallied antislavery nations like France and Britain to the Union side; and, most importantly, it enabled African-American men and women to serve in the U.S. armed forces and in hospitals and sanitary organizations. By the end of the war, more than 180,000 African Americans had helped the Union defeat the Confederacy. The proclamation also laid the groundwork for the Thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished SLAVERY in 1865. Two months before the end of the war and his assassination, Lincoln acknowledged the importance of

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the Emancipation Proclamation, claiming that it was “the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century.”

 ENTERTAINMENT

Nineteenth-century urbanization moved people closer together, creating greater demand for access to public entertainment. People enjoyed many types of entertainment, ranging from refined theater to bawdy variety acts. Theater was one of the earliest and most important cultural institutions in the early nineteenth century. In colonial times, theater was considered sinful and frivolous. It was maledominated, with men playing women’s roles, because to allow a woman to act in a play was thought to taint her purity. However, by the late eighteenth century women began entering the theater as actresses. One of the first prominent women in theater was Anna Cora Mowatt, the first female playwright in the United States, who produced her play Fashion in 1845. Fashion was a “comedy of manners” that made fun of the new rich (the people who had worked their way up from the MIDDLE CLASS to the upper class and did not have family roots in wealth and high society). Another woman who had a big impact on theater was HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52). Hundreds of “Tom’s Shows” resulted from her novel, and overall Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the most produced plays in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of the lower forms of entertainment was the minstrel show, a form of outlandish variety entertainment in which white musicians wore black face makeup and impersonated African Americans. Shows involved singing, dance, comedy, acrobatics, and music played on instruments associated with plantation slaves (banjos, tambourines, and animal bones). Minstrel shows were racist and demeaning and reinforced negative stereotypes about African-American culture. Vaudeville performances were derived from minstrel shows; they encompassed a wide variety of unrelated acts in the same vein as those of the minstrels. Vaudeville entertainment also included animal shows and “burlesque,” a type of comedy that parodied the original source, such as a play. Another type of burlesque, also widespread, focused on the woman’s body, usually while undressing; such acts were known commonly as “leg

shows.” In the 1890s, when the motion picture industry was beginning, vaudeville acts were used as material for movies. However, by 1930 motion pictures replaced variety acts as the people’s choice in theater entertainment. Museums were also popular. Early in the nineteenth century, the museum was a place to view “curiosities,” such as human and animal freaks, wax figures, and mechanical oddities. When P. T. Barnum purchased the American Museum in New York, he filled it with a variety of attractions. His “Grand Colossal Museum and Menagerie” contained more than 600,000 curiosities in 1850, and later he used many of them in his “traveling menagerie,” the Barnum and Bailey Circus. In 1850, Barnum hired the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to tour the United States with his show. People would pay hundreds of dollars to hear her sing, and her work with Barnum catapulted her to stardom. The focus of the museum shifted in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when museums became repositories for high art, such as paintings and sculpture. Thus the museum, like the theater, became a more upper-class form of entertainment. In the West, entertainment took on a rustic flavor. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveled across the country promising spectators a “Living Picture of Life on the Frontier.” Buffalo Bill’s “curiosities” were live Indians, Cowboys, and Mexicans (vaqueros) who staged train robberies, Indian races, and bison hunts. The most famous member of his cast was ANNIE OAKLEY, his “Little Sure Shot.” Oakley could fire her gun behind her back using a mirror to aim at her target. She was so popular that King Senegal of Paris offered to buy her from Buffalo Bill for 100,000 francs. Much of the music written by women in the nineteenth century was associated with woman SUFFRAGE and the TEMPERANCE movement. During protest marches, women would sing songs that reflected their causes. Also, many hymns of the nineteenth century were written by women, such as the famous “Jesus Loves Me,” composed by Anna B. Warner in 1860. The first book of anthems and hymns written and published by a woman was Clara H. Scott’s Royal Anthem Book in 1882. FURTHER READING

Braden, Donna R. Leisure and Entertainment in America. Dearborn, MI: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, 1998. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

ENTREPRENEURS

 ENTREPRENEURS

Nineteenth-century women engaged in a wide variety of businesses, creating for themselves a realm of economic and social independence at odds with the myths of Victorian womanhood. At the beginning of the century, married women did not

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TRAILBLAZERS When Lydia Pinkham began marketing her Vegetable Compound in 1875, she transformed a practice in domestic arts into a successful commercial undertaking. Her history epitomizes the patent medicine boom that occurred in the United States in the decades after the Civil War. Pinkham (1819–82) was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the tenth of William and Rebecca Estes’s 12 children. The Estes were abolitionists, friends of William Lloyd Garrison and John Greenleaf Whittier, and neighbors of Frederick Douglass. In 1843 Lydia married Isaac Pinkham, a man who frequently changed careers and moved his family from place to place in search of an elusive success. Lydia kept a small housekeeping book in which she wrote home remedies used to treat her growing family, one of which was an herbal brew said to cure “female maladies.” Lydia’s son Dan, noticing both the proliferation of advertisements for bottled remedies and the local demand for Lydia’s infusion, encouraged her to market the brew. The result was an extremely successful family enterprise that sold Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound in bottles with Lydia’s picture on the label. The 1870s and 1880s were decades marked by a deep dissatisfaction with doctors and an almost obsessive concern with female diseases. Patent medicines addressed these issues, promising good health without professional intervention. The Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company capitalized on these trends, using aggressive advertising to sell their product. In 1884 the company spent almost $100,000 on advertising in English, German, Spanish, and Yiddish-language newspapers and quantities of circulars and pamphlets, all of which touted the benefits of the Vegetable Compound. Pinkham also sold an herbal douche. Nineteenth-century women considered douching a method of birth control, and though Pinkham’s product did not explicitly claim to prevent pregnancy, women understood the implicit uses of Pinkham’s Sanative Wash. Lydia Pinkham died of a stroke in 1882. Family members continued to run the business until 1968, when it was sold to a large pharmaceutical company that moved the business to Puerto Rico. Pinkham, who grew up in the reform tradition, combined a shrewd business sense with a home remedy that she understood as more effective and less toxic than the medicines prescribed by regular doctors. Her foray into the business of women’s medicine supported her family for generations.

have the right to own property, sign contracts, or make wills. The common law principle of coverture had long transferred a woman’s civic and legal identity to her husband at marriage, effectively removing a married woman’s control over any property or business she might own before marriage or acquire after marriage. By the 1830s, the first married women’s property rights acts began to guarantee women rights to any property or goods they might own. These laws immeasurably encouraged women’s business activities. A number of women owned and operated businesses in the nineteenth century. Lydia Pinkham and Madame Restell both made fortunes from the sale of patent medicines aimed at female audiences. In Santa Fe,

Gertrudis Barcelo ran a saloon that left her worth more than $10,000 at her death and made her one of the most influential people in town. In places as widely varied as New York

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and the mining frontier, women owned and operated houses of prostitution, creating for themselves arenas of considerable power. In fact, by 1900 prostitution was the single largest female employment outside the home. Free AFRICANAMERICAN WOMEN in Petersburg, Virginia, ran grocery stores, taverns, and restaurants. Most occupations and businesses were closed to nineteenth-century African-American women, but a number of them did overcome the considerable obstacles to their success. Some white Southern women ran plantations and owned slaves. Significantly, these women were more likely to will their property to other women and to free slaves than to men. A large number of nineteenth-century women made their living as midwives. More than childbirth facilitators, midwives acted as nurses, physicians, morticians, and pharmacists for their communities.

 EQUAL RIGHTS PARTY

American political party that supported a wide range of reforms in American politics, primarily woman SUFFRAGE. The origins of the Equal Rights Party lay with the woman suffrage movement and the National Labor Union, an organization that represented the interests of labor. Groups such as these wanted to form a radical political party that would reform American life and politics. They believed that the liberal wing of the Republican Party, which had promied reforms, was failing to make good on its promise. In 1872, these and other reformist groups met in New York City to nominate VICTORIA WOODHULL for president on a ticket they called the Women’s Negroes’ and Workingmen’s ticket; Frederick Douglass, a prominent African-American who wrote and lectured widely about his experiences as a slave, declined the group’s nomination for vice president. Feminists and other reformers continued their efforts in the 1876 and 1880 presidential elections, but they were unsuccessful because they were unable to distinguish themselves from other reformist parties such as the Greenback-Labor Party. Then, in 1884, the woman suffrage advocates who had been working since 1872 to nominate a woman presidential candidate formed the Equal Rights Party. For president they nominated BELVA ANN LOCKWOOD, the first woman lawyer ever to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lockwood received 4,129 votes in six states. She ran again in 1888, with peace activist Alfred Henry Love as the vice presidential candidate. The ticket, however, received only a few hundred votes. The Equal Rights Party, which was never tightly organized and never gained broad popular support, then died out, though many of its goals, particularly woman suffrage, world peace, improvement of the conditions of working people, and restraint on the monopoly power of big business, were taken up by the more broadly based Populist Party. See also: Populism.

 ETIQUETTE BOOKS

The Victorian rules of appropriate social behavior were outlined in etiquette books that were popular among the urban MIDDLE CLASS. The middle class grew in number and importance throughout the nineteenth century. Proper etiquette distinguished them from the lower classes, which they perceived as unrefined. In order to achieve “self-elevation,” members of the newly emerging middle class had to behave appropriately in matters of courtesy, bodily and emotional control, and education. For information on respectable social behavior, they turned to etiquette books. The first popular etiquette books were imported from Britain in the early eighteenth century, but by the 1830s, there were several American publications as well. Etiquette books covered proper behavior at dances, dinner parties, weddings, and other social occasions. There were separate books written for ladies, gentlemen, young ladies, boys, and children, instructing each on how to look and act refined. One of the more popular etiquette books for women was The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility (1853), by Emily Thornwell. Etiquette books covered a wide range of topics. For example, according to Victorian custom, ladies were expected not to talk too much at social gatherings. They were never to refer to another adult by his or her first name in public, or sit with their legs crossed. A lady was never to dance with the same partner more than twice. When dining, married couples were instructed never to sit together, as they were together at all other times. On the street, a lady was to “walk in her own quiet, lady-like way,” and always be friendly and approachable.

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FACTORIES AND FACTORY  WORKERS Industrial manufacturing facilities and laborers. The factory system of labor is one in which industrial workers join together to complete work faster and cheaper than they could individually. A result of the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, the factory system in the United States helped propel the nation to a position of great economic, political, and technological power in the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1870, the number of factories in the Northern United States increased by 80 percent. In 1789, Samuel Slater built the first spinning machine in the United States in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1790, the first U.S. cottonspinning mill was opened in Pawtucket, and its first workers were nine children under the age of 12. Likewise, many mills that followed employed women and children through the family labor system, in which entire families were hired to work in the same factory. Women and children

As the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial society, women sought work in factories.

were assigned domestic tasks, such as spinning yarn and weaving cloth. They were considered appropriate for such jobs because they already had experience in domestic issues, they worked for lower wages than men, they were generally smaller and more agile than men and could move more easily among the machinery, and their employment was often necessary to the economic survival of the family. Early on, many people, especially women and immigrants, were attracted to factory work because the jobs required little education or training. Factory work was often physically hazardous. Because many workers were paid according to productivity, the faster they worked, the more money they made. Therefore, carelessness for the sake of speed often caused people to injure themselves—sometimes even lose limbs—in the machinery. Other dangers included fires that spread quickly because of oil spilled onto floors from machinery; such catastrophes often cost the lives of many. Despite adverse conditions, women went to work in factories for many reasons. First, many single women who had to support themselves were not skilled in trades and did not have much formal education. Aside from domestic service, factories were often their only employment option, and factory work was less demanding than servitude. Second, married WORKING CLASS women frequently had to work to help support their families. Third, the CIVIL WAR sent many women into the factories to manufacture weapons, ammunition, clothing, and canned goods for the military; these women worked as replacements for men who left their jobs to become soldiers. Most often, however, the tasks completed by women were domestic in nature, such as sewing and weaving. These jobs were considered ideal for women who had become proficient in them at young ages. Textile factories, such as those in Lowell, Massachusetts, were likely to employ a staff primarily composed of women. But even though they were earning their own wages, women found that they were, on the average, paid much less than men. In 1880, women employed by manufacturing companies were paid an average of $5.58 per week, whereas men

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with equivalent jobs were paid $7.50 per week. This inequality made paying living expenses extremely difficult. Factory owners justified women’s wages by arguing that men, not women, supported families, and, therefore, women did not need to be paid as much as men. However, the truth is that most women, whether single or married, worked out of economic necessity. Furthermore, it was assumed that single women would cease to work once they were married and were, therefore, less deserving of higher wages because their positions were only temporary. Like women, children were paid extremely low wages to perform menial tasks. Jobs given to children included, but were not limited to, cleaning animals, making and sorting material goods, and stripping tobacco. Child labor was physically detrimental because children faced all the same dangers as adult factory workers. It was also intellectually detrimental, because children who worked could not attend school. By the mid-nineteenth century, workers began to form labor unions to fight against poor working conditions. These first labor unions set the stage for labor reform in the United States. Because of their efforts, the government mandated regulations in the best interest of all workers. See also: Lowell Mill Workers; Working Women’s Protective Union; Strikes. FURTHER READING

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, eds. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History 1600 to the Present. New York: Norton, 1995. Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

FAMILY, NUCLEAR AND  EXTENDED Although the phrase “nuclear family”—describing a structure with parents at the center with children revolving around them—was coined relatively recently, the reality of independent, single-family units dates to the colonial period. The extended family—including adults and children from two or more generations—has been more rare in American history. This is not to say that the extended family did not exist in the nineteenth-century United States. The extended family system most often occurred in regions or areas where economic conditions made it difficult for the nuclear family to achieve

self-sufficiency, in the rural SHARECROPPING South, for example. Nineteenth-century families in the urban, industrial setting also often lived in multigeneration groups, crowded together in TENEMENTS with everyone, from children to grandparents, working to support the group. Historians have posited that upward of 45 percent of laboring households had lodgers. Nineteenth-century slave families, and later free African-American families, lived in families at odds with majority culture norms. Families could be broken up through sales, which separated mothers, fathers, and children for the economic benefits of masters. The sexual violation of slave women by white men also created significant challenges to African-American families. Nonetheless, in the face of such hardships, slaves did create families of both real and fictive kin (nonfamily members who were treated like family), and family was considered so important that at the end of the Civil War thousands of freed people took to the roads in search of missing family members. This suggests that extended family was particularly significant for nineteenthcentury black Americans. The majority of Americans, particularly native-born, white, Northeastern men and women, enjoyed a much more stable family structure. Most Americans created a single family unit, though occasionally grandparents or unmarried relatives joined families. These additions to the family often proved temporary, as unmarried sisters and brothers moved from family to family or married and made families of their own. Victorian America saw changing roles for mothers, fathers, and children, as the companionate family model, where ties of gentle affection rather than patriarchal authority kept families together, took hold. The companionate family profoundly elevated women’s roles as mothers. Families had fewer children who lived with their parents for longer periods of time. Clearly, the nineteenthcentury American family had a number of variants, most of which resist the notion of a mythic past where Americans lived in perfectly cooperative, extended families. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7; “Family, Marriage, Sexuality,” p. 10; “Race and Slavery,” p. 30. FURTHER READING

Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

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Mintz, Stephen. A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture. New York: New York University Press, 1983.

 FAMILY WAGE SYSTEM

The concept of a family wage developed with the family labor system. In the early nineteenth century Rhode Island’s mill owners in Rhode Island’s TEXTILE INDUSTRIES hired families who worked in and lived at large mill complexes. Later Southern mill owners adopted this sytem, which employed large numbers of children and women. For owners the system had the advantage of encouraging a relatively stable labor population, while taking advantage of inexpensive child and female labor. Eventually even in industries that did not hire families the concept of a family wage remained central to industrialization. Organized workers often used the family wage system to justify higher wages for men. Their argument was that men needed to be paid enough to support their families, who in turn would not need to engage in waged labor. Thus the family wage favored the economic contribution of men over women. While labor organizers fought to decrease CHILD LABOR (see Volume 3) and allow women to work solely at domestic work, the family wage concept also helped to devalue women’s industrial labor. As a result union organizing often divided along gender lines, as men and women failed to agree whether to agitate for a higher family wage, or higher wages for both men and women. Female labor organizers argued that the family wage system did not take into account the realities of women’s labor. Women, they maintained, also worked to support their families, and many nineteenth-century families did not have a male worker to do so.

 FASHION

Nineteenth-century women’s clothes were neither comfortable nor practical. Fashion, though, was considered a fundamental element of womanhood. By midcentury, a respectable woman wore seven or eight layers of clothing; five or six petticoats; ground-sweeping skirts; cinched, whalebone-enforced corsets; sleeveless, low-cut dresses for evening; and three-inch or higher “French heeled” shoes. A lady wore a bonnet in public and a shawl if weather required. The 1856 advent of the hoop skirt began the “Era of the Hoop,” as skirts grew to such prodi-

Fashions changed throughout the nineteenth century, but fashion was considered a fundamental element of womanhood.

gious size that two women could not walk or sit side-by-side. As one historian of fashion put it, “a woman was a majestic ship, sailing proudly ahead, while a small tender—her male escort— sailed along behind.” Dresses were festooned with flounces, laces, ribbons, and a wide variety of trimmings, all speaking to the excesses of the age and symbolic of women’s decorative role in American society. Women’s clothes constrained not only their movements but also the possibility that they might function as equals to men. In the 1870s, the hoop skirt’s train evolved into the bustle, a wire or horsehair contraption that rested on a woman’s backside and was hung with large amounts of fabric. Skirts flattened in front, with fabric drawing material back to the bustle. The 1880s saw the height of the bustle and corsets that pushed ladies busts forward so much so that women were said to resemble in silhouette the curve of an “S.” During the last decades of the century, the bustle gradually disappeared, replaced first by extravagantly large “leg-o-mutton” sleeves and then by the lighter, more airy tea gowns seen on Gibson Girls. Given those uncomfortable and unhealthy fashion choices, it is not surprising that a number of women and men called for DRESS REFORM. Supporters of dress reform were often also women’s rights advocates, strongly suggesting the ties between fashion and gender oppression. SARA

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JOSEPHA HALE, during her 50-year tenure as editor for GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK, urged dress reform for children, whose fashions followed the excess of women’s fashion. AMELIA BLOOMER attempted to shift women from voluminous and heavy skirts to a “bloomer costume,” more like large Turkish pants. Bloomer contended that fashion was detrimental to women’s health and symbolic of women’s subjection to men. The movement evoked such passionate responses that Paulina Wright Davis banned discussions of dress reform at the first national Women’s Rights Convention in 1850. Male critics charged that women reformers were unwomanly and sought to wear the pants in society, effectively making dress reform seem ridiculous and outlandish. FURTHER READING

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: The Free Press, 1989. Theriot, Nancy. The Biosocial Construction of Femininity. Lexington: Greenwood Press, 1988.



FERN, FANNY (1811–1872) Novelist, first woman newspaper columnist in the United States. Fanny Fern was born Sara Payson Willis on July 9, 1811, in Portland, Maine. Her father, Nathaniel Willis, founded and edited Youth’s Companion. Although she was not very studious, Fern attended the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. Indeed, she was better known for her tendency to incur bills at local shops than her scholarship. Despite the fact that her parents were strict Calvinists, she was not known for piety. In 1837, Fern married Charles Eldredge, a banker. They had three children (the first died in 1846). When Eldredge died in 1846, Fern tried to support her children through sewing and TEACHING, but was unsuccessful at both. Under pressure from her father, she remarried in 1849, this time a local merchant named Samuel P. Farrington. However, Farrington was abusive and they were soon divorced. Because it was considered improper for a wife to leave her husband in the nineteenth century, Fern received no help from her family. She turned to writing to support herself and her two children. Her first piece, “The Model Minister,” was published in a Boston home magazine under the pseudonym “Fanny Fern.” It earned her 50

cents. The article was so popular that it was republished in several newspapers and launched Fern’s career as a writer. Fern was most notably an essayist who wrote from personal experience. She lampooned the wealthy and pretentious, and was among the first columnists to use satire to comment on domestic, social, and political events in the United States, especially issues regarding women and the poor. By 1855, she was earning $100 a week for her column in the New York Ledger. In 1856, Fern married James Parton, a staff writer for the Home Journal, and she insisted on a prenuptial agreement. She believed that women should have the same independence as men and that a woman should not base her identity on her status as a wife and mother. Although she is most noted for her work as a columnist, Fern also published various novels and essays. In Ruth Hall, a novel published in 1855, Fern satirized men’s domination of women and exposed the social and economic repercussions of female oppression. She died in New York City on October 10, 1872.

FILLMORE, ABIGAIL  POWERS

(1798–1853) Wife of President Millard Fillmore. Abigail Fillmore was the first president’s wife to be employed after marriage and helped to turn the White House into a cultural center. She was born Abigail Powers in Stillwater New York, in 1798. Valuing education greatly, Powers entered an open academy in the village of New Hope when she was 21. While there, she met and fell in love with aspiring lawyer and fellow book lover Millard Fillmore. They married in 1826 after which they endured several years of hardship as Fillmore sought to build up a law practice. Abigail helped support the family by returning to TEACHING shortly after their marriage. In 1849, the couple relocated to Washington after Millard won election as Zachary Taylor’s vice president. After Taylor died in 1850, they moved into the White House. An injured ankle made the responsibilities that accompanied being first lady difficult. Her daughter consequently took over many of the social responsibilities of the White House. Thus, freed of some of the duties that came with serving as first lady, Abigail was able to devote her energies to making the White House a cultural center. With funds granted by Congress,

FOSTER, ABIGAIL KELLEY

she established the first library in the White House. She also invited a number of authors including Washington Irving to hold colloquiums at the Executive Mansion. Abigail fell ill while attending the outdoor inauguration for incoming President Franklin Pierce in 1853. She died of pneumonia on March 30, 1853.

FOOTE, MARY  HALLOCK

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TRAILBLAZERS Charlotte Forten was one of the first AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN to teach at a FREEDMEN’S SCHOOL. Forten was born on August 17, 1837, to Robert Forten and Mary Virginia Woods Forten, both prominent in Philadelphia in the ABOLITION movement. Forten’s father, Robert, emphasized education, and sent her to live with an abolitionist family friend, so she could attend the integrated Higginson Grammar School in Salem, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1855, Forten taught at a number of schools, including her Aunt Margaretta’s school in Philadelphia. In 1862, the Freedmen’s Relief Association commissioned Forten to teach at the Port Royal seaport islands, where 10,000 former slaves were being held as contraband in a blockade and needed education and training. After the CIVIL WAR, Forten continued to work for freedmen at the New England Freedmen’s Union. In 1873, she was appointed from a pool of 500 applicants to be a clerk in the Treasury Department; she continued to be active in racial causes and was a founding member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF

(1847–1938) Writer and illustrator. Mary Hallock was born in Milton, New York, on November 19, 1847. She attended Poughkeepsie Female Collegiate Seminary from 1864 to 1867 and then took art courses at the Cooper Institute in New York City. She became a professional illustrator, and during the 1870s, her work appeared in Scribner’s Monthly and COLORED WOMEN. Harper’s Weekly. Hallock married Arthur Foote, a mining engineer, in 1876, and the couple moved west so that he could work in the mining industry. Over the next two of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society from decades, the couple lived in mining communities 1835 to 1837. She attended the woman’s nanot only in California but also in Colorado and tional antislavery convention in 1838, where she Idaho. Their experiences formed the subject mat- spoke so effectively that leading abolitionists ter for Hallock’s later writing and art work. She asked her to leave her teaching job and become published The Led-Horse Claim in 1883 and In Exile a full-time lecturer. For the next several years she lectured across and Other Stories in 1894. Her fiction presents a realistic picture of the mining communities in which the North and journeyed to Indiana and Michishe lived as well as the struggles of people trying gan. By speaking publicly against slavery, she vioto adjust to the harsh life of the West. She contin- lated conventional gender roles which prohibited ued writing and illustrating fiction during the women from speaking in public before mixed early part of the twentieth century, presenting the male and female audiences. She was booed and lives of miners, Mexicans, and other inhabitants even pelted with rotten eggs for her public speeches, but she kept speaking. of the West. In 1845, she married Stephen S. Foster, who She died on June 25, 1938. was also an abolitionist lecturer, and they continued speaking together until the outbreak of FOSTER, ABIGAIL KELLEY the Civil War. Foster explained that as a lec(1810–1877) turer Abigail “was perhaps the most successful Abolitionist. Abigail Kelley was born on January of us.” She believed that slavery was a moral 15, 1810, in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was a issue and that Americans had a moral obligaQuaker who eventually became a teacher at a tion to abolish it. She and her husband also adQuaker school in Lynn. Kelley became an ar- vocated TEMPERANCE and woman SUFFRAGE dent abolitionist after reading The Liberator, a during their speeches. Suffering from poor journal published by the leading abolitionist health after the Civil War, Foster reduced her William Lloyd Garrison. She served as secretary public appearances. Nevertheless, in 1880 she



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FREEDMEN’S AID SOCIETIES

spoke out strongly on behalf of woman suffrage. Foster died on January 14, 1887.

FREEDMEN’S AID  SOCIETIES Societies formed mostly by Northern whites to provide relief and education to freed African Americans in the South during the CIVIL WAR and RECONSTRUCTION. The freedmen’s aid movement began in 1862, when 52 white men and women from the Northeast journeyed to the Sea Islands in South Carolina, where freed slaves were living in shabby, temporary camps. The individuals called themselves Gideonites, after the biblical parable of Gideon, who led 500 Israelites to success in battle armed only with trumpets and lamps. The Gideonites brought relief supplies, medicine, and schoolbooks, and hoped to help transition the former slaves to freedom by providing material resources, education, and support. Aid societies formed in the Northeast and West, and raised almost $1 million in funds by the end of the Civil War. Roughly half of these groups were secular, and the other half were divisions of the American Missionary Association (AMA), which played a major role in the movement. While they were all charitable societies, they engaged in cutthroat competition with one another for converts and fund-raising dollars. In 1866, the secular organizations banded together and formed the American Freedmen’s Union Commission to fight the divisiveness fostered by the denominational groups. It split in 1869, however, and most of the secular societies were either dismantled or absorbed by the AMA. Despite infighting, the societies managed to fund a network of more than 2,000 FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS by the turn of the century. Women were active in the aid societies and many were ideologically invested in promoting the welfare of the freedmen. Some women had been active in the antislavery societies and shifted their efforts to the work of the freedmen’s societies. Women were responsible for much of the fundraising efforts, but the greatest number of women served as teachers in the freedmen’s schools. Societies collectively raised approximately half a million dollars each year from 1865 to 1870 for freedmen’s aid. They eventually lobbied for governmental funding and fought for freedmen’s legal rights and statuses. They also urged the establishment of a government bureau of emanci-

pation. In 1865, Congress formed the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. This governmental arm coordinated the efforts of the societies, focused on education and creating schools, and provided federal monies for transportation and buildings. Although the bureau was dismantled in 1870, many of the societies lasted into the twentieth century.

 FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS

Schools formed by FREEDMEN’S AID SOCIETIES for the education of freed African Americans in the South. The earliest of these schools were founded and headed by African Americans. However, because of their limited political and economic power, newly freed people also need the help of whites to establish and run these schools. After emancipation, the federal government supported the foundation of freedmen’s schools. Control over the schools allowed the government to control the freedmen and the education they received. This was seen as an important step in transforming the slave economy into a functional capitalist economy. Many schools were sponsored by the freedmen’s aid societies, whose main objective was to provide educational opportunities to freedmen. From 1862 to 1899, these societies funded more than 2,000 schools. However, many of them lacked adequate facilities or enough teachers. The divisive clashes within the aid movement, as well as opposition to education for former slaves by white Southerners further chipped away at the quality of schools. Many schools were built outside the aid societies as well. These were funded by money raised by African-American groups outside of the few African-American aid societies within the movement, such as the African Civilization Society. The grassroots fundraising often raised more money than there were resources to build schools. Eventually, the Freedmen’s Bureau established by Congress served as the governing body for all freedmen’s schools. It helped finance all of these schools, including Howard University, which became a premier AfricanAmerican college. Most other African-American colleges, such as Fisk University and Morehouse College, were founded with aid from religious denominations.

F R É M O N T, J E S S I E A N N B E N T O N

Most of the teachers at freedmen’s schools were women. This was partly because few men were available during the war, and partly because by the 1860s, education had become largely feminized. A popular belief within the aid movement was that white women could instruct African Americans on morality and elevate them from what whites believed was their depraved state. White Southerners did not welcome the teachers, whether African American or white. Of course, the situation was worse for African-American teachers, who eventually made up one-half of the teachers in freedmen’s schools. The quality of education varied greatly from school to school. The curriculum of these schools was largely practical and industrial, rather than academic. Some schools taught different subjects to men and women. However, many schools provided moral instruction, and radical teachers gave citizenship lessons and even preached against theories of racial inferiority. Texts were written to support the education of freedmen, and some were written to be read by freedmen, including Helen Brown’s John Freeman and his Family and LYDIA MARIA FRANCIS CHILD’s The Freedmen’s Book. FURTHER READING

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Butchart, Ronald. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

 FREEMAN, MARY WILKINS

(1852–1930) Author. Mary Wilkins was born on October 31, 1852, in Randolph, Massachusetts. She attended local schools there and in Brattleboro, Vermont, where the family moved in 1867. She learned also from listening to the conversations of her parents and their friends. An eager reader, Wilkins enjoyed the works of New England authors of the time. In her twenties she began to write verse and children’s stories. By 1880, her work was regularly published in a children’s magazine called Wide Awake. Three years later she published “Two Old Lovers” in Harper’s Bazaar; this was her first story written for adults. She returned to her original home town of Randolph and devoted herself to writing full-time.

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The next ten years were successful for Mary Wilkins. During this time she became able to support herself financially through her writings. She published several books of short stories, including one called A Humble Romance (1887), and she began work on novels as well. Wilkins married Charles M. Freeman in 1902. The couple moved to New Jersey, where she continued to write and publish historical and regional fiction. She was especially admired for her understanding of New England culture and manners. Among her best-known works are The Shoulders of Atlas (1908) and Pembroke (1894). Mary Freeman died in Metuchen, New Jersey, on March 13, 1930.

FRÉMONT, JESSIE ANN  BENTON

(1824–1902) Writer and wife of explorer John C. Frémont. Jessie Ann Benton was born on May 31, 1824, one of four daughters of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. In 1840, while still a young woman, she met Lieutenant John C. Frémont and married him a year later. While her husband headed an exploration of the West, Jessie Frémont acted as her father’s hostess in Washington, D.C. Following John Frémont’s second expedition in 1843, he published a report of the lands he explored—much of it was written and edited by Jessie. The report helped convinced many settlers to head west. The Frémonts eventually settled in California. When gold was discovered on their land in 1851, they became very wealthy. In 1856, John Frémont became the first Republican nominee for president, and Jessie helped him with the campaign. She was far more popular than her husband who was severely criticized for his support of ABOLITION and his illegitimate birth. He lost the election. In 1861, during the CIVIL WAR, the Frémonts lived in St. Louis, where he was commander of Union troops. After the war, his investments did poorly, and in 1873 he went bankrupt. Jessie Frémont devoted herself to writing to support herself and her husband. Her articles appeared in many magazines, and in 1878 she published a book, A Year of American Travel. Frémont helped her husband write his autobiography, which was published in 1887. She published another book three years later, Far-West Sketches. Jessie Frémont died on December 27, 1902.

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FRIENDSHIPS, FEMALE

 FRIENDSHIPS, FEMALE

Nineteenth-century women often found significant support and affection in female friendships. The close relationship between SUSAN B. ANTHONY and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, for example, gave confidence to both women and spurred their dedication to the feminist cause. In analyzing journals, diaries, letters, and autobiographies, historians have developed several theories of nineteenth-century female friendship. One view holds that these relationships were primary in women’s lives, more important even than their relationship with their husbands. Within this “female world of love and ritual” women created a world where men made only “a shadowy appearance.” These relationships, both with relatives and friends, helped women to create feelings of security and self-esteem in a maledominated world that did not always encourage femaleness. This sense of security and gender solidarity allowed women to find the courage to engage in political activism. Other historians suggest that while female friendships were undoubtedly significant, the tenets of romantic love and companionate marriage made husbands the penultimate person in women’s lives. Nineteenth-century Americans placed a premium on heterosexual love, marriage, and child rearing, and this primacy meant that many women saved their emotional energy, not for their sisters and friends, but for their husbands and children. The ideas surrounding companionate marriage meant that married men and women were supposed to be utterly in sympathy with each other and meet all their emotional needs within the bonds of marriage. Probably many women did find female friendships their most compelling personal ties. A number of nineteenth-century women used female friendship to reject heterosexuality. Not strictly LESBIANS in the way we think of it today, these homoerotic relationships could be deeply passionate and committed. “Boston Marriages,” where two women lived together and had their primary emotional commitments with each other, were relatively common and unremarkable in the United States in the Victorian era.

 FULLER, MARGARET

(1810–50) Author and journalist. Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810. As a child she was educated largely at

Margaret Fuller, author and journalist, was probably the first woman in American history to support herself as such.

home by her father, who turned her into a prodigy but refused to allow her to engage in normal childhood pursuits. By her teens she had acquired wide-ranging knowledge both of the classics and of modern languages and literature. After the death of her father in 1835, Fuller turned to TEACHING, first in Boston, then in Providence, Rhode Island. She returned to Boston in 1839 to lead “Conversation” classes, similar to discussion clubs, in literature and the social issues. Initially the audience for the classes was primarily women, but in time many men participated as well. In 1836 Fuller became friends with transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a result of their friendship, she was appointed editor of The Dial, a transcendentalist literary magazine for which she wrote reviews and poetry from 1840 to 1842. In 1844, she published her second book, Summer on the Lakes, an account of a trip to the Midwest. The book caught the attention of Horace Greeley, who hired her as a literary critic for the New York Tribune. Fuller was probably the first woman in American history to support herself as a journalist. In 1845, Greeley published her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which

G A G E , M AT I L D A J O S L Y N

contained her famous essay from The Dial called “The Great Lawsuit.” The book was a plea for the social and sexual liberation of women based on the transcendentalists’ belief in universal, sacred individual rights. The essay, in particular, had a direct influence on the 1848 Seneca Falls conference on women’s rights. The final years of Fuller’s brief life were eventful. In 1846, a number of her Tribune pieces were collected in Papers on Literature and the Arts, a book that established her position as a leading intellectual of the time. That year, too, she set sail for Europe as the Tribune’s foreign correspondent. Her “letters” to the newspaper were eventually collected and published in 1856 under the title At Home and Abroad. Fuller finally settled in Italy, where she became involved in a movement to unite the country led by the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. She also became romantically involved with Gio-

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vanni Angelo Ossoli, a nobleman 11 years her junior, and in September 1848 she gave birth. In early 1849, she traveled to Rome to report on revolutionary events, particularly the flight of the pope, the arrival of revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the proclamation of the Italian Republic. When the French invaded Italy, she served briefly in a hospital, but she fled when French forces reached Rome in July. In May 1850, Fuller, Ossoli, and the baby set sail for the United States, but all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, on July 19, 1850. Unfortunately, the manuscript of her history of the revolution in Italy was lost. FURTHER READING

Chevigny, Bell Gale. The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1976.

G

GAGE, FRANCES DANA  BARKER

(1808–1884) Author and reformer who advocated TEMPERANCE, women’s rights, and ABOLITION. Francis Dana Barker was born in 1808 in Marietta, Ohio. She married James Gage in 1829 and soon gave birth to the first of the couple’s eight children. Child rearing occupied most of Gage’s time, but she emerged in the 1840s as a powerful and persuasive voice in favor of variety of reform causes. Initially, she focused on writing letters to newspapers and speaking publicly against SLAVERY and drink and in favor of women’s rights. At an 1850 reform convention, she led a group to demand that the words white and male be expunged from the Ohio state constitution. The following year she won election as president of an Ohio women’s rights convention and embarked on a series of speaking engagements in favor of reform causes. Gage was both persuasive and successful. In 1860, her efforts on behalf of women’s rights helped win passage of an Ohio state law granting married women limited property rights. Gage’s activities expanded during the CIVIL WAR. She volunteered for the Western Sanitary

Commission, and held the post of superintendent for freed slaves living on Parris Island, South Carolina. Following the conflict, Gage devoted her efforts to temperance and to women’s rights through speaking and newspaper articles. She also published a number of reform-oriented novels including the protemperance novel Elsie Magoon (1867). Her public career ended, however, after she suffered a debilitating stroke in 1867. Gage died in 1884 in Greenwich, Connecticut.

 GAGE, MATILDA JOSLYN

(1826–1898) Suffragist and advocate of women’s rights. Matilda Joslyn was born on March 25, 1826, in Cicero, New York, the daughter of a physician who supported ABOLITION and women’s rights. Her childhood home was a meeting place for reform activists and a stop on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. She studied at the Clinton Liberal Institute in upstate New York and married Henry H. Gage, a merchant, in 1854. The couple had five children. Gage attended the National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1852 and was a charter member of the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION

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GARFIELD, LUCRETIA RUDOLPH

(NWSA). In 1872, Gage attempted to vote in the presidential election, but her ballot was refused because she was a woman. In May 1875, Gage became president of the NWSA and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. She and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (who succeeded her as NWSA president in May 1876) coauthored the Declaration of Rights for Women, which was delivered at Philadelphia’s centennial Independence Day celebration in 1876. Gage also collaborated with Stanton and SUSAN B. ANTHONY in producing the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86). From 1878 to 1881, Gage edited the NWSA’s official newspaper, the National Citizen and Ballot Box. She also contributed essays to suffragist publications and testified on the issue before Congress. In 1870, she wrote a pamphlet that called particular attention to the role of women inventors in the United States. Believing that misogyny encouraged by the church impeded the cause of SUFFRAGE, Gage established the Women’s National Liberal Union in 1890. The organization was dedicated to exposing the “cause of delay in the recognition of women’s demands” and opposing efforts to mix the interests of church and state. She elaborated her views on these issues in the book Women, Church and State (1893). Gage died on March 18, 1898, in Chicago. See also: Women’s Rights Movement.

GARFIELD, LUCRETIA  RUDOLPH

(1832–1918) Wife of James Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Lucretia Rudolph was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on April 19, 1832. Her father was a carpenter and a farmer with a strong interest in education. At a time when most women did not receive much formal schooling, Rudolph’s father considered education a priority for his daughter. In 1850, he helped found a coeducational college in Hiram, Ohio, and Rudolph was among the first to attend the school. Following graduation, Rudolph taught school for several years. In 1853, she began a correspondence with James Garfield, then a student; five years later they married. Her husband served as a CIVIL WAR general but was best known for his political career; he served in the Ohio legislature and Congress and won election to the presidency in 1880.

A political life proved stressful for both Garfields. Lucretia Garfield chose at first to remain in Ohio after her husband’s 1862 election to the U.S. House of Representatives but soon changed her mind. James’s busy life resulted in increased duties for Lucretia. She ran the household, reared seven children, and entertained political as well as personal friends. James grew to depend on her for moral support, and he relied on her to manage the details of his life as well. James Garfield was assassinated only a few months after taking office in 1881. Lucretia Garfield lived another 37 years. She preserved and indexed many of her husband’s papers. She died on March 13, 1918, in South Pasadena, California.

GAYLE, SARAH ANN  HAYNESWORTH

(1804–1835) A diarist and wife of Alabama’s sixth governor. Sarah Ann Haynesworth was born on January 18, 1804, in Sumter County, South Carolina. As a child, she moved to the Alabama Territory with her parents, who established a plantation along the Alabama River north of Mobile. In 1819, she married a childhood acquaintance, John Gayle. They had five children. Throughout her life, Gayle recorded her impressions of frontier Alabama and her experiences with a broad spectrum of people in letters, journals, and personal memoirs. Her writings illuminate relations among whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in the antebellum era. They also express her devotion to her mother and daughters, her feelings about marriage, and her worries about mortality and how she would be remembered. Gayle died on July 30, 1835, in Tuscaloosa. See also: Diaries and Journals.

GENERAL FEDERATION OF  WOMEN’S CLUBS International women’s volunteer service organization founded in 1890. Throughout the nineteenth century, women sought both the company of other women, and ways of becoming more involved in their communities. Some formed civic groups, literary societies, and even political interest organizations. In 1889, JANE CUNNINGHAM CROLY celebrated the twenty-first anniversary of her literary club, SOROSIS, by inviting members of other women’s lit-

GERMAN IMMIGRANTS

erary clubs to the event. The next year, these clubs reconvened with other representatives from nonliterary women’s groups to address broader issues and reforms. The result was the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC). CHARLOTTE HAWKINS BROWN was its first president. The main objective of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was to involve women in their communities. At the time of its formation, most of the clubs were local civic or literary societies. These small and localized groups found a unified national voice in the GFWC. Membership swelled to two million in the early years of the twentieth century. The GFWC addressed social and political issues of interest to women, such as labor legislation and education. It advocated an eight-hour workday and lobbied against child labor. In 1899, it developed a national model for juvenile court reform. Despite its concern for women, it did not officially endorse woman SUFFRAGE until 1914, and excluded the clubs of AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. The reason for its conservative views was to accommodate the views of its large but largely middle-class membership.

 GERMAN IMMIGRANTS

One of the largest waves of immigration during the nineteenth century was from Germany. A wide range of economic, political, and social issues initiated mass emigration from Germany in the 1800s. Between 1800 and 1850, the population there doubled, causing economic stress. Land was scarce and the cost of living was high. In industry, Germany could not keep up with European competitors, which further depressed the economy. Religious tensions in 1839 and the 1870s prompted the emigration of Lutherans and Catholics who were fleeing religious persecution. Also, the Napoleonic Wars (1805–12) and the German Revolution of 1848 caused many people to emigrate. In the 1880s, German immigration to the United States was at its greatest height. In that decade, more than 1.4 million Germans made America their new home. Few German women traveled to the United States on their own; most arrived with husbands and families. The bulk of German immigrants in the 1800s consisted of farmers, skilled trades people, and laborers (although political tensions, especially after 1848, did force the exile of intellectual leaders). German farmers, who traveled to the

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United States under the impression that there was much available land, were often unable to afford it and had to work at unskilled labor instead. Many artisans—carpenters and shoemakers, for example—continued their trades in the United States. Traditionally, married German women did not work outside the home. The most accepted women’s roles in German culture were Kirche, Kinder, Kuche—“church, children, and kitchen.” Many single women took jobs as DOMESTIC SERVANTS. In 1880, 50 percent of employed German-American women worked as domestic servants. Germans comprised the second-largest ethnic group to work in domestic service, but their numbers trailed far behind the number of IRISH IMMIGRANTS who took domestic jobs. The second most common employment for German women was in the TEXTILE INDUSTRY, which became increasingly popular with U.S. industrialization. Although Germans settled throughout the United States, the densest German-American populations could be found in the Midwest. Intent on preserving German customs and language, German immigrants tended to huddle in close communities called “Little Germanys,” which had their own beer halls, stores, clubs, theaters, singing societies, and schools. Most German schools were parochial, and only the German language was spoken, which did little to facilitate the assimilation of German children into American society. However, organizations such as the Turner society strove to network German clubs and activities, and helped integrate the Germans into American culture. German influence in the United States can be seen in the current public educational system. For example, German-American schoolteacher Margaretha Meyer Schultz introduced the concept of kindergarten to the United States. In addition, Germans advocated music education at all grade levels and were the first to incorporate extracurricular sports. Many American Christmas traditions, such as the Christmas tree and the modern concept of Santa Claus, have German origins. Furthermore, Germans popularized gymnastic sports in the United States. FURTHER READING

Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The GermanAmerican Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

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Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

 GIBSON GIRL

The Gibson Girl was the creation of American artist Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944). In 1890, when the Gibson Girl made her first appearance in drawings, Gibson was already a successful commerical artist in major magazines. The Gibson Girl symbolized the woman of the 1890s who was becoming independent and working outside the home. She was spirited, but still feminine. Gibson portrayed her with a flowing skirt, hair piled up on her head, upper class in appearance, but with a little mischief in her eyes. He pictured her playing golf, attending social events, rearing children, and advertising clothing. She was also portrayed riding a bicycle, a new symbol of freedom for women at the end of the nineteenth century. The Gibson Girl was a great marketing success. Her image was found on chinaware, pillow covers, fans, and wallpaper; she was also the subject of plays and songs. Gibson also created the Gibson Man to escort the Girl. The Gibson Girl remained popular until the 1920s, when she was replaced by the flapper—a symbol of the fully emancipated woman and her new clothing styles.

GILMAN, CHARLOTTE  PERKINS

(1860–1935) Author, lecturer, and theorist of the early feminist movement. Charlotte Anne Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860. When she was a child, her father abandoned the family. As a result she endured poverty and an irregular education. In 1884, she married Charles Stetson, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1894. During the marriage, she suffered a mental breakdown; from this experience came her most widely reprinted short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). During the 1890s Perkins established a literary career by publishing essays on such social issues as ethics, the role of women, and the plight of labor, in addition to short stories and poetry. In 1898 she published her major work, Women and Economics, in which she argues that the maternal role of women is overemphasized. She believed that women could achieve true freedom only when they have economic independence and when society recognizes their social and economic potential. And so, unlike the suffragists of her time,

Gilman emphasized women’s economic status over political rights. During these years she divided her time between California and New York, where she supported herself by lecturing on social issues. She also traveled to England, where she came to know the Fabians, a socialist organization devoted to political and economic reform. In 1900, Perkins married George Gilman of New York. In the years that followed, she continued to write and lecture, establishing herself as one of the major theorists of the feminist movement. Other books include The Home (1903), The Man-Made World (1911), and His Religion and Hers (1923). From 1909 to 1916 she also edited her own feminist magazine, Forerunner. Serialized in this magazine was her 1915 book Herland, a utopian novel that depicts social, cultural, and family relationships in a society composed entirely of women. In 1935, Gilman was afflicted with breast cancer. She committed suicide in Pasadena, California, on August 17 of that year. FURTHER READING

Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Makings of a Radical Feminist: 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

 GODEY’S LADY’S BOOK

Nineteenth-century magazine aimed at women. Louis A. Godey founded Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1830. A genius at marketing, he convinced women that they needed his MAGAZINE; in addition, he persuaded men to purchase it for their female loved ones. Although the magazine’s contributing writers often expressed support for “women’s rights,” its contents supported traditional gender roles. The magazine reinforced women’s domestic roles by focusing on recipes, housekeeping tips, needlework and dress patterns, etiquette tips, and advice for the care of children. Godey’s also contained fiction and poetry, nonfiction articles that focused on women’s interests, and metal engravings and fashion plates handmade and tinted by female staff members. These fashion plates, advertisements for women’s clothing, were a major cultural force by the 1840s. They defined femininity in terms of clothing, cosmetics, and accessories. As women shifted from being producers within the domestic sphere to

G R E E N H O W, R O S E O ’ N E A L

consumers outside the home, fashion plates helped redefine the female image. In 1837, Godey bought out one of his competitors, Ladies’ Magazine, and SARA JOSEPHA BUELL HALE became the new editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. As editor, Hale made major changes. Her goal was to improve every woman’s intellect. Whereas many of the magazine’s poems and stories remained sentimental, Hale elevated the literary quality of Godey’s by adding the works of major writers and recommending books of literary merit. Hale wrote articles about proper writing techniques, provided information about schools for women, and promoted the professionalization of women in careers previously closed to them. Hale and Godey worked together until Godey’s Lady’s Book was sold in 1877. Godey’s went through several more owners until it finally ended publication in 1898.

 GRANT, JULIA DENT

(1826–1902) Wife of the eighteenth U.S. president. Julia Dent was born on January 26, 1826, on the White Haven plantation near St. Louis, Missouri. She studied at the Mauro boarding school in St. Louis. In 1848, she married Ulysses S. Grant, then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. They would have four children. As an army wife, Grant traveled with her husband to isolated posts, which lacked the luxuries to which she was accustomed. She tolerated the hardships and deprivations for several years, but when her husband was transferred West in 1852, the family stayed behind at his parents’ home in Galena, Illinois. After her husband resigned his army commission in 1854, the Grants returned to Missouri where her husband farmed the land she inherited at White Haven. They later moved to St. Louis and Galena, where Ulysses worked in his father’s leather shop. He returned to the army with the outbreak of the CIVIL WAR and rose quickly in rank to general. Julia traveled to be with him between battles. She gloried in his wartime fame, which helped elevate him to the presidency in the election of 1868. Grant savored her role as first lady. A gracious hostess, she is credited with creating a comfortable environment for visitors to the White House. She was the first presidential wife to give interviews to the press.

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After leaving the White House in 1877, the Grants went on a two-year world tour and then settled in New York City. In 1884, facing bankruptcy, she cared for her husband as he battled throat cancer and wrote his memoirs to raise funds. He died the following year. Julia Grant died on December 14, 1902, and was laid beside her husband in Grant’s Tomb in New York City. See also: Reconstruction.

 GRATZ, REBECCA

(1781–1869) Humanitarian and religious educator. Rebecca Gratz was born on March 4, 1781, in Philadelphia. Her father was a merchant and land speculator who had supported the patriots during the American Revolution. Although Gratz was a Jew in a largely Christian city, she became an important member of Philadelphia society. As a young woman, she enjoyed parties and intellectual discussions with other young Philadelphians, but she soon developed a greater passion for humanitarian work. Gratz’s humanitarian efforts began in 1801, when she helped to found an organization that offered support to poor women and children in Philadelphia. Later, she founded or cofounded the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum (1815) and two Jewish charities, the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society (1819) and the Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum (1855). Gratz also organized a Sunday school for Jewish children in 1838; she got the idea partly by observing Christian Sunday schools. She remained deeply involved in these and other charitable institutions throughout her lifetime. She served as president of the Sunday School Society from its inception until 1864, for example. Although Gratz never married, she helped bring up most of her sister’s nine children after their mother died. Some family members and friends have speculated that Gratz was the model for the character Rebecca in Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, although there is no direct evidence to support this position. Gratz died in Philadelphia at the age of 88.

 GREENHOW, ROSE O’NEAL

(c.1815–1864) Confederate spy. Little is known of Rose O’Neal’s early life. She was born in Maryland, possibly Montgomery County, around 1815. She was

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raised by an aunt in Washington, D.C., and married Robert Greenhow, a physician, librarian, and translator, in 1835. They had four children. Greenhow was a popular Washington hostess who became a confidante to such prominent politicians as James Buchanan and John C. Calhoun during the 1840s. It was at this time that she developed her strong proslavery views and a reputation for backroom intrigue. Unable to secure a position in Washington, her husband was transferred in 1850 to Mexico City and then to San Francisco. Helping her husband research land claims, she learned to how to interpret maps—a skill that would prove useful in her CIVIL WAR spying. After her husband’s death in 1854, Greenhow moved back to Washington and resumed socializing with prominent politicians. When the war broke out in 1861, she was enlisted in a Confederate espionage ring. Her greatest contribution came in July 1861, when she sent crucial information to Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard about the movement of Union troops toward Manassas Junction, Virginia. Allan Pinkerton, director of the Union secret service, arrested Greenhow in August and ordered her to remain at home. She persisted in her clandestine activities and was removed with her youngest daughter, Rose, to Old Capitol Prison in January 1862. Still she was able to communicate with Confederate intelligence, and a federal War Department commission banished her to the South in June of that year. Recognized as a heroine, Greenhow was awarded $2,500 for her services by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In 1863, Greenhow traveled to Europe as a Confederate emissary and published her prison diary, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington. Her ship ran aground on the return voyage, and Greenhow—weighted down by gold for the Confederacy—drowned on October 1, 1864, near Wilmington, North Carolina. See also: Spies, Civil War.

 GRIMKÉ, SARAH MOORE

(1792–1873) Abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Sarah Grimké was born on November 26, 1792, in Charleston, South Carolina. One of 14 children, she was the daughter of John Grimké, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a state legislator, and a

Sarah Moore Grimké worked to advance the abolitionist cause and the women’s rights movement.

judge, and Mary Smith Grimké, the daughter of a prominent Charleston family. As a child she was educated privately by tutors at the family’s house in Charleston and its large cotton plantation in the country. She was disappointed that, unlike her brothers, she was unable to continue her education after girlhood. Like many cotton planters in the South at that time, the Grimké family benefited from SLAVERY, a practice Grimké found morally objectionable,

"The motto of woman, when she is engaged in the great work of public reformation should be,—‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’" —Sarah M. Grimké, response to pastoral letter of Congregational ministers of Massachusetts, 1837

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calling it “a millstone around my TRAILBLAZERS neck.” She secretly delighted in teaching her “companion,” an enEmeline Horton Cleveland was not only a physician, she was slaved girl about her own age, to one of the first female doctors in the United States. Furtherread. In 1819, she visited Philadelmore, in a time when female college professors were rare, phia, where she became acquainted Cleveland was a professor of anatomy and histology at the with the Quaker religion, particuPennsylvania Women’s Medical College. As an 1855 graduate larly the works of John Woolman, who wrote about the evils of slavery. of the college, she was its chief resident until 1868 and was Grimké considered joining the highly respected by her male colleagues. church because of its stand against Cleveland attended the Paris Maternité School of Obstetslavery, but she returned home to rics from 1860 to 1861. On graduating, she was awarded five weigh her decision, knowing she prizes for superior achievement and an honorable mention for would be turning her back on her excellence in clinical observation. In 1861, she returned to Episcopal roots. Philadelphia and assumed her roles as teacher and physician In the South, Grimké found that at the Women’s Hospital. she could not bear the existence of In 1875, Cleveland performed her first major surgery, an slavery around her, so she returned ovariotomy. It was also the first recorded instance of a major to Philadelphia in 1821 and joined surgery performed by a woman. The significance of this the Quaker church. She spent the achievement was remarkable, because it defied the nineteenthnext several years in charitable accentury notion that women were too emotional to become doctivities. When her sister ANGELINA tors. Many men believed that women lacked the logical skills GRIMKÉ WELD joined her in 1829, and scientific knowledge required to practice medicine. Howthe two more actively joined the ever, in a society where men dominated the medical profession, fight against slavery, and for the Cleveland paved the way for hundreds of female physicians to next four decades they were insepafollow her example. rable both in name and in fact. In In 1878, Cleveland was appointed gynecologist to the Deaddition to taking part in boycotts partment for the Insane at the Pennsylvania Hospital. As a against products made with slave proponent of Moral Treatment, the theory that mental health labor, Sarah wrote two important reform was linked to religion and spirituality, Cleveland works in the mid-1830s: An Epistle to served not only as a medical physician but also as the Victothe Clergy of the Southern States and An rian model of moral piety. Her life’s work helped forge a new Address to Free Colored Americans. ideal of nineteenth-century womanhood: the woman well balBoth attacked slavery, particularly the argument that slavery was acanced between traditional femininity and professional duty. ceptable because it was recognized by the Bible. By 1837, the Grimkés were on the front lines of the fight against slavery. To advance women’s rights was her 1838 book, Letters on the the abolitionist cause, Sarah joined Angelina in an Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women, comexhausting 23-week lecture tour in the Northeast. paring the condition of slaves with that of women. Grimké never married, but after Angelina Though they were scheduled to speak together, they frequently found the crowds so large that they married the abolitionist Thomas Weld in 1838, had to split up, one sister speaking in one building, Sarah accompanied them on their moves to New the other at a different location. The sisters often Jersey, then to Massachusetts, living with them met with ridicule from those who believed that it and helping to raise their three children. was not proper for women to speak in public about Though she largely gave up public speaking, she such issues, particularly to “mixed” audiences of continued to write and petition against slavery men and women. Largely on this basis, Sarah and, after the CIVIL WAR, for the rights of began to focus more of her attention on women’s women. She also helped support the family by rights. She believed that until women were com- TEACHING. In 1870, at age 79, she joined Anpletely free, they could not effectively work for the gelina and 42 other women in casting ballots at a rights of others. One outcome of her interest in Massachusetts polling place. She was not arrested

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only because of her advanced age. Though women were not immediately given the right to vote, the act garnered a great deal of publicity and represented another small step toward the goal of woman suffrage. Sarah Grimké died on December 23, 1873. FURTHER READING

Birney, Catherine H. Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights. New York: Haskell House, 1970. Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

 GYNECOLOGY

The medical science pertaining to women’s health issues. From 1780 to 1835, great advancements in anatomical knowledge and medical technology changed the way physicians dealt with women’s health issues. Childbirth was no longer considered a natural, mechanical event to be presided over by a husband or midwife. Physicians warned that only medical professionals with a thorough understanding of medicine as a whole should supervise a childbirth. Because of this professionalization of medicine, gynecology emerged and gradually eliminated the folk medicine used by midwives, whose services lost popularity by 1900. Although gynecological services were available in the nineteenth century, they were often not used. Public discussions of women’s health issues were taboo. The Victorian woman was expected to be passionless and to display the virtues of innocence and purity. Such conventions in modesty often developed into prudery and inhibited proper reproductive care, because women feared exposing their female organs to physicians, most of whom were men. The rarity of pelvic exams caused rapid spread of disease, because problems were usually left untreated. Although regular gynecological exams could benefit a woman’s reproductive health, they could also be counterproductive. The consensus among

nineteenth-century gynecologists was that female organs were the cause of every health problem imaginable, from headaches to INSANITY. The ovaries were assumed to determine all of a woman’s characteristics; therefore, any abnormalities could be traced directly back to the ovaries. Overall, women in the 1800s were assumed to be sick simply because they were women. As a result, common illnesses were frequently treated through the sexual organs. “Cures” were painful and could include leeching, injections, cauterization, and sometimes complete removal of the reproductive organs. The “science” behind these methods asserted that because female organs caused the disorders, treatment of these organs would solve the problems. In “severe” cases, where “symptoms” included masturbation and nymphomania, clitoridectomies (surgical removal of the clitoris) were performed. Female physicians differed in opinions about gynecological care, but overall they were more sensitive to women’s health issues than men were. Many women doctors only performed sexual surgery to cure gynecological and physiological ailments. In response to the rising number of ovariotomies (the surgical removal of the ovaries) in the last third of the nineteenth century, physician ELIZABETH BLACKWELL contended that irresponsible men practiced poor medicine when linking the ovaries to insanity. In 1894, physicians Calista V. Luther and Anne H. McFarland published a paper downplaying the connection between insanity and the female organs. In 1896, Dr. Mary Augusta Scott, a surgical assistant at the Johns Hopkins University, demanded that abusive gynecological surgery be stopped. See also: Abortion; Childbirth and Pregnancy; Contraception; Midwifery. FURTHER READING

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. “The Sexual Politics of Sickness.” For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978.

H A R P E R , F R A N C E S E L L E N WAT K I N S

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HALE, SARAH JOSEPHA  BUELL

(1788–1879) Author and editor of GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK. Sarah J. Buell was born on October 24, 1788, in New Hampshire. She was educated at home by her parents. Her brother, Horatio, attended Dartmouth College, and, with his encouragement, Sarah became a teacher. She married a lawyer named David Hale, but he died of pneumonia in 1822, leaving her with four children to rear. For a while, Hale joined her sister-in-law Hannah in the millinery business and wrote a book titled The Genius of Oblivion and Other Original Poems (1823). This was followed by Hale’s first novel, Northwood (1827). It so impressed the Reverend John Lauris Blake, the headmaster of the Cornhill School for Young Ladies, that he asked Hale to become the editor of his new magazine for women called Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette.

In 1836, Louis Godey, who had founded his Lady’s Book in 1830, asked Hale to take over the editorship of his magazine. She remained the editor until 1877. Over the years, she transformed Godey’s Lady’s Book from a periodical that simply reprinted articles from England to one that featured the works of American authors. Under her guidance, Godey’s Lady’s Book became one of the most popular magazines in the United States, reaching a circulation of 150,000. Hale strongly supported the founding of a new college for women, Vassar, which opened in 1865. When she discovered that the faculty of the college would be composed primarily of men, she said, “all instructors should be ladies except when properly qualified teachers of that sex cannot be found.” As a result of her efforts, 22 women were hired for the faculty and only eight men. Hale also believed women made excellent physicians. In addition to her work as an editor, Hale also campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as the national Thanksgiving Day. Hale died on April 30, 1879. FURTHER READING

Evans, Sara. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: The Free Press, 1989. Fryatt, Norma R. Sarah Josepha Hale: The Life and Times of a Nineteenth Century Career Woman. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975.

HARPER, FRANCES ELLEN  WATKINS

Author and editor Sarah Josepha Hale believed strongly in the advanced education of women.

(1825–1911) Author, abolitionist, and TEMPERANCE leader. Frances Ellen Watkins was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of free African Americans. Before Harper was three years old, her mother died, and she was reared by her uncle who ran a school for AfricanAmerican children. She attended his school, the Academy for Negro Youth, but left in 1839 and went to work as a servant in a Baltimore home. In 1845, Watkins published her first book of poetry, Forest Leaves. Her writing grew from a love of nature, and these poems reflect her wanderings in the woods as a child. Five years later,

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she went to Union Seminary, which was run by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, near Columbus, Ohio. Here she taught sewing. She returned to Pennsylvania in 1852, where she taught in Little York. About this time she also became involved in the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, which helped slaves escape from the South to the free states of the North. In 1854, Watkins traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where she delivered a speech titled “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.” Her speech was so successful that she traveled through Maine for the Anti-Slavery Society. Between 1856 and 1860, she delivered speeches in other states in the Northeast and Midwest against SLAVERY. In 1854, she published her second book of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. In 1860, she married Fenton Harper, but he died in 1864. Following the CIVIL WAR, Harper followed a vigorous lecture schedule. She went on tour throughout the South and in 1872 published Sketches of Southern Life, another series of poems. These were written in the dialect of African Americans who had been living in slavery before the Civil War. She also became very active in the woman SUFFRAGE movement and gave a speech in 1866 at the National Women’s Rights Convention calling on America to provide equal rights for everyone, including AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. Between 1883 and 1890, Harper was actively involved in the national WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU). Meanwhile, she published another book, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted, in 1892. Her novel was one of the first to be published by an African-American woman in the United States. In 1896, she helped found the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN and was elected a vice president a year later. Harper died of heart disease on February 22, 1911, in Philadelphia.

 HARRISON, ANNA SYMMES

(1775–1864) First lady of the United States and wife of President William Henry Harrison. Anna Tuthill Symmes was born near Morristown, New Jersey, on July 25, 1775. She was educated in New York at Clinton Academy and Mrs. Isabella Marshall Graham’s School. In 1794, Symmes accompanied her father, Judge John Cleves Symmes, to Ohio where he established a settlement on the “north bend” of the Ohio River. A year later she married Lieutenant

William Henry Harrison. Her father opposed the marriage, because he did not want his daughter to live on frontier posts. The couple had ten children, although Harrison was often away from home becoming famous as a successful Indian fighter and a hero of the War of 1812. As a result, Anna had to rear the children almost single-handedly. In 1840, Harrison was elected president, but Anna was too sick to travel to Washington, D.C. She remained at north bend and did not attend her husband’s inauguration. She was 65 years old, the oldest person to become first lady. Harrison died after a month in office. After her husband’s death, Anna Harrison continued living at north bend. She died on February 25, 1864. Her grandson, Benjamin Harrison, became president of the United States in 1889.

HARRISON, CAROLINE  LAVINIA SCOTT

(1832–1892) First lady of the United States and wife of Benjamin Harrison, twenty-third president. “Carrie” Scott was born in Oxford, Ohio, the daughter of Mary Potts Neal and the Reverend Dr. John W. Scott. Her father was a Presbyterian minister and founder of the Oxford Female Institute, which Scott attended. As a student there, she met Benjamin Harrison who was attending nearby Miami University. The couple were married in 1853. They moved to Indianapolis, where Harrison opened a law practice and later served as a general during the CIVIL WAR. The Harrisons had two children, a son and a daughter. After the war, Harrison was elected to the U.S. Senate (1881–87), but his wife was often too ill from tuberculosis to act as his hostess. In 1888, Harrison was elected president, and the following year the couple moved into the White House. Caroline Harrison participated in Washington charities and raised money for the Johns Hopkins University medical school but only after it agreed to admit women. Unfortunately, Caroline Harrison did not live to enjoy her husband’s entire term. She died of tuberculosis at the White House in October 1892.

 HAYES, LUCY WARE WEBB

(1831–1889) First lady of the United States and wife of Rutherford B. Hayes, nineteenth president. Lucy

H I S PA N I C FA M I L Y L I F E

Ware Webb was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on August 28, 1831. Her father, a prominent doctor, died when Lucy was two years old. In 1844, her mother moved the family to Delaware, Ohio, where Lucy attended Ohio Wesleyan University and later graduated from Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati (1847). In Cincinnati, Webb was courted by a young lawyer named Rutherford Hayes, and the couple married on December 30, 1852. Both were strongly opposed to SLAVERY. Rutherford Hayes joined the Union Army during the CIVIL WAR, commanding the Twenty-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry. During the war, Lucy Hayes was known as “Mother Lucy” for tending to the wounded men under her husband’s command. Following the war, Rutherford Hayes was elected as congressman and later governor of Ohio. In 1877, he became president of the United States, and the couple entered the White House. As a TEMPERANCE supporter, Lucy Hayes did not allow liquor to be served in the White House, earning her the nickname, “Lemonade Lucy.” Her position as first lady gave strong support to the temperance movement to outlaw the sale of alcohol, which had been gaining strength in the United States. Both Lucy Hayes and her husband were very concerned about the problem of alcoholism. Following four years in Washington, the Hayeses returned to Ohio. Lucy died on June 25, 1889.

 HEALTH

Women’s health became a controversial topic in the early nineteenth century. Many more women suffered from chronic ill health in the nineteenth century than in the colonial era, even as the birthrate was declining, meaning fewer women were weakened by repeated childbirth. Physicians identified certain conditions, including anemia, hysteria, neurasthenia, and other nervous complaints, as characteristically feminine, and medical literature emphasized female fragility. Women’s medical problems may have resulted from poor medical care; psychological malaise caused by their confinement to the domestic sphere; and national health trends, such as the spread of venereal disease in the early nineteenth century. In a survey of women’s health in the 1850s, CATHARINE ESTHER BEECHER concluded that 75 percent of American women endured chronic ill health.

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Many women, whether healthy or ill, turned to alternative medicine. Those who disagreed with the advice of professional physicians could consult individuals who practiced medicine without holding a medical degree. Some tried water cures, animal magnetism, Sylvester Graham’s diet, and other experimental treatments. Still other women became interested in the new field of preventive medicine, hoping that a moderate diet, fresh air, rest, exercise, and regular baths would prevent them from falling ill. Women pooled medical information by joining ladies’ physiological societies (clubs that discussed health issues) and introducing medical columns in women’s magazines. Women’s entry into MEDICINE in the mid-nineteenth century improved the health care available to women. For the first time, women could receive medical treatment from academically trained physicians of their own sex. Although women physicians were few in number, their emphasis on preventive medicine, exercise, and personal cleanliness gradually improved American women’s state of health. Women physicians also did pioneering work in GYNECOLOGY and helped relieve the suffering of women who contracted pelvic disease and other gynecological disorders. See also: Diseases.

 HISPANIC FAMILY LIFE

With the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mexican American War came to an end and almost one-third of prewar Mexico became United States territory. This increase included 75,000 Spanish-speaking Mexicans and 150,000 Native Americans, all of whom had to make the transition from Mexican to American citizenship. This transformation did not come easily, in part because of Anglo-American’s assumptions and stereotypes about Mexican people as “lazy” and “ignorant.” These attitudes helped to justify a pattern of land dispossession, and a farm tenant system that eventually clustered large numbers of Hispanics in low-paying, unskilled jobs. Hispanic women carried the double burden of race and gender discrimination, while the majority culture created myths that represented women of Mexican descent as morally lax and unclean. In reality Hispanic women played a significant role in their family economies. Given the precarious economic position of many Hispanics in the American Southwest,

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women’s work, both inside and outside the home, provided a vital means of survival. To support their families Hispanic women ran boarding houses, did agricultural and industrial work, tended gardens and livestock, ran laundry services, and performed a number of other types of labor. In part as a response to women’s important economic contributions to the family, and unlike their nineteenth-century Anglo counterparts, Hispanic couples shared PROPERTY RIGHTS. Sons and daughters also inherited equally. Because Hispanic men generally willed their property to their wives, rather than sons (as was the Anglo-American custom), Southwestern towns often had a number of relatively powerful widows who were heads of households or businesses. The presence of property-owning, relatively powerful women undermined strict divisions of labor according to gender. Child rearing did not always fall solely on Hispanic women. The whole family, father, mother, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathers, all took responsibility for the children. Clearly Hispanic families’ adherence to traditional gender roles varied from family to family, dependent upon time, region, class, and generation. Nonetheless, many nineteenth-century Hispanic families were far less traditional and patriarchal than Anglo myths driven by ethnic and religious stereotypes allow. Though many nineteenthcentury Hispanics were CATHOLIC, for example, a significant minority of them converted to Protestantism in the late nineteenth-century, largely under the guidance of male and female Protestant missionaries. FURTHER READING

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940. New York: Oxford Press University Press, 1987. Martin, Patricia Preciado. Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992.

HOME PROTECTION  BALLOT The argument that women should receive the right to vote in order to defend their homes from alcohol and male abuse. It was first suggested by political strategist and TEMPERANCE reformer FRANCES WILLARD in the 1880s. Recognizing that many nineteenth-century women were tentative

about fighting for voting rights, Willard presented suffrage as a spiritual duty by emphasizing domestic and temperance issues. In this way, she turned suffrage into an extension of women’s traditional domestic roles rather than as a challenge to those roles. Women rallied to Willard’s idea; in 1879, for example, more than 180,000 Illinois residents signed a petition advocating home protection. The WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION officially adopted home protection as part of its platform in 1880, and in 1881, Willard and other prohibitionists met at the Lake Bluff Convocation in Chicago to form a new political party called the “Home Protection Party.” This new party rivaled the Democratic and Republican parties over the next ten years and many of its members joined the Populist Party in the 1890s.

 HOMESTEAD ACT

Law that enabled both men and women to acquire land in the American West. Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862 to ease overcrowding in the East and to help small farmers acquire low-cost land. Under the law, a U.S. citizen who was the head of a family and 21 years old—a “homesteader”—could acquire 160 acres of unoccupied land for a small fee. The person had to live on the land for at least six months each year for five years and cultivate and improve the land. After six months of residence, the person could buy the land for only $1.25 per acre. By 1900, almost 400,000 individuals and families had filed for land under the act, which expired in 1976. The Homestead Act made it possible for many women to acquire land. These women, often middle class or poor, had previously not been able to save enough money to buy land and become self-sufficient. But under the act, many widowed, unmarried, and divorced women acquired land as the heads of households. A good example of an independent woman who benefited from the act was Adeline Hornbek, a single mother of four who defied stereotypes to become a prosperous rancher in Colorado’s Florissant Valley.

 HOUSEWORK

The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION profoundly affected American households and housework. Ready-made cloth eliminated the need for home

HULL HOUSE

spinning and weaving; kerosene and gas replaced the woodpile; and commercial markets meant households no longer had to make their own butter, raise and butcher animals, or plant large gardens. This transition had a tremendous impact on women’s domestic work, changing the tenor of both urban and rural women’s lives. While historians once suggested that this shift created leisure space in middle-class women’s lives, it now appears this was not at all the case. While the kind of housework women did changed, the amount of labor may even have increased. The advent of commercial wheat flour, for example, changed the kind of bread women made in their homes. Cornmeal and other coarse ground grains made fairly simple “quick” breads, while fine white flour had to be made into a more labor-intensive leavened bread. Carpets, which were taken up once or twice a year and taken outdoors and beaten clean, now had to be vacuumed several times a week. Early models of the vacuum cleaner had to be hand-pumped. So while a number of technological innovations made particular household tasks easier, standards for the housework became higher as the nineteenth century progressed. The separation of male and female spheres, caused in part by industrialization, also meant that housework became increasingly defined as women’s work, rather than as a shared household obligation. The number of domestic servants a household might employ also declined in the nineteenth century, leaving many women solely responsible for duties that had once been shared. Lastly, though housework was both a product of the Industrial Revolution and a kind of industrial labor, it bore one striking difference from other industrial work: most of the women who did housework did not get paid. Housework required a woman be a “Jane-of-alltrades,” had no defined off time, became increasingly exacting and arduous, and was done in isolation. See also: Domestic Arts; “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7.

 HOWE, JULIA WARD

(1819–1910) Poet, social reformer, and author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Julia Ward was born in New York City on May 27, 1819. She received a private education and, after marrying Samuel

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Gridley Howe in 1843, lived primarily in Boston, Massachusetts. Throughout her career she was a tireless worker for social reform, and she and her husband edited an antislavery newspaper, The Commonwealth. Howe was also a poet, but today she is remembered for only one poem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She wrote it in 1862 after visiting an army camp near Washington, D.C. There she heard a group of soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body,” the tune to which “The Battle Hymn” is sung. The minister who accompanied her on the visit urged her to write a poem to fit the melody. The words came to her all at once. She sold the poem to the Atlantic Monthly magazine for four dollars, and it was published in February 1862. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” quickly became a Union anthem during the CIVIL WAR. After the Civil War, Howe was moved by the plight of many war widows, who were left impoverished by their husbands’ deaths in the war, so she wrote and lectured to promote equal educational, professional, and business opportunities for women and to liberate women from stifling traditional roles. With LUCY STONE and others, she founded the New England Women’s Suffrage Association in 1868. This organization in 1869 became the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION, and she fought for women’s rights. She was also an advocate of international peace. In 1891, she founded the American Friends of Russian Freedom, and in 1894, the United Friends of Armenia. In 1907, she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she received three honorary doctorates. Howe died in Newport, Rhode Island, on October 17, 1910.

 HULL HOUSE

The most important and influential settlement house during the Progressive Era. Hull House was founded in Chicago in 1889 by JANE ADDAMS and ELLEN GATES STARR. While traveling in England several years earlier, Addams had visited the Toynbee Hall social settlement house in London. Impressed by the social settlement movement—the effort to provide basic social services, health care, education, and self-help to impoverished urban residents—Addams decided to open one in Chicago. Initially, Hull House consisted of a mansion on Halstead Street donated by retired businessman Charles

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“It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. . . . But I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself.” —Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

I

G. Hull. Later, Addams and her associates added 12 more buildings, a playground, and a summer camp located in Wisconsin. Hull House proved an immediate and lasting success. Eschewing the judgmental attitudes of traditional social workers, the women and men who resided and worked at Hull House focused on aiding the poor immigrants who lived in the neighborhood and made a point of respecting their cultures. Services such as literacy classes, day care, adult education, homemaking courses, and health care greatly aided Chicago’s heterogeneous and impoverished immigrants. Hull House also served as a vital incubator for social and political reform and played a key role in securing passage of progressive legislation, such as the eight-hour workday for women and child labor legislation.

ILLINOIS WOMEN’S  ALLIANCE

IMMIGRATION AND  NATURALIZATION

In 1888 over 30 women’s organizations came together to form the Illinois Women’s Alliance (IWA). The IWA created a unique association of working- and middle-class women, all of whom believed PROTECTIVE LABOR LAWS for women and children should be their common goal. Accordingly, members worked for the passage of laws that limited how long women and children should work, as well as laws that improved working conditions and wages. In 1892 the well-known Chicago settlement house, HULL HOUSE, joined with the IWA. From this association Florence Kelly, Hull House’s director, became the first state factory inspector in Illinois. The IWA, Hull House, and the GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS (GFWC) worked successfully together to gain passage in 1892 of an Illinois law that required women and children work no more than eight hours a day. Unfortunately, after their 1892 successes the IWA fragmented and lost its effectiveness, in part because of the growing gap between middle- and working-class women. Nonetheless, both the IWA and the GFWC illustrated the enormous potential of women’s cooperative endeavors in the late nineteenth century.

See: “IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION,” p. 36.

 INDIAN REMOVAL

U.S. government policy in the nineteenth century to move Native American tribes west of the Mississippi River. As early as the Jeffersonian Era in the early 1800s, the U.S. government realized that Native Americans occupied valuable land and stood in the way of white settlement. Many tribes in the Midwest departed with little resistance; however, others, especially the “Five Civilized Tribes” living in the Southeast, refused to relocate. The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles were known by this name because they had adopted many practices that white Americans considered civilized. Many Native American societies, including those of the Five Civilized Tribes, were matrilineal, which meant that women held a great deal of power within the tribe. Women were in charge of working the land, healing, trade, education, and sometimes in choosing men to hold leadership positions within the tribe. Property rights were also matrilineal. Because women were farmers and gatherers and played the most significant

INDIAN RIGHTS MOVEMENTS

role in subsistence, inheritance determined that land was transferred from mother to daughter. Native American women lost power within their tribes once the Native Americans ceased to be hunting and gathering societies. Tribes became acculturated into agricultural societies and missionaries promoted “proper” sexual division of labor among the Native Americans. Therefore, men took the farming work out of the women’s hands and Native American women were stripped of their traditional roles and lost their base of power within the tribe. Missionaries taught Native American women to complete domestic tasks as prescribed by the Victorian feminine ideal; however, such assimilation to white culture meant that a Native American woman no longer held a meaningful position among her people. By 1900, Native Americans occupied only small reservations in the West and their culture was almost completely destroyed.

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TRAILBLAZERS Schoolteacher Mary Lucinda Bonney and writer Amelia Stone Quinton founded the Women’s National Indian Association, the first national Native American reform group, in 1879, as a response to governmental Native American policies. Bonney and Quinton began by circulating articles such as Quinton’s An Earnest Petition Needed, which detailed the forced removal of the Five Civilized Tribes to Indian Territory. They also petitioned President Rutherford B. Hayes and Congress to prevent white encroachment of Native American territories and to uphold existing treaties. In her articles and lectures, Quinton maintained that education, U.S. citizenship, and legal protection for the Native Americans under U.S. law would rescue them from oppression. She also criticized the reservation system, arguing that it hindered the civilization of Native Americans. Bonney served as president of the WNIA until her death in 1900. As WNIA leaders, she and Quinton initiated policies that were endorsed by other Native American rights groups and eventually adopted by the government, most notably the DAWES ACT of 1887, which provided land allotments to Native Americans.

FURTHER READING

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970. Marks, Paula Mitchell. In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998.

INDIAN RIGHTS  MOVEMENT Movement to promote the civil and political rights of Native Americans. Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton founded the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), a group of middle- and upper-class women dedicated to the improvement of Native American life, in 1879. The WNIA opposed the white encroachment of Indian Territory in violation of federal treaties, and repeatedly petitioned Congress to put a stop to it. In 1882, the WNIA began working in conjunction with Herbert Welsh’s newly founded Indian Rights Association (IRA). As the IRA lobbied for Native American rights, the WNIA turned its

focus toward the “civilization” of Native Americans. In addition to promoting Christianity among the tribes, WNIA missionaries taught Native American women the “proper” homemaking skills of the nineteenth-century Victorian woman according the Christian ideas of motherhood and the woman’s central role in the home. Welsh served as a buffer between the Native Americans, their agents, and settlers throughout his 22 years as head of the IRA. He encouraged the government to appropriate more funds for Native Americans and fought against illicit use of natural resources taken from tribal lands. He also argued for on-reservation schooling taught by Native American teachers, as opposed to government-regulated Native American schools such as the CARLISLE SCHOOL. Although the intent of the IRA and WNIA was to advocate Native American rights, these organizations seemed to be more concerned with Native American reform. Welsh and Quinton argued that Native Americans could not survive in a predominantly white society and must assimilate to survive. As with much of Native American culture, they dismissed Native American spirituality and encouraged Native Americans to con-

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vert to Christianity. In addition, the IRA and WNIA supported the DAWES ACT of 1887, which provided allotments of reservation land to Native American individuals and families. FURTHER READING

Hagan, William T. The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882–1904. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. Mathes, Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and her Indian Reform Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN  HOME Founded in March 1886, by Angie Newman, the Industrial Christian Home Association of Salt Lake City, Utah, was a RESCUE HOME for polygamous MORMON wives. The association was made up of Protestant women and members of the defunct Ladies Anti-Polygamy Society who believed that Mormon polygamy was immoral and victimized women. Newman successfully applied to the federal government for funding to organize a rescue home for Mormon women who wished to escape polygamy. Because government officials would not allow women to financially control the

home, Congress appointed an all-male Board of Control to oversee the women who ran the rescue home. Disputes between the male board and female workers eventually caused organizational problems for the rescue home, a situation exacerbated by Mormon efforts to discredit the entire enterprise. The Industrial Christian Home opened its doors in December 1886, and 154 women and children applied for admittance during the first nine months. The board refused most of these applicants admission, reasoning that first wives, children of polygamists, and women in monogamous relationships would not be helped by the home. Mission women restricted their successful applicants to women whose marriages they considered illegal and immoral because they were second or third wives. In 1888–1889, Congress approved funding for an elaborate new home, which, once built, never had enough residents to fill its many rooms. The home closed its doors in 1893, a failure and an object lesson in the vast tensions between male and female missionaries.

 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The transition to a factory-based economy that spread during the nineteenth century in the

The Industrial Revolution contributed to the mechanization of factory work, and many women worked long hours in poor conditions in the factories.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

United States. Major changes leading to the Industrial Revolution included the invention of machinery to use in place of manual labor, the creation of the factory system, and the rising propensity for people to purchase premade material goods rather than creating their own. The Industrial Revolution began in eighteenth-century England. Two men are credited with bringing manufacturing to the United States. The first is Samuel Slater, a British mill manager who came to the United States in 1789 to build a spinning mill in Rhode Island. Because he was not allowed to export plans from Britain, he built his machines from memory. When the first American cotton-spinning mill was opened in Pawtucket in December 1790, nine children under the age of 12 were the first mill workers. The Pawtucket mill was among the first in the TEXTILE INDUSTRY to use the employment of women and children, who worked for less money than men did. Also, children were small and agile and could move easily among the machinery. It is important to understand that the early-nineteenth-century attitude about CHILDHOOD differed from the twentieth-century notion that childhood is a time for emotional growth and education. Children were expected to work, especially in poor families. The mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts, became a center of industry where many women came to work in the 1820s to 1840s. Factories in Lowell employed mostly single, white, nativeborn women from MIDDLE-CLASS New England farm families. These women were paid in cash as opposed to “wage credit” (which meant that workers could only purchase items at the place where they worked). The LOWELL MILL WORKERS were the first large group of women to work together outside the home. It did not take long for the manufacturing industry to spread from New England to the Midwestern states. With the creation of the high-pressure steam engine, steamboats and locomotives made the transport of goods easier than ever before. Also, an immense volume of goods could be transported at once. In addition to improved transportation, better machinery was created. Metal machinery replaced wooden counterparts, and Eli Whitney’s creation of standardized, interchangeable parts made working the machines faster and easier. Major social changes accompanied the technological and economic ones caused by the Industrial Revolution. Foremost were the results of

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urbanization, the mass exodus from the rural areas of the country to the larger cities. Many women moved to urban areas in hopes of getting factory jobs, which were open to unskilled, uneducated workers. Industrialization also caused changes in class structure. Especially for upper- and middle-class families, the standard of living improved because a wider variety of manufactured goods were available at lower prices than ever before. Also, as corporations grew larger, there was an increase in the number of white-collar jobs available to young women who could work at semiskilled jobs, such as clerical work. Women who had once been members of the WORKING CLASS could earn better wages working for corporations than they could earn in the factories. Nevertheless, the gap between the “lady of leisure” and the working-class woman grew. Upper-class women required other women— seamstresses, DOMESTIC SERVANTS, and cooks—to maintain their elite lifestyles. In addition, the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT was largely oriented toward the middle and upper classes. Efforts to aid working women often produced mixed results. For example, in 1869 when SUSAN B. ANTHONY encouraged working-class women to train as stenographers by taking the jobs of striking male printers, the union labeled the women scabs (strike breakers). This worsened the situation of those working-class women who were subsequently blacklisted by union employers. Also contributing to the widening gap between the classes was the rise of big business in the United States. Industrialization began with competition between small corporations, but eventually corporate power became concentrated in the hands of a few dominant companies. Big-business owners could be oppressive to their employees by paying low wages and preventing unionization. Although the Industrial Revolution was instrumental in the economic and technological progress of the United States, it did not come without its problems. People were forced to work long hours, factories were dangerous and unhealthy environments, and cities became overpopulated and dirty. The Industrial Revolution marks one of the major transitions in human history.

See also: Factories and Factory Workers; Family Wage System; Ladies’ Industrial Association.

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FURTHER READING

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, eds. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History from 1600 to Present. New York: Norton, 1995. Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.

 INFANCY

The time between birth and one year of age. The nineteenth-century reorganization of class structure during the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION affected the interaction between a mother and her baby. The elite Victorian woman often hired a nanny to nurse and care for her infant. This allowed her to focus on her social duties and was also sign of high social status. WORKING-CLASS women, however, were forced back to work by economic necessity after giving birth. Since mothers from disadvantaged classes could not afford to hire DOMESTIC SERVANTS, their newborns were often left under the care of an older daughter. The entry of women into the workplace caused separation between mothers and infants further. In 1850, 3 percent of the U.S. population was under one year old, yet that small fraction accounted for 17 percent of the country’s deaths. Most deaths, 26 percent, were caused by malformations at birth; coming in second at 24 percent were deaths caused by gastrointestinal diseases. When babies fell ill, the first advice given was often to take the baby off milk and substitute a sugar solution or animal broth, because milk was often irritating to the bowel. Thus, gastrointestinal diseases could have been caused largely by contaminated cow’s milk. Numbers show that infants who were breastfed were four times more likely to survive infancy than babies who were not breastfed. Of course, this left orphans and children with working mothers at a great disadvantage. Therefore, in 1899, Dr. Henry Koplik opened the first infant milk dispensary in New York City. Baby milk was specially formulated for nutrition and was less susceptible to contamination. See also: Childbirth and Pregnancy; Midwifery.

 INSANITY

Generally used term for mental illness in the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, many physicians believed that insanity was caused

Many women were sent to insane asylums because they were believed to be suffering from “brain strain,” a mental condition of women who “thought too much.”

by physical brain damage. Despite autopsies that revealed otherwise, doctors thought that the mentally ill had organic lesions on their brains. Insanity was treated as a physical disease. In 1845, physicians in New York revealed a new theory: Society caused insanity. The positive correlation between the rise of urbanization and number of reported insanity cases led to the belief that progress was unhealthy and caused social and mental ills. Because society “caused” insanity, physicians believed that if the patient were removed from society the patient would be easily cured. The notion of isolation as a cure led to the development of the insane asylum. Before 1810, there were only a few asylums in the United States. The insane were housed with family members or in poorhouses, or placed in jails. By 1860, 28 of the 33 states had state mental institutions. Asylums were built in rural areas where patients could be free from the social ills believed to have caused their insanity. “Moral treatment,” introduced in the 1840s and advocated by reformer DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX, strove to create an environment that corrected the deficiencies of society with a disciplined routine of daily activities. Initially, medical superintendents (the nineteenth-century term for the psychiatrists who ran the asylums) reported 100 percent recovery rates. However, by the end of the 1840s, the number of chronic inmates increased and overcrowding became a problem. Many patients who were brought to the asylum for minor cases of mental illness only grew more ill. In 1870, it became clear

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that the optimism of moral treatment WOMEN’S FIRSTS advocates was unfounded and that mental illness was not easily cured. After the last member of her family died, an impoverished Whereas the asylum had once been a Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1903) emigrated from Ireland to place where patients were sent at the Montreal, Canada, in 1844. In need of money, she found emfirst sign of mental illness, by 1870 the asylum had become a last resort. ployment writing for Canadian journals. Her primary audiThe asylums had proven inadequate ence was the Irish Catholic market. Within a few years, she for curing and became a place for the was writing and translating novels. incurable. Sadlier was married in 1846. Her husband, James, was the Women were often sent to asyMontreal branch manager of the New York Catholic Publishlums because they did not meet the ing House D. J. Sadlier and Company. The couple moved to nineteenth-century standard of New York in 1860. Although she had her own career and six “true womanhood.” True womanchildren to care for, Sadlier edited her husband’s magazine hood meant that a woman was a and produced 60 books, including domestic novels (novels faithful wife, a good mother, and a about women’s issues) and historical romances. pious servant; therefore, failing to Bessy Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America (1861) was adequately fulfill traditional womSadlier’s most notable domestic novel. Her purpose in writing anly roles could cause insanity. the novel was to give Irish American girls insight about the Women who “thought too much” nature of domestic servitude, the primary occupation of ninewere believed to be subject to “brain teenth-century female Irish immigrants in the United States. strain,” a mental condition that did Bessy Conway highlighted the chaos and corruption of the not affect men, who were presumcities, and the forgotten spirituality. Through such domestic ably innately capable of engaging in novels, Sadlier influenced Irish girls to retain their Old World intellectual work. In addition, docvirtues and to continue practicing the Roman Catholic relitors asserted—without scientific gion despite the corruption of the American cities. proof—that unfeminine activities In 1895, Notre Dame University awarded Sadlier the caused uterine derangement, which Laetare Medal for Literature. In 1902, she received a blessing in turn caused mental illness. Befrom Pope Leo XIII for her service to the Catholic Church. cause the female organs were beHowever, after her death, much of her work was forgotten. lieved to cause insanity, women were often subjected to “cures” such as electrical stimulation of the uterus, clitoral cauterization, and prescribed weight gain to keep the ovaries from slipping. Another treatment, known as the “rest hardship. Self-supporting Irish women who cure,” required women to rest in bed for periods as worked as DOMESTIC SERVANTS found that few long as six weeks to two months. families could afford maids. Furthermore, the absence of industrial development in Ireland prohibited women from finding factory jobs. The Irish arrived in the United States only to IRISH IMMIGRANTS find little improvement in their situation. PrejuThe first large wave of immigrants in the United States in the nineteenth century. In the 1800s dice against Irish Americans was rampant, often Ireland was an agrarian country that had suf- as pervasive as that against African Americans. fered many crop failures and was economically The Irish were stereotyped as lazy, drunken, and impoverished. During the Potato Famine of ignorant, only “a step above blacks.” In fact, an 1845–1849, one million Irish people either emi- 1830 job ad in the New York Courier and Enquirer grated or died of starvation and disease. Many read, “No Blacks or Irish need apply.” Furtheryoung and impoverished women in Ireland had more, as CATHOLICS in a predominantly Proteslittle opportunity for either marriage or employ- tant society, the Irish were victims of religious ment. Poor farmers were either evicted or hesi- persecution. Many native-born Americans tant to divide their land among heirs. Marriage thought the Irish bore too many children and without possession of land was an economic feared that Catholics would take over the United



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States. Because of discrimination and intolerance, the Irish often stayed in their own neighborhoods and ran their own schools. Most nineteenth-century Irish Americans were poor and lived in dirty and dilapidated TENEMENTS in urban areas such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Irish-American households were predominantly headed by women for three major reasons. First, more Irish women than men emigrated to the United States. Second, many Irish men were unskilled and uneducated, so their only employment option was to do the heavy labor that other Americans found undesirable. Because of the high risk of industrial accidents, many Irish women were widowed. And third, there was a higher rate of male desertion among Irish households than among other ethnic groups. Some men, unable to find work, left to seek employment in other cities. Others left because of marital discord. Single Irish women often worked as DOMESTIC SERVANTS. In fact, Irish women dominated the domestic workforce, which was considered undesirable labor by native-born Americans who thought it demeaning and associated it with “the

uneducated Irish.” However, Irish servant girls believed their position was one of strength. Because no one else would do the work, they were needed and found employment opportunities more easily than Irish men. By 1900, 60 percent of all Irish-born women in the United States had worked as domestic servants. Other Irish women found jobs in textile mills, NURSING, TEACHING, and stenography. From 1820 to 1900, nearly 3.9 million people from Ireland emigrated to the United States, second only to immigrants from Germany. Among the nineteenth-century Irish Americans who made a significant impact in U.S. history are Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a political reformer; MARY HARRIS “MOTHER” JONES, a labor leader; and MARY KENNEY O’SULLIVAN, an education labor leader. FURTHER READING

Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

J

JACKSON, HELEN MARIA  FISKE HUNT

(1830–1885) An author and defender of the rights of Native Americans. Helen Maria Fiske was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on October 15, 1830. Her father was a professor of Latin and Greek at Amherst College, and her mother was a writer. Her father arranged for Helen to have a formal education at the Ipswich Female Seminary in Massachusetts and the Abbott Institute in New York City. In 1852, Fiske married Edward Bissell Hunt, a captain in the U.S. Army. Their marriage was marred by tragedy. Their first child died of a brain disease while still an infant. Hunt himself died during the CIVIL WAR, while experimenting with submarines. Another child died of diphtheria in 1865. Helen Hunt eventually moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where she met Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a soldier and author, who encouraged her to write. In 1870, she published

Verses. Suffering from a respiratory infection, Hunt moved to a drier climate in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There in 1875 she met and married a banker, William Sharpless Jackson. In 1879, Jackson visited Boston and attended a lecture by Chief Standing Bear. He described the effects of the federal government’s decision to force his people, the Ponca Indians, off their reservation in Nebraska. Jackson was so moved by his words, that she decided to devote herself to the cause of the Native Americans. In 1881, Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which detailed the dishonest treatment of the Native Americans by federal officials. Jackson specifically focused on the poor management of Indian reservations, as well as the treaties that the U.S. government had broken with the Native Americans. She sent a copy of the book to every member of Congress. Inside she wrote, “Look upon your hands: They are stained with the blood of your relations.” In addition to the book,

JACOBS, FR ANCES WISEBART

Jackson circulated petitions to change governmental policies and wrote letters to newspapers to awaken the public to the unfair treatment that Native Americans were receiving. These efforts were largely unsuccessful. In 1882, President Chester Arthur appointed Jackson as a special commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first woman to be named to this position. In 1884, Jackson wrote another book about Native Americans. Titled Ramona, this novel described the plight of the mission Native Americans in California, where Jackson had lived in the early 1870s. Although considered a romantic rather than a strictly accurate picture, the book was a great literary success, and it was often compared to HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jackson’s novel is credited with passage of the DAWES ACT in 1887. Jackson suffered a leg fracture in 1884, from which she never fully recovered. Nevertheless, she returned to California. There she was diagnosed with cancer and died on August 12, 1885.

 JACKSON, REBECCA COX

(1795–1871) Religious leader. Rebecca Cox’s early life is sketchy. She was born in 1795, the child of a free African-American family. After her mother’s death, when Rebecca was 13, she went to live with her brother Joseph Cox, a Methodist minister. In 1830, following her marriage to Samuel Jackson, she experienced a religious conversion. She began to hear an inner voice from God directing her to become a preacher. At first religious leaders criticized Jackson for not joining an organized religion. But when a Methodist bishop attended one of her revival meetings, he said, “If ever the Holy Ghost was in any place, it was in that meeting. Let her alone.” Jackson traveled widely, bringing the word of God to religious gatherings. Eventually, she joined the Shakers, a religious community in Watervliet, New York. But after four years, she left the community because it did not, in her opinion, make enough effort to attract African Americans. Eventually, Jackson established a group of African American Shakers in Philadelphia. She died in 1871, but the Shaker community Jackson had founded continued for many years. Jackson exemplifies the role that women played in spreading religious teachings during the nineteenth century.

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JACOBI, MARY CORINNA  PUTNAM

(1842–1906) Physician. Mary Corinna Putnam was born to an American family living in London, England, on August 31, 1842. Six years later, the family returned home to the United States and settled in New York. Putnam was already interested in science, which inclined her to attend the New York College of Pharmacy. She graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1864. At that time, there were very few women doctors. After traveling to Paris for additional medical training, Putnam returned to the United States in 1871, began practicing medicine and TEACHING at the WOMAN’S MEDICAL COLLEGE OF THE NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN. A year later she founded the Association for the Advancement of the Medical Education of Women, to provide new opportunities for women to enter the medical profession. In 1873, Putnam married Abraham Jacobi, a leading pediatrician. Over the next two decades, she was involved with pediatric medicine, opening a children’s ward at the New York Infirmary in 1886. Jacobi also published numerous books, including Essays on Hysteria, Brain-Tumor, and Some Other Cases of Nervous Disease in 1888. She died on June 10, 1906.

JACOBS, FRANCES  WISEBART

(1843–1892) Civic leader. Frances Wisebart was born to a Jewish family in Kentucky in 1843. At 22, following her marriage, she moved to Colorado, eventually settling in Denver in 1874. Jacobs was so appalled at the poverty and the amount of homelessness she saw there that she joined the Hebrew Benevolent Ladies Aid Society to help the poor. She also helped establish the Ladies’ Relief Society during the 1870s. Under her leadership, the society helped to set up day care centers and homeless shelters in Denver. In 1887, Jacobs led an effort to establish the Charity Organization Society, a group of charities that worked together to raise and distribute funds. This group eventually became the United Way, a major national charitable organization that still exists today. The United Way raises money from corporations and other organizations and distributes it to charities across the United States. Jacobs also organized the creation of the first free kindergarten in Denver and established a medical

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facility which would become the National Jewish Hospital for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine. At 49, Jacobs died of pneumonia.

 JACOBS, HARRIET ANN

(1813–1897) Author of a slave narrative and an abolitionist. Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. Her mother Delilah was owned by John Horniblow, who ran a saloon, and her father by Dr. Andrew Knox. When Jacobs was only six years old, her mother died and she was reared by her grandmother. In 1825, she was sold to Dr. James Norcom. Jacobs later described her treatment by Norcom in her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, first published in 1861. She wrote under the pseudonym Linda Brent, to protect her identity. “My master met me at every turn,” she wrote, “reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him.” To protect herself from Norcom, Jacobs became the lover of another white man and bore him two children. She reasoned that this man would protect her if Norcom continued his advances. In 1835, Jacobs escaped from Norcom’s plantation and hid at her grandmother’s home in the crawl space. Jacobs was finally helped by friends to flee to the north, where her children eventually joined her. Jacobs lived in New York City, where she worked as a nursemaid and started writing her autobiography. Parts of it were published in the New York Tribune in 1853. When the complete work finally was published in 1861, many people be-

“In slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child . . . will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curese. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.” —Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (186l)

lieved the author was white. During the twentieth century, research by scholars revealed that Jacobs was the true author. Jacobs had changed the names of the characters in the book, which contributed to the belief that the book was fiction. During the CIVIL WAR, Jacobs served as a nurse. When the EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION freeing the slaves was issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, Jacobs wrote Child, “I have lived to hear the Proclamation of Freedom for my suffering people. All my wrongs are forgiven. I am more than repaid for all I have endured.” Jacobs moved to Washington, D.C., where she died on March 7, 1897. Only after her death, was her autobiography recognized as a true story written by a former slave.

 JEWETT, HELEN

(1813–1836) Prostitute. Helen Jewett, whose real name was Dorcas Doyen, was born in Maine, the child of working-class parents. After receiving a brief education, she became a servant in the home of a judge. Because of an affair with a young man, Doyen lost her “reputation” and was forced to leave the household of her employer. She went to New York City to escape her past and earn a living. Changing her name to Helen Jewett, she became a prostitute. New York had an estimated 10,000 prostitutes during the 1830s when Jewett was plying her trade. One of Jewett’s customers was Richard Robinson. The son of a well-to-do Connecticut family, Robinson had moved to New York City to become a clerk. At first his relationship with Jewett seemed very friendly, and the two lovers exchanged warm letters. Gradually, the relationship soured and became violent. Early on April 10, 1836, Jewett was bludgeoned to death with an ax, and her bed was set on fire. Robinson was the most likely suspect, and he had been seen at the brothel on the night of the murder. But his lawyer convincingly argued that anyone from such an upstanding family could not have committed so terrible a crime. Meanwhile Jewett was portrayed as a cynical temptress who corrupted men. Robinson was acquitted of the murder. The death of Jewett was one of the first major murder cases to be covered by the newspapers. The press turned it into a moral tale about an upstanding young man lured into sin by a wily woman, who received a just punishment.

JOHNSON, ELIZA McCARDLE

 JEWETT, SARAH ORNE

(1849–1909) Regional author. Sarah Orne Jewett was born on September 3, 1849, in South Berwick, Maine. As a child she was sickly and attended school irregularly, so her formal education took place largely at home. But her father was the local physician, and the most important part of her education took place as she accompanied him on his rounds to nearby farms and villages. In this way she learned about local people and absorbed their manners, beliefs, and speech patterns. Jewett decided that she wanted to become a writer after reading a collection of short stories about New England life by HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. She published her first story at age 18, but her break came in 1869 when one of her stories was accepted by the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine. In the years that followed she also published in Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines. In 1877, she published her first collection of stories, Deephaven. Her 1886 collection, A White Heron and Other Stories, contained her most famous story, “A White Heron.” By the end of her career she had published 20 volumes of short stories, including her most respected volume, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). She also wrote novels, poems, and children’s books. Her work consistently celebrates the simple values of rural and small-town life. In 1902 Jewett suffered a disabling accident, ending her writing career. She died in South Berwick on June 24, 1909.



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Accustomed in Europe to working in an agricultural family economy, many female Jewish immigrants in America worked in factories, took in piece work or ran their homes as boarding houses. Radical young Jewish garment workers made up a new generation of female workers. Clara Lemlich, a Russian Jew, led thousands of women in the International Lades Garment Workers Union on strike in 1906, capitalizing on the rising worker discontent of the late nineteenth century. Russian Jews made up 55 percent of workers in the garment trade, but made up ninety percent of the strikers. However, the solidarity generated by Jewish women did not translate across ethnic borders and the factory owners defeated the “Uprising of the Thirty Thousand.” Nonetheless, factory owners and union organizers alike came to understand female Jewish workers would lead the labor reform movements of the twentieth century. Jewish women created a number of reform associations and cultural clubs near the end of the nineteenth century. These clubs often emphasized the long history of Jewish participation in American history as committed Jews with their own set of moral values. Their voluntary contributions to woman suffrage, unionization of female worker and civil rights agitation and many other reforms often combined the radical and Jewish components of women’s public lives. “Sisterhoods” of Jews also developed to serve their congregations in a number of ways. Female Jewish activism has both complemented and contrasted to Protestant women’s moral reform associations. FURTHER READING

JEWISH AMERICANS

Though historically Judaism has been patriarchal, Jewish women have made significant contributions to American life. American Jewish women may be found in all three branches of the religion: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, although women in the latter group enjoy the greatest gender equality of the three. Many Jewish women regard themselves as culturally Jewish, rather than religiously Jewish. Though Jews were among the very early American colonists most American Jews came to this country in the late nineteenthcentury. They came from eastern Europe and Russia, primarily in family groups, driven across the ocean by government persecution, the expansion of military drafts, and changing agricultural practices.

Tax, Meredith. “The Uprising of the Thirty Thousand.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994.

JOHNSON, ELIZA  M CARDLE

C (1810–1876) First lady of the United States and wife of Andrew Johnson, seventeenth president. Eliza McCardle was born in Leesburg, Tennessee, on October 4, 1810. In 1826, her father, a shoemaker, moved his family to Greeneville, Tennessee. There Eliza met Andrew Johnson, a tailor, whom she married on May 17, 1827. Johnson taught her husband how to write and master spelling as well as basic arithmetic. The couple had five children—Martha, Charles,

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JONES, MARY HARRIS

“MOTHER”

Mary, Robert, and Andrew, Jr. Andrew Johnson eventually became a politician who served as a state legislator, governor, and U.S. Senator. In 1864, he was elected vice president of the United States and became president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Mrs. Johnson made few public appearances because of poor health, preferring to let her daughter Martha handle the social obligations of first lady. Johnson’s term in office was filled with controversy. He was impeached in 1868. When he was acquitted, his wife said, “I knew he’d be acquitted; I knew it.” In 1869, the Johnsons returned to Greenville, Tennessee. Eliza Johnson died on January 15, 1876.

JONES, MARY HARRIS  “MOTHER”

(c. 1830–1930) Labor leader and union organizer. Mary Harris was born about 1830 outside of Cork, Ireland. Her family was involved in the movement for Irish independence from England. Her father, a laborer, had to flee to Canada with his family to escape arrest for his part in the Irish rebellion. Mary Harris grew up in Toronto, Canada, where she was educated in public schools and trained to be a teacher. She moved to the United States and in 1861 married George Jones, an iron molder. They settled in Tennessee where they had four children. In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic took the lives of Jones’s husband and all four of her children. Jones moved to Chicago where she opened a dressmaking shop and began sewing for wealthy women. But she was concerned about the plight of people who were poorer and couldn’t support themselves. As she put it, “Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses . . . I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches jobless and hungry.” In 1871, Jones’s house and her dressmaking shop were destroyed in the great Chicago fire. While helping victims of the fire, she also attended a meeting of the KNIGHTS OF LABOR, a labor union. Jones immediately realized that unions were dedicating themselves to improving the lives of American workers. Most workers spent long hours in factories and mines for very little pay. Unions were trying to shorten work hours and improve wages. As she began her union work, Jones was immediately nicknamed “mother” not only because

Mother Jones was an early leader of the labor movement. Her motto was “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

of her age, she was about 47, but also because of her efforts to lead other union organizers. In 1877, she joined the railroad workers strike in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 20 strikers were killed by the state militia. This was the beginning of her organizing efforts, which would continue for more than 50 years. In 1890, Jones became an organizer for the United Mine Workers union. In 1900, she led a march of miners’ wives in Pennsylvania. Her fiery leadership persuaded the miners to strike, and the mine owners finally gave in to their demands for higher wages. Three years later Jones led a brigade of children from the textile mills of Pennsylvania to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt. She believed that children might stir the heart of the president and force him to act in support of the mill workers. From this march she went south to Alabama and Georgia where she tried to improve the working conditions of children in the mills.

JOURNALISM

Jones was arrested many times because of her radical speeches. In 1913, she was even convicted for conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to prison, but the governor of West Virginia decided that she had been wrongly accused and released her from prison. A year later she was at the Ludlow massacre when coal miners from Colorado went out on strike and tried to join the United Mine Workers. They were attacked and 20 people were killed. In 1919 and again in 1924, she participated in union strikes. The following year she published her autobiography. Jones died on November 30, 1930.

 JOURNALISM

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TRAILBLAZERS Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) was a fiercely independent woman who entered journalism in order to advocate her two favorite causes, ABOLITION and the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Born in Pennsylvania, Swisshelm did not observe the effects of slavery until she and her husband moved to Kentucky in the late 1830s. Her interest in women’s rights emerged around the same time, in response to her husband’s discouragement of her artistic and political interests. Swisshelm refused to join the mainstream women’s rights and antislavery organizations because she preferred to work independently, fighting injustice in print. She began her journalistic career in the 1840s, writing articles on social topics as diverse as capital punishment, SLAVERY, and married women’s property rights (she helped win passage of a Pennsylvania law protecting married women’s estates). The Saturday Visitor, a reformist newspaper that Swisshelm started in the 1840s, eventually achieved a circulation of 6,000; later Swisshelm moved to Minnesota, where she edited two antislavery newspapers, the St. Cloud Visitor and the St. Cloud Democrat. During the CIVIL WAR, she worked briefly as a Union army nurse, and later she founded yet another newspaper, the Reconstructionist, which vigorously supported radical Reconstruction. Though women journalists were rare in the nineteenth-century United States, a few, such as Swisshelm, exercised great influence in liberal politics and social reform.

Writing was one of the few professions open to women in the early and mid-nineteenth century. By the CIVIL WAR era, many women contributed regularly to newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals. Journalism meshed neatly with the ideology of “separate spheres.” Most women journalists worked at home, writing short stories or articles on social reform topics such as the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT, TEMPERANCE, and ABOLITION. Middle-class women, particularly married women, found part-time journalism a convenient occupation because it required no formal professional training and did not interfere with their family responsibilities. Only a few women found full-time work as journalists. MAGAZINES, which were relatively new and often specialized in literature and social topics, accepted women’s contributions more readily than politically oriented, male-dominated newspapers did. Women’s magazines, which were introduced in the 1790s and became quite popular by the 1840s, opened many new career opportunities to women. Publications such as GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK (1830–98) not only solicited stories and articles but also hired women editors. So did liberal, reform-minded periodicals such as The Dial (1840–44), but mainstream journals employed women less frequently. After the Civil War, the rapid expansion of the maga-

zine industry opened many new writing and editing jobs to women. Only a few women wrote for newspapers in the nineteenth century, but several of them became famous. Newspapers hired women journalists for their publicity value as much as for their writing, and they expected “stunt girls” to make headlines. MARGARET FULLER, one of the very first women journalists, traveled to Europe to cover the revolutions of 1848 for the New York Tribune, while NELLIE BLY infiltrated an insane asylum by feigning madness. Newspapers also hired women journalists to write social columns and popular interest stories, but they seldom assigned women to cover political or business news. In the late nineteenth century, women journalists, such as Ida Tarbell and IDA B. WELLS BARNETT, became prominent muckrakers (journalists who specialized in writing about social problems). Not until the 1930s, however, did women gain full access to newspaper journalism. See also: Magazines and Periodicals.

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K

 KEARNEY, BELLE

(1863–1939) Suffragist, reformer, and politician. Belle Kearney was born near Flora, Mississippi, on March 6, 1863. Her father had been a slaveholding planter, politician, and Confederate officer. The family lost most of its wealth during the CIVIL WAR, so Kearney’s parents were unable to educate her. Kearney decided to study on her own. She opened a school herself, which met in her bedroom in the family home, and went on to teach in the local public schools for six years. Kearney’s great interest, however, was the cause of TEMPERANCE. In 1889, she met temperance reformer FRANCES WILLARD and became deeply involved in the goals of the organization. After two years of local antialcohol work in Mississippi, she became a national organizer for the WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU). From the early 1890s until 1912 she traveled frequently around the country giving lectures against alcohol. Kearney also became deeply involved in the woman SUFFRAGE movement during this time, as did a number of those who worked for temperance. In 1912, Kearney began to withdraw from lecturing, instead devoting more time to working behind the scenes. She moved to Washington, D.C., and then back to Mississippi in 1920, the year women won the right to vote. Kearney ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1922 but won a seat in the state senate two years later, making her the first Southern woman to hold that position. She was reelected once and participated in national politics thereafter. Kearney died in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 27, 1939.

KECKLEY, ELIZABETH  HOBBS

(c.1818–1907) African-American seamstress who was a confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. Elizabeth Hobbs was born about 1818 in Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia. The daughter of slaves, she learned sewing skills from her mother and became a dressmaker for her owners. She also raised a son, George, fathered by one of her master’s friends. Hobbs married James Keckley, who

claimed to be free but who turned out to be a slave; they later separated. In 1855, having bought her freedom, Keckley moved with her son to St. Louis, Missouri, where she learned to read and write. Moving to Baltimore, Maryland, and then Washington, D.C., in 1860, she took a small apartment and offered her services as a seamstress. She attracted several prominent customers and was asked to create Mary Todd Lincoln’s inaugural ball gown. From then on she was the first lady’s dressmaker, companion, and confidant. After Mary Lincoln left the White House, Keckley assisted the former first lady in her widely publicized auction of clothing and jewelry. Keckley’s autobiography, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) is generally recognized as the first insider’s account of life in the White House. But the book was heavily ridiculed, and Mrs. Lincoln said that Keckley had betrayed her by including several personal letters. Keckley taught sewing at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, from 1892 to 1893, moved back to Washington, and died there on May 26, 1907.

 KEMBLE, FRANCES ANNE

(1809–1893) An English actress and diarist who promoted ABOLITION. One of the most talented of a celebrated family of English stage actors, Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born on November 27, 1809, in London. She made her debut in October 1829, as Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for her father’s theatrical company at London’s Covent Garden. She was an immediate success. Despite her great talent, Kemble loathed acting and preferred writing novels and plays. She retired from acting in 1834 to marry Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner. They would have two daughters together. Horrified by Butler’s use of slaves and his treatment of women, Kemble distanced herself emotionally from her husband. When she learned that he had been unfaithful to her, Kemble returned to England in 1846. After her divorce was final in 1848, Kemble gave a series of Shakespeare readings in Boston

L A B O R R E F O R M A S S O C I AT I O N , F E M A L E

and moved to Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1863 she published her best-known work, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, based on the diary she kept during her marriage. The journal promoted abolition by describing the living conditions of slaves on her former husband’s plantation. Published during the CIVIL WAR, her book helped sway British opponents of SLAVERY and keep that nation out of the war. Kemble settled in London in 1877 and died there on January 15, 1893.

 KNIGHTS OF LABOR

National labor organization. The formation of the Knights of Labor (KOL) in 1869 grew out of the revival of trade unions in the late 1860s. The KOL began as a secret organization (union) in Philadelphia and quickly spread west, particularly in the mining industry. The group maintained its secrecy until 1881. Under the leadership of Terence Powderly, the KOL championed the idea of the triumph of the producer class through collective action and organization, and cooperative ideals. Although most unions at the time were trade-specific, the KOL welcomed laborers across industries, both skilled and unskilled. Its admission policies were likewise inclusive and admitted African Americans. By 1878, the year of its first general meeting, it advocated the idea of equal pay for equal work for women. The following year, the KOL admitted women as members.

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By the 1880s, women workers everywhere were forming KOL locals called Ladies Assemblies. These locals were comprised of cooks, laundresses, weavers, mill workers, boardinghouse keepers, shoemakers, and workers from other trades dominated by women. In accordance with the policy of admitting unskilled workers, the KOL also admitted non–wage-earning housewives, affording respect to the HOUSEWORK women performed in personal spheres. The Ladies Assemblies raised issues important to women workers. They participated in marches and strikes, spoke in public, and sent representatives to KOL meetings to advocate on behalf of particular gender issues such as equal pay. Some women performed organizational work within the KOL structure, such as MOTHER JONES, who fought on behalf of miners. In 1886, the KOL established a permanent commission to investigate the abuse of women workers by their employers, and a New York woman, LEONORA MARIE BARRY, was elected to the office of General Investigator. At its peak, woman membership in the KOL nationwide was estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 at this time. In 1886, increasingly strong trade unions and the bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square during a labor demonstration led to a decline in KOL membership. Internal strife and the 1893 depression eventually broke the KOL completely. In 1900, it was permanently absorbed into the American Federation of Labor.

L

LABOR REFORM  ASSOCIATION, FEMALE Founded in December 1844, the Female Labor Reform Association (FLRA) was one of the earliest women’s labor unions in nineteenth-century America. It sprang from New England female textile operatives’ almost continuous efforts in the 1840s to establish a ten-hour workday. Women and men created the ten-hour movement in response to efforts by owners to increase mill productivity and decrease costs, efforts that resulted in substantial increases in the speed and amount of work with only incremental increase in pay. First organized in Manchester, Massachusetts, by

Sarah Bagley, Hudah Stone, and Mehitable Eastman, and with more than 300 members the FLRA soon had a branch in Lowell, Massachusetts. The labor newspaper VOICE OF INDUSTRY provided the FLRA with ample support, so much so that mill overseers were said to discharge workers know to subscribe to the paper. FLRA activists could also be blacklisted, or barred from working in the mills, for attending labor meetings. In 1847, the Lowell branch of the FLRA recreated itself as the Lowell Female Industrial Reform and Mutual Aid Society, which added insurance benefits to its program of labor reform.

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L A N E Y, L U C Y C R A F T

Labor organizers hoped to attract new members with the $2 to $5 weekly sick benefits for Aid Society members. The organization’s efforts in labor reform led to critiques of the women’s sphere and, for members like FLRA secretary Huldah Stone, to women’s rights activism. Female labor activists also developed an antipathy to male labor reformers, who so often failed to support women’s organizing efforts. In their growing feminism and hostility to male reform, the experiences of the women of the FLRA strongly resemble those of middle-class reformers of the early nineteenth century. The FLRA grew from a defensive movement for the maintenance of wages to an articulate women’s reform movement and remained so until changes in the mill workforce in the 1860s brought about the organization’s demise.

 LANEY, LUCY CRAFT

(1854–1933) Educator. Lucy Craft Laney was born a slave in Macon, Georgia, on April 13, 1854. Her father was a carpenter as well as a Presbyterian minister. Following the Civil War, Lucy entered the newly opened Atlanta University and graduated in 1873. She began TEACHING in Macon, Georgia, and in 1883 opened the first school in Augusta, Georgia, for African-American children. By 1885, when the first class graduated, the school had more than 200 students. Laney’s school operated in the Christ Presbyterian Church in Augusta. In 1885, she spoke before the Presbyterian Church Convention and asked it to fund an expansion of her school. When they refused, Mrs. Francine E. H. Hanes, president of the Woman’s Department of the Presbyterian Church, raised $10,000 to finance the expansion. Laney renamed the school, Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. Students studied mathematics, Latin, and the trades. Since Laney did not marry or have any children of her own, the students became her children. In addition to founding the Institute, Laney began the first kindergarten for African-American children in Augusta, and the city’s first nursing school for African-American women. She died of nephritis and hypertension on October 23, 1933.

 LARCOM, LUCY

(1824–1893) Poet, teacher, and editor. Lucy Larcom was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 5, 1824. Her

father died when she was young, and her mother took a job supervising a dormitory constructed for the use of young female mill workers in the nearby town of Lowell. To supplement the family’s income, Larcom took a job in a cotton mill after completing grade school; she remained a factory worker for ten years. Larcom had a deep interest in literature. She read extensively and wrote verses in her spare time. In 1846, she left New England for Illinois, where she taught school for three years and then returned to school herself to earn a college degree. Upon graduating, she returned to her birthplace. In 1854, she accepted a position teaching at Wheaton Seminary, a post she held for eight years, and she also began to write for publication in earnest. Larcom’s primary output consisted of poetry. Many of her verses were printed in magazines of the time and were later collected in book form. She also wrote articles and accounts of her childhood and mill experiences. Indeed, her bestknown work today is the autobiographical A New England Girlhood, published in 1889, an important work for its depiction of mill life and childhood in New England at the time. Larcom wrote extensively, too, on religious topics. In 1865 she was appointed an editor of a children’s magazine called Our Young Folks. She died on April 17, 1893, in Boston.

 LAWYERS

There were no women lawyers in the United States until after the Civil War. Women’s exclusion from the bar in the antebellum United States was more absolute than their exclusion from many other professions, because states regulated the licensing of lawyers more carefully than they regulated the licensing of teachers and physicians. Moreover, reformers found it difficult to persuade the public and the courts that women should be allowed to practice law. Many Americans believed that women’s nurturing abilities suited them for TEACHING, NURSING, and even MEDICINE, but the law remained a bastion of male privilege, because it was closely linked to politics and the public realm was considered a male domain. In 1869, Arabella Mansfield was admitted to the Iowa bar and became the first woman lawyer in the United States. In the same year, however, the state of Illinois rejected the application of MYRA BRAD-

L AWYERS

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for admission to the bar on the grounds of her sex. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), the Supreme Court ruled that states had the right to exclude women from the bar. The effects of this decision resonated for a generation, making it difficult for women to gain admission to law schools as well. A few law schools began to admit women in the late 1860s, but most women who wanted to become lawyers read law (that is, studied independently) in their fathers’, brothers’, or husbands’ law offices. Some states did not allow women to practice law until the 1890s. Woman lawyers were usually excluded from courtroom work. Some found jobs with the government or women’s organizations; others worked in academia, journalism, and social policy. Woman lawyers struggled constantly to balance the demands of their profession with popular conceptions of “ladylike” behavior. Professional organizations like the Equity Club, founded in 1887, offered some support, but popular disapproval, combined with the difficulty of Sophonisba Breckinridge was an early member of the finding legal jobs, discouraged many women. As National Association for the Advancement of Colored late as 1910, there were still only 1,500 woman People and an officer of the National American Woman lawyers in the United States (compared to 9,000 Suffrage Association. woman physicians). Although few women did routine legal work, woman lawyers such as Sophonisba Breckinridge TRAILBLAZERS contributed greatly to social reform movements in the late nineteenth After graduating from Wellesley College in 1888 and teaching and early twentieth centuries.

WELL

FURTHER READING

Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs. Women in Law. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Morello, Karen Berger. The Invisible Bar: The Women Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1986.

mathematics for a few years, Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866–1948), the daughter of a liberal Kentucky congressman, studied in her father’s Lexington law office. In 1892 she became the first woman to be admitted to the Kentucky bar. Later, she attended the University of Chicago, where she earned a Ph.D. in political science in 1901 and a J.D. in 1904. Like many woman of her generation, Breckinridge struggled to climb the academic ladder; ultimately she made her career in social policy—a new field that attracted many reformminded women—rather than law or political science. She was particularly interested in urban poverty, and she designed some of the first women’s studies courses ever taught in the United States. Breckinridge also worked actively for social reform, particularly woman SUFFRAGE and the expansion of opportunities for African Americans; she was a close friend of JANE ADDAMS and spent three months a year living at Addams’s social settlement, HULL HOUSE. By the 1920s, Breckinridge had earned a national reputation as a social policy expert, and in the 1930s she occasionally served as an adviser to the Roosevelt administration.

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LAZARUS, EMMA

 LAZARUS, EMMA

(1849–1887) A poet, translator, and author of a poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, in New York City. Her father, Moses Lazarus, was a wealthy sugar refiner. Her ancestors were Sephardic JEWS (from Spain and Portugal) who had been among the first Jewish settlers in America. As a result of her father’s wealth and the long-established position of the Lazarus family in the United States, Emma mixed with the high society of New York. Emma Lazarus published her first book in 1866, Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen. She sent a copy to author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became her mentor and critiqued many of her poems. In 1871, she published her second book of POETRY (see Volume 1), Admetus and Other Poems. A review in the Illustrated London News said that “Miss Lazarus must be hailed by impartial literary criticism as a poet of rare original power.” In 1881, she published a translation of the works of German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, which received high praise from reviewers. By 1882, an estimated 50 of Lazarus’s poems and translations appeared in well-known magazines. Lazarus was keenly aware of her Jewish heritage and the discrimination suffered by many Jews throughout the world. She translated the works of medieval Hebrew poets and, in 1876, wrote a play dealing with the persecution of the Jews. During the 1880s, a wave of anti-Semitism, or persecution of Jews, in parts of Europe forced

After meeting poor Russian Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island, Emma Lazarus donated money and volunteered her services at settlement houses in New York.

many Jews to emigrate to America. Lazarus spoke out forcefully against the anti-Semitism. In 1883, Lazarus started the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. She strongly believed that Jews deserved a homeland, which would eventually become the state of Israel. Perhaps her best-known work was a poem she published in 1883 called “The New Colossus.” It was written to help raise funds for the pedestal that would support the Statue of Liberty. The poem reflects Lazarus’s commitment to making America a land where all immigrants are welcome. Among the poem’s most famous lines are “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” TRAILBLAZERS Lazarus died on November 19, 1887. In 1903, a bronze tablet conJosephine Lazarus was a Jewish essayist in the late nineteenth taining her poem was placed in the and early twentieth century. In the 1890s, Lazarus published pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, The Spirit of Judaism, a compilation of theological essays she which stands in New York harbor.

had written from 1892 to 1894. In this compilation appeared “The Outlook of Judaism,” written in 1893 for the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the Colombian Exposition. Lazarus was a featured speaker at the Parliament and read this essay to that body on September 16, 1893. Josephine Lazarus mentored other Jewish women authors such as Mary Antin and wrote a biographical sketch of her sister, Emma Lazarus, that appeared in The Poems of Emma Lazarus, published by two other Lazarus sisters, Mary and Annie.

FURTHER READING

Levinson, Nancy. I Lift My Lamp: Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty. New York: Dutton, 1986.

LEASE, MARY  ELIZABETH CLYENS (1853–1933) Populist reform leader. Elizabeth Clyens was born on September 11,

LEE, JARENA

1853, in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, the daughter of IRISH IMMIGRANT farmers. She blamed the Democratic Party and its split into Northern and Southern factions for her father’s and brothers’ deaths and her family’s impoverishment in the CIVIL WAR. Graduating from St. Elizabeth’s Academy at Allegany, New York, in 1868, she worked to unionize local teachers and moved to Osage Mission, Kansas, in 1870 to teach at St. Anne’s Academy. In 1873, she married Charles Lease, a pharmacist; they would have six children. Lease was the most notable female figure in the POPULIST movement, dedicated to promoting the interests of farmers in the late nineteenth century. Her fiery rhetoric seized the attention of farmers, who suffered serious financial setbacks in a series of agricultural depressions. Lease’s Populist passion was born of personal experience. She and her husband had struggled as farmers for ten years in Kansas and Texas. They finally settled in Wichita, Kansas, where she studied law. In 1885 she was admitted to the bar and made her first speaking tour. The Irish National League and the KNIGHTS OF LABOR served as forums for her speeches on the plight of farmers. She also promoted the causes of SUFFRAGE and TEMPERANCE. Lease spoke at the 1888 state convention of the Union Labor party and edited the party newspaper. Supporting the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party, she spoke at rallies for candidates during the 1890 Kansas election campaign, which the Populists dominated. Campaigning with James Weaver, the 1892 Populist candidate for president, Lease toured the South, where she encountered antagonistic resistance to her cause. Embittered by her childhood memories, Lease declared the Democratic platform insufficient to achieve needed socioeconomic reforms. She opposed Populists who allied with Democrats, denouncing fusion candidates. As a result, the Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Lewelling, removed her as president of the State Board of Charities in 1894. Her opposition to fusion candidate William Jennings Bryant at the 1896 Populist convention ended her formal relationship with the party. She articulated her reform ideals in The Problem of Civilization Solved (1895). In her later years, Lease endorsed the cause of Progressivism and the incorporation of specific Populist agendas into the platforms of the major political parties. She died on October 29, 1933, in Callicoon, New York.

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See also: Rural, Farm, and Ranch life. FURTHER READING

Stiller, Richard. Queen of Populists: The Story of Mary Elizabeth Lease. New York: Crowell, 1970.

 LEE, ELIZA BUCKMINSTER

(1789?–1864) Author and translator. Eliza Buckminster was baptized in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on March 28, 1789. She was probably born shortly before that date, but records are unclear. Very little is known about her childhood. As the daughter of a clergyman, she seems to have had a reasonably good education, at least according to the standards of the time. In 1827, she married Thomas Lee of Massachusetts. The couple had no children. In 1838, Lee published her first work. Entitled Sketches of a New England Village, the book described scenes from a typical New England town of the time, with particular emphasis on the religious life of the community. She followed this work with several others, including a biographical account of her father and brother. While most of her works have been long out of print, several were successful during Lee’s time. Florence, the Parish Orphan, which was published in 1852, and Parthenia; or the Last Days of Paganism, published eight years later, were both popular in their day. Religion and philosophy were subjects that particularly intrigued Lee, and several reviewers found her ideas an interesting mix of “masculine” intelligence and “feminine” emotion, a number noting that she questioned religious orthodoxy. While some observers argued that her works moved toward a rather negative view of the world and humanity, others found her perspective refreshing and liberating. Lee was also well known during her time for her translations of German writings. Although she does not seem to have ever been truly at home with the language, she learned enough to make her a capable translator. Her 1842 edition of several works by the philosopher Jean Paul Richter helped establish her as a literary figure, and Lee went on to translate works by several other German writers. Lee died on June 22, 1864, in Boston.

 LEE, JARENA

(1783–?) Religious leader. Jarena Lee was born in Cape May, New Jersey, as a free black child. When she

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was 21, Lee experienced a religious conversion. She asked the African Methodist Episcopal Church to let her become a preacher. The church did not permit women to serve as ministers. In 1819, Richard Allen, the founder of the church, finally granted permission for Lee to begin preaching because he was so moved by her devout commitment to God. By this time Lee had married, given birth to several children, and become a widow. Lee became an itinerant preacher. In one year she traveled over 2,300 miles and gave over 175 sermons, making her one of the most widely heard and successful preachers of the era. Lee published her autobiography, The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, in 1836. She wanted people to know about her conversion so that they might find God, too. One thousand copies were immediately printed and Lee began giving them to people while she preached.

 LESBIANS

“Lesbian” as they are thought of today did not exist in the nineteenth century. This is not to say that nineteenth-century women did not have passionate, physical relationships with each other, only that they would not have identified themselves as lesbians. Nor did these relationships carry the stigma that they sometimes do in the modern age. Rather, women in such relationships thought of themselves as engaging in romantic friendships—a category considered acceptable in Victorian America. These friendships, though generally not as culturally desirable as a heterosexual relationship, were tolerated and sometimes even celebrated and many women saw no conflict between such friendships and heterosexual relationships. Historians continue to debate the level of physical sexuality Victorian women brought to same-sex relationships, partly because it is difficult to determine what women actually did in private, but whatever their level of sexuality, female relationships could be intense and long-lasting. Nineteenth-century Americans often used the term “Boston marriage” to describe long-term female monogamous relationships. Novelist Henry James’s comment on Boston marriages as “one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England,” with no hint of condemnation or moral outrage, suggests Victorian Americans found these relationships within the

boundaries of respectability. A great number of American women engaged in such relationships with little social stigma. Transvestism, on the other hand, did offend many Americans. Women who dressed as men, worked for men’s wages, and even married their female lovers faced great hostility if exposed. But, as one “passing woman” who had been arrested for disorderly conduct said, “Do you blame me for wanting to be a man, free to live life in a man-made world?” Nineteenth-century society found it easier to accept women who loved women as long as those women stayed within the female sphere. Indeed, these intense female friendships grew out of the ideology of separate spheres. This ideology fostered such friendships by establishing a separate female sphere that brought women together. A woman who attempted to pass as a man threatened Victorian gender standards in an unacceptable manner. Not until the late nineteenth century did some Americans come to regard same-sex love between women as “abnormal” and repugnant. Sexologists like Havelock Ellis cast female romantic love as a malady and a sexual perversion. Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (1897), for example, described female homosexual relationships as psychotic, morbid, and sexually deviant. Social attitudes toward lesbians would become more critical as the twentieth century began. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7.

FURTHER READING

Duberman, Martin Bauml, et al., eds. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: NAL Books, 1989. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.

 LETTERS

Nineteenth-century Americans were letter writers, particularly white, native-born, middle-class, and elite people. Not only did these men and women write letters but also they wrote often, in detail, and with an eye toward the preservation of their letters. The writers and receivers consciously saved their letters, preserving for relatives and professional historians a record of their physical and emotional lives.

LINCOLN, MARY ANN TODD

Historians of women have found nineteenthcentury letters to be a veritable gold mine for source material. Letters describe the past in a way that official documents do not. Rather than reflecting the politically powerful, they provide an intimate look at homes, schools, stores, churches, families, friendships, and communities. Letters from homesteading women, for example, expand our understanding of the West to include more than the cowboy, rancher, and explorer. Women, inspired by both courage and loneliness, wrote letters home about their lives on the frontier—experiences only recently considered part of American history. Although letters provide a rich source of historical material, they have their limitations. They do not, as a general rule, encompass the lives of many working-class women, prostitutes, African-American, Hispanic, or Native American women. Topically, women wrote about things they considered appropriate for general consumption, omitting important aspects of their lives. Although women were frank about hardships and privations in their lives, they used guarded and euphemistic language to discuss issues of sex, birth control, childbirth, pregnancy, and death. Women seldom wrote about marital disharmony, though some surely experienced unhappiness in their marriages. Whatever their omissions, letters provide an important chronicle of past events outside political, economic, or intellectual historical interpretations and provide an invaluable look into the lives of nineteenth-century American women.



LILIUOKALANI (1838–1917) Patriot and last of Hawaii’s monarchs. Born Lydia Kamakameha in Honolulu to a noble family, Liliuokalani received a Western education at the Royal School run by missionaries. In 1862, she married a transplanted American named John Dominis. Fifteen years later, she became heir presumptive to her brother, King Kalakauam. As heir, Liliuokalani became increasingly alarmed when her brother entered into an unfavorable treaty with the United States and approved a constitution that enhanced the power of white sugar planters at the expense of the monarchy. Liliuokalani ascended to the throne in 1891, intent on regaining the authority ceded by Kalakauam. Toward that end, she promulgated a

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Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii expressed her patriotism through her music as well as her foreign policy. She wrote one of her country’s most beautiful songs, “Aloha Oe.”

new constitution in 1893 that restored power to the monarchy. This proved too much for the increasingly powerful American sugar planters. Led by Sanford Dole and abetted by U.S. Minister John Stevens, the planters seized the palace and overthrew the Hawaiian queen. Liliuokalani surrendered to prevent further violence, but appealed to President Grover Cleveland to reinstate her. Cleveland agreed to restore her on condition that she pardon those men who had overthrown her, but Liliuokalani wavered. Her hesitation proved a mistake. Dole proclaimed Hawaii an independent republic on July 4, 1894, and quickly won recognition from Washington, thereby ending Liliuokalani’s chances of regaining power. After the United States annexed the islands in 1898, Liliuokalani led a quiet life in which she enjoyed the support of a government pension and the reverence of indigenous Hawaiians. She died in 1917.

 LINCOLN, MARY ANN TODD

(1818–1882) First lady of the United States (1861–1865), wife of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States. Mary Ann Todd was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on December 13, 1818. She

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was one of seven children born to Robert S. Todd and Eliza Parker Todd. An excellent student in school, Todd could speak French fluently. In 1839, she moved to Springfield, Illinois to live with her older sister. There she made friends with Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was almost immediately attracted to Todd. Over the next three years, Lincoln courted Todd, although they went through several conflicts and even broke up on occasions. However, the couple eventually married in 1842. After their wedding, they lived in a boardinghouse known as the Globe Tavern in Springfield, Illinois. Their first son, Robert, was born there in 1843. That same year, they rented a small home and in 1844, they purchased a permanent residence in Springfield. The couple had three more children: Edward (1846), William (1850), and Thomas (1853). In 1846, Abraham Lincoln was elected to the House of Representatives, and Mary and their children went to live with him in Washington, D.C. However, he did not run for reelection in 1848, and the family returned to Springfield. In 1858, Lincoln debated Douglas for the United States Senate seat from Illinois. Although Douglas was elected, two years later Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republican Party and elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Mary Lincoln moved to Washington, D.C., in 1861. During the CIVIL WAR, she was criticized because she had family who still lived in Kentucky and fought for the Confederacy. This criticism hurt her deeply, because she was a strong supporter of the Union cause. She also grieved the loss of her son, Willie, who died in 1862. On April 9, 1865, the war ended. Five days later, the president and Mrs. Lincoln attended Ford’s Theater for a performance of the British comedy, Our American Cousin. At approximately 10:15 P.M., while the couple were holding hands and watching the play, the president suddenly was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Mary was holding her husband’s hand as his head fell onto her chest. Lincoln died the next day, and Mary Lincoln never fully recovered from the loss of her husband. In 1868, she left the United States and lived in Europe for a time. Gradually, her mental health seemed to decline. Her son, Robert, believed that she was going insane and forced her to undergo a hearing regarding her sanity in 1875. Witnesses testified that Mary Lincoln was unstable and a jury declared her insane. As the court put it: “The disease was of unknown dura-

tion; the cause is unknown.” She was confined for four months to a sanitarium. A year later, a second jury declared her sane. She went to Europe and lived in France, but her health began to fade. She returned to the United States and died in Springfield, Illinois, on July 16, 1882. FURTHER READING

Baker, Jean. Mary Lincoln: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1987. Collins, David. Shattered Dreams: The Story of Mary Todd Lincoln. Greensboro: M. Reynolds, 1994.



LIND, JENNY (1820–1887) Singer. Johanna Maria Lind was born on October 6, 1820, in Stockholm, Sweden. There she attended the Court Theater School and appeared in her first opera in 1838. Three years later she went to Paris, France, for further study. She sang in Berlin, Germany, and the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote a special part in one of his operas for her. In 1847, she sang in London, England, where everyone who heard her “went mad about the Swedish nightingale,” as Lind was called. In 1850, the renowned showman, P. T. Barnum, brought Lind to the United States for a singing tour. He publicized her in the newspapers and 40,000 people greeted her when she landed in New York. Her first appearance at Castle Garden in New York City caused some tickets to be sold at the exorbitant price of $650 each. Her beautiful soprano voice made her extremely popular with audiences. Lind spent a year touring the United States and singing for such notables as President Millard Fillmore, Senator Daniel Webster, and author Washington Irving. She reportedly earned more than $175,000 for the tour, which was considered a fortune at the time. Her popularity led to dances, such as polkas and waltzes, being named after her. In 1852, she married her accompanist Otto Goldschmidt. The couple moved to London, where Lind continued to sing until 1883. She died on November 2, 1887.

 LIVERMORE, HARRIET

(1788–1868) Evangelist. Harriet Livermore was born on April 14, 1788, in Concord, Massachusetts. By all accounts, she was an energetic child given to bouts of temper. Livermore attended a boarding school

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beginning at age eight, and continued her formal education there and at other schools through her adolescence. In her early twenties, Livermore met a local man named Moses Elliott. The couple hoped to marry, but his parents were concerned about Livermore’s emotional stability. They asked Elliott to call off the wedding, and he complied. The experience changed Livermore’s life. She saw the broken engagement as a sign of divine disapproval, and she began to study religion. Over the next few years she read the Bible extensively and changed her church affiliation from Episcopal to Baptist. In 1824, she left the Baptists and remained unaffiliated with any denomination thereafter. In 1824, Livermore published a book called Scriptural Evidence in Favor of Female Testimoney in Meetings for the Worship of God, which was strongly in favor of an increased role for women in church services. The following year she began a career as a traveling evangelist. Calling herself the Pilgrim Stranger, she preached in every venue, from town squares to the United States Congress, which she addressed first in 1827 and then several times afterward. At first, Livermore preached strictly in the northeast. In 1832, however, she set out for Kansas. Five years later, she traveled to Jerusalem, a city she would visit ten times in all. Livermore continued to write books as well. However, her books were not especially popular, and as time went on her preaching began to fall out of favor. Running low on funds, she died in a Philadelphia poorhouse on March 30, 1868.

LIVERMORE, MARY  ASHTON RICE

(1820–1905) Reformer and author. Mary Ashton Rice was born on December 19, 1820, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a laborer. Known for her charitable work during the CIVIL WAR, Livermore volunteered in coordinating civilian relief efforts at the Chicago SANITARY COMMISSION; she was named codirector in 1862. In addition to touring military hospitals, she joined with a number of other women in staging an 1863 sanitary fair that generated $70,000 in funds. Livermore’s wartime activities convinced her that woman suffrage was essential to achieving such social reforms as temperance. She organ-

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ized a suffrage convention in Chicago and was elected president of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. The following year she started a suffragist newspaper, The Agitator. Livermore traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1869 for the founding convention of the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (AWSA), where she was elected vice president. She moved with that publication to Melrose, Massachusetts, where it merged with the Woman’s Journal under Livermore’s editorship in 1870. She served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873, the AWSA from 1875 to 1878, and the WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION from 1875 to 1885. Her books include My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years’ Personal Experience (1887) and The Story of My Life (1897). She also edited A Woman of the Century with FRANCES WILLARD. Livermore died on May 23, 1905, in Melrose.

LOCKWOOD, BELVA ANN  BENNETT M NALL

C (1830–1917) The first woman to practice law before the United States Supreme Court. Belva Ann Bennett was born on October 24, 1830, at her father’s farm in Royalton, New York. She attended rural schools until age 15, when she was forced to leave and take a job teaching. In 1848, she married Uriah H. McNall, a neighboring farmer, and they had one daughter. Her husband died in 1853, whereupon she resumed her education. After graduating with honors from Genessee College in 1857, she taught at schools in upstate New York until 1866, when she moved to Washington, D.C., to study law. In 1868, she married Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and former Baptist minister. Lockwood graduated from National University Law School in 1873. She was admitted to the District of Columbia bar later that year but was denied the right to practice in federal courts. She immediately began lobbying Congress for a bill ensuring women the right to appear as legal counsel in the Supreme Court, and a law to this effect was finally passed in 1879. The following year, Lockwood successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to admit Samuel Lowery, the first African American from the South, to practice before the highest court in the land. A staunch feminist who sought publicity for the cause of women’s rights, Lockwood ran for president of the United States with the nomination of

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the National EQUAL RIGHTS PARTY in 1884. She became only the second American woman to run for that office. Although SUFFRAGE leaders such as SUSAN B. ANTHONY and others opposed her candidacy, the campaign generated widespread interest, and Lockwood ran again in 1888. Practicing law with her daughter in Washington, Lockwood applied her expertise to reforming PROPERTY RIGHTS and guardianship laws to protect the rights of women. She also promoted laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work. In 1906, Lockwood helped secure a historic multimillion-dollar land claim settlement on behalf of Cherokee Indians. Lockwood died on May 19, 1917, in Washington, D.C. See also: Bradwell, Myra; Lawyers; Woodhull, Victoria.

 LOVE, ROMANTIC

By the mid-nineteenth century romantic love, an emotion Americans had once regarded with suspicion, came to be viewed as the primary basis for MARRIAGE. This transition stemmed from a number of cultural factors, chief among them the heightened value of emotions in America’s First and SECOND GREAT AWAKENINGS. Evangelical religion, allied with changing notions of personal liberty, challenged the more hierarchical, patriarchal and role-bound sense of social order of the eighteenth century. Law, religion, family, and property

issues became secondary compared to the transcendent experience of romantic love. Romance became celebrated, rather than mistrusted. Romantic love had well-defined components. Americans understood that romantic love entailed mutual sharing of feelings and goals, utter sympathy with the other’s physical and emotional life, and a commitment to candor, or frank self-revelation. Romantic love made high demands of interpersonal intimacy. In 1852, for example, Clayton Kingman delared to Emily Brooks that he wanted her to be “as open & confiding to me, as to any one, and I will be to you.” Men like Kingman used love letters to illustrate their command of the language of love and the desire to be emotionally intimate. Women wrote similar letters. At mid-century one Northeastern American bride wrote to her absent husband, “Shall I tell you how much I miss you & how the sunshine has all gone from your beautiful home? Paradise is no paradise without a God & my life is indeed deserted.” This passage illustrates a key feature of romantic love—that in Victorian America romantic love became a “new theology,” a religion in which one’s lover replaced God as the central person in people’s lives. Some historians have argued that romantic love, with its increasing emphasis on affection and loyalty between spouses, improved the position of women in marriage. But the high goals of romantic love could prove elusive to many couples, creating increased disappointment in failed relationships. FURTHER READING

Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

 LOWELL, JOSEPHINE SHAW

In the late 1800s, popular magazines celebrated romantic love in articles, short stories, and illustrations.

(1843–1905) Social reformer. Born in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1843, Josephine Shaw was one of five children. Her father, Francis George Shaw, was a wealthy philanthropist. Josephine grew up on Staten Island, New York, where her family had moved in 1855. During the CIVIL WAR, Josephine volunteered to work with the United Sanitary Commission, which sent clothing and medical supplies to Union

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soldiers. She was also a volunteer with TRAILBLAZERS the WOMEN’S CENTRAL ASSOCIATION OF RELIEF, which also cared for soldiers by sending clothes to the war Born in Boston in 1825, Harriet Hanson began to work in the front. On October 31, 1863, she marmills in Lowell, Massachusetts, when she was just ten years ried Charles Russell Lowell and went old, as a “doffer.” As she says in her memoir Loom and Spinwith him to Virginia to nurse the dle (1898), “The doffers were the very youngest girls, whose wounded. He was killed in battle in work was to doff, or take off, the full bobbins, and replace 1864. Her brother, Robert Gould them with the empty ones.” Though the work day was 14 Shaw, had also lost his life in the war hours long, the work itself was not hard, lasting only about 15 while leading a black regiment. minutes in each hour. When they were not doffing, the girls In 1865, Lowell worked for the were free to read, play, or even run home for lunch. Freedman’s Association, which had Hanson was working as a doffer in 1836, when the first strike been established to help free slaves in the Lowell mills took place. Twelve to fifteen hundred young support themselves and receive an women walked off the job to protest a reduction in wages, and education. Later, Lowell returned to Hanson was among them, proudly leading her small group of New York where she participated in a coworkers from the lower room where they worked. variety of charities. She was instruWhen Hanson became too old to work as a doffer, she mental in establishing institutions to tended a spinning wheel for a time. She was then chosen to be help the mentally ill and prisons to rea “drawing-in girl,” a job considered one of the best and most form female criminals. In 1876, New difficult in the mills. The drawing-in girls used hooks to pull York Governor Samuel Tilden aptogether thousands of threads to feed into the looms. While pointed her the first woman commisworking in the mills, Hanson was able to complete high school sioner of the State Board of Charities. and to take private lessons in German, drawing, and dancing. She continued to hold this position As was the case with many of the mill girls, Hanson was an until 1889. In 1882, Lowell helped establish avid reader who took advantage of the Lowell circulating lithe Charity Organization Society of brary. She began to write poetry, some of which appeared in New York Central Coordinating the literary magazine published by and for the “mill girls,” Agency. This was a clearinghouse for The Lowell Offering. information on state charities as well Hanson left the mill in 1848, when she married William as an agency that screened applicaStevens Robinson, a newspaper editor. An advocate for tions from the poor and directed woman suffrage, she organized the National Woman Suffrage them to programs that would proAssociation of Massachusetts in 1881. In addition to Loom vide assistance. But Lowell realized and Spindle, a history of her years in the mills, Robinson pubthat it would take more than money lished a work on the woman suffrage movement in Massachuor clothing to help them. setts and a dramatic poem. She died in 1911. Lowell believed strongly that the poor could not improve their lives unless unfair social conditions were eliminated. Therefore, she devoted herself to changing these conditions and cloth could be done in a factory, many workby lobbying the state legislature, advocating the ers were needed to run the machines. Francis passage of new laws, and establishing organiza- Cabot Lowell, a pioneer in the development of the tions to represent the rights of the poor. She died power loom and a member of the group who built on October 12, 1905. some of the first mills along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, did not want to exploit poor families as British mill owners had. Therefore, in the 1820s he established what came to be known LOWELL MILL WORKERS Young women who worked in the textile mills in as the “Lowell System.” Mill owners recruited Lowell, Massachusetts, and surrounding towns, young, unmarried women to run the machines from 1826 to 1850. As textile production became and guaranteed them living conditions that mechanized and the process of making thread would preserve their virtue and good reputation.



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Thus, the Lowell “mill girls” were required to stay in supervised boardinghouses, abide by strict rules governing their conduct, and attend church regularly. Many young women were eager to move to the mill towns because they could live in the “big city” and earn much higher wages than they could have earned anywhere else. The company also provided educational opportunities that they could not otherwise have obtained. Girls could attend lectures, night classes, concerts, and literary discussion groups. At first, the Lowell mills were regarded as an ideal manufacturing environment. Visitors from all over the world toured the town and marveled at how well the system worked. Although pay and working conditions were considered enlightened at the time, many of the young women still worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week, for as little as 50 cents a week. As the demand for textile production grew, mill owners began to demand that they produce more for less money. The workers eventually responded with strikes and protests. An 1836 strike of mill workers in Lowell was one of the first in the country. The strike was a failure. The mill owners would not negotiate, and workers eventually returned to their looms. Over the next several years, mill owners closed the boardinghouses. Workers had to find rooms in the tenements that arose near the mills. IRISH IMMIGRANTS, who came to the United States in large numbers to escape the Potato Famine in Ireland, were willing to work for less than the native-born workers and gradually replaced them. The proportion of children working in the mills also increased substantially. In 1844, workers joined to form the Lowell Female LABOR REFORM ASSOCIATION, one of the first labor organizations for women, to protest work rules that forced women to tend more and faster machines. By 1850, the original Lowell system had been all but abandoned. Workers no longer had to live in company housing, no longer were required to go to church, and the company no longer felt compelled to protect the morals of the workers. FURTHER READING

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Robinson, Harriet H. Loom and Spindle: Or Life Among the Early Mill Girls. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1898.

 LYNCHING

Executions carried out by mobs without due process of law. Lynching began in America during the Revolutionary War. The term is taken from the name of Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace in Virginia, who encouraged vigilante groups to go outside the law to rid the state of British and Tory sympathizers. Although most people think of “lynching” as synonymous with “hanging,” any method of unlawful execution is considered lynching. After the Civil War, the primary targets of lynchings were African-American men, though whites who objected to lynching or tried to protect blacks lost their lives as well. The most frequent reason given for lynchings was that an African-American man had raped a white women; “the protection of white womanhood” became a rallying cry for many Southerners. Sometimes, accusations of RAPE were brought by white women who had voluntary sexual relations with black men to avoid the embarrassment of having the relationship exposed; these charges were seldom questioned because women were not expected to have a strong interest in sex. In most cases rape was a trumped-up charge to disguise the real motives for lynching. Sometimes successful black businessmen or farmers were lynched by jealous white neighbors, and some victims were accused of nothing more than “outspokenness.” African-American males were not the only victims of lynching. Seventy-six black women and 16 white women were lynched between 1882 and 1927. Altogether, from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,730 lynchings in the United States, most involving black men and women, and most taking place in the South. Mississippi led the nation with more than 600 lynchings, followed by Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. One of the most horrible aspects of lynchings was the carnival atmosphere that accompanied many incidents. People brought children to witness victims being mutilated, burned alive, and hacked to pieces. Onlookers would often take pieces of the victims’ bodies as souvenirs. Among those who opposed lynching and helped to bring about reforms was an AfricanAmerican woman named IDA B. WELLS BARNETT. Through a series of articles in the Memphis, Tennessee, Free Speech and Headlight, Barnett documented the true stories behind 728 lynchings that had taken place from 1882 to 1892. When

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three friends were lynched in 1892, she wote an editorial urging African Americans to leave Tennessee, a place that “takes us out and murders us in cold blood.” Many people took Barnett’s advice and left the state, as did Wells Barnett herself some time later, after a mob destroyed her printing press. She continued to work for reform from her new home in Chicago. The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN (NACW) was formed partly in an effort to stop lynchings, as was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Black women’s clubs supported the antilynching movement in general and Wells Barnett in particular, both financially and morally. FURTHER READING

Brown, Mary Jane. Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement, 1892–1940. New York: Garland, 2000.

 LYNN SHOE WORKERS

Beginning in 1635, the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, was a center for making shoes. Until the 1850s, most shoes were made by hand, in small shops around the town. Each shop was a small cube, ten feet by ten feet, where the shoemaker, his sons, and perhaps a hired worker or two would turn raw materials into shoes. Wives and daughters also participated in shoemaking. The women, working at home, bound the shoes by hand, sewing the uppers together before they were attached to the soles. Shoe production and women’s roles in shoemaking were revolutionized by the introduction of the sewing machine. In 1851, John Brooks

Women shoe workers leaving a factory in Lynn, Massachusetts.

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Nicholas modified a Howe sewing machine to enable it to sew shoe uppers together. Manufacturers soon installed the machines in factories, forcing women to leave their homes to work. As a result, fewer married women worked. In 1860, 800 women and 4,000 workmen went on strike in Lynn to protest the displacement of married women by unmarried women in the factories. Although the strike was successful, increasing numbers of immigrants began taking the jobs that had once been held by women born and raised in Lynn. In 1869, the women shoe workers of Lynn formed the first national union of women, the DAUGHTERS OF ST. CRISPIN.

 LYON, MARY

(1797–1849) Educator and founder of MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE. Mary Lyon was the sixth of eight children born to Aaron and Jemima Lyon of Buckland, Massachusetts. Lyon’s father died when she was just five years old. When she was 13, her mother remarried and moved away from the family farm with her new husband, leaving Mary to keep house for her older brother, Aaron. Aaron paid his sister a dollar a week so that she could to continue her education. In 1814, Lyon began teaching in the local school. She was paid 75 cents a week and lived by “boarding around” with the parents of her pupils. Teaching taught Lyon that she herself needed to learn more. So, in 1817 she enrolled in the Sanderson Academy in Ashfield, Massachusetts. She also studied at Amherst Academy for a term. While she pursued her studies, she taught in district schools. In 1821, while studying at Blyfield Academy, Lyon met Rev. Joseph Emerson, who convinced her of the need for schools for women. In 1824, Lyon opened a successful school for girls in Buckland; she taught there during the summer and at Ipswich Academy in the winters. She also continued her own education by attending lectures at Amherst and Renssalaer Colleges. An attack of typhoid fever convinced Lyon that she was doing too much, and she decided to leave Buckland and concentrate her energies entirely on teaching at Ipswich. In 1834, after spending the summer of 1833 traveling, Lyon decided to open a residential seminary for women. She wanted to make education available to as many women as possible, so she planned to keep tuition low by requiring that students themselves perform all the necessary domestic tasks. She ensured the permanency of

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the college by buying the land on which the buildings were erected and by placing the governance of the college in the hands of a volunteer board of trustees. Lyon supervised plans for the original building and served as principal and a member of the science faculty for 12 years. Mount Holyoke Seminary was founded in November 1837 with 80 students aged 17 and older. Each paid $60 in tuition and brought with her a Bible, an atlas, a dictionary, and two spoons. By the second year of operations, there were more than 200 applicants for ninety openings. The institution was officially renamed Mount Holyoke College in 1893.

Lyon was a pioneer in science education for women, requiring seven courses in science and mathematics for graduation. Female students at Mount Holyoke studied science through experiments they performed themselves as well as from lectures by distinguished visiting professors. At the same time, Lyon was greatly concerned with promoting religious piety, and many of the school’s students became missionaries. Mary Lyon died at Mount Holyoke in 1849 at the age of 52. The college continues to this day and is regarded as one of the best in the country.

M

 M CORD, LOUISA CHEVES

C (1810–1879) Writer and pro-slavery advocate, supporter of the Confederacy. Louisa Cheves was born in Charleston, South Carolina, one of 14 children of Langdon Cheves and his wife Mary Elizabeth. Langdon was a prominent attorney and successful politician. He served as speaker of the House of Representatives and, in 1819, was appointed president of the Bank of the United States by James Monroe. When he accepted this position, he moved his family from Charleston to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, Louisa Cheves attended an academy for girls and later a school run by M. and Mme. Charles Picot. When Louisa’s father found her eavesdropping on her brothers’ lessons and trying to do their math problems, he allowed her to study with them. After the family returned to Charleston in 1829, Louisa was drawn to politics but realized that the ideology of SEPARATE SPHERES prohibited women from the political world. Still, she departed from conventional gender roles when she managed a cotton plantation she had inherited. At Lang Syne, near Columbia, South Carolina, she supervised the work of more than 200 slaves. In 1840, Cheves married David McCord, a newspaper editor and state legislator. David eventually withdrew from politics but continued to write articles for local papers. The couple had three children. In 1848, at her husband’s request, Louisa McCord translated Sophismes Économiques by Frédéric

Bastiat. This book attacked the idea of a protective tariff and was often cited in defense of the plantation system, including slavery. Because of McCord’s scholarly work on the translation, Southern newspaper editors invited her to write on such subjects as slavery, economics, and women’s rights. Her work, well-reasoned and powerfully written, argued against women’s rights and in favor of slavery. She believed that women should continue to labor “in her own sphere”—the home. And in an 1853 essay for the Southern Quarterly Review, McCord attacked HARRIET BEECHER STOWE for inaccuracies in her portrayal of slavery. After her husband’s death in 1855, McCord settled in Columbia, South Carolina. When the Civil War began, she equipped a company of soldiers commanded by her son. During the war she worked in a military hospital, organizing the nurses and caring for the wounded. In 1862, she was devastated by her son’s death at the Battle of Bull Run. After the war, Louisa emigrated to Canada and lived there for two years, refusing to take the oath of allegiance that would have allowed her to return home. She eventually did take the oath and lived for the rest of her life in Charleston with one of her daughters. She died there in 1879.

 M KINLEY, IDA SAXTON

C (1847–1907) First lady of the United States (1897–1901), wife of William McKinley, 25th president. Ida Saxton

MAGAZINES AND PERIODICALS

was born on June 8, 1847, in Canton, Ohio. Her father, a wealthy banker, sent Ida to local schools and then on a tour of Europe to finish her education. When she returned, Ida decided to work at her father’s bank as a cashier. William McKinley, a lawyer, came to Canton in 1867, where he met Ida Saxton, and the couple were married on January 25, 1871. They had two daughters, both of whom died before reaching adulthood. These deaths created so much sadness for Mrs. McKinley that she became an invalid and began having epileptic seizures. McKinley was very attentive to the needs of his wife, even as his demanding career in politics advanced. He became a congressman, later governor of Ohio, and in 1896 was elected president. Because of her illness, Mrs. McKinley could not stand for long periods and was seated during White House receptions. At dinners, the president sat next to her, and if she had a seizure he would cover her face briefly with a handkerchief so she would not be embarrassed. President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and Mrs. McKinley returned to Canton. She died on May 26, 1907.

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TRAILBLAZERS In 1844, Sara Jane Clarke (1823–1904), a 21-year-old physician’s daughter, began writing letters to newspapers and magazines under the pen name “Grace Greenwood.” Greenwood was a versatile writer, who handled controversial social and political issues as adeptly as she composed short stories and stylish sentimental verse. Soon the editors of such distinguished periodicals as GODEY’S LADY’S BOOK, the American Monthly Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post were clamoring for her work. Greenwood secured a job as an editorial assistant for Godey’s Lady’s Book, but she was soon dismissed for publishing an antislavery essay in another periodical. Later she became an editorial assistant for the National Era and the Washington correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. She was one of the few American women in the early nineteenth century to forge a career in JOURNALISM. Greenwood married Leander K. Lippincott in 1853 but did not abandon her literary career. Indeed, she and her husband collaborated on the Little Pilgrim, a popular children’s magazine. Greenwood was best known, however, as the author of several popular collections of short stories, letters, and parodies, as well as travelogues on Europe and the American West. Like other women writers and journalists, Greenwood was also a prominent social reformer, espousing antislavery, prison reform, and the abolition of capital punishment.

MAGAZINES AND  PERIODICALS Magazines and periodicals proliferated in the nineteenth-century United States. The first American magazine was published in 1741, but only in the 1820s did magazines acquire a large reading public. Circulation surged again after the Civil War, and by the century’s end specialized periodicals catered to readers of every age and interest. Women participated extensively in the magazine industry as readers, writers, illustrators, and editors. Women’s magazines were introduced in the 1790s and became quite popular by the 1830s. Antebellum women’s magazines, published for affluent, well-educated women, featured articles on moral and practical subjects, short stories, poetry, illustrations, and fashion plates. GODEY’S LADY’S BOOK (1830–1898), edited by SARA

JOSEPHA HALE, began as a dress design manual, expanded to include short fiction and articles on social and moral topics, and soon became the leading women’s magazine in the United States, with 160,000 subscribers by 1860. Most women’s magazine editors took a moderate stance on women’s education and related social issues; by and large, they avoided overt political commentary. Mainstream women’s magazines carefully defined “women’s sphere” to include housekeeping, family affairs, and PHILANTHROPY, but not party politics. Some journalists, like Jane Grey Swisshelm, lost jobs because they commented too openly on slavery, women’s rights, and other controversial topics. The political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century, combined with the spread of literacy, heightened the reading public’s appetite for magazines. Between 1850 and 1885, the number of magazines published in the United States multiplied from 600 to 3,300. Rotary presses, national railroads, and the growth of advertising lowered

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publishing costs and enabled editors to market magazines to a wider audience. While magazines continued to print short fiction, their nonfiction offerings became increasingly important. Latenineteenth-century women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s published feature articles on childrearing, housekeeping, and social issues. They introduced advice columns, printed readers’ letters and queries, and kept rural women in touch with urban trends by publishing dress patterns and fashion plates, as well as detailed drawings of new costumes and hairstyles. The growth of the magazine industry allowed many American women to forge careers in JOURNALISM. While newspapers were reluctant to hire women, magazine editors actively recruited female talent. Women wrote not only for women’s magazines but also for mainstream literary periodicals and liberal political reviews. Women journalists like MARGARET FULLER and IDA TARBELL achieved fame by contributing to and editing muckraking periodicals, which exposed social and political corruption and urged reform; both their gender and their political views excluded them from writing for mainstream publications. On the other hand, Harper’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and later The Atlantic Monthly regularly solicited contributions from less controversial women writers and illustrators like Grace Greenwood and MARY HALLOCK FOOTE. Magazines and periodicals played an important role in both antebellum (pre–Civil War) and Gilded Age (late nineteenth century) social reform movements. In the decades before the Civil War, abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and other social reformers published numerous political periodicals. While most were short-lived and reached only a modest number of subscribers, they helped unite supporters of each cause. Similarly, The Lowell Offering (1840–45) helped the LOWELL MILL WORKERS forge a group identity. After the Civil War, liberal magazines like The Woman’s Journal (1870–1917) fostered the suffrage movement, while African-American men and women debated political and social strategy in numerous secular, religious, and educational periodicals. Radical political magazines, especially those that advocated equality for African Americans, sometimes became targets of community wrath, however. In 1892 a mob shut down IDA B. WELLS BARNETT’S journal Free Speech and Headlight and drove her out of Memphis.

Women living in small towns and rural areas relied on magazines to keep them in touch with recent social, literary, and fashion trends. The extensive coverage of household affairs by women’s magazines supported and promoted women’s sense that homemaking was a profession; at the same time, magazines’ positive coverage of college and professional women encouraged the reading public to accept women’s broadening career opportunities. Magazines also allowed women to follow current social and political issues and even to contribute to public debates, despite their exclusion from voting and political office. By the 1890s, magazines had played a crucial role in molding the public image of both the homemaker and the “New Woman.” Darcy R. Fryer See also: Advice Books; Writers. FURTHER READING

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1960. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.

 MARRIAGE

Women’s views on marriage underwent major institutional and ideological shifts in the nineteenth century. Women held new and divergent views on the necessity of and reasons for marriage, while evaluating their quality of life within marriage. About 90 percent of women in the United States married, and in the beginning of the 1800s, women still looked to marriage as a primary occupation. However, individual choice, rather than financial considerations or family input, determined whom a woman married. A growing atmosphere of individualism and self-knowledge, as well as currents of women’s independence contributed to a sharp rise in the emphasis on ROMANTIC LOVE as the basis for marriage. By 1800, most middle-class people selected their own mates. Marital life was largely affected by the doctrine of separate spheres. Under this idea, women were responsible for the domestic sphere, which included HOUSEWORK, child rearing, and the moral and spiritual state of the home. In doing so, women derived equality, authority, and status from their distinct roles and responsibilities as

MARRIAGE L AWS

TRAILBLAZERS Elizabeth Packard, a woman who acted against nineteenthcentury marriage conventions, found herself at the mercy of inequitable marriage laws when she was involuntarily incarcerated in an asylum by her preacher husband. Under Illinois law in the mid-1800s, a husband could commit his wife to the state asylum without evidence of INSANITY; the husband’s suspicion was considered cause enough. Elizabeth Parsons Ware married Theophilus Packard, an older family friend and a minister, familiar with both Elizabeth’s mother’s struggles with mental illness and her own teenage bout of brain fever. The condition today is known as encephalitis, but was thought to be a mental illness at the time. During Bible discussions in Theophilus’s congregation, Elizabeth began to question tenets of Calvinist doctrine and orthodoxy, such as the total depravity of humans and predestination. Theophilus immediately connected this show of independent thought and opinion to insanity. Theophilus rallied parishioners against her and called in doctors, who determined that Elizabeth’s accelerated pulse verified her insanity. She was committed to Illinois State Hospital in 1860, where she stayed for three years against her will and without medical evidence. When she was finally discharged in 1863, she only encountered further difficulty with Theophilus, but was intent on changing her condition. She wrote prolifically and published and distributed pamphlets on a variety of topics including conditions in the asylum and inconsistencies in Calvinist doctrine. In 1864, a group of Elizabeth’s friends filed suit on her behalf against Theophilus when he imprisoned her in her room. In the case of Packard v. Packard, she and her lawyers won a judgment in her favor, with the jury finding her to be sane. For the rest of Elizabeth’s life, she continued to write about her experiences, in an effort to protect women from similar injustices. She remained married, despite an outstanding petition for DIVORCE.

preserves of the home. Nonetheless, a woman’s work in the family was dependent upon a husband’s ability and inclination to provide. Because of the dependence upon men that marriage fostered, some reformers began questioning marriage altogether. They believed that the origins of sexual inequality lay within the institution of marriage and that women enjoyed little autonomy within marriage. While women’s rights activists such as SUSAN B. ANTHONY likely never married for this reason, the majority did not oppose marriage and only advocated changes within

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the marital relationship. Women’s rights advocates such as LUCY STONE, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, and ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD, enjoyed marriage partnerships with men who were progressive and supported women’s rights in society and within a marriage. Prohibitive MARRIAGE LAWS were reason enough not to marry for some. Women ceded their property, legal, and economic rights to their husbands when they married. As individuals, women were absorbed by their husbands. This loss of rights reinforced the sexual division of labor within marriage. Some women were discouraged and dissatisfied with the household inequities between husband and wife. Whether they had careers or not, women were uniformly charged with chores that were often physically and psychologically draining and left women little time to pursue an education, careers, or hobbies. Unhappiness in marriage was also due to other reasons, such as ADULTERY and in a small number of cases, some marriages ended in DIVORCE. FURTHER READING

Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

 MARRIAGE LAWS

Laws governing the rights of married women. Marriage laws in the United States derived from English common law, which included COVERTURE (see Volume 1). After marriage, a woman became feme covert, meaning one protected, and lost property and legal rights to her husband. They also had no recourse against seizure or loss over property, children, or even their own persons. Women retained minimal rights such as retaining dowries, or appealing to a judge’s sense of fairness under equity law regarding issues

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M E D I C A L C O L L E G E O F P E N N S Y L VA N I A , F E M A L E

MEDICAL COLLEGE  OF PENNSYLVANIA,

TRAILBLAZERS Born in Poland, Marie Zakrewska (1829–1902) trained as a midwife in Berlin and later immigrated to the United States to study medicine. She earned an M.D. from Western Reserve College in Cleveland in 1856, worked with the pioneering women physicians Emily and ELIZABETH BLACKWELL at the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, and in 1859 accepted a professorship at the NEW ENGLAND FEMALE MEDICAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN. In 1862, Zakrewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, which she ran until her retirement in 1899. Two overriding goals guided Zakrewska’s work at the New England Hospital: to enable woman patients to consult physicians of their own sex, and to offer woman medical students an opportunity to obtain rigorous clinical training in an era when many teaching hospitals refused to enroll them. Unlike many nineteenth-century women physicians, who celebrated women’s capacity for empathy and nurturing, Zakrewska believed that medical women’s status rested on their scientific credentials. She fought to ensure that her students received thorough, up-to-date scientific training, including dissection and microscopic work. She was one of the most prominent and revered women physicians in the nineteenth-century United States.

such as prenuptial agreements or breach of contract. Progressive couples such as LUCY STONE and Henry Blackwell took public vows in protest of the marriage laws, but only in these uncommon circumstances did women enjoy any autonomy. After an early legislative change in Mississippi that had mostly to do with slaveholding, the first law to address real property was the New York State Married Woman’s Property Act of 1848, which granted limited property rights to women and launched a series of similar acts across the country. Reformer ELIZABETH CADY STANTON addressed the New York legislature in 1860 and helped secure passage of an omnibus to the 1848 act that, in its final form, permitted women to retain real property and any attendant rents and profits, and prevented seizure by the husband. Women could also collect wages, practice trades, seek legal recourse, and enter into contracts. By 1865, 29 states had some form of law protecting women’s property rights, and by 1900, all states had enacted such laws.

FEMALE

The Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, founded in 1850, was the second women’s medical school in the United States. (It was the first to grant women medical degrees.) The first faculty members were liberal Quaker physicians who had informally tutored Quaker women in MEDICINE since the 1840s. Like the faculty of the WOMEN’S MEDICAL COLLEGE OF THE NEW YORK INFIRMARY, they sought to raise academic standards at women’s medical schools. Several graduates of the school had distinguished medical and academic careers: Ann Preston, a member of the first graduating class, was appointed dean of the college in 1866, while Emmeline Cleveland did advanced clinical work in Europe and became a professor of obstetrics. Unlike most other women’s medical schools, the Female Medical College did not merge with a major university, but remained an independent, all-female institution until it became coeducational in 1969.

 MEDICINE

In the mid-nineteenth century, women on both sides of the Atlantic sought access to established medical schools. Women had long worked as nurses, midwives, and healers, but until the 1850s they could not attend medical school or become professional physicians. As medical training improved and physicians’ status rose, however, some women sought to enter the profession. Unlike earlier female practitioners, women physicians received rigorous scientific training, used surgical instruments, and diagnosed illnesses as well as providing routine care. Advocates of women’s medical education argued that women’s nurturing abilities fitted them to care for the injured and ill, that children would prefer women pediatricians, and that women physicians would protect the modesty of female patients. Women physicians explored important new branches of medical research; several did pioneering work in GYNECOLOGY and preventive medicine.

METHODISTS

The first qualified women physician in the United States was ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, who received her M.D. in 1849. In 1857, Blackwell, together with her sister Emily and Marie Zakrewska, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, which offered pediatric and gynecological care in the New York City tenement district. Many early women physicians devoted themselves to social service, providing health care and health education to immigrants and the poor. Rebecca J. Cole, an African-American woman who earned her M.D. in 1867, interned with the Blackwell sisters in New York and later worked as a physician and health care educator in AfricanAmerican communities in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Other woman physicians worked to expand women’s opportunities to study medicine. Most established medical schools refused to admit women students; some, such as Western Reserve College, opened their doors to women—only to shut them a few years later. Frustrated reformers founded several all-female medical schools, including the WOMEN’S MEDICAL COLLEGE OF THE NEW YORK INFIRMARY and the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. Hospitals that specialized in the care of woman and children offered clinical training to women graduates, and activists such as Marie Zakrewska worked to establish and maintain high scientific standards at women’s medical schools and hospitals. After the Civil War, some prestigious all-male medical schools, including the University of Michigan in 1871 and Johns Hopkins University in 1892, began to admit woman students. By 1900, approximately 5 percent of American physicians were women. FURTHER READING

Drachman, Virginia. Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862–1969. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Walsh, Mary Roth. “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

 METHODISTS

Protestant denomination founded in the 1700s to revitalize the Church of England. Led by minister John Wesley, Methodism began as an organization within Anglicanism. Unlike orthodox Anglicanism, though, Methodism stressed the importance of individual choice in conversion and holy living.

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By the end of the 1700s, it broke with Anglicanism, forming an autonomous denomination with its own ministers, churches, and government. Women played an important role in the creation and spread of Methodism. Wesley’s mother, Susanna Wesley, educated and encouraged John in faith, while other women performed crucial roles as preachers, teachers, and evangelists. In the 1760s, women such as Sarah Crosby, Anne Carr, and Mary Bosanquet-Fletcher were enormously popular religious leaders who garnered huge followings. These women believed that God directed both men and women to preach: “I do not believe every woman is called to speak publicly,” wrote Bosanquet-Fletcher, “no more than every man to be a Methodist preacher, yet some have an extraordinary call to it, and woe be to them if they obey it not.” Methodism thrived in the United States, especially on the frontier. Methodist “circuit riders” (traveling ministers) crisscrossed the West, built churches, preached, and offered communion. Asbury, for example, reportedly trekked 300,000 miles on horseback during his career. During the late 1700s and 1800s, Methodism splintered along regional and racial lines. In 1797, a group of African Americans left St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church because of discrimination. Under the direction of Richard Allen, these African Americans formed an independent denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Racial solidarity did not bring gender equality, though, as Allen refused to ordain African-American female religious leaders like JARENA LEE. In 1845, as the slavery issue became more hotly contested, white Methodists split into northern and southern denominations. Throughout the nineteenth century, women continued to influence Methodism and battle for female rights within the church. Because of its emphasis on individual conversion over church hierarchy, Methodism allowed women to take leadership roles. In the 1830s, for example, Phoebe Palmer led prayer meetings for the “Promotion of Holiness” and became a spokeswoman for the holiness movement. To Palmer, holiness meant that Christians could live perfect lives after their conversion. In the late 1800s, Methodists began ordaining some women. Concomitantly, women like temperance reformer FRANCES WILLARD served as Methodist deacons and argued for women’s rights. Methodism continues as a powerful Christian denomination.

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FURTHER READING

Schmidt, Jean Miller. Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism, 1760–1939. Nashville: Abingdom Press, 1996.

 MIDDLE CLASS

The economic expansion of the early nineteenth century created more distinct divisions between the working and middle classes. The doubling of per capita income from 1820 to 1860 meant that many Americans enjoyed increased wealth. Middle-class women usually lived in comfortable homes, furnished with store-bought furniture and rugs. Iron cookstoves and Franklin stoves kept their comfortable houses warm and often one or two paid DOMESTIC SERVANTS helped lighten women’s work load. Improved transportation, particularly canals and railroads, and rising factory production meant that home manufacture decreased. Brands familiar even today— such as Nabisco, Lipton, and Del Monte—provided goods women had once made at home. Newspapers, magazines, novels, and ADVICE BOOKS all helped women and men establish the boundaries of genteel behavior, proper dress, and social forms. The ideology of domesticity, which claimed that women found their greatest satisfaction in housewifery and mothering, also described women as naturally more pious, disinterested, selfless, virtuous, cheerful, and loving than men. Yet domesticity described norms, not the real behavior and mentality of all middleclass women. These notions of womanhood also created tremendous tensions in the lives of women who did have to work for wages or simply wanted to work outside the home. Nineteenthcentury native-born white women had fewer children as new views of childhood meant that women had to spend more time nurturing children than ever before. As many as one-third of all pregnancies ended in ABORTION, which was legal in much of the country until the Civil War. In the last decades of the nineteenth century average middle-class income again rose, this time by almost 30 percent. The cost of living increased as well, but many middle-class families made up the difference by having more waged family members and keeping boarders in their homes. By the end of the century more than a third of middle-class families owned their own homes. Suburbs sprang up around urban areas, fueled by a public transportation revolution that allowed men to commute, mostly via streetcar. A typical

suburban home had indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, private bedrooms for family members, and servant rooms in the attics or basements. Although a myth of the leisured middleclass woman still exists in some histories, middleclass women continued to work hard, but at different and invisible jobs. A respectable woman could care for her children’s and husband’s physical and emotional needs, run a household, even if by directing servants, engage in some meaningful voluntary philanthropy, and purchase the increasing amount of goods necessary to a middleclass home. Women became consumers, and while critics have suggested shopping fed “women’s desire for material possessions” they have overlooked the very real demands made upon women to fuel a retail revolution. The late nineteenth century also saw an increase in the number of women in higher education and professional schools. By the end of the century 20 percent of all college graduates were women who matriculated at both all female and coeducational institutions. Though job opportunities for educated middle-class women remained limited well into the twentieth century, many women did make professional working lives. TEACHING represented the most suitable female occupation, but women found employment as nurses, doctors, LAWYERS, and in CLERICAL WORK. Both before and after the Civil War women also joined or founded a number of voluntary associations and reform groups. Middle-class women were at the forefront of ABOLITION, TEMPERANCE, WOMEN’S RIGHTS, married women’s property reform, and DIVORCE REFORM. They sometimes joined with working class women in labor organization, protective legislation, and the reform of factory and slum conditions. Thus by century’s end middle-class women increasingly entered the waged work force, had smaller families, lived in houses with greater amounts of consumer goods, and went to college. As women challenged traditional patriarchal family organization arguments about women’s inferiority redoubled. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres,” p. 7.

 MIDWIFERY

While the vast majority of births in colonial America were attended by midwives, by 1900, only half of all births had a midwife in attendance. By 1920, the figure dropped to only 15 percent.

MINING CAMPS

This decline was the result of a deliberate campaign by doctors to discredit midwives. The campaign began because doctors were unable to gain clinical experience in observing the deliveries of babies when midwives were in attendance. Women tended to be extremely modest in the eighteenth century, and few would allow a man in the room during a birth. Thus, doctors who were called upon to assist with births had often seen only a couple, while midwives had often seen many. Wealthy women in the early years of the nineteenth century began to ask to have doctors in attendance because they believed doctors could do more to protect them. Doctors prescribed opium to ease the pain of childbirth, and used forceps to help with obstructed deliveries. Even so, through most of the nineteenth century, women delivered by midwives were much less likely to die of childbed fever or puerperal fever. Babies also fared better. In 1917, 25 in 1,000 babies delivered by midwives died within a month, while 38 in 1,000 died when delivered by a physician. As doctors began to take patients away from midwives, their rhetoric against midwifery became even stronger. Doctors seemed intent on wiping out midwifery—partly for economic reasons. Fewer midwives meant more deliveries by doctors. A doctor Gerwin in 1906 described midwives as “the typical, old, gin-fingering, guzzling midwife, . . . her mouth full of snuff, her fingers full of dirt, and her brain full of arrogance and superstition.” Doctors began to insist that childbirth was a medical event, as opposed to a natural one. As such, childbirth required “a broad scientific man, with surgical training.” Doctors tended to intervene more in births, leading to more assisted (forcep) deliveries and more caesarian sections. As the medical field became increasingly professional, with strict educational requirements, midwives lost ground because they were often selftaught. Still, until well into the twentieth century, immigrant and poor women, especially in the rural South, relied primarily on midwives to help them in childbirth. Midwives did not interfere with the natural process of childbirth as much as doctors did and they tended to focus on natural means to comfort the mother, to ease pain, and to assist with delivery. The first law limiting the practice of midwifery was passed in Rochester, New York, in 1896. Laws in other states followed quickly; most were passed between 1910 and 1920.

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MINER, MYRTILLA (1815–1864) Educator. Myrtilla Miner was born near Brookfield, New York, on March 4, 1815. She went to school in Rochester, New York, and eventually became a teacher at the Newton Female Institute in Whitesville, Mississippi. Although Miner wanted to teach AfricanAmerican girls, racial prejudice in the South made this type of education impossible. Miner, therefore, returned to the North where, with the help of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, she opened the Colored Girls School in Washington, D.C., in 1851. At the school, girls not only received a basic education, but were trained to be teachers. In 1857, Miner’s poor health forced her to leave Washington for a better climate in California. Several years later, she returned to Washington, but died following a carriage accident on December 17, 1864.

 MINING CAMPS

The mining frontier was predominantly inhabited by single men. This population dynamic created a social world different from the world familiar to many Victorian women. White women, women of color, poor and middle-class women, all accommodated themselves to the cultural differences of life on the mining frontier. Newly settled areas generally tolerated a wide range of behavior in both women and men, while established communities with churches, schools, and newspapers often had higher standards of civic and social morality. Mining camps sprang up quickly, the result of a stampede of men looking for precious metals, particularly gold, silver, and copper. The camps were impermanent by nature; inhabitants did not intend to settle permanently in the area. PROSTITUTION provided many women not only with an occupation but also an avenue for entrepreneurship. In Helena, for example, Mary Airey (known as “Chicago Joe”) worked her way up from prostitute to property owner and wealthy madam. By 1880 Airey controlled most of the Helena red light district. Like Airey, most prostitutes were white, native-born women, but Chinese and Hispanic women also worked in the mining frontier sex trades. Women also owned and ran more respectable businesses, including boardinghouses, laundries, and stores of various kinds. Some even

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v.

HAPPERSETT

undertook farming and livestock raising. Women on the mining frontier were more apt to own property, vote in local elections and divorce their husbands than were their more urban counterparts.

 MINOR

V. HAPPERSETT In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to freed African Americans. The amendment was the first time that the word male was inserted into the U.S. Constitution. Although the wording related to voting matters, Virginia Minor and her husband Francis developed a constitutional argument that the Fourteenth Amendment actually protected woman citizens’ right to vote. They reasoned that the amendment had equated citizenship with suffrage, and thus female citizens could legally vote. As an officer for the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION, Virginia Minor was in the right position to bring such a case to court and, conveniently, Francis Minor was a lawyer. In protest of the Reconstruction amendments which had failed to legalize woman suffrage, women across the country broke the law and voted, SUSAN B. ANTHONY among them (see Documents). Others sued registrars of voters who refused to allow women to vote. In 1872 the St. Louis registrar, Reese Happersett, refused to register Virginia Minor to vote because she was not a male citizen and was therefore ineligible. Virginia Minor sued Happersett for damages, with her husband acting as her chief attorney. She lost, then appealed to the circuit court, and lost again. The Minors carried their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which again denied her claim in a unanimous vote. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who authored the court’s opinion in 1875, wrote, “the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage on any one.” The failure of this case persuaded woman suffrage activists that only an amendment to the U.S. Constitution or a state-by-state campaign would result in the vote for women. Minor did not give up. In 1879 she refused to pay her taxes, arguing that since she had no representation the government had no right to tax her.

 MISSIONARIES

Individuals who sought to spread their religious faith at home and abroad. Many nineteenth-

century women were avid churchgoers. For them, the church was the primary locus of activity outside of the home. Women were traditionally barred from PREACHING or holding positions of leadership within churches and instead were limited to teaching Sunday school. Women were drawn to missionary work for many reasons including a desire to serve their churches, a sense of adventure or divine calling, or concern for the welfare of non-Christian peoples. Prompted by such ideas, more women also sought and attained a religious education at seminaries devoted to women’s theological studies. Two of the early seminaries, TROY FEMALE SEMINARY and MOUNT HOLYOKE SEMINARY produced large numbers of graduates seeking missionary work. While the first female missionaries were women married to missionaries, more and more single women soon also sought mission opportunities. In addition to the sizable general mission boards, organizations formed in response to the growing interest in women’s mission work, from as early as Mary Webb’s Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes in 1800. Sarah Doremus formed the Women’s Union Missionary Society in 1861, an interdenominational group that specialized in placing single women missionaries. Mission boards dispatched about 500 women from various denominations to Native American reservations by 1865. Missionary women were sent to evangelize and teach white domestic ideals. Women were thought to be the spiritual guardians of home and society, so the goal of mission work was to civilize other societies and cultures through teaching Christianity to the women. This view was problematic because it assumed white Christian superiority over other racial and religious groups. The missionaries often operated with a disregard for these groups’ cultural and religious traditions and institutions, and disrupted their family lives. Other types of domestic mission work included charity work at church-sponsored missions in urban areas, such as the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME in San Francisco, which offered support and resources to CHINESE IMMIGRANT women. Eventually, Chinese, AFRICAN AMERICAN (see Volume 3), and NATIVE AMERICAN (see Volume 3) converts served as missionaries themselves.

MORMONS FURTHER READING

Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997.

 MISSOURI

V. CELIA Court case involving an enslaved woman tried for murder. Many nineteenth-century civil rights activists were concerned about the sexual vulnerability of women in general and enslaved women in particular. That vulnerability was a common theme both in abolitionist literature and in the literature devoted to women’s rights. An 1855 court case, Missouri v. Celia, provided them with yet another disheartening example of the grave injustices to which enslaved women were subjected. Missouri v. Celia was a criminal trial. “Celia” was a slave who had been raped by her master for five years. As a result of the rapes, she had borne two children and was pregnant with a third. She had repeatedly warned him and other family members that she would kill him if the rapes did not stop. One night she made good on her threat by bludgeoning him to death. During Celia’s trial for murder, her lawyer tried to prove that she acted in self-defense and argued that she should be protected by the same state laws that protected white women against RAPE. The trial judge disagreed. During the trial he severely limited any references to her sexual abuse, and he refused to allow the jury to consider the issue of whether a slave was protected by the same laws that protected white women. Despite the fact that many white townspeople felt sympathy for Celia, the jury found her guilty. She was hanged.



MITCHELL, MARIA (1818–1889) Astronomer. Maria Mitchell was born on Nantucket Island to William and Lydia Mitchell. Her father, William, was the proprietor of his own school and was an amateur astronomer. When she had completed her formal schooling, Mitchell became the librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, a job she held for 20 years. Because the library was only open for a few hours a day, Mitchell could spend the rest of the day as she chose. Like her father, Mitchell became interested in astronomy and she joined him in working at an observatory that he built

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on the roof of a local bank. The pair became well known in scientific circles for their careful astronomical observations. While helping her father in 1817, Mitchell discovered a new comet, which was named for her. The king of Denmark gave her a medal for her discovery. Matthew Vassar recruited Mitchell for the faculty of his new woman’s college in Poughkeepsie, New York. Mitchell joined the faculty in 1865. At VASSAR COLLEGE, she was known as an unconventional teacher who ignored the grading system and refused to take attendance. In addition to teaching, Mitchell continued with her own research on sunspots and solar eclipses. In 1873, she founded the Association for the Advancement of Women, a group that promoted the careers of women in the professions. She was also the first woman to be elected to the American Philosophical Society. Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888 and died the next year at the age of 70.

MORAL REFORM  ASSOCIATION See New York Female Moral Reform Society.

 MORMONS

Mormons are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in 1830 during the period of religious revival known as the SECOND GREAT AWAKENING. Driven by community opposition and mob violence from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, the Mormons settled in Utah’s Great Salt Lake valley in 1847, establishing a permanent home for their church. Mormons adhere to many of the beliefs of most Christian religions. They diverge, however, in believing that human souls exist before birth, that the living faithful can ensure salvation for ancestors by baptizing them after death, and that humans can eventually attain the state of godhood. Mormons also believe in “celestial marriage,” the idea that marriage is for all eternity; they also believe that women can be saved only if they are celestially married. Although polygamy was officially abolished by the church in 1890 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it illegal, as many as 60 percent of Mormon women were in polygamous marriages before 1880. One justification advanced for the practice was that polygamy kept men from committing

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adultery. Polygamy was also used by some men to keep their wives in a subordinate position. According to Austin and Alta Fife in Saints and Sages, Mormon leader Brigham Young recommended that a man who was unhappy with his wife “take a plural wife or two—since this was a sure cure for a shrewish and recalcitrant female.” FURTHER READING

Fife, Austin, and Alta Fife. Saints of Sage and Saddle. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1980. McConkie, Bruce R. Mormon Doctrine. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966.

 MOTHERHOOD

The nineteenth century saw the flowering of a cult of motherhood that equated women’s biological capacity to reproduce life with an innate ability to nurture children perfectly. Social ideas about motherhood, bolstered by popular magazines, novels, and advice manuals, held that maternity stood at the center of a woman’s life. Many nineteenth-century Americans believed that no woman could be complete or happy with-

Writers like Sarah Hale and Catharine Beecher told women that their greatest contribution to society lay in their work as wives and mothers.

out the experience of motherhood. Even so ardent a feminist as VICTORIA WOODHULL could write, “that those who pass through life failing in this special vision of their mission can not be said to have lived to the best purpose of a woman’s life.” This version of motherhood, like the ideologies of Victorian womanhood, did create considerable power for women through theoretical female moral superiority. As an ideology that combined nurturance and domesticity though, the Victorian cult of motherhood not only bound women to their biology, but created a standard that many women could not meet. Among the reasons only a few women could enact a perfect vision of motherhood was the reality that mothering experiences were deeply influenced by economic and class conditions, the places in which women lived, and the ethnic or racial group to which a woman belonged. A slave mother, for example, faced extremely different conditions of maternity than did a middle-class New England woman. White women were to become mothers only within the bonds of marriage, while states did not recognize slaves marriages as legally binding institutions. Since children followed the condition of their mothers all slave mothers gave birth to slave children. These mothers had little control over the fate of their children. Slave mothers were less likely to escape slavery than men because of their child bearing and raising responsibilities, worked harder with less nutritious food than their white counterparts, and could not count on the presence of a father in their children’s life. Masters could and did separate parents and children by sale. And while slave mothering may be the most extreme example of difficult mothering, poor white women, women on the frontier, immigrant women, and those women who worked in nineteenth-century FACTORIES also could not live up to the cult of motherhood. The physical realities of mothering were no less daunting. Nineteenth-century CHILDBIRTH was extremely dangerous. One mother in every 154 live births died, and one in every 30 women could expect to die at some point in her reproductive years. Frequent pregnancies resulted in a number of childbirth-related DISEASES, all of which combined to create tremendous “birth anxiety” in women. By mid-century women began promoting “voluntary motherhood,” which claimed women’s right to limit their fertility through CONTRACEPTION and sexual abstinence.

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 MOTT, LUCRETIA COFFIN

(1793–1880) Reformer. Lucretia Coffin was born on Nantucket Island to Thomas, a sea captain, and his wife, Anna. Like many women on the island, Anna managed the family and the family business on her own while her husband was away at sea. Thus, it was no surprise that Lucretia became one of the nation’s earliest and most influential defenders of the rights of women. At the age of 13, Coffin was sent to a coeducational QUAKER school, Nine Partners, where she was a student for two years, then a teacher. She quickly noticed that even there women were treated unequally: female teachers earned less than half of what male teachers were paid. In 1811, Coffin married James Mott, whom she had met at Nine Partners and who subsequently came to work for her father. Throughout their lives together, the couple worked as partners against slavery and for the rights of women. Through her activities in the antislavery movement, Mott met ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. The two women were instrumental in organizing a convention of women in SENECA FALLS, New York, from which came the Declaration of Sentiments (see Documents), which asserted women’s rights in words that echoed the Declaration of Independence. Mott was the first to sign the declaration. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the Mott home became a stop on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. After the war, Mott continued to work for education and opportunity for freed slaves. Lucretia Mott lived to be 87 years old, and she delivered her last speech only a few months before her death in 1880.

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MOUNT HOLYOKE  SEMINARY One of the Seven Sisters colleges, located in South Hadley, Massachusetts, established as one of the first seminaries for women. Mount Holyoke was founded by MARY LYON, a former Baptist-turned-Congregationalist. Lyon established Mount Holyoke as a school where women would be able to receive an advanced education and study and learn how to teach principles of Christian faith. However, she wanted to keep tuition low to provide access to all, including disadvantaged women in rural areas. Lyon’s solution was to eliminate servants and hold students responsible for residential chores, and to provide subsistence wages for herself and the teachers. The seminary’s first 80 students in 1837 only paid $60 in annual tuition. While Lyon emphasized this domestic plan, she also made strides in women’s education by offering courses not previously offered to women elsewhere, such as human anatomy, and encouraged independent thought through essay writing and discussion. Lyon’s commitment to education was surpassed only by her emphasis on benevolence and social and religious service. Over 20 percent of Mount Holyoke graduates went on to serve as MISSIONARIES, which Lyon believed to be the ideal calling for her graduates. As one of the earliest seminaries for women, Mount Holyoke set a benchmark for women’s COLLEGES, as well as for mission boards. Schools and boards alike solicited Lyon’s advice. Mount Holyoke officially became a college in 1893 by dropping its preparatory course, increasing further the rigor of its course offerings, and building a campus.

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NATIONAL ASSOCIATION  OF COLORED WOMEN The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed in Washington, D.C., in 1896, the result of a merger of the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the COLORED WOMEN’S LEAGUE. The Federation was

founded in 1895 by JOSEPHINE ST. PIERRE RUFFIN and the League in the same year by MARY CHURCH TERRELL. All of these organizations emerged from the black women’s club movement, many of which were formed to fight LYNCHINGS, “Jim Crow” laws that established and enforced segregation, and increasing attackes

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against the character of African-American women in the final years of the century. The NACW addressed gender as well as racial issues. Though admonished by some AfricanAmerican men to focus their concerns on the domestic sphere, many clubwomen believed that women were uniquely suited to lead the movement for racial equality. Like the white women who formed BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES to carry out charitable work, African-American clubs were primarily made up of well-educated, middle-class women. The first president of the NACW was Mary Church Terrell. The organization’s goal was to improve the lives of African Americans and to ensure that they were able to exercise full citizenship rights; its motto was “Lifting as We Climb.” The NACW was dedicated to improving job training, wages, education, and child care; in 1912, it established a scholarship for African-American women. In that same year, it endorsed woman suffrage. State and local groups founded YWCAs, schools, hospitals, settlement houses, and reformatories. By 1916, the NACW had 35 different departments including Legislation, Young Women’s Work, Business, Suffrage, Juvenile Court, Rural Conditions, and Health and Hygiene. During the First World War, the hundred thousand members of the NACW raised five million dollars in war bonds and was powerful enough to merit representation on the National War Council. At the 1918 meeting in Denver, Colorado, the governor and one of Colorado’s senators addressed the convention.

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF  JEWISH WOMEN The oldest active Jewish women’s volunteer association in the United States, the National Jewish Council of Women (NCJW) was founded by HANNAH GREENEBAUM SOLOMON in 1893. Solomon had a comfortably middle-class childhood, attended religious school, and belonged to a prominent Chicago reformed Jewish family. In 1879 she married Henry Solomon and had three children, two of whom lived to adulthood. Hannah and her sister Henriette became active in a number of social clubs, and were the first Jewish members of the exclusive CHICAGO WOMEN’S CLUB. Henriette Greenebaum Frank became the president of the CWC in 1884, after which the club took a more active role in women’s and children’s reforms.

In 1890, the WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION planners asked Hannah Solomon to organize a national Jewish women’s congress for the Parliament of Religions that was to be held at the world’s fair in 1893. Solomon gathered a number of the nation’s most prominent Jewish women for the Parliament, and it was this group who helped to organize the NCJW. Local chapters were organized across the country, many of them dedicated to fighting for woman SUFFRAGE. Solomon served as the NCJW’s president from its founding until 1905, when she was made honorary president for life. The NCJW was also founded to assist Jewish women. In Chicago, for example, the NCJW provided legal advice to new Jewish immigrants and helped them find work. This Jewish women’s club exists to the present day and is highly involved in a number of liberal, female-oriented causes.

NATIONAL WOMAN  SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION The battle to gain women the right to vote began in 1848, with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, spearheaded by LUCRETIA MOTT and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. The Declaration of Sentiments adopted at the convention (see Documents) called for equal rights for women in all aspects of life, including suffrage. Many women believed that the right to vote should be the most important goal of the women’s movement because it would help women gain other rights, but they faced considerable opposition from both men and women. Many people believed that women lacked the intelligence or inde-

In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Despite the name change, the goals remained the same.

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pendence to vote, that their husbands could represent them better than they could represent themselves, and that the right to vote would lead to a breakdown of the family. In 1869, influenced by the debate over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—which gave the right to vote to black men but not to women of any color—suffrage advocates divided into two organizations to work for women’s right to vote: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (AWSA). The more radical of the two was the NWSA, headed by SUSAN B. ANTHONY. This group wanted a Constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote and refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not enfranchise women. Many members of the NWSA began to move away from the idea of universal suffrage and used racist rhetoric and tactics to promote only woman suffrage. In 1872, Anthony and several other women actually voted in the presidential election and were arrested and fined. Anthony’s speech at her trial—which attracted national attention—ended with the words, “Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God.” The second organization was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) headed by LUCY STONE. This organization supported the Fifteenth Amendment, believing that it opened the door for woman suffrage and hoping to gain the vote state by state. In 1890, the two organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association(NAWSA). During World War I, led by CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, the NAWSA persuaded Woodrow Wilson to support a Constitutional amendment in exchange for the organization’s support of America’s war effort. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress in 1919 and was added to the Constitution on August 26, 1920. FURTHER READING

Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. New York: Belknap Press, 1996.

NATIVE AMERICAN  FAMILY LIFE Native Americans lived under very diverse circumstances in 1800. Some eastern groups had disappeared, merged with others, or surrendered under pressure from Spanish, French,

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By the nineteenth century most native Americans, like these Ute women and children, had adopted clothing and other material culture from whites, but their own traditions remained strong.

English, and then U.S. settlers. Some western groups, like the Nez Perce, had never set eyes on a white person. A century later, in 1900, NativeAmerican nations across the United States shared a common fate: they had lost their political independence and were confined to RESERVATIONS. This loss of autonomy profoundly affected Native American families. Native Americans defined family much more broadly than Europeans did. Most organized their societies into elaborate kin groups that shaped whom they would live and work with, marry, and defend. They emphasized cooperation and harmony. Tatanka Iyotanka, or Sitting Bull, became a Hunkpapa leader not only because he was a great warrior and hunter but also because he fostered peace within his village and gave liberally to the poor. Native-American children were raised to put the group’s welfare before their own. Native American women enjoyed substantial rights and freedoms. Men usually hunted, conducted diplomacy and war, and were recognized as spiritual and political leaders. Women usually cared for younger children, gathered and processed food, and, in the case of agricultural societies like the Pueblo, tended the crops.

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tery, but they commonly allowed couples to divorce whenever a wife or husband wished to and allowed Sara Winnemucca, who would become one of the most promiyoung women and men to pursue nent Native Americans of the late nineteenth century, was born sexual relations before marriage. around 1844 in Nevada, to Taboitonie and Old Winnemucca, a Native peoples raised their chilleader of the Northern Paiute (a Western tribal group). One of dren gently but rigorously. They selher early memories was of being buried up to her neck in sand dom hit them. Yet boys and girls learned at a very early age what their and left under sagebrush so that whites would not find her. elders expected of them. Parents, But whites soon settled in Nevada, and Winnemucca learned grandparents, uncles, aunts, and othto speak and write English as a child. By the late 1860s she was ers continually praised children who working for the government as a scout and interpreter. She wed were brave and generous and critia white man in 1871, one of several unsatisfactory marriages. cized those who acted selfishly. StoWinnemucca became an articulate advocate for her people ries told again and again during long in the 1870s. She argued that the Northern Paiute ought to winter nights repeated these lessons. have “a permanent home on their own native soil,” safe from The arrival of peoples from Eumarauding whites and complete with “the required advanrope and the expansion of U.S. territages of learning.” During the Bannock War of 1878 she rode tories profoundly changed Native more than 200 miles in a little over two days in an attempt to American society, including the famkeep the Northern Paiute out of the conflict. She promised ily. Smallpox and other European whites that she would “educate my people and make them lawdiseases killed one half or more of abiding citizens” and asked them to treat Native peoples justly many villages within a few years and and compassionately. fractured marriages, families, and Despite Winnemucca’s pleas, her people were sent from clans. Horses arrived in the Southeastern Oregon to eastern Washington, where they continued west with the Spanish in the 1500s, to suffer. Frustrated by corrupt and hostile reservation offiand over the next two centuries they cials, Winnemucca turned to eastern reformers. She visited spread across the Great Plains and Washington, D.C. in 1880 and three years later traveled to onto the Columbia River Plateau. Boston, where she undertook a series of lectures and, with the They offered unprecedented opporassistance of Mary Mann, wrote Life Among the Piutes: Their tunities for mobility and wealth. The Wrongs and Claims. status of men in general and warriors Sara Winnemucca died in 1891, at the approximate age of in particular rose with the horse’s ar47. Though her reform efforts had not borne much fruit, she rival—at the expense of women. White settlement was extremely had succeeded in calling attention to her people’s plight—and damaging to Native American famiin pursuing an independent and remarkable life. lies. This was particularly the case in California, where miners literally hunted Native peoples in the mid1800s. Simply surviving was exWomen’s critical economic roles gave them substantial power, for they often controlled most of tremely difficult under such circumstances; the food. Women had a great deal of political in- maintaining a stable marriage and raising chilfluence even when men monopolized positions dren were next to impossible. Treaties that confined Native Americans to of formal leadership. Among the Iroquois, for example, women nominated and lobbied male reservations brought additional challenges. Unchiefs. In many groups women could become derfunded and corrupt, the reservations seldom shamans or healers. Many peoples, like the Iro- provided sufficient equipment or even food. quois and the Pueblo were matrilineal and ma- Thousands of Native American husbands, wives, trilocal, meaning that lineage was reckoned and children died there from disease or starvathrough one’s mother and that the man lived tion during the nineteenth century, fracturing with his wife’s family. Others, like the Chinook of Native American families still further. Reservations also constituted an attempt to the lower Columbia River, were patrilineal and patrilocal. Few Native Americans tolerated adul- socialize Native people to Anglo-Saxon norms.

TRAILBLAZERS

NEW ENGLAND FEMALE MEDICAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN

Agents and reformers, including missionaries, were particularly critical of the Native American family. They opposed plural marriage, divorce, women working outside the home, and communitarian social relations. They established schools—both on and off these reservations—to separate children from their parents and to inculcate Anglo-Saxon ideals of individualism. But Native Americans never entirely forgot the old ways of doing things. Men refused to farm— or turned to cattle raising instead. Women continued to act assertively and to seek divorces—from Native American and white men alike. Parents continued to teach their children the old stories and often kept them out of school. Today they are recalling ancient traditions and stories as they go about healing old wounds and reconstructing societies and families that are both cooperative and harmonious. David Peterson del Mar See also: Algonquian Household Economy (Volume 1); Carlisle School; Family Life, Nuclear and Extended; Iroquois Household Economy (Volume 1); Native Americans (Volume 1); Sacagawea (Volume 1). FURTHER READING

Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Riley, Patricia, ed. Growing Up Native American: An Anthology. New York: William Morrow, 1993.

 NEURASTHENIA

A mental and physical disorder produced by stress or extreme nervousness. The term neurasthenia, literally meaning nerve (neuro) weakness (asthenia), was coined in 1869 by neurologist George Beard. As millions of immigrants from southern and eastern European poured into the United States after the Civil War and cities rapidly grew, a sense of hopelessness and a “fear of everything” gripped thousands of native-born middle- and upper-class women and men in the North. It struck women like JANE ADDAMS and CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN. Extreme anxiety sapped their strength, making them physically exhausted. Neurasthenia became so widespread in the late 1800s that one doctor called it “the disease of the age.” Physicians offered men and women starkly different treatments for neurasthenia but failed miserably at curing it. Doctors recommended

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that men rededicate themselves to their work, while women were given the “rest cure,” a treatment originally developed by physician S. Weir Mitchell. Only allowed dairy products to eat, women were confined to their homes and discouraged from visiting with friends, reading books, or writing letters. Doctors deemed any “mental exertion” dangerous to the female neurasthenic. At the same time, some women responded by arguing that neurasthenia was caused by women’s inactivity and confinement to the home. They argued that rest cures actually made women more anxious. Since the rest cure often did little more than fatten women with milk and cheese, many women turned to alternative treatments like the “mind cure” religions of Theosophy or mental therapy. These methods proved much more successful because they dealt with neurasthenia not solely as a physical disorder, but as a mental one. In fact, mental explanations for neurasthenia helped propel psychology as a valid academic science in the early 1900s.

NEW ENGLAND FEMALE  MEDICAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN When the New England Female Medical College for Women opened in 1848, it was the only medical school for women in the United States. The founder, Samuel Gregory, was a social reformer who believed that women should be allowed to study MEDICINE, particularly GYNECOLOGY and obstetrics, so that female patients would not have to compromise their modesty by seeking treatment from male physicians. Initially, the college’s academic standards were low, and established physicians treated it dismissively. In the 1850s, the college slowly achieved greater academic respectability. Marie Zakrewska, who taught obstetrics at the college from 1859 to 1862, urged Gregory to expand the school’s clinical curriculum. Gregory was slow to respond, and some students complained that the college condescended to women by offering them only a second-rate medical education. Nevertheless, the college graduated nearly 100 women physicians between 1848 and 1874. In 1874, the Female Medical College was absorbed by Boston University and became one of the first coeducational medical schools in the United States.

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 NEW ERA CLUB

A voluntary association organized by AfricanAmerican women in 1893. JOESEPHINE ST. PIERRE RUFFIN founded the New Era Club to provide an organization for black women similar to the many white women’s clubs in this period. Ruffin also belonged to the New England Women’s Club, a prominent voluntary association founded by JULIA WARD HOWE, as well as the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. Primarily middle-class black women joined the New Era Club, which focused on educational and social reform for both African-American and white women. The New Era Club also published a newspaper, the Women’s Era, in which members promoted their reformist interests, including SUFFRAGE. After forming the New Era Club, Ruffin began developing a national organization for black women’s clubs. Under the aegis of the New Era Club, women organized the National Federation of Afro-American Women in 1895, which joined with the National League of Colored Women in 1896 to become the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN. At a 1900 meeting of the GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS (GFWC) Ruffin was not permitted to represent the New Era Club. Some members of the GFWC did not want to allow black women’s clubs in their organization, and successfully blocked the group. The GFWC continued its racist policy for decades, further convincing black women of the need for separate clubs. Like white women’s clubs, black women’s clubs like the New Era embraced the superiority of middle-class values and often failed to connect with the working poor. Both groups believed in female moral superiority and saw family as a microcosm of society. Black woman activists faced many of the same ideological limitations and strengths as did white reformers, though certainly with the added difficulties of being black women in a racist society. See also: Women’s Club Movement.

NEW YORK CHILDREN’S  AID SOCIETY Antebellum New York teemed with street children and the city’s factories profited from lowwaged child labor. As many as 30,000 homeless children lived in New York City by mid-century, many of them poorly paid paper collar workers, textile operatives, and tobacco rollers. In 1853

New York labor reformer Charles Loring Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society of New York City (CAS). Brace believed that the best solution for homeless children would be sending them to foster parents in the country, and he organized “orphan trains” to transport them west. By 1868, he had placed almost 2,000 children in country homes and 11,000 more New York children in urban homes and lodging houses. By 1870 the CAS supported child labor and mandatory education bills, ran the well-publicized Newsboys’ Lodging House, which provided homeless newsboys with room and board, and trained girls to find work as DOMESTIC SERVANTS. The CAS used both paid workers and volunteers to improve the wretched conditions of many working-class children’s lives. Men dominated the CAS’s payroll, while women were most often volunteer agents who worked in separate programs like the Female Lodging House and associated industrial schools. Female volunteers attempted to mold young working-class girls into future wives and mothers with middle-class standards of womanhood. Girls learned home sewing, cooking and house cleaning.

NEW YORK FEMALE MORAL  REFORM SOCIETY In the spring of 1834 a group of primarily middle-class women met at the Third Presbyterian Church and formed the New York Female Reform Society. Based on the earlier work of the New York Magdalen Society, which sought to reform New York City’s prostitutes, the Moral Reform Society made a militant declaration to convert New York’s prostitutes to evangelical Protestantism and close all the city’s brothels. These women boldly suggested that “the licentious man is no less guilty than his victim, and ought, therefore, to be excluded from all virtuous female society.” Women who joined the Moral Reform Society understood that their role in reform as guided by women’s natural moral superiority; an idea created in response to early nineteenthcentury notions of separate spheres. The enthusiasm these New York City women brought to their reform was distinctly anti-male. They criticized and urged reform of masculine sexual license and the gendered double standard. The Female Moral Reform Society also set up a House of Reception where prostitutes might find

NOVELS

refuge, be reformed, and learn new trades. Five years after its inception the Moral Reform Society had 445 chapters on the Eastern seaboard. The Society published a weekly newspaper, The Advocate of Moral Reform, which focused on denouncing male sexuality, exposing employment agencies which lured women into PROSTITUTION, and lobbying for a law to make seduction a crime. The organization chose not to support women’s rights, believing women’s moral mission was based on their roles as wives and mothers. In the 1850s the Society made female unionization one of their most important causes, but was gradually overtaken by more working-class based organizations. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres.”

 NEWMAN, ANGIE

(1837–1910) Social reformer. Angelia Thurston was born in Montpelier, Vermont, on December 4, 1837. She studied in local schools and took a teaching job before her 15th birthday. In 1852, her family moved to Wisconsin, where she married Frank Kilgore; when he died a year later, she taught school again. In 1859, she married merchant David Newman. Twelve years later the couple moved to Nebraska with their two children. In Nebraska, Newman turned her attention to social reform and church work, partly owing to encouragement from her husband. A staunch Methodist, she became involved in the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society. She lectured frequently on the need to Christianize people of other countries. Newman also was distressed by the presence of the MORMON Church in nearby Utah. In particular, she rejected the Mormon idea of polygamy. She lobbied for laws against it and worked to establish a home for Mormon plural wives cast out of their homes. Newman won funding for the home in 1886, but in fact there was little need for it. Newman’s influence grew steadily. In 1887, her experience

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and hard work earned her the distinction of being the first woman chosen as a delegate to her church’s national convention, although the other delegates ultimately voted not to seat her. She served on a number of other religious and secular committees, and she was active in many other movements. She served as state superintendent of prison activities for the WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION, was a delegate to the National Conference of Charities and Correction, and held positions in several other service organizations. Newman died in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 15, 1910.

 NOVELS

Most of the novels written by women in the nineteenth century are not necessarily known as great

TRAILBLAZERS Maria Susanna Cummins was considered one of the most successful practitioners of the popular domestic novel. Her first novel, The Lamplighter, was published in 1854 and met with instant success, selling a remarkable 40,000 copies in under a month, and 70,000 that year. The book and its commercial success is said to have spawned Nathaniel Hawthorne’s public outburst denigrating women writers. The Lamplighter is a sentimental and melodramatic work, exemplary of the style and substance of the popular domestic novel. It tells the life story of a young orphan named Gerty, a lonely, rebellious girl who is mistreated by her caretaker. When she is befriended by a lamplighter, her life takes a turn for the better. Gerty’s successes and setbacks in friendship, love, and society helped women readers to navigate a life path at once romantic and familiar. Readers were drawn to the Gerty’s melodramatic rise from degradation and suffering to spiritual well-being. Cummins, who was born in 1827 to a wealthy family in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was educated at an elite girls school and lived with her parents in practical seclusion for her short 39-year life. After an anonymous publisher issued The Lamplighter in 1854, she followed with three more novels. Mabel Vaughn tells of the fall of a wealthy heiress, El Fureidís is a romance about a young woman in Palestine, and Haunted Hearts is about the tragic consequences of a young woman’s irresponsible moral and flirtatious behavior. Although each of these novels centered around certain situations and issues of interest to women at the time, none was as successful as her first.

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works in the history of U.S. literature. Most novelists were women, generally well educated, and well read in classical literature. Mainstream domestic novels were introspective, sentimental, and told the story of young women facing the trials and tests of adulthood. They were immensely popular and widely read by women in the nineteenth century, but were neglected for much of the twentieth century, until their recent rediscovery by scholars of women’s history. Some of the rediscovered popular domestic novelists were FANNY FERN and SUSAN WARNER. Women also wrote novels that are considered classics, such as LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’s Little Women (1868–69) or KATE CHOPIN’s The Awakening (1899), which was poorly received upon its publication but is revered today as a crucial feminist work. Like Chopin, CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN wrote novels that challenged the subordination of women. Other women novelists turned their attention to political and social issues, such as HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, in her famous book on slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even within the domestic novel genre, women such as LYDIA MARIA CHILD wrote about mixed-race romance. A number of women made a living as writers, and popular novelists CATHARINE SEDGWICK and Maria Cummins enjoyed what would be considered today as best-seller status. Beyond achieving commercial and professional success, women novelists were important pioneers in establishing, interpreting, promoting, and altering women’s place in society, by enlarging the domestic sphere to which women were largely confined at the time. Because the writers themselves often struggled with the duality of living privately as women and publicly as published popular authors, they reflected a similar crisis in their works. The domestic novel explored the intersection of private and public spheres, in regards to suitors, economic circumstances, and familial and social relations. FURTHER READING

Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. 2d ed. Reprint. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

 NURSING

Until the mid-nineteenth century, a “nurse” was essentially a domestic servant who worked in a hospital. Women of all classes and ethnicities nursed sick relatives at home, but middle-class women avoided hospital nursing because it was rough and degrading work. Moreover, it was considered wrong for respectable women to handle the bodies of strange men. During the Civil War, however, a severe shortage of nurses led many women to volunteer their services. Three thousand American women served as Union and Confederate army nurses, many without pay. DOROTHEA DIX, a Union administrator, required that nurses be older than 30 and plain, so that they would not attract romantic attention from patients. Army nurses worked long hours in horribly unsanitary conditions, often near the battlefront. They made nursing, and women’s desire to participate in the national struggle, respectable in the eyes of the American public. After the Civil War, reformers worked to improve standards for nurses’ training and conduct and make a respectable profession for educated women. Veteran army nurses founded training schools and wrote nursing textbooks. The development of the profession was closely intertwined with changes in medical care in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. At that time, hospitals were dangerously unsanitary; many patients died of infections they caught at the hospital. Professional nurses emphasized the importance of cleanliness and helped bring down the infection rate, making hospitals much safer. Nurses’ training emphasized duty and selfsacrifice, and the profession attracted many idealistic women who were deeply committed to caring for the wounded and ill. Some women opted to nurse because they were interested in medicine but did not aspire to become physicians; nursing, like teaching, was increasingly considered a womanly occupation. From the 1870s on, nurses trained as probationers, that is, apprentices. They earned nursing diplomas by working in hospitals for little or no pay; then they sought private employment, caring for patients in their homes between physicians’ visits. By 1900, there were 12,000 nurses in the United States, of whom 90 percent were women. See also: Barton, Clara; Richards, Linda; Settlement House Movement.

O L D A G E A N D M O R TA L I T Y

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TRAILBLAZERS

(1860–1926) Sharpshooter. Annie Oakley was One of the most influential Oberlin graduates was Fanny Marborn Phoebe Ann Moses near ion Jackson Coppin. Born a slave in 1837, Coppin gained her Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of freedom when her aunt purchased her. In 1860, she enrolled Jacob and Susan Moses. After her faOberlin, earning her degree in 1865. Coppin spent the rest of ther’s death, Moses discovered his her career educating African Americans by teaching at rifle and found she had a talent for African-American institutes, and in 1869, she became the shooting. She was so accurate that principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, she was able to support the family the first African-American woman to hold such a position. In and, legend has it, pay the mortgage 1902, she accompanied her husband to Cape Town, South by selling the game she shot. Africa, where she worked to set up educational missions. CopWhile visiting a married sister in pin died in Philadelphia in 1913. Cincinnati, Moses signed up for a shooting contest with a professional marksman named Frank Butler. To everyone’s surprise, including Butler’s, the 16-year-old girl beat him. AWAKENING revivalist Charles Finney joined the The two were married in 1876, and Butler soon faculty, and Oberlin subsequently became a gave up his career to manage his wife’s. haven for Christians who supported abolition Moses performed in circuses and Wild West and women’s rights. The college functioned as shows, eventually joining Buffalo Bill’s Wild West a stop on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, and Show in 1885. She took the name “Oakley” as a was the first U.S. college to admit both women stage name. She was known for incredible feats of and African Americans. As LUCY STONE, a femimarksmanship, including shooting a cigarette nist and Oberlin graduate in 1847 noted, “Men out of Butler’s mouth and shooting a playing came to Oberlin for various reasons . . . card that was thrown into the air. Oakley could women, because they had nowhere else to go.” hit the card a dozen times before it hit the ground. Thus, tickets that have been repeatedly OLD AGE AND MORTALITY punched came to be known as “Annie Oakleys.” Oakley’s career in the Wild West show ended In New England during the late 1700s and early in 1901 when the show train crashed and she was 1800s an increasing number of people lived to be badly injured. For a time after her recovery, she 60 or older because of better nutrition and acted in stage plays and, along with Butler, gave greater resistance to disease. As they had in the shooting demonstrations. During World War I, seventeenth century, elderly women and men developed the important new role of grandparents. she taught sharpshooting to soldiers. Annie Oakley gave free shooting lessons to In the nineteenth century, the first manuals more than 2,000 women and helped numerous began to appear with advice about aging. Many orphans pay for their educations. She died in were written by women, as more and more fe1926 near her birthplace in Ohio. Butler sur- males were making a living as writers. During this period, life was divided into four states: vived her by only three weeks. childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Writers often emphasized the importance of a strong religious faith in old age to deal with the infirmiOBERLIN COLLEGE Ohio college founded in 1833 by Reverend ties of aging, the loss of loved ones, and to ease John J. Shipherd and Philo P. Steward to edu- one’s own passage into death. In the middle of the nineteenth century, imcate religious teachers for the quickly growing United States West. In 1835, SECOND GREAT provements in health and hygiene convinced





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to eternal life. This helped women as well as men deal with their fear of dying.

 O’NEALE, MARGARET L.

Old age came early in the nineteenth century. In Massachusetts, for example, a female born in 1850 could expect to live 40.5 years. The life expectancy of a woman born in 1897 was 46.6 years.

some female writers that the type of old age a woman experienced could be, to some degree, determined by how well she took care of her body. For example, Mary Gove Nichols in her Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology (1846) emphasized that diseases are not ’an immediate visitation from the Almighty’ but arise from ’established laws with respect to life and health, and that transgression of these laws is followed by disease.’ The average life expectancy for women was only 43 years, and Nichols wanted to help them prolong life and enjoy a healthful old age. She stressed vegetarianism and regular bathing and changes of clothing as a sure way to enjoy health in old age. Nevertheless, religious leaders continued to remind people that contentment in old age still depended in large part on a strong belief in God and a virtuous life. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Reverend Theodore Parker depicted the ideal old man as a saintly grandfather who sits by the fire. The ideal elderly woman was one who had spent most of her life caring for her family. Authors such as LYDIA MARIA CHILD presented a romantic view of old age in her book Looking Toward Sunset, published in numerous editions between 1864 and 1887. She portrayed the elderly as having overcome the turmoil of life. Self-help manuals pointed out that the elderly should try to maintain good health and their closeness to God. They could then experience a rewarding old age and a peaceful death that would be the gateway

(1799–1879) Center of a political scandal. Margaret “Peggy” O’Neale was born on December 3, 1799, in Washington, D.C. Her father was an innkeeper whose lodgings were popular with political figures of the time. O’Neale soon gained a reputation in Washington for her sparkle, good looks, and flirtatious behavior. In 1816, she married a naval officer named John Timberlake, and the two settled in the capital. Over the next few years, O’Neale and her husband formed a friendship with Tennessee senator John Henry Eaton. Eaton helped Timberlake financially and helped him secure a place on several sea voyages. While her husband was away at sea, Eaton also escorted O’Neale to various Washington affairs. Before long, rumors spread through the capital linking Eaton and O’Neale as a couple. In 1828, Timberlake died on an ocean voyage. That November, Eaton’s close friend, Andrew Jackson, was elected to the presidency. Hoping for a position in Jackson’s cabinet and afraid that his relationship with O’Neale would damage him politically, Eaton proposed. The couple was married on January 1, 1829, and Eaton was indeed named secretary of war. However, for many Washingtonians, the nomination was unacceptable. Many prominent women in Washington society refused to associate with O’Neale. Further gossip about O’Neale’s life and other lovers began to circulate, though there was no evidence that any of the stories were true. Jackson defended O’Neale staunchly. He included her at state dinners and forcefully attacked the rumors of her misconduct, even going as far as to suggest that cabinet members who disapproved of her ought to resign. The issue continued to plague the administration, and divisions within the cabinet threatened to weaken Jackson’s party. Peggy O’Neale did not live the remainder of her life quietly. She remained at Eaton’s side during the rest of his political career. She also took on the task of raising four of her grandchildren after their parents died. After Eaton’s death in 1856, O’Neale created another scandal by marry-

OUTWORK

ing her grandchildren’s 19-year-old dance instructor. She died on November 8, 1879, in Washington.

 OREGON TRAIL

The route from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Between 1840 and 1870, nearly a half million people traveled the 2,000-mile Oregon trail. Of these, about 50,000 were women. While some women were excited by the prospect of travel, many others went either to please their husbands or because their husbands ordered them to do so, brokenhearted to leave behind the community and connections that were so important to them. Daily life on the trail was grueling. Women performed their ordinary tasks under nearly impossible conditions. Formerly neat housewives served meals on the ground, wore the same clothes for months without washing, and watched everything they owned become covered with layers of dirt and dust. Toward the end of the journey, meals might consist of field mice cooked over a buffalo-chip fire. Women also took on new roles, trading with Native Americans, herding animals, and repairing wagon wheels. Many of the women who traveled the trail had young children with them, and others became pregnant and gave birth along the way. Many women died in childbirth with no midwife to help them; many others lost young children to cholera and other diseases. When they arrived in Oregon, women faced more difficult times. Families had to wait until spring to even begin to build shelter, and many lived in makeshift shelters for months after they arrived. As soon as they could, however, women, who had taken leadership roles on the trail and learned they had much more strength and stamina than they had thought, began to build new communities to replace those they had lost.

 O’SULLIVAN, MARY KENNEY

(1864–1943) Labor leader. Mary Kenney was born in Hannibal, Missouri, on January 8, 1864. She worked as a dressmaker to support her mother before moving to Chicago in 1889. There she worked in several factories and became a union organizer for the Chicago Women’s Bindery Workers’ Union.

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Kenney was a friend of JANE ADDAMS, the founder of HULL HOUSE, a settlement house in Chicago. In 1889, Kenney set up the Jane Club at Hull House. It was a home for female factory workers who earned so little that they could not afford other housing. In 1892, due to her outstanding work investigating the harsh working conditions for women in factories, Kenney was named the first woman organizer of the American Federation of Labor. This large union of workers was headed by Samuel Gompers who had appointed Kenney to her new position. She traveled to New York and Massachusetts, organizing female garment workers and carpet weavers. In 1894, Kenney married John F. O’Sullivan, an editor for the Boston Globe. In Boston, she continued her organizing work among rubber makers and garment workers. In 1903, she helped form the Women’s Trade Union League. During 1914, she was appointed a factory inspector by the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and continued to hold this position until her retirement in 1934. She died on January 18, 1943.

 OUTWORK

The practice of sending raw materials to workers in their homes to be made into finished goods. Before the Industrial Revolution, the manufacture of textiles was done primarily in rural homes across the country. Merchants would purchase raw materials, such as wool or cotton, and then send these materials to families, who in turn, carded, spun, and wove the raw material into fabric. The finished product was returned to the merchant, who paid workers by the piece. This practice was also called the “putting-out” or “domestic” system and was different from handicrafting in that workers neither bought raw materials nor sold the finished product. The domestic system was also used in the manufacture of shoes. In the early stages of the urban garment industry, until about 1840, the outwork system was also used. The system of outwork resulted in the first large-scale employment of women and children. Especially in the manufacture of textiles, women were the primary workers. Young, unmarried women did so much spinning, in fact, that the word “spinster” came to mean an unmarried woman as well as a woman who spins. “Distaff,” which is part of a spinning wheel, has come to mean “female,” as in “the distaff side of the family.”

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Outwork restricted many women to poorly paid and irregular jobs that isolated them from one another. It benefited merchants by lowering wage costs and thereby increasing profits. On the other hand, outwork helped farm families earn extra money. With the invention of water- and steam-powered looms and other machines used in textile manufacture, however, it became possible to manufacture textiles from thread to final

fabric under one roof. Instead of employing entire families in the textile manufacturing process, adolescent girls and young women were brought into towns to work in the new textile mills. Outwork did not immediately disappear with the advent of the Industrial Revolution but underwent a gradual decline. See also: Lowell Mill Workers; Lynn Shoe Workers.

P

 PAGE ACT

crimination in the United States. These immiThe 1875 act aimed primarily at Asian women grants, primarily from China and Japan, were a that restricted some Chinese immigration to the source of low-wage labor, especially for the growUnited States. Throughout the late nineteenth ing railroad industry. Some people felt that the nacentury Asian immigrants faced a great deal of dis- tion was being overrun with Asian immigrants. The Page Act was passed by Congress in 1875 in response to these concerns. The law forTRAILBLAZERS bade the entry of “Orientals” (though the act was primarily Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830–1908) was the first internadirected against CHINESE IMMItionally recognized American female sculptor. Her father, HayGRANTS) who were forced conman Hosmer, a physician and an attentive parent, educated her tract laborers, criminals, and at home in Massachusetts for part of her childhood. In her prostitutes. In particular, any teens she attended Mrs. Charles Sedgwick’s School for Girls, Chinese woman who wanted to which encouraged the young girl’s interest in art and things meenter the United States was chanical. Hosmer took art lessons from local artists Paul screened in Hong Kong to enStephenson and Cornelia Crow, and after her training with sure that that she was of good those teachers was complete her father sent her to study moral character. Many Chinese anatomy with a St. Louis doctor. She never married and often women were not allowed to traveled alone, in defiance of Victorian convention. Hosmer enter the United States because was known for her close friendships other female artists and they were wrongly labeled as with actresses such as FRANCES KEMBLE and Charlotte Cushman. prostitutes. In combination with In 1852, accompanied by Cushman, Hosmer traveled to a number of other immigration policies and state laws, the Page Rome to expand her training. A number of other women Act discouraged Chinese men artists followed her there and created a small expatriate from settling permanently in group. Hosmer received her first commission in 1852 and crethe United States. Seven years ated her most important statues in the years before the Civil later, Congress passed the CHIWar, among them Puck (1856), Beatrice Cenci (1857), and NESE EXCLUSION ACT, which Senobia in Chains (1859). After the Civil War Hosmer’s work ended almost all Chineses imbecame less in demand as Americans became less enamored of migration. The Page Act, Chithe classical themes she favored. She moved to England, where nese Exclusion Act, and related she remained until 1900, designing and sculpting a number of legislation resulted in a large fountains and gates for English estates. At the end of the cenimbalance between the number tury Hosmer returned to Watertown, Massachusetts, the town of men and women of Chinese of her birth, where she died eight years later. ancestry; consequently, most of these men never married. With

PA S S I O N L E S S N E S S

so few Chinese women admitted to the country, the formation of Chinese families and communities proved difficult.

 PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

Women of this period made significant contributions to every major movement in painting and sculpture, but some fields were easier for them to enter than others. Miniature painting provided many women artists with their first foray into painting. Miniatures, which were popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were accessible to female artists for a number of reasons. Because of their size, they required limited studio space and materials, and because they focused on the head and bust, they did not require the artist to have a solid training in anatomy—training that was difficult for women to obtain. Early miniaturist Ann Hall had a New York exhibition in 1817 and was the first female member of the National Academy of Design. As the nineteenth century progressed, the number of female painters and sculptors rapidly increased. Often female artists were related to male artists. Fathers, uncles and brothers would recognize talent in female relatives, train them, and often share studio space. In the artistically prominent Peale family, for example, daughters and nieces received family instruction from James and Charles Peale. American art schools admitted women until 1844, when women’s drawing from live nude models was strictly forbidden on the basis of social strictures about female virtue and purity. Female students drew from plaster casts which were fitted with strategically placed fig leaves. Not until 1868 did the Pennsylvania Academy establish a ladies’ class with a live nude female model, and then the academy was roundly criticized for the move. To counter the difficulties they faced, women formed art associations and groups all over the country. The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, founded after the Civil War, sponsored its own art academy, gave female exhibits, and funded scholarships for women in the late nineteenth century. At mid-century a number of women left America to find greater artistic opportunity in Europe. Sculptors such as Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, and Vinnie Ream Hoxie all mastered their skills in Rome. In the last decades of the century female Impressionists such as MARY CASSATT gained considerable fame.

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 PARKER, CYNTHIA ANN

(c. 1827– c. 1864) Captive and mother of Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. Cynthia Ann Parker was born in Illinois but moved with relatives to Texas while she was still quite young. In 1836, a Comanche war party attacked the settlement, killing five and capturing five residents, including nine-year-old Parker. She was adopted and raised by the Comanche captors. She eventually married a war chief, Nocona, and gave birth to three children—two boys, Quanah and Pecos, and a girl, Topsannah. Although the Parkers made at least two attempts to ransom her, she refused to leave her adopted family. On December 18, 1860, a group of Texas Rangers attacked a Comanche work party and captured a woman with fair hair and blue eyes. Now known as Naduah, their reluctant captive was the 34-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. Since the Rangers had killed several women, it is not known why she was spared, but perhaps it was because she had her daughter in her arms. When she was returned home to her relatives, Parker initially could not remember English, although the language eventually came back to her. Parker tried several times to escape and rejoin her Native American family, but never succeeded. When her daughter died, she lost her will to live and died shortly after. She was buried near the family settlement in Texas. Parker’s son, Quanah, eventually became a great war chief, and the last Comanche chief to surrender. When he learned of his mother’s death, he arranged to have her body and that of his sister moved from Texas to his home in Oklahoma for reburial.

 PASSIONLESSNESS

The belief that women lacked sexuality was a hallmark of nineteenth-century sexual ideology. Previous to the nineteenth century, women were viewed as particularly sexual, and more lustful than men. Early American colonists expected that women’s sexual appetites would at least equal, if not exceed, those of men. During the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, in response to a host of factors, Americans came to see women as more morally pure and less sexual than men. The transformation of women from sexual to moral beings greatly influenced the position of American women in society. Indeed, the argument

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that women were “naturally” more moral than men was the cornerstone of women’s wider reform activities and provided an avenue into public space. Thus passionlessness both supported ideas about separate spheres, which arose in response to the market revolution, and was used to subvert those spheres. Women in the NEW YORK FEMALE MORAL REFORM SOCIETY, for example, based their attack on PROSTITUTION and the men who frequented prostitutes on women’s superior moral capacity. Female reformers could not conceive that prostitutes might willingly engage in sex work, and believed that all prostitutes were victims of sexually aggressive men. The New York reformers’ casting of men as the evildoers and prostitutes as victims was based on notions of women’s natural passionlessness. Passionlessness may have created a kind of sexual solidarity among some women and encouraged passionate female relationships. Women also used the doctrine of passionlessness to justify women’s right to control their reproduction. The “voluntary motherhood” movement helped women limit the number of children they could have by limiting sexual intercourse within marriage. Because women found sex repugnant, responsible and sensitive husbands were supposed to limit their sexual needs to fit their wives’ smaller passions. Fewer sexual demands naturally led to fewer pregnancies. The argument that men should limit their sexual demands on wives and that wives had the right to refuse their husbands was a change from the previously unchallenged assumption that women should dutifully submit to men’s sexual demands. Thus, while acceptance of the ideology of passionlessness placed limitations on women, it also created a venue for feminist behavior. See also: “Domesticity and the Ideology of Separate Spheres” (p. 7).

 PATERNALISM

While PATRIARCHY (see Volume 1) generally means the absolute rule of men over women and children, paternalism suggests reciprocal family relations to a less absolute head of household. In the nineteenth century, paternalism took two related forms. In the North paternalism most generally manifested itself in industrial work, while in the South paternalism justified slave labor. Slavery defenders argued that enslaved men and

women were childlike, irresponsible, and unable to take care of themselves. White masters provided the same kind of guidance and care for their slaves as they would for a child, while providing the sociological benefit of controlling an inherently “undisciplined” population. White Southerners developed a theory of benevolent paternalism to counter abolitionists’ charges that slavery was immoral, fraught with violence, and destructive to society. Paternalism defined SLAVERY as a legitimate return for masters’ protection. Some slave owners went so far as to complain about the burden of having so many dependents, claiming the slaves cost them more than their labor was worth. In reality unwaged slavery was extremely profitable, and racist notions about African Americans functioned almost entirely to maintain the plantation economy. Paternalism was also used to control Southern white women, who fell under the yoke of planter authority as surely as did slaves, though more gently. In the North, mill owners initially engaged in a system of paternalism in handling workers. Early mills were built around company housing, stores, and entertainment. Parents who sent their daughters to work in the LOWELL MILLS were assured that suitable and supervised housing would ensure the virtue of female workers. Lowell “operatives” were required to attend church on Sunday, abstain from intoxicating beverages, observe the 10 P.M. curfew, and punctually attend meals. Both company policy and group pressure by female workers assured parents and capitalists that women workers would conform. In the 1850s and 1860s, paternalistic policy fell victim to economic pressures and a more readily available immigrant labor force.

 PATTERSON, MARY JANE

(1840–1894) Educator. Mary Jane Patterson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, to ex-slave Henry and Emmeline Patterson. Henry was a bricklayer and mason who used his craft to gain his freedom in the 1850s and then moved his family to Oberlin, Ohio, where he worked as a skilled mason. Mary Jane Patterson was one of at least nine children, and may have been the oldest. In 1857, Patterson enrolled in OBERLIN COLLEGE. She undertook the “gentleman’s” or classical course of study, one of only a very few women to do so, and she graduated magna cum laude in 1862.

PHILANTHROPY

Patterson taught school in Chillocothe, Ohio, Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia, before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1869. She taught there from 1869 to 1871 and then was appointed principal of the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth. She was the high school’s first AfricanAmerican principal and was probably the first black principal of any high school in the city. After stepping down as principal in 1884, Patterson continued to teach at the high school until her death in 1894.

PEABODY, ELIZABETH  PALMER

(1804–1894) Educator and writer. Elizabeth Peabody was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, on May 16, 1804. She was educated at home by her mother, who ran a school for girls. Peabody started her own school in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1820, and then opened a school in Boston two years later. Peabody moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where she began a third school in 1825. She also served as secretary for William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister. When the school closed in 1832, Peabody began writing to support herself. In 1837, she became a member of the Transcendentalist Club, which included Channing, MARGARET FULLER, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From the West Street bookstore in Boston, which Peabody opened in 1839, Fuller lectured on a variety of philosophical topics. At the bookstore, Peabody also published books and wrote articles in support of the transcendental movement. From 1859 to 1867, Peabody ran the country’s first kindergarten based on the German model. Many of her later books focused on early childhood education, including Kindergarten Culture (1870). She also lectured at the Concord School of Philosophy and published a book on Channing (1880). She died on January 3, 1894.

PHELPS, ELIZABETH  STUART

(1815–1852) Novelist. Elizabeth Stuart was born in Andover, Massachusetts, to Moses and Abigail Stuart. By the age of ten, Elizabeth was writing stories for her younger brothers and sisters. At 16, she attended Mount Vernon School in Boston and lived with the family of the Rev. Jacob Abbott. Abbott was a writer and editor of a religious

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magazine. Elizabeth wrote stories for Abbott’s magazine. In 1834, Elizabeth became seriously ill and returned to her parents’ home where she remained for several years partially blind and subject to headaches and episodes of paralysis. After an attack of typhus, her health improved. In 1842, she married the Rev. Austin Phelps, minister of the Pine Street Congregational church in Boston. The couple had three children. In 1851, Phelps published The Sunny Side; or, The Country Minister’s Wife, a novel largely based on her own life and journals she had kept over the years. The book was an immediate success and sold 100,000 copies before the end of the year. This was followed by A Peep at “Number Five”; or, A Chapter in the Life of a City Pastor, a novel Phelps considered her best work. After the birth of her third child in 1852, Phelps’ health troubles returned and she died in November at the age of 37. Several of her books were published posthumously. Phelps’s oldest daughter, Mary Gray, took her mother’s name as an adult and went on to have a long career as a writer. See also: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

 PHILANTHROPY

Philanthropy has long been the particular province of women. Philanthropy may be defined as charitable works or endowments intended to enhance the well-being of humanity, and though often nineteenth-century women’s VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS and moral reform associations were philanthropic in nature, philanthropy may also fall outside formal organizations. Certainly, Catherine Ferguson’s Sunday school work in the early part of the century figures as a significant private endeavor. While Ferguson’s philanthropic efforts stemmed more from her immense sense of benevolence for children than from wealth, many philanthropic endeavors have been funded from considerable private fortunes. In the late nineteenth century, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, funded architectural competitions, college scholarships, and two buildings at the University of California. Hearst was also a cofounder of the ParentTeacher Association (PTA). Although the idea of female philanthropists as white, Protestant, wealthy women has some cre-

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WOMEN’S FIRSTS Founder of the first Sunday School in New York City, Catherine Ferguson (1779–1854) was born a slave. When Ferguson was eight her mother was sold, and the two never saw each other again. This experience indelibly marked her, causing her to devote her life to taking care of orphaned children. At 16, a female friend purchased Ferguson’s freedom for $200. Two years later Ferguson married and had two children, both of whom died in infancy. After the death of her children she began informally adopting homeless or abused children. She acted as mother for 48 children, 20 of them white, raising them to adulthood or finding them suitable homes. Although illiterate, Ferguson also gathered both black and white children at her home every Sunday for religious instruction. She did this at a time when poor Americans had exceedingly few educational opportunities. The minister for her congregation, Dr. William Mason, heard her teaching the children one Sunday and asked her to transfer her school to the basement of his new church. He also organized volunteers to help in the Sunday school. Though the Sunday school movement for the separate religious education of children began in England in 1780, Ferguson’s school was the first such endeavor in New York. Abolitionist Lewis Tappan and reformer Henry Ward Beecher both greatly admired Ferguson, as did many other New Yorkers. Ferguson did not limit her philanthropy to Sunday schools and foster parenting, but also held biweekly prayer meetings for children and adults in her neighborhood. She continued her work until the day she died in 1854.

dence, women from all classes and racial contexts served the less fortunate. As a devout JEW, REBECCA GRATZ organized the Female Association of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances in antebellum Philadelphia and founded two orphanages, one specifically serving the Jewish community. Gratz also conducted free religious schools for Jewish children, using the Christian Sunday school model. The school was open and free. She accomplished all of this while raising her deceased sister’s nine children. In 1809, Elizabeth Seton, the first Americanborn saint of the Catholic Church, founded a religious community and was famed for her services to the poor and sick. Bridget “Biddy” Mason, an exslave, made a small fortune in MIDWIFERY and realestate in late-nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Mason was famous for providing food and shelter

to homeless people and for visiting men in jail, and was a founding member of the Los Angeles branch of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. See also: Benevolent Societies; Catholics (Volume 1). FURTHER READING

Brody, Seymour. Jewish Heroes and Heroines of America. Hollywood, FL.: Lifetime Books, 1996. Ginsberg, Lori. Women and the Work of Benevolence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

 PIECEWORK

Piecework is a type of industrial labor where people took home raw materials, worked on them in their homes and returned the finished products to the factory. In the nineteenth century piecework was done almost exclusively by women. Although most often associated with the garment industry, a number of other products were also manufactured this way, including shoes and cigars. Since workers labored outside the industrial setting, factory owners paid this kind of work by the piece rather than by the hour, hence the name. Working by the piece, rather than the hour also encouraged workers to work fast and with few breaks. Jewish and Italian women most often did piecework, and this type of female industrial work remained underwaged through the century. Women did the work, though, because it allowed them to work in their homes, to take care of children and ailing relatives, and to regulate their work hours.

PIERCE, JANE MEANS  APPLETON

(1806–1863) First lady and wife of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president. Jane Means Appleton was born in Hampton, New Hampshire. Her father, a Congregational minister, was president of Bowdoin College in Maine. In 1834, Jane married a graduate of Bowdoin, a lawyer named Franklin Pierce.

POPULISM At the time of the marriage, Franklin Pierce had already embarked on his political career. He served as a U.S. congressman and later as U.S. senator from New Hampshire. Jane Pierce did not enjoy the social life in Washington D.C., however, and finally convinced her husband to retire from politics in 1842. In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico, and Franklin Pierce served as a brigadier general. He became a hero at the capture of Mexico City in 1847. When the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce for president in 1852, Jane Pierce hoped he would not be elected, but after his victory she resigned herself to returning to Washington. Two months before the Pierces entered the White House, their son was killed in a train accident. Mrs. Pierce never fully recovered. She did not carry out many social obligations while serving as first lady, but devoted herself to prayer and letter writing. After her husband’s term ended in 1857, the couple returned to New Hampshire where Jane died.

 PLESSY

V. FERGUSON The 1896 Supreme Court case that established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” In 1890, Louisiana passed a law that said “all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” In 1892, Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old African American, was arrested for sitting in the “whites only” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy contested his arrest, and in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, he argued that the Louisiana law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery, and the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship rights to freed slaves. Plessy lost the case in Louisiana courts and appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1896, the justices voted, 8-1, to uphold the Louisiana law. The majority opinion held that any statute that makes a distinction between races does not “destroy the legal equality of the two races.” It also maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to “abolish distinctions based on color.” Plessy v. Ferguson established the precedent that “separate” facilities could be constitutional as long as they were “equal.” This ruling sanctioned segregation in schools, theaters, recreation facilities, rest rooms, and all other aspects of life in the South.

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It was only in 1954, with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was struck down. This doctrine was also used to discriminate against women, permitting such entities as “men only” clubs.

 POLK, SARAH CHILDRESS

(1803–1891) Wife of James K. Polk, eleventh president. Sarah Childress was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was educated at the Moravian Institute in Salem, North Carolina, where she studied Greek and Latin, geography, music, and sewing. Sarah Childress met James Polk through her brother; both young men attended Murfreesboro Academy. The couple was married in 1824, just after James was elected to the Tennessee legislature. A year later, he was elected to Congress, where he served for 14 years. Because the Polks had no children, Sarah was able to accompany her husband to Washington, where she earned the respect of her husband’s colleagues for her intelligence and charm. Polk, whose health was never the best, depended on his wife to be secretary, nurse, and counselor. After a term as governor of Tennessee, Polk was elected president in 1844. Sarah, a strict Presbyterian, did not allow dancing or hard liquor at the White House, although she served wine at state dinners. When Polk left the White House in 1848, the couple hoped for a peaceful retirement in Tennessee. But James Polk died only three months after leaving office. Sarah Polk lived at Polk Place for the next 42 years, where she brought up a great niece, Sarah Polk Jetton. During the Civil War, she was visted by generals from both the North and the South. The telegraph was first used to announce her husband’s presidential nomination; interestingly, Sarah lived long enough to have the first telephone in Nashville installed in her home. She died there in 1891 at the age of 88.

 POPULISM

A short-lived but powerful third party movement largely derived from the agrarian reform movement spearheaded by such organizations as the Grange and the Farmers Alliance, which advocated for farmers’ socioeconomic rights. These organizations were based on broad, inclusive,

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grass-roots membership, which provided a solid base for the development of populism. The organizations included women and AFRICAN AMERICANS, both of whom were active contributors to the farming economy. Women comprised one quarter of Grange membership, which included women from its 1867 inception. The Grange stipulated that certain leadership offices be held by women, such as Sarah Baird, who was the master of the Minnesota State Grange. As many as a million women were thought to have been active in the Grange, the Alliance, and eventually the Populist party in the late nineteenth century. Industrialization drew power toward the cities and away from rural areas. Farmers began to organize for political reforms and to provide mutual aid as their political, social, and economic needs were ignored. Reacting to the harmful effects of capitalism and industrialization on agrarian society, the Populists advocated radical public policies such as national control of railroads and public utilities, and the abolition of the gold standard toward an increase in silver-backed money. Also known as the People’s Party, the Populist party launched its platform at the 1891 National Union Conference, drawing reformers from across the country. In addition to women from the farming organizations, which supported such progressive legislation, women from major reform movements—particularly those led by women, such as the TEMPERANCE and SUFFRAGE movements—were drawn to the Populists. The women in these movements hoped that the Populist goals of greater democracy, freedom, and equality would help promote their causes. However, populism had to make some concessions to appease its broad base of supporters, which included many more conservative and traditional voices from its rural constituent base in the South. Woman suffrage was one of the first casualties. At the party’s first national convention, in Omaha in 1892, woman suffrage was deleted from its official platform. One of the most famous Populist women, the outspoken orator MARY ELIZABETH LEASE, would split with the party over the suffrage issue. Populism did not last long. By 1896, it had already peaked with a membership between one to three million, and began to decline. By the end of the year, it would eventually dissolve after joining with the Democratic Party to endorse William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 elec-

tion. Not only were Populist demands for radical economic change ignored, but Bryan’s eventual defeat left the party in shambles. However, many of their demands were adopted by Progressives in the early 1900s.



POST, AMY KIRBY (1802–1889) Abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Amy Kirby was born in New York to Joseph and Mary Kirby. In her early twenties Amy moved to Scipio, New York, to live with her sister Hannah and brother-in-law, Isaac Post. When Hannah died in 1827, Amy married Isaac the following year. They had four children. In 1836, the Posts moved to Rochester, New York, and Post became involved in the antislavery movement. She opened her home to antislavery lecturers who visited Rochester, and her home became a stop on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. Raised as a QUAKER, Post left the Society of Friends because she did not believe that the leaders had the right to judge individual members’ moral stances. While most Quakers did not approve of slavery, many leaders disapproved of the activities of abolitionists. Post was also involved in the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT from its beginnings in 1848. She attended the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION and signed the Declaration of Sentiments. She also established the WORKING WOMEN’S PROTECTIVE UNION, a group devoted to improving pay for working women. She also became involved in the spiritualist movement, a group whose members attempted to make contact with the dead. After the Civil War, Post joined the Equal Rights Association and the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION. In 1872, Post and SUSAN B. ANTHONY attempted to vote in the presidential election. While Anthony succeeded in casting her vote, Post did not, although she was able to register. Post died in Rochester in 1889.

 PREACHING

Although women had been preaching in the American colonies since early Puritan settlement, they took to the pulpit through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries without being officially ordained. LUCRETIA MOTT became a QUAKER minister in 1818, after a religious schism separated Quakers into the orthodox or traditional Quaker branch, and a more evangelical, radical group led by Elias Hicks. As a Hicksite

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Antioch College in 1855 and graduated in 1856. At Antioch she met Antoinette Brown Blackwell (no relation). Blackwell had been ordained a Congregational minister by a New York parish and inspired Brown to apply to theological Schools. Canton Theological School accepted her, thus beginning her long career as a minister, and feminist activist. Although many nineteenth-century preachers were white women, a number of AFRICANAMERICAN WOMEN counted themselves as preachers as well. In the 1840s and 1850s, SOJOURNER TRUTH was an unordained preacher, as well as an eloquent speaker for abolition and women’s rights. Lena Doolin Mason entered the ministry in 1887 as a preacher for the Colored Conference of the Methodist Church. Mason proved herself a powerful evangelist, preaching to all black, all white, and then eventually racially mixed audiences. Anna Howard Shaw was the first woman minister of the Methodist Protestant Church.

Quaker, Mott preached on a number of issues, most notably the evils of SLAVERY. The Hicksites encouraged female preaching and a number of Quaker women followed in Mott’s footsteps. Mott may be counted as one of the first women to translate her speaking experience into making speeches about ABOLITION and the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Lydia Ann Jenkins may have been the first U.S. woman ordained by a nomination, but records of her 1860 ordination have been lost. A Universalist, Jenkins preached alongside her husband, Edmund Samuel Jenkins, supported women’s rights, and eventually left the ministry to become a physician. OLYMPIA BROWN is more commonly accepted as the first U.S. woman minister ordained with full denominational authority. The Universalist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, ordained Brown in 1863. She studied at MOUNT HOLYOKE FEMALE SEMINARY before transferring to

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Born in England, Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) emigrated to Massachusetts with her family in 1851. In 1859 the family moved to a homestead in Michigan, where young Shaw undertook many of the tasks her absent father and unwell mother would ordinarily have done. She cleared land, planted crops, finished the cabin, and cared for her family. After two or three year of school, Shaw became a teacher at the age of 15. At the end of the Civil War she moved in with her older sister in Big Rapids, Michigan, and enrolled in high school. There, Shaw heard Universalist preacher Marianna Thompson, and decided to become a preacher herself. She gave her first sermon in 1870 and was licensed as a Methodist preacher in 1871. Shaw attended first Albion College, then Boston University’s Divinity School from which she graduated in 1878. Although the Methodist Episcopal Church refused to ordain her, she was accepted by the Methodist Protestant Church two years after her graduation, making her the first woman minister of that church. While attending to her congregation on Cape Cod she pursued medical studies, graduating with an M.D. from Boston University in 1886. Her struggles convinced her that her real work should be for woman SUFFRAGE. She became a women’s rights lecturer and close friend of women like SUSAN B. ANTHONY and LUCY STONE. From 1904 to 1915 Shaw was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She continued her reform work until her death, just before the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 3) was ratified.

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See also: Denominationalism. FURTHER READING

Brekus, Catherine. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

PRESBYTERIAN MISSION  HOME Mission home that helped young Asian immigrant women in San Francisco. Founded by Presbyterians in 1874, the mission was established to aid CHINESE IMMIGRANT girls and women, many of whom had been illegally smuggled to the United States and sold into prostitution and domestic slavery. Donaldina Cameron, a local San Francisco woman, entered the Mission Home to teach sewing classes, and became its most prominent MISSIONARY and director. She opened the doors of the Mission Home to countless young women who were being abused by their employers, or chased down by slave traders. The mission workers regularly raided brothels to rescue women sold into prostitution, but also took in young girls from their own homes. At the Mission Home, girls would learn English, study the Bible, and find shelter and community. They would also receive technical instruction that prepared them for factory work, and domestic lessons in case they were to marry. One of the unofficial services offered by the Mission Home was to find proper husbands for the young women. Many of the women who found refuge there stayed on as employees, such as AH TSUN, who taught classes and eventually married, and WU TIEN FU, who traveled the country on rescue missions. The mission moved buildings in 1939, but still exists today as a Christian-based organization for recent Asian women immigrants.

PROPERTY RIGHTS,  MARRIED WOMEN See MARRIAGE; MARRIAGE LAWS.

 PROSTITUTION

Prostitution, or the practice of taking payment for sexual intercourse, was illegal in nineteenthcentury America but generally tolerated. Until 1900 more women worked as prostitutes than

any other waged labor. Nineteenth-century industrialization, urbanization, and westward expansion may have increased prostitution, in part because single male populations in cities and the West drove the sex trade, and in part because many women could not survive on the low wages of industrial or domestic work. In New York City during the 1830s there may have been as many as 10,000 “girls on the town,” or approximately two of every 15 women. Although nineteenth-century reform associations, such as the NEW YORK FEMALE MORAL REFORM SOCIETY, assumed that prostitutes were victims of male lust, some female sex workers willingly chose their lives and enjoyed the independence and economic freedom prostitution provided. Prostitutes were occasionally arrested for “vagrancy,” but pre–Civil War New York and other towns were surprisingly tolerant of commercial sex. By contrast, Chinese prostitutes on the Western frontier were often virtually enslaved. Young women were procured from China, transported to the United States, and sold to “owners” who kept most or all of the women’s wages. Prostitutes in MINING CAMPS were often a mixed population, women of Mexican descent, African-American women, Chinese women, and immigrant women of European descent. Nativeborn white women, however, continued to dominate the trade throughout the century. Many owned property and engaged in legitimate businesses. Others lived in terribly degraded conditions and died as a result of sexually transmitted diseases. As the nineteenth century progressed, prostitutes came under increasing attacks from the “respectable” population. The 1910 Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes, decreased but did not eliminate forced prostitution. The late nineteenth century also saw control of prostitution shift away from women to male procurers and organized crime networks, funneling much of the money created in the tremendously lucrative sex trades away from sex workers and into the hands of men. FURTHER READING

Petrick, Paula. No Step Backward. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society, 1987. Rosen, Ruth. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

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 PROTECTIVE LABOR LAWS  PURVIS, HARRIET FORTEN In the nineteenth century a number of laws were passed that regulated the labor of women and children: how long they could work, where they could work, and under what conditions. These laws were promoted both by labor reformers and some labor organizations concerned with the growing population of child and female workers. Male workers also had concerns about female and child labor, mainly because they provided a cheap labor pool which could compete with male labor. Rather than join with women to protect their right to work under humane conditions for a decent wage, male workers often tried to drive women from a trade by restricting their numbers, the hours they could work, and the conditions that would govern their work. Reform organizations, settlement houses, and state boards of labor had good intentions, but nonetheless these groups assumed that male workers could bargain for themselves and that women needed protection from employers and others. States often had two mechanisms for dealing with worker abuse. The first was to regulate situations that undesirably affected both male and female health in factories. The second recognized a “higher good” which regulated women’s access to employment or particular working conditions. Late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century courts privileged men’s right to contract their work, but did not hold the same standard for women. An 1881 California law, for example, restricted women from working anywhere that sold alcoholic beverages. This law, based on the belief that such a work environment would damage a woman’s moral and physical health, led some women to lose their jobs and prevented others from getting jobs. See also: Muller v. Oregon (Volume 3).

(1810–1875) Abolitionist. Born in 1810 in Philadelphia, Harriet Forten was the first child of sailmaker and inventor James Forten and his wife Charlotte Vandine Forten. Wealthy and prominent in the free black community of Philadelphia, James and Charlotte devoted much of their lives to supporting the antislavery movement and financing several ABOLITIONIST organizations. Their passion in this arena was passed down to their daughters, all three of whom were involved in the struggles for the rights of slaves, blacks, and women. In 1832, Harriet married Robert Purvis, son of a wealthy cotton broker, and well known for his own involvement as a leading African-American abolitionist. The two supported each other’s political activities, and established a safe haven for abolitionists and fugitive slaves in their Philadelphia home. Both were also regular participants in the literary and scientific societies popular among the black elite at that time. A year after her marriage, Harriet, together with her sisters and mother, helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the nation’s first interracial organization of female abolitionists. Purvis regularly cochaired the Society’s antislavery fairs, and served as its representative to meetings of other organizations where she advocated civil rights and spoke on woman SUFFRAGE. She remained an active member until the organization’s dissolution in 1870. With the EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, issued in 1863, declaring free all slaves in Confederate states, Harriet Purvis redirected her political attentions. She focused her energy and commitment on two issues: the effort to end discrimination and the movement to gain suffrage for black men and all women.

Q

 QUAKERS

In the 1670s, led by William Penn, English Quakers emigrated to the American colonies. Though Penn’s dreams of an American utopia never materialized, by the nineteenth century Quakers had created a vision of social and religious possibili-

ties. By 1820, Quakers in America no longer held a unified system of belief and worship, but all Quaker theology depended upon the doctrine of Inner Light. This belief held that each individual was equally important in the eyes of God. Inner

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Light was the basis for Quakers’ strong opposition to racism, sexism, war, and religious intolerance. Early in the nineteenth century, scores of female and male Quaker missionaries lived among the Iroquois tribes, preaching Christianity and teaching white culture. Like other missionaries, Quakers often denigrated Native culture, but they did encourage sobriety and discourage gambling—both crucial to the early nineteenth-century renaissance of the Iroquois. Though ultimately Native leaders would have a greater impact on the Iroquois than any number of Quaker missionaries, Quaker schools, food and medicine proved significant cultural contributions. Quakers are known for their work in ABOLITION and WOMEN’S RIGHTS. From their earliest years in North America, Quakers contended that slavery was immoral and should be abolished. Quakers permitted women a voice in their

churches and even allowed female ministers. Thus, not only did Quaker women speak publicly and powerfully for abolition, they also translated that reform into women’s rights. LUCRETIA MOTT, for example, began her adult life as a teacher in a Quaker school, was ordained as a minister when she was 28, and soon after became a committed abolitionist whose home was used as a regular stop on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. In 1848, Mott and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON planned the famed SENECA FALLS CONVENTION for women’s rights. Though Mott heartily supported women’s rights, Stanton’s resolution to demand female SUFFRAGE worried Mott. “Thou will make us ridiculous,” she wrote. “We must go slowly.” Despite Mott’s misgivings, Quaker women proved pivotal to nineteenth-century women’s drive for civil rights and suffrage.

R

 RADCLIFFE COLLEGE

One of the Seven Sisters colleges, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Albert Gilman, a local man concerned with the higher education opportunities of his own daughters, lobbied the president of Harvard for an official women’s annex to Harvard. In 1879, a group of local citizens, including Gilman and an influential woman, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, formed the Society for the Collegiate Education of Women. The Society hoped for coeducation and the eventual absorption by Harvard, but Harvard’s trustees refused. Gilman was able to successfully recruit Harvard faculty to teach at the annex, which opened in 1879, with Agassiz as president. Despite a high tuition, the 25 women who entered that year received instruction, but no degree. They also had no campus at which to meet, hold discussions, or reside. Agassiz still hoped for coeducation. Aided by the considerable funds she had raised, she persuaded Harvard to agree to establish an official relationship with the annex. In 1893, the women of the annex voted to become Radcliffe College, named for Anne Radcliffe, Harvard’s first woman benefactor. Radcliffe was chartered in 1894 and

offered a rigorously academic curriculum in the classical languages, sciences, and fine arts. However, Radcliffe students did not enjoy the full benefits of either a Harvard education or those of a fully independent women’s college. Harvard oversaw Radcliffe’s administration, appointed an all-male faculty, and cosigned degrees. See also: Colleges.

 RAPE

Rape is the crime of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse. Nineteenth-century Americans did not think of rape as we think of it today. The principles of feme covert, which held that a husband had legal control over his wife’s body, made marital rape legally impossible. Men could and did rape their wives without fear of prosecution. Children were also viewed as male property. As a result, nineteenth-century society was blind to the sexual and physical abuse of children. Not until late in the century did child protection agencies begin to address issues of sexual violence in the family. Victorian culture was also blind to sexual violence by middle- and elite-class men; it was

RECONSTRUCTION

believed only poor men were morally degraded enough to rape. Conversely, poor women, black women, and prostitutes could not generally bring rape charges because nineteenth-century culture believed these women were inherently morally degraded and thus would not refuse sex under any circumstances. Popular ideology made class an important component in society’s ability to recognize rapists or rape victims. Thus, for a rape charge to be successfully prosecuted the rape victim had to be a white, respectable woman, who was unrelated to her lower-class rapist. The sexual violation of slave women by white masters also did not fall under the category of rape for many nineteenth-century Americans. Slave owners could and did demand sex from enslaved females. Given the power of masters over slaves, the vast majority of slave women cannot be considered consensual partners in sex acts with masters. Rape defined miscegenous relationships, which ran the gamut from relatively friendly to combative sexual activity. Some female slaves may have used sex with white men to improve their lives, but many more were victims of a sexual domination designed to impress upon both female and male slaves the power of masters. Black women did not fare much better after the CIVIL WAR. Many white Americans believed that rape was a consequence of the end of slavery, because the cultural configuration for rape only recognized black male rapists and white female victims. Popular ideology held that black men lusted for white women, and that no white woman would willingly accept the sexual advances of a black man. At the same time, the myth of black women’s sexually rapacious nature worked to suggest that they could not be rape victims because no black woman would ever refuse sex. Until well into the twentieth century many Southern states set the age of consent for black females as low as ten years old. These policies and beliefs were based on racism and sexism. White men raped black women in great numbers and often escaped punishment. At the same time white women could not always claim rape by a white man because Victorian society was so firmly entrenched in the idea of the black man as synonymous with the rapist. With these and many other popular ideologies, nineteenth-century Americans failed to recognize the vast majority of rapes, leaving most women extremely vulnerable to sexual attack.

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FURTHER READING

Gordon, Linda. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. London: Virago Press, 1988. McMillen, Sally. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992.

 RECONSTRUCTION

The period of United States history known as Reconstruction stretches from the end of the CIVIL WAR to 1877. Congressional Reconstruction barred former Confederate military officers or political officeholders from ever again holding public office, established a Freedmen’s Bureau to provide emergency assistance to the recently freed population, and passed a series of Constitutional amendments and acts that attempted to guarantee freedpersons’ civil rights. In 1865 congressional Republicans passed and helped ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Southern states were readmitted to the Union once qualified voters, including black men, elected delegates to state-level constitutional conventions that wrote constitutions guaranteeing black suffrage. Voters then elected governors and legislators, some of them black, and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which mandated black citizenship, in 1868. Meanwhile Southern states began instituting Black Codes to regulate the behavior of ex-slaves. Vagrancy laws, for example, defined any black not employed by a white person as a vagrant and subject to arrest and fines. New Southern state governments also made no provisions to guarantee the civil rights of freedpersons or their right to vote. In an effort to ameliorate some of the more egregious infringements on the rights of freedpersons, Congress passed three Reconstruction Acts in 1867 which, among other things, divided the South into military districts and garrisoned former Union soldiers in the South to force white Southerners to accept the new racial order. Congress and the states also set about getting both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteeenth Amendment, which enfranchised black men, ratified. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments left women, black and white, out of the suffrage equation. Women reformers who had worked for decades on both ABOLITION and woman SUFFRAGE were bitterly disappointed when, for the first time

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in American history, the word “male” was inserted into the Constitution. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and other women campaigned against the Fourteenth Amendment, rightly suspecting that if women were left behind in 1868 it would become decades before they came close to suffrage again. Frederick Douglass, a noted black abolitionist and supporter of women’s rights, suggested that women step aside because it was “the Negro’s hour.” As a result, the woman suffrage movement split in 1869, in disagreement as to whether or not female activists should have supported the Fourteenth Amendment. Activist women also disagreed as to whether they should continue their fight for a Constitutional amendment for woman suffrage or fight for the vote state by state. For black women, Reconstruction was doubly a time of mixed blessings. While they, too, had been freed, they had not been enfranchised. More significantly, black women sustained a large measure of the new race hostility in both the South and the North. Black women were harassed, beaten, raped, and killed for daring to speak out or claim the prerogatives of any other woman. Many black women labored in virtual agricultural servitude, SHARECROPPING and tenant farming in a seemingly endless cycle of servitude. But black women and men did, immediately after being freed, set out on the road in search of lost family members, reunite, and remarry so their unions would be considered legal and official, and attempt to create stable family units. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, when in a political deal over electoral votes future president Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull the last of the federal troops out of the South and signaled that he would not enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. This effectively ended any hopes that blacks might have equal civil rights in the nineteenth century. FURTHER READING

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. McPherson, James. The Abolitionists’ Legacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

 RESCUE HOMES

Rescue homes, wherein reform-minded people provided shelter and services to people in need, number among the variety of reforms undertaken by native-born, middle-class American women in

the mid and late nineteenth century. Women engaged in rescue work on the basis of their perceived moral superiority both to men and to women who fell outside the boundaries of respectability. Homes varied from the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME in San Francisco, founded for Chinese prostitutes, to the INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN HOME in Salt Lake City which took in polygamous MORMON wives. Many of these homes persisted well into the twentieth century. The Florence Crittendon Association had operations across the country which specialized in meeting the needs of unwed mothers. These homes ran on a strict set of rules set to instill the “right” values into women and girls who had transgressed by becoming pregnant outside the bounds of MARRIAGE. What these rescue homes had in common, whatever population they served, was the desire of woman MISSIONARIES to establish authority in relation to men and to the women they served. This authority could lean into a kind of racist and class-bound social control, but often the women whom reformers served used rescue homes for their own purposes. Chin Leen, for example, left her husband Frank Wong and moved into the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco not because her husband intended to sell her into prostitution, as the missionaries incorrectly believed, but because she no longer wanted to live with him. Wong’s assurances that he had no intention of selling his wife fell on deaf ears and Leen did not return to her husband. In Salt Lake City polygamous wives entered the rescue home, not because they were morally offended by their marital condition, but because they were in straitened financial circumstances. To the dismay of rescue home workers, who hoped to inculcate Protestant values of monogamy into Mormons, these women often returned to polygamy. Thus rescue homes served as an arena of female intercultural relations where different sets of women’s values and needs met and sometimes clashed.

 RESERVATIONS

See NATIVE AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE.

RICHARDS, ELLEN  SWALLOW

(1842–1911) Chemist and ecologist. Born in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Ellen Swallow Richards spent much of

ROGERS, MARY

her early childhood helping her father on the family farm. Her parents home-schooled Ellen until it was clear that her desire and will to learn exceeded their resources. Determined to nurture Ellen’s intellectual curiosity, the Swallows moved to a nearby town and enrolled Ellen in Westford Academy. After completing the four-year program at VASSAR COLLEGE in two years, Richards graduated with the college’s first class in 1867. Subsequently, she was admitted on a “special student” basis to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and became MIT’s first woman graduate, receiving a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1873. That same year, she also earned an M.A. from Vassar based on her work in a basement laboratory at MIT. In 1875, Swallow married Robert Richards, a professor at MIT. Richards hoped to pursue a doctorate, but MIT voted not to admit women to its science programs. Nevertheless, Richards continued her innovative work, eventually founding the Science Laboratory for Women (1876–1883), the first of its kind in the world, which was housed in an MIT garage. She served as Instructor in Sanitary Chemistry, taught science to schoolteachers, and began her research into ecology that would shape her later scientific interests. Starting in 1890, Richards began to devote full-time to the field she named human ecology. Her research into this field enabled her to apply scientific principles to the domestic realm and find connections between the pure sciences and the social sciences. In promoting human ecology, Richards sought to find ways to use scientific knowledge in the service of better lives for women and their families. The interdisciplinary nature of human ecology made it controversial within the scientific establishment, and Richards was not successful in her lobbying for a formal place for human ecology among the disciplines of science. Undeterred, she created a multidisciplinary profession by the same name, later to be known as HOME ECONOMICS. In 1901, Richards founded and became the first president of the American Home Economics Association. Richards’s most fundamental goals remained consistent, and she found numerous ways to contribute to the betterment of society. Nutrition became her main focus within home economics, and she advocated research for the education of women about health issues. Richards’s research and concern extended to all women, which was

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exemplified when she helped to establish the New England Kitchen in 1890, which offered low-income immigrant families healthful food designed for a modest budget. The school lunch program, another of Richards’s initiatives, integrated healthy eating habits on a mass level.

 RICHARDS, LINDA

(1841–1930) Nurse and educator. Linda Richards felt a vocation for NURSING as a teenager but was frustrated in her search for training until 1872, when she enrolled in the first school for nursing in the United States. A year later she received the first nursing diploma awarded at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Soon she was superintendent of the Boston Training School, where she developed the training program and secured the respect of the medical staff for her students and their work. In 1877 she went to England to study under Florence Nightingale for several months and brought inspiration back with her to a new program for nurses she established at Boston City Hospital. In 1885 she traveled to Japan to serve as a MISSIONARY. There she taught Bible classes and opened Japan’s first training school for nurses. She returned after five years, and in her remaining 20 years of life started or strengthened nursing programs in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Hartford, and discovered a new cause: improving standards of nursing for the INSANE. She died in Boston at 88.

 ROGERS, MARY

Mary Cecilia Rogers was a young woman who mysteriously disappeared from her New York City boardinghouse residence in July 1841. Her body, badly bruised, was soon found near the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River, prompting a city-wide search for her presumed murderer. Her death quickly became a cause célèbre, prompting endless commentary in the new urban newspapers (the penny press), pronouncements by politicians and police, and a series of popular NOVELS. The case received its most famous exposition in Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Rogers, who worked as a “cigar girl” in a popular tobacco store near City Hall, had come to New York from New London, Connecticut, and was the descendant of two distinguished New

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England families, the Mathers and the Rogerses. She was a part of an extensive migration to New York City in the mid-nineteenth century, years that helped define New York as a metropolitan center of industry, culture, and commerce. There were many explanations for her death—a rowdy gang, a lover’s rage, even an act of suicide. In time, however, it was widely acknowledged that Rogers had died as the result of an abortion gone awry. Occurring at a time of social and cultural transformation and connecting the themes of urban disorder and sexual danger, Rogers’s life and death quickly became a source of popular entertainment, a topic of political debate, and an inspiration to public policy. In her name, two important pieces of legislation were passed in 1845: the New York City Police Reform Act, which effectively modernized the city’s system of policing, and the New York State law criminalizing ABORTION. Any Gilman Srebnick

ROSE, ERNESTINE LOUISE  POTOWSKI

(1810–1892) Abolitionist, women’s rights leader. Ernestine Potowski was born in Poland, but when she was a child her family moved to England, where she was educated. When her father arranged a MARRIAGE for her, as was a custom among many families in the period, she refused to marry the young man. Instead, in 1826, she traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. She met Robert Owen, the utopian, and was strongly influenced by his advocacy of equality for all people. In 1835, Potowski married William Rose, a jeweler, and a year later they moved to New York City. Ernestine Rose became active in the ABOLITION movement, lecturing against slavery in both the Midwest and the South. Returning to New York, she lobbied for a law to give women control over their own property after marriage. Fifteen years later, the law was finally adopted. She also spoke at so many national and state women’s conventions that she was known as the “Queen of the Platform.” Following the CIVIL WAR, Rose continued to fight for women’s rights. After African-American males were given the rights to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, she advocated the same right for all. As she put it: “Emancipation from every kind of bondage is my principle.” In 1869, Rose helped form the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AS-

SOCIATION. She was also a strong opponent of anti-

Semitism, writing and speaking out against it.

RUFFIN, JOSEPHINE ST.  PIERRE

(1842–1924) Civil rights leader, newspaper editor. Josephine St. Pierre was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After receiving a brief education in Salem and Boston, she married George Lewis Ruffin at the age of 16. He was the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. After rearing four children, Ruffin devoted herself to founding clubs for black women. She believed that through these clubs, black women would work together to expand their rights. Since women were not allowed to vote or hold political office, the clubs were the most effective way to act as a group and bring pressure on state legislatures. Furthermore, the black women’s clubs showed that these women were interested in civic life. As Ruffin put it: “We are not alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and welcoming any others to join us.” In 1894, she started the Woman’s Era Club, one of the earliest black women’s clubs. She also founded the Woman’s Era, a publication designed to give black women a greater voice in society. In 1895, Ruffin helped organize the first national convention of black women’s clubs, and a year later became first vice president of the newly formed NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN. She also helped to start the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She died on March 13, 1924.

RURAL, FARM, AND  RANCH LIFE In 1820, less than one-fifth of all Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. By 1860, almost half did. After the War of 1812, men and women flooded into Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and parts of Iowa and Missouri. Even on the eastern seaboard the vast majority of Americans made their living in agriculture. In 1860, farmers made up 60 percent of America’s labor force. Most rural communities were made up of both men and women who could be characterized by their ownership of the land they

S A N I TA R Y C O M M I S S I O N

A woman gathers buffalo chips for fuel on the treeless Great Plains.

farmed. Improved plows, threshers, wagons, and railroads rapidly changed the economic practices and environmental realities of rural America. Land wore out, forests were cut down, and prairies were overgrazed in the farmers’ and ranchers’ attempts to increase their earnings. By the 1840s Americans had pushed as far west as California and Oregon. In the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War, Mexico ceded almost a third of its territory to the United States. Many families migrated west, dreaming of bettering their lives through independent farming or ranching. Because ranches tended to be larger than farms, women on ranches were usually more isolated from female support networks than women on farms. Ranching women were also more likely to be left alone for long periods of time, as their husbands moved herds from one location to another. The majority of Western migrants, except for those who took part in the Gold Rush, were recently married couples, ranging in age from the late twenties to the forties. Women’s diaries suggest that many wives, sisters, and daughters were

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less enthusiastic about the move than their male counterparts. For many women the move meant leaving their extended families forever, and women, who greatly depended upon the female networks for emotional and physical support, deeply felt this loss. Yet though many women lived on the rural frontier against their wills, many more looked forward to their new lives with great anticipation. Women’s contributions to the household economy were invaluable. Women managed the small livestock like chickens, milk cows, goats, and pigs, tended gardens, canned produce, and often worked alongside of men at harvest time. Many a single male settler wished he had a wife. Also, a number of women farmed or ranched without husbands, either because their husbands died or had left the farm for the mining frontier. Not all farmers and ranchers were nativeborn white Americans. Many Native Americans and African Americans lived and worked in rural areas during the nineteenth century. CHINESE IMMIGRANTS and Mexican men and women congregated in a number of western communities and Irish, Norwegian, Polish, and other immigrants settled in small towns across the country. Middleclass rural women founded churches, hospitals, chambers of commerce, and schools, while campaigning against gambling, saloons, opium dens, and bordellos. Thus, many of the VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS formed by rural women created the infrastructure for rural life. FURTHER READING

Jensen, Joan. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. White, Richard. It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

S

 SANITARY COMMISSION

The Sanitary Commission functioned as a medical branch of the the United States government during the CIVIL WAR. In April 1861, two weeks after the war began, American women from both the

Union and Confederacy began forming approximately 20,000 aid societies. The members of these societies, realizing that the government of neither side was prepared to meet the needs of marching and fighting armies, collected food, clothing, and

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TRAILBLAZERS Tireless “Mother Bickerdyke” (1817–1901) made her fame in nursing wounded Civil War soldiers and in speaking tours on behalf of the Sanitary Commission. Born Mary Ann Ball on a Knox County, Ohio, farm, she lost her mother when she was a baby and moved from one relative’s home to another during her childhood. When she was 16 she moved to Oberlin, Ohio, and worked as a domestic. In 1847 she married Robert Bickerdyke, a widower with several children. The couple moved to Galesburg, Illinois, and had three children of their own, two of whom lived to adulthood. Robert Bickerdyke died in 1859, leaving Mary Bickerdyke to support herself by practicing herbal medicine. In 1861 the pastor of the Galesburg Congregational Church, Edward Beecher, described the terrible suffering of wounded soldiers in a nearby camp at Cairo, Illinois. The congregation raised a relief fund and Bickerdyke traveled to the camp in June 1861 to supervise the distribution of the fund. She found rampant disorder, terrible sanitary conditions, and starving soldiers lying in the tents which served as the hospital. Horrified, Bickerdyke started cleaning, nursing, and cooking for the men, without any army official’s approval or orders to do so. In February 1862 she left Cairo for the battlefield at Fort Donelson aboard the United States SANITARY COMMISSION’S hospital ship City of Memphis. This experience convinced her that her mission was at the front. In April 1862 she became an agent for the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, thus formally taking charge of disbursing the food and medical supplies she had informally commandeered the year before. Bickerdyke continued her impressive efforts for the remainder of the war. She made a number of speaking tours, all aimed at garnering additional supplies for the Sanitary Commission. After the war, Bickerdyke worked at a home for indigent women and children, participated in an ill-fated Kansas homesteading venture, worked with the San Francisco Salvation Army, and never ceased helping Union veterans, whom she regarded as “her boys.” In 1886 Congress awarded her a pension of $25 a month. She lived her final years with her sons in Kansas and is buried in Galesburg.

medical supplies, and otherwise prepared for war. Days after the start of the war a group of women headed by ELIZABETH BLACKWELL organized the WOMEN’S CENTRAL ASSOCIATION OF RELIEF (WCAR) to recruit and train female nurses. The WCAR would serve as the nucleus of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), which the federal government officially organized in June

1861. The Confederacy did not centralize its aid societies, in part because the basis of the Southern government lay in state, rather than federal power. Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect for New York’s Central Park, directed the Commission. Though men held most of the Sanitary Commission’s management positions, women made up the majority of the membership. Critics accused the USCC women of being too refined for the rough work of war relief, but Harriet Whetten, a nurse in a floating hospital, wrote that the work was “very real, and very hard and actual nursing, which includes more than reading, writing and smoothing pillows.” The realities of Civil War hospitals were harsh indeed, full of stench, filth, disease, and the cries of dying men. USSC women faced hostile physicians, a poor military procurement system, and the general social censure of those who believed they had stepped outside the bounds of respectability. USSC women led the postwar movement to establish professional schools for female nurses. See also: Nursing.

 SAY, LUCY SISTARE

(1801–1885) SCIENCE illustrator and first woman to become a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Lucy Sistare Say was married to renowned naturalist Thomas Say and illustrated his books on entomology. Say’s husband and brotherin-law were members of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and she was admitted as a member in 1841 for her exceptional natural science illustrations. Lucy was born in October 1801 in New London, Connecticut, to Joseph Sistare and Nancy Way. Lucy, her brother, and her sister grew up in New York City. Lucy Sistare moved to New Harmony, Indiana, in 1826 with the famous group of educators and

SCIENCE

scientists from Philadelphia called the “Boatload of Knowledge.” This group hoped to establish a socialist utopia on what was then the frontier. They succeeded in creating the first free public school, the first free library, and the first completely coeducational school in the United States. After her marriage to Thomas Say in 1827, Lucy Say illustrated all of her husband’s books, including American Conchology, considered the first concise American book on entomology, the study of insects. After her husband’s death in 1834, Say remained in New Harmony, where she printed his final volumes on mollusks. In 1842, she returned to New York City and continued collecting specimens until her death in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1885.

 SCHUYLER, LOUISA LEE

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From 1908 to 1915, Schuyler was a leader in the effort to establish the Society for the Prevention of Blindness. She firmly believed that charitable organizations needed to be placed on a sound financial basis and administered by professionals. Schuyler died on October 10, 1926.

 SCIENCE

Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated by science, particularly by scientific and technological discoveries. Well-educated women sometimes studied botany and natural history as a hobby, and women’s academies offered scientific courses. Some women even published scientific books and papers based on their natural history observations. Very few women, however, had the opportunity to study science at universities or to do laboratory research. Most women who were interested in science and could afford to attend college studied MEDICINE, as it was the only scientific field that was readily open to women.

(1837–1926) Social worker. Louisa Lee Schuyler was born in New York City on October 26, 1837. Her parents were supporters of the Children’s Aid Society, and Louisa TRAILBLAZERS worked with this organization during the 1850s. After the CIVIL WAR Nettie Stevens (1861–1912) was one of the first American began, Schuyler led the WOMAN’S women to make a significant contribution to science, but she CENTRAL ASSOCIATION OF RELIEF, an struggled all her life with financial problems and an academic organization started by her mother, establishment that was often hostile to women. Her family was which was part of the United States not well-to-do, and Stevens worked as a librarian and teacher Sanitary Commission. The Associafor many years in order to save enough to attend college. In tion raised money to buy bandages, 1896, at the age of 35, she enrolled at Stanford University in blankets, and other supplies for California. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees Union troops in the field. at Stanford, Stevens entered a Ph.D. program at BRYN MAWR Following the Civil War, Schuyler COLLEGE, where she researched cytology (the study of cells) formed the State Charities Aid Assowith the distinguished geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. She ciation in New York. Members inreceived her doctorate in 1903. spected local prisons and poorStevens was a meticulous and productive scholar. Her most houses as part of an improvement important accomplishment was the discovery that a particular effort. In 1873, due largely to chromosome determines a person’s sex. By showing that parSchuyler’s efforts, the Bellevue ticular chromosomes are linked to particular traits, Stevens Training School for Nurses opened, helped geneticists establish the chromosomal basis of heredity. the first professional NURSING school in the United States. Her social But although colleagues admired Stevens’s achievements, she work expanded during the 1880s, did not live to enjoy her professional success. Stevens was when she successfully lobbied the awarded a research professorship at Bryn Mawr in 1912, but state legislature to establish separate she died of breast cancer before her term began. Later generfacilities at state hospitals for the ations of biologists drew on her laboratory observations and mentally ill. Previously, they had applauded her contributions to cytology and genetics. been kept in poorhouses and often treated inhumanely.

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, women’s COLLEGES made university-level science courses available to women for the first time. In 1865, VASSAR COLLEGE hired astronomer MARIA MITCHELL to teach math and science. Mitchell’s students were among the first academically trained women scientists in the United States. Cornelia Clapp took the lead in scientific education at MOUNT HOLYOKE SEMINARY, where she taught math, natural history, and zoology begginning in 1872. By the 1880s, several American universities had begun to admit women graduate students. While Maria Mitchell had been obliged to study privately with her father, the next generation of women scientists earned academic qualifications. Clapp took a three-year leave of absence from Mount Holyoke in order to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago; Nettie Stevens, a cytologist (cell biologist), studied at Stanford and Bryn Mawr. Even after women started to earn Ph.D.s in science they often had difficulty obtaining professional recognition. Maria Mitchell was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848, but it was almost a century before the association elected another woman member. Some women scientists, like Clapp, focused on TEACHING rather than research. Others, like Stevens, had difficulty because they worked with famous male scientists whose reputations overshadowed theirs. Professional women of science remained rare throughout the century; as late as 1906, American colleges and universities employed only 75 women scientists.

SECOND GREAT  AWAKENING A term used to describe a series of religious revivals in the United States from the 1790s to the 1840s. During the early nineteenth century, the United States underwent a massive physical, economic, and social transformation as the market revolution transformed the nation from a principally agrarian society into an entrepreneurial capitalistic one. In the midst of such change, intense religious revivals and new belief systems emerged as men and women sought to make sense of their new society. The Second Great Awakening began on the frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee in the late 1790s as men and women flocked to all-day and

weeklong religious gatherings. Half carnival, half worship service, these “camp meetings” began a religious awakening that spread throughout the United States. In the 1820s and 1830s, revival fires blazed so pervasively in upstate New York that that area is now commonly referred to as “the burned over district.” Through religious services and prayer meetings where ministers would call the unconverted to the front of the meeting, make house-to-house visits, and distribute religious tracts, evangelical Protestantism spread Christianity throughout the United States. With religious enthusiasm came new faiths and social possibilities. Female prophets such as JEMIMA WILKINSON (see Volume 1) and Ann Lee, founder of SHAKERISM (see Volume 1), garnered large followings. These faiths flourished as predominately female communities, as they emphasized women’s rights and control of their bodies. At the same time, new religious leaders built socialistic communes, like New York’s Oneida, Indiana’s New Harmony, and Massachusetts’s Brook Farm, as escapes from the individualistic capitalism of the market revolution. In contrast to these communal societies, evangelical Protestantism stressed an individualistic faith that offered women more autonomy. For this reason, women made up the vast majority of awakening participants. Protestant revivalists like Charles Finney taught that each individual needed to have faith and that each person should work for the kingdom of God. This theology legitimated female activism. In the field of education, revivalists and converts opened new institutions of higher learning like OBERLIN COLLEGE and Berea College, which admitted both women and African Americans. Religious conversion propelled women into social reform. Deep-seated religious commitment drove both SARAH GRIMKÉ and ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD to become abolitionists and advocate women’s rights. For the Grimkés, faith offered them an impetus to speak publicly even when society denounced public females. Moreover, thousands of other women took up urban reform in northern cities like New York and Boston after the revivals. Great Awakening converts, in fact, made up the bulk of women involved in urban missions to the impoverished and to prostitutes. While the Second Great Awakening opened new doors for women, it also had some conservative and repressive effects as evangelicals sought to suppress alcohol use through TEMPERANCE societies.

SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT FURTHER READING

Boles, John B. The Great Revival, 1787–1805: the Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972. Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

 SEDGWICK, CATHARINE

(1789–1867) Writer. Sedgwick was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on December 28, 1789. Her parents, Theodore and Pamela (Dwight) Sedgwick, were both descended from elite Connecticut families. Her father served in the state legislature and as a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice. Her mother suffered several periods of melancholia and insanity during Sedgwick’s childhood. Sedgwick was educated in several schools but received her most effective instruction from her father at home. After her mother’s death in 1806, Sedgwick became increasingly religious and in 1821 she joined a Unitarian church in New York. Her first book, A New-England Tale (1822), reflected her spiritual views against religious bigotry. Her other novels, many of them classified as “historical romances,” include Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and Clarence (1830). Sedgwick also published moral tracts and didactic stories that were published regularly in magazines and gift books. Common themes in her writing included the alleviation of city TENEMENT conditions, the abolition of dueling, the advancement of religious tolerance, and prison reform. Sedgwick never married, despite several marriage proposals. She died of paralysis in 1867 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

SENECA FALLS  CONVENTION The first women’s rights convention held in July 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, and inspired by an incident that occurred in London, England. LUCRETIA MOTT was not allowed to take her seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention because she was a woman. At the convention, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON met Mott, and they discussed the need for a women’s rights convention to address the status of women. Led by Stanton and Mott, the Seneca Falls Convention centered on a Declaration of Sentiments largely written by Stanton and

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modeled after the United States Declaration of Independence (see Documents). Approximately 300 people were present at the convention, including many male supporters. The Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed that “all men and women are created equal,” that women should have equal rights and equal representation in politics, marriage, and the workplace. The Declaration also challenged the ideology of separate spheres, even while drawing on some of its assumptions. The Declaration of Sentiments ended with resolutions to fight for women’s right to SUFFRAGE, a radical and revolutionary idea at the time, equality within the covenant of marriage, and property rights. Approximately 100 women and men signed the Declaration, although some later withdrew their names because of the negative reaction to the convention. Public reaction to the Seneca Falls Convention indicated a tumultuous future for the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. The press was adamantly against the convention and everything that it represented. When the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 2) was passed in 1920, Charlotte Woodward was the only surviving signer of the Declaration of Sentiments, the only one who had lived long enough to cast her vote.

 SEPARATE SPHERES

See “DOMESTICITY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF

SEPARATE SPHERES,” P. 7.

SETTLEMENT HOUSE  MOVEMENT Reform movement utilizing community-based action. The settlement house movement began with university students in London, who established Toynbee Hall in 1884 in the city slums, as a resource that would provide aid and support for neighborhood residents. In the United States, settlement houses were founded independently of each other in urban areas during the 1880s. While some settlement house founders like JANE ADDAMS had visited Toynbee Hall, the settlement house movement grew out of broader social and cultural trends. Settlement houses represented an effort to address the social problems and inequities brought

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nated by women. Settlement work was an ideal vehicle for women seeking lives in public service, and apLillian D. Wald was a founder of the Henry Street Settlement pealed to young women COLLEGE House in New York City. She was active in both the settlement graduates who had few other opporhouse and the public health movements. Born on March 10, tunities to employ their education. 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wald studied at the New York HosThe most prominent of these women pital’s nursing school and the WOMEN’S MEDICAL COLLEGE. are JANE ADDAMS and ELLEN GATES STARR, who founded Chicago’s Hull In 1893, she and a friend, Mary Brewster, moved to ManhatHouse. Their initial vision was that of tan’s lower East Side, a neighborhood of tenement buildings women living together in a closely and poor immigrants. They created a nursing settlement house, knit service-based community, right the first of its kind, that provided visiting nursing services in in the heart of an impoverished area patients’ homes and taught preventive medicine. Within two to which they would provide services. years, with a rapidly growing staff and expanding services, the The settlement house, they hoped, settlement moved to its now famous location at 265 Henry would serve to bridge the gap beStreet. Wald and her nurses only accepted whatever payment tween different social classes, benefittheir poor patients could offer; she supplemented her nurses’ ing both those who provided aid and income with donations procured through fund-raising. those who received it. Wald took a particular interest in children. She helped estabFounders of the settlements lish New York’s Bureau of Child Hygiene and its school nurse stressed the importance of moving program. Because she believed CHILD LABOR (see Volume 3) was into the neighborhoods themselves a primary factor in child illness, she was also active in the and developing residential prowomen’s and children’s labor movement. In 1905, she lobbied grams. The settlements served mulfor the federal CHILDREN’S BUREAU, established in the Taft admintiple functions as social centers, istration (see Volume 3). schools, and service centers, dispensIn 1912, Wald became the first president of the National ing employment and housing reOrganization for Public Health Nursing. Many of Wald’s efsources, medical care, and child forts shaped New York’s public health system, as well as havcare. The philosophies of the settleing national impact. Most importantly, however, her role in the ments reflected an understanding of growth and promotion of the visiting nurses movement saved the relationships between family, edlives and provided relief and education to countless poor and ucation, culture, employment, and ailing people. Her legacy continues today in the Henry Street community, and how poverty exacSettlement and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. erbated difficulties in these relationships. Settlements also believed in using culture as a social solvent to uplift communities, offering classes in practical arts such as carpentry, or about by the industrialization and urbanization fine arts such as music. Occasionally, this became of the late nineteenth century. College-educated problematic for immigrant residents when settleyoung men and women interested in improving the conditions of the less fortunate began to ment house workers demonstrated a shallow move into poor urban areas and provide serv- understanding of different cultures and emphaices within the neighborhood. In the late 1880s, sized assimilation and Americanized values. Settlement houses also fell short in serving ambitious settlements were established in the their African-American residents. Most African nation’s cities, the most famous of which are AnAmericans in need of settlement house services dover House in Boston, founded in 1891, HULL HOUSE in Chicago, founded in 1889, and Henry were migrants from the South and had different Street in New York City, founded in 1893. Even- needs from those of white European immigrants. tually, dozens of settlements would be founded, African-American settlements, such as the Flaneach working with the others, frequently ner House in Indianapolis, were both more inclined and better able to meet these needs. through organized boards, to fight poverty. Because their experiences led them to believe While men played important roles in the settlement movement, the movement came to be domi- that poverty was inextricably tied to public policy,

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some settlement workers came to espouse radical social reforms and causes. Some of them supported labor unions, and settlement house workers also became active in lobbying for legislation that would improve working conditions in factories. In this way, settlement houses both reflected and furthered women’s participation in politics and the public sphere. They paved the way for social work as a profession, and contributed to the Progressive movement and other grassroots community empowerment movements. FURTHER READING

Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Davis, Allen F. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

 SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISM

One of the fastest growing churches of the nineteenth century, Seventh Day Adventism is an evangelical religion emphasizing individuals’ personal relationship with God and the possibility of direct revelation. Between 1831 and 1844 William Miller, a former Baptist preacher, preached the imminent end of the world and coming of Christ. Miller predicted the end of the world for October 22, 1844. When the prediction proved inaccurate, many of Miller’s followers, or Millerites, termed the day “the great Disappointment.” Some Millerites continued his religious philosophy, but decided that Jesus would return at the end of the world on some unannounced day in the relatively near future. Ellen G. Harmon soon became the leader of this group of Adventists. She began by preaching Miller’s view while still in her teens, and eventually began having religious visions of the Advent of the City of God. In emphasizing each person’s relationship with God, regardless of sex, race or class, the Seventh Day Adventists and other evangelical religions opened the door wider to female PREACHING. In 1846 Harmon married James White and soon after had a vision about the significance of the Seventh-Day Sabbath, which she interpreted as Saturday, not Sunday. In the 1870s and 1880s the Seventh Day Adventists proselytized across the United States and in Europe. By 2000 the church had more than 10 million members.

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 SEXUALITY, REGULATION OF

Nineteenth-century American culture was obsessed with sexual purity. Ladies were urged to separate male and female authors on their bookshelves and some pianos wore pantaloons on their legs to preserve female modesty. “True Womanhood,” the ethos that theoretically described how all nineteenth-century American women should conduct themselves, was based in part on sexual purity. Because people revered purity and because real women were supposed to be sexually pure, a kind of sexual repression defined many women’s lives. Once a woman had transgressed the rules of purity—having an affair or premarital sex with someone she did not marry, or divorcing her husband—she became a “fallen woman,” and thus lost her claim to true womanhood. Some laws did exist to control the sexuality of women. Many states severely limited the conditions under which a woman could DIVORCE her husband, while in New York and South Carolina all divorces were illegal until well after the Civil War. RAPE laws did not recognize marital rape or other sexual violence in families, leaving women vulnerable to the sexual predations of relatives and spouses. While PROSTITUTION was illegal, nineteenth-century society did little to enforce the laws and when they were enforced, the prostitutes were usually punished rather than the clients. Although these laws did set limits on women’s sexuality, sexual control most often stemmed from extra-legal and informal social and cultural ideas about womanhood and manhood. There is also evidence to suggest that nineteenth-century women were not as sexually controlled as we might think. Americans considered sex an intensely private matter, and many twentieth-century commentators have confused this reticence with repression. One Victorian sexologist noted that the married women he interviewed reported frequent orgasms and sexual satisfaction. Many women enjoyed sex when they had it, but may have had sex less frequently given the reproductive realities of the nineteenth century. The idea of “voluntary motherhood” suggested that women could refuse their husbands to control their own fertility. Voluntary motherhood also offered resistance to male sexual norms and provided many women with a measure of control over their own sexuality. As the nineteenth century progressed, growing tension and social anxiety about women’s roles cre-

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ated a movement by physicians and scientists to justify social oppression based on biological difference. Black, Hispanic, Native American, and immigrant women all experienced negative sexual labeling based on their supposed “natural” differences from true women. Even white, middle-class women could be subjected to scientific justifications of social roles. Doctors used measures ranging from hospitalization to clitoridectomies (the excision of a woman’s clitoris) to control women’s sexuality. Women who masturbated, for example, were said to be vulnerable to cancer of the uterus, spinal irritation, heart trouble, hysteria and mental debility, and insanity. Some medical professionals believed that “liberating the clitoris,” saved patients from the dangers of masturbation. It appears that both women and men engaged in the control of women’s sexuality. The results of this control ranged from liberation ideas about women’s superiority to oppressive and violent attacks on women’s bodies. The definition of appropriate sexuality largely depended upon a woman’s social and racial identity and each definition existed in context with other cultural norms for that woman or group of women.

 SHARECROPPING

A post–Civil War system of agricultural labor wherein poor black and white people worked other people’s land in return for a portion of the profits. Landowners often provided not only the land, but seed, tools, and housing. The system developed to control free black labor, keep agricultural workers in virtual debt peonage, and insure the continued supremacy of Southern landowners. After the war General William Tecumseh Sherman declared that the government would apportion ex-slave families “forty acres and a mule” from confiscated Confederate gentry holdings, but Congress never seriously considered making good on his promise. Thus many ex-slaves found themselves sharecropping. Southern landowners created sharecropping in response to ex-slaves’ resistance to any work system closely approximating slavery. Black women and men contracted with a landlord, bought on credit seed, fertilizer, tools, food, and clothing, and grew crops—usually cotton. At harvest time the landlord would take his half share of the crop and either buy the other half or allow the cropper to sell it to another merchant. Either way sharecroppers usually spent their half of the crop

paying for the goods they had received earlier in the year. Both men and women worked the crops, and often fell victim to unscrupulous merchants and landlords who could alter loan agreements at will. Women expanded the family economy by growing gardens, taking in laundry, or acting as midwives. Black families resisted land owners’ power by “shifting,” moving every year or two to mitigate the power any one individual owner had over them. Nonetheless, sharecropping was not all that different from slavery, and in fact by the end of the nineteenth century 85 percent of all Southern blacks did the same kind of work they or their parents had done as slaves.

 SHOE INDUSTRY

In late eighteenth-century New England shoemaking was a gender-divided artisanal craft. Women sewed the leather “uppers” at home, while men did the work that finished the shoe in outside shops. Lynn, Massachusetts, became the first town to move from handcrafted to industrial production of shoes. As the industrialization of the industry expanded, “shoebinding” became defined as women’s work, and as such had less economic value than other stages of shoe production. The introduction of a gendered division of labor into shoemaking had a number of consequences. Because shoebinding was done separately from the rest of shoe making, women found it difficult to learn and gain admittance to other parts of the process. But by mid-century women shoebinders in Lynn understood that they had a monopoly on an essential part of the industrial process and could use that power in labor protest. In an 1860 strike women and men organized for better wages and labor conditions, but they had different aims. Some female strikers wanted higher wages for both female and male factory and home workers, while men urged the adoption of a FAMILY WAGE SYSTEM. After the Civil War, women’s work in the shoe industry shifted out of the home and almost entirely into factory production. Shoebinding also became mechanized. In the postwar era the DAUGHTERS OF ST. CRISPIN offered many women their first experience in labor organization. An 1870 labor protest centered around an attempt by factory owners to replace male with female workers, and thereby reduce wages. A public debate about the moral standing of women who worked with men accom-

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panied the dispute, but female shoe workers defended both their virtue and the gendered division of labor. Strikes in the 1890s protested increased mechanization and the use of inexpensive immigrant labor. Though these strikes had ambiguous outcomes, women in the shoe industry continued to be the highest-paid female industrial workers.

SIGOURNEY, LYDIA  HUNTLEY

(1791–1865) Writer. Lydia Huntley was born in Norwich, Connecticut to Ezekiel and Zerviah (Wentworth) Huntley. Her interest in literature formed at an early age. Her father worked as a hired hand and the widow who employed him, Mrs. Daniel Lathrop, enjoyed having Lydia read to her. In 1811, Huntley opened a girls’ school in Norwich, and she later taught in Hartford, Connecticut. During this time she also composed poetry, and Daniel Wentworth, a relative of Mrs. Lathrop, financed the publication of her first book, Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815). Huntley quit teaching in 1819 when she married Charles Sigourney, a hardware merchant and later a church warden. They had two children together. Lydia continued writing and through her work supported the TEMPERANCE movement, peace societies, and Indian reform. Her work was regularly published in GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK. Sigourney died in Hartford in 1865. She published numerous volumes of prose and poetry, with historical, moral, and religious themes, over the course of her career. Some titles include Letters to Young Ladies (1833), The Voice of Flowers (1850), and the autobiographical Letters of Life (published posthumously in 1866).

 SLAVERY

A system of coerced labor which began in America in the seventeenth century and lasted until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution officially abolished it. Most slaves in the United States were engaged in plantation agriculture—planting and cultivating crops of tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, or sugar—though a small percentage were house servants or skilled craftsworkers. Men were usually chosen to learn skilled crafts while women

This illustration of a slave market appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

who were not field hands worked as cooks, servants, or nannies in the master’s house. Enslaved women bore an added burden because of their gender. Not only were they forced to work, but they were also valued for reproduction. Some masters assigned male sexual partners to women slaves for purposes of having strong children. Others sexually abused their female slaves. Enslaved women could, at times, choose their own slave partners, but the master could terminate their unions at any time. If slave women became pregnant their children were born slaves, no matter what the status of the father. Some masters granted the women short periods off work before and after the birth of a child. Children born into slavery might be sold at any time. Women resisted the indignities of slavery both physically and psychologically. At times, they fought back against their masters and, at other times, they used all their powers of persuasion to bargain for advantages for themselves and their families. Some women ran away.

“The peace of our homes, the welfare of society, the prosperity of future generations call aloud & imperiously for some decisive & efficient measure—and that measure cannot, we believe, be efficient, or of much benefit, if it have not for its ultimate objective, the extinction of slavery from amongst us.” —petition by 215 women to the Virginia legislature after the slave revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831

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SMITH, SOPHIA

Though many women lost their lives because of the harsh conditions of slavery, most survived. Slaves transformed the religion that their masters foisted upon them, making it a religion of hope and salvation. They created extended families through close female networks on the plantations and through these created institutions, sustaining their lives. See also: African-American Women; “Race And Slavery,” p. 30.



SMITH, SOPHIA (1796–1870) Philanthropist. Sophia Smith was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts on August 27, 1796. She was one of four children. As a child, she had a strong interest in reading poetry, fiction, and history. Smith attended school in her hometown as well as in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was a wealthy farmer who died in 1836. That same year Sophia became deaf. Having inherited a substantial amount of money from her father’s estate, Smith wanted to use some of it for philanthropic purposes. At first she thought about establishing a school for the deaf, so others with her affliction might be helped, but a school was already being established in Northampton, Massachusetts. With the help of Rev. John Morton Greene, a Congregational minister, Smith considered a variety of other institutions. The one she accepted was a “Plan for a Woman’s College” that Greene and two professors from Amherst College developed. In her will she left almost $400,000 toward the establishment of a new COLLEGE for women. Her will states that the money should go to “the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for the education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.” Smith intended that young women be given the education that was denied to her. She died on June 12, 1870. A year later SMITH COLLEGE was chartered. It opened in 1875 and became one of the nation’s leading colleges for women.

 SMITH COLLEGE

The first Seven Sisters college to be endowed by a woman. SOPHIA SMITH endowed the college in her will on the advice of John Morton Greene. She indicated her desire for a full curriculum in the Christian tradition, including moral and reli-

gious instruction, daily chapel, and a presiding spirit of evangelical Christianity. Trustees selected by Greene chose Northampton, Massachusetts, as the setting for the school. Although Greene’s wife had attended MOUNT HOLYOKE SEMINARY, he wanted Smith College to offer something different. The major changes he advocated were to have several small buildings rather than one large one, and to emphasize a practical life in society, which he believed the larger town of Northampton would encourage. In the original design of the college, women would enjoy a liberal arts education equal in caliber, rigor, and scope to that of a men’s college. Courses included sciences, arts, mathematics, and ancient languages. Eager to distinguish Smith as a college, rather than a seminary, the trustees appointed a male president whom they felt would convey more academic authority. They chose L. Clark Seelye, an Amherst professor. They did, however, hire a woman principal, Sarah W. Humphrey, and a mixed faculty of men and women to greet its first 14 students in the fall of 1875.

SOLOMON, HANNAH  GREENEBAUM

(1858–1942) Social activist. Hannah Greenebaum was born on January 14, 1858, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, a successful merchant, and her mother were JEWS deeply involved in Jewish affairs in Chicago. Hannah Greenebaum attended a religious school where she learned Hebrew. In 1879, she married Henry Solomon, and together they had three children. In 1890, Hannah Solomon organized the first National Jewish Women’s Congress as part of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Several years later the Congress established the National Council of Jewish Women, a permanent organization aimed at educating Jewish women to play an active role in their religion and in society. Solomon became the council’s first president, a position she held until 1905. Solomon worked with JANE ADDAMS at HULL HOUSE, a settlement house in Chicago, that provided shelter, education, and vocational training for the poor. She assisted many Russian-Jewish immigrants coming to Chicago, giving them guidance about their new city as well as legal advice. Solomon was also active in the movement to establish separate juvenile courts and probation officers for young people ar-

SPELMAN SEMINARY

rested for committing crimes. In the 1920s, she retired from most of her activities. She died on December 7, 1942.

 SOROSIS

One of the first women’s clubs, located in New York City. When journalist JANE CUNNINGHAM CROLY was denied admission to a New York Press Club function for Charles Dickens in 1868, she and her friend Alice Cary decided to establish a club where women could discuss issues of academic or professional interest. Croly and Cary chose the name Sorosis, a botanical term for the flower that eventually results in fruit. Club members designed curricula for study and held discussions on topics of interest. Revealing a void in the intellectual and cultural lives of women at the time, Sorosis enrolled 83 members in its first year. Although its purposes were vague, Sorosis brought women together and provided a vehicle for women to participate in public affairs. It was an elite club; biweekly meetings were held at the popular restaurant Delmonico’s, and the annual dues of five dollars were considered to be expensive at the time. As one of the first formally organized women’s clubs, Sorosis played a leading role in the WOMEN’S CLUB MOVEMENT, and other women followed in its footsteps by establishing clubs of their own. Later, an anniversary celebration of the club’s formation launched the beginning of the GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS.

 SOUTHERN LADY

A term that encapsulated a set of ideas about womanhood that in reality few women could fulfill. Nineteenth-century Southern women confronted a number of myths about themselves. Southern culture often identified black women with mythic figures like the sexually insatiable “Jezebel” or the self-denying, loyal “Mammy.” Middle and upper-class white women lived with the idea of the “Southern lady,” which, like Northern prescriptions of womanhood, represented a moral force for religious piety, sexual purity, and commitment to domesticity. Southern concepts of womanhood differed from their Northern counterparts in that the lady was elevated as a symbol of the superiority of the Southern way of life, meant to serve as a direct contrast

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to black womanhood and explicitly free from manual labor. The mythic Southern lady was woman of leisure, more decorative than useful. Even elite Southern white women did not often fulfill their roles according to the myth. White women worked extremely hard running households and sometimes managed plantations in their husbands’ absence. Poorer white Southern women often labored right alongside their husbands and sons in the fields. But the myth still attached itself to white feminity. Many Southerners, both before and after the Civil War, considered the application of the title lady to black women an insult to white women. Post–Civil War white supremacists found freedwomen’s efforts to claim ladyhood deeply offensive and threatening to the white social order.

 SPELMAN SEMINARY

(1881) One of the first seminaries for African-American women. When Sophia B. Packard, a white Baptist missionary, traveled to the U.S. South, she was appalled by the plight of AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN and girls. She returned to the North and rallied support and money for a school for African-American women. Accompanied by her friend Harriet E. Giles, Packard traveled to Atlanta in April of 1881, where she gained support from African-American BAPTISTS. Within a week’s time, the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary held its first classes in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Church, with 11 girls in attendance. The numbers quickly grew: 80 women and girls aged 15 to 52 enrolled within three months, and 200 enrolled within a year. With funds raised from Northern and Southern Baptists, and generous donations from John D. Rockefeller, the school expanded to a larger site. In 1884, the school was renamed Spelman for Laura Spelman Rockefeller’s mother. The curriculum varied from elementary education for recently freed slaves to training courses for teachers, MISSIONARIES, and church workers. Technical and practical studies, such as printing and home economics, were added. Eventually, the curriculum grew to include college preparatory courses. In 1886, Spelman opened the first African-American nursing department. In 1897, Spelman opened the college department that turned the school into the premier AfricanAmerican women’s college.

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S P I E S , C I V I L WA R

 SPIES, CIVIL WAR

troops at parties, Confederate women might Untold numbers of women supported either eavesdrop on conversations and share what they Union or Confederate forces in the CIVIL WAR by learned with Confederate officers. Women also conveying strategic military information. Some flirted with soldiers who might let their guard women acted as double agents. While wartime down and reveal crucial information. Because women’s physical movements were spying often was impulsive, some espionage conrarely monitored, they could safely transport ducted by women was carefully planned and inidocuments and maps, or act as couriers and tiated by military police, secret-service agents, or scouts. Women were welcome visitors at military army officers. Conventional assumptions about camps, where they might note suspicious activity gender roles often made it possible for women to pass unsuspected as carriers of vital information. or pass along information hidden in their clothSpying activities by women helped both sides ing, satchels, flour sacks, or pharmaceutical vials. avert military disasters, making legends of BELLE Some Civil War spies hid notes at designated BOYD, ROSE GREENHOW, Pauline Cushman, Anto- drop sites, such as caves and barns. Working women sometimes used their places of business nia Ford, Elizabeth Van Lew, and others. Most spies who volunteered to collect and pass as means for collecting and disseminating inforalong information were motivated by patriotism, mation, while hospital volunteers might convey a few by a taste for adventure. Military leaders information about enemy casualties. Some woman spies memorized military intellitried to recruit prominent women who had exgence messages or coded information using citensive social contacts and access to people with phers. Signals such as the placement of laundry on military secrets. While entertaining occupation the clothesline might alert troops to enemy movements. Female spies such as S. EMMA EDMONDS disguised themselves as black women or as men to TRAILBLAZERS gain access to military sites that were off-limits to white women. Pauline Cushman (1833–1893) was born in New Orleans, and No women spies in the Civil grew up in Michigan. She moved to New York City to become an War were ever executed. Some actress, but it was the Civil War that provided her with her most wrote memoirs, but most refamous role. mained anonymous.

In 1863, William Truesdale, the chief of the Union Army police, hired Cushman to gather information because of her Southern background. Pretending to search for her brother, she visited Confederate encampments near Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to securing information about the size of Confederate forces, Cushman was able to draw diagrams of their locations and steal maps that described their movements. When she tried to enter Nashville, these items were found hidden in her boots, and Cushman was arrested. Cushman managed to escape but was apprehended outside Nashville. Taken to the headquarters of Confederate General Braxton Bragg, she was subjected to harsh interrogation, found guilty of espionage, and condemned to die. Before the hanging could take place, however, Union troops attacked and the Confederates were forced to retreat. Cushman was rescued. According to legend, the Union Army presented Cushman with the honorary rank of major and granted her permission to wear a military uniform. After the war, Cushman lectured widely about her spying experiences. She died in California, where her gravestone identifies her as a Union spy.

 SPIRITUALISM

The belief in and the practice of communication with the dead or the spirit realm, which gained popularity in the early nineteenth century and was practiced throughout the century. Spiritualist circles consisting of small groups of women and men would gather with a medium, often a young woman who purportedly received and transmitted messages from the dead. These messages were expressed through rapping or tapping under tables and behind walls, through trancespeaking or automatic writing, a practice where a spirit is alleged to guide a written message.

S TA N T O N , E L I Z A B E T H C A D Y

Teenagers Margaret and Katherine Fox of Hydesville, a town outside Rochester, New York, are credited with beginning the Spiritualist craze in 1844 when they claimed to receive messages from the spirit realm through rappings in their home. Word of the girls’ talents quickly spread through neighboring towns and was widely reported in the press. The Fox sisters recanted their story in 1888, explaining that the sounds came from their peculiar ability to pop their toe joints. Interest in Spiritualism sprang up across the Eastern seaboard and in the new frontier settlements. Spiritualism was popular for a variety of reasons: it comforted the people who had lost children or spouses, it entertained partygoers, and it provided reformers with a way to secure endorsements for their causes from beyond the grave. A number of scientific figures tried to explain and justify this method of communication. Some believed that there were two “spirit forces” at work in the world: one affected the human body and produced the sounds associated with rappings and knockings, and the other worked directly on the human mind to produce automatic writing and verbal messages through a medium. It should be noted, however, that just as many scientific figures came out against Spiritualism. Spiritualism reached its height of popularity in the 1850s. By then some popular mediums were earning large sums by promoting their spirit communication before audiences around the country. During the CIVIL WAR, spiritualist practice waned as public entertainment but remained active in private circles. Spiritualism reemerged during

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Margaret Fox (left) and Katherine Fox (center) are shown with another medium, identified only as “Mrs. Fish.” The sisters inspired many adolescent girls to contact the spiritual world.

the late nineteenth century as an organized church denomination, before fading again after the turn of the century.

STANTON, ELIZABETH  CADY

(1815–1902) WOMEN’S RIGHTS leader. Elizabeth Cady was born in Johnstown, New York on November 12, 1815. Her father, like many WOMEN’S FIRSTS Americans of his day, believed that women were the weaker sex. In her autobiography Eighty Years and More, Kate and Margaret Fox were the founders of Spiritualism in Stanton writes that after her America. In 1848, their home in Hydesville, New York was brother’s death, her father, a promifilled with strange noises. In response, the two girls developed nent judge, told her, “Oh my daugha series of table and wall tappings with which they claimed to ter, I wish you were a boy!” She be able to communicate with the dead. vowed to prove to him that a daughWhen the sisters were sent to live in Rochester, New York, ter was as good as a son. they began to hold seances. News of their achievement in comAn excellent student, Cady tried to municating with the dead spread rapidly through the United follow in her brother’s footsteps, only States and Europe, and Spiritualism was born. Both women to discover that the college he atlater denounced the rappings as a fraud. At a Spiritualist tended was not open to women. Dismeeting in 1888, Margaret, with Kate in attendance, anappointed, she enrolled instead at nounced, “I am here tonight, as one of the founders of SpiriTROY FEMALE SEMINARY and gradutualism, to denounce it as absolute falsehood.” ated in 1832. During those years, Cady was drawn to such causes as

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S TA N T O N , E L I Z A B E T H C A D Y

In her autobiography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (right) wrote that she “forged the thunderbolts” and that Susan B. Anthony (left) “fired them.”

and ABOLITION. She encountered leaders of both movements at a cousin’s home. On one visit, she met abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton. The couple married in 1840 and, at Cady’s insistence, they deleted the word “obey” from their vows. After the wedding, the Stantons sailed to London for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Elizabeth, an observer, was outraged when male delegates refused to allow females to participate. Her protests led to a friendship with LUCRETIA MOTT, one of the excluded women. The two resolved to hold a women’s rights convention when they returned home. TEMPERANCE

“Woman’s degradation is in man’s idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.” —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to Susan B. Anthony, 1860

Eight years passed before the women carried out their idea. In the meantime, Stanton established her household and started a family that grew to seven children. Despite her busy home life, she actively supported women’s causes. Her 1848 campaign for a New York law that would allow married women to own real estate led to married women’s property acts in other states. Later that year she and Mott finally organized their women’s rights convention. It was held at a church near Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York. Mott handled the details, while Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, detailing the grievances that prompted the convention (see Documents), and a resolution calling for woman SUFFRAGE—the first public demand for the vote by women. After the convention, Stanton wrote articles and letters in support of women’s rights. In 1851, Stanton met SUSAN B. ANTHONY for the first time. The two forged an association that would last over 50 years. In many ways they complemented each other: Stanton was the writer and Anthony the strategist. The two did not always agree. Anthony was more focused on woman suffrage, while Stanton wanted also to address such issues as domestic abuse, coeducation, DRESS REFORM, and DIVORCE LAWS. In 1860, she persuaded lawmakers to broaden New York’s Married Women’s Property Act to include the right to one’s wages and guardianship of one’s children. Stanton and Anthony had long worked for both abolition and woman suffrage. When slavery was abolished after the CIVIL WAR, they expected their fellow abolitionists to support woman suffrage. When they did not, Stanton and Anthony were outraged. In 1868, they founded a new group, the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION. Stanton served as president for 21 years. She also wrote extensively. She edited the Revolution, a weekly journal that advocated not only woman suffrage but also discussed controversial issues like RAPE, ABORTION, and domestic violence. In 1878, Stanton authored a bill for woman suffrage that was introduced in every session of Congress until 1920, when it became the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution (see Volume 3). And between 1881 and 1886, she and Anthony published a three-volume History of Woman Suffrage. As interest in woman suffrage grew, new groups were founded. In 1890, to coordinate their efforts, Stanton and Anthony merged the two largest into the National American Woman

STONE, LUCY

Suffrage Association. Although Stanton briefly served as president, she was more radical than most members. After she wrote The Women’s Bible, a study of sexism in the Old Testament, in 1895, a number of suffragists believed that she was hurting their cause and distanced themselves from her. Despite the criticism, her commitment to women’s rights never wavered. Hours before her death on October 26, 1902, she wrote President Theodore Roosevelt urging support for woman suffrage. FOR FURTHER READING

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More. New York, 1898.

 STARR, ELLEN GATES

(1859–1940) Social reformer. Ellen Starr was born near Laona, Illinois, and attended the Rockford Female Seminary where she graduated in 1878. After graduation, Starr taught at the Kirkland School, an elite private school in Chicago. She also maintained a correspondence with JANE ADDAMS, whom she had met at the Seminary. Addams invited Starr to travel with her to Europe in 1887. As part of the trip, the two women went to London, where they visited a famous settlement house, named Toynbee Hall. Inspired by the work of Toynbee Hall, Starr and Addams opened their own settlement house in Chicago, HULL HOUSE, in 1889. Starr helped raise money for the house from wealthy families of the children she had taught at the Kirkland School. For 30 years, Starr lived at Hull House where she worked side by side with Addams to serve the poor. She also saw Hull House as an opportunity for college-educated young women, to whom many careers were closed, to use their knowledge to do valuable work. Starr established art programs and developed a bookbindery. She also lobbied to improve child labor laws and increase wages for factory workers. During a strike of textile workers in 1910 Starr collected money to support the workers and their families. She often walked the picket lines in support of strikers and was arrested in 1914 while picketing. Starr eventually left Hull House and in 1930 entered a Roman Catholic convent in Suffern, New York. She died on February 10, 1940.

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 STEWART, MARIA MILLER

(1803–1879) Reformer and abolitionist. Maria Miller was a free black woman, born in Hartford, Connecticut. Orphaned at an early age, she became a servant in the home of a minister. Eventually, she moved to Boston and married James W. Stewart, a shipping agent, in 1826. He died three years later, and unscrupulous business agents kept Stewart from inheriting his estate. The following year, Stewart had a profound religious experience that convinced her she must work to free enslaved African Americans. In 1831, she sent an essay to William Lloyd Garrison for publication in his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. The essay, printed as a pamphlet, was titled, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.” The following year, she began her career as a public speaker. On September 21, 1832, Stewart became the first black woman to speak before an audience of males and females, blacks and whites, when she addressed the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, Massachusetts. In doing so, she challenged the belief that it was improper for women to speak publicly in front a mixed-gender group. In 1832, she published Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. Stewart left Boston around 1834 to pursue a long career as a teacher in New York City, Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.



STONE, LUCY (1818–1893) Women’s rights advocate, orator, and editor. Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on August 13, 1818, and grew up on a farm. Her father believed that women did not need higher education and refused to pay for Lucy to attend college. Against his wishes, Stone paid for her own education by doing part-time jobs. In 1847, she graduated from OBERLIN COLLEGE, a coeducational institution, and became the first woman from her state to receive a college degree. Stone became a speaker for the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. In 1850, she helped plan the first national women’s rights convention, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1855, she married Henry B. Blackwell, an abolitionist, but kept her name as a protest against the inequalities endured by women in the United States. In 1866, Stone helped found the AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION to achieve SUFFRAGE for women.

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STOWE, HARRIET ELIZABETH BEECHER

She campaigned for voting rights in numerous states, including Kansas and New York. Stone was one of the founders of the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION in 1869. This was a conservative women’s rights group that broke away from a more radical faction headed by SUSAN B. ANTHONY and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. The AWSA believed in trying to achieve the vote for women in individual states, while Anthony lobbied for a Constitutional amendment giving women the vote throughout the United States. In 1870, Stone helped establish the Woman’s Journal; she and her husband became its editors. The Journal was called “the voice of the woman’s movement.” One of the most prominent feminists of the nineteenth century, Stone died on October 18, 1893, in Boston.

STOWE, HARRIET  ELIZABETH BEECHER

(1811–1896) A writer and reformer whose antislavery NOVEL, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became a national sensation. Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of the prominent Congregational minister Lyman Beecher. She was inspired throughout her life by the family’s dedication to religion and EDUCATION. As a child she attended the Litchfield Female Academy, and from 1824 to 1827 she studied Latin at her sister CATHARINE BEECHER’s Hartford Female Seminary. After TEACHING composition there for five years, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she taught at the Western Female Academy, also established by her sister. Cincinnati’s literary community was an inspiration to Beecher, who penned stories and essays for area periodicals and wrote a geography text for use in her classroom. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a seminary professor and biblical scholar. They would have seven children. Focusing on her writing, Stowe sold MAGAZINE articles and short stories to earn money. The Mayflower, a collection of her stories, was published in 1843. Later that year, she experienced a religious awakening that would have a lasting effect on her life and writing. Living in Cincinnati, located across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, Stowe encountered a number of fugitive slaves. She listened to their stories and interviewed people who

hid them. She visited nearby communities in Kentucky to observe slave life firsthand and learned of the emotional and physical cruelties visited on slave families divided among separate owners. She also discussed Southern culture and traditions with friends and read a number of writings on ABOLITION. The death of her son in a cholera epidemic in 1849 and passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 intensified her sympathy for African-American families broken up by slavery. In 1850, Stowe moved to Brunswick, Maine, when her husband accepted a professorship at Bowdoin College. It was in this setting that she began writing her landmark slave story. The National Era, a Washington, D.C., antislavery periodical, printed the suspenseful narrative in 40 weekly installments during 1851 and 1852. The complete story was published in book form under the title Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, in 1852. The story gave readers a rare glimpse into the horrors experienced by slaves in the American South. Translated into several foreign languages, distributed internationally, and adapted for the stage, Uncle Tom’s Cabin gained a vast audience. Its characters, themes, and messages became familiar to people everywhere. To counter criticisms that the novel was inaccurate, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853. This work included documents and affidavits regarding slavery that she hoped would prove her credibility. Uncle Tom’s Cabin continued to attract both supporters and enemies throughout the 1850s and into the CIVIL WAR years. Upon meeting the author in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln reportedly declared, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” After the war, Stowe continued writing essays, novels, and short fiction that examined American social traditions and culture. Later novels included Oldtown Folks (1869) and Poganuc People (1878), depicting New England Puritanism. She also published a book of religious poems. Moving to Hartford in 1864, Stowe helped her son Charles to prepare her biography, which was published in 1889. She died on July 1, 1896, at Hartford. FURTHER READING

Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

STRIKES

Stowe, Charles Edward. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Journals and Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1889.

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WOMEN’S FIRSTS While women walked out of New England mills sporadically in the nineteenth century to protest unfair wages, the Lowell Strike of 1834 is largely thought to be the first organized strike of women’s labor. The mill girls of the Lowell textile mills lived and worked in town. At the time, Lowell was one of the largest textile towns in the nation. Having left their rural homes behind for the greater independence of a mill town, women experienced a range of feelings about life in the mills, from the pains of hard work to the joys of community and sisterhood with their coworkers. In March of 1834, the Lowell mills announced a 15 percent decrease in wages. This prompted women workers to hold several meetings where in which they came to agree to strike. The boardinghouses in which 95 percent of the girls lived were close-knit communities with a social code and order that faciliated organizing for collective action. When one of the caucus leaders was fired, she gave a signal and the women workers immediately turned out to rally around her. About 800 women participated in a march around town, and an unknown woman addressed the town in an unprecedented public speech. The women aired their grievances and demanded a restoration of their previous wages. Although the mills did reduce wages, almost all the women returned to work the next day. The strike itself was unsuccessful in achieving its objectives, but it set an important precedent and a model for collective action by women workers.

Walkouts by workers because of grievances against employers. Women’s roles in strikes reflected their status in factory work. While women worked in factories, they were restricted to certain industries and to certain jobs within those industries. They worked primarily in the textile and shoe industries. Women began entering factories in the 1820s, as New England’s rapid industrialization drew girls and young women from farms. At first, the New England towns where the young women lived and worked were portrayed as ideal industrial societies. Single, but not without hope of MARRIAGE, they were carefully guarded with curfews and dress codes, while they earned an income and enjoyed the companionship of other girls. However, within a short time, decreasing wages and declining working conditions produced unrest among women workers. The women of the textile mills, or mill girls, as they were called, did not hesitate to walk out in impromptu strikes when their wages went down, and when factories initiated unfair practices such as setting clocks back to cheat workers of pay. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, mill girls turned out in protest, such as with the LYNN and LOWELL mill strikes, often with the support of men’s trade unions. Women struck less than men, however. One reason was that support for their cause was still uneven. For instance, the National Trade Union Convention supported union strikes, but were against girls working in mills to begin with. Also, women struck less because of the limited economic opportunities available. They needed the wages and were afraid that they would not be able to find work elsewhere. Women supported men in their strikes, however, and worked with men to fight for common causes, such as the ten-hour workday.

Strikes led workers to organize. Factory girls began to form cooperative organizations such as the first women’s union, the Troy Collar Laundry Union, which was formed by Kate Mulloney in New York in 1860. The first national women’s union, the DAUGHTERS OF ST. CRISPIN, formed in 1869, was eventually absorbed by the KNIGHTS OF LABOR in the 1880s. The strikes were not always successful. Mills would retaliate with firings and blacklists, hiring newly arrived IRISH IMMIGRANTS willing to work for lower wages. An 1860 shoe workers’ strike in Lynn, Massachusetts, endured a long winter, with public and union support, but ultimately failed. The women returned to work in the spring with only a small increase in pay. Despite these losses, strikes demonstrated that women would stand up for their economic rights and organize for that purpose.

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FURTHER READING

Foner, Philip S., ed. The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings on Life and Struggles in the New England Factories of the 1840s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

 SUFFRAGE

Most historians date the beginning of the woman suffrage movement to the mid–nineteenth century, but its seeds were sown much earlier. Although a few women in colonial North America were allowed to vote under special circumstances, the framers of the Constitution left the question of voter qualification to the states, which generally restricted the privilege of the ballot to adult white men. Women, thought to be too fragile and too intellectually limited to understand the complexities of politics, were to remain at home.

Women line up to vote in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, in 1888. Women had been allowed to vote there since 1869, and they retained the right when Wyoming became a state in 1890.

Nevertheless, early in the nineteenth century women began to cautiously venture beyond the domestic sphere. They enrolled in female seminaries and joined VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS, frequently church-related. Although these groups fully supported women’s primary role as REPUBLICAN MOTHERS (see Volume 1), whose patriotic duty it was to raise responsible and moral children, they also brought women together and into the public arena. By the 1830s, the TEMPERANCE and ABOLITION movements caught the ambitions of a few courageous women who spoke out publicly for reform, earning them social condemnation from men and women alike. When abolitionist Quaker LUCRETIA MOTT and young ELIZABETH CADY STANTON were relegated to sitting behind a drawn curtain at the World AntiSlavery Convention in 1840, however, their indignation led them to recognize the critical need for women to be equal participants with men under the law. In 1848, in SENECA FALLS, New York, Stanton, Mott, and others convened the first women’s rights convention, drawing about 300 men and women. Stanton delivered her famous Declaration of Sentiments speech, which included a controversial call for woman suffrage (see Documents). Modeling her speech after Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Stanton outlined a statement of liberty for women, such as what men had claimed earlier. Many, including her husband, feared she raised the suffrage issue prematurely, believing that most were not ready to conceive of so revolutionary a measure. Nevertheless, Stanton persevered and shortly thereafter other women’s rights advocates, especially SUSAN B. ANTHONY, agreed that woman suffrage provided the best means of shaping the laws governing women’s lives. By labeling the movement “woman suffrage” Stanton and Anthony underscored the importance of suffrage as central to women’s enjoyment of full citizenship. Interrupted by the CIVIL WAR, the advancement of woman suffrage suffered a blow with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Hoping that the amendment would guarantee them equal rights as citizens along with African Americans, suffrage leaders were taken aback to see that it confined voting rights specifically to “male citizens.” Their resentment deepened when the Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, enfranchised black men only. Stanton and An-

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(NWSA), and Stone, the AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION (AWSA). Known as the first African-American woman in North AmerAt first, Stone’s plan seemed to ica to edit a weekly newspaper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary hold more promise. Wyoming (1823–1893) was a cofounder and the editor of the Provincial adopted woman suffrage in 1869 when it became organized as a terriFreeman, a nonsectarian journal dedicated to the interests of tory but over the next 20 years only black people in Canada. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, three states followed. In 1878, a and one of 13 children, she was inspired to the cause of ABOLIwoman suffrage amendment was inTION by her father, Abraham Doras Shadd, a prominent antitroduced in Congress, debated, and slavery activist. Mary Shadd worked for 12 years as a teacher eventually defeated in 1887. Antisufin Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania, but passage of the frage groups—supported by wealthy, Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 prompted her to move to Canada as influential women but funded by cora leader and spokesman for black refugees. Settling in Windporate capitalists, Southern consor, Ontario, she opened a school supported by the American gressmen, and especially the liquor Missionary Association, but funding fell through two years interests—were determined to defeat later. The Freeman was launched in Toronto in 1854 and woman suffrage. Recognizing the moved to Chatham in 1855. During its four years of publicamounting power of their opponents, tion, the paper promoted racial integration, discussed black the two suffrage organizations life in Canada, and exposed discrimination on both sides of merged in 1890. After electing Stanthe border. The Freeman’s motto was “Self-reliance is the ton their president, the renamed Nafinal road to independence.” tional American Woman Suffrage AsIn 1855 Shadd became the first woman to address the Nasociation (NAWSA) turned its focus to tional Negro Convention, earning the admiration and praise working at the state level without losof Frederick Douglass for her speech in favor of black emigraing sight of the need for a federal tion to Canada. She was married in 1856 to Thomas Cary, a amendment. If enough states apToronto barber, and had one daughter. She later moved to proved suffrage, then achieving ratiWashington, D.C., where she taught school for 15 years, and fication for an amendment to the eventually earned a law degree at Howard University. A freU.S. Constitution would be assured. quent lecturer, she was an outspoken proponent of SUFFRAGE By the early twentieth century, the and the rights of women as well as racial advancement. momentum for suffrage had stalled. Stanton and Anthony died without seeing their dream realized. CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, the new president of thony who had labored hard for abolition, felt NAWSA, knew the movement required revitalizaprofoundly betrayed. “My question is this: Do tion. She announced a “winning plan” for sufyou believe the African race is composed entirely frage: an all-out coordination of activities on every of males?” remarked Stanton. They vowed to de- level, consisting of a massive effort to pass a fedfeat the amendment while seeking a separate eral amendment while pursuing suffrage in the Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women states. the vote. Other suffragists such as LUCY STONE Rebecca M. Dresser and her husband, Henry Blackwell, counseled a more moderate approach. They supported the FURTHER READING amendments and proposed that suffrage could Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in be gained through changes in state constitutions. America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. This divergence in tactics culminated in a split Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United within the national suffrage movement. In 1869, States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Anthony and Stanton formed the more radical NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION

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TA Y L O R , M A R G A R E T M A C K A L L S M I T H

T

TAYLOR, MARGARET  MACKALL SMITH

(1788–1852) First lady of the United States and wife of Zachary Taylor, 12th president. Margaret Smith was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on September 21, 1788. Her father was a wealthy plantation owner. In 1809, on a visit to her sister in Kentucky, she met Lieutenant Zachary Taylor and the couple were married the following year. As Taylor continued his career in the army, Margaret lived with him on a number of frontier military posts. The couple had six children, one of whom married Jefferson Davis, who became the president of the Confederate States of America in 1861. Zachary Taylor became a hero during the Mexican War (1846–1848) and was elected president of the United States in 1848. By the time she entered the White House, Margaret Taylor was an invalid and did not participate in social events. Her husband’s official hostess was Mary Elizabeth, the couple’s youngest daughter. Zachary Taylor died in 1850, before his term was complete. Margaret Taylor moved to Kentucky and died on August 14, 1852.

 TAYLOR, SUSIE KING

(1848–1912) Nurse, activist, writer. Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1848. Unlike many slaves she came from an intact family and knew her parents, Raymond and Hagar Baker. She was allowed to leave the plantation to stay with her grandmother, Dolly Reed, in Savannah, where she learned to read, write, and sew. Upon the outbreak of the CIVIL WAR, Taylor and her grandmother participated in secret reform meetings where Taylor wrote passes for slaves to expand their mobility throughout the country. However, Taylor was sent back to her parents at the plantation in Liberty County when her grandmother was arrested during a police raid on a reform meeting in 1862. Later in 1862, Taylor and her family were transported to St. Simon’s Island, where the government had set up a small community to observe how African Americans would respond to free-

dom. Taylor was appointed to teach in a small school on the island. After the island was evacuated, Taylor was assigned to work as a laundress and nurse with Company E, the South Carolina volunteer regiment. There she met Sergeant Edward King, whom she married sometime during the war (the actual date is unknown). In 1865, King returned to Savannah and established a school for blacks in her home. When Edward was killed in an accident in 1866, Susie left the school in the hands of a friend and worked several jobs before marrying Russell Taylor in Boston in 1879. Taylor’s postwar efforts included the organization of Corps 67, a women’s national relief corps, and work with the veterans’ association. She published her Reminiscences of My Life in Camp in 1902. She died in October, 1912.

 TEACHING

In the eighteenth century, most teachers were men, but by the Civil War era, 25 percent of teachers were women, and by 1900, the figure had grown to 75 percent. Teaching was the most common professional occupation for women throughout the nineteenth century. School administrators hired women for both practical and ideological reasons. It was cheaper to employ women, because they were paid only about half as much as men. At the same time, many early-nineteenthcentury Americans believed that women had a natural talent for caring for children and training them in virtue and good citizenship. The rapid proliferation of common schools (small, often one-room, public elementary schools) in the 1820s and 1830s also encouraged school administrators to hire women teachers. Women sought teaching jobs because teaching was one of the few socially acceptable ways for single middle-class women to support themselves. Teachers worked hard, and they often enjoyed considerable authority and status in isolated rural communities. In the late nineteenth century, immigrant and AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN sought teaching jobs in order to climb to the middle class. (African-American teachers almost always taught African-American pupils in segregated public

TEMPERANCE

schools.) Most women taught briefly, for a few terms or several years, and retired from teaching when they married. Many school boards refused to hire married women as teachers. Nineteenth-century women were better prepared to teach than their eighteenth-century counterparts were. White women’s educational opportunities improved greatly between about 1780 and 1840, as many girls’ schools and academies were founded. In the late 1830s, educational reformers introduced rigorous standardized tests for prospective teachers. Leading women educators like CATHARINE BEECHER lobbied for teacher-training schools as early as the 1850s, but many teachers entered the classroom with only an eighth-grade or tenth-grade education and no professional training at all. Most states did not require teachers to have high school diplomas, much less college degrees, until the 1920s or later. Teachers, school principals, and other educators combined to form the National Education Association in 1870, but unionization was not widespread until the 1890s. See also: Education.

 TEMPERANCE

Before the ABOLITION and SUFFRAGE crusades, temperance emerged as the first major social reform movement of the nineteenth century. Through their calls for temperance (moderation

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in and, later, abstinence from drinking alcohol), women sought to suppress forces destructive to their lives, drawing attention to the stark inequities of the law. Temperance advocates believed a drunken society threatened their mandate as Christian women to provide and protect the morality and purity of their home, the domain of married women and mothers. At a time when affordable urban entertainments were few and purity of water unknown, crowds of working men congregated in saloons for recreation. The drunkenness that ensued brought with it crime, poor work performance, poverty, and family violence. Since women were denied the right to their own income, the right to hold property separately when married, the right to DIVORCE, and custody of their children, there existed no legal means by which a woman could take control of her own life if her husband failed to provide for her. Historians estimate that by 1830 consumption of “ardent spirits” of 40percent alcohol or more averaged 7.1 gallons for every American. Given that women, children, and slaves rarely drank, the actual figure for white men was probably much higher. In an effort to curb drinking, church-led temperance movements sprang up as early as 1808 fueled by a wave of evangelical activism known as the SECOND GREAT AWAKENING. Emphasizing a person’s capacity for moral goodness, preachers urged a turning away of sinful behavior, including drink. Thousands of women were drawn to

Carry Nation was one of the most colorful and imposing temperance “crusaders.”

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“Our young men are grown more bold in seeking the saloon and bar-room. They disturb the quiet of our streets with their nightly brawls. . . . They pollute our drawing rooms, and come into the presence of our sisters and daughters, with faces flushed and breath reeking with the fumes of intoxicating drinks. They are fast hastening down, down to ruin.” —Temperance advocate Mary Vaughan, letter to Amelia Bloomer, 1851

the doctrine of repentance and salvation, which galvanized them to take a more active role in their lives beyond the confines of their homes. Although alcohol consumption declined by the 1840s largely due to church-led temperance societies, state legislatures of 13 states passed laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor but the laws fell victim to the shifting politics of the turbulent pre–Civil War era. After the war, the temperance movement reemerged but with a significant difference: Women now spearheaded the cause. The exigencies of the war had changed not only the country, but women as well. With husbands gone or dead, many assumed successful management of the family farm or business. Industrialization had grown apace, and more women ventured outside the confines of the home and the narrowness of their prescribed maternal roles. In 1873 in Hillsboro, Ohio, Eliza Jane Thompson, galvanized by a temperance lecture, led a coterie of women out of their homes and into the streets and the rum shops. The women knelt on the floor, sang hymns, prayed, and refused to move until saloonkeepers agreed to stop selling liquor. “The Women’s Crusade,” as it became known, spread throughout the Midwest, eventually attracting over 60,000 women who, with prayers and hymns, closed 250 local saloons. Their success proved temporary, however, as saloonkeepers soon reopened. In 1874, a coalition of local temperance societies who recognized the need for a national organization formed the WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU). Members pledged total abstinence and committed themselves to temperance education in schools and churches. No man was allowed membership; and only members

could organize and direct the new organization. Members wrote a constitution and elected Annie Wittenmyer their first president. A Methodist missionary, Wittenmyer had distinguished herself during the CIVIL WAR through her efforts in the Iowa SANITARY COMMISSION. Singular in her goals for the WCTU, for the next five years the conservative Wittenmyer advocated temperance through religious conversion, rather than through politics. Wittenmyer’s brilliant successor, FRANCES WILLARD, had different ideas. Willard came to the WCTU in 1879. She had been president of Evanston College for Ladies but left there following Northwestern University’s absorption of the school in 1873. The phenomenal success of the temperance movement appealed to Willard who astutely viewed the WCTU as a potentially powerful vehicle for the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT. Under her stewardship the WCTU grew to become the largest women’s organization in the United States and later the world. A highly intelligent, persuasive speaker, and determined advocate of temperance, Willard never departed from being a model of social decorum. She effectively supported the traditional roles of mother and guardian of the home while simultaneously leading women to move beyond it. She traveled and lectured throughout the nation, looking to thousands of white, Protestant, middleand upper-class women to join the cause of “home protection.” Willard’s appeal carried with it an undeniably nativist bent, excluding black, and immigrant (primarily Catholic) women as a reflection of its membership and a generally widespread nativist sentiment of the time. Although Willard recognized the value of woman suffrage, she knew she risked alienating her membership if she pursued it directly. Instead, she organized a HOME PROTECTION BALLOT, which restricted women’s voting to matters related to the sale and control of liquor. The home ballot failed, but the idea of female suffrage began to catch on. Although the “good news” temperance crusade remained their chief cause, members also extended their efforts into other avenues of social reform related to temperance such as prison reform for women, providing services for destitute women and children, education, public health, and labor reform. Willard’s motto, “Do Everything,” became the watchword for the WCTU throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

TENEMENTS FURTHER READING

TRAILBLAZERS Wielding a hatchet and exhorting her followers with cries of “Smash, ladies, smash!” Carry Nation (1846–1911) carried out a militant crusade against illegal saloons that made her the most colorful and best-known figure of the temperance movement. Born in Garrard County, Kentucky, Nation endured poverty, childhood handicap, and the mental illness of her mother before marrying at age 20. Her husband’s alcoholism and her later work in Kansas (a dry state) as a “jail evangelist” for the WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION fired her hatred of alcohol and her passionate campaign against drink “joints.” Her saloon-smashing campaign began in Kiowa, Kansas, in 1900, and she was arrested more than 25 times for her forays. At nearly six feet tall and 180 pounds, Nation combined a formidable physical presence with the zeal of a self-appointed missionary. Her “hatchetation” campaign, however, lasted only for a brief period. From the latter part of 1901 to the end of her life, she campaigned for temperance in lectures across the country, billing herself as “Carry Nation, Joint Smasher,” and selling copies of her autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1904). In January 1911, she collapsed on stage in Arkansas. She died six months later.

In 1880, the WCTU officially endorsed suffrage chiefly as a means to bring prohibition to the United States. It also carefully continued to distinguish itself from other suffrage organizations, partly because of the continued ambivalence about suffrage. By 1894, the Union was enthusiastically endorsing suffrage, lending its vast network of local organizations to lobby for the vote, thereby enlisting thousands of women into the political realm for the first time. During these years WCTU membership grew exponentially from 73,176 in 1883 to 168,324 in 1900. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, became law in 1920. Annual consumption plunged, but illegal traffic in alcohol continued and consumed such excessive degrees of manpower that by 1933 public support of prohibition waned enough to result in its repeal. The real legacy of women and temperance, however, may not be so much in realizing national prohibition, but in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which guaranteed women equal suffrage under the law. Rebecca M. Dresser

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Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

 TENEMENTS

Tenements are urban rental apartment buildings whose facilities and maintenance barely meet minimum standards, or fail to. In the nineteenth century, many of these buildings began as acceptable housing, only to become overcrowded and delapidated as landlords attempted to meet the needs of the rising numbers of working poor, many of them recent immigrants. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, urban WORKINGCLASS families lived and even worked in tenement housing, their numbers significantly increasing in the decades after the Civil War. Then, as now, housing patterns often reflected social and economic divisions. Though many tenement houses and buildings fronted main streets, the worst urban housing lay concealed in back yards or alleys, where landlords built additional apartments to meet the demands of the expanding working class. Families shared

The Lower East Side of New York City in the late 1800s was lined with tenements.

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apartments, or even single rooms, with no indoor plumbing, windows, or heating. Urban slums also represented a transformation in working life. Nineteenth-century workingclass men could not be sure of supporting their wives and children. Women and children usually worked as well, often at the lowest-paying, most dangerous labor. Many did PIECEWORK in the tenements, transforming living space into industrial working space. Women’s important place in the family economy meant that many working-class men felt a loss of power and authority. At the same time, conditions of tenement life made it impossible for working-class women to live up to middleclass ideal of “separate spheres.” These tensions, combined with poverty and crowding, often led to alcoholism and domestic violence, making tenement life all the more perilous. In the late nineteenth century a number of reformers attempted to ameliorate the inequities of tenement life. In 1890 Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. Filled with pictures and descriptions of New York tenement slums, his work shocked the middle and elite classes. In South Boston, MARY KENNEY O’SULLIVAN agitated for the reform of industrial workers’ living conditions, and by the turn of the century she planned and managed a model tenement. Other reform efforts were directed at tenements from San Francisco’s Chinatown to the working slums of Chicago. Many reformers posited that tenement conditions caused most or all of the social evils that shocked so many Americans, including PROSTITUTION, family violence, and public intoxication.

 TERRELL, MARY CHURCH

(1863–1954) Activist, educator, writer, lecturer. Born to two former slaves in Memphis, Tennessee, Mary Church Terrell went on to become one of the most persistent and well-educated black female activists of her time. Her father, Robert Church, worked his way up from dishwasher on a ship to its steward, but made his millions through his property investments. After his divorce from Louisa Church, Robert maintained close contact with his daughter and ensured that Mary received the best education available to a black woman in the nineteenth century. Church attended a private boarding school, and in 1884 received a B.A. in classics from

Oberlin College, which was run by abolitionists and had started admitting blacks in 1835. Four years later, while teaching at the Colored High School, Church obtained her master’s degree and in 1888 commenced a two-year tour of Europe where she studied French and German. In 1891, Church married Robert Terrell, a young lawyer who became the first black judge for the District of Columbia. Terrell, along with her husband, had long been involved in the struggles to end segregation; however, it was the 1892 LYNCHING of Terrell’s friend Tom Moss that propelled her out of the classroom and onto the streets, launching her career as an activist working on behalf of racial justice and equality. That same year, Terrell helped to create the COLORED WOMEN’S LEAGUE, whose purpose was “to collect all facts obtainable to show the moral, intellectual, industrial and social growth and attainments of our people, to foster unity of purpose, to consider and determine methods which will promote the interests of colored people [in every direction].” Eventually, the League and the Federation of Afro-American Women, both products of the popular impulse among nineteenth-century African-Americans toward selfhelp and social clubs, decided to merge, and the result was the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN (NACW), with Terrell as the first president. The newly formed club was dedicated to improving the lives of African-American women and men by eradicating discrimination and inequality and by helping black people attain full citizenship rights, but also by addressing the systematic exclusion of black women from national women’s organizations. As a longtime suffrage activist, Terrell persuaded white women’s clubs to include African-American women and criticized the SUFFRAGE movement for its racial prejudice. Mary Church Terrell fought against racial segregation and discrimination throughout her life as a high school teacher, lecturer, suffrage activist, founder of NLCW, and as one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Still active at the end of her life, Terrell lived to see the fruition of her work in two major victories: the Supreme Court’s ruling to desegregate public facilities in 1953, and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 which ended segregation in public schools. Mary Church Terrell died in 1954.

THOMA S, MARTHA CAREY FURTHER READING

Trager, James. The Women’s Chronology. Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., 1994.



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rural values and ways of life, creating a different mill culture than in the North. FURTHER READING

TEXTILE INDUSTRY

During the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century textile production was primarily a matter of household manufacture. Women carded, spun, and wove wool, cotton, and flax into fabric for family consumption and to earn extra cash. In 1813, with the founding of the first fully integrated textile factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, the industrial production of textiles began to replace household manufacture. Early New England mills usually followed one of two models. The Waltham system primarily relied on native-born single women as workers, housed them in boardinghouses, and provided paternal oversight to regulate female worker’s behavior. Woman operatives tended the machines, sometimes three or four large machines at once, which turned cotton or wool into thread and wove that thread into cloth. Operatives lived and ate together in dormitories, supervised by older women who maintained physical and moral order among their charges. The Slater, or Rhode Island, system utilized considerably more child labor, hiring entire families to work and live at the mills. These two systems became less distinct after the Civil War as immigrant labor came to dominate the textile industry. Although New England indisputably dominated the American textile industry before the CIVIL WAR, a small number of white Southerners did establish mills in their region. Most prewar Southern mills were quite small and primarily limited to yarn production for local markets. In the postwar period the South expanded its textile industry, turning small agricultural centers like Greenville, South Carolina, into busy mill towns. Southern mill towns attracted workers and rail lines, much as they did in the North, but the labor force tended to be poor whites and African Americans. Black and white Southern women were more likely to be part of whole families that worked in the mills, unlike the single female mill workers of the North, particularly as poor Southerners found they could not make a living at tenant farming or SHARECROPPING. These workers, both black and white, often came from the interior regions of the South. Thus the industrial world of the South was influenced by

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, et al. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. New York: Norton, 1987.

THOMAS, ELLA GERTRUDE  CLANTON

(1834–1907) Writer. Ella Gertrude Clanton was born on a large plantation in Columbia County, Georgia. After attending the Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, she married James Jefferson Thomas, a medical student, in 1852. The Thomases lived on a large plantation, a gift from Gertrude’s father, near Augusta, Georgia. The couple had ten children, several of whom died in infancy. When the CIVIL WAR began in 1861, her husband joined the Confederate army. Gertrude was left in charge of her family on the plantation, which she managed by herself. Following the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the Thomases found themselves reduced to poverty. Their Confederate currency was worthless. In 1869, Thomas lost a store he had owned. Gertrude Thomas had always enjoyed writing, and she began selling stories to magazines to raise money. During the 1870s and 1880s, her articles appeared in The Planter and Grange, The Dixie Farmer, and several Georgia newspapers. She also kept a 450,000-word diary, finally published in 1990, called, The Secret Eye. This diary depicts the life of a wealthy Southern woman growing up on a plantation before the Civil War. In addition, Thomas also portrays life in Georgia during the war, and the terrible decline into poverty which the Thomases endured as a result of the defeat of the Confederacy. Thomas died in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 11, 1907.

 THOMAS, MARTHA CAREY

(1857–1935) Educator and women’s rights advocate. Martha Carey Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 2, 1857. Her parents were QUAKERS and she went to Quaker schools in Baltimore and Ithaca, New York. Against her father’s wishes, she attended college and graduated from Cornell University in 1877. She went to Europe to do

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graduate work and received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1882. Thomas returned to the United States to become dean at BRYN MAWR COLLEGE in 1884. She was the first female “dean” in the nation. At Bryn Mawr, located in Pennsylvania, she developed the program for undergraduates, and set up the first female graduate program for women in the United States. She believed that a curriculum for women should not be filled with feminine subjects such as domestic science, but should be as rigorous as a college curriculum for men. As she put it: “girls can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature, science, and conjecture.” Through her efforts, Thomas also convinced Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to admit women to its medical school. In 1908, Thomas was chosen to be president of Bryn Mawr, a post she held until 1922. She also served as first president of the National College Woman Equal Suffrage League in 1908 and supported a Constitutional amendment granting equal rights to women. She died on December 2, 1935.

TIBBLES, SUSETTE LA  FLESCHE

(1854–1903) Prominent nineteenth-century spokesperson for Native American rights. Susette LaFlesche was born a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska. Her paternal grandfather had been a French fur trader and her father an Omaha leader from 1853 to his death in 1888. Suzette was the eldest of five siblings and all were educated at the Presbyterian Mission school on their Nebraska reservation. She also attended the Elizabeth Institute in New Jersey, graduating in 1873 and returning to her reservation to teach. Throughout her life La Flesche’s vision of Native American rights emphasized equal civil rights, equal rights to private property, and equal educational opportunities. Thus she vigorously supported the 1887 DAWES ACT, which authorized individual allotments from tribal lands for Native Americans. Historians now describe the passage of the Dawes Act as the “Second Great Removal,” because of the vast tracts of land that were swindled away from Native Americans. La Flesche’s career as a reformer grew out of the federal government’s assignment of Ponca tribal land to the Sioux nation in 1877. This move forced the Ponca’s removal. In 1879 Ponca leader Standing Bear was arrested for attempt-

ing to return his people to their land. Journalist Thomas Henry Tibbles publicized the case and convinced Standing Bear to go on a speaking tour. Susette La Flesche went with them as an interpreter. Wearing her native garb, but with the veneer of Protestant education, La Flesche, or Bright Eyes, as she was called, seemed the very model of an Indian princess to Eastern audiences. La Flesche married Tibbles in 1881; they had no children. Susette Tibbles continued her career as a speaker, writer and newspaper editor. In 1902 the Tibbleses moved to a Nebraska farm situated on the allotment due her as an Omaha Indian. Susette La Flesche Tibbles died one year later and was buried near her farm.

TILLSON, CHRISTIANA  HOLMES

(1798–1872) Author, philanthropist, and pioneer. Christiana Holmes Tillson wrote her autobiography, A Women’s Story of Pioneer Illinois, at her daughter’s request in 1870. Her daughter wanted Tillson to write down some of her “early western experiences.” Tillson was hesitant and felt that nothing she had to say would be of interest. However, her autobiography offered readers a glimpse of what life was like for women at a time when the United States was being transformed from a rural, agricultural country to a more urban, industrialized nation. Published originally in 1872 as Reminiscences of Early Life in Illinois, by Our Mother, Tillson’s memoir serves as a rare source documenting the role women played in the early settlement of Illinois. Christiana Holmes was born in Kingston, Massachusetts, on March 13, 1798. She married John Tillson in October 1822 and moved to Illinois territory that same year. The Tillsons set up a general store and real estate business. In her autobiography Tillson tells of their rise to prominence and wealth through the speculative land boom during the 1820s. Tillson writes of toiling in her home, of being a supportive wife and mother of four, and of helping with her husband’s business. Although they lost most of their fortune after 1836 when the land boom went bust, the Tillsons continued as prominent citizens of Illinois and in 1837 helped found Hillsboro Academy which was a school. The Tillsons also donated $9,000 to help found Illinois College. After her husband’s death in 1853, Christiana continued to give to benevolent causes. Tillson died in New York City on May 29, 1872.

TRUTH, SOJOURNER

 TOWLE, NANCY

(1796–?) Christian preacher and evangelist. Nancy Towle was a young New Hampshire schoolteacher when she decided to forsake her family and friends to become a Christian evangelist. On April 20, 1821, Towle left her family to spread the message of Christian salvation. She met much resistance to her preaching because female preachers were not accepted in most communities. But Towle became an aggressive evangelist, traveling over 10,000 miles in her first decade of preaching. Once, Towle was invited to preach to a Methodist congregation in Pennsylvania, but was turned away because the preachers would not allow women to lead or speak from a position of authority in the church. Towle’s response was that “many high-minded men are aggravated to see a greater congregation to hear a woman than they could gain themselves.” She ended up preaching instead to a large group at the nearby courthouse. Towle continued evangelizing full time for 14 years. She preached against the subordination of women, calling it one of the “growing evils” in the world.

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women’s domestic roles and so she continued to offer traditionally female courses, such as those providing moral and religious instruction. The offerings eventually expanded to include such fields of study such as astronomy, elocution, geography, and mathematics, which had traditionally been considered appropriate only for men. Troy’s students demonstrated their proficiency and intellectual equality in public exams each year, and many of Troy’s graduates went on to spread the gospel of women’s education, by becoming teachers themselves. The school’s trustees purchased the school from the city in 1872, and in 1895, changed the name to the Emma Willard School.

 TRUTH, SOJOURNER

(1797?–1883) ABOLITIONIST and women’s rights advocate. Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York’s Ulster County. At the time of her birth, New York and New Jersey were the only Northern states that still permitted slavery. Truth,

See also: Preaching.

 TRANSCENDENTALISM

See DALL, CAROLINE HEALEY; FULLER, MARGARET; PEABODY, ELIZABETH PALMER.

 TROY FEMALE SEMINARY

Considered to be the first endowed institution of higher learning for women. When EMMA WILLARD was denied entry to a men’s college, she applied in 1819 to the New York State legislature for money to establish a school for women in the state. Her request was approved, but the legislature was slow to provide the funds. When Willard moved to Waterford, New York, to await the necessary funding, the nearby town of Troy, on its own initiative, passed a resolution for a levy to raise $4,000 for Willard’s cause, and purchased a school building. Troy Female Seminary opened its doors to 90 girls from across the country in September 1821. Like other reformers at the time, Willard wanted to furnish young women with an education that was intellectually rigorous. In line with this vision, she offered courses beyond the standard curriculum at finishing schools, such as history and natural philosophy. At the time, Willard still upheld

A powerful speaker, Sojourner Truth could often turn an angry audience into a receptive one.

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whose given name was Araminta Ross, was sold away from her family at the age of 11. After several more sales, she entered the household of John J. Dumont of New Paltz, New York, in 1810. There she had four children who survived infancy, three girls and a boy. Her two oldest daughters were sold away from her as soon as they could work. Dumont promised Truth that he would free her in 1827, a year before slavery was to be abolished in New York. When he failed to keep his word, she fled with her infant daughter to the home of Isaac and Maria Van Wagener. There she successfully sued for the release of her son, who was illegally sold and shipped to Alabama. In 1829, Truth moved to New York City with her children and worked as a domestic in several religious communes. In 1843, she had a revelation that prompted her to change her name to “Sojourner Truth” and become a traveling preacher. In Northampton, Massachusetts, she encountered her first abolitionists. Sojourner Truth soon became one of the antislavery movement’s most famous speakers. She supported herself by selling the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, an autobiography. Truth’s work as an abolitionist led her to the woman SUFFRAGE movement, where she challenged the ideology of “true womanhood” popular among middle-class Americans. In 1851, she told a minister who claimed that women were too helpless to vote that “nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” By 1857, Truth had settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where her daughters and their families joined her. Her son Peter went to sea in 1842 and was never heard from again. During the CIVIL WAR, Truth gathered supplies for African-American regiments and later counseled former slaves for the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. These experiences prompted her to ask the government for land in the West for a “Negro state.” The government failed to act, but the idea inspired African-American communities in Kansas and Nebraska in the 1870s. Truth visited many of those communities and continued to speak out for suffrage, TEMPERANCE, and equal rights. She died on November 26, 1883, in Battle Creek. FURTHER READING

Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996.

 TUBMAN, HARRIET ROSS

(1820?–1913) ABOLITIONIST, rescuer of slaves, Civil War scout. Harriet Ross was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, in about 1820. Little is known about her early years, but the injuries she suffered during that time influenced her life. As an adolescent, she rushed to protect another slave, only to have an angry overseer strike on the head with a two-pound weight. As a result of the injury, she experienced sleeping seizures and dizzy spells throughout her life. In 1844, Ross married John Tubman, a free black. A few years after their marriage, fearful that she would be sold away from her family, Harriet decided to escape to the North despite her husband’s objections. She left with two brothers who lost heart along the way and returned to slavery. Although Tubman reached safety, she became a “conductor” of the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and returned to the South 19 times to free over 300 slaves, including her siblings and par-

Harriet Tubman worked tirelessly to rescue fugitive slaves, to promote the cause of abolition, and in support of women’s rights.

TYLER, LETITIA CHRISTIAN

ents. Slave owners regarded her as such a threat that they placed a $40,000 bounty on her head. Yet she repeatedly eluded capture. During the CIVIL WAR, Tubman served as a spy and scout for Union troops in South Carolina. On some scouting raids, she commanded the troops, both black and white. On one raid, she rescued 756 slaves without losing a single Union soldier. During her three years of service, she received just $200 from the government. For the most part, she supported herself by making and then selling pies and root beer to soldiers. After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, New York, and married Nelson Davis, a Civil War veteran. Her first husband had died in 1867. Her new marriage did not alter her commitment to expanding opportunities for newly freed African Americans. Although she herself was illiterate, she promoted the establishment of FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS in the South. She also attended woman suffrage conventions and supported the National Federation of Afro-American Women. When the government gave her a pension, she used the money to establish the Harriet Tubman Home for Indigent Aged Negroes. On March 10, 1913, she died there at the age of 92. FURTHER READING

Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

 TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE

Historic black college. Founded by Booker T. Washington as the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 in Macon County, Alabama, the Tuskegee Institute offered a variety of roles and opportunities for women: teachers, students, administrators, and support personnel. The private, coeducational college originally offered technical instruction in practical activities, such as mattress making and cooking, that would help AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN secure employment and improve their homes. Students learned industrial skills by constructing the school’s buildings, but academic courses were also offered. In annual conferences, students gave agricultural and home economics demonstrations for people of the community and surrounding countryside. The school was instrumental in helping impoverished, rural blacks, mostly former slaves, achieve autonomy.

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Margaret James Murray Washington, the wife of the founder, and Hallie Brown served as the institute’s most prominent dean of women and principal, respectively, during the nineteenth century. Combating sexism and racism, they instructed female students to work diligently and become self-reliant. To promote self-esteem and racial pride, students were required to learn rules of ETIQUETTE and study African-American history. In addition to career training, Washington taught her charges skills for MARRIAGE and MOTHERHOOD. The first woman to graduate from Tuskegee was Virginia Adams. Women at the institute participated in the Tuskegee Women’s Club, organized by Margaret Washington, and attended celebrations such as the annual Founder’s Day festivities. A variety of black women’s associations from around the country held annual meetings at the school. Halle Tanner Dillon was the school’s physician in the nineteenth century, and prominent female visitors included the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston. Designated a National Historic Site in 1974, Tuskegee Institute preserves extensive records on the lives of black women.

 TYLER, LETITIA CHRISTIAN

(1790–1842) First lady of the United States and wife of John Tyler, tenth president. Letitia Christian was born on November 12, 1790, on her family’s plantation near Richmond, Virginia. She received no formal education, and in 1813 married John Tyler. The couple had eight children as John Tyler pursued a successful political career. He was elected governor of Virginia in 1825, and United States senator in 1827. In 1840, he was selected to run as vice president on the Whig Party ticket with William Henry Harrison. When Harrison died a month after assuming office as president of the United States, Tyler became president. Letitia Tyler suffered a paralytic stroke in 1839, which made her unable to act as official hostess in the White House. These duties were assumed by her daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler. Letitia Tyler died on September 10, 1842, the first woman to die while serving as first lady.

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U

UNDERGROUND  RAILROAD

TRAILBLAZERS

A network of roads and safe havens Delia Webster was one of many unsung heroines of the Underfor escaped slaves seeking freedom. ground Railroad. Even as a young girl growing up in Vermont, SLAVERY and its dehumanizing pracshe cultivated antislavery ideals that derived both from her tices drove many men and women to Congregationalist background and a moral and philosophical attempt escape from bondage, debelief that SLAVERY was abhorrent. She began teaching at the spite great risk to their lives. The early age of 12, and later attended the coeducational OBERLIN COLnineteenth century saw the rise of an LEGE. Webster then moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where she organized ABOLITION movement, translated her antislavery beliefs into action. which sought to bring about the end In Lexington, Webster served in the Underground Railroad, of slavery. both as a contact and providing shelter to slaves seeking freeOne of the major accomplishdom. In an infamous incident in September of 1844, she was arments of abolitionists was the formarested and imprisoned for three months without a trial when tion and use of the Underground she attempted to help three slaves escape under cover of night Railroad, a loose network of back in a high-risk plan engineered by the Methodist preacher roads, homes, stables, caves, and Calvin Fairbank. Fairbank had appealed to Webster for assisother hiding places where escaped tance, knowing of her dedication to the antislavery cause. slaves on the road north could travel undetected and protected by individDespite her difficulty with the law, Webster continued to uals sympathetic to their cause. Both assist with the antislavery cause in a variety of ways. She esAFRICAN-AMERICAN and white inditablished a “free labor” farm in Kentucky, where freedmen viduals joined together to facilitate could work for wages, and she nursed soldiers near the Union the travel of escaped slaves. border during the war. Additionally, she taught in AFRICAN One of the most famous “conducAMERICAN schools and tried to establish a FREEDMEN’S SCHOOL. tors” of the Underground Railroad was HARRIET TUBMAN, who had herself escaped to freedom. Many white women were also active in the Underfreedom. The increased consequences for capture ground Railroad, using their social status, influ- in the North made the safe passages of the Underence, money and homes to provide shelter, help, ground Railroad even more important in helping and support. LUCRETIA MOTT sheltered escaped escaped slaves find freedom. slaves in her Philadelphia home and even fought in court for the freedom of Jane Johnson, an es- FURTHER READING caped slave who had been recaptured. Blockson, Charles L. The Underground Railroad. New Once the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987. 1850, the need for the Railroad became all the Still, William. The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, more dire. Slaves who had successfully escaped to Authoritative Narratives, Letters, Etc. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872. the north could be returned to their former owners for punishment and certain re-enslavement. Anyone known to aid escaping slaves was subject URBAN/CITY LIFE to fines and imprisonment. Because the North was no longer a safe haven, it became necessary See TENEMENTS; “IMMIGRATION AND for many slaves to reach Canada before fully claim URBANIZATION” (P. 36).



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 VASSAR COLLEGE

A Seven Sisters college located in Poughkeepsie, New York. Urged by friend Milo Jewett to direct his legacy toward women’s education, local philantrophist Matthew Vassar founded a women’s COLLEGE that followed the classical liberal arts curriculum of fine arts and sciences, previously found only at men’s colleges. Vassar offered intellectually rigorous subjects under a nine-school “university system.” Subjects included hard sciences such as physics and mathematics, as well as classical languages. This radical curricular departure, while progressive, led Vassar and Jewett to structurally temper the “male” tilt of the curriculum with the single-building ideal promoted by MARY LYON at MOUNT HOLYOKE SEMINARY. Both to promote community and to control students—supposedly to protect them from potential harm and degradation—women lived, learned, studied, and socialized in one building, unlike campuses with multiple buildings at male institutions. SARAH HALE, the editor of GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK, publicly opposed Jewett’s traditional vision of an all-male faculty for the college, and Vassar agreed. When trustee John Raymond was chosen as President, Vassar chose Hannah Lyman as the first principal, who closely governed the life and studies of the students. Despite plans for hiring women faculty, only one woman professor was hired initially, astronomer MARIA MITCHELL. After Vassar’s opening in 1865 to 353 women, adjustments were continually made to the woman’s liberal arts experience, including the hiring of more women professors, removal of Jewett’s university system, and the addition of preparatory coursework for women unprepared for the rigors of Vassar’s curriculum.

 VOICE OF INDUSTRY

The weekly labor newspaper Voice of Industry was first published in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. Huldah J. Stone, a Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) officer, acted as the paper’s correspondent. In 1845 the New England Workingmen’s Association made the

Voice its official organ. Lowell, Massachusetts, textile operative and feminist labor organizer SARAH BAGLEY served on the three-member publishing committee in 1845 and 1846 and briefly served as the weekly newspaper’s chief editor. At the time of her association with the newspaper, Bagley was also the president of the LFLRA, and in 1846 the organization bought the paper’s press. Under Bagley’s guidance the Voice of Industry established a separate women’s department and hired editors to travel to mill towns to report on labor conditions outside Lowell.

 VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS

Over the course of the nineteenth century, women formed groups, clubs, and associations dedicated to social and political reforms, ranging from abolition to child labor issues. These voluntary associations functioned as women’s primary vehicle for social and political activism. Inspired by problems caused or exacerbated by urbanization, industrialization, and lack of basic political rights, reform-minded women cited female moral authority as a basis for organization. This authority came from antebellum ideologies of womanhood that claimed that women were naturally more moral and pure than men, and that women, as the mothers and wives of citizens, had a responsibility to ensure moral uprightness in those around them. Voluntary associations were the logical outgrowth of these prescriptive ideologies and allowed women to transform their work from housewifery to broader political activity. While most of the labor in voluntary associations was performed by middle- and upper-class white, native-born, Protestant women, some working-class organizations did exist, as well as a significant number of African-American women’s clubs, Jewish women’s clubs and Catholic women’s clubs. Working-class women were more likely to unionize, strike, and boycott than middle-class women, but movements like TEMPERANCE crossed class lines. Some associations provided direct assistance to those in need, nursing

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soldiers, collecting clothing, providing shelter and child care, while others concerned themselves more with changing laws and political agendas. All of these groups played a significant role in nineteenth-century reform movements, while at the same time transforming the women who created them by drawing them into the public sphere. Many women came to the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT, for example, after having been politicized by their experiences in ABOLITION or temperance movements. The most prominent feature of these voluntary associations was the local nature of the groups. Early nineteenth-century groups like the NEW YORK FEMALE MORAL REFORM SOCIETY or the Female Labor Reform Association in Lowell, Massachusetts, worked locally, but on national is-

sues. Within communities women sometimes came together in diverse and multicultural groups that fostered connections across class and race lines. Voluntary associations began as church or charitable societies, but by mid-century expanded into temperance, abolition, women’s rights, and other moral reforms. In the late nineteenth century reform-minded women increasingly embraced “social housekeeping,” or the idea that women were responsible for developing social work, urban development, immigrant education, labor reform, and other issues of social welfare.

See also: Benevolent Societies; Lowell Mill Workers; Women’s Club Movement.

W

 WAGE EARNERS

For most women in the nineteenth century, paid employment was the exception rather than the rule. Women who worked did so out of economic necessity. The opportunities to earn wages were circumscribed and limited to a few jobs. The options for employment were limited to those jobs that were, or became, “feminized,” performed almost entirely by women for less pay than men. Although there were few job options, the possibilities increased as the century progressed, reflecting changes in immigration and migration, increasing education for women, and new technologies. The jobs in which women were most likely to be employed included agriculture, domestic work, factory employment, teaching, nursing, and, by the end of the century, clerical work. Each of these jobs had different status. Domestic service—maid, cook—was the lowest rung of the ladder. The hours of employment were long, regulated not by a clock but by the whim of one’s mistress. The work was isolating, and the pay was usually poor. Factory work was one step up the ladder. The pay might be small, but workers were surrounded by other people, and had a definite sense of when the workday would end. Higher up the ladder were teaching and nursing, both of which required education and thus were accorded greater status. CLERICAL WORK, which emerged after the Civil War, was

highly regarded. This work was typically in a clean office, with other people, and might also include interaction with men. Why did women work outside the home? The popular theory held that women worked for “pin money,” that is, money to purchase frivolous things such as hat pins and ribbons. This theory seemed to have much credence, in part because the early factory employees saw themselves as only temporary members of the workforce, who were there by choice. The reality for most women, however, was economic necessity. Many women worked to support themselves or their families. Because of the persistence of the “pin money” theory, women were usually paid less than men for performing the same task. When employers were questioned (and they seldom were), they said that men worked to support families and women did not, despite much evidence to the contrary. As some jobs became “feminized,” or mostly performed by women, the pay for these jobs stayed low. When clerical work shifted in the late nineteenth century from serving as a stepping stone to a managerial role to a dead-end position, the pay decreased as more and more women flocked to this work. The waves of immigration to the United States meant that women from other countries would be competing with native-born women (American women of Euro-

WA G E E A R N E R S

pean descent) for the same jobs, and would often be paid less for the same job. The migration west provided job opportunities for courageous and entrepreneurial women. One of the most visible changes in employment patterns was in who did what type of work. As new jobs appeared, white, native-born women would normally move on to these jobs, leaving open their former jobs for other women. An example were the “mill girls” in Lowell, Massachusetts. (See Documents.) Originally seen as the ideal workforce, the daughters of farmers flocked to Lowell in the early and mid-1800s to earn money and get freedom before marriage. They were the perfect employees: nearby and cheap to hire. Soon, however, the factory operatives began to organize, protesting working conditions and wages. The perfect employees were less than perfect. Just as problems with the farm girls increased, a new labor source presented itself: Irish and Italian immigrant families. Similarly, as immigrant women left one job for a higher-paying one, the door was opened for African-American women, particularly after the Civil War. Immigrant women typically went into factory work or DOMESTIC SERVICE, even though the latter was often barred to them—in the 1840s, many homemakers refused to hire Irish women as servants, claiming that they were ignorant of proper cleaning techniques and were in general dirty. Factory work often proved a better choice. Women could work with their friends, converse in their native language, and make money. The disadvantage of factory work, however, in addition to its unregulated danger, was the seasonal nature of the job. Canning fruits and vegetables was necessarily linked to the harvest of the produce. Clothing manufacturers required production for summer and winter seasons, with periodic unemployment between “seasons.” Also, before factory work became so centralized, much of the work was outsourced: workers were paid by the piece. This PIECEWORK system enabled women to work at home, but often entailed the entire family contributing their labor. African-American women were primarily employed in agriculture or domestic work. Prior to the Civil War, slaves did not have choices about what they would do for work. Free blacks did, however; many, particularly women, owned property and bought the freedom of family members still in servitude. After the Civil War, many African-American women chose to follow the pat-

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tern set by their white counterparts, and not work outside the home. When economic necessity forced them to alter their decisions, many consciously chose domestic work over agricultural work. The latter, however, paid better, and for strong women often meant a better yield on their time: agricultural workers were paid based on what they picked, not their gender. As African Americans began to migrate north and west, particularly in the last third of the century, many women were consigned to kitchens for employment, as discrimination barred women from many jobs, from factory work to department stores to clerical work. The exception to this color-based hiring was African-American firms. Women migrating west had several options. For single women, teaching was a distinct possibility. Typically a town would hire a teacher within several years of its founding. The pay for teachers was quite low, and decreased as men disappeared and women appeared as teachers. Teachers were expected to live with a family in town, or occasionally take a room in a boardinghouse. In mining towns and other towns with a preponderance of men, women did laundry, cooked, and ran boardinghouses for men, all traditional “wife” jobs. The CIVIL WAR had a decisive effect on two forms of employment: NURSING and clerical work. Prior to the war, most nursing was done by women in their homes for their immediate families. As the preponderantly single male immigrants swelled the population, more and more people who became ill had no family to take care of them. Still, society frowned upon women working outside the home, particularly to care for strangers. During the Civil War, however, the need for nurses was great and the objections to women nurses faded. After the war, as nursing for women became more respectable, nursing itself began to professionalize. Schools for nurses opened, usually as part of a hospital, where the student nurses provided the bulk of the nursing care for the patients. As in all occupations, nursing was segregated: most African-American women received their training, and provided services after training, in all-black institutions and private homes. In the late nineteenth century, with improved education for women, a new and highly educated cohort of women pursued traditional female occupations, such as motherhood, and nontraditional occupations, such as MEDICINE and LAW. Almost all of these women were from the upper

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class: college education was expensive and many believed that more educated women were less marriagable. Educated women also became teachers, social workers, and college administrators. For many of the college-educated women, the decision to pursue a career often precluded marriage and a family, although there were many exceptions to this rule. The emerging middleclass and upper-class women who chose not to work for a salary often devoted themselves to voluntary service organizations. Gwen Kay See also: Factories and Factory Workers; Lowell Mill Workers; Settlement House Movement; Strikes. FURTHER READING

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, eds. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to Present. New York: Norton, 1995. Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work. New York: Columbia University, 1990. Harris, Alice Kessler. Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

WARD, ELIZABETH STUART  PHELPS

(1844–1911) Author. Mary Gray Phelps was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 31, 1844. Her father was a clergyman and professor at the Andover Theological Seminary, and her mother was the author ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. After her mother’s death, Mary Gray chose to take her name. At 13, Phelps was already a published author. Youth’s Companion printed and one of her stories and another appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1864. Four years later, Phelps published her first novel, titled The Gates Ajar, about a girl who must deal with the death of her brother during the Civil War. It was an instant success, selling 80,000 copies in the United States. Her books combined interesting plots and characters, set against the great events of second half of the nineteenth century. Phelps wrote over 50 books, including a successful series, Gypsy Bernyton, for girls. Other books focused on women trying to balance a career and marriage. She also wrote about unfair labor practices against women workers in A Silent Partner. In 1888, Phelps married Herbert D. Ward, and they wrote several books together. She died on January 28, 1911.

 WARNER, SUSAN

(1819–1885) Author of one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Susan Bogert Warner was born on July 11, 1819, in New York City. The daughters of a wealthy attorney, she and her younger sister, Anna Bartlett Warner, were educated at home by tutors. When their father lost his fortune in 1837, the girls were moved from a mansion to a farmhouse on Constitution Island on New York’s Hudson River. To earn money to support the family, Susan Warner wrote and published her first novel, The Wide, Wide World, in 1850, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell. It is believed to have been the first book by an American author to sell one million copies. A sentimental novel, it recounts the ordeals of Ellen Montgomery, who lived with an aunt in a rural area after her father suffered financial losses. With strong religious and moral themes, the novel appealed to contemporary readers and was translated into several foreign editions. Warner’s second novel, Queechy (1852), followed a similar theme. The Hills of the Shatemuc (1856) was her first novel with a male protagonist, a character clearly based on her father. From then on, Warner published at least one book every year until her death. Many examined Biblical subjects and carried evangelical messages. Her writing also emphasized the importance of women in maintaining moral and ethical standards in society. Her sister collaborated with her on a number of titles. Susan Warner died on March 17, 1885, in Highland Falls, New York.

See also: Novels; Writers.

 WELD, ANGELINA GRIMKÉ

(1805–1879) ABOLITIONIST and WOMEN’S RIGHTS activist. Angelina Emily Grimké was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 26, 1805. Her father, John Grimké, had fought in the Revolutionary War and served in the state legislature and on the state’s highest court as a judge. Her mother, Mary Smith Grimké, was the daughter of a wealthy Charleston family. One of 14 children, Angelina Grimké was educated by tutors at the family’s house in Charleston and its large cotton plantation in the country. Even as a child Grimké

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was uneasy about the scores of slaves who did most of the work on the plantation. She often clashed with her mother about the issue after her father died in 1818. A change in Grimké’s life came in 1829 when she left home to join her sister, SARAH MOORE GRIMKÉ, in Philadelphia. There she joined the QUAKER religion and became a teacher. In time, though, she became disillusioned with the church because it offered women a limited role in church and civic affairs. Believing that slavery was a moral evil, she wanted to be more active in the abolitionist cause, so in 1833 she joined the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, formed that year by William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of an abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator. In 1835, Garrison published an impassioned letter from Grimké in which she said that abolition was a cause “worth dying for.” This letter thrust her into the front lines of the fight against SLAVERY. Her fame increased in 1836 when the Society published her major work, the Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, which attracted a wide readership. Her goal in the book was to use the Bible to show the immorality of slavery. As a result of their growing fame, she and Sarah were invited to speak at antislavery conventions throughout the Northeast. Because of her intense and vocal opposition to slavery, Angelina was warned not to return to the South. In 1836, the Grimké sisters moved to New York City. A year later, the two launched a 23week lecture tour against slavery. The tour came to a climax when Angelina addressed the Massachusetts legislature. Although some abolitionists applauded the sisters, many people were critical, arguing that it was not a woman’s place to speak in public about such issues. This criticism convinced the sisters that, like slaves, women were treated as second-class citizens. As a result, Angelina became increasingly active in the struggle for women’s rights. In 1838, Grimké married abolitionist Thomas Weld, and in the years that followed she remained active circulating antislavery petitions. From 1848 to 1862 she and her husband ran a school in Belleville, New Jersey. In 1863, they moved to Boston. From 1864 to 1867, Angelina Weld worked as a teacher, but she continued to fight for the rights of women, particularly the right to vote. That struggle culminated in 1870 when she, Sarah, and 42 other women symbolically deposited ballots at a polling place.

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In late 1873, Sarah Grimké died. Weld then suffered a series of strokes that left her paralyzed for the rest of her life. She died on October 26, 1879. FURTHER READING

Ceplair, Larry. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Cooper, James L. and Sheila McIsaac. The Roots of American Feminist Thought. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973.

 WELLESLEY COLLEGE

A Seven Sisters college for women, founded in 1875 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. While preaching at MOUNT HOLYOKE, Henry Fowle Durant, an evangelical Christian, was deeply impressed with the school’s system of education and Christian spirit. He later became a trustee and hoped to erect a copy on his Wellesley estate. Durant was unusual not only for his deep interest in women’s spiritual education, but also for his ideas on women’s inequitable condition. He openly advocated higher education as the weapon to fight against the subordination of women. In 1869, he petitioned for Wellesley’s charter and drafted trustees from his colleagues on Mount Holyoke’s board. He made an unprecedented appointment when he made his wife, Pauline, the first woman trustee, and followed suit with other appointments of women. Durant also recruited a woman president in 1874, Ada Howard, a Mount Holyoke graduate. Howard’s power was diminished by Durant’s fiscal and philosophical dominance. More significant was his commitment to an all-woman faculty, which he aggressively recruited from other women’s COLLEGES and coeducational schools. Durant believed that the students would benefit from positive female role models and was committed to providing opportunities for women to advance as academic employees. The curriculum was rigorous; classical languages, laboratory sciences, and literature were required. When Wellesley opened in 1875, Durant had successfully copied Mount Holyoke’s religious and educational philosophies, improved upon VASSAR’s already substantial physical beauty, and made groundbreaking strides in building a true educational community of women.

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WESTERN FRONTIER,  FAMILY LIFE The western frontier of the United States was not a single place but rather a series of places where nonNative Americans were pushing aside or colonizing Native Americans. Soldiers and priests moving north from Mexico established the first in 1598. New frontiers would appear over the next three centuries or more, populated by peoples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and many parts of North America. Most people associate the frontier with the nineteenth-century western United States. Unattached men dominated most frontiers, especially western mining towns, where they sometimes outnumbered women by 50 to 1. This shortage of Caucasian women sometimes led to intermarriages with Native Americans, especially in northern Mexico and among fur traders. White women’s scarcity brought them advantages and disadvantages. Although the great majority migrated as part of a family, they were free from many of the social constraints that bound women in more settled areas. DIVORCE, for example, was easier to come by. Some made a very good living running bakeries or boardinghouses, for women’s and men’s work overlapped in recently settled areas. But rough conditions and undeveloped economies meant that most frontier wives engaged in a great deal of hard, tedious labor: cultivating crops and tending livestock while cooking, cleaning, and caring for children in crowded and crude homes. Frontier women also suffered from isolation. Indeed, the shortage of eligible women meant that they generally married very

For the frontier family, comforts were few and hardships severe.

young, often to men twice or even three times their age. Husbands tended to enjoy the frontier more than their wives did. This was especially so during the mid–nineteenth century, when thousands of farmers from Missouri, Illinois, and other parts of the Midwest took long wagon trains to California or Oregon. One man listed the adventures—real or imagined—of the overland trail: “herding stock, through either dew, dust, or rain, breaking bush, swimming rivers, attacking grizzley bears.” Frontier living made for distinctive childhoods. Families tended to be large, for children’s labor was particularly valuable where work was plentiful and hired hands scarce. Indeed, frontier children spent more time helping their parents than going to school. These demands were often offset by a sense of openness and freedom, especially for boys. Frontier families became less distinctive as their settlements matured. But, at least until late in the nineteenth century, there was always a new frontier somewhere else to tempt young men— and some women. See also: Foote, Mary Hallock; Frontier Life (Volume 1); Hispanic Family Life; Oregon Trail.

 WIDOWHOOD

Historically, women’s dependence on men continued into widowhood. A widow’s position, as far back as pre-Christianity, many have been enhanced by the presence of sons, but childless widows or mothers of daughters had very few guaranteed rights. In colonial America, widows numbered among the poorest people; husbands could and did write wills that left the majority of their property to someone other than their living wives. By the nineteenth century, widows had more inheritance and property rights than ever before in the history of the United States, but they continued to be disproportionately represented among the nation’s poor. The realities of nineteenth-century widowhood were not all bleak. COVERTURE, an ancient theory of social contract (see Volume 1), had deemed that women transferred their civic identity to their husbands upon marriage. Husbands controlled their wives’ bodies and properties. Under this principle, married women in America could not own property, sign contracts, or otherwise have legal or political standing until well into the nineteenth century. Feme covert did not

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usually effect the legal rights of Victorian widows, who were defined as feme sole, or woman alone. Only in widowhood could a woman legally own a home or business or contract to do business in any way. Many women found widowhood a time of independence and relative freedom, in which they gained a measure of control over their destinies for the first time.

 WILLARD, EMMA HART

(1787–1870) Educator and writer, born in Berlin, Connecticut. The sixteenth of 17 children, she was educated at Berlin Academy and in 1804 became a teacher there. It was the start of a TEACHING career that took her to academies in Westfield, Massachusetts, and Middlebury, Vermont. In Middlebury she married John Willard, a physician, in 1809. Five years later, Willard opened the Middlebury Female Seminary. The curriculum included subjects usually taught only to males, including the classics and SCIENCE. Willard wanted to demonstrate that women could handle the same curriculum as men. In 1819, Willard published An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. As a result of her pamphlet, Governor DeWitt Clinton invited her to open a school in New York. In 1819, she opened her school in Waterford, New York, followed two years later by the TROY FEMALE SEMINARY in Troy, New York. Willard’s seminary became a model for other women’s schools. By 1831, there more than 300 students, many of whom became teachers. They carried on Willard’s ideas that any subject in the school curriculum should be open to women. Willard retired from the seminary in 1838 and devoted herself to lecturing and writing. She died on April 15, 1870. Twenty-five years later the seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School.

WILLARD, FRANCES  ELIZABETH CAROLINE

(1839–1898) A lecturer, educator and TEMPERANCE reformer. Frances Willard was born in Churchville, New York. When she was a child, her family moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where they ran a farm. Her mother, who had attended college, wanted Frances to receive a good education. As a child, she

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read an abolitionist newspaper, wrote regularly in a journal, and became a skillful writer. At 17, Willard attended Milwaukee Female College. A year later she went to Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, and later graduated as valedictorian of her class. Willard went on to become a teacher at various colleges, and in 1871 president of Evanston College for Ladies. Willard believed strongly in women’s moral superiority to men and she believed that women should receive an education equal to men so as to use their intellects in the service of God and the improvement of society. These beliefs led her to join the WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU) in 1874. The WCTU was dedicated to the prohibition of the sale of alcohol throughout the United States. The organization arose because of the rampant abuse of alcohol. Some men spent their entire paychecks drinking in taverns, only to then stumble home and abuse their wives and children. Women often seemed to have no effective way to stop the spread of alcoholism. Willard had seen the effects of drinking on her brother as well as on his two sons who also suffered from alcoholism. She and other women who joined the WCTU walked into taverns where they sang and prayed for everyone to support the cause of TEMPERANCE. In 1879, she was elected president of the WCTU; she held this position for 20 years. She traveled throughout the United States and Europe spreading the message of temperance. The WCTU supported not only alcohol prohibition but also other reforms to help people who wanted to stop drinking. These included building water fountains in town squares so farmers would not have to go to a saloon if they were thirsty. The WCTU also campaigned to end the international trade in narcotics, establish homes to help prostitutes to reform, improve prison conditions, and promote woman SUFFRAGE. In her support for woman suffrage, Willard did not seek to overturn traditional assumptions about women’s domestic roles. Rather, she argued that giving women the vote would enable them to protect their homes. In her efforts to expand the rights of women, Willard believed they should not be excluded from PREACHING in churches. From her study of the Bible, she concluded that “there can be no doubt that they did preach in the early church.” Willard wanted women to return to what she felt

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was their role. As she put it: “Let me, as a loyal daughter of the church, urge upon younger women who feel a call, as I once did, to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. . . ” She envisioned an active role for women in changing society, but also saw women as preserving many of its fundamental principles, such as a firm belief in God, strong family units, and quality education for all citizens, male and female. Willard died on February 18, 1898. Thousands of people mourned her passing. She did not live long enough to see the 1919 passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the United States.

WILLIAMS, FRANCES  BARRIER

(1855–1944) Teacher and civil rights leader. Frances (Fannie) Barrier was born in Brockport, New York, on February 12, 1855. Her father was a barber and coal seller. He and his wife Harriet had three children, of whom Frances was the youngest. She graduated from the Brockport Normal School, a teacher’s college, in 1870, becoming its first African-American graduate. She then moved to Washington, D.C., in the 1870s to teach former slaves. While in Washington, Barrier took courses at the School of Fine Arts where she encountered racial discrimination. In Washington she also met S. Laing Williams, a law student, whom she married in 1887. The couple settled in Chicago, Illinois, where Fannie Williams helped her husband establish a law practice. In 1893, she helped establish the COLORED WOMEN’S LEAGUE, and three years later, the National Association of Colored Women, a federation of black women’s clubs. Her involvement in the club movement came out of her belief that black women should work together to secure the vote for themselves. Since black women were denied membership in other women’s clubs, Williams believed that African Americans must establish their own organizations. These groups also provided services that had been denied to black women, such as daycare centers, employment agencies, and savings banks. In 1891, Williams helped set up Provident Hospital, a facility that gave African-American women nurses’ training. Several years later, she delivered an address to the World’s Congress of Representative Women titled The Intellectual

Progress of the Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation. Williams emphasized that AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN were capable of the same intellectual achievements as other women. In 1895, she became the first African American to be admitted to the Chicago Women’s Club. Later, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

WOMEN’S CENTRAL  ASSOCIATION OF RELIEF In April 1861, two weeks after the newly formed Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, doctors ELIZABETH BLACKWELL and Emily Blackwell called a meeting of 50 to 60 “most respected Gentlewomen” to plan an organization that would coordinate New York women’s war-related charities. The women made a public appeal to city leaders for a meeting at Cooper’s Institute the following Monday. On the appointed day almost 3,000 women and men, including Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, attended the founding of the Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR), which existed until the end of the CIVIL WAR. The WCAR greatly differed from previous benevolent enterprises, both in its large scope and in the level of its organization. In September 1861, the WCRA became an auxiliary arm to the United States SANITARY COMMISSION, though the WCRA retained its standing as an independent association with separate officers and meetings. The eight WCAR officers were all young, white women from middle-class families, most of them unmarried. They included Abby Woolsey, LOUISA LEE SCHUYLER, Caroline Lane and Angelina Post. Despite their youth and relative inexperience these women and many more like them helped to systematize on a national scale the feeding, clothing and NURSING of soldiers. In turn women’s involvement in the WCAR brought them into the public arena, despite conventional prohibitions against women’s political activity.

WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN  TEMPERANCE UNION The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in 1874 as a national coalition of local and statewide women’s temperance organizations dedicated to fighting the ill effects

WOMEN’S CLUB MOVEMENT

of alcohol in society. During the spring and summer of 1873, northern and midwestern women held prayer meetings in opposition to alcoholism and male brutality against women. Throughout the nineteenth century, heavy drinking often led to domestic abuse, where husbands battered both wives and children, and the squandering of the family’s money. Very quickly, TEMPERANCE women turned their prayers into actions. Attempting to close down saloons and denounce alcohol abuse, they signed petitions and sang hymns outside of the beer houses. Some entered the saloons and physically destroyed them. Saloon owners responded by locking the women out or physically assaulting them. To organize temperance efforts, these women formed the WCTU. At first, under the direction of Annie Wittenmyer, the Union was only interested in temperance reform. They wanted women and men to stop drinking alcohol, especially rum and whiskey. In the late 1870s, their platform widened. In 1879, educator and acclaimed speaker FRANCES WILLARD became president of the Union. One of the United States’ most powerful orators and third-party politicians, Willard guided the WCTU to endorse a broad platform of reform. Willard’s “Do Everything” policy (as she called it) encouraged women to engage in a myriad of reform movements. The WCTU subsequently advocated women’s SUFFRAGE, lobbied for labor and prison reform, and fought for the abolition of PROSTITUTION. Other key WCTU women included Boston’s Maria T. Hale Gordon, Brooklyn’s Mary C. Johnson, famous lecturer and Unitarian MARY LIVERMORE, and Carry Nation, who became a national celebrity for attacking saloons with an axe. For the most part, the WCTU was made up of native-born, white, Protestant women. It shied away from racial reform and never formally endorsed government legislation against the lynching of African Americans. In the 1880s, the WCTU spread its influence into the United States South and into the world. In 1883, Willard and the WCTU formed the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and over the decades it became the largest women’s organization in the world, with a membership exceeding two million; the World WCTU had chapters in over 70 countries. The WCTU helped radically alter society in the United States with regard to both alcohol and women’s rights. In 1919, the United States ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which made the

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sale of intoxicating beverages illegal, and in 1920 the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (see Volume 3) gave women the right to vote. The WCTU continues as an organization to the present, encouraging “moderation” in all activities of life. See also: Temperance. FURTHER READING

Bordin, Ruth Birgitta. Woman and Temperance: The Quest For Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

WOMEN’S CLUB  MOVEMENT By the mid-nineteenth century a number of American social movements provided women with an opportunity for independent organization, providing the basis for the women’s club movement. Women often came to these groups from associations and clubs run by men, churchsponsored aid societies or women’s auxiliaries, or female branches of male groups. Women’s club members were generally white, Protestant, relatively well educated, middle-class women who sought to expand their scope of influence in communities. A number of black women’s clubs, WORKING GIRLS CLUBS, Jewish women’s clubs, and Catholic women’s clubs also participated in the club movement. Many clubs specialized in the study of literature, music, or even the sciences and law. Clubwomen from these types of groups held discussions, wrote papers, and gave speeches on their study topics, expanding the limited opportunities for women in higher EDUCATION. Other clubs focused on voluntary community work, often addressing the needs today met by the government. Women founded orphanages, libraries, regular and Sunday schools, kindergartens and child care centers, and agencies for feeding and clothing the POOR. Such clubs often branched into more overtly political work, agitating for married women’s property reform or woman SUFFRAGE. Founded in 1868 by JANE CUNNINGHAM CROLY, the literary club SOROSIS led the way in envisioning women’s clubs as an avenue both for improving female education and bettering society through voluntary community service. In 1890 Sorosis members issued invitations to other female literary clubs to form an umbrella organization. Thus the GENERAL FEDERATION OF

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WOMEN’S CLUBS was born. In addition to the clubs’ educational mission, the GFWC dedicated itself to working for an eight-hour work day, the end of child labor, and civil service reform. Though the GFWC and its members had a distinctly liberal platform with regard to many issues, the organization did not encourage the considerable number of black women’s clubs to join them. As a result, black women formed the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN in 1896. These clubs accomplished a great deal both in their local communities and in the national forum, particularly considering that until 1920 women were not enfranchised. See also: Voluntary Associations.

WOMEN’S MEDICAL  COLLEGE OF THE NEW YORK INFIRMARY

TRAILBLAZERS Called a great “practical philanthropist” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Eliza Farnham (1815–1864) was a founding member of the Women’s National Loyal League (WNLL), as well as an early supporter of prison reform, an author, and a lecturer. Farnham was born in Rensselaerville, New York, of QUAKER parents and had an unstable and unhappy childhood. In 1836 she married Thomas Jefferson Farnham, with whom she had three sons (one of whom survived to adulthood), but who left in 1840 for adventure in Califirnia. In 1846 Farnham published her first book, Life in Prairie Land, which described customs and institutions on the frontier. This led to a job writing in the magazine Brother Jonathan. There she first encapsulated her theories about female moral authority. Women should not vote, she argued, but should elevate society through their work as wives and mothers. She also committed herself to prison reform and became the matron of the women’s division of Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. At the prison she practiced the application of her theories on the humane treatment of prisoners. In 1848 Farnham’s husband died in San Francisco. She made the long journey by sailing ship to California to settle his affairs. She taught school there, criticized the San Quentin prison, and published a book about California in 1856. She remarried in 1852. After divorcing her husband in 1856, she returned to New England. It was Farnham’s theory about the powerful influence women had in American society that led her to her work with the Women’s National Loyal League. A prominent abolitionist in her own right, in 1862 she helped to found the WNLL and joined in petitioning Congress for a constitutional amendment ending slavery. By concentrating on gathering signatures for petitions to Congress, Farnham emphasized women’s powers of influence. Farnham, like other members of the WLNN, believed that the Constitution should disavow slavery and thus settle the quarrel between the free and slaveholding states. As part of her commitment to ending the war she and other female volunteers went to Gettysburg in July 1863 to nurse wounded soldiers. Farnham became sick there and died of tuberculosis in 1864. Before her death she finished her book Woman and Her Era (1864), in which she fully described her belief in the moral superiority of women.

The Women’s Medical College, which opened in 1868, was one of the first American medical schools for women. It was affiliated with the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, which was founded by three pioneering women physicians, ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, Emily Blackwell, and Marie Zakrewska, in 1857. Although American women had been studying MEDICINE since the 1840s, women’s medical education was still controversial. Many physicians criticized women’s medical schools such as the NEW ENGLAND FEMALE MEDICAL COLLEGE FOR WOMEN for having low academic standards. Elizabeth Blackwell believed that women should be allowed to study at established medical schools, but since she could not persuade such schools to admit female students, she instead decided to create a first-rate medical school for women. The Women’s Medical College had an unusually rigorous three-year curriculum; students were required to do clinical work and were examined by

New York’s leading physicians. They also studied preventive medicine, which was not taught at most other medical schools. The Women’s Medical College was very successful and helped gain public acceptance of women’s medical education. All-male medical schools such as Harvard and

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the University of Pennsylvania imitated some of its curricular innovations. In 1900, the Women’s Medical College merged with Cornell University.

WOMEN’S NATIONAL  LOYAL LEAGUE On May 14, 1863, SUSAN B. ANTHONY and ELIZABETH CADY STANTON formed the Women’s National Loyal League (WNLL) to bring about the passage of a constitutional amendment to abolish SLAVERY. Anthony, Stanton, and other female members of the WNLL believed that if they could abolish slavery they could also bring about the end of the CIVIL WAR. The first convention of the WNLL, in New York City, resolved that the members “heartily approved” of the EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, that the federal government had a responsibility to end slavery, and that they expected equal civil rights for freedpersons. The WNLL also declared that “there can never be true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established.” The WNLL organized and presented to Congress a petition with over 400,000 signatures endorsing the idea of a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. When the amendment was ratified in 1865, the group disbanded and many of its members, prepared with valuable political organizing experience, joined the drive for woman SUFFRAGE. Many people in the ABOLITION movement, black and white, incorrectly understood the WNLL’s positions as a signal that women placed black men’s suffrage before suffrage for women. Noted radical Republican and antislavery supporter Senator Charles Sumner credited the WNLL for the impetus behind the Thirteenth Amendment.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS  MOVEMENT Movement promoting political and civil rights for women. During the antebellum period, women’s rights had frequently been discussed by women ABOLITIONISTS in connection with the emancipation of AFRICAN-AMERICAN slaves. However, an articulate and organized movement officially began with the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION, held July 19–20, 1848.

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In an informal meeting, one of the movement’s leading intellectuals, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, met with friends Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt and Martha Coffin Wright, the younger sister of abolitionist LUCRETIA MOTT in early July of 1848. Mott and Stanton had met in London in 1840, when they attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention and women were denied seats. They had discussed the state of women’s rights and had agreed to work together to further the cause. At the 1848 meeting, the women again discussed the state of women, noted multiple grievances and decided to hold a convention to discuss the condition of women. A few weeks later, in the convention in Seneca Falls, New York, 300 men and women gathered in response to fliers advertising the event. A Declaration of Sentiments (see Documents) was signed by 68 women and 32 men, who supported women’s demands for political and economic rights. The declaration was modeled after the Declaration of Independence to highlight the disparity between women’s liberty and men’s. Declaring that “all men and women are created equal,” the declaration demanded the right for women to education, to divorce their husbands and seek guardianship over their children, to serve as ministers, and to vote. It protested the economic inequities of marriage laws and the governance of women without the rights of citizenship. It argued that women had no responsibility to be moral since they were ruled by laws that they had no voice in creating. Seneca Falls served as a call to arms for women to address their grievances en masse in articulate, specific, separate terms. Similar conventions and smaller gatherings began taking place all over the country, such as in Ohio in 1851, when famed orator SOJOURNER TRUTH made one of her famous speeches, which highlighted the dual burden of being both a woman and African-American. The year 1848 featured another key event in the women’s rights movement, when the first married women’s property act was passed, reversing the negative and restrictive effects of MARRIAGE LAWS on the lives of women. This small step toward endowing women with economic rights was a fitting accompaniment to other demands for rights, particularly the political right of SUFFRAGE. AMELIA BLOOMER, the editor of the women’s rights magazine The Lily, introduced Stanton to

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the woman who would be her eventual coleader in the movement, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, in May of 1851. The two women formed a partnership that would steer the movement through its formative years. Stanton and Anthony would lobby all over the country for suffrage and equality in all spheres. In 1869, they would form the NATIONAL WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION. Not all women necessarily agreed with the agenda set forth by Stanton and Anthony. Women’s rights activists differed over both means and ends. Suffragists traveled to Kansas in 1867, when the state legislature announced that its forthcoming election would decide suffrage for women and African Americans. LUCY STONE and her husband arrived first, and Stanton and Anthony arrived afterward. A Democrat, George Train, approached the women with support, but with a racist agenda. Stanton and Anthony did not dismiss his support, but Stone immediately distanced herself from Train and Stanton and Anthony. This set the stage for factions within the movement. The greatest split in the movement occurred in 1869 over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised African-American men. While many suffragists had supported abolition, the faction led by Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because they believed it would reinforce women’s exclusion from political rights. In contrast, the suffragists who defected to form the AMERICAN WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION, led by Lucy Stone, in 1869, supported the Fifteenth Amendment, believing it was a step toward woman suffrage. Stanton and Anthony lost key support from their former allies, who believed their rejection of the Amendment to be racist. Constant and tireless lobbies and appeals were made for women’s suffrage in both state and federal courts. In 1869, suffragists achieved a victory in Wyoming, where women were granted the vote, and were legally able to hold office and property and serve as jurors. Still, in 1873, Anthony was arrested and fined for attempting to vote under a loose interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. VICTORIA WOODHULL promoted suffrage by including it in a platform for the political party she helped organize, the EQUAL RIGHTS PARTY. She was nominated as their presidential candidate in 1872, although it was a symbolic nomination, as she would have been arrested if she had

tried to run. In 1876, the centennial birthday of the United States, the NWSA prepared a speech which Anthony presented at an Independence Hall celebration in Philadelphia. The Declaration of Rights for Women reiterated the demand for suffrage and political and economic equality under the law. Despite this, and despite advances made in other spheres professional, educational, and intellectual, women would not achieve suffrage until 1920. FURTHER READING

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, et al. eds. History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 1–6. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881–1882.

WOODHULL, VICTORIA  CLAFLIN

(1838–1927) Reformer who challenged the political, social, and sexual assumptions of her time. Married three times and divorced twice, Victoria Claflin Woodhull boasted of her lovers and called marriage “legalized prostitution.” She took pride in her own financial independence. She and her sister Tennessee were the nation’s first women stockbrokers. Woodhull was also the first woman to run for president. Unlike many nineteenth-century reformers, Woodhull and her sister came from a poor family that survived by its wits. Her parents ran a traveling medicine show. At 15, Victoria left home to marry Canning Woodhull, an alcoholic who left her and their two children penniless. To survive, she and her sister sold fortunes and offered séances. On their travels, Woodhull met her second husband, James Harvey Blood. He introduced her to socialism, free love, and other causes. In 1868, she moved to New York, where she and her sister met Cornelius Vanderbilt. His lucrative stock tips led the pair to open their own brokerage house. In 1870, the sisters also established a journal that advocated social reforms and exposed injustices, WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY. That year Woodhull declared herself a candidate in the 1872 presidential election. To make her views known, she appeared before the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives. Her speech on women’s rights so impressed the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION that leaders invited Woodhull to join, but her involvement was short-lived as members increasingly saw her as an opportunist.

WORKING CLASS

They also feared her views on “free love” would hurt their efforts to win the vote. Woodhull retaliated by exposing their hypocrisy by revealing Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s adulterous affair with a parishioner. The move backfired, when the government charged the sisters with sending obscene material through the mail. Although they were acquitted, the trial left them bankrupt and ostracized. In 1877, Woodhull moved to England, where she remarried and lived out the rest of her life.

taken by feminists in MINOR V. HAPPERSETT that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed women as citizens the right to vote and that no additional amendment was needed. It was also in this newspaper that in 1872 Woodhull exposed the Beecher-Tilton affair. Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent preacher, had been having a sexual liaison with Elizabeth Tilton, reformer Theodore Tilton’s wife, and the news became a tremendous national scandal. Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly published its last issue in June 1876, a victim of the scandal and Woodhull’s radicalism.

WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN’S  WORKING CLASS  WEEKLY On May 14, 1870, the feminist and free love activist VICTORIA WOODHULL and her sister Tennessee Claflin published their first issue of their newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. The newspaper contained a mix of radical politics, fashion, sports, a serialized novel by George Sand and regular columns on SPIRITUALISM and magnetic healing. The main goal of the publication, however, was to provide a platform for Woodhull’s candidacy for president of the United States. Announced more than two years before the election, Woodhull’s campaign was more about publicizing her radical political platform than about a serious belief that she might one day become president. Primary among the reforms endorsed by the newspaper were woman SUFFRAGE and free love ideology. The newspaper supported the stance

Victoria Woodhull spoke for woman suffrage before the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, February 4, 1871. Her sister, Tennessee Claflin, is shown seated at right.

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The nineteenth century saw the rise of the working class, a group of people who labored for wages but did not own the factories or businesses in which they labored. Immigrants represented 20 percent of this labor force and over 40 percent of workers in manufacturing and extractive industries like mining. Urban immigrants made up more than half the working population and as first-generation Americans they were often unskilled, unable to speak English, overworked, and underpaid. Native-born Protestant whites found themselves at the top of the labor hierarchy, holding most of the well-paid, skilled jobs, while free blacks indisputably occupied the bottom labor rung. As America, particularly the Northeast, industrialized in the early decades of the nineteenth century most workers found themselves laboring in large factories rather than small shops and divided into groups depending upon their ethnicity and labor in conditions that often made worker solidarity difficult to recognize. Work conditions were unsafe and unhealthy. Women who labored over sewing machines, for example, developed digestive ailments and curved spines, while miners contracted brown lung from breathing particular matter and died in frequent cave-ins. Immigrant women were far more likely to engage in waged labor than their native-born counterparts, and in fact made up 20 percent of the labor force by 1900. Women workers were paid less than men, discriminated against, and clustered in gender-based work like paid DOMESTIC SERVICE and PROSTITUTION. Many historians of the working class have studied working-class life without considering women’s place in that culture. Studies of the female working class have expanded the understanding of the working class as a group. This

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approach examines the ways in which family life encouraged women’s activism, how the separation of male and female workers retarded organization, the divisions among women workers, and the cross-class alliances working-class and middleclass reformers sometimes created.

 WORKING GIRLS’ CLUBS

Founded in New York in 1884, the first Working Girls Club had 13 members. The Club had a nonsectarian, self-governing, independent platform designed to serve as a model for other such clubs. By 1894 five associations of clubs existed in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. In New York alone there were 21 clubs and six associate member clubs. The Philadelphia Working Girls Club had over 300 members. These clubs were designed as genteel clubs for working girls and in the beginning were sponsored by upper-class women who wished to teach standards of respectability to girls who worked for wages. The clubs soon became venues of consensus and conflict between women of different class and ethnic backgrounds, and by the turn of the century the control of clubs shifted to working-class members. Monthly dues made the clubs financially independent. This independence fostered differences among clubs, so that some had primarily young married members, while others specialized in philanthropic work, entertainments, or reading libraries. Clubs also often sponsored classes in French, German, literature, philosophy, and politics, as well as lectures on such topics as varied as “Should Women Vote?” and “How to Tell a Real Lady.” These working-class clubs were not specifically political in nature, nor were they particularly radical. The 1890 Convention of Clubs, held in New York City, featured more than 300 out-of-town delegates. The convention stressed that clubs be democratic and independent, and working-class women’s participation in the governance of the clubs shifted their emphasis to labor reform and women’s rights. The last of these clubs closed in 1928.

WORKING WOMEN’S  PROTECTIVE UNION Socialist Alzina Stevens (1849–1900) founded the Working Women’s Protective Union in Chicago in 1878. Stevens came from a once wealthy New

England family that lost its fortune in the CIVIL WAR. She worked as a child laborer in the Lowell textile mills where wages and conditions radicalized her to a lifetime of union organizing. She moved to Chicago at 18. She was joined in the founding of the Working Women’s Union by Lucy Parsons, wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, and Elizabeth Rodgers, a socialist organizer. The organization had approximately one thousand members from different trades and was the only women’s union in Chicago at that time. Members visited workplaces and encouraged female laborers to organize, wrote articles exposing the terrible working conditions in factories, and joined the campaign for an eight-hour workday. In 1881 the Working Women’s Union was transformed into an all-female branch of the KNIGHTS OF LABOR, a national labor organization that supported equal pay for equal work and the eight hour work day, opposed to child labor, and favored an end to discrimination against women and blacks. Elizabeth Rodgers and Alzina Stevens continued to be active in the women’s union, renamed the Local Assembly no. 1789, until their deaths. See also: Lowell Mill Workers; Textile Industry.

WORLD’S COLUMBIAN  EXPOSITION OF 1893 In the years from 1876 to 1916, almost one hundred million Americans visited 12 different world’s fairs across the country. The Chicago Fair, called the World’s Colombian Exposition of 1893, sold 21.5 million tickets and gave away 6 million free admissions, making it one of the most widely attended events of the century. Based on the theme of “progress,” the fair also marked the emergence of the United States as an economic and political power. But in an event that celebrated the ascendance of American culture in the years after the Civil War, no black representative sat on any fair committee. One piece of fair literature actually said that American SLAVERY had been good for African Americans because of their current “advanced social conditions . . . over that of their barbarous countrymen.” African-American women such as IDA B. WELLS BARNETT protested the fair as racist and sexist. The centerpiece of the fair was the “White City,” so called because all the buildings were painted white. The White City is considered the

W R I G H T, F R A N C E S

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Sophia Hayden designed the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Born in Santiago, Chile, to a Chilean mother and an American father, Hayden (1868–1953) moved to Massachusetts when she was six years old to live with her father’s parents. When she was 18 she was admitted to the MIT architecture school and graduated with honors four years later. But Hayden could find no one willing to employ a female architect. She eventually took a job teaching drawing at a Boston high school. In 1891 a branch of the planning committee for the World’s Columbian Exposition advertised a competition for female architects to design the fair’s Women’s Building. Hayden submitted a plan and won the competition with an Italian Renaissance, three-story design. Although Hayden’s design also won an additional award for “delicacy of style, artistic taste and geniality and elegance,” male critics suggested the building was too “feminine,” too timid and weak. One such critic, while acknowledging the architect’s “evident technical knowledge,” nonetheless insisted that the plan “at once differentiates it from its colossal neighbors and reveals the sex of the author.” Hayden was also paid less for her design than male architects received for designing other fair buildings. Like all but two of the other buildings, the Women’s Building was torn down at the end of the Exposition. Upset at the way she and her building had been treated, Hayden retired from architecture, married William Blackstone Bennet, an artist of some repute, and lived a quiet life in Massachusetts until her death. This was treated as evidence that women were not suited to careers in architecture.

origin of the “City Beautiful” program in the United States and was the largest artistic collaboration of its time. The fair also featured the first separate amusement area, called the Midway Plaisance, with a variety of attractions that recouped some of the money spent on the White City. The Midway contained the first ferris wheel and is said to be the birthplace of the hamburger. To mark the event, HANNAH SOLOMON organized the first national Jewish Women’s congress. The group founded the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN to assist Jewish women in meeting their obligations to family, community and Judaism. Also at the Columbian Exposition, a Women’s Building housed major sculpture and painting

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commissions by women such as MARY CASSATT and Mary MacMonnies. This exhibition brought women’s art to more than a quarter million people who visited the hall. The Women’s Building featured an ethnological display meant to illustrate women’s role in peacemaking through the ages. Twelve groups of objects were arranged hierarchically, emphasizing the “savagery” of American Indian, African, and Malaysian art. Thus, the Exposition displayed American racial attitudes cloaked in ethnological science.

 WRIGHT, FRANCES

(1795–1852) Writer, heiress, and social reformer. Frances Wright was born to James and Camilla (Campbell) Wright in Dundee, Scotland, in 1795. Her parents died when she was a child, and she and her sister, Camilla, were sent to live with maternal relatives in London. Frances and Camilla went to live with their uncle James Milne (a philosophy professor) in 1816. During their stay with Milne, Frances began writing plays. In 1818, the sisters traveled to New York City and Frances tried to establish herself as a dramatist. Her first play, Altorf, was staged in 1819 but closed after three performances. Frances and Camilla toured the United States for two more years, and Frances recorded her travels and published them in 1821 under the title Views of Society and Manners in America. During a later stay in the United States, in 1825, Wright published a pamphlet against SLAVERY and bought land for a plantation near what is now Memphis, Tennessee, which she named “Nashoba.” The slaves she purchased for Nashoba were promised eventual emancipation, to be paid for by the profits earned by their labor. However, the project was a failure, and in 1827 Wright fell ill and returned to Europe. She freed the slaves at Nashoba and paid for their transport to Haiti, where she arranged for their employment.

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After the demise of Nashoba, Wright again toured the United States, giving lectures condemning organized religion, discrimination against women, and the obstruction of reason. She spent some time at the utopian community of New Harmony in Indiana, where she formed a relationship with the founder’s son, Robert Dale Owen. Owen and Wright moved to New York together. There they copublished a magazine, the Free Enquirer, which Wright used as a platform for her political views. When Camilla grew ill in 1830, Frances took her back to Europe where she died in Paris the same year. In 1831 Frances married Guillaume Sylvan Casimir Phiquepal D’Arusmont, a French physician and reformer whom she had met in New Harmony. The couple had two daughters who died in infancy. Meanwhile, despite her travels to New York to maintain them, Frances’s undertakings in the United States crumbled. Her marriage also failed, and she was divorced in 1850. Frances Wright died in Cincinnati, Ohio, in December, 1852, after a poor recovery from a broken hip. FURTHER READING

Morris, Celia. Fanny Wright: Rebel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.



WOMEN’S FIRSTS Edgar Allen Poe called one of Alice Cary’s poems “one of the most musically perfect lyrics in the English language,” yet she is best remembered for her prose. Cary (1820–1871) was born on a farm north of Cincinnati, one of nine children. Her sister Phoebe, also a writer, was her lifelong companion. When Alice was 16, a Cincinnati paper published her first poem, The Child of Sorrow, which marked the beginning of a fairly prolific period of verse writing for both Alice and Phoebe. The sisters not only caught Poe’s attention, but also the attention of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier; Horace Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor; and the anthologist Rufus Griswold. With Griswold’s help the sisters published their first volume of poetry, Poetry of Alice and Phoebe Cary, in 1850, and soon after moved to New York City. Alice’s short stories and sketches about rural life in Ohio brought her considerable fame and success. Clovernook, or Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852) became a minor best-seller. Cary published a second Clovernook book in 1855. These two collections, along with her novels Hagar, A Story of To-day (1852), Married, Not Mated (1856), and The Bishop’s Son (1867) vividly describe the hard work and deprivation of frontier life. Cary’s novels also contain within them implicit criticism of nineteenth-century men’s power over women. Both Alice and Phoebe were sympathetic to the WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT, but both were more committed writers than organizers. Alice spent the last 20 years of her life battling tuberculosis, a disease that also killed her mother and two of her sisters. She was 50 years old when she died in the home she shared with her sister. Phoebe died the following year of hepatitis.

WRITERS

Women have been writers since the advent of the written word, but nineteenth-century women surpassed all who came before. Indeed, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained in the 1850s of being surrounded by “scribbling women.” Women wrote NOVELS, histories, cookbooks, natural philosophy, poetry, and autobiography, as well as private DIARIES AND JOURNALS and LETTERS. Many women writers were popular figures and created a large domestic literary culture. For example, Sara Parton, writing under the pseudonym FANNY FERN, purposely wrote novels for a female audience. Though Parton and women like her sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their books, they

found themselves in a contradictory position as proponents of female life, emphasizing the DOMESTIC ARTS, PASSIONLESSNESS, and separation of spheres, while becoming public figures. However modest women writers may have been in the nineteenth century, and certainly the reclusive poet EMILY DICKINSON may represent the far end of that spectrum, their works had an immense impact on the world around them. It is said that when Abraham Lincoln met HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he said, “So you ’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Though Stowe did not start the war, her book had an immense impact on the way many Americans viewed race and slavery.

WU TIEN FU

TRAILBLAZERS An accomplished poet and longtime professor of English at WELLESLEY COLLEGE, Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) is best known as the author of the ever-popular patriotic hymn “America the Beautiful.” On a trip West in the summer of 1893, she was greatly impressed by the WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION in Chicago and the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The opening lines of the hymn came to her after climbing Pike’s Peak and gazing out across the expanse of fertile land. “When we left Colorado Springs,” she wrote, “the four stanzas were penciled in my notebook.” The lyrics first appeared in print on July 4, 1895, in the Congregationalist, and they attracted great attention. Bates wrote a second version of her poem in 1904 and the final, eight-stanza version in 1913. The words have been sung to a variety of tunes over the decades. The one most familiar to Americans today, originally called “Materna,” was written by Samuel Ward in 1882—a full decade before Bates’s original verse. The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, Bates was born in Falmouth (Cape Cod), Massachusetts, where a bronze statue of her stands today. She attended the newly opened Wellesley College, receiving a B.A. in 1880. Invited back as an instructor five years later, she was named a professor in 1891 and remained at Wellesley until her retirement in 1925. In addition to teaching, she published six volumes of poetry during her lifetime; two more were published posthumously. With the exception of “America the Beautiful,” Bates’s verse was modeled on that of the New England poets and essentially regional in stature. Among her admirers was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She was also a founder and president of the New England Poetry Club; a friend and adviser of many poets; and the author of travel books, children’s stories, and textbooks. The popularity of “America the Beautiful,” she said, was “clearly due to the fact that Americans at heart are idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”

Not all female writers wrote novels, or domestic literature, as popular nineteenth-century women’s fiction has been called. VICTORIA WOODHULL and her sister Tennessee Claflin wrote and edited their own newspaper, WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN’S WEEKLY. SARAH JOSEPHA HALE wrote and edited the tremendously popular GODEY ’S LADY ’S BOOK and female textile workers contributed to the unionizing organ VOICE OF INDUSTRY. In The Woman’s Bible ELIZABETH CADY STANTON wrote a stern critique of the Old Testament, including an analysis of Biblical passages

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derogatory to women. Black women wrote and published The Woman’s Era, a weekly newspaper, and the tireless IDA B. WELLS BARNETT had a long career in journalism, marked by her antilyching campaign. In 1889 to 1890 Barnett purchased a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and used it as a platform to write about not only lynching, but also education reform for black children. Women wrote on botany, medicine, astronomy, industrialism, the inequities of race and gender, and many other topics. Thus, writing provided women with a means of personal expression, and a public voice, at a time when women were supposed to remain within the private sphere. And through their writing women both challenged and upheld the established social order. FURTHER READING

Kelly, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

 WU TIEN FU

(1887–1975) Chinese woman missionary who was sold into servitude in the United States as a young girl. Born in China, Wu Tien Fu grew up in a well-to-do family. During this time, the sale of young girls to take to the United States was common. When her father gambled away the family fortune, she was sold to Chinese merchants who brokered women as if they were commodities. She was taken by boat to San Francisco in 1893. Wu Tien Fu was indentured as a house servant girl or mui tsai in a brothel, where she endured abusive treatment. She was rescued by members of the PRESBYTERIAN MISSION HOME, run by Donaldina Cameron. At the Mission Home, she was taught and guided by Cameron and women such as AH TSUN, and eventually converted to Christianity. Wu Tien Fu, who became a trusted aide and dear friend to Cameron, was sent east to

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be educated at the expense of a Mission Home benefactor. She studied first at the Stevens School in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and later the Toronto Bible College in Canada. When Wu Tien Fu returned to San Francisco, she continued to work at the Mission, serving as

an interpreter, working in the nursery, and escorting police to homes where other women like herself were held in bondage, often traveling around the United States to do so. She died in 1975 and was buried next to Cameron.

Y

YOUNG WOMEN’S  CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION First established in England in 1855, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) aimed to “advance the physical, social, intellectual, moral and spiritual interest of young women.” The first branch of the YWCA opened in the United States in 1858 and emphasized helping women “who are dependent on their own exertion for support.” In 1860 the New York City Association established the YWCA boardinghouse for women under 25, and in 1868 a Boston residence opened for the same purpose. In 1866 the New York and Boston Associations wrote the first American constitution for the YWCA. These early associations assisted urban working women by providing inexpensive housing, education

programs and wholesome recreation activities. Immigrant women also found homes and assistance at YWCA’s. The first African-American branch was formed in Dayton, Ohio, in 1889, and a branch for American Indian women opened in Chilocco, Oklahoma, the following year. By 1890 there were 106 YWCA chapters in the United States, in both urban and rural areas. The Young Women’s Christian Association was established as completely independent from the Young Men’s Christian Association. The reformminded women who ran early Associations offered services without regard to the economic, racial or religious backgrounds of the young women they served, though the YWCA did attempt to inculcate middle-class domestic ideals and values.

Part 3 Documents

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(1817)

Nancy Ward to the Cherokee Council (1817) In the following message by respected Cherokee leader Nancy Ward (c. 1783–1822) presented on May 2, 1817, to the Cherokee Nation, she urges the tribe members not to give up the land that has sustained their Cherokee Nation for generations. The Cherokee Nation always had great respect and admiration for their women, and Native American women have enjoyed substantial rights and freedoms. Many Native American tribes were traditionally matrilineal in nature; women controlled agricultural production, made economic decisions, and enjoyed property rights (tribal lands were traditionally passed on from mothers to daughters). The white settlers, who began imposing their social and cultural mores and values on the Native Americans’ lives, profoundly affected Native American society, including family structure, political and economic traditions, and spiritual ways. The white settlers began forcibly overtaking Native American lands and pushing the tribes farther and farther away from what had been their homelands and into new, unfamiliar, and increasingly confining areas.



Amovey [Tenn.] in Council 2nd May 1817 A True Copy} The Cherokee ladys now being present at the meeting of the Chiefs and warriors in council have thought it their duties as mothers to address their beloved Chiefs and warriors now assembled.

Paper talks is Ward’s term for treaty negotiations that would lead to the cession of tribal lands.

Our beloved children and head men of the Cherokee nation we address you warriors in council we have raised all of you on the land which we now have, which God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions we know that our country has once been extensive but by repeated sales has become circumscribed to a small tract and never thought it our duty to interfere in the disposition of it till now, if a father or mother was to sell all their lands which they had to depend on which their children had to raise their living on which would be indeed bad and to be removed to another country we do not wish to go to an unknown country which we have understood some of our children wish to go over the Mississippi but this act of our children would be like destroying your mothers. You mothers your sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our lands, we say ours you are descendants and take pity on our request, but keep it for our growing children for it was the good will of our creator to place here and you know our father the great president will not allow his white children to take our country away only keep your hands off of paper talks for it is our own country for if it was not they would not ask you to put your hands to paper for it would be impossible to remove us all for as soon as one child is raised we have others in our arms for such is our situation and will consider our circumstance.

A N A D D R E S S T O T H E U N I T E D TA I L O R E S S E S S O C I E T Y

(1831)

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Therefore children don’t part with any more of our lands but continue on it and enlarge your farms and cultivate and raise corn and cotton and we your mothers and sisters will make clothing for you which our father the president has recommended to us all we don’t charge anybody for selling our lands, but we have heard such intentions of our children but your talks become true at last and it was our desire to forewarn you all not to part with our lands. Nancy Ward to her children Warriors to take pity and listen to the talks of your sisters, although I am very old yet cannot but pity the situation in which you will hear of their minds. I have great many grand children which I wish they to do well on our land. Nancy Ward Attested A McCoy Clk. } Thos. Wilson Secty } Jenny McIntosh Caty Harlan Elizabeth Walker Susanna Fox Widow Gunrod Widow Woman Holder

Widow Tarpin Ally Critington Cun, o, ah Miss Asty Walker Mrs. M. Morgan Mrs. Nancy Fields

An excerpt from

An Address to the United Tailoresses Society (1831) In 1831, tailoresses—female tailors—in New York City demonstrated to improve their working conditions and wages. The following speech by strike leader Louise Mitchell presents their purpose of securing “adequate and permanent reward for [their] labors.” In this era, many women labored as factory workers, domestic servants, or seamstresses. While these women may have experienced a sense of independence and self-sufficiency, the work was often limiting, uncreative, and arduous. Hours were long, wages were low, and conditions were poor. Women began to join forces, to organize, and to stand up for their rights.



I consider it a duty encumbent on all who feel an interest in this our infant society, to promote as far as possible its rise and progress; for this purpose we are here assembled, and for this purpose I now attempt a few remarks, which I hope will meet the approbation of those in whose service I am for a term engaged, and whose approval

Cherokee Women to Cherokee Council, May 2, 1817. Andrew Jackson Presidential Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington D.C.

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“United we stand divided we fall” was a watchword of the American Revolution.

(1831)

with regard to my official duties, I am proud to merit. But to the purpose. In the first place, I would recommend (as the only firm basis on which we can establish ourselves) patience and perseverance, with a determination to be united, not only as a society, but in the interest of every cirumstance connected with our present important undertaking. If union is strength, why should we be weak? Let this be our motto, “United we stand divided we fall.” Secondly, suffer me to urge the necessity of a free and candid avowal of opinion on the part of the members, respecting every subject in discussion; let each individual consider this her duty, as well as her right. I am aware that many are averse to this measure, feeling themselves incapacitated for public business, and acknowledge their inability to act without the aid of man—but they will do well to remember who are our oppressors;—that it would be worse than useless to seek redress through their instrumentality. Let us, then, have more confidence in our own abilities, and less in the sincerity of man. ’Tis true, custom and education have assisted to intimidate us, but our energies once roused, we shall find ourselves less deficient than we were wont to believe, and have we not sufficient excitement to arouse those energies? Oppression! and its consequent attendant, misery, call loud for our utmost exertions. Can we resist so urgent an appeal to our feelings? no—if we have one solitary spark of female spirit in our composition, now is the time to exert it. Suffer it to emerge from obscurity and unite our unwearied efforts to accomplish our purpose. Undoubtedly a great number (from their hitherto secluded lives) feel a reluctance to come forward, fearful of having their names made public. Excuse me, if I say I consider this a timidity unworthy of us; for in my estimation, the publicity of a respectable name can be no injury to the lady, or the cause she advocates; and is not this a cause worthy to be advocated by all who bear the name of woman? Are we not a species of the human race, and is not this a free country? Then why may not we enjoy that freedom? Because we have been taught to believe ourselves far less noble and far less wise than the other sex. They have taken advantage of this weakness, and, tyrant like, have stept from one ascendancy to another, till finally, and without resistance, they have us in their power; and severely have they abused that power; nay, they have even trampled us under their feet, (comparatively speaking,) and we have made no resistance; our supposed helplessness has heretofore caused us to remain silent and submissive, but I hope and believe our eyes are now open to a scene of injury too glaring to be overlooked, and too painful to be submitted to. When we complain to our employers and others, of the inequality of our wages with that of the men’s, the excuse is, they have families to support, from which females are exempt. Now this is either a sad mistake, or a willful oversight; for how many females are there who have families to support, and how many single men who have none, and who, having no other use for the fruits of their employers’ generosity, they child like, waste it; while the industrious mother, having the care of a helpless offspring, finds (with all the economy she is necessitated to practice) the scanty reward of her labors scarcely sufficient to support nature! To this argument, when forced to acknowledge its truth,

LET TERS ON THE EQUALITY OF WOMEN

the reply is, the fault is our own; we will admit it, inasmuch as we have suffered their imposition. This, then, ought to stimulate us to unheard of exertions.—Then again let me urge the necessity of a joint interest in this our common cause, to enable us to go through with a mighty work began, namely, that of gaining our liberty; for we are, literally, slaves, and I know of nothing at present so essential as punctual attendance to our meetings; each night of appointment let not one be missing. In this way we will express the interest we feel, and thereby encourage others to join so prosperous a cause—for prosperous it will be, if we persevere. Fear not public opinion; trust me, it will be in our favor; our proceedings will be garnished with a title no less formidable than that of female heroism—excited by oppression, and exerted in behalf of their just claim to a share of the boasted Independence.

Excerpts from

Letters on the Equality of Women and the Condition of the Sexes (1837) Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) was privately educated and became a strong advocate for women’s equality. She was a crusader against slavery and then turned her attention to addressing the rights and privileges of women. In the following excerpts, Grimké protests against the perceived idea of women’s “domesticity” as being more important than their “mental cultivation.” She rejects the contemporary perceived notion of women as inferior to men. Her Letters have been considered the first serious writing by an American author on the rights of women. They provide valuable insights into the status of women in nineteenth-century America.



Brookline, 1837 My Dear Sister, I have now taken a brief survey of the condition of woman in various parts of the world. I regret that my time has been so much occupied by other things, that I have been unable to bestow that attention upon the subject which it merits, and that my constant change of place has prevented me from having access to books, which might probably have assisted me in this part of my work. I hope that the principles I have asserted will claim the attention of some of my sex, who may be able to bring into view, more thoroughly than I have done, the situation and degradation of woman. I shall now proceed to make a few remarks on the condition of women in my own country. During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world; and of this class of women, I am

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New York Daily Sentinel, March 3 and June 25, 1831.

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Acquirements are abilities or faculties developed through long endeavor.

Preferment is an advancement or step ahead in rank, social status, or dignity.

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constrained to say, both from experience and observation, that their education is miserably deficient; that they are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction; hence to attract the notice and win the attentions of men, by their external charms, is the chief business of fashionable girls. They seldom think that men will be allured by intellectual acquirements, because they find, that where any mental superiority exists, a woman is generally shunned and regarded as stepping out of her “appropriate sphere,” which, in their view, is to dress, to dance, to set out to the best possible advantage her person, to read the novels which inundate the press, and which do more to destroy her character as a rational creature, than any thing else. Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life; and who have been called from such pursuits by the voice of the Lord Jesus, inviting their weary and heavy laden souls to come unto Him and learn of Him, that they may find something worthy of their immortal spirit, and their intellectual powers; that they may learn the high and holy purposes of their creation, and consecrate themselves unto the service of God; and not, as is now the case, to the pleasure of man. There is another and much more numerous class in this country, who are withdrawn by education or circumstances from the circle of fashionable amusements, but who are brought up with the dangerous and absurd idea, that marriage is a kind of preferment; and that to be able to keep their husband’s house, and render his situation comfortable, is the end of her being. Much that she does and says and thinks is done in reference to this situation; and to be married is too often held up to the view of girls as the sine qua non of human happiness and human existence. For this purpose more than for any other, I verily believe the majority of girls are trained. This is demonstrated by the imperfect education which is bestowed upon them, and the little pains taken to cultivate their minds, after they leave school, by the little time allowed them for reading, and by the idea being constantly inculcated, that although all household concerns should be attended to with scrupulous punctuality at particular seasons, the improvement of their intellectual capacities is only a secondary consideration, and may serve as an occupation to fill up the odds and ends of time. In most families, it is considered a matter of far more consequence to call a girl off from making a pie, or a pudding, than to interrupt her whilst engaged in her studies. This mode of training necessarily exalts, in their view, the animal above the intellectual and spiritual nature, and teaches women to regard themselves as a kind of machinery, necessary to keep the domestic engine in order, but of little value as the intelligent companions of men. Let no one think, from these remarks, that I regard a knowledge of housewifery as beneath the acquisition of women. Far from it: I believe that a complete knowledge of household affairs is an indis-

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pensable requisite in a woman’s education,—that by the mistress of a family, whether married or single, doing her duty thoroughly and understandingly, the happiness of the family is increased to an incalculable degree, as well as a vast amount of time and money saved. All I complain of is, that our education consists so almost exclusively in culinary and other manual operations. I do long to see the time, when it will no longer be necessary for women to expend so many precious hours in furnishing “a well spread table,” but that their husbands will forego some of their accustomed indulgences in this way, and encourage their wives to devote some portion of their time to mental cultivation, even at the expense of having to dine sometimes on baked potatoes, or bread and butter. . . . There is another way in which the general opinion, that women are inferior to men, is manifested, that bears with tremendous effect on the laboring class, and indeed on almost all who are obligate to earn a subsistence, whether it be by mental or physical exertion—I allude to the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and of women. A man who is engaged in teaching, can always, I believe, command a higher price for tuition than a woman—even when he teaches the same branches, and is not in any respect superior to the woman. This I know is the case in boarding and other schools with which I have been acquainted, and it is so in every occupation in which the sexes engage indiscriminately. As for example, in tailoring, a man has twice, or three times as much for making a waistcoat or pantaloons as a woman, although the work done by each may be equally good. In those employments which are peculiar to women, their time is estimated at only half the value of that of men. A woman who goes out to wash, works as hard in proportion as a wood sawyer, or a coal heaver, but she is not generally able to make more than half as much by a day’s work. The low remuneration which women receive for their work, has claimed the attention of a few philanthropists, and I hope it will continue to do so until some remedy is applied for this enormous evil. I have known a widow, left with four or five children, to provide for, unable to leave home because her helpless babes demand her attention, compelled to earn a scanty subsistence, by making coarse shirts at 12 1/2 cents a piece, or by taking in washing, for which she was paid by some wealthy persons 12 1/2 cents per dozen. All these things evince the low estimation in which woman is held. There is yet another and more disastrous consequence arising from this unscriptural notion—women being educated, from earliest childhood, to regard themselves as inferior creatures, have not that self-respect which conscious equality would engender, and hence when their virtue is assailed, they yield to temptation with facility, under the idea that it rather exalts than debases them, to be connected with a superior being. There is another class of women in this country, to whom I cannot refer, without feelings of the deepest shame and sorrow. I allude to our female slaves. Our southern cities are wheeled beneath a tide of pollution; the virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brute lust of those who bear the name of Christian.

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An unscriptural notion is one not contained in or mandated by the Bible.

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Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (pp. 56–58, 59–61). Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

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In our slave States, if amid all her degradation and ignorance, a woman desires to preserve her virtue unsullied, she is either bribed or whipped into compliance, or if she dares resist her seducer, her life by the laws of some of the slave States may be, and has actually been sacrifice to the fury of the disappointed passion. Where such laws do not exist, the power which is necessarily vested in the master over his property, leaves the defenseless slave entirely at his mercy, and the suffering of some females on this account, both physical and mental, are intense. Mr. Gholson, in the House of Delegates of Virginia, in 1832, said, “He really had been under the impression that he owned his slaves. He had lately purchased four women and ten children, in whom he thought he had obtained a great bargain; for he supposed they were his own property, as were his brood mares.” But even if any laws existed in the United States, as in Athens formerly, for the protection of female slaves, they would be null and void, because the evidence of a colored person is not admitted against a white, in any of our Courts of Justice in the slave States. “In Athens, if a female slave had cause to complain of any want of respect to the laws of modesty, she could seek the protection of the temple, and demand a change of owners; and such appeals were never discountenanced, or neglected by the magistrates.” In Christian America, the slave has no refuge from unbridled cruelty and lust. . . . I cannot close this letter, without saying a few words on the benefits to be derived by men, as well as women, from the opinions I advocate relative to the equality of the sexes. Many women are now supported, in idleness and extravagance, by the industry of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who are compelled to toil out their existence, at the counting house, or in the printing office, or some other laborious occupation, while the wife and daughters and sisters take no part in the support of the family, and appear to think that their sole business is to spend the hard bought earnings of their male friends. I deeply regret such a state of things, because I believe that if women felt their responsibility, for the support of themselves, or their families it would add strength and dignity to their characters, and teach them more true sympathy for their husbands, than is now generally manifested,—a sympathy which would be exhibited by actions as well as words. Our brethren may reject my doctrine, because it runs counter to common opinions, and because it wounds their pride; but I believe they would be “partakers of the benefit” resulting from the Equality of the Sexes, and would find that woman, as their equal, was unspeakably more valuable than woman as their inferior, both as a moral and an intellectual being. Thine in the bonds of womanhood, Sarah M. Grimké

THE LOWELL OFFERING

Excerpts from

The Lowell Offering (1840s) In the following excerpts, the writer (probably Harriet Farley, one of the editors of The Lowell Offering), presents in fictionalized form an experience that was familar to all the Offering’s readers. The protagonist, Susan, has determined to find work at Lowell, Massachusetts, to support herself and her family. Although she is apprehensive at first, she adjusts to the social climate of the women in the mills and achieves her purpose of securing financial independence for her family. Lowell, one of the nation’s largest textile-producing towns in the nineteenth century, attracted young women by offering them a chance to be self-sufficient and independent and to earn wages for themselves and their families. But millwork was not always easy and the women, although often provided with adequate living circumstances, sometimes were disillusioned and lonely. In addition to providing employment, leisure activities and educational opportunities (such as training in domestic duties) were available. The Lowell Offering began publication in the 1840s as a factory magazine by and for the women. It provides a glimpse of the American working woman of the mid-nineteenth century.



“I am going to Lowell,” said Susan quietly, “to work in the Factory,—the girls have high wages there now; and if we all have our health, and mother and James get along well with the farm and the little ones, I hope, I don’t think, that we can pay it all up in the course of seven or eight years.” “That is a long time for you to go and work so hard, and shut yourself up so close, at your time of life,” said the Deacon, “and on many other accounts I do not approve of it.” “I know how prejudiced the people here are against factory girls,” said Susan, “but I should like to know what real good reason you have for disapproving of my resolution. You cannot think there is any thing really wrong in my determination to labor, as steadily and as profitably as I can, for myself and the family.” “Why, the way that I look at things, is this,” replied the Deacon. “Whatever is not right, is certainly wrong; and I do not think it right for a young girl like you, to put herself in the way of all sort of temptation. You have no idea of the wickedness and corruption which exist in the town of Lowell. Why, they say that more than half of the girls have been in the House of Correction, or the County Jail, or some other vile place; and that the other half are not much better; and I should not think you would wish to go and work, and eat, and sleep, with such a low, mean, ignorant, wicked, set of creatures.” “I know such things are said of them, Deacon, but I do not think they are true. I have seen but one factory girl, and that was my cousin Ester, who visited us last summer. I do not believe there is a

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Consumption was the common name for tuberculosis, also called the “great white plague.” This infectious lung disease was a leading cause of death in the nineteenth century. It is marked by a deterioration of strength and slow wasting away of the body. Victuals is an archaic term for food.

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better girl in the world than she is; and I cannot think she would be so contented and cheerful among such a set of wretched as some folks think factory girls must be. There may be wicked girls there; and when I go there, I shall try to keep out of the way of bad company, and I do not doubt that cousin Esther can introduce me to girls who are as good as any with whom I have associated. If she cannot, I will have not companion but her, and spend the little leisure I shall have, in solitude; for I am determined to go.” “But supposing, Susan, that all the girls there were as good, and sensible, and pleasant as yourself—yet there are many other things to be considered. You have not thought how hard it will seem, to be boxed up fourteen hours in a day, among a parcel of clattering looms, or whirling spidles, whose constant din is of itself enough to drive a girl out of her wits; and then you will have no fresh air to breathe, and as likely as not come home in a year to two with a consumption, and wishing you had staid where you would have had less money, and better health. I have also heard that the boarding women do not give the girls food which is fit to eat, not half enough of the mean stuff they do allow them; and it is contrary to all reason, to suppose that folks can work, and have their health, without victuals to eat.” “I have thought of all these things, Deacon, but they do not move me. I know the noise of the Mills must be unpleasant at first; but I shall get used to that; and as to my health, I know that I have as good a constitution to begin with, as any girl could wish, and no predisposition to consumption, nor any of those diseases which a factory life might otherwise bring upon me. I do not expect all the comforts which are common to country farmers; but I am not afraid of starving—for cousin Esther said, that she had an excellent boarding place, and plenty to eat and drink, and that which was good enough for any body. But if they do not give us good meat, I will eat vegetables alone; and when we have bad butter, I will eat my bread without it.” “Well,” said the Deacon, “if your health is preserved, you may lose some of your limbs. I have heard a great many stories about girls who had their hands torn off by the machinery, or mangled so that they could never use them again; and a hand is not a thing to be despised, one easily dispensed with. And then, how should you like to be ordered about, and scolded at, by a cross overseer?” “I know there is danger,” replied Susan, “among so much machinery; but those who meet with accidents are but a very small number, in proportion to the whole; and if I am careful, I need not fear any injury. I do not believe the stories we hear about bad overseers,—for such men would not be placed over so many girls; and if I have a cross one, I will give him no reason to find fault; and if he finds fault without reason, I will leave him, and work for some one else. You know that I must do something, and I have made up my mind what it shall be.” It was with pain that Mrs. Miller heard of Susan’s plan; but she did not oppose her. She felt that it must be so,—that she much part with her for her own good, and the benefit of the family; and Susan hastily made preparations for her departure.

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She arranged every thing in and about the house for her mother’s convenience; and the evening before she left, she spent in instructing Lydia how to take her place, as far as possible; and told her to be always cheerful with mother, and patient with younger ones, and to write a long letter every two months, (for she could not afford to hear oftener,) and to be sure and not forget her for a single day. Then she went to her own room; and when she had re-examined her trunk, band-box and basket, to see that all was right, and laid her riding dress over the great arm-chair, she sat down by the window to meditate upon her change of life. She thought, as she looked upon the spacious, convenient chamber in which she was sitting, how hard it would be to have no place to which she could retire and be alone; and how difficult it would be to keep her things in order in the fourth part of a small apartment; and how possible it was that she might have unpleasant roommates; and how probable that every day would call into exercise all her kindness and forbearance. And then she wondered if it would be possible for her to work so long, and save so much, as to render it possible that she might one day return to that chamber and call it her own. Sometimes she wished she had not undertaken it, that she had not let the Deacon know that she hoped to be able to pay him; she feared that she had taken a burden upon herself which she could not bear, and sighed to think, that her lot should be so different from that of most young girls. She thought of the days when she was a little child; when she played with Henry at the brook, or picked berries with him on the hill; when her mother was always happy, and her father always kind; and she wished that the time could roll back, and she could again be a careless little girl. She felt, as we sometimes do, when we shut our eyes, and try to sleep, and get back into some pleasant dream, from which we have been too suddenly awakened. But the dream of youth was over, and before her was the sad, waking reality, of a life of toil, separation and sorrow. When she left home the next morning, it was the first time she had ever parted from her friends. The day was delightful, and the scenery beautiful,—a stage-ride was of itself a novelty to her, and her companions pleasant and sociable; but she felt very sad, and when she retired at night to sleep in a hotel, she burst into tears. Those who see the factory girls in Lowell, little think of the sighs and heart-arches which must attend a young girl’s entrance upon a life of toil and privation, among strangers. To Susan, the first entrance into a factory boarding-house, seemed something dreadful. The rooms looked strange and comfortless, and the women cold and heartless; and when she sat down to the supper table, where, among more than twenty girls, all but one were strangers, she could not eat a mouthful. She went with Esther to their sleeping apartment, and after arranging her clothes and baggage, she went to bed, but not to sleep. The next morning she went into the Mill; and at first, the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs, in constant motion, was

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Avails are profits or proceeds.

The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Women (1840–1845) (pp. 51–55, 175–77, 179–181). Benita Eisler, ed. New York: Lippincott, 1977.

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very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure that she could never learn to weave; the harness puzzled, and the reed perplexed her; the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump upon her head; and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the treads. It seemed as if the girls all stared at her, and the overseers watched every motion, and the day appeared as long as a month had been at home. But at last it was night; and O, how glad was Susan to be released! She felt weary and wretched, and retired to rest without taking a mouthful of refreshment. There was a dull pain in her head, and a sharp pain in her ankles; every bone was aching, and there was in her ears a strange noise, as of crickets, frogs, and jews-harps, all mingling together; and she felt gloomy and sick at heart. “But it won’t seem so always,” said she to herself; and with this truly philosophical reflection, she turned her head upon a hard pillow, and went to sleep. Susan was right; it did not seem so always. Every succeeding day seemed shorter and pleasanter than the last; and when she was accustomed to the work, and had become interested in it, the hours seemed shorter, and the days, weeks and months flew more swiftly by, than they had ever done before. She was healthy, active and ambitious and was soon able to earn even as much as her cousin, who had been a weaver several years. Wages were then much higher than they are now; and Susan had the pleasure of devoting the avails of her labor to a noble and cherished purpose. There was a definite aim before her, and she never lost sight of the object for which she left her home, and was happy in the prospect of fulfilling that design. And it needed all this hope of success, and all her strength of resolution, to enable her to bear up against the wearing influences of a life of unvarying toil. Though the days seemed shorter than at first, yet there was a tiresome monotony about them. Every morning the bells pealed forth the same clangor, and every night brought the same feeling of fatigue. But Susan felt, as all factory girls feel, that she could bear it for a while. There are few who look upon factory labor as a pursuit for life. It is but a temporary vocation; and most of the girls resolve to quit the Mill when some favorite design is accomplished. Money is their object—not for itself, but for what it can perform; and paydays are the landmarks which cheer all hearts, by assuring them of their progress to the wished-for goal.

Excerpts from

A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) Catharine Esther Beecher (1800–1878) was an ardent advocate of the educational training of women in order that they should raise morally responsible children who were virtuous and upright. In the following excerpts, Beecher advocates the importance of the individual within a democratic society and in particular the place of

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women in that society. Beecher believed the teaching profession had two purposes: to improve the character of children and to allow women to develop financial independence to support themselves. One focus of her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) was the promotion of child care as a female responsibility. Beecher advocated that mothers had the strongest influence in raising moral and good children, and she urged women to take active control of the management of their domestic affairs. The Treatise was considered “advice literature” in its day: a self-improvement guide for women. It changed social attitudes about women. Beecher professed that women’s domestic work gave them a superior moral sensibility.



There are some reasons why American women should feel an interest in the support of the democratic institutions of their Country, which it is important that they should consider. The great maxim, which is the basis of all our civil and political institutions, is, that “all men are created equal.” And that they are equally entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But it can readily be seen, that this is only another mode of expressing the fundamental principle which the Great Ruler of the Universe has established, as the law of His eternal government. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” . . . The principles of democracy, then, are identical with the principles of Christianity. But, in order that each individual may pursue and secure the highest degree of happiness within his reach, unimpeded by the selfish interests of others, a system of laws must be established, which sustain certain relations and dependencies in social and civil life. What these relations and their attending obligations shall be, are to be determined, not with reference to the wishes and interests of a few, but solely with reference to the general good of all; so that each individual shall have his own interest, as much as the public benefit, secured by them. For this purpose, it is needful that certain relations be sustained, that involve the duties of subordination. There must be the magistrate and the subject, one of whom is the superior, and the other the inferior. There must be the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employed, each involving the relative duties of subordination. The superior in certain particulars is to direct, and the inferior is to yield obedience. Society could never go forward, harmoniously, nor could any craft or profession be successfully pursued, unless these superior and subordinate relations be instituted and sustained. But who shall take the higher, and who the subordinate, stations in social and civil life? This matter, in the case of parents and children, is decided by the Creator. He has given children to the control of parents, as their superiors, and to them they remain subordinate, to a certain age, or so long as they are members of their household.

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A parterre is an ornamental garden, as found on castle grounds.

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And parents can delegate such a portion of their authority to teachers and employers, as the interests of their children require. In most other cases, in a truly democratic state, each individual is allowed to choose for himself, who shall take the position of his superior. No woman is forced to obey any husband but the one she chooses for herself; nor is she obliged to take a husband, if she prefers to remain single. So every domestic, and every artisan or laborer, after passing from parental control, can choose the employer to whom he is to accord obedience, or, if he prefers to relinquish certain advantages, he can remain without taking a subordinate place to any employer. Each subject, also, has equal power with every other, to decide who shall be his superior as a ruler. The weakest, the poorest, the most illiterate, has the same opportunity to determine this question, as the richest, the most learned, and the most exalted. . . . The tendencies of democratic institutions, in reference to the rights and interests of the female sex, have been fully developed in the United States; and it is in this aspect, that the subject is one of peculiar interest to American women. In this Country, it is established, both by opinion and by practice, that women have an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or political, institution, is right, that sacrifices her interest to promote that of the other sex. But in order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns, her interests be intrusted to the other sex, without her taking any part in voting, or in making and administering laws. . . . The success of democratic institutions, as is conceded by all, depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the mass of the people. If they are intelligent and virtuous, democracy is a blessing; but if they are ignorant and wicked, it is only a curse, and as much more dreadful than any other form of civil government, as a thousand tyrants are more to be dreaded than one. It is equally conceded, that the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young is committed mainly to the female hand. The mother writes the character of the future man; the sister bends the fibres that hereafter are the forest tree; the wife sways the heart, whose energies may turn for good or for evil the destinies of a nation. Let the women of a country be made virtuous and intelligent, and the men will certainly be the same. The proper education of a man decides the welfare of an individual; but educate a women, and the interests of a whole family are secured. . . . No American woman, then, has any occasion for feeling that hers is an humble or insignificant lot. The value of what an individual accomplishes, is to be estimated by the importance of the enterprise achieved, and not by the particular position of the laborer. The drops of heaven that freshen the earth are each of equal value, whether they fall in the lowland meadow, or the princely parterre. The builders of a temple are of equal importance, whether they labor on the foundations, or toil upon the dome. Thus, also, with those labors that are to be made effectual in the regeneration of the Earth. The woman who is rearing a family of

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children; the woman who labors in the schoolroom; the woman who, in her retired chamber, earns, with her needle, the mite to contribute for the intellectual and moral elevation of her country; even the humble domestic, whose example and influence may be moulding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state;—each and all may be cheered by the consciousness, that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility

Declaration of Sentiments (1848) The first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848. Such notable women as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary McClintock, and Martha Wright were in attendance, protesting against the inequality of women in political representation, marriage, the workplace, educational opportunities, commercial ventures and business, and property rights. Based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Declaration of Sentiments was written largely by Stanton and Mott. The Seneca Falls Convention served as the motivation for other women’s rights conventions throughout the United States to begin the emancipation of women and to protest against the inequalities to which women were subjected.



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. Prudence indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are

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479

Mite is an old-fashioned word for a meager amount of money. In medieval times a mite was a small Flemish coin. Beecher, Catharine. A Treatise on Domestic Economy (chap. 1). New York: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1881.

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sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he had oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

MARIA PERKINS TO HER HUSBAND

He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life. Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States. In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions embracing every part of the country.

(1852)

481

History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et al., eds. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881.

A letter from

Maria Perkins to Her Husband (1852) In the following letter, written in 1852, Maria Perkins is worried about keeping her family together, and she writes to her husband about her fears. Few enslaved women learned to read and write partly because owners were concerned that literacy might lead to rebellion. This is a rare example of writing by a slave woman. It reveals some of the concerns that many women of her day had to face. African-American women had their own particular burdens to bear. In addition to having more children than white women and having them earlier in life, they also faced the prospect of having their children taken away from them and sold. This letter is all that is known of Maria Perkins and her family.



Charlottesville, Oct. 8th, 1852 Dear Husband I write you a letter to let you know my distress my master has sold albert to a trader on Monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also and I want you to let [me] hear from you very soon before next cort if you can I don’t know when I don’t

Cort: perhaps a misspelling of court.

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SUSAN B. ANTHONY ANNOUNCING HER HAVING VOTED

Know: misspelling of now.

Buy: misspelling of by. Maria Perkins to Richard Perkins, October 8, 1852, Ulrich B. Phillips Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven.

(1872)

want you to wait till Christmas I want you to tell dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go afterwards. I don’t want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to the court houste too they never put me up a man buy the name of brady bought albert and is gone I don’t know where they say he lives in Scottesville my things is in several places some is in staunton and if I should be sold I don’t know what will become of them I don’t expect to meet with the luck to get that way till I am quite heartsick nothing more I am and ever will be your kind wife Maria Perkins.

A letter from

Susan B. Anthony Announcing Her Having Voted (1872) In 1872, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was arrested in Rochester, New York, for voting illegally in the presidential election. In the following letter, Anthony writes to Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the events in Rochester and the reactions of both parties. (Anthony voted Republican.) In a trial that received international coverage the following year, Anthony was found guilty and fined $100. She never paid the fine.



Rochester, November 5, 1872 Dear Mrs. Stanton: Well, I have been and gone and done it! positively voted the Republican ticket—straight—this A.M. at seven o’ clock, and swore my vote in, at that; was registered on Friday and fifteen other women followed suit in this ward, then in sundry other wards some twenty or thirty women tried to register, but all save two were refused. All my three sisters voted—Rhoda De Garmo, too. Amy Post was rejected, and she will immediately bring action against the registrars; then another woman who was registered, but vote refused, will bring action for that—similar to the Washington action. Hon. Henry R. Selden will be our counsel; he has read up the law and all of our arguments, and is satisfied that we are right, and ditto Judge Samuel Selden, his elder brother. So we are in for a fine agitation in Rochester on this question. I hope the morning telegrams will tell of many women all over the country trying to vote. It is splendid that without any concert of action so many should have moved here.

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Thanks for the Hartford papers. What a magnificent meeting you had! Splendid climax of the campaign—the two ablest and most eloquent women on one platform and the Governor of the State by your side. I was with you in spirit that evening; the chairman of the Committee had both telegraphed and written me all about the arrangements. Haven’t we wedged ourselves into the work pretty fairly and fully, and now that the Republicans have taken our votes—for it is the Republican members of the board; the Democratic paper is out against us strong, and that scared the Democrats on the registry boards. How I wish you were here to write up the funny things said and done. Rhoda De Garmo told them she wouldn’t swear nor affirm, “but would tell them the truth,” and they accepted that. When the Democrat said that my vote should not go in the box, one Republican said to the other, “What do you say, Marsh?” “I say put it in.” “So do I,” said Jones; “and we’ll fight it out on this line if it takes all winter.” Mary Hallowell was just here. She and Sarah Willis tried to register, but were refused; also Mrs. Mann, the Unitarian minister’s wife, and Mary Curtis, sister of Catharine Stebbins. Not a jeer, not a word, not a look disrespectful has met a single woman. If only now all the Woman Suffrage women would work to this end of enforcing the existing Constitutional supremacy of National law over Sate law, what strides we might make this very winter! But I’m awfully tired; for five days I have been on the constant run, but to splendid purpose; so all right. I hope you voted too. Affectionately, Susan B. Anthony

Excerpts from

“Solitude of Self ” (1892) Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was an ardent abolitionist, suffragist, and social reformer. In 1892, at age 77, she delivered a speech entitled “Solitude of Self ” to the Judiciary Committee of the United States Congress. In the following selections, she urges Congress and the American people to recognize the importance of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and the need of individuals to improve themselves through training and education. Selfdevelopment, she believed, was crucial to the personal preparation for life’s experiences that everyone must face, and education, she insisted, was the key. Women especially, she believed, must be trained to cultivate their minds so as to be prepared to face life’s great stresses and not have to rely on others who may or may not be available and supportive.

(1892)

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History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et al., eds. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1882.

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Robinson Crusoe is the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel about an English castaway. Friday is the native man Crusoe rescues from cannibals, who becomes his servant and companion.

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: We have been speaking before Committees of the Judiciary for the last twenty years, and we have gone over all the arguments in favor of a sixteenth amendment [to the Constitution in favor of woman suffrage] which are familiar to all you gentlemen; therefore, it will not be necessary that I should repeat them again. The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment—our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness. Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government. Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same—individual happiness and development. Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, that may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman’s sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison, and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of woman may never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual. Just so with woman. The education that will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do. The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of selfdependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must

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rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. . . . To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will never find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any large class of the people is uneducated and unrepresented in the government. We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities, then each man bears his own burden. . . . To throw obstacle in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property, like cutting off the hands. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all selfrespect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare’s play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman’s position in the nineteenth century—“Rude men” (the play tells us) “seized the king’s daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands.” What a picture of woman’s position. Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection. The girl of sixteen, thrown on the world to support herself, to make her own place in society, to resist the temptations that surround her and maintain a spotless integrity, must do all this by native force or superior education. She does not acquire this power by being trained to trust others and distrust herself. If she wearies of the struggle, finding it hard work to swim upstream, and allows herself to drift with the current, she will find plenty of company, but not one to share her misery in the hour of her deepest humilation. If she tried to retrieve her position, to conceal the past, her life is hedged about with fears lest willing hands should tear the veil from what she fain would hide. Young and friendless, she knows the bitter solitude of self. How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignifi-

(1892)

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Garden of Gethsemane: In the Bible, the garden in which Jesus was betrayed.

(1892)

cance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible. The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment with a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune and position, has a certain harbor of safety, occurs against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a desirable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare common sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of character that the most succesful stateman possesses. An uneducated woman, trained to dependence, with no resources in herself must make a failure of any position in life. But society says women do not need a knowledge of the world, the liberal training that experience in public life must give, all the advantages of collegiate education; but when for the lack of all this, the woman’s happiness is wrecked, alone she bears her humiliation; and the attitude of the weak and the ignorant is indeed pitiful in the wild chase for the price of life they are ground to powder. . . . Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown. From the mountain tops of Judea, long ago, a heavenly voice bade His disciples, “Bear ye one another’s burdens,” but humanity has not yet risen to that point of self-sacrifice, and if ever so willing, how few the burdens are that one soul can bear for another. In the highways of Palestine; in prayer and fasting on the solitary mountain top; in the Garden of Gethsemane; before the judgment seat of Pilate; betrayed by one of His trusted disciples at His last supper; in His agonies on the cross, even Jesus of Nazareth, in these last sad days on earth, felt the awful solitude of self. Deserted by man, in agony he cries, “My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?” And so it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, on the long weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each mortal stands alone. . . . Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No! no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed. We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human being for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self dependence of every human soul we see the need of courage,

S OUTHERN HORRORS: LYNCH L AW IN ALL ITS PHA SES

judgment, and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man. Whatever may be said of man’s protecting power in ordinary conditions, mid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone, woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation; the Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man’s love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever. A recent writer says: I remember once, in crossing the Atlantic, to have gone upon the deck of the ship at midnight, when a dense black cloud enveloped the sky, and the great deep was roaring madly under the lashes of demoniac winds. My feelings was [sic] not of danger or fear (which is a base surrender of the immortal soul), but of utter desolation and loneliness; a little speck of life shut in by a tremendous darkness. Again I remember to have climbed the slopes of the Swiss Alps, up beyond the point where vegetation ceases, and the stunted conifers no longer struggle against the unfeeling blasts. Around me lay a huge confusion of rocks, out of which the gigantic ice peaks shot into the measureless blue of the heavens, and again my only feeling was the awful solitude. And yet, there is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter. Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Excerpts from

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892–1895) The journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells Barnett (1862–1931) was particularly challenged to secure equality for African Americans and women. Her emphatic editorials, powerful pamphlets, and enthusiastic speeches denounced injustice and mob violence. She urged African Americans to strive for independence and self-sufficiency and to reject racial violence and segregation. In the following excerpts, drawn from pamphlets written between 1892 and 1895, Barnett denounces the “many inhumane and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans.” These writings reveal her belief that lynchers targeted African Americans who sought to improve their lives and who were

(1892–1895)

487

“Solitude of Self.” Address delivered by Elizabeth Cady Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892.

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economic rivals to whites. She even suggested that a middle-class, African-American community posed a competitive threat to their white neighbors and that white women were responsible for sexual advances of African-American men. The selections here represent some of Barnett’s most energetic, forceful, and notable writings.



Lynch law . . . is brought to bear mainly against the Negro. The first fifteen years of his freedom he was murdered by masked mobs for trying to vote. Public opinion having made lynching for that cause unpopular, a new reason is given to justify the murders of the past 15 years. The Negro was first charged with attempting to rule white people, and hundreds were murdered on that pretended supposition. He is now charged with assaulting or attempting to assault white women. This charge, as false as it is foul, robs us of the sympathy of the world and is blasting the race’s good name. The men who make these charges encourage or lead the mobs which do the lynching. They belong to the race which holds Negro life cheap, which owns the telegraph wires, newspapers, and all other communication with the outside world. They write the reports which justify lynching by painting the Negro as black as possible, and those reports are accepted by the press associations and the world without question or investigation. The mob spirit has increased with alarming frequency and violence. Over a thousand black men, women, and children have been thus sacrificed the past ten years. Masks have long since been thrown aside and the lynchings of the present day take place in broad daylight. The sheriffs, police and state officials stand by and see the work well done. The coroner’s jury is often formed among those who took part in the lynching and a verdict, “Death at the hands of parties unknown to the jury” is rendered. As the number of lynchings have increased, so has the cruelty and barbarism of the lynchers. Three human beings were burned alive in civilized America during the first six months of this year (1893). Over one hundred have been lynched in this half year. They were hanged, then cut, shot and burned. The following table published by the Chicago Tribune January, 1892, is submitted for thoughtful consideration. 1882, 52 Negroes murdered by mobs 1883, 39 “ “ “ “ 1884, 53 “ “ “ “ 1885, 77 “ “ “ “ 1886, 73 “ “ “ “ 1887, 70 “ “ “ “ 1888, 72 “ “ “ “ 1889, 95 “ “ “ “ 1890, 100 “ “ “ “ 1891, 169 “ “ “ “

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269 253 44 37 4 27 13 10 7 5 32

Of this number were charged with rape. “ “ “ murder. “ “ “ robbery. “ “ “ incendiarism. “ “ “ burglary. “ “ “ race prejudice. “ “ “ quarreling with white man. “ “ “ making threats. “ “ “ rioting. “ “ “ miscegenation “ “ “ no reason given

This table shows . . . that only one-third of nearly a thousand murdered black persons have been even charged with the crime of outrage. This crime is only so punished when white women accuse black men, which accusation is never proven. The same crime committed by Negroes against Negroes, or by white men against black women is ignored even in the law courts. . . . . . . Will Lewis, an 18 year old Negro youth was lynched at Tullahoma, Tennessee, August, 1891, for being “drunk and saucy to white folks.” The women of the race have not escaped the fury of the mob. In Jackson, Tennessee, in the summer of 1886, a white woman died of poisoning. Her black cook was suspected, and as a box of rat poison was found in her room, she was hurried away to jail. When the mob had worked itself to the lynching pitch, she was dragged out of jail, every stitch of clothing torn from her body, and she was hung in the public courthouse square in sight of everybody. Jackson is one of the oldest towns in the State, and the State Supreme Court holds its sittings there; but no one was arrested for the deed—not even a protest was uttered. The husband of the poisoned woman has since died a raving maniac, and his ravings showed that he, and not the poor black cook, was the poisoner of his wife. . . . . . . In 1892 there were 241 persons lynched . . . Of this number 160 were of Negro descent. Four of them were lynched in New York, Ohio and Kansas; the remainder were murdered in the South. Five of this number were females. . . . . . . A lynching equally as cold-blooded took place in Memphis, Tennessee, March 1892. Three young colored men in an altercation at their place of business, fired on white men in self-defense. They were imprisoned for three days, then taken out by the mob and horribly shot to death. Thomas Moss, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell were energetic business men who had built up a flourishing grocery business. This business had prospered and that of a rival white grocer named Barrett had declined. Barrett led the attack on their grocery which resulted in the wounding of three white men. For this cause were three innocent men barbarously lynched, and their families left without protectors. Memphis is one of the leading cities of Tennessee, a town of seventy-five thousand inhabitants! No effort whatever was made to punish the murderers of these three

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men. It counted for nothing that the victims of this outrage were three of the best known young men of a population of thirty thousand colored people of Memphis. They were the officers of the company which conducted the grocery. Moss being the President, Stewart the Secretary of the Company and McDowell the Manager. Moss was in the Civil Service of the United States as letter carrier, and all three were men of splendid reputation for honesty, integrity and sobriety. But their murders, though well known, have never been indicted, were not even troubled with a preliminary examination. [In an editorial for Free Speech, May 21, 1892, Wells wrote:] [“]Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” “The Daily Commercial” [a white-owned newspaper] of Wednesday following, May 25th, contained the following . . . [editorial]: “Those negroes who are attempting to make the lynching of individuals of their race a means for arousing the worst passions of their kind are playing with a dangerous sentiment. The negroes may as well understand that there is no mercy for the negro rapist and little patience with his defenders. A negro organ printed in this city, in a recent issue publishes the following atrocious paragraph: ‘Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that negro men rape white women.’ . . . “The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it. “There are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate, and the obscene intimations of the foregoing have brought the writer to the very outermost limit of public patience.” . . . Acting upon this advice, the leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged, not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—but by the leading business men, in the leading business centre. Mr. Fleming, the business manager and owning a half interest the “Free Speech,” had to leave town to escape the mob, and was afterwards ordered not to return; letters and telegrams sent me in New York where I was spending my vactation advised me that bodily harm awaited my return. Creditors took possession of the office and sold the outfit, and the “Free Speech” was as if it had never been. The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant as a warning. Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.

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Since my business has been destroyed and I am an exile from home because of that editorial, the issue has been forced, and as the writer of it I feel that the race and the public generally should have a statement of the facts as they exist. They will serve at the same time as a defense for the Afro-American Samsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs. . . . There are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women. . . . The Southern white man says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man, and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force. In numerous instances where colored men have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained. . . .

An excerpt from

Sadie Frowne: A Sweatshop Girl (1902) In the following excerpt, Sadie Frowne, a young Jewish girl from Poland, tells of her experiences living in New York City around the turn of the twentieth century. She and her mother emigrated to the United States following the death of Frowne’s father. On arrival, Frowne set out for domestic work to support herself and to help with her family’s financial situation. She finds employment in a factory—the sweatshop. Frowne describes in detail the dangers of the factory and the long hours of work. Those who worked in the sweatshops had to find small pleasures in the few hours of free time they had each week. Frowne’s determination, dreams, and aspirations are evident as she reveals her desires for educational opportunities, fine clothes, and good, fresh food. She told her story to an editor for the Independent, a liberal journal, where it was published in 1902.



My mother was a tall, handsome, dark complexioned woman with red cheeks, large brown eyes and a great quantity of jet black, wavy hair. She was well educated, being able to talk in Russian, German,

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Miscegenation laws: laws preventing black people and white people from marrying. Barnett, Ida B. Wells. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (pp. 17–19, 74–79, 145, 226–232). Trudier Harris, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Excerpted from “The Reason Why the Colored America Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition” (1893), “Southern Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1892), and “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Cases of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894” (1895) by Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

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Polish and French, and even to read English print, tho, of course, she did not know what it meant. She kept a littler grocer’s shop in the little village where we lived at first. That was in Poland, somewhere on the frontier, and mother had charge of a gate between the countries, so that everybody who came through the gate had to show her a pass. She was much looked up to by the people, who used to come and ask her for advice. Her word was like law among them. She had a wagon in which she used to drive about the country, selling her groceries, and sometimes she worked in the fields with my father. The grocer’s shop was only one story high, and had one window, with very small panes of glass. We had two rooms behind it, and were happy while my father lived, altho we had to work very hard. By the time I was six years of age I was able to wash dishes and scrub floors, and by the time I was eight I attended to the shop while my mother was away driving her wagon or working in the fields with my father. She was strong and could work like a man. When I was a little more than ten years of age my father died. He was a good man and a steady worker, and we never knew what it was to be hungry while he lived. After he died troubles began, for the rent of our shop was about $6 a month and then there were food and clothes to provide. We needed little, it is true, but even soup, black bread and onions we could not always get. We struggled along till I was nearly thirteen years of age and quite handy at housework and shop keeping, so far as I could learn them there. But we fell behind in the rent and mother kept thinking more and more that we should have to leave Poland and go across the sea to America where we heard it was much easier to make money. Mother wrote to Aunt Fanny, who lived in New York, and told her how hard it was to live in Poland, and Aunt Fanny advised her to come and bring me. I was out at service at this time and mother thought she would leave me—as I had a good place—and come to this country alone, sending for me afterward. But Aunt Fanny would not hear of this. She said we should both come at once, and she went around among our relatives in New York and took up a subscription for our passage. We came by steerage on a steamship in a very dark place that smelt dreadfully. There were hundreds of other people packed in with us, men, women and children, and almost all of them were sick. It took us twelve days to cross the sea, and we thought we should die, but at last the voyage was over, and we came up and saw the beautiful bay and the big woman with the spikes on her head and the lamp that is lighted at night in her hand (Goddess of Liberty). Aunt Fanny and her husband met us at the gate of this country and were very good to us, and soon I had a place to live out (domestic servant), while my mother got work in a factory making white goods. I was only a little over thirteen years of age and a greenhorn, so I received $9 a month and board and lodging, which I thought was doing well. Mother, who, as I have said, was very clever, made $9 a week on white goods, which means all sorts of underclothing, and is high class work.

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But mother had a very gay disposition. She liked to go around and see everything, and friends took her about New York at night and she caught a bad cold and coughed and coughed. She really had hasty consumption, but she didn’t know it, and I didn’t know it, and she tried to keep on working, but it was no use. She had not the strength. Two doctors attended her, but they could do nothing, and at last she died and I was left alone. I had saved money while out at service, but mother’s sickness and funeral swept it all away and now I had to begin all over again. Aunt Fanny had always been anxious for me to get an education, as I did not know how to read or write, and she thought that was wrong. Schools are different in Poland from what they are in this country, and I was always too busy to learn to read and write. So when mother died I thought I would try to learn a trade and then I could go to school at night and learn to speak the English language well. So I went to work in Allen street (Manhattan) in what they call a sweatshop, making skirts by machine. I was new at the work and the foreman scolded me a great deal. “Now, then,” he would say, “this place is not for you to be looking around in. Attend to your work. That is what you have to do.” I did not know at first that you must not look around and talk, and I made many mistakes with the sewing, so that I was often called a “stupid animal.” But I made $4 a week by working six days in the week. For there are two Sabbaths here—our own Sabbath, that comes on Saturday, and the Christian Sabbath that comes on Sunday. It is against our law to work on our own Sabbath, so we work on their Sabbath. In Poland I and my father and mother used to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath, but here the women don’t go to the synagogue much, tho the men do. They are shut up working hard all week long and when the Sabbath comes they like to sleep long in bed and afterward they must go out where they can breathe the air. The rabbis are strict here, but not so strict as in the old country. I lived at this time with a girl named Ella, who worked in the same factory and made $5 a week. We had the room all to ourselves, paying $1.50 a week for it, and doing light housekeeping. It was in Allen street, and the window looked out the back, which was good, because there was an elevated railroad in front, and in summer time a great deal of dust and dirt came in at the front windows. We were on the fourth story and could see all that was going on in the back rooms of the houses behind us, and early in the morning the sun used to come in our window. We did our cooking on an oil stove, and lived well, as this list of our expenses for one week will show: Tea Cocoa Bread and rolls Canned vegetables Potatoes Milk

$0.06 .10 .40 .20 .10 .21

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Indian meal is cornmeal.

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Fruit Butter Meat Fish Laundry

.20 .15 .60 .15 .25

Total Add rent

$2.42 1.50

Grand Total

$3.92

Of course, we could have lived cheaper, but we are both fond of good things and felt that we could afford them. We paid 18 cents for a half pound of tea so as to get it good, and it lasted us three weeks, because we had cocoa for breakfast. We paid 5 cents for six rolls and 5 cents a loaf for bread, which was the best quality. Oatmeal cost us 10 cents for three and one-half pounds, and we often had it in the morning, or Indian meal porridge in the place of it, costing about the same. Half a dozen eggs cost about 13 cents on an average, and we could get all the meat we wanted for a good hearty meal for 20 cents—two pounds of chops, or a steak, or a bit of veal, or a neck of lamb—something like that. Fish included butter fish, porgies, codfish and smelts, averaging about 8 cents a pound. . . . It cost me $2 a week to live, and I had a dollar a week to spend on clothing and pleasure, and saved the other dollar. I went to night school, but it was hard work learning at first as I did not know much English. Two years ago I came to this place, Brownsville, where so many of my people are, and where I have friends. I got work in a factory making underskirts—all sort of cheap underskirts, like cotton and calico for the summer and woolen for the winter, but never the silk, satin or velvet underskirts. I earned $4.50 a week and lived on $2 a week, the same as before. I got a room in the house of some friends who lived near the factory. I pay $1 a week for the room and am allowed to do light housekeeping—that is, cook my meals in it. I get my own breakfast in the morning, just a cup of coffee and a roll, and at noon time I come home to dinner and take a plate of soup and a slice of bread with the lady of the house. My food for the week costs a dollar, just as it did in Allen street, and I have the rest of my money to do as I like with. I am earning $5.50 a week now, and will probably get another increase soon. It isn’t piecework in our factory, but one is paid by the amount of work done just the same. So it is like piecework. All the hands get different amounts, some as low as $3.60 and some of the men as high as $16 a week. The factory is in the third story of a brick building. It is in a room twenty feet long and fourteen broad. There are fourteen machines in it. I and the daughter of the people with whom I live work two of these machines. The other operators are all men, some young and some old.

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At first a few of the young men were rude. When they passed me they would touch my hair and talk about my eyes and my red cheeks, and made jokes. I cried and said that if they did not stop I would leave the place. The boss said that should not be, that no one must annoy me. Some of the other men stood up for me, too, especially Henry, who said two or three times that he wanted to fight. Now the men all treat me very nicely. It was just that some of them did not know better, not being educated. Henry is tall and dark, and he has a small mustache. His eyes are brown and large. He is pale and much educated, having been to school. He know a great many things and has some money saved. I think nearly $400. He is not going to be in a sweatshop all the time, but will soon be in the real estate business, for a lawyer that knows him well has promised to open an office and pay for him to manage it. Henry has seen me home every night for a long time and makes love to me. He wants me to marry him, but I am not seventeen yet, and I think that is too young. He is only nineteen, so we can wait. I have been to the fortune teller’s three or four times, and she always tells me that tho I have had such a lot of trouble I am to be very rich and happy. I believe her because she has told so many things that have come true. So I will keep on working in the factory for a time. Of course it is hard, but I would have to work hard even if I was married. I get up half-past five o’clock every morning and make myself a cup of coffee on the oil stove. I eat a bit of bread and perhaps some fruit and then go to work. Often I get there soon after six o’clock so as to be in good time, tho the factory does not open until seven. I have heard that there is a sort of clock that calls you at the very time you want to get up, but I can’t believe that because I don’t see how the clock would know. At seven o’clock we all sit down at our machines and the boss brings to each one the pile of work he or she is to finish during the day, what they call in English their “stint.” This pile is put down beside the machine and as soon as a skirt is done it is laid on the other side of the machine. Sometimes the work is not all finished by six o’clock and then the one who is behind must work overtime. Sometimes one is finished ahead of time and gets away at four or five o’clock, but generally we are not done till six o’clock. The machines go like mad all day, because the faster you work the more money you get. Sometimes in my haste I get my finger caught and the needle goes right through it. It goes so quick, tho, that it does not hurt much. I bind the finger up with a piece of cotton and go on working. We all have accidents like that. Where the needle goes through the nail and makes a sore finger, or where it splinters a bone it does much harm. Sometimes a finger has to come off. Generally, tho, one can be cured by a salve. All the time we are working the boss walks about examining the finished garments and making us do them over again if they are not just right. So we have to be careful as well as swift. But I am getting so good at the work that within a year I will be making $7 a week, and then I can save at least $3.50 a week. I have over $200 saved now.

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Frowne, Sadie. “The Story of a Sweatshop Girl,” Independent 54 (September 25, 1902), pp. 2279–82.

(1902)

The machines are all run by foot power, and at the end of the day one feels so weak that there is a great temptation to lie right down and sleep. But you must go out and get air, and have some pleasure. So instead of lying down I go out, generally with Henry. Sometimes we go to Coney Island, where there are good dancing places, and sometimes we go to Ulmer Park to picnics. I am very fond of dancing, and, in fact, all sorts of pleasure. I go to the theater quite often, and like those plays that make you cry a great deal. “The Two Orphans” is good. Last time I saw it I cried all night because of the hard times that the children had in the play. I am going to see it again when it come here. For the last two winters I have been going to night school at Public School 84 on Glenmore avenue. I have learned reading, writing and arithmetic. I can read quite well now in English and I look at the newspapers every day. I read English books, too, sometimes. The last one I read was “A Mad Marriage,” by Charlotte Braeme. She’s a grand writer and makes things just like real to you. You feel as if you were the poor girl yourself going to get married to a rich duke. I am going back to night school again this winter. Plenty of my friends go there. Some of the women in my class are more then forty years of age. Like me, they did not have a chance to learn anything in the old country. It is good to have an education; it makes you feel higher. Ignorant people are all low. People say now that I am clever and fine in conversation. We have just finished a strike in our business. It spread all over and the United Brotherhood of Garment Workers was in it. That takes in the cloakmakers, coatmakers, and all others. We struck for shorter hours, and after being out for four weeks won the fight. We only have to work nine and a half hours a day and we get the same pay as before. So the union does good after all in spite of what some people say against—that it just takes our money and does nothing. I pay 25 cents a month to the union, but I do begrudge that because it is our benefit. The next strike is going to be for a raise of wages, which we ought to have. But tho I belong to the Union I am not a Socialist or Anarchist. I don’t know exactly what those things mean. there is a little expense for charity, too. If any worker is injured or sick we all give money to help. Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes. They say that instead of a dollar a week I ought not to spend more than 25 cents a week on clothes, and that I should save the rest. But a girl must have clothes if she is to go into high society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theatre. Those who blame me are the old country people who have old-fashioned notions, but the people who have been here a long time know better. A girl who does not dress well is stuck in a corner even if she is pretty, and Aunt Fanny says that I do just right to put on plenty of style. I have many friends and we often have jolly parties. Many of the young men like to talk to me, but I don’t go out with any except Henry. Lately, he has been urging me more and more to get married— but I think I’ll wait.

Part 1 Essays



Industry, Modernity, and Diversity: A Historical Overview of the Twentieth Century mericans who lived through the twentieth century experienced two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam confl icts, and the greatest economic crisis in our nation’s history. Yet even those major events do not begin to describe the transformations in economics, culture, and politics that entirely reshaped women’s lives. Women moved from being primarily unpaid workers at home to become consumers and wage-earners. Ideas about a woman’s place changed from “ a woman’s place is in the home” to “ a woman’s place is where she chooses it to be.” The ways in which women participated as citizens changed as well. In 1900 a woman’s rights as a citizen were intertwined with those of her family and represented to the political system by the male family head. By 2000 women not only voted independently, but also held numerous seats in CONGRESS and major leadership positions in national movements. These changes for women did not take place in isolation, but affected their families, coworkers, and communities. This volume introduces the reader to a sample of individual women, events, and organizations that represent a century of change for women in the United States. The overarching changes affected all women, yet we cannot accurately speak of one representative history. The experiences of growing up female varied with the infl uences of class, ethnicity, religion, race, and region. Three themes—industry, modernity, and diversity—organize the experiences of women’s lives in this introduction. Industry made wageearners of women and girls. Modernity introduced better EDUCATION, birth control, and greater independence in women’s lives. Diversity refl ects the differences among women as well as the expansion of rights to all Americans. Each theme defi nes an era in women’s history, but they all overlap chronologically.

A

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INDUSTRY The daily life of a girl or woman in 1900 bore little resemblance to our lifestyles today. Whether in the country or city, few homes had electricity. Telephones were rare and computers did not exist. Consumerism was limited to necessities for most people. Young people amused themselves at dances, concerts, and fairs. In the country these events were less frequent, so entertainment consisted of visiting, reading, or writing letters. The majority of women and girls had only recently begun to buy their clothes “ ready made.” Canning of home-grown food was a common skill. Industrial production and the reorganization of labor, however, dramatically changed women’s lives as workers and consumers. Women and children worked in agriculture, as waitresses, cooks, and seamstresses, but as the economy became more industrialized additional jobs opened for them in glass factories, textile mills, food processing plants, and garment making industries. In fact, a child’s education might end at age 14, the legal age to enter the workforce by the 1910s. In the country, compulsory school attendance was frequently set aside to accommodate planting, harvesting, or other family needs. African-American and Latino children were considered workers fi rst and children second in agricultural economies of the South and West. African-American girls entered the workforce at a young age and worked consistently over their lives. Similarly, Latinas often worked as family groups in agriculture. Single women composed the largest group of employed female workers. They mixed their wages with those of other family members. As the Western states became more settled, the services of single women in DOMESTIC SERVICE, sales, and food service, as well as NURSING and teaching, were in great demand and could bring higher wages than in other regions. Most married women worked at home. Their services to the

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family proved a greater value than the low wages they could earn. If a married woman had young children, she worked intermittently if at all until her children attended school. The exception to that rule applied to women who were the sole or major support of their families. Although the number of women and girl wage earners was increasing, only a small number of occupations were open to them. Jobs were segregated not only by sex, but also by race. Well into the 1960s, domestic service remained largely work performed by women of color. In 1900, women knew relatively little about their bodies aside from information passed down from family members. Midwives delivered most babies. In rural areas of the country, older daughters learned about childbirth as they helped relatives and neighbors deliver. Information about CONTRACEPTION (see Volume 2) passed in a similar manner from friend to friend and between female relatives. Magazines ran ads for medicines specifi cally designed for “ female troubles.” Yet information about managing the number or sequence of births rarely passed between medical practitioners and women. In 1916, when MARGARET SANGER opened her clinic in New York City to distribute birth control information, she was arrested, her materials confi scated and labeled obscene. Regardless of these and other limitations, the birth rate declined considerably by 1920. Women actively participated in the development of their communities, as volunteers and fund-raisers for churches, schools, clubs, parks and libraries. They led the campaigns to remove garbage from city streets, provide clean water and fresh milk for children, and clean up government. Furthermore, they did so in a context that censured women’s public leadership. The term “ public woman” referred to a prostitute and was used as a pejorative against assertive women. The parades, strikes, picketing, and public speeches organized by the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT were considered radical and conduct unsuitable for a woman. At the same time that images of women occupied more public space in advertisements, magazines, and movies, the political activities of women produced debates about women’s place and civic engagement. Consequently, women learned to position their public activism within the context of women’s duties as mothers and homemakers.

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First among all the issues that engaged women during the early twentieth century was the movement to win the right to vote. By 1912 even the nation’s most conservative women’s groups gave their support to the suffrage campaigns. They convinced their members to support the vote as a tool to accomplish their organizational goals against liquor or CHILD LABOR, or for better working conditions. Furthermore, they appeased members’ fears about acting “ unwomanly” by linking the vote to their jobs as mothers. MATERNALISM, or the idea that women’s public action could be justifi ed on the basis of their fundamental and primary role as mothers, used a traditional argument to open new fi elds of activity. This strategy worked, and in 1920 the states ratifi ed the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT granting the right to vote to women. The pre-suffrage image of a woman’s voting bloc quickly dissolved amidst the differences that divided women politically. African-American women, especially in the South, continued to be denied their voting rights along with AfricanAmerican men. Divisions between women who supported equal rights or PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION defi ned legislative strategies into the 1960s. Working-class women and women of color often allied with the political objectives of their class, race, ethnicity, or religion over their sex.

MODERNITY Americans began to describe their lives as a break from the past and a turn toward modern ways of living in the years following WORLD WAR I. The new economy led by business and technology promised higher standards of living for all. Despite the disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II, women benefi ted directly from advances in educational attainment, improved living standards, and the expectation of companionship in marriage. Women gave birth to fewer children, practiced birth control, and explored their sexuality. The migration to cities continued and offered women greater opportunities not only to work, but also to partake in the consumer culture. Young people made more decisions independent from their families and enjoyed new forms of MUSIC, DANCE, and art. Stores and banks helped women increase their purchasing power with easy credit. Whether the young working woman

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with new discretionary income or the married HOMEMAKER who made the major purchases for the family, women became a vital part of the consumer economy. Women who moved into cities experienced the advantages of technology and new manufactured goods. Electricity spurred the purchase of “ labor-saving” devices in many middle-class homes. Clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators changed the way the homemaker managed her work. The Great Depression sent consumption trends in rapid reverse, and highlighted the economic (if unpaid) value of women’s skills in domestic production. Gardening, canning, and sewing saved a great amount of money. With the entrance of the United States into World War II, consumer trends revived and expanded. This time more women worked outside the home because their labor was much needed, and they received higher wages. Women of color who worked in segregated job markets also saw a positive shift. Leaving the domestic service jobs of the South, for example, they moved to cities of the upper Midwest and West to fi ll wartime production jobs. Segregation did not end, but wages and types of employment improved. Many wartime workers wanted to continue in the higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs when the war ended, but industry jobs were promised to returning servicemen to ease their reintegration into civilian life. Women lost those jobs, but many stayed in the workforce. Despite the characterization of the 1950s as the age of domesticity and the return to family duties for many married women, the economy continued to need workers. Offices needed typists, stenographers, bookkeepers, and fi le clerks. Retail stores needed designers, publicists, and salespeople. Factories continued to employ workingclass women. Single women predominated in these work settings, but married women entered the workforce in greater numbers. By the 1960s, women workers joined labor unions although they did not hold leadership positions, and many fi elds were still closed to them. Civic activism continued as the changes of the prior decades were consolidated into community institutions and everyday life. Women voted, ran for office, sat on juries, and participated in voter registration drives. The LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS formed to educate women voters about their government, the campaign process, and candidates’ records. The NATIONAL WOMAN’ S PARTY

continued its campaign for sexual equality by introducing the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT in 1923 and repeatedly for decades (see Documents). At the federal level, the women of the New Deal participated in policymaking and government jobs to the greatest extent in history. They headed government bureaus, conducted national research, hired thousands of college graduates, and participated in creating the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. As fi rst lady, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT set the standard of public activism. She also brought public attention to the needs of African Americans. By the 1940s, women of the NAACP worked with their chapters to end lynching, pass desegregation laws, and register African Americans to vote. They made room for civil rights workers in their homes, raised funds, and participated in nonviolent civil disobedience. They integrated schools as children and young adults, mobilized bus boycotts, and offered leadership to a younger generation. Women in Latino communities worked behind the scenes to support churches, social welfare organizations, political groups, and unions. The civil rights movement brought the greatest political changes in the years after World War II. Women and men working together organized local communities to challenge discriminatory practices. In doing so, the women of the civil rights movement enlarged citizenship rights regardless of race. They also helped to create a model of non-violent social activism that the women’s movement, Chicanos, and gay and lesbian activists would follow in subsequent decades.

DIVERSITY During the last three decades of the century, a realignment in global systems of power occurred. Independence movements overthrew imperialist nations at the same time that technology and markets brought once distant countries into the global economy. Evidence of these forces in the United States appeared with civil rights, expanded immigration, and challenges to legal inequality between men and women. The social unrest in the United States resulted not only from the liberation movements of the 1960s, but also from the infl uence of evangelical religion. The dominant worldview of Protestant, middleclass values that had characterized mainstream culture for much of the century now shared the stage with a multiplicity of perspectives and

I N D U S T R Y, M O D E R N I T Y, A N D D I V E R S I T Y

views. Women participated in all aspects of the century’s changes but in a variety of ways. The changes wrought by technology and social relations near the end of the century emphasized choice over tradition. Divorce and remarriage rates reached new heights during the last quarter of the century. In the terms of the time, “ broken families” became “ blended families” as the children of fi rst and second marriages merged into one. The availability of relatively safe contraception methods such as the birth control pill revolutionized sex, giving women the choice to enjoy sex for reasons other than procreation. Twenty years later, technology not only separated sex from reproduction, but separated pregnancy and giving birth from biological parenthood. Artifi cial insemination, surrogate motherhood, and frozen embryos gave people for whom conception was difficult the opportunity to have children. As new ways of having children became widely known, new forms of families became more widespread. The care of children also underwent change. By the 1970s, several issues linked to the double shift of working mothers became topics of public discussion. CHILD CARE, leave for PREGNANCY, fl exible time for working mothers, and partner benefi ts are a few examples. As more married women entered the workforce as parttime or full-time workers, the random and informal methods of child care—relying on relatives or neighbors—broke down. By the 1970s, the need for day-care facilities became a matter of public policy and debate over the American family. Feminists questioned why parents would not share the responsibility of child rearing or at least consider it a matter of choice rather than biology. Some important changes in fathers’ involvement did occur. Nevertheless, the number of hours spent attending to family and household duties by mothers declined only slightly by the end of the century. The balance between wage-earning and family continues to preoccupy young women in the early twenty-fi rst century. The women’s movement changed American society in fundamental ways. Women entered the workforce with expectations of fair wages, equity,

and workplaces free of harassment. Women expected to live free from violence, and found refuge at shelters for battered women and RAPE crisis centers. Exploring the diverse experiences and perspectives of women’s lives gave rise to new ways to understand ourselves. The fi eld of gender studies infl uenced every academic discipline in the universities and produced WOMEN’ S STUDIES programs and new degree specializations.

CONCLUSION Many of the issues of the Second Wave of the women’s movement focused on gaining access to areas previously prohibited to women. Women wanted to participate in ATHLETICS, attend professional schools, serve in the MILITARY, be pop divas, and sit on the Supreme Court. As gains were made, individual women sometimes attributed their success to individual talent and dismissed the importance of the struggle for equal rights. During the 1980s, articulate, well-funded groups formed to oppose choice, access, and diversity. At the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, debates about feminism could be found everywhere, despite great changes in the lives of women and girls. We can be sure that the path ahead will be neither predictable nor easy and that women and girls will need new skills to overcome the new obstacles that arise. Joanne L. Goodwin See also: Sexual Revolution; “ The Civil Rights Movement,” p. 21.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Evans, Sara. Born for Liberty, A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1997. Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson. A Shining Thread of Hope, The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Jameson, Elizabeth, and Susan Armitage. Writing the Range, Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Ruiz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows, Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE



Women in Public Life rom the fi ght for woman suffrage at the beginning to the rebirth of feminism at its end, the twentieth century has witnessed signifi cant changes in the public lives of American women. Lacking the right to vote in all but a few states in 1900, women found ways to infl uence American life by creating and participating in civic associations, social service agencies, and public interest groups. Once women gained the vote in 1920, they became active in formal political parties as well. During the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s, women organized relief efforts and protested unemployment, and they supported the nation with defense work and MILITARY SERVICE during WORLD WAR II. Despite these contributions, women continued to face discrimination in the workplace and society. Only when greater numbers of women entered higher education and the paid labor force did their efforts to organize to demand equal rights with men begin to bear fruit. From the 1960s to the present day, women have protested for and won an equal place in public life.

F

WOMEN’S POLITICS AND WOMAN SUFFRAGE In the years between 1900 and 1920, lacking many formal political rights, women of different classes, races, and religions organized in voluntary associations to gain the right to vote. Early victories in the West gave women a limited opportunity to engage in party politics, but subsequent state campaigns for the vote left women without much say in forming state and federal policies. In 1900, under the leadership of CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT (see Volume 2) the National American Woman Suffrage Association began to change tactics. Taking over from Anna Howard Shaw, Catt coordinated resources for both state and national SUFFRAGE campaigns to get the best results for the effort. From 1900 to 1905, and from 1915 on, Catt coordinated national and state efforts in a “ winning plan” to keep the suffrage message constantly before the public. In 1911 Washington state passed a woman suffrage amendment; California followed in 1912. Losses in woman suffrage campaigns in 1915, however, brought a new generation to the fore.

Younger leaders such as Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (see Volume 2), and ALICE PAUL devoted their energies to the cause in such organizations as the College Equal Suffrage League, the Political Equality Association, and, most importantly, the Congressional Union. Crucial to the success of the movement was a shift in suffrage tactics toward public protest, education, and publicity. Suffrage parades and motorcades, whistle-stop campaigns, door-to-door canvassing, and public relations work brought new support to the suffrage cause. The Congressional Union’s campaign to picket the White House in 1917, while controversial, aroused public sympathy. The shared experience of disenfranchisement underwrote much of the suffrage appeal as elite, middle-class, and working-class women participated for the fi rst time in broad-based cross-class organizing. Little effort, however, was directed across the racial divide. Despite some interracial cooperation, white woman suffragists in Southern states insisted on racially segregated organizations, and some campaigned exclusively for the right to vote in state primaries for white women only. Electoral politics and suffrage battles were only a small part of women’s public life. The Progressive era was high tide for a distinctive women’s political culture. Devoted to “ civic housekeeping,” a movement to address the problems of poverty and government indifference, women from settlement houses, social agencies, and organizations such as the NATIONAL CONSUMERS LEAGUE and the NATIONAL CONGRESS OF MOTHERS sought to pressure cities to improve services, safety, and sanitation. The power of organized women established the fi rst day-care centers, created the MOTHERS’ PENSIONS, fueled the movement for a juvenile justice system, and attempted to clean up government corruption. Such activism led to the creation of many state and federal agencies, including the United States CHILDREN’ S BUREAU. Voluntary associations existed across class and race lines to support welfare, civil rights, and educational efforts among African Americans in such groups as the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN and the labor work of the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S TRADE UNION LEAGUE.

WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

By 1910, most women’s organizations were committed to working for suffrage. It was by then clear that women’s organizations had reached the limit of what they could do outside formal electoral and institutional channels. Women could educate and lobby, but without the vote, they could not make elected officials fully responsive to their demands. As a result, women’s organizations formed for such diverse purposes as TEMPERANCE (see Volume 2), labor, civil rights, good government, and child welfare devoted resources to suffrage work. Despite their different and sometimes opposing goals, women achieved unity in the late suffrage campaigns and secured congressional passage of women’s right to vote in 1919. The strong state-level organization of the National American Woman Suffrage Association brought about ratifi cation of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT in August 1920. In the suffrage struggle, the great promise of women gaining the right to vote was that they could form a block to lobby for legislation in social welfare, education, and peace. After suffrage, however, women voted much as men did, and their voting refl ected sharp political and social differences. Initial victories in the passage of the MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT (1921), minimum wage legislation, and the CABLE ACT, which secured independent citizenship for married women, were thus followed by divisions among women over the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT and the fear of losing legal protections. Despite their earlier unity, women had, in fact, different visions of what needed to be done. The majority of women did not join either a women’s party or nonpartisan organizations like the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. Most voted in ways that refl ected loyalties to a racial or ethnic group, occupation or union, religion, region, or political belief. It was not that women lacked feminist consciousness but rather that, in the decades after suffrage, women were more interested in pursuing partisan interests. The new generation of women activists held more positive views about government than did their elders and sought to expand social programs. By the 1920s, women also had emerged as activists in the Democratic and Republican parties.

WOMEN’S PUBLIC LIVES UNDER THE NEW DEAL During the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s, much of the nation experienced social and po-

litical upheaval. Responding to this crisis were many voluntary associations, which women often staffed or led. These acts of private charity and coordination of public resources did much to alleviate suffering. With unemployment as high as 25 percent nationwide and 60 percent in some cities, however, private agencies and local governments found their resources inadequate. As both citizens and public activists, women protested to stop evictions and cuts in relief. They went on strike against unfair employers, and they mobilized in support of political candidates and parties who promised to address the unemployment crisis. First lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT came to represent the activism of women in political life. She was, however, only the most visible symbol of women’s progress in electoral politics. By 1933, women had served in public office—including two governors, one senator, fourteen representatives, and hundreds—if not thousands—of state and local legislators and government officials, yet it was the women in the NEW DEAL administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who signaled the ascendancy of women to positions of power. MARY DEWSON, who headed the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee; Labor Secretary FRANCES PERKINS, the fi rst woman to serve in a presidential cabinet; and Ellen Sullivan Woodward, an administrator assigned to relief agencies, strongly infl uenced social policy. They proved to be instrumental in drafting such important legislation as the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT (1935) and the FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT (1938). During WORLD WAR II, women were engaged in supporting the war effort in a range of roles. Although the government redirected domestic resources from domestic social programs into national defense, women social workers and administrators were important for the war effort. Such individuals as MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE helped to train and mobilize young workers into defense jobs. Similarly, women were to be found in the ranks of civil defense committees, helping to organize bond and scrap drives, establishing day-care centers, and working in civilian government. In the WACs (Army), WAVES (Navy), SPARS (Coast Guard), and the Marine Corps, in the Army and Navy nursing corps, and as pilots (WASPS), more than 350,000 women entered MILITARY SERVICE during the war. Women’s patriotism and labor led workers to exceed production quotas

4

WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

and dedicate part of their earnings to Liberty Bonds and relief efforts.

WOMEN AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE POSTWAR UNITED STATES After World War II, women seemed to retreat from public life. Expected to return to the home and take up the traditional role of wife and mother, many women, however, shifted their attention to paid employment, volunteer work, and public activism. Women’s work for peace and racial justice and their founding of organizations for women’s political and sexual rights (including the Women’s Strike for Peace, the DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS, and the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN) meant that neither feminism nor women’s activism disappeared from public view. Escalating labor force participation, the new wave of women entering college, and the changing political climate opened new opportunities for women’s public activism. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American and white women focused on facing down the racial and sexual discrimination that had long haunted American society. First through the civil rights movement and second through the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT, women came to terms with the ways in which they were constrained from full participation in public life. The emergence of a strong civil rights movement in the South coincided with other efforts to shift the racial and sexual grounds of American democracy. In the mid-1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights organizations brought suit to challenge racial discrimination in public education, transport, and housing. From the 1950s to the early 1960s, public protests such as the Montgomery bus boycott, student sit-downs in cafeterias, the freedom rides to desegregate public transportation, and voting registration campaigns sought to overturn segregation laws. Women such as ROSA PARKS and FANNIE LOU HAMER were central to these efforts. In the 1960s and 1970s, consciousness of discrimination also fueled activism among Chicanas, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Paralleling these moves for racial equality was the effort of women to dismantle barriers to sex equality under the law. In 1963, the PRESIDENT’ S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN published a report which documented pervasive discrimination against women in education and

employment. Woman activists including BETTY FRIEDAN, labor advocate ESTHER PETERSON, and civil rights lawyer PAULI MURRAY founded the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN in 1964. Hundreds of bills for women’s rights were considered and passed between 1960 and 1966, including the EQUAL PAY ACT of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave women equal employment rights under TITLE VII. It was, however, the social movements of the 1960s that shifted the struggle for women’s equality from courtroom and Congress to widespread public activism. In the civil rights and antiwar movements, women organized protests, conducted voter registration campaigns, and spoke and wrote for the cause. At the same time, they often were assigned to stuff envelopes, mimeograph newsletters and fl yers, and make coffee. The gap between the words of social movements calling for human equality and the reality of men’s and women’s unequal power, even in democratic movements, came home to women as the ground shifted from civil rights to broader student struggles. By 1967, women had begun talking to each other and organizing caucuses to demand equal representation on committees and a more visible public role. Soon, however, activist women broke from the radical student organizations to form their own groups. In what came to be called women’s liberation, college-age women joined older women in creating a social movement that encompassed both public and private concerns, where the personal became political. Through their efforts, the legal and political rights of women were expanded in the areas of sexual and REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS, economic justice and fi nancial independence, EDUCATION and the professions, and personal life. MARRIAGE and divorce, child care and CHILD CUSTODY, HEALTH care, sexual assault, and domestic abuse were issues made more visible by the women’s movement. In the economic arena, an ever-growing number of women in the paid labor force faced wage and employment discrimination and occupational segregation, conditions which underwrote women’s dependence and inequality. The work of women, both in the political arena and in their voluntary efforts to establish women’s clinics, domestic shelters, and workplace and union coalitions to fi ght discrimination, not only made women visible participants in public life but fundamentally changed the landscape of American politics.

WOMEN AND THE LABOR FORCE

SUMMARY: WOMEN AND PUBLIC LIFE In the last three decades of the twentieth century, women have made enormous progress. In ever-increasing numbers, they have attended college and graduate school, taken on nontraditional professions, sought and served in political office, refi ned the character of American politics through innovative campaigns, and shifted electoral and legislative agendas in government. Not all the changes women made, however, were progressive in character. With greater activism on issues of reproduction and sexual freedom came the reaction of those who opposed women’s right to choice over their bodies and the exercise of sexual preference. Conservative women as well as liberal and radical women came to redefi ne what feminism and women’s interests were, some choosing to pursue individual freedom, others preferring to use women’s role as maternal protector in support of peace, in protest of the nuclear arms race and the death penalty, or against abortion. The power of women’s electoral and voluntary politics has changed the political landscape. While women’s inequality persists, and women lack full and equal representation in many walks

of life, they have altered the future through their visible public activism. The enormous changes in women’s public life in the twentieth century has shifted the ground of women’s struggle from winning the vote to making women’s vote and participation count. Elizabeth Faue See also: “ Violence Against Women,” p. 19; “ The Civil Rights Movement,” p. 21.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Chafe, William. The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Roles, 1920–1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Crawford, Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1989. Gustafson, Melanie, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry, eds. We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.



Women and the Labor Force uring the twentieth century, enormous changes took place in women’s work lives. They shifted from unpaid, often invisible work to paid labor. Business cycles, wars, and economic structural reorganization set constraints and opened opportunities. However, sociopolitical movements forged new language and policies that changed American understandings of women’s work. The shift from unpaid to paid work was well under way by the opening of the twentieth century. In 1900, over one-third of single women worked for wages. The fi gures for urban women not in school reached nearly four-fi fths. By 1930, nearly all single women either attended school or worked for pay, rather than performing unpaid work at home.

D

Paid labor slowly contributed to greater autonomy for single women or girls. In 1900, most immigrant and second-generation daughters lived at home and turned their entire paychecks over to their parents. They spent their leisure with their families. By 1930, more young women kept a portion of their pay for themselves, whether sneaking it from their pay envelopes or negotiating a percentage with their parents. They wanted to spend money on clothes and to socialize with their friends at amusement parks and music halls. WORLD WAR II expanded opportunities for travel and migration west for new defense jobs. In the 1960s, more women began to live on their own, delaying MARRIAGE or avoiding it entirely. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, employed immigrant women still contended with

WOMEN AND THE LABOR FORCE

parental expectations that they remain at home until marriage. Married women’s move into paid work accelerated throughout the century, especially in the years after World War II. Before the war, most married women worked at home, rearing children and keeping house. African-American wives and mothers, who worked for wages in larger numbers, were the exception. Some married women kept boarders, did laundry, or took OUTWORK (see Volume 2) that enabled them to care for their children while earning money. The number of married women working outside the home increased with each decade after World War II. Married women worked before childbirth, part-time when their children were at school, and after their children were grown. In the 1970s, a major shift occurred when married women with young children began working fulltime. During the 1930s, the GREAT DEPRESSION created massive unemployment. Americans scapegoated married women workers as well as ethnic and racial minorities, despite the dire circumstances pushing them to seek work. Laws outlawed married women’s employment. More than 1,600 women lost their jobs. College graduates were discouraged from seeking employment,

“ career women” were criticized, and women in general were blamed for intensifying the unemployment crisis. Conversely WORLD WAR I and WORLD WAR II created a demand for more workers. During both wars, women temporarily found employment in “ men’s jobs,” especially in wartime production. In World War II, even married women were encouraged to work in defense plants, although the companies maintained gender job distinctions. The employment of married women created a demand for child care, but the belief that married women really belonged at home limited the number of federal day-care centers. In the 1950s, assumptions about women being temporary workers continued, despite the booming postwar economy’s demand for more workers. When the numbers of single women fell short, employers hired married women to fi ll the jobs. Part-time employment rose. Nonetheless, popular attitudes maligned employed married women, who still saw themselves as primarily HOMEMAKERS contributing extras to the family, rather than its main support. These same assumptions infl uenced employers’ decisions, as the United States shifted from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to a service and global economy over the twentieth

Percentage of Men and Women in the Labor Force, 1890– 2000 100

Men Women

80

60

40

20

NA

0 1890

1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1995

2000

Sources: 1890–1930: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 131–32. 1980–2000: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1989, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Wahington, D.C., 1989), p. 376.

WOMEN AND THE LABOR FORCE

century. The shift was dramatic. In 1900, nearly three-quarters of employed women worked in agriculture, DOMESTIC SERVICE, and factories or shops, often in exploitative sweatshops. By 2000, the areas of employment changed. The proportion of women in agriculture and domestic service dropped to under 3 percent each, as women moved into clerical, service, professional and managerial jobs. However, the timing of the change varied by ethnic or racial group. Many Japanese Americans did not leave domestic service until after World War II; most urban AFRICAN AMERICANS remained domestics until replaced by HISPANIC AMERICANS with the surge of immigration after 1965. Sweatshops, which had declined in the 1930s, reappeared in the apparel industry in the 1980s. As American businesses opened low-wage factories in other countries, U.S. wages and working conditions deteriorated. In the 1990s evidence surfaced of immigrant women brought to the United States for slave labor as domestic, sex, garment, and fi eld workers. When employers reorganized the workplace, adopted new technology, or opened new types of establishments, the gender-typed jobs might switch. For example, male shopkeepers selling ready-made clothing replaced women dressmaking and millinery proprietors at the turn of the century. Women supplanted men in CLERICAL WORK (see Volume 2), banks, restaurants, and real estate. However, cultural assumptions infl uenced employers’ choices. Airlines and restaurauteurs assumed that attractive young women would please their predominately male customers. Employers expected to pay low wages to youthful and inexperienced female office and retail workers. These gendered cultural assumptions about who worked and why infl uenced how contemporaries interpreted business cycles and wars, and how business choices contributed to restructuring the economy. Throughout the century, sociopolitical movements promoted policies affecting women’s employment and provided the language for debates on women’s work. Progressives of the early 1900s, for example, debated whether women should have rights equal to men’s or be treated differently, and whether women were better served by unions or government laws. Within this context, they considered whether work victimized or “ emancipated” women.

7

Dismayed by the hardships of immigrant and native-born women working in sweatshops and factories, reformers portrayed them as victims of oppressive employers and their own families. To improve their work conditions, reformers promoted PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION, such as minimum wage and maximum hour laws specifically for women. In 1908 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in MULLER V. OREGON that states could protect women by limiting their hours of work. In contrast to this image of helplessness, some suffragists hailed new middle-class jobs, like SOCIAL WORK, as opportunities for women to become independent or “ emancipated.” These two portrayals of working women hardened in the 1920s after the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT passed. The NATIONAL WOMAN’ S PARTY called for an EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA) to extend equal treatment. Most reformers, however, opposed the ERA because it would have eliminated protective labor legislation for women. The drive for unionization of unskilled and semiskilled factory workers in the 1930s reinforced the reformers’ image of working-class women as victims. The union movement’s efforts to restore self-esteem and power to failed male breadwinners confi ned women to the roles of symbolic victims or “ Union Maids” who battled bosses in female auxiliaries. The limited role for women nearly erased their contribution to the union movement from historical memory, despite women’s major role in earlier labor struggles. Even the federal government’s pro-union Works Progress Administration (WPA) theater productions portrayed women as junior partners who inspired their men to take action. This same image of women continued in the celebrated 1954 fi lm SALT OF THE EARTH, which chronicled a real strike by male Mexican-American miners in New Mexico whose overburdened wives pressured their husbands to include household issues as strike demands. Working women’s views about their own work were more complex than those of reformers, unions, or suffragists. They did not share the sense of a division between working-class women as victims (or at best as militant helpers) and middle-class women as “ emancipated.” Middleclass women had their own struggles at work. Those in men’s occupations, like doctors and LAWYERS, needed to prove their competence in fi elds where professionalism was defi ned as masculine. Those in middle-class “ women’s” fi elds,

WOMEN AND THE LABOR FORCE

like teaching, social work, library work, and NURSING also agonized about status. Nurses struggled to prove their professional efficiency and still maintain the caring attitude expected of women. Social workers worried about their low wages, low-status clients, “ hard-boiled” image, and the need to remain feminine. Some social workers even downplayed the professional traits of ambition and specialized knowledge, and some organized trade unions, rather than the more typical professional association. At times, working-class women shared the reformers’ view of them as victims. Domestics felt victimized when employers did not treat them humanely. Saleswomen resented management efforts to impose dress codes. Nevertheless, working-class women rejected reformers’ characterization of their work as degrading and took pride in their skills and resourcefulness. They developed a work culture that gave them infl uence over their work. For example, waitresses developed informal practices that they taught to new coworkers, such as taking turns calling in sick when bosses overstaffed them. Chicana cannery workers in California shared coping techniques, such as using cold cream to protect their skin from the irritating peach fuzz. Saleswomen scheduled long appointments with special customers, exploiting their relationships with customers to thwart management control. This work culture often gave rise to unions or strike activity. Although working women held their own selfimages, the language and policies of Progressive reformers, suffragists, and the labor movement shaped government policies and national discussions about working women for decades, until the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement inspired Second Wave feminism in the 1970s to develop new ways to think about women workers as well as new policies. New feminist organizations such as the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) shared the civil rights movement’s emphasis on equality and integration. NOW called for an “ equal partnership of the sexes” and went to court to insure an enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination by sex and race. At fi rst, feminists echoed the older policy goal of “ equal pay for equal work,” but they soon began to question the formula’s effectiveness at equalizing salaries, because men and women occupied different jobs in a “ sex segregated” labor market. Feminists

then called for a reevaluation of salaries based on “ comparative worth,” the use of objective criteria like education, skill, and responsibility. The policy of affirmative action sought to promote equity and integration by the employment of underrepresented groups. Although it benefi ted women, affirmative action’s challenge to men’s work cultures contributed to a backlash in the 1990s. Women also sought to promote equal treatment by establishing rules for defi ning appropriate behavior at work, particularly by banning SEXUAL HARASSMENT. Such abuse was not new in the workplace. Between 1910 and 1940, AfricanAmerican mothers in the South sent their daughters to Northern cities to avoid the sexual advances of men in homes where they worked as domestics. Factory workers had long complained about the advances of foremen who had the power to hire and fi re. Women in CLERICAL WORK resented the jokes about the “ pretty typewriter” girl. Until the 1970s, women accepted sexual harassment as a part of life, even though individuals sometimes retaliated against persecutors. As sexual harassment became recognized as a form of workplace discrimination, some women turned to the EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC) for redress. The discussion of sexual harassment in the workplace gained national attention in 1991 when Anita Hill, an attorney for the EEOC, accused Clarence Thomas, the head of the agency and President George Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. The Black Power movement’s veneration of African-American culture inspired feminists to celebrate feminine styles of work. Feminists contrasted the nurturing style of nursing and MIDWIFERY with doctors whom they accused of sexism, arrogance, and invasive high-tech birthing procedures. Conservatives contributed to the shaping of American understanding of working women in the 1980s and 1990s. The economic wing of the New Right believed that the unregulated market could eliminate uncompetitive companies and spread wealth. When small businesses made a resurgence and women’s numbers grew dramatically, ENTREPRENEURS such as Debbi Fields of the Mrs. Fields Cookies chain were touted as proof of opportunity for enterprising business women. This new emphasis on business reinforced feminist approval of women who moved into male

WOMEN AND THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

jobs, giving rise to media attention to the few women in executive positions. Nonetheless, the long-standing critique of “ career women” tempered the glorifi cation of entrepreneurs. Popular culture criticized women wearing “ power suits” as symbols of corporate power, wealth, and unnatural womanhood. As early as 1976 Faye Dunaway, in the fi lm Network, played a corporate executive with no soul. By the 1990s, such criticism became even more common: The hero in the 1996 fi lm Jerry Maguire replaced his driven, high-powered girlfriend with a nurturing, subordinate, working woman. Paid work was fi ne as long as women maintained perceived feminine qualities. At the same time, feminists complained that a GLASS CEILING curbed women’s rise up the corporate ladder. The transformation from unpaid to paid work as well as business cycles, wars, and economic restructuring shaped women’s experiences in the workforce. However, until the 1970s, assumptions about single women as temporary workers framed the understanding of those experiences. The contemporary social-political movements shaped the language and government policies that fashioned varied understandings of women’s work. Early in the century, the Progressives and labor movement divided women

9

workers into victims or “ emancipated” women, although working women themselves held more complex views about their work experiences. Beginning in the 1970s, the civil rights and Black Power movements shaped feminist goals of equality and pride in distinctly feminine skills, while conservatism promoted an ambiguous appreciation of entrepreneurship. Carole Srole See also: American Federation of Labor (AFL/CIO); Asian Americans; Business and Industry; Equal Pay Acts of 1963 and 1972; Native Americans; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire; Unions, Labor. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994. Gluck, Sherna Berger. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out-to-Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.



Women and the Consumer Society ll people in the modern United States depend on consumer goods to meet their needs. Shopping and buying, however, are generally identifi ed as female activities. Bumper stickers declaring “ Born to Shop” remind us that consumption is one of women’s most visible contemporary roles. The story of women as consumers begins long before the twentieth century and involves more than simply buying things. Through different uses of their purchasing power, women navigated changing social conditions and found resources to express themselves as workers, citizens, and individuals.

A

MAKING A CONSUMER SOCIETY Historians disagree about the origins of a consumer society in the United States. Some scholars focus on the nineteenth century and the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (see Volume 2). They argue that mass production led to changes that created a consumer society. Others emphasize the relationship of changes in consumer taste and behavior to economic change. Much recent scholarship explores what historian of technology Ruth Schwartz Cowan has called “ the consumption junction” : the intersection where producers and consumers struggle over economic, social, and personal interests.

WOMEN AND THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

Many historians now believe that the story of the consumer society began during the eighteenth century with the desires of a growing urban population for a greater range of fashionable goods. By the nineteenth century, the new consumer orientation of households combined with emerging ideals about female domesticity to identify women with consumption. Historians write about a “ consumer revolution” but change occurred both gradually and unevenly. The consumer society spread first to urban areas and the affluent and later to rural areas and the poor. New production methods also coexisted with traditional manufacturing practices. Mamie Garvin’s experiences illustrate this complex transformation. In 1913 Garvin, an African American, traveled from her home in Charleston, South Carolina, to Boston to earn money for her trousseau. She worked by day in a garment factory, sewing PIECEWORK (see Volume 2) with Polish and Italian immigrant women. By night, Garvin and two friends copied styles from ladies’ magazines to custommake fashions for Boston’s African-American, middle-class women. If the consumer society created a revolution, it was a long and complicated one.

WOMEN AND WORK Women’s unpaid domestic work as well as their wage labor took new forms in the consumer society. Rising standards of living pressured women to put more time and energy into household consumption while consumer capitalism opened up new types of paid jobs for women. Mass production of goods made factory work processes more specialized and mechanized, and separated laborers from the fi nal product. Mass consumption, however, had very different effects on housework. The job of HOMEMAKER remained highly unspecialized, personalized, and time-consuming. Fashionable ready-made clothing offered more choices, yet took more time for shopping and washing. The automobile created a new workplace for suburban homemakers: the driver’s seat. Advertisers’ warnings of the social stigma of “ ring around the collar” or “ halitosis” manipulated female responsibility for house-hold consumption into social pressure and guilt. Poor women suffered additional indignities when they could not afford the clothing and household fur-

nishings that meant respectability to middle-class employers, teachers, and social workers. Women’s consumer responsibilities in the home also led to new education and employment opportunities. HOME ECONOMICS classes in high schools and colleges created more teaching jobs for women instructors. In business, companies anxious to appeal to “ Mrs. Consumer” hired college-educated home economists for positions in product development, testing, and demonstration. From her test kitchen at Corning Glass Works, Lucy Maltby wrote recipes as well as shaped the company’s market research, technological innovation, and public relations from 1929 to 1965. Women’s DOMESTIC ARTS (see Volume 2) also found a new place in the consumer society. Maria Martinez, a Pueblo Indian, learned pottery making from the women in her family. Basing her work on traditional designs rediscovered by archeologists, Martinez became an internationally known artist by the 1920s. Buyers valued the “ traditional” and “ authentic” qualities of the pottery, and its popularity created new appreciation for Native American culture. At the same time, her buyers’ taste for “ Indian” pottery limited Martinez’s artistic choices. Following the Pueblo “ traditions” expected by her clients meant that Martinez could not experiment with new technologies or designs. Consumer society both supported and constrained opportunities for women skilled in domestic arts. In the twentieth century personal ambitions, economic need, education, and skills encouraged increasing numbers of women to enter the paid workforce. Consumer culture provided resources for working women to express their rights and expand their impact in the workplace. Young immigrant women who worked in urban factories at the turn of the century used consumer culture to assert their rights as workers and as women. Clara Lemlich, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine who became a labor organizer and leader, demanded not only higher wages and shorter hours but also cloakrooms for women workers. Lemlich wanted the owners to recognize the right of factory operatives to be both laborers and ladies. Many working-class women, including Appalachian textile workers, Irish-American telephone operators, native-born stenographers, and Mexican-American cannery workers, bought fashionable things as a way to defi ne their individual identities.

WOMEN AND THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

The consumer society created a new arena for consumption, the department store, which became a new workplace for women. Sales clerks balanced the advantages of a glamorous work setting fi lled with stylish merchandise against the disadvantages of low wages, little opportunity for advancement, and male supervisors’ patronizing control. Saleswomen who became buyers forged a female specialty within the male world of management, earning attractive wages and providing role models for female coworkers. In the urban department store, women workers negotiated with middle-class women buyers and male managers to earn income, respect, and recognition. Consumer society linked women with new roles and opportunities in public life, offering them complicated routes toward economic and personal autonomy.

WOMEN AS CITIZENS Before and after gaining the vote, women expressed their citizenship through consumer activities. Women used the language and relations of consumption to defend their political interests, demand rights, and shape the practice of American politics. At the turn of the twentieth century, consumer culture provided the reunited SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT with new arguments and tactics to promote women’s rights. Some suffrage leaders justifi ed women’s capacity for voting on the basis of the skills required for shopping: Women voters would use skills developed through comparison shopping to evaluate different candidates’ merits, and apply household thriftiness to scrutinize corporate and government spending. Suffragist organizers also borrowed advertisers’ methods. “ Votes for Women” appeared on giant billboards and the sides of streetcars; in busy city centers suffragists paraded wearing sandwich boards and selling suffrage newspapers. Portraying women voters as citizen consumers, the suffragists contributed campaign strategies to American politics as they popularized women’s rights. Women reformers also found resources in the consumer society to promote their political agendas. Under the leadership of FLORENCE KELLEY, the NATIONAL CONSUMERS LEAGUE (NCL) mobilized middle-class woman consumers to oppose exploitative labor practices and protect woman workers. Kelley encouraged woman

shoppers to buy goods carrying the NCL White Label, signifying that the manufacturer had met stringent factory, labor, and sanitation standards. The NCL translated female moral responsibility for the welfare of woman workers into a political voice for PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION. Women’s role as purchasers for their families provided a powerful tool for working-class women to fi ght for their rights. Immigrant Jewish homemakers in early-twentieth-century New York organized boycotts and rent strikes to force merchants and landlords to reduce prices. In the 1930s African-American women in Detroit formed the Housewives League. Members pledged to patronize merchants and professionals in their local community, thus spending their dollars to help black businesses and families survive the hard times. The League’s strategy of combining consumer advocacy with boycotts and picketing later became a model for the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and other civil rights activism in the 1950s. In the 1970s, MexicanAmerican and Chicana women urged middle-class housewives to boycott grapes in support of farm workers’ rights. Middle-class women gained new political awareness from their exposure to the civil rights agenda of the United Farm Workers. At the same time Chicana organizers and workers became more conscious of gender inequality and experienced empowerment as women. Through consumer activism women developed political consciousness and brought about change.

WOMANHOOD In the consumer society, advertising created new forms of communication to both educate and persuade buyers. Advertisers used images of womanhood to infl uence consumer attitudes and behavior. At the same time, women found new ways to use consumption to present images of themselves and their hopes. These varied and often competing representations of womanhood reveal the very public and the very personal meanings that consumer society offered women in the modern United States. By the 1920s advertising trade journals estimated that women were responsible for 85 percent of consumer spending. Popular notions about womanhood powerfully shaped advertisers’ messages. In addition, advertisers’

A WOMAN’S BODY

preoccupation with women encouraged women to become preoccupied with themselves. Most advertisements depicted consumers as not only female but also white and middle-class. Women of color encountered few, and often negative, depictions of their roles in consumer society. Aunt Jemima, a housemaid pictured on pancake mix boxes, portrayed African-American women as simple, uneducated, and subservient. Asian, Latina, and other women of color rarely appeared in mainstream advertising until the 1970s. Despite advertising’s limited and often damaging portrayal of female consumers, women found a range of ways to express themselves and their desires through consumption. After passing through Ellis Island in New York Harbor or Angel Island outside San Francisco, a young immigrant woman’s fi rst purchase was often readymade American clothing to symbolize her newly constructed American self. Immigrant mothers, by purchasing foreign-language publications and traditional foods from neighborhood markets,

also used consumption to express American ethnic identity. Women of color dressing attractively in current fashions and ethnic styles created public self-images that declared their right to selfdefi nition and provided an alternative to racist stereotypes. The “ consumption junction” where women interacted with changing economic and social institutions presented them with a complex blend of promises and challenges. The study of consumer society helps explain the varied and often contradictory roles of women in the twentieth century. Nancy Page Fernandez

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Glickman, Lawrence. Consumer Society in American History: A Reader. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Scanlon, Jennifer, ed. The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000.



A Woman’s Body he battlefi eld for many of women’s struggles during the twentieth century was woman’s body. Women made tremendous gains in sexuality, HEALTH care, and REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS during the twentieth century, but by the end of the century, conservative backlash threatened to erode earlier gains in access to safe, legal ABORTION. Though attempts to challenge the dominant conceptions of appearance were made, many feminists believed that by the end of the century the ideal appearance had changed for the worse.

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APPEARANCE Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists struck out against unhealthy FASHION standards. In the nineteenth century feminists counseled against corsets and long voluminous skirts. They succeeded in modifying clothing by the 1890s when GIBSON GIRLS (see Volume 2), young, healthy, athletic women, loosened their corsets and trimmed their skirts.

In the early twentieth century, clothing followed those simpler lines. In the 1920s short skirts and bound breasts were a major break from the past, displaying a new woman who was more boyish and who might do masculine things like pilot airplanes. Subdued by the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s, women turned back to simpler dresses with longer skirts. In the 1940s, they wore slacks and shoulder-padded jackets refl ecting the masculine roles women were taking in war industries and the armed services. With the back-to-the-home movement of the 1950s, fashion turned to a revised interpretation of the nineteenth-century hourglass fi gure. Women cinched their waists and lifted their breasts with various undergarments— corset-like “ merry widows,” waist cinchers, girdles, and bras. In a dramatic turnaround, the youth movement of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s advocated comfortable, natural clothing without restraint—characterized most

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forcefully by the protest at the MISS AMERICA PAGEANT in 1968 where restrictive garments were thrown into a trash can. Counterculture women abandoned bras and makeup. For the career-minded, pantsuits refl ected women’s goals of career success. The post-feminist 1980s and 1990s were notable for a more unattainable and, many believe, unhealthy obsession with slenderness. The body itself became an artistic canvas. Rather than merely using clothing to adorn their bodies, some women decorated them with piercing and tattoos. In trying to achieve the perfect body, many women, at the end of the twentieth century, were turning to fi tness programs and rigid discipline over diet—sometimes crossing the line to eating disorders. Because of the complex way in which images are updated for novelty and replicated incessantly in our media-obsessed culture, the goal of healthy realistic ideals for women’s appearance was perhaps the most diffi cult objective to achieve.

SEXUALITY By the turn of the twentieth century, a SEXUAL for women was in progress. Working-class women who lived in cities began to frequent new spaces for leisure—dance halls, movie houses, and amusement parks. Dating in public began to replace visiting at women’s homes as a rite of courtship. By the 1920s, middle-class women entered this public space as well. While the dating system took away some of women’s power to control sexuality, it also gave them more freedom of sexual expression. Some historians point out that the date implied a bargain. Men paid for dinner and amusement and expected sexual favors in return. With greater privacy and more opportunity, many working-class women were initiated into premarital sexual intercourse. By the 1920s, middle-class women were adopting these mores. Of the women who became adults in the 1920s, about 50 percent had sexual intercourse before marriage. This proportion remained stable until the 1960s. During these decades, most women reserved premarital intercourse for men whom they planned to marry. During WORLD WAR II, many men and women gave lip service to this moral standard, but became engaged numerous times. In the postwar 1950s, there was an attempt to return to simpler times with steady dating, early MARREVOLUTION

RIAGE, and premarital intercourse in committed relationships. During the 1960s, a different kind of sexual revolution took place. Women no longer restricted their sexual activity to men they could trust, experimenting with partners more freely. By the 1980s, 80 percent of women had experienced sexual intercourse before marriage and marriage was coming at a later age. Acceptance of cohabitation without marriage became commonplace. The AIDS epidemic that began at this time changed contraceptive use, but did not necessarily turn back the sexual revolution. Condom use increased while use of oral contraceptives decreased. At the same time, the percentage of adolescent women who experienced sexual intercourse and multiple partners remained static. A return to the sexual mores of the 1950s did not occur. During the 1980s and 1990s signifi cant gains were made by LESBIAN women who declared their sexuality and worked for rights that they were denied. By the end of the century, lesbians were expressing their commitment to one another openly. In addition, they were gaining rights of CHILD CUSTODY and adoption, as well as recognition of their partners by employers, health plans, and hospitals.

WOMEN’S HEALTH MOVEMENT During the colonial and early national periods, women—as wives, mothers, healers, and midwives—dispensed most health care. With the professionalization of medical care in the nineteenth century, male doctors were able to get laws on the books that prevented the practice of MEDICINE by persons untrained at medical colleges (see Volume 2). At fi rst, women were not accepted into medical schools, and only after protracted struggles were they admitted in very small numbers. By the turn of the twentieth century, though midwives were still delivering many of the babies in the country, medicine, and, most particularly, reproductive practices, were becoming the domains of male doctors. Childbirth had become unnatural, with lengthy periods of hospitalization and separation of mother and baby. In the late 1960s when the nascent women’s movement gave women the encouragement to question their treatment, they found much that was not to their liking. They asserted that they were not allowed to make informed choices about their medical care, and that medical research was

4

A WOMAN’S BODY

most often carried out on men, with no concern about how women would react to treatments being tested. Women also found many male doctors to be condescending and arrogant. The women’s health movement came into its own—publishing self-help manuals like OUR BODIES, OURSELVES in 1969 (see Documents) and agitating for changes in the health-care system. Many women learned about their bodies through self-help clinics where they viewed themselves with the aid of speculums and mirrors and learned to diagnose and treat themselves. Women activists testifi ed before Congress and government agencies and fi led lawsuits connected to such issues as the safety of contraception, the availability of abortion, and the cessation of sterilization abuse. It helped that women were fl ocking to medical schools. By 1999, 22 percent of physicians in the United States were women.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS Of all the changes regarding women’s bodies that occurred in the twentieth century, none was more important than the control of reproduction. Without control over whether or not to have children and when to have them, other gains for women would be limited. Knowledge of birth control was severely hampered by the 1873 COMSTOCK LAW (see Volume 2) that banned “ obscene” materials from the mail, including birth control information. In addition, most states had laws restricting the dissemination of birth control. MARGARET SANGER was arrested in 1916 for fl outing these laws. Though the Comstock Law’s ban on birth control was overturned in 1936, women still had limited options until 1960. In that year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill. It was the fi rst reliable contraceptive under the control of women that separated the use of birth control from sexual activity. Within fi ve years, the pill was the most popular form of birth control in the United States. Though women were fl ocking to the pill, there were disturbing rumors of possible dangerous side effects—blood-clotting disorders that could sometimes lead to death. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) held hearings on the safety of the pill in 1970. These all-male hearings about a matter that was of primary concern for women galvanized the women’s health movement. Feminists did not want to throw out the pill; they wanted women to be able to choose whether to use it,

with all the information about the side effects available to them. After a lengthy fi ght, eventually the Food and Drug Administration required inserts to be packaged with the pill so that women could exercise informed consent. This was a formidable victory for all prescription users, as it became standard procedure for all medications. This success led feminist health activists to move on to other reproductive rights issues— particularly the legalization of ABORTION. This confl ict would prove to be the most difficult battle in the war over women’s bodies. From the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, abortion was prohibited in all states. Still experts estimated that hundreds of thousands of abortions took place each year in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During the 1960s, many state abortion laws were repealed and therapeutic abortions were legalized. Usually a woman had to convince a board of doctors that she needed an abortion to safeguard her physical or mental health. In 1973 the Supreme Court made one of the most important decisions in United States history. ROE V. WADE legalized abortion in the fi rst trimester of pregnancy. Soon after Roe v. Wade, abortion became widely available; however, a backlash against the Supreme Court ruling led to a raging battle in the 1980s and 1990s between pro-choice and pro-life groups. At the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, women were being held to a higher standard of physical perfection than ever before. At the same time, their right to sexual freedom, though opposed by religious groups and clouded by the specter of sexually transmitted diseases, seemed stronger than ever. The women’s health movement had made great strides, but its achievements had not reached many poor women. Birth control was safer and more reliable than ever before, but the opportunity for safe legal abortion was diminished. While signifi cant gains were made in the twentieth century regarding a woman’s body, none came without considerable struggle. Bonnie L. Ford See also: Hyde Amendment; Midwifery; National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League; National Right to Life Coalition; Planned Parenthood. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

D’Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press, 1988. Seid, Roberta P. “ Too ‘ Close to the Bone’: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with

Slenderness.” In Fallon, Patricia, et al., eds., Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders. New York: The Guilford Press, 1991. Solinger, Ricky, ed. Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.



Violence Against Women iolence against women has a complex history that has barely been explored. Even a widely accepted definition has been difficult to agree upon. Violence against women could include RAPE, incest, PORNOGRAPHY, and various forms of emotional or psychological abuse. This essay will focus on wife beating, the form of violence toward women that has attracted the most attention from American courts and scholars. Violence against wives has been both accepted and commonplace throughout most of American history. The Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies passed laws against spousal violence in the seventeenth century, but courts were reluctant to separate couples and were critical of wives who acted independently. Indeed, husbands then and later routinely and successfully defended violence as a means of subduing and “ correcting” wives who disobeyed them. Violence against wives apparently declined during the nineteenth century, for several reasons. Growing numbers of middle-class couples believed that relations between spouses ought to be characterized by mutual respect, not masculine dominance and feminine submission. Violence in general, including homicide rates, fell as people became more settled and as society placed more emphasis on self-restraint. Other forms of violence against women remained commonplace by the turn of the twentieth century, however. Violence toward prostitutes was both widespread and accepted. The concept of marital rape did not exist, for women were expected to submit to intercourse when their husbands required it. By 1900 these social changes had affected the nation’s legal climate. Wives could secure a di-

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vorce on the grounds of physical cruelty alone in a growing number of states. The post–C ivil War WOMEN’ S RIGHTS MOVEMENT (see Volume 2) had sometimes focused on wife beating. Many men continued to hit their wives in the early twentieth century, particularly in rural areas. City women had more options. Police officers, though wary of intervening in family disputes, might arrest a violent husband. Most urban couples did not enjoy a great deal of privacy around 1900. Many lived in boardinghouses, apartments, or in small houses in crowded residential areas. S. C. Hilton of Portland, Oregon, recalled an evening when he and a friend were sitting on his front porch and noticed “ quite a gathering” down the street. A neighboring couple was in the middle of an argument. The wife loudly refused to “ go back in the house again with you for you to beat me.” The husband “ seemed to get ashamed” and slunk back home. Hilton invited the wife and her child to stay with him and his wife for a few days. She did—and soon fi led for divorce. This sort of willingness to assist abused wives declined during the twentieth century. One study found that neighbors and friends had constituted 46 percent of people who had intervened against violent husbands in the mid-nineteenth century and just 14 percent in the mid1950s. Homes had become larger and more isolated. Couples were less likely to live with boarders, servants, and extended family. Attitudes also shifted. In the 1970s a woman who had just been beaten by her husband fl ed barefoot from her home. She appeared at a neighbor’s door, desperate for help, only to be met with rejection: “ We don’t want to get involved,” the woman said. Violence apparently rose during the twentieth century. MARRIAGE became more and more

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emotionally intense, creating opportunities for both increased intimacy and increased disappointment and confl ict as husbands and wives expected more of each other. Husbands were also becoming more violent because society as a whole was emphasizing self-realization at the expense of self-restraint. Twentieth-century advertisers urged people to indulge themselves. Banks invited clients to borrow rather than to save. These shifting norms affected how people acted when they were angry. By the 1920s enraged husbands were more likely to act upon rather than to curb their emotions. These husbands, moreover, were married to women who were less and less likely to defer to them. Twentieth-century wives enjoyed easier access to divorce and employment than ever before. The growth of government programs for impoverished mothers meant that leaving one’s husband did not necessarily lead to losing one’s children. All of this meant that wives could afford to expect more from their husbands than just economic support. These wives, like their husbands, increasingly asserted a right to pursue their own happiness. “ Wife beating,” as historian Linda Gordon observes, “ arose not just from subordination but also from contesting it.” This is not to say that assertive wives were responsible for the violence they suffered. Rather, women’s growing determination to reject male dominance enhanced both their chances for respect and autonomy and their chances of being hit. Marginal women—poor women and women of color—were especially apt to resist men’s attempts to dominate them. A study of women imprisoned for homicide in 1926 found that 124 out of 161 were African-American, and many of these women had killed their husbands or boyfriends. Native American and working-class women were more likely than white, middle-class women to fi ght abusive spouses. There were, therefore, many reasons why husbands might have become more violent during the twentieth century. But did violence against wives actually increase? This is a very diffi cult question to answer, for the vast majority of violent acts that occurred within the family went unrecorded. Testimony presented in divorce suits offers telling clues, however. Twentiethcentury wives became more and more likely to describe husbands who utilized violence quickly and without restraint, who hit them rather than calling them names, for example. More so than nineteenth-century divorce seekers, these

women spoke of husbands who regularly beat them from head to toe, who broke their bones, or burned them with cigarettes. Husbands’ violence was becoming more extreme in part because its causes were becoming more diffuse, more varied. Violent husbands of the early nineteenth century had usually hit their wives for very specifi c reasons: an action or attitude on the wife’s part that the husband considered unacceptable. But by the 1920s more and more husbands were hitting their wives for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the women’s actions or attitudes. One mother recalled that her son-in-law “ would come home from the mill cross and cranky, and throw things around.” If her daughter “ would try to talk to him he would slap her.” Violence against wives became both more commonplace and more recognized during the last half of the twentieth century. Marital expectations reached unprecedented heights, even as husbands and wives alike asserted unprecedented rights to pursue their own happiness. A recovering wife abuser in the 1990s recalled that he had expected his wife to “ love me and fi x me and be my everything.” Violence often fl ourished in this intense environment. Other forms of violence against women also rose in the 1960s and 1970s. Reports of rape skyrocketed, as did the availability of violent pornography. But a profound shift in public awareness regarding violence against women appeared in the 1970s. Feminists, churches, community groups, and social workers across the nation began organizing dozens and then hundreds of hotlines and shelters for battered women. The battered women’s movement was part of a growing sensitivity to exploitation in general and to the oppression of women in particular. The battered women’s movement has been extraordinarily successful. In the early 1970s battered wives had virtually no one to turn to other than family and friends. Abused women across the country can now seek refuge in shelters where they and their children can at least begin to sort out their options in a safe and supportive environment. Police officers—who once treated wife beating as a private matter—have become much more likely to arrest husbands, and these husbands are often directed to mandatory counseling. The movement has also brought an unprecedented amount of public attention to wife beating. The press ignored violence against wives during the 1960s. In 1977

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the New York Times published 44 articles on the subject. Popular culture discovered wife beating and featured it in a number of fi lms. Feminists also identifi ed and publicized related problems, including dating violence, emotional or psychological abuse, and marital rape. Violence against wives appeared to be declining at the close of the twentieth century. Spousal killings constituted a bit more than 12 percent of homicides in 1974. In 1994, they made up just 5 percent of such deaths. Reported acts of wife beating began to decline in the mid-1990s. But such statistics are difficult to interpret. The falling rate of spousal homicides, for example, may simply indicate that people are marrying later or not at all. Even with increased public funding, violence against wives and the other forms of abuse that accompany it will be difficult to eradicate. The average man still enjoys substantial physical, economic, and social advantages over the average woman. Most marriages are therefore characterized by inequality, and inequality can easily become a breed-

7

ing ground for cruelty and violence—especially when inequalities are unrecognized. History shows that the causes and even the extent of wife beating have changed over time. But it also indicates that violence against wives is a deeply rooted part of our national history. David Peterson del Mar See also: Divorce; Feminism, Radical; New Woman, the; Welfare.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Gordon, Linda. Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880–1960. New York: Viking, 1988. Peterson del Mar, David. What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.



The Civil Rights Movement HISTORICAL BACKGROUND he images of the civil rights movement are vividly etched in the minds of Americans who witnessed the violence of white Americans upon black American citizens. The televised coverage of police dogs attacking peaceful protestors, tearing their clothing and their fl esh; the rush of water from fi re hoses knocking them to the ground; and the stinging clouds of tear gas blinding American citizens shocked people across the nation. Racial justice and civil rights could no longer be considered a regional issue. The United States emerged from World War II a global superpower, having defended democracy abroad. By the 1950s, capitalism became a global image of the American system, particularly when compared to communism. How could the super democracy explain the scenes of civil rights confl icts taking place in U.S. cities? These violent undemocratic practices embarrassed the nation’s leaders and shocked the international community even as America staked its claim to moral leadership of the free world. The legal, cultural,

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and ideological system of race differences had its roots in SLAVERY (see Volume 2). The CIVIL WAR and RECONSTRUCTION (see Volume 2) brought signifi cant gains, particularly with the three constitutional amendments passed during these years. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to African Americans and guaranteed them equal protection under the law. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave all male citizens the right to vote. Women, regardless of color, could not vote. When African Americans tried to claim their constitutional rights, however, they encountered bitter resistance, often by institutions of their own government. For a brief period during Reconstruction black men could vote and hold political office in the Southern states. That window closed shut when Northern occupation of Southern states ended in the 1870s. White supremacists quickly turned back the laws within the states and denied not only voting rights, but access to education, employment, and freedom of movement.

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The segregationist era of Jim Crow dominated the South but patterns of race-based discrimination existed throughout the United States. The civil rights movement had earlier precursors in the twentieth century, but the term generally refers to the groups and actions that took deliberate steps to gain equal constitutional protection for Americans regardless of race in the years since 1940. Movement activists struggled for equal education, employment, housing, public accommodations and voting rights. Most civil rights groups used nonviolent methods, including sit-ins, boycotts, and marches. They endured despite murders, lynchings, beatings, bombings, and arrests. Finally, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, discriminatory practices against African Americans, other minorities, and women began to erode in earnest.

WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The women of the twentieth century have a long record of activism. However, the names of only a few are familiar to us. Most histories of the civil rights movement emphasize the leadership of male clergy or black male radicals. Women’s involvement in civil rights began to be told in the 1980s by journalist Paula Giddings, activist Angela Davis, and historians such as Darlene Clark Hine and Anne Standley. Yet the actions of legions of women in this campaign continue to be collapsed into a few names. This essay introduces a few less familiar activists and the issues they promoted.

Education Slaves in the nineteenth century had not been permitted an education; in fact, it was a crime to teach a slave to read. In addition, racial segregation and poverty created poorly staffed and underfunded schools for African Americans. Large numbers of African Americans did not know how to read and write, a fact that contributed to limited economic options. Nevertheless, education became a personal and community responsibility. Clubs and organizations raised funds to support schools locally as well as in other states. Teaching became one of the few avenues for professional jobs, and literacy campaigns became an essential fi rst step for many in the civil rights movement. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme

Court ruled unanimously that the “ separate but equal” doctrine justifying racial segregation of students in public schools was unconstitutional. Despite this landmark ruling, Southern whites mobilized to fi ght school integration. Septima Poinsetta Clark (1898– 1987) graduated from high school at 18. She had no teaching experience, yet she served as the principal of a two-teacher school with 132 students in South Carolina. Conditions at the school were deplorable, and attendance sporadic since many students had to work in the fi elds. These injustices moved Clark to become active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization fi ghting racial inequality. In 1956, when the South Carolina legislature decreed that no state employee could belong to the NAACP, Clark was one of 11 African-American teachers fi red. She had taught 40 years. Clark continued to work in education, but in a different setting. As director of workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, she taught African Americans to read and write and prepared them to pass the voter registration test. One of Highlander’s better-known students, ROSA PARKS, applied its principles when she refused to give up her seat on a bus and was arrested, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott.

Public Accommodations One of the most visible institutions of Southern segregation laws was the separation of blacks and whites in restaurants, hotels, and other public facilities, and on public transportation. The AfricanAmerican women of Montgomery, Alabama, who often worked as maids in the homes of white families, used public transportation in large numbers. Despite the fact that the bus company relied on their business, drivers treated them rudely, failed to stop at regular bus stops, and on occasion threw them off the bus. After long hours of menial labor, Montgomery’s black workers had to stand in the back of the bus, leaving the front seats reserved for whites. Representatives of the black community, men and women, met with politicians and bus company representatives for years without successful resolution. Much has been written about the Montgomery bus boycott, yet the public rarely associates it with Jo Ann Robinson. Through her leadership of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a black middle-class professional organization, and as a board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Robinson was instru-

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

9

The wages of African Americans were much lower than those of whites who performed essentially the same jobs in less grueling conditions. Without equal opportunity in education, housing, health care or the political arena, most African Americans found it difficult to move up from low-paying, menial labor. Gloria Richardson led the Cambridge Movement, a drive for economic and political equality in a small Maryland town where black unemployment hovered at 50 percent. It was the fi rst such movement outside the Deep South and the only one led by a woman. Richardson, an African American who studied at Howard University, had learned early on that neither her education nor her well-to-do family could protect her from segregation. She focused on the economic status of African Americans in Cambridge. With the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other fl agship organizations of the civil rights movement, Richardson brought the attention of local, state, and federal officials to conditions in Cambridge. On July 23, 1963, in the office of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the “ Treaty of Cambridge” was signed, integrating public schools and hospitals, employment, public accommodations, and housing. It also established a human rights commission.

question was to count the bubbles on a bar of soap. African Americans were required to pay poll taxes that most could not afford, and many were beaten or fi red for trying to exercise their constitutional rights. No one showed a more indomitable spirit in rising above these obstacles than FANNIE LOU HAMER, the youngest of 20 children of a Mississippi sharecropper. Due to family illness and poverty, she left school to go to work at 12 years of age. Hamer worked weighing cotton, a job she lost, at the age of 40, for trying to vote. She was the victim of severe beatings, numerous arrests, and constant threats; she, her husband, and her daughter all lost their jobs as Hamer became known to the world for her activism. In 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party, which had broken with the national Democrats over civil rights: it excluded the state’s 400,000 African Americans. Hamer led the MFDP to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where her appearance drew the nation’s attention to the sad state of human rights in Mississippi. The work of Hamer and the MFDP bore fruit in 1968 and 1972, when the Democratic conventions included blacks, women, and other groups previously denied representation. Shirley Chisholm, the nation’s fi rst AfricanAmerican congresswoman, walked the trail blazed by Hamer. In 1972, she ran for president of the United States and received 151 delegate votes at the Democratic convention. These are just a few of the women who devoted themselves to the struggle for civil rights. Across the country, women of all ages and ethnicities were active in the movement. Casey Hayden, Penny Patch, Dorothy Miller, and Mary King were SNCC volunteers whose bravery and early commitment paved the way for other whites to join the movement. Jewish women, according to historian Debra Schultz, joined the civil rights movement in disproportionate numbers; half the Freedom Riders and attorneys going south were Jewish. They had helped to establish the NAACP, and they contributed generously to civil rights organizations.

Voting Rights and Political Empowerment

Institutions and Organizations

Although the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments extended voting rights to all men and women, African Americans still faced huge obstacles to voting. They were forced to take literacy tests designed for failure; a typical “ test”

Several organizations were established during the civil rights movement to fi ght segregation and Jim Crow laws. SNCC included numerous women leaders, including Doris Smith, a highly visible and effective volunteer recruiter who died

mental in organizing and implementing the boycott. As a result, she was one of 17 professors fi red from Alabama State University afterward. The boycott succeeded with the full support of the black community, including the cooks and maids who walked long miles to work and back to maintain the boycott. Although it is Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose names rose to prominence from this boycott, its success depended upon the planning and efforts of Jo Ann Robinson and the WPC. Similar boycotts were conducted in Tallahassee, Birmingham, and Baton Rouge. In 1956 the United States Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the Alabama state and local laws that segregated transportation.

Economic Empowerment

T H E C H A N G I N G A M E R I C A N FA M I L Y

at the age of 26 in 1966. One of the fi rst women to hold a leadership position in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ELLA BAKER was an inspirational organizer and motivator who gained a reputation for excellence at building bridges between groups, sharing ownership of projects, and minimizing the role of a single leader. Among the institutions working to create a foundation from which to mobilize citizens to action advance the status of black America, no organization did more than the black church. Segregated society contributed to the dominant role of black churches, one of the few cohesive institutions to emerge from slavery. The churches with their predominantly female membership anchored their community. The church was the place for meetings, strategy sessions, worship, and a sense of sanctuary from the white world. It was also one of the few places large enough to accommodate great numbers of people. Black women mobilized their congregations to seek support for the civil rights movement.

CONCLUSION The focus of the civil rights movement was discrimination based on race, not sex, but the social upheaval it created made a path for black women of courage and leadership to gain valuable political experience. It also taught ordinary citizens how injustice works and how to fi ght it– – lessons many women applied to the struggle against sexism that followed. Today, many of their accomplishments are being challenged by reverse discrimination lawsuits and the abolition of affirmative action. Recent

court rulings denying special consideration on the basis of race for college admissions and employment have raised concerns that opportunities for women and minorities will be curtailed. Many African Americans have mobilized to resist these actions. On March 7, 2000, some 11,000 people marched in Florida against a program to end affirmative action. It was the largest civil rights march in state history. During the aftermath of the bitterly contested presidential election of 2000, Florida A&M University students staged a silent sit-in at the state capital. In both efforts, women of all ages and colors played key roles. Elsie Bradwell Crowell See also: African Americans. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Cowan, Toma and Maguire, Jack. Timelines of African American History––500 years Of Black Achievement. New York: Perigee Books, 1994. Crawford, Vicki L., et al., eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement Trailblazers & Torchbearers, 1941–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of the Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Morris, Alton D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984. Olson, Lynne. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. New York: Scribner’s, 2001. Shultz, Debra. Going South— Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Walker, Melissa. Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966–1989. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.



The Changing American Family y the early 1900s the United States had evolved from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial giant. Railroad magnates connected the country with thousands of miles of track, and developers built cities up and out to accommodate the burgeoning population. Just as labor and landscape adjusted to this transformation, so did women and their families. In working-class families all able-bodied members contributed to the household economy.

B

Fathers fi lled positions in factories, mines, and farms while wives cared for their children and kept the home. Depending on their ethnicity, many married women took jobs outside of the home as well. Jewish women, for instance, often worked in factories. Italian, Polish, and Irish women, however, were less likely to work outside of the home after marriage. They supplemented the family income by taking in boarders or doing piecework in their homes. For poor AFRICAN-AMERICAN women,

T H E C H A N G I N G A M E R I C A N FA M I L Y

racial discrimination all but eliminated their chances of fi nding factory work. They were forced to take DOMESTIC SERVICE jobs to make ends meet. In middle-class families the father was the sole provider. He might be a skilled professional in the fi eld of medicine, business, or labor while his wife was a HOMEMAKER. These families could separate themselves from the busy urban environment by purchasing homes in residential communities at the edge or outside of the cities. Wives carried on the nineteenth-century Victorian ethos of devotion to the domestic sphere. For the most part these women did their own household chores, those at the upper end of the middle class assisted by servants. The wealthiest families in the United States, by far the minority, might own more than one home, each equipped with hired help. Husbands might or might not have to work, while wives were responsible for directing the household employees. These women had plenty of time for leisure activities. Although life experiences varied greatly among young women of different social and economic classes at the turn of the twentieth century the gap narrowed significantly by the 1920s. CHILD LABOR restrictions, decreasing unemployment, and the availability of high school EDUCATION temporarily kept the children of poor families out of work and in school. After graduation young women, regardless of economic class, usually delayed marriage and entered the workforce or went off to college. While young women of the previous generation had worked at home or in single-sex environments, after 1900 women often worked in offices or department stores alongside men. At the end of the day, female workers went out to social clubs and dance halls. Freed from her parents’ watchful eyes the NEW WOMAN smoked, drank, and participated in sexual experimentation. The growing independence of women contributed to the emergence of a new familial ideal, the companionate family. Women and men, less restricted by parental control and the arduous chores formerly demanded in MARRIAGE, chose partners based on sexual interest and intellectual and emotional compatibility. Modern conveniences supposedly freed up wives so that they could focus on familial relationships. The availability of birth control enabled women to spend more time nurturing fewer children.

Although new attitudes had seemingly relieved wives of loveless marriages, backbreaking labor, and burdensome numbers of children, the new model of the family was equally challenging. Rather than relying on female friends for companionship, wives were expected to fi nd it in their spouses. New appliances may have made work easier, but standards of cleanliness became more rigid. Women may have had fewer children, but the expectations of “ good parenting” became more difficult to live up to. Just as women and men were more likely to enter marriage based on individual satisfaction with their partner, they were more likely to abandon marriage if they became dissatisfied. In the nineteenth century restrictions on divorce, social pressure, and moral obligation kept unhappy couples together. By the 1920s one out of every seven marriages ended in divorce. Changing attitudes toward marriage and family life in the 1920s signaled a social crisis to some observers, but those concerns were quickly overshadowed by the GREAT DEPRESSION in 1929. People lost jobs and property overnight, and families were forced to pool their resources to survive. By 1932 the unemployment rate in the United States approached 25 percent. Those of marriageable age often delayed weddings. Those who did marry often limited their family size. Although the average number of children born to a family had been steadily declining, for the fi rst time Americans experienced negative population growth. Divorce rates slowed. A couple was more likely to endure an unhappy marriage before paying for a divorce or losing a potential wage earner. During the Depression, many people believed women should not work if their husbands were employable. Some blamed high rates of unemployment, low wages, and the general malaise that seemed to infect men on married women who worked. Both the government and independent businesses fi red married women during the Depression to create jobs for men. Yet more married women took jobs than ever before. WORLD WAR II finally brought an end to the Depression. The government called men to military service and women to the factories. Women’s employment grew from 28 percent to 37 percent during the war. Three-quarters of those newly employed were married. They trained and worked as welders, burners, and riveters, among other jobs.

T H E C H A N G I N G A M E R I C A N FA M I L Y

When the war ended so too did women’s newly won achievements in the labor force. Employers laid off women first to make room for returning veterans. Those who had to work out of economic necessity returned to stereotypically women’s jobs such as clerical work. African-American women retained some war benefits. More jobs were open to them than before the war, but like other women they lost the higher wages brought about in the crisis. After more than a decade of family dislocation due to depression and war Americans were eager to embrace family life. Women and men married early and had large families. The generation born during and after the war came to be known as the “ baby boomers.” Eager to take advantage of the postwar housing development, middle-class parents moved their growing families away from the city. These suburban pioneers left behind the familial support networks that had sustained their parents’ generation, and had to rely on their neighborhood and organizational connections rather than blood ties. It was up to mothers to make and sustain these vital lifelines. Critics of postwar SUBURBANIZATION argue that the houses resembled boxes and that both the buildings and the gadgets inside them promoted consumerism and subsequently debt. The neighborhood support system that seemed like a reasonable substitute for extended family demanded political conformity. And fi nally, mothers, whose domestic roles were so central to family life, often felt unfulfi lled. Cleaning, child care, and cooking left little time to attend to their own interests. BETTY FRIEDAN’ S famous critique, The Feminine Mystique (see Documents), described women suffering from “ the problem that has no name.” Middle-class women found themselves with everything society told them they should want: a husband, children, and a house, but none of these seemed to make them happy. Some women turned to alcohol to solve their problems while others took prescription drugs such as Valium. Some found more constructive answers to their needs. Women took jobs outside of the home once their children went off to school, or blended their domestic devotion with social and political activism to form or join movements that would ultimately benefi t children and families, such as the La Leche League, Women Strike for Peace, or the civil rights movement. The 1950s created a culture of self-awareness. Young baby boomers had less economic responsibility, more education, leisure, and time spent

with their peers than any previous generation. When they arrived at adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s many carried with them a sense of entitlement and a willingness to challenge the status quo. Both women and men challenged the style of marriage they had inherited from their parents’ generation. Feminists encouraged women to pursue education and gain economic self-sufficiency. The birth control pill, developed in 1960, also encouraged women’s independence, offering married women a reliable method of limiting PREGNANCY and unmarried women a chance to experience sexual fulfi llment outside of marriage. Although birth control had been available for centuries, the pill’s simplicity made it uniquely liberating. Just as women questioned their dependence on men, men questioned their duty toward women. New attitudes toward rights and responsibilities kept unwilling expectant couples from marrying. The number of children born out of wedlock more than tripled. Divorce rates climbed along with the number of single-parent families. Once divorced, women more often than not became the primary caretakers. The 1980s produced varied reactions to changes that occurred in the previous two decades. Women blending marriage, children, and career became the norm. Just as women took on additional responsibilities they expected more from their marriage partners regarding child care and housework. Despite the controversies over the modern family, it continues to thrive. Foreign adoption and new reproductive technology have enabled single women, homosexuals, and infertile couples to have children. Women, as they gain higher levels of education and move into betterpaying jobs, are less likely to fi nd themselves in a situation of economic dependency on men, and are therefore fi nancially better equipped to handle divorce. And the federal government, while it lags behind other industrialized countries in the area of paid maternity leave and subsidized child care, nevertheless enacted the FAMILY AND MEDICAL LEAVE ACT into law in 1993, recognizing that family is a priority for everyone. Sara Dwyer-McNulty F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

WOMEN AND THE MEDIA

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families and the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Mintz, Steven and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press, 1988.



Women and the Media s mass media developed in the twentieth century, so did women’s roles within them. In the early 1900s, women held infl uential positions at women’s MAGAZINES and on women’s sections of newspapers. Many magazines had woman editors; for example, Vogue has only had woman editors since its 1892 beginning. In 1900, 2,193 of 30,098 JOURNALISTS in the United States were female, according to the Census. By 1910, the number of women in writing or editing jobs doubled. This early precedent allowed women to gain a foothold in most mass media. Savvy publishers and editors understood that as half the population, women had purchasing power that their advertisers desired. Thus, their role as consumers produced an expansion of woman-focused media throughout the century. Women had a hand in all the major media: newspapers, magazines, photography, radio, television, fi lm, cartooning, public relations, advertising, and the Internet. Women who wrote for the print media in the early twentieth century followed fl amboyant role models. A tradition of “ stunt reporting” began in the late nineteenth century with women such as the renowned NELLIE BLY (see Volume 2), who made the country aware that women could be reporters. It would prove impossible for the women journalists who followed to match Bly’s amazing feats. But some did learn to infuse as much drama as possible into their stories. They were known as the “ sob sisters.” In covering such sensational stories as the 1906 trial of coal heir Harry Thaw, who was accused of murdering his wife’s lover, they infl uenced American culture in a number of ways, including the development of soap operas and advice columns, as publishers sought to attract more woman readers. Women had become an integral part of the world of newspapers, as consumers. Stores directed their advertising toward them, and newspapers created sections specifi cally for them.

A

These sections initially focused on homemaking. But by the late twentieth century, most newspapers retooled “ women’s pages” as lifestyle sections for a broader audience. In 1865, the country had 700 magazines; by 1890 that number had grown to 4,400, and in 1999 the National Directory of Magazines listed 20,000 titles. A number of women led the magazines from the beginning. Gertrude Battles Lane edited Woman’s Home Companion. The Ladies Home Journal, the fi rst U.S. magazine to reach 1 million subscribers (in 1903), was started by Cyrus H.K. Curtis, but his wife, Louisa May Knapp, who had been the editor of his newspaper’s women’s section, was its fi rst editor. These magazines continually reinvented themselves to focus on issues of interest to women: By the late 1980s, 65 percent of American women were still reading one of the “ seven sisters,” Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes & Gardens, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Family Circle, Redbook, or Woman’s Day. The subject content of women’s periodicals historically extended beyond home and family. Women began a number of publications, some focused exclusively on gaining the right to vote for women, while others featured a wide array of timely subjects. For example, MARGARET SANGER edited The Woman Rebel, which she used to lobby for REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS for women in 1917 (see Documents). These publications appealed to the audience of reformers during the Progressive era of the early 1900s. Another journalistic innovation of the era was muckraking, which produced about 2,000 investigative articles in the fi rst 15 years of the twentieth century. One of these muckrakers, IDA TARBELL, is now revered as the “ patron saint” of investigative journalism. She dug into documents and interviewed experts, instead of relying on gossip as many muckrakers did. Her 18part exposé of the Standard Oil Company and its head, John D. Rockefeller, published in

4

WOMEN AND THE MEDIA

McClure’s magazine in 1902, led to government investigations of the company and a landmark antimonopoly Supreme Court decision. Journalist IDA B. WELLS BARNETT (see Volume 2) used her pen to raise awareness of racial violence. As a part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, Barnett exposed the prevalence and horrors of LYNCHING (see Volume 2), and she later took over the editorship of the Conservator, the fi rst black newspaper in Chicago. Feminist and racial issues in women-directed media surged again in the 1960s and 1970s. GLORIA STEINEM, the editor of MS. MAGAZINE, founded in 1972, appealed to educated, middleclass women who made up the majority of the women’s rights movement. Ms. covered many issues at the heart of the movement: maternity leave, spouse abuse, equal pay, date rape, and sexual harassment. Essence, founded in 1970, linked the issues of the civil rights movement with the lives of young, urban black women. Essence gained a circulation of 890,000 by 1990, making it one of the fastest-growing women’s publications of its time. Women had the vote after 1920, but they still had less access to media jobs than men. First lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT helped that situation by holding 348 weekly press conferences during her time in the White House, and insisting that only woman journalists could attend. Except for one time during World War II, Roosevelt stuck by her rule. This policy encouraged media outlets to hire women to cover her. Roosevelt understood the challenges faced by women working in the media because she was a writer herself. Before becoming fi rst lady, she edited a baby magazine with her daughter, and she wrote a syndicated column, “ My Day,” for daily newspapers from 1936 until 1962. Her column’s underlying message was one of independence and equality for women (see Documents). Roosevelt’s interest in social issues ensured that her press conferences produced substantive stories for journalists, that would appear in the news sections, rather than the society or homemaking pages. Similarly, her all-women press conferences allowed for women’s issues to have a platform. For example, in 1933 she chastised the government for laying off married women from the federal workforce as a moneysaving effort. During the war, Roosevelt used the conferences to support servicewomen. Many of the women at her press conferences went on to illustrious careers in journalism af-

ter Roosevelt left the White House. With the advent of World War II, women also began to have more access to the newer media of the time: broadcasting. Women had a tough time in early news broadcasting because their higher-pitched voices were not believed to be authoritative. However, women had been involved in broadcasting from the beginning as radio actresses. In the tradition of women’s pages, networks wanted women on the radio to focus on homemaking. Ruth Crane’s radio show, “ Mrs. Page’s Home Economy,” ran on WJR in Detroit from 1929 to 1944. Some women had to give up more serious media work just for a chance to get on air. Mary Margaret McBride, formerly a journalist for magazines and newspapers, became a radio announcer in 1934. Producers told McBride to mimic a grandmotherly voice for her show, but halfway through she burst into her real voice as she told listeners that she had no children or husband and would rather her show focus on people and places, rather than homemaking. Listeners supported her and her radio interview show lasted until 1960. WORLD WAR II opened many opportunities for women in broadcasting. In 1946, women made up 28 percent of the broadcasting workforce in jobs ranging from sales to the control room. These gains proved temporary, however, as returning service men forced women out. Women slowly gained more on-air time, but it took until the late 1970s and early 1980s for women to appear frequently. BARBARA WALTERS became the highest-paid news personality in 1976 with a fi ve-year, $5 million contract, when she left NBC’s “ Today” show to co-anchor the evening news on ABC. By the end of the twentieth century, women could be seen and heard all over radio and TV. In fact, women made up 40 percent of the television workforce in 2001. However, they have not broken the GLASS CEILING to executive jobs. Only 13 percent of the top executives at the major media and telecommunications companies were women in 2001. Just as women wrote for all aspects of media, they also created much of the visual fabric of the media in the twentieth century through photography, cartooning, fi lm, and video. In photography, Jessie Tarbox Beals was reportedly the fi rst female press photographer; she began her career at the Buffalo Inquirer and Courier in 1902. Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White, two of the most renowned PHOTOGRAPHERS of the century, documented major events ranging from

FEMINISM

bread lines during the GREAT DEPRESSION to India’s Mahatma Gandi. Women’s visual sensibilities also found an outlet through cartooning. Louise Quarles illustrated puns in 1901 and is believed to be the fi rst woman cartoonist. Cute images fi lled the early cartooning of women, with cartoonists like Rose O’Neill drawing a comic strip featuring the cupid-like Kewpies in 1909. (Later, they became the well-known dolls.) However, one cartoon transformed women’s image in comics. Begun in 1940 by Dalia “ Dale” Messick, “ Brenda Starr” featured a red-headed news reporter, a strong career woman character admired by both men and women. Women were prominent fi lm makers in the early days of the cinema, before 1920, when many actresses had their own production companies and directed fi lms, too. However, the burgeoning Hollywood structure made it difficult for women to be directors. Between 1939 and 1979, women directed only 14 of the 7,332 Hollywood feature fi lms produced. By 1990, women directed 4 to 5 percent of feature fi lms annually. Women worked in the business side of media for all of the twentieth century in areas such as publishing, advertising, production, and public relations. The New York Herald-Tribune appointed Helen Reid vice president of its merged newspaper in 1924. Dorothy Schiff became publisher of the New York Post in 1939. Eleanor “ Cissy” Patterson bought two newspapers in Washington, D.C., combined them into the Washington TimesHerald, and ran it beginning in 1939. Her niece, Alicia Patterson, began publishing Newsday on Long Island in 1940 based on an accurate hunch that Americans would move to the suburbs. One of the most well-known woman publishers, KATHARINE GRAHAM, oversaw The Washington Post during the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. Women have found success in the world of advertising as well. Since advertising agencies be-

gan in the 1920s, woman copywriters have developed slogans for top products. Although difficult to break into in the early years, public relations is now dominated by women. By 1993, 60 percent of PR specialists were female compared to 25 percent in 1968. As opportunities exploded for women in all types of media in the late twentieth century, they claimed an equal share of many jobs. Many college women are attracted to media professions. In 1999, women made up about 63 percent of mass communication graduates. Of these, 26 percent sought public relations jobs, 24 percent advertising agency jobs, and 19 percent TV jobs. Throughout the century, women gained power as both media consumers and media workers. From TV programming to ad copy to magazine startups, media companies realized they must address the interests and needs of women if they were to succeed. This trend gave women the ability to guide the media as well, through their increased roles as publishers, producers, editors, writers, and creators. After a century, women are truly integral in defi ning all aspects of U.S. mass media. Beth Haller F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Abramson, Phyllis Leslie. Sob Sister Journalism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Beasley, Maurine and Sheila Gibbons. Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993. Robbins, Trina. A Century of Women Cartoonists. Northhampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Rosenbloom, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville Press, 2000. Sanders, Marlene, and Marcia Rock. Waiting for Prime Time: The Women of Television News. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Streitmatter, Rodger. Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.



Feminism n the early twentieth century, Americans began using the term feminism to describe the women’s movement. Feminists sought to

I

transform gender relations in every part of life— cultural, economic, political, and personal. They challenged nineteenth-century values of

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womanly submission and self-sacrifi ce, and stressed freedom and aspirations. As one early twentieth-century feminist declared, “ We intend simply to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.” Every other Saturday, a group of these new feminists met in Greenwich Village, New York, beginning in 1912. Calling their club “ Heterodoxy,” they discussed a wide range of topics related to women’s emancipation. Club member CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (see Volume 2), devised strategies for reducing the time women devoted to taking care of their families, such as living in apartment buildings equipped with communal kitchens and day-care centers. Other club members included birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, Grace Nail Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Henrietta Rodman, a high school vocational counselor. Rodman founded the Feminist Alliance to fi ght for the right of married women to hold jobs even after bearing children. In the early 1900s, women became active in civic life on an unprecedented scale. In settlement houses, women’s clubs, and labor unions, they organized not only for suffrage but also to clean up cities, improve working conditions, and reduce infant mortality. Among them were African-American feminists, who faced barriers to opportunity across the nation. Inspired by journalist IDA B. WELLS BARNETT (see Volume 2), the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN (NACW) joined her crusade against the LYNCHING (see Volume 2) of AFRICAN AMERICANS. At the same time, they defended African-American women against sexually demeaning treatment and stereotypes. Activists such as Nannie Burroughs wove feminism into their social reform work. Burroughs, a member of the NACW, fought for women’s rights in the black BAPTIST church (see Volume 2) and devoted much of her energy to enabling African-American women to be economically self-sufficient. Virtually all feminists supported women’s right to vote, with various strategies. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), facing well-fi nanced opposition, courted well-to-do women. Other activists took suffrage into the streets. Groups like the College Equal Suffrage Association canvassed door-todoor and held outdoor meetings. Harriot Stanton Blatch brought factory workers and profes-

sional women together in 1907 to found the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, which staged the fi rst in a series of large suffrage parades in 1910. The militant British suffragettes provided a model for Alice Paul, who headed the NAWSA’s Congressional Committee. Paul and her companions picketed the White House, staged a counter-inaugural parade in 1913, and captured headlines by going on hunger strikes when they were arrested and sent to prison in 1917. In contrast, NAWSA politely lobbied congressmen of both parties and demonstrated patriotism by supporting the war effort. After WORLD WAR I ended, the combination of strategies culminated in victory for the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT with the ratifi cation of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT. Historians puzzle over what happened in the 1920s. The early-twentieth-century wave of feminism seemed to wane just as women gained an important political tool in the vote. Some historians point to internal confl icts in the women’s movement, particularly between supporters of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA) and those who advocated PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION for women workers. In 1923 Alice Paul, as the leader of the NATIONAL WOMAN’ S PARTY (NWP), began the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (see Documents). Many feminists opposed the ERA because they believed it would nullify laws that set maximum hours and minimum wages for many women workers. FLORENCE KELLEY hoped that labor laws for women would eventually extend to male workers as well. Until that happened, she believed women workers were particularly vulnerable to exploitation and needed protection, not the ERA. Other confl icts divided feminists along racial lines. During the suffrage movement, African-American feminists had experienced the racism of white suffrage organizations. After 1920, they sought white allies in the struggle against their disfranchisement. In a typically disappointing encounter, MARY CHURCH TERRELL (see Volume 2) asked for the NWP’s support in defending African-American women’s voting rights. Alice Paul refused. External pressures as well as internal confl icts served to mute feminism after 1920. In the aftermath of World War I, the Red Scare threw suspicion on anyone organizing for justice and equality. The outspoken anarchist feminist EMMA GOLDMAN was deported in 1919, and many others feared that they would be jailed or fi red for

FEMINISM

associating with radical women like her. The burgeoning consumer culture co-opted feminist themes, enticing women with the promise of a good life achieved without the necessity of political activism. A pro-business government found an ally in the Supreme Court, which struck down minimum wages for women in 1923. Feminists faced obstacles in the political arena. Armed with their new political importance as voters, women participated actively in party politics, but they did not vote as a bloc. In 1921 feminists in the federal CHILDREN’ S BUREAU won passage of the Sheppard-Towner MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT, but its funding was eliminated in 1929. The wartime WOMEN’ S BUREAU became a permanent part of the Department of Labor in 1920, but its staff lacked the support of a powerful grass roots women’s movement. Although women were joining a variety of interest groups, they no longer composed a visible feminist movement. Many women participated as workers and mothers in the wave of labor and consumer organizing during the GREAT DEPRESSION. However, few claimed to be feminists in a climate that renewed the emphasis on feminine self-sacrifi ce. In the federal government, some tried to combat discrimination in NEW DEAL assistance programs. MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, founder of the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN, served as director of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration. First lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT brought members of her women’s reform network into the government. They included FRANCES PERKINS and MARY DEWSON, both of whom opposed the ERA. The FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT of 1938 extended labor legislation to men as well as women, but special rules for women workers continued. The ERA did not become a widely shared feminist goal until the 1960s. The “ Second Wave” of feminism seemed to burst on the scene in the 1960s. However, it had been percolating since WORLD WAR II when women workers found new opportunities in war production jobs. They developed a heightened consciousness of their own abilities and took pride in their new skills. After the war, most “ Rosie the Riveters” lost their “ men’s jobs” and returned to work in the service and clerical sectors, but millions of working-class women joined unions to improve conditions in “ women’s jobs.” They demanded paid maternity leave, minimum wages, and CHILD CARE. By 1955 they had won

7

equal pay statutes in sixteen states plus Alaska, and in 1963 the federal EQUAL PAY ACT mandated equal pay for equal work. In 1952 labor journalist BETTY FRIEDAN published The UE Fights for Women Workers, an account of one union’s role in improving the lot of working-class women. Eleven years later, Friedan soared to fame with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, which described the discontent of many HOMEMAKERS (see Documents). Across the country, women who felt trapped in suburban domesticity recognized themselves in the book. Friedan recommended that such women pursue careers outside the home, but her book did not say how they could attain careers beyond the lowpaid world of “ women’s work.” Friedan saw an opportunity to broaden women’s access to jobs when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. TITLE VII of the act made sex discrimination in employment illegal and set up the EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC) to hear workers’ complaints. The EEOC failed to take sex discrimination seriously and even upheld the practice of sex-segregated job listings in newspapers. Friedan and a group of other frustrated feminists founded the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) in 1966. NOW became the leading organization in the “ women’s rights” branch of Second Wave feminism. While labor union activists and professional women tackled inequality in the workplace, other women were developing a feminist perspective through their work in a variety of social movements. The civil rights movement heightened women’s expectations for equality. In the early 1960s, young women joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they worked in freedom schools and voter registration drives. In 1965 two white members of SNCC, Mary King and Casey Hayden, wrote “ A Kind of Memo” that listed examples of sexist practices in the organization. Empowered by the civil rights movement’s vision of equality, SNCC volunteers carried their analysis of sexism into other social movements as well. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminism emerged in the antiwar and social justice movements of the New Left. The black nationalist movement provided for African-American women what the New Left provided for many white women—an experience of sexism that came up against expectations raised by the civil rights movement. Kathleen Cleaver observed,

FEMINISM

for example, that in the Black Panther Party if she brought up an idea it would be rejected, but if a man raised the same suggestion it would be implemented. In 1973, the NATIONAL BLACK FEMINIST ORGANIZATION (NBFO) was founded, in its statement of purpose criticizing the way women had been treated in the Black Power movement. In the Chicano nationalist movement, Francisca Flores responded to sexism by stating, “ The issue of equality, freedom and selfdetermination of the Chicana—like the right of self-determination, equality, and liberation of the Mexican community—is not negotiable.” CHICANA, ASIAN-AMERICAN, and African-American feminists confronted sexism in their communities as well as racism among white feminists. Women of color insisted that feminism address the ways sexism intersects with racism and economic oppression. Women who became feminists in the social movements of the 1960s forged the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION wing of the Second Wave. Liberation meant more than equal rights with men. Like the feminists of Heterodoxy at the beginning of the century, women’s liberationists sought to transform society. The key political tool of Second Wave feminism was “ consciousness raising,” which took place when a small group of women gathered to discuss an aspect of their lives, such as relationships with partners, housework, body image, or discrimination at work. Consciousness raising went public in speak-outs about women’s issues. In 1969 12 women in New York City spoke to an audience of 300 about their illegal abortions. Journalist GLORIA STEINEM, recognizing her own experience in the stories she heard, became a feminist. In 1972 she launched MS. MAGAZINE as a consciousness-raising tool for women around the country. Feminist institutions and organizations blossomed in the Second Wave. Shelters for battered women and RAPE crisis hot lines met urgent needs, while women’s MUSIC festivals and coffee houses nurtured feminist culture. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) fought for rights and respect for poor mothers. The Boston Women’s Health Collective published the fi rst edition of OUR BODIES, OURSELVES in 1970 to spread the fi ndings of feminist HEALTH groups (see Documents). After the Supreme Court overturned antiabortion laws in 1973, the NATIONAL ABORTION RIGHTS ACTION LEAGUE defended the

reproductive right women had won in ROE V. WADE. WOMEN’ S STUDIES programs at colleges and universities transformed academic disciplines. Historians are only beginning to assess feminism at the end of the twentieth century. Some see the decline of feminism in the 1920s being repeated. Bitter divisions over whether to give women the right to sue producers of PORNOGRAHY generated lasting animosities among feminists. Political gains seemed to be dissipating. After passing Congress in 1972, the ERA fell short of ratifi cation in the states. In 1989 the Supreme Court hemmed in abortion rights. The commercial media and advertisers were again selling a form of “ lifestyle” feminism to women. More optimistic historians point to the lasting effects of both the fi rst and second waves of feminism. Feminism ushered in many changes, from greater employment and educational opportunities to women’s sports and gender-neutral language. The fruits of suffrage could be seen in the gender gap that emerged in 1980 and in the increasing numbers of women who attained political office. In 1993 Rebecca Walker and a group of young feminists declared themselves the “ Third Wave” and dedicated themselves to “ Continuing the Women’s Movement.” Anna R. Igra See also: Feminism, Radical; “ A Woman’s Body,” p. 16; “ The Civil Rights Movement,” p. 21. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Anzaldua, Gloria, and Cherie Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Crow, Barbara A., ed. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Garcia, Alma M. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake, eds. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000. Rupp, Leila J., and Vera Taylor. Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945–1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Part 2 Articles

A B B O T T, E D I T H

A  ABBOTT, EDITH

(1876– 1957) A pioneer in American SOCIAL WORK, education, and reform. Edith Abbott was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, to parents who were passionate about social and political issues. Her father was the fi rst lieutenant governor of Nebraska and her mother a pacifi st who championed woman suffrage and abolishing slavery in the United States. Both Edith and her younger sister, GRACE ABBOTT, became involved in the social problems of the day. At a time when few women attended college, Edith Abbott graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1901 and went on to earn a doctoral degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1905. Under a Carnegie fellowship, Abbott went to England, where she continued her studies at University College, London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. After teaching for a year at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Abbott was offered a position as assistant director of the research department at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, a new education venture. It was a somewhat risky career move, but Abbott relished the challenge and moved to Chicago, where she lived at HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2), one of the fi rst social settlements in North America, with her sister and a host of remarkable women of the time, among them Hull House founder JANE ADDAMS (see Volume 2). During the early 1900s, social workers received their education and training in the fi eld, basically as apprentices to caseworkers in social agencies. Abbott, on the other hand, fi rmly believed that social work should be taught at the university and graduate-school level, and was instrumental in transferring the School of Civics and Philanthropy to the University of Chicago, where it was renamed the School of Social Service Administration. It was the fi rst university-based graduate school of social work, and Abbott served as its dean from 1924 until 1942. She also helped establish the Cook County Bureau of Public Welfare, assisted in drafting the Social Security Act of 1935, served as president of the National Conference of Social Work, and was a founder and editor of

Social Service Review, which examines and evaluates social welfare policy and practice.

 ABBOTT, GRACE

(1878– 1939) Director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau under four presidents. Abbott played an instrumental role in getting AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN included in the Social Security Act of 1935. Born in 1878 in Grand Island, Nebraska, Abbott and her sister, EDITH ABBOTT, grew up listening to their father argue law cases and learning from their mother about the rights of all Americans. Grace graduated from Grand Island College, and taught high school. She began intermittent summer graduate classes at the University of Chicago in 1904, moved to Chicago in 1907, and completed her M.A. degree in political science in 1909. In the middle of her studies, she moved into the city’s most famous social settlement, HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2) to participate in the community of intellectuals and reformers. Her career in social work built on Hull House relationships throughout her life. Soon after arriving at the settlement house, Abbott was recruited to direct the Immigrants’ Protective League, founded in 1908 to provide legal and social services to newcomers. She met Julia Lathrop at Hull House who, a few years later, became the fi rst director of the U.S. CHILDREN’ S BUREAU. Lathrop invited Abbott to join her in Washington, D.C., to head up the Children’s Bureau child labor division in 1917. Her primary responsibility was to oversee the fi rst federal child labor law. The law passed in 1916 but was declared unconstitutional in 1918, and Abbott had to dismantle the apparatus she had set up. After completing a few more duties for the bureau, Abbott returned to Chicago in 1919. Two years later, she returned to the Children’s Bureau as director and served until 1934. During her tenure, the Children’s Bureau worked on stricter regulation of child labor, supported the development of MOTHERS’ PENSIONS laws in the states, and administered the fi rst MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT passed by Congress in 1921.

ABZUG, BELLA SAVITSKY

After Abbott retired from the Children’s Bureau in 1934, she returned to Chicago to teach social welfare at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and become managing editor of the Social Service Review. Her sister and Sophonisba Breckinridge founded the school and the journal. Within a short time, Abbott was involved again in welfare policy, this time working to draft a provision for aid to dependent children in the Social Security Act. She died in Chicago in 1939, but her ideas on social welfare continued to infl uence generations of students through her books. They included The Child and the State, a compendium of American legal and policy directives toward children; and From Relief to Social Security, a history documenting welfare policies through the Depression.

based on a constitutional right to privacy, with the result that most state laws banning abortion were thereafter considered unconstitutional. Since then, efforts have been made to reverse Roe v. Wade. Led largely by evangelical Christians and the Roman Catholic Church, the right-to-life movement has been somewhat successful in limiting abortion rights, in part by returning some authority to states and by intimidating doctors.

 ABZUG, BELLA SAVITSKY

(1920– 1998) A lawyer, feminist, and outspoken member of the United States House of Representatives from 1970 to 1974. Born Bella Savitsky on July 24, 1920, she graduated in 1942 with a bachelor of arts degree from Hunter College in New York.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Costin, Lela B. Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. Vol 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

 ABORTION

The termination of a pregnancy. Ancient medical texts describe both oral and surgical methods to induce abortion. While the instruments have changed, the methods remain largely the same. Beginning in the 1820s, a growing number of states began to outlaw the procedure. Still, abortions remained widely available and relatively safe through the early 1900s. Then, in the 1930s, as abortion moved from women’s homes and doctors’ offices into hospitals, it came under increasing scrutiny from obstetricians and law enforcement. By 1940, anti-abortion laws were being enforced and physicians providing abortion prosecuted. As abortion was pushed underground, it became increasingly dangerous. By 1965, it had become a crime in every state, and it was during this period that health risks from abortion became widespread. In response to the growing dangers to women’s health that resulted from “ back alley” abortions, an organized movement to decriminalize the procedure took hold, led by physicians and women’s rights advocates. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court in ROE V. WADE established a limited right to abortion

Bella Abzug, lawyer and feminist, was an avid supporter of the ERA.

ACTORS

Two years later, she married Maurice Abzug, a stockbroker. The couple would have two daughters. In 1945, she earned her law degree from Columbia University. Abzug practiced labor law in New York City for 23 years. She then won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1970, where she served two terms. During her tenure in the House, she chaired the Committee on Public Works and Transportation and the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights. She also served as assistant Democratic Whip, a key position within the party leadership. Throughout her career, Abzug was active in the women’s rights movement, an avid supporter of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA), and an outspoken member of the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW). Soon after her election to the House, she drew public attention with her wide-brimmed hats and fl amboyant style. Abzug challenged the maledominated Congress and admonished her colleagues as elite white males who were out of touch with mainstream America. She vocally advocated the immediate withdrawal of American troops from VIETNAM as the war raged on. She was equally outspoken on such issues as women’s and minority rights and federal aid to cities. Despite her popular appeal, some of her political allies criticized her style as too confrontational, noting that she was unwilling to compromise to pass key legislation. Among Abzug’s successes in Congress were the passage of the “ Government in the Sunshine Act,” which increased the public’s access to government records. She cofounded the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S POLITICAL CAUCUS in 1971 and authored several bills designed to improve the status of women and prevent sex discrimination. Abzug gave up her seat in Congress to run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate. She later ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City and then again for the House. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter appointed Abzug cochair of the National Advisory Committee for Women, but dismissed her a year later after the committee criticized the president for cutting funds for women’s programs. After Abzug returned to private practice, she remained in the public spotlight as a news commentator, lecturer, and author. Abzug followed her successful 1972 book Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington with The Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women in 1984.

Abzug served on a number of international bodies and was an organizer of the 1991 Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet. In 1995 she played a key role at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women. Abzug’s health declined in the late 1990s. She died on March 31, 1998, from complications after heart surgery.

 ACTORS

Women have starred on the American stage and screen throughout the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries and have taken increasing control of the fi nancial and production aspects of the business. Stage actor Maude Adams (1872– 1953) was most famous for her portrayal of Peter Pan in the play written expressly for her by James Barrie in 1905. Academy Award– winner Helen Hayes (1900– 1993), often called the “ fi rst lady of the American theater,” is best known for portraying women possessed of an inner core of steel. In 1964 Hayes founded the Helen Hayes Repertory Company to promote the reading of Shakespeare’s plays in American universities.

Bette Davis’ s career as an actress spanned nearly six decades and included two Academy Awards for best actress.

ACTORS

Women’s roles in silent fi lm represented 1981. Of similar name, but no relationship, was stereotypes: divas and innocents, vamps and fl apthe Belgian-born Audrey Hepburn (1929– 1993), pers. With a complexion described as “ a rose whose petite frame and large, expressive eyes blushing through old ivory,” Anna May Wong made her one of the most appealing presences (1905– 1961) was featured alongside a number of in fi lms of the second half of the twentieth cenHollywood’s leading men during the era of silent tury. fi lm. Within the pantheon of the stars of silent Throughout the twentieth century, leading fi lms that included Theda Bara (1890– 1955), roles often called for young, beautiful women. CLARA BOW (1905– 1965), Lillian Gish (1893– 1993), From the 1970s on, however, actors such as Jessica Tandy (1909– 1994), Joanne Woodward and Gloria Swanson (1899– 1983), Mary Pickford (b. 1930), Anne Bancroft (b. 1931), Ellen Burstyn (1893– 1979) reigned as “ America’s Sweetheart” (b. 1932), Cicely Tyson (b. 1933), Shirley until her retirement in 1933. She was also a coMacLaine (b. 1934), Jane Fonda (b. 1937), Faye founder of United Artists and winner of an AcadDunaway (b. 1941), Sally Field (b.1946), Diane emy Award for her role in the 1929 fi lm Coquette. Keaton (b. 1946), Susan Sarandon (b. 1946), The 1940s was a golden age in Hollywood. Meryl Streep (b. 1949), Michelle Pfeiffer (b. 1958), Legends such as the comic actress Carole LomJulia Roberts (b. 1967), and Gwyneth Paltrow bard (1908– 1942), the red-haired beauty Rita Hayworth (1918– 1987), and the dynamic Barbara Stanwyck (1907– 1990) set the standards of glamour TRAILBLAZERS and talent to which later generations of women would match their own achievements. It was reputed that Bette Davis once described herself as having “ eyes like a bullactress and dancer BETTY GRABLE frog, a neck like an ostrich, and limp hair.” Nonetheless, her (1916– 1973) insured her famous intense personality and unforgettable stare made her a legend legs for a million dollars. Whether or of American film. She won Oscars for her portrayal of an acnot this was so, her shapely limbs tress fallen on hard times in Dangerous (1935) and for her made her the favorite pinup girl of work in Jezebel (1938). men serving in the United States Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, armed forces during WORLD WAR II. Massachusetts, she renamed herself “ Bette” after the heroine Bette Davis (1908– 1989) was known of Balzac’s novel, Cousin Bette. Davis studied acting in New as much for her short temper and York City, where her dance teacher was the choreographer difficult behavior as she was for the MARTHA GRAHAM. After working in live theater and failing her complex characters she portrayed. first screen test for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio (MGM), African-American Dorothy Danshe was hired by Universal Pictures. dridge (1923– 1965) appeared in a Davis was most popular for the menacing or sharp-tongued number of “ race fi lms,” or pictures characters she played in films like The Letter (1940), The Litmade for the African-American autle Foxes (1941), and the classic All About Eve (1950). In later dience. She became a star in the title role of Carmen Jones but her years she often played eccentric older women. In What Ever talents were not encouraged and Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Davis, as the title character, valued in the 1950s and 1960s. terrorized her sister, played by fellow veteran actor Joan MARILYN MONROE (1926– 1962) reCrawford (1904– 1977). mains an enigmatic fi gure and an Davis began appearing on television in the 1950s, and icon of female beauty and sexuality from the 1970s made a number of made-for-television films. to this day. A star of romantic comeHer last appearance came in the 1987 theatrical release The dies in the 1950s, her acting gifts alWhales of August, in which she was paired with another film lowed her to transcend otherwise legend, Lillian Gish (1893– 1993). two-dimensional roles. KATHARINE Bette Davis succumbed to cancer in Neuilly-sur-Seine, HEPBURN (b. 1907) won a record France, on October 6, 1989, just after she was honored at a four Academy Awards for best acfilm festival in Spain. tress and received 13 nominations in all, the fi rst in 1933 and the last in

4

A D A M S , E VA B .

(b. 1972) turned in award-winning performances as aging, eccentric, or unglamorous characters. Television has provided a range of opportunities for actors, including work in series programs as well as fi lms produced for the small screen. Mary Tyler Moore (b. 1936) became known to television audiences in the 1960s and went on to headline her own series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Candice Bergen (b. 1946) also made her mark in both fi elds. In 1987, Marlee Matlin (b. 1966) became the fi rst deaf actor to win an Academy Award (for Children of a Lesser God) and continues to be a regular presence in fi lms and television.

Adams was admitted to the bars of Nevada and the District of Columbia. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed her Director of the U.S. Mint. President Lyndon B. Johnson reappointed her in 1964. She was the fi rst woman to receive this position which she held until 1969, when she retired and returned to Reno. She continued to serve as a consultant for public service organizations and held positions on federal commissions. One notable example of that service was the Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary’s Advisory Committee on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women in 1975. Adams died in Reno in 1991.

 ADAMS, EVA B.

ADKINS  HOSPITAL

(1908– 1991) Director of the U.S. Mint (1961– 1969). A native of Nevada, Eva Adams’s career as a public servant took one of the few paths open to women of her time. She worked as an administrative assistant for three senators from the state of Nevada. Adams was born in Wonder, Nevada, in 1908 where her father worked for mining and banking magnate George Wingfi eld. She loved school and took advantage of opportunities to expand her knowledge. She graduated from high school at the age of 14, earned her bachelor’s degree in 1928 from the University of Nevada, and by the age of 19, moved to southern Nevada to teach at Las Vegas High School. Several years later, she continued her education at Columbia University in New York City and earned a master’s degree in English in 1936. That same year, she returned to Reno to teach in the English Department at the University of Nevada. Her career took a different turn in 1940 when she accepted an invitation from Senator Patrick McCarran (D-NV) to join his staff in Washington, D.C. She worked as McCarran’s assistant until his death in 1954. McCarran’s powerful role in the Senate and his Cold War positions on national security and foreign affairs placed Adams at the center of national politics. That experience served her well after McCarran’s death when she became administrative assistant to his successors, Nevada Senators Ernest Brown (appointed in 1954) and Alan Bible (elected in 1954). While working in Washington, D.C., she earned a law degree from American University’s Washington College of Law (1950) and a masters degree in law from George Washington University (1952).

V.

CHILDREN’S

A 1923 U.S. Supreme Court case. The case was important in the history of efforts to pass laws guaranteeing minimum wages to workers. In the early years of the twentieth century, many state legislatures passed laws to improve conditions for workers. Some of these laws regulated the number of hours employees could be required to work; others established a minimum wage. Progressives saw these statutes as important victories in the fight for social reform, but many business owners opposed them. In their view, these laws interfered with private property rights and with the right of workers to contract freely to provide their labor to employers. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital arose from the federal Minimum Wage Act of 1918, which established a minimum wage board in the District of Columbia to set minimum wages for women and minors and ensure that employers paid these wages. The Children’s Hospital in the District of Columbia employed several women at wages lower than the standard, and when the minimum wage board took action against the hospital, the women lost their jobs. The Children’s Hospital brought suit to prevent Adkins and other board members from enforcing the wage orders. The women said they were satisfi ed with their pay and working conditions, so the hospital sued on their behalf to stop enforcement of the law and allow the women to take whatever jobs they wanted. At issue was whether the women had been denied due process under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that “ due process of law” has to be

ADOLESCENCE

followed before someone can be denied “ life, liberty, or property.” In its fi ve-to-three decision, the Supreme Court ruled against the minimum wage board, saying that “ the right to contract about one’s affairs is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fifth Amendment.” The Court went on to say that “ the statute in question is simply a price-fi xing law forbidding two parties to contract in respect to the price for which one shall render service to the other.” The Court concluded, “ To uphold individual freedom is not to strike down the common good, but to further it by the prevention of arbitrary restraint upon the liberty of its members.” The effect of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, combined with the Great Depression of the 1930s, was to put an end to efforts to establish minimum wages in the United States. However, popular pressure continued to build for minimum wage laws, and in 1937 the Court overturned its ruling in Adkins by upholding a minimum wage law for women in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. By 1939 twentyfi ve states had enacted minimum wage laws, and in 1941 the Court upheld federal minimum wage standards for both men and women.

 ADOLESCENCE

TRAILBLAZERS Among the many contributions of Margaret Mead (1901–1 978) to the field of anthropology, those for which she is best known stem from her early work in American Samoa and New Guinea. After studying adolescent girls in Samoa and young children in New Guinea, Mead concluded that while adolescence was a biological process, there were significant differences in how this process was handled by different cultures. Among her great discoveries is the idea that “ human nature is malleable,” that people behave as they do largely because they were trained to do so, not because it is part of “ human nature” to do so. Mead extended her insights into gender roles and demonstrated that many of the ideas prevalent in Western society about gender and gender roles were cultural rather than biological in origin. In particular, her work among three different cultures in New Guinea, the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli, showed women in gender roles quite different from those they typically adopted in Western culture. Among the Tchambuli, for example, women were dominant and men submissive. Mead received a degree in psychology from Barnard College, then did a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia, studying under Franz Boas and RUTH BENEDICT. In 1925 she traveled to American Samoa to study adolescent girls. The results of her research were published as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a work that was an immediate best-seller, partly because of its open and frank treatment of adolescent sexuality. Her second work, Growing Up in New Guinea (1931), pointed out that Western cultures had much to learn from socalled “ primitive” cultures about how children were reared and educated. Mead taught at a number of colleges and universities, but her primary affiliation was with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She wrote more than 20 books and coauthored another 20. She received numerous honors during her life and was elected president of many professional organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mead died of cancer in 1975.

It is only in the twentieth century that adolescence has been seen as a separate and distinct period of development. In earlier centuries, young people married and went to work at younger ages, and most people slipped from childhood to adulthood fairly easily; girls married in their teens, and boys embarked on their careers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, psychologist G. Stanley Hall published Adolescence, a work that revolutionized the perception of teenagers and how they should be treated. One of his most important insights was that adolescence should be prolonged. He also saw adolescence as a period

of “ storm and stress” as young people struggled with their emerging sexuality. In the 1920s anthropologist Margaret Mead countered many of Hall’s insights, pointing out that emerging sexuality among Samoan adolescents was not fraught with difficulty and demonstrating that gender assumptions were cultural rather than biological in origin.

AFRICAN AMERICANS

In keeping with Hall’s ideas about prolonging adolescence, Progressive-era reformers campaigned against CHILD LABOR and for compulsory EDUCATION laws. Reformers also worked to raise the age at which people could marry. Through most of the 1920s Mary Richmond worked to end what she called “ child marriage.” In many states at the time, girls could legally marry at the age of 12. The twentieth-century view of adolescence has been particularly hard on girls. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg notes in her ground-breaking work, The Body Project, “ The process of sexual maturation is more difficult for girls today than it was a century ago because of a set of historical changes that have resulted in a peculiar mismatch between girls’ biology and today’s culture.” Girls tend to reach sexual maturity much younger than they did a century ago. But the process of psychological maturation has not accelerated and society simply does not offer the same protection to girls as they received in the nineteenth century when young women were carefully watched and chaperoned. Moreover, television and print advertising places tremendous pressure on adolescent girls to reach a standard of physical attractiveness that was unheard of a hundred years ago. In contrast to modern teenage girls’ obsession with appearance, Brumberg notes that most nineteenthcentury homes did not even have mirrors. Twentieth-century adolescent girls receive mixed messages constantly. On the one hand, they are forbidden by law to marry, while on the other hand they are constantly reminded of their sexuality and taught to use their sexuality to attract men. Although many girls develop into healthy, well-adjusted adults, some react to all the pressure by a series of rebellious acts; others develop eating disorders; others emerge from adolescence with little self-confi dence or self-esteem. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Vintage, 1998. Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine, 1995.



AFRICAN AMERICANS

At the outset of the twentieth century, African Americans were overwhelmingly poor, rural, and Southern. A century later the vast majority lived

in cities across the nation, and about half were relatively well educated and prosperous. AfricanAmerican women were at the heart of this transformation. Many women participated in the migration of blacks out of the rural South to Southern and then Northern cities, a migration that began late in the nineteenth century. Married or not, urban African-American women often earned money as domestic servants, laundresses, peddlers, or seamstresses. WORLD WAR I stimulated northward migration. African-American women soon dominated domestic service in Northern cities, although most insisted on living in their own homes, where they could care for their children, rather than with their employers. WORLD WAR II offered opportunities for African-American women in defense plants at wages that were many times higher than they had earned during the Depression. Growing numbers of female AfricanAmerican entrepreneurs appeared beginning in the 1920s, fueling the emergence of a substantial black middle class. Thousands of seamstresses and hairdressers set up shops, often in their homes. Growing numbers of college-educated African-American women worked as teachers and nurses. Whether they earned money or not, AfricanAmerican women were strong wives, mothers, and community members. They raised their children to be hardworking and autonomous and took leading roles in community groups, from churches to antilynching campaigns. MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE and members of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN were among the leaders of such movements. The role of African-American women grew still larger during the second half of the twentieth century. In refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person, ROSA PARKS helped to ignite the civil rights movement in 1955, and, though male leaders enjoyed the most publicity, women organizers such as ELLA BAKER, FANNIE LOU HAMER, and JoAnn Robinson played critical roles. African-American women were also assuming greater familial and economic roles. They headed just 18 percent of black families in 1950, but that number had increased to 40 percent by 1980. The percentage was much higher among those living in poverty, where single mothers struggled, with the help of family and neighbors,

AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN

to keep their children fed and safe. Middle-class African-American women were also becoming more powerful. By the later years of the century they outnumbered their male counterparts in colleges and many professions. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Morrow, 1984. Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

AID TO DEPENDENT  CHILDREN The fi rst federal program to support mothers with young children who were desperately poor and without adult male support. The policy became a part (Title IV) of the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT (1935), a comprehensive program designed during the 1930s to provide a safety net against economic disaster for Americans. The idea behind Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) was to keep poor families together, to provide a subsidy for the poor mother, and to prevent children from leaving school to enter the workforce. It built on earlier state-level experiments called mothers’ aid or MOTHERS’ PENSIONS. By the 1960s, ADC became the largest poverty program paid for by federal and state tax revenues. In 1996, President Bill Clinton ended the safety net program and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The widespread economic disruption of the Great Depression during the 1930s created the context for aid to dependent children. Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932 on his promise to provide economic security for all Americans. The plan that passed Congress, the 1935 Social Security

7

WOMEN’S FIRSTS The first African-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives was early childhood expert Shirley Chisholm (b. 1926), who took her seat in 1969 and served for 15 years. In 1972 she achieved national recognition by becoming the first African-American woman to run for president. Born Shirley St. Hill to West Indian immigrant laborers, Chisholm had the opportunity at 14 to meet ELEANOR ROOSEVELT. In an interview in later life she named Roosevelt as one of three great infl uences in her life (the others were her grandmother and HARRIET TUBMAN– – see Volume 2) and recalled Roosevelt’s words to her: “ You are black and you are a young woman, but don’t you let anybody stand in your way. Because you’ve got it!” In Congress she made a name as a critic of the war in Vietnam and an advocate of the interests of the urban poor. She retired from politics in 1982, seeking a more private life. She once remarked: “ Of my two ‘ handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.” Her two books are Unbought and Unbossed (1970), a memoir, and The Good Fight (1973), an account of her presidential bid.

Shirley Chisholm

A L B R I G H T, M A D E L E I N E K .

Act, took social responsibility for the elderly, the very young, the unemployed, the sick, and the disabled and subsidized their income through a plan of social insurance. Some features of the act were new, but the provisions for dependent children had been used in many states for two decades. The U.S. CHILDREN’ S BUREAU, created in 1912 to research all aspects of children’s lives, wrote the provision and lobbied for its inclusion in the Social Security Act. The bureau knew the statelevel mothers’ pension laws better than anyone, and they believed that any social insurance plan must provide a measure for families without fathers. In part, this refl ected contemporary moral values, but it also recognized economic realities. At the time, most women worked in a small sector of jobs that paid meager wages. Consequently, employment programs, while successful for male heads of families, would leave hundreds of thousands of mother-only families in poverty. In addition, some supporters argued, a mother’s fi rst job was in the home raising her children. That work proved of far greater value to society than the wages she could earn or the costs of ADC. The “ proper” role for mothers as care-givers or wage-earners remained at the heart of debates over ADC, with the balance shifting increasingly toward self-support. States, seeking to reduce welfare expenses, enforced work rules mandating wage work by mothers. In 1962, 33 states had work rules and the federal government began focusing on jobs and training. The trend coincided with an increase in the number of working mothers throughout the United States as well as an increase in unmarried mothers and African-American women who received ADC. The program, already unpopular in many states, began to symbolize all that was wrong with federal programs. The issue of welfare reform became a campaign theme during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton, having won that election, carried out his campaign promise to “ end welfare as we know it” in 1996, when he signed legislation ending AFDC. A program with far greater limits called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families replaced it.

 ALBRIGHT, MADELEINE K.

(b. 1937) U.S. government official and diplomat; the fi rst woman to serve as secretary of state. Broadly ex-

perienced in international diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy, respected by her peers as a consummate professional, and with a reputation for directness, Madeleine Albright was a natural choice for President Bill Clinton to name as secretary of state at the start of his second term in 1997. The start of her tenure as a high-profi le cabinet official was dominated by a personal revelation. Soon after taking office, Albright––t he daughter of a Czech diplomat who had taken the family to America after the Communist takeover in 1948– – learned that her parents, who raised her as a Roman Catholic, had been born Jewish; a number of her relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. Born Madeleine Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia, she came to the United States at age 11 with a grant of political asylum. After earning her B.A. from Wellesley and M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia, she worked on national security affairs in the departments of defense, state, and treasury during the early 1960s. She later held positions in the Export-Import Bank, the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter, and the faculty at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. During Clinton’s fi rst term (1993-97), Albright served as chief U.S. representative to the United Nations. As secretary of state, she took an active role in enforcing trade sanctions on Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, seeking resolutions to the crisis in Kosovo and the Yugoslav War, and adding new members to NATO. Albright is the author of several books and numerous articles. She has three daughters from her marriage to journalist Joseph Albright, which ended in divorced.



AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN The oldest national organization dedicated to expanding opportunities for women’s EDUCATION. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae, formed in 1882, merged with regional organizations to form the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in 1921. At that time, only a small percentage of women attended colleges and universities, and many schools legally denied women admission. Within a few years, the AAUW established not only a scholarship program but also a research branch. In 1938, the organization published its fi rst study of sex dis-

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crimination on campuses; similar studies would be repeated over the years. The organization has been a consistent advocate of both sex equity and CIVIL RIGHTS. It supported the passage of the Civil Rights Act, TITLE IX (prohibiting sex discrimination in athletics), and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Today, the AAUW has 150,000 members with more than 1,500 branches across the United States. It is also a member of the International Federation of University Women making the network global.

reform for women and their political and economic rights. In 1992, the ACLU’s abortion rights team broke away to form the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (for organizational efficiency rather than policy differences). The ACLU was also active during the 1990s in establishing standards and defi nitions of SEXUAL HARASSMENT and in making it easier for women to fi le complaints.

AMERICAN CIVIL  LIBERTIES UNION

INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS

National nonprofi t organization dedicated to preserving and protecting constitutional rights through litigation and legal defense, legislative lobbying, and public education. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in 1920 by a group of civil libertarians that included JANE ADDAMS (see Volume 2), HELEN KELLER, Norman Thomas, Felix Frankfurter, and Roger Baldwin, who served as director until 1950. Its predecessor organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau, was founded in 1917 to protect the right to free speech of citizens who spoke out against U.S. participation in WORLD WAR I. Other women instrumental in the formation of the organization included the labor organizer and Communist party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the social reformer Crystal Eastman. Headquartered in New York and with chapters in every state, the ACLU has been active since its formation in defending free speech, civil rights, due process of law, separation of church and state, the right to privacy, and other constitutional freedoms; it has opposed segregation, capital punishment, and government censorship. ACLU leaders and attorneys have supported a number of controversial groups and causes, including the First Amendment rights of the American Nazi Party in the late 1970s. Conservative groups and politicians have criticized the organization for what they perceive to be liberal excesses. The ACLU has been active in opposing gender discrimination and defending abortion rights. In 1971, RUTH BADER GINSBURG, then a law professor at Rutgers University and later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, founded the ACLU Women’s Rights Project to promote legal

AMERICAN FEDERATION  OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF Federation of labor UNIONS in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Panama. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the organization was formed in 1955 by a merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As of 2001, the AFL-CIO included 64 unions, representing 13 million working women and men. The unions are selfgoverning but cooperate within the federation; they are represented at the biennial AFL-CIO convention, the federation’s supreme governing body. The chief functions of the AFL-CIO are to lobby government and employers on behalf of organized labor; give legal assistance; provide research and information services; and resolve disputes between members. The AFL was organized in 1886 as a decentralized federation that emphasized the organization of skilled workers into craft unions (as opposed to industrial unions made up of workers with diverse skills). In 1935 it set up the Committee for Industrial Organization to organize workers in mass-production industries. That body established its own federation in 1938 and changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organization. Its dramatic rise in membership and prestige, as well as a mutual desire to confront anti-labor policies in the federal government, fi nally led to the merger. Many unions with traditionally heavy female membership are, or have been, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Among these are the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The Working Women’s Department of the AFL-CIO works with civil rights, community, and religious organizations to promote equal pay, fl exible

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A M E R I C A N F E D E R AT I O N O F T E A C H E R S

hours, child-care benefi ts, and other issues important to female members. In 1995, LINDA CHAVEZ-THOMPSON became the highest-ranking woman in the labor movement when she was elected to the new position of AFL-CIO executive vice-president.

AMERICAN FEDERATION  OF TEACHERS Labor organization for teachers, school counselors, custodians, and school bus drivers. Founded in 1912 and formally joined with the American Federation of Labor in 1915, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was based on the educational philosophy of John Dewey, who believed that the worker and employer should work together to serve each other’s interests. MARGARET HALEY, who had established the Chicago Teacher’s Federation in 1897—the fi rst teacher’s union to join forces with organized labor—helped found the AFT. However, she left the organization in 1916 because of philosophical differences with the union president, Charles Stillman. At the turn of the twentieth century, teachers hoped that by forming a union they were more likely to be accepted as professionals and have a larger voice in educational policy and curriculum. They might have joined the NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (NEA), which was founded in 1857, but many believed that the NEA did not give them enough professional support. Because NEA membership was comprised mainly of school administrators and college professors, it was they whom the NEA primarily served. Female teachers felt a particular need to organize. Between 1900 and 1920, 80 percent of the nation’s teachers were female. However, they were only paid half as much as their male counterparts. With no labor support, teachers could be fi red for little or no reason. In addition, a woman who married usually lost her job. During WORLD WAR II, teacher shortages forced school administrations to allow married women to teach. With help from unions, teaching has allowed women access to the professional world and the political arena. Classroom teachers were among the fi rst groups to advocate equal pay for men and women. Teacher unions have infl uenced

educational bureaucracies, have given teachers a voice in structuring school curriculums, and have professionalized education. Today the AFT, an AFL-CIO affiliate, works to support educators across the United States: It fi ghts for higher salaries, pensions, and tenure for educators; it negotiates contracts; and it infl uences state and local educational policies.

 ANDERSON, LAURIE

(b. 1947) Multimedia performance artist, writer, and musician. Born June 5, 1947, in Chicago, Anderson moved to New York to study art at Barnard College in 1968 and received an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia in 1972. One of her fi rst public performances was in 1968 on a New York City street, where she played a duet with a tape recorder inside her violin, while wearing ice skates frozen in two blocks of ice. The performance ended when the ice melted. Anderson has been at the forefront of avant-garde art ever since, frequently performing with musical instruments of her own creation, including a harmonizer that fi lters her natural voice into a low male-sounding voice, which she dubs “ the voice of authority” and uses whenever assuming the persona of a lecturer. Long fascinated with technology, Anderson describes herself as a “ techno ice-queen observer.” Anderson’s art, in any of its multiple forms–– sculpture, spoken word, writing, music––e xamines the points of view afforded Anderson as an urbanite, a woman, a feminist, and an artist. She uses multidisciplinary presentation to increase the impact of her work, integrating images through photographs, fi lm, or fi ne art with text, music, or performance. In 1984, Anderson presented her debut single, “ O Superman,” a spoken-word piece, to mainstream airwaves. It reached number one in Britain. She tours extensively with her multimedia shows and concerts, which have included United States, Empty Places, and Nerve Bible, the last of which was published in book form.

 ANDERSON, MARY

(1872– 1964) Labor organizer, fi rst WOMEN’ S BUREAU chief. Born in Sweden in 1872, Mary Anderson emigrated with her sister to the United States in

ANOREXIA NERVOSA

4

1882 and found work washing dishes in a Michigan boarding house for lumberjacks. She then worked for several years in Chicago garment and shoe factories before becoming an organizer for the National Boot and Shoe Workers’ Union; she eventually became the local branch president. In 1903, she joined the Chicago branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) after experiencing difficulties working with allmale executive boards. By 1910, she was the WTUL representative for the Garment Workers’ Union. In that position, she organized, lectured, and investigated strikes. In 1914, Anderson began researching women’s war work for the federal government. Her research and union leadership gained the attention of political fi gures. She became chief of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau in 1919. She helped lead a fi ght to defeat the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, which she believed would be detrimental to women’s lives. She published vital evidence backing a series of laws reforming working conditions and pay. She retired in 1944 and spent the rest of her life lecturing about women and labor issues.

 ANGELOU, MAYA

(b. 1928) Writer, and actress, and director. Born Marguerite Johnson, Maya Angelou had a difficult childhood. At the age of eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and suffered several episodes of muteness as a result. Her early childhood is covered in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). Angelou’s other autobiographies, including Gather Together in My Name (1974) and The Heart of a Woman (1981), focus on economic, racial, and sexual oppression, as do her novels, poetry, and screenplays. Marguerite Johnson became “ Maya Angelou” while working as a dancer in San Francisco in the 1940s. Angelou worked several seedy jobs, including one as a prostitute. She relocated to New York City in the 1950s, where she was encouraged by the Harlem Writer’s Guild to develop her writing talent. In the meantime, she acted in several stage productions, including Porgy and Bess. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt, in the early 1960s. While there she worked to improve conditions for Third World women and was the associate editor of the Arab Observer. On returning

Maya Angelou has worked as a writer, actress, and director.

to the United States, she became the fi rst AfricanAmerican woman to have one of her stories made into a fi lm (Georgia, Georgia, 1972). In addition, she received two Tony nominations for her acting in Roots and was the fi rst female AfricanAmerican director in Hollywood. Angelou has been a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University since 1981. In 1993, she was the inaugural poet for President Bill Clinton, where she read her poem “ On the Pulse of the Morning.”

 ANOREXIA NERVOSA

An eating disorder. Anorexia is most often found in ADOLESCENT girls and young women and is characterized by an exaggerated preoccupation with body size. A young woman afflicted with anorexia believes that she is fat even when her body weight falls well below what is healthy for her height and bone structure. Anorexia may lead to severely reduced calorie intake,

4

A N T I - M I S C E G E N AT I O N L AW S

compulsive exercise, and bulimia—binge eating followed by vomiting to purge what has been consumed. Young women who lose signifi cant amounts of weight stop menstruating and may experience reduced heart rate, low blood pressure, and depression. Among women afflicted with anorexia, 10 percent will die, most from heart problems. Biological, social, and psychological factors have been identifi ed as causes of anorexia. Not much is known about the biological factors, but there is some evidence that anorexia may occur as a result of mood swings and depression. Social factors include the pressure on women to be thin. Psychologically, young middle-class women who are achievement oriented and who hope for a traditional lifestyle, including marriage, tend to develop anorexia. Psychologists speculate that the competing desires to be successful at school and work and yet feminine and attractive to men may create confusion and a sense of being overwhelmed. Anorexic young women are often perfectionists, and their families may have very high expectations for them. Treatment for anorexia is difficult, and many victims must be hospitalized. A combination of psychotherapy, antidepressant medication, and education about nutrition can help many recover.

ANTI-MISCEGENATION  LAWS State laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races. The term “ miscegenation” dates only to 1864, but anti-miscegenation laws in America were in force for more than 300 years. Maryland enacted the fi rst anti-miscegenation law in 1661; by the nineteenth century similar laws were in place in most states. Interracial relationships were regarded as both a breach of morality and a threat to the economic structure of slavery. Anti-miscegenation laws soon included other races. In 1880, California barred licenses for marriages between a white person and a “ Negro, mulatto, or Mongolian,” in a reaction to the infl ux of mostly Chinese immigrants. In 1909 it added people of Japanese heritage to this list. Laws did not prevent either interracial marriage or the birth of children of mixed race, and following WORLD WAR II, many of the statutes were challenged. In 1948, the California

Supreme Court ruled that such laws were based on racial distinctions that were “ by their very nature, odious to a free people.” Civil rights gains in the 1950s and 1960s drew attention to the anti-miscegenation laws, although a Gallup poll conducted in 1958 on the subject of interracial marriage showed that 94 percent of the white people questioned opposed such marriages. In 1967, 16 states still had anti-miscegenation laws on their books when, in LOVING V. VIRGINIA, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1924 Virginia law forbidding interracial marriages as unconstitutional and a denial of Fourteenth Amendment rights.

 ARDEN, ELIZABETH

(1878– 1966) Beautician and cosmetics entrepreneur. Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham in Ontario, Canada. She attended nursing school in Toronto, but upon becoming a nurse discovered a path that she considered more interesting— cosmetics. Arden believed that creams and salves used for medical purposes could also serve as beauty creams and lotions. Unable to fi nd the perfect beauty cream on her own, Arden moved to New York City in 1908 and formed a partnership with a chemist. At that time, the concept of beauty cream was unheard of. Cosmetics were used mainly by stage performers. Undiscouraged, Arden worked in a beauty parlor until she could afford to open her own salon in 1910. Arden’s Fifth Avenue salon, which offered superior products and services, was popular with New York’s elite. Soon her products were being sold in exclusive department stores around the world. In addition, Arden was the fi rst to use beauty advisors and made “ makeovers” commonplace in stores that sold her products. Among Arden’s innovations in cosmetics were foundations made to match skin tone, coordination of colors for face and nails, and anti-aging creams. By 1920, there were over 100 Elizabeth Arden products on the market. Overall, Arden made cosmetics a socially acceptable—and perhaps even essential—part of everyday fashion. After establishing herself in the cosmetic industry, from the 1930s until her death in 1966 Arden ran the Maine Chance Stables in Kentucky where the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner was bred.

ARTISTS

 ARTISTS

Creators of visual images whether painting, prints, sculpture, environmental, or performance. In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin published an article entitled, “ Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin’s question raised two related issues: Women had created art for centuries, but they were excluded from the history of art and the institutions of cultural power. Whether they were denied admission to schools and academies to study, patrons to fi nance their work, or acceptance into galleries to exhibit their work, women had to leap great barriers to turn their art into a profession. During the twentieth century some of these barriers fell. The academy system that had controlled access to professional training in the visual arts during the nineteenth century fell apart by the end of WORLD WAR I. New artists experimenting with new styles replaced the academic traditions and created modern art schools. Women participated in every movement from surrealism to abstract expressionism and performance art. They worked in every medium, such as PHOTOGRAPHY at the beginning of the century and electronic media at its close. Berenice Abbott and Imogene Cunningham became noted photographers of urban and natural landscapes, respectively. Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange used the photographic image to document the United States during the Depression and WORLD WAR II. Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, and Annie Liebowitz use documentary portraiture as social commentary. The woman artists with the greatest international reputations during the second half of the century, Georgia O’Keeffe and LOUISE NEVELSON, used aspects of minimalism and abstraction in their painting and sculp-

4

TRAILBLAZERS Georgia O’Keeffe (1887– 1986) was a painter whose abstractions of natural forms— clouds, fl owers, desert landscapes— became her signature work. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she began her art studies as a child and by age 16 had five years of private lessons. She spent one year (1905) studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and another (1907) with the Art Students’ League in New York City. Unsettled about the direction of her artwork, O’Keeffe spent the next several years teaching art and taking classes. Beginning in 1916, the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz displayed her drawings in his gallery. He also preserved some of the best images of O’Keeffe in photographs of the artist. In 1918, she returned to New York City, and she and Stieglitz married in 1924. That year, O’Keeffe began to paint her enormous abstractions of fl owers. Looking for new visual stimulation, O’Keeffe traveled west by train in 1929 to Taos, New Mexico. She stayed with MABEL DODGE LUHAN. The colors of the land, the Native American and Spanish cultures of the Southwest, and the distance from all she knew captivated her. After that summer, she returned to New York and Stieglitz but returned each subsequent summer to further explore northern New Mexico. O’Keeffe’s work became less popular during the postwar years when abstract expressionism was in vogue. She had only a few solo shows. However, by the 1970s a new generation of admirers renewed interest in her work and she held two major exhibitions. She stopped painting in the early 1970s as her eyesight failed. O’Keeffe died at the age of 98 in 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An art museum dedicated specifically to her life and work was built in her honor a few years later.

Georgia O’ Keefe is best known for her large, visually stimulating canvases.

44

ASH, MARY KAY

tures, respectively. Although neither appreciated being called a woman artist, they both broke barriers for the next generation. After World War II, New York replaced Western Europe as the center of the art world and created the context for a new school of painting called abstract expressionism. For decades, only male practitioners of abstract expressionism gained attention, and yet prominent women such as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler worked alongside Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, and others. The WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT of the 1960s and 1970s brought new energy into the art world, challenging the subjects and institutions yet again. Some women began to examine the way in which gender shaped their lives and incorporated their observations into their artwork. Issues that had previously been taboo— rape, incest, menstruation, childbirth, and sexuality—became the subject matter of visual and performance artists. Judy Chicago’s paintings and The Dinner Party installation brought into full public view women’s bodies, experiences, and histories. Women’s lives became a subject of the visual arts as women’s bodies and mythical attributions had been a century earlier. Ana Mendieta’s performance work, Betye Saar’s and Faith Ringgold’s sculptural pieces, and Jenny Holzer’s electronic message installations captured the social changes underway with their unconventional art works. It took longer to gain access to the art world’s exhibitions, critics, collectors, and historians. Yet, the change occurred because of the persistence, dedication, and political mobilization of women to end their exclusion and marginalization. As with other forms of creative expression– – DANCE, acting, MUSIC, and LITERATURE– – women make their own choices to work as visual artists today, rather than having those choices made for them.

 ASH, MARY KAY

(b. 1915) Business executive and entrepreneur. Mary Kay Wagner was born in Hot Wells, Texas, in 1915 and grew up during the Depression. After her father, Edward Wagner, contracted tuberculosis, she ran the household and cared for him while her mother, Lulu, worked as a restaurant manager to support the family. During the 1930s, af-

ter graduating from high school, Wagner married Ben Rogers and had three children. She sold books door to door to earn additional income for her family and was divorced from her husband in 1938 after he returned home from serving in the armed forces. She joined the Stanley Home Products company, selling housewares and cleaning products, and eventually became a manager in the organization. In 1952, she became national training director at the World Gift Company and helped expand the company’s business. However, she encountered a GLASS CEILING and could not be promoted to a top position because those jobs were only open to men, so she left. In 1963, she used $5,000 of her own money to found Mary Kay Cosmetics in Dallas, Texas, hiring women to sell beauty products door to door and rewarding outstanding salespeople with pink Cadillacs, diamonds, and other incentives to motivate them to sell. By the 1990s, the company employed over four hundred thousand salespeople in 25 countries across the globe. It is the largest company selling cosmetics through direct sales. Ash has been married three times and has a daughter and two sons.

 ASIAN AMERICANS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, few Asian women had managed to overcome the legal barriers necessary to emigrate to the United States. Having arrived only recently from many different countries, most had not yet forged identities as Asians and Americans. The earliest Asian immigrants to come to the United States were the Chinese. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a small number of Chinese women were employed in domestic service, but many others were still trying to escape past legacies of slavery and oppression. While the 61-year ban on Chinese immigrants fi nally ended in 1943, the National Origins Act of 1924 banned the entry of Koreans, Japanese, and Asian Indians, and the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie act restricted the number of Filipino immigrants to 50 a year. With the exception of the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement, which allowed Japanese women to enter the country as family members of Japanese men, resulting in near equal proportions of men and women Japanese immigrants, legislation existed that restricted the im-

AT H L E T I C S

migration of Asians and had the particular effect of barring women. It was not until 1965 that all Asian immigration laws were lifted and quotas fi nally increased to reunite families. Today, Asian women emigrate from a multitude of Asian countries, such as Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, representing numerous cultural and national backgrounds and religions. While some women arrived independently, in large part, women emigrated with family members. Many women followed men, both husbands and would-be husbands. Some Japanese and Korean women came as picture brides, a form of arranged marriage. Many Asians emigrated fi rst to Hawaii or California. While legal barriers have been lifted against their entry, Asian-American women continue to face prejudice. A 1990 study showed that Asian immigrant women without profi ciency in English were more likely to be impoverished than other immigrant groups. Additionally, negative portrayals of Asian women in the media perpetuate negative stereotypes of Asian women as submissive and subservient or, in the equally unfavorable alternative, as ruthless “ dragon lady” caricatures. In reality, Asian women are struggling to advance themselves in all areas and are now becoming visible as journalists, Cabinet members, mayors, and activists. And Asian-American women possess a growing consciousness of their dual identities, which is slowly being introduced to mainstream white culture by writers such as Chinese-American AMY TAN.

 ATHLETICS

By the dawn of the twentieth century, upper-class women were participating recreationally in the socially acceptable sports of archery, bowling, tennis, and golf, while others played croquet or enjoyed the freedom of bicycling. At the collegiate level, women’s competitive experiences were available at some institutions, but the quantity and quality of these opportunities varied greatly from campus to campus. The most popular college sports were basketball, tennis, fi eld hockey, swimming, softball, and archery. In this era, tennis star Suzanne Lenglen won Wimbledon (1919) and Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel, shattering the men’s record by over two hours.

4

The Growth of Sporting Opportunities for Women By the late 1920s, industries and municipal recreation departments and agencies were running recreational and competitive basketball, bowling, and baseball/softball leagues for women, with top teams participating in national championships. Women in the middle and upper classes, however, continued to focus their abilities on individual sports, such as golf, tennis, fencing, fi gure skating, and swimming, rather than on teams. In the fi rst quarter of the twentieth century, national championships were established for these women. In 1920, the United States entered a full women’s swimming team and two fi gure skaters in the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium; in 1928, a women’s track-and-fi eld team was sent to the Amsterdam Olympic Games. The most outstanding female athlete of the 1932 Olympics, and perhaps the fi nest female athlete of the twentieth century, was MILDRED “ BABE” DIDRIKSON ZAHARIAS, who won two gold medals and one silver in track-and-fi eld events. A great all-around athlete, Babe went on to become one of America’s best golfers ever. Ironically, as women’s sporting opportunities in society at large were expanding, the opportunities for women in intercollegiate sports were diminishing and soon would almost disappear, supplanted by several less competitive approaches, such as intramurals. Not until the 1960s would intercollegiate opportunities for women reappear. African-American women were able to participate in athletics primarily through traditionally African-American colleges. Tuskegee Institute dominated the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national track-and-fi eld competition from 1937 to 1948 and Tennessee State University dominated AAU and Olympic competition from 1947 into the 1960s. Sprinter Wilma Rudolph was one of Tennessee State’s stars. Major league baseball suffered from a lack of manpower during WORLD WAR II, leading to the creation of a women’s baseball league in 1943. By 1948, it consisted of ten teams and attracted almost a million fans, but as the soldiers came back from World War II, the women’s league struggled to compete for spectators. It fi nally dissolved in 1954. Industrial leagues also folded in the 1950s when society returned to more traditional views of

4

AT H L E T I C S

Equal Pay Act, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the modern women’s rights movement began. The NAIn 1960 at the Olympic Games in Rome, Wilma Rudolph beTIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN came the first American woman to win three gold medals. What (NOW) was formed in 1966, and women started entering fi elds formade her accomplishment so amazing was the fact that, after merly closed to them. contracting polio at age four, she was told that she would never Concomitant with this push towalk again. ward equality for women on many Born in 1940 in Tennessee, Wilma was the twentieth of 22 fronts was the growing interest in children. Her poverty-stricken family additionally suffered high-level competitive opportunities from the injustices of a segregated society. Throughout her in collegiate sports. This resulted in childhood, she was afflicted with measles, mumps, chicken pox, the development of the Commission double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and then polio, which left her on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women with a crippled left leg. Several members of her family pro(CIAW) in 1966. In 1971, the CIAW vided daily physical therapy exercises which, in time, allowed evolved into the Association for InterWilma to walk with the support of a metal leg brace. Eventucollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), ally, by age 12, she walked normally, thanks to her great dewhich set out to create an educatermination. tionally sound and student-oriented Fours years later, she ran in the four-by-four relay at the model for athletics, offering state, re1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and won a bronze medal. The gional, and national championship following year, she enrolled at Tennessee State University, opportunities for women. whose track and field athletes had dominated AAU and In 1972, the passage of TITLE IX Olympic teams for years. gave sportswomen the biggest boost In the 1960 games, she won gold medals in the 100 meters toward equality in the twentieth cenand 200 meters (Olympic record); a third gold was won for tury, prohibiting discrimination anchoring the 400-meter relay (world record). Dubbed the based on sex in educational institu“ World’s Fastest Woman,” she was feted throughout Europe tions receiving federal funding. With before returning to the United States. this law, the world of educational In her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, the first racially sport was to be forever changed. integrated event ever held in the town was a welcoming home In 1973, former Wimbledon tennis champion Bobby Riggs, then in parade and banquet in her honor. That year she was named his fi fties, belittled women tennis United Press Athlete of the Year and Associated Press Woman players as inferior and challenged Athlete of the Year. In 1962, she won the Babe Zaharias Award BILLIE JEAN KING, the top female tenas the most outstanding athlete in the world. nis player, to a match. Promoted as After retiring from track at age 22, Rudolph worked as a the “ Battle of the Sexes,” the event coach and inspirational speaker. In 1967, she was selected to attracted a worldwide television auwork in Operation Champ to train ghetto children in track dience of fi fty million. Many considthen later worked with Chicago’s Youth Foundation. In 1981, ered the match a contest to detershe founded the Wilma Rudolph Foundation to train young mine if a woman could defeat a man underprivileged athletes. in sport and prove herself to be as Rudolph died of a malignant brain tumor in 1994 at age 54. skilled, as popular, and as entertaining. King won in straight sets, and another giant step toward equality women’s roles in society, emphasizing femininity, for women was taken. For all her many contridomesticity, and motherhood. butions, especially for her fi ght for equal pay for female tennis players and also for the establishment of the Women’s Sports Foundation in 1974, The Impetus for Signifi cant Changes King is regarded by many as the most infl uential in Opportunities for Women female athlete of the twentieth century. The Foundation, comprised of national, international, The 1960s saw a radical requestioning of women’s and Olympic female champions, has become the roles in society. Following the 1960 Report of the strongest collective voice for women in sport. Commission on the Status of Women, the 1963

WOMEN’S FIRSTS

A V I A T I O N A N D S PA C E

47

The Setbacks

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Throughout the 1970s, the growth of opportunities for girls and women in sport was phenomenal because institutions not in compliance with Title IX risked the loss of federal funds. Opposing Title IX, however, was the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Unsuccessful in its attempt to exempt football and men’s basketball, the NCAA then maneuvered to achieve the next best result—to take control over all women’s sports. Using its dominant power and its great fi nancial resources, the NCAA competed with the AIAW by offering championships for women. By June 1982, the AIAW had been put out of business. Women were subsumed into the male model of sport, losing several national championship opportunities, athletic scholarships, and hundreds of leadership positions. Another huge setback for athletic equality was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Grove City College v. Bell (1984), in which the justices held that only athletic programs that directly received federal funding were required to comply with Title IX. Almost no athletic departments in the country receive direct federal funding. Title IX was resurrected with the 1988 Civil Rights Restoration Act, but it was not enforced until 1993, when President Clinton took office.

Gerber, E., J. Felshin, P. Berlin, and W. Wyrick. The American Woman in Sport. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1974.

Conclusion Despite enforcement of Title IX in the 1990s, women in educational institutions still do not receive comparable opportunities, support, treatment, or coverage in sport at any level. These collegiate results demonstrate that many educational institutions continue to discriminate in violation of a federal law mandating equal opportunity for all. Despite the discriminatory treatment, American sportswomen continue to excel. Jackie Joyner-Kersee was the fi rst woman to win the heptathlon in consecutive Olympic Games in 1992. In 1996, U.S. women won Olympic gold medals in soccer, basketball, softball, synchronized swimming, and gymnastics. The women’s ice hockey team won its fi rst gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, and in that same year the U.S. soccer team won the World Cup before a worldwide television audience. The growth of women’s sports in the 1970s, in the 1990s, and since has been phenomenal. Christine Grant

 AVERY, BYLLYE

(b. 1937) Women’s health care activist and founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP). Born in Deland, Florida, Avery received her MA in special education in 1969 from the University of Florida. After the 1973 Supreme Court decision ROE v. WADE, Avery became involved in women’s reproductive health issues. That same year, Avery, a young widow with two small children, became pregnant and made the difficult choice to have an abortion. She subsequently left her job as a special-education teacher to help open a clinic in Gainesville, Florida; five years later, in 1979, she helped found the Birthing Center there. Eventually she focused on the health of African-American women and families, and in 1981 became the founding director of the National Black Women’s Health Project, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Avery later broadened her efforts to include education and national health policy. One of her projects was the fi lm On Becoming a Woman: Mothers and Daughters Talking to Each Other (1987), a documentary depicting two generations of AfricanAmerican women engaged in discussions about menstruation, sex, love, and communication. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1989, Avery has also been a visiting fellow at the Harvard University School of Public Health; a consultant on women’s health care in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean; and an advisor on health issues to the Kellogg Foundation for its International Leadership Program.

 AVIATION AND SPACE

The operation of airplanes and spacecraft. The fi rst woman to obtain a pilot’s license was barnstormer Harriet Quimby in 1911, from the Aero Club of America. Quimby had been working as a writer and was inspired to become a pilot after attending the Belmont Park Aviation Meet. She became the fi rst woman to fl y over Mexico City and, on April 16, 1912, gained further notoriety for fl ying across the English Channel. Her achievements paved the way for AMELIA EARHART, perhaps the most famous female American aviator.

4

BAEZ, JOAN

In 1928 Earhart became the fi rst female passenger to fl y across the Atlantic Ocean. After this successful venture, she decided to make the transatlantic fl ight as a pilot in 1932. Flying solo, she broke the existing time record for crossing this ocean, completing the fl ight in 13 hours and 30 minutes. Earhart was a strong advocate of commercial air travel. In 1927 she worked as a sales representative for a commercial airport. Later, she cofounded Boston and Maine Airways, one of the first commercial airlines. With fellow pilot Ruth Nichols, she also helped form the NINETYNINES, an association of women fliers. Earhart was the first president of the Ninety-Nines, so named for the number of members in the group. Other female pioneers in aviation include Clara Trenchmann, who worked for the Curtis Flying Service; Olive Anne Beech, owner of Beech Aircraft; and Jacqueline Cochran, the woman responsible for supervising hundreds of women pilots in the Women’s Air Service during WORLD WAR II.

Planes were not the only crafts in which women fl ew. In 1924 Jeanette Piccard became the fi rst woman to pilot a hydrogen balloon, taking a 175-foot zeppelin (a craft designed by German military officer Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin that was used in WORLD WAR I air raids) to an altitude of 57,559 feet. Many women took to the skies in 1935 when they became the fi rst “ air hostesses,” serving food and beverages to airline passengers. To work in this capacity, women had to meet certain age and weight restrictions, and were often subjected to sexual harassment by passengers and pilots. Antidiscrimination laws later eliminated these restrictions, and the job title changed to “ fl ight attendant” when equal employment laws allowed men to gain entry into the fi eld. The fi rst American woman astronaut was SALLY RIDE, who in 1983 spent six days orbiting the earth as part of the space shuttle Challenger’s crew. Ride later directed the Space Institute of the University of California. Mae Jemison became the fi rst African-American woman astronaut in 1992 when she spent eight days in space on the Endeavour.

B  BAEZ, JOAN

(b. 1941) Musician and social activist. With a three-octave vocal range and a strong sociopolitical focus in her traditional folk songs, it is no surprise that Joan Baez has been labeled “ Queen of the Folk Singers.” Baez was born in Staten Island, New York, on January 9, 1941. Her father, Albert Baez, a physicist, undoubtedly infl uenced her pacifi sm when he turned down a job making high-tech war weapons. Because she was half Mexican, half Anglo, Baez faced racial issues at school. Believing that music was the key to being accepted by other students, she took up the ukulele and the guitar. Her fi rst performance was at a high school talent show when she was 14 years old. She quickly became known as a girl with a voice. Baez studied drama at Boston University but she did not graduate. She gained a strong fol-

lowing due to her regular musical gigs at coffeehouses, and in 1959 she made her musical debut at the Newport Folk Festival. The Vanguard label immediately signed her and released a recording of her festival performance. A year later, she released her fi rst studio album Joan Baez. Throughout the 1960s, Baez used her musical career to promote civil rights and to protest the VIETNAM WAR. She organized and performed in a musical tour of black Southern colleges because African Americans were not allowed access to concerts at all-white colleges. In 1965, Baez founded the Institute for the Study of NonViolence (now called the Resource Center for Non-Violence) in Palo Alto, California. In 1967, she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam draft. Baez’s tour of Vietnam inspired her 1973 album Where Are You Now, My Son?

BAKER, JOSEPHINE

Baez also cofounded Amnesty West Coast (a division of Amnesty International, a worldwide human rights organization). In addition, she founded Humanities International, an organization that focuses on human rights, disarmament, and nonviolence. She was the opening act at the Live Aid concert for Ethiopian relief in 1985 and costarred with musical acts Sting, U2, and Peter Gabriel in Amnesty International’s 1986 “ Conspiracy of Hope” tour. Baez continues her work in music and politics today. Her autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, was released in 1987. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Garza, Hedda. Joan Baez. New York: Chelsea House, 1991.

 BAKER, ELLA

(1903– 1986) Ella Baker is one of the least-known leaders of the civil rights movement. She wanted it that way. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgianna Ross Baker, a powerful and compassionate woman who profoundly shaped Ella’s life. She went to college at Shaw University, where the president became so vexed by her insistence that male and female students ought to be able to socialize with each other that he tried—unsuccessfully—to expel her. Unlike many African-American women who graduated from college, Baker did not pursue a teaching position. Instead she went to Harlem, in 1927 the center of African-American art and thought. She was soon deeply involved in several reforms. She helped to convince the New York City Public Library to hire African Americans and then got a job there. She married T. J. Roberts in 1941, but kept her maiden name (which was then very unusual) and her independence. Baker moved onto the national scene in 1941 when she became a fi eld secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This position showcased her talents for grassroots organizing, and she quickly increased the civil rights organization’s membership. She resigned fi ve years later, frustrated by the leadership’s unresponsiveness to its rank and fi le. She worked and volunteered for a number of organizations over the next decade and often spoke on issues of race and justice. The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, brought Baker back to the South. She helped

49

found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, but resigned a few years later, frustrated that Martin Luther King and other young ministers seemed more comfortable with “ a leadership-centered group” than a “ group-centered leadership.” She was much more optimistic about the young idealists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization that she helped found in 1960. Like Baker, they believed strongly in organizing and educating ordinary Southerners to achieve political and social change. Indeed, SNCC soon began registering Southern black voters. Hundreds of these activists learned the trade from “ Miss Baker.” Baker spoke on and worked for a broad array of increasingly radical causes after returning to New York City in the 1960s. She helped establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964, and gave the keynote address at its founding convention. At her memorial service in 1983, civil rights leader Bob Moses asked that people who considered themselves her children come forward. Hundreds of people of all ages moved to the front of the church. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Grant, Joanne. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

 BAKER, JOSEPHINE

(1906– 1975) Music hall dancer, nightclub entertainer, blues singer, and fi lm actress. Born on June 3, 1906, in the slums of St. Louis, Missouri, Freda Josephine Carson spent her life pursuing her love of the stage and became well-known in the United States and Europe as a versatile intertainer. The daughter of washerwoman Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson, she worked as a maid and babysitter for wealthy white families while pursuing her interests in musical theater and cabaret. She began appearing in comical skits with the Jones Family Band and the Dixie Skippers at age 13 and attracted attention in 1923 as a member of the chorus in a touring production of the all-black musical Shuffle Along. She was married and divorced four times; her second marriage, in 1921, was to Willie Baker, whose last name she chose to keep. After appearing in several New York theater and nightclub productions, Baker accepted a

BARBIE

tionalities– – whom she referred to as her “ Rainbow Tribe” – – at her châ teau in southwestern France. She also remained a frequent performer and international celebrity, making triumphant apearances on Broadway in 1964 and 1973, and in Paris just before her death on April 12, 1975.

 BARBIE

Josephine Baker was well known in the United States and Europe as a versatile entertainer.

dancing role in a Paris stage show called La Revue Nè gre in 1924. Her feathered skirt, sensual dance routines, and exotic beauty make her an overnight senasations. Moving to the famous Folies Bergè res music hall, she received star billing––a nd the adoration of audiences––f or her no-holds-barred dance routines and banana skirts. Performing her notorious Danse Sauvage (Savage Dance), she became known by such nicknames as the Black Venus, Black Pearl, and Creole Goddess. Her immensely popular stage performances in the 1920s and 1930s personifi ed American “ hot jazz” for European audiences. She starred in two movies in the early 1930s, ZouZou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935), and earned international acclaim as a blues singer. Thriving professionally and finding refuge from American racism, Baker became a French citizen in 1937. During WORLD WAR II, she performed for the troops and served undercover in the French Resistance. She was later awarded the Medal of the Resistance with Rosette and named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, two of France’s most prestigious honors, for her efforts. Beginning in the 1950s, Baker adopted and raised dozens of children of various na-

A doll fi rst manufactured by Mattel, Inc., in 1959. Barbie has become the best-selling fashion doll in the world, with annual sales of more than $1.5 billion. Barbie was the brainchild of Ruth Handler, who noticed that her daughter liked to play with paper dolls that represented adult women. Handler modeled Barbie on the Lilli doll, a largebreasted, provocatively dressed German doll. The fi rst Barbies—named after Handler’s daughter—sold for three dollars. In the doll’s fi rst year of production, a record 351,000 were sold. Barbie is best known for her fi gure. The 1134inch doll’s measurements, transferred to human size, would result in a woman with a 39-inch bustline, an 18-inch waist, and 33-inch hips. Many women have objected that Barbie sets an unrealistic standard of appearance for young girls. It has also been criticized for embodying traditional attitudes toward women and women’s work—the doll was originally marketed as a teenage fashion model, and her fi rst outfi ts included a wedding dress. When the fi rst talking Barbie was introduced in the late 1960s, feminists were outraged that one of her utterances was, “ Math class is tough.” Over the years Mattel has responded to some of the criticism by introducing a variety of new editions that show the doll as an astronaut, physician, and computer programmer. The line has also added Barbie dolls that are African American, Asian American, and members of other ethnic groups.

 BEARD, MARY RITTER

(1876– 1958) A women’s rights leader, labor organizer, and historian. Ritter was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. While studying at DePauw University, she met and married Charles Beard. In 1900, they moved to England so Charles could continue his

B E N E D I C T , R U T H F U LT O N

studies at Oxford University. There, the couple became active participants in the British woman suffrage movement. Returning to the United States in 1904, the Beards entered New York’s Columbia University for graduate training, but Mary found social activism far more invigorating and directed her energies to labor reform and women’s rights. In 1907, she began working with the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization committed to helping working-class women. The group boasted an impressive list of members, including JANE ADDAMS (see Volume 2), FLORENCE KELLEY, and Sophonisba Breckinridge. From 1910 to 1912, Beard also edited a suffrage journal The Woman Voter and played a critical role in organizing New York City textile workers into unions. After women in the United States won the right to vote with the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, Beard broke with suffragists who favored an EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. She opposed such an amendment because she feared it might destroy governmental legislation put in place specifi cally to aid women. Along with organizing labor and championing women’s rights, Beard became the most prominent female historian in the United States, and her books remain extremely infl uential. In 1927, she and her husband published the fi rst of a fourvolume series on U.S. history The Rise of American Civilization, and in the 1930s and the 1940s, she wrote several books on how women have infl uenced U.S. and world history. These studies include Understanding Women, America Through Women’s Eyes and Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America. In 1946, Beard published her most important work in women’s history, Women as Force in History. In this ground-breaking study, she attacked other historians for neglecting women. To combat these scholars, she positioned women at the center of history and argued that they had made important contributions to all parts of society. Beard’s scholarly accomplishments still infl uence historians today. In fact, many late– twentiethcentury feminist historians acknowledge her scholarship. Gerda Lerner, one of the most accomplished of these female historians, vividly recalled her fi rst encounter with Women as Force in History: “ I was able to connect with her central idea, that women have always been active and at the center of history. I was struck by a sudden illumination, by the simplicity and truth of her insight.”

 BENEDICT, RUTH FULTON

(1887– 1948) Anthropologist who helped popularize the concept of cultural relativism. Born Ruth Fulton in New York City on June 5, 1887, Fulton’s childhood was marred by the death of her father and periodic bouts of depression. After moving with her mother to St. Joseph, Missouri, and then Buffalo, New York, she attended Vassar College. A gifted student, Fulton graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909. She then toured Europe for a year and worked briefl y as a social worker before marrying a biochemistry professor, Stanley Benedict, in 1914. Seeking intellectual stimulation, Benedict began taking classes at the New School for Social Research. Working with ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS there introduced her to the study of anthropology and inspired her in 1921 to begin graduate work at Columbia University under the tutelage of famed cultural anthropologist Franz Boas. After earning her doctorate in 1923, she became a lecturer at Columbia and served as Boas’s administrative assistant. From 1922 to 1939 Benedict conducted research among the Serrano, Zuñ i, and Cochiti Indians that became the basis for books including Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1931), Zuñ i Mythology

Ruth Benedict introduced anthropological concepts to a mass audience.

B E R R Y, M A R Y F R A N C I S

(1935), and Patterns of Culture (1934). A bestseller, Patterns of Culture introduced anthropological conceptions to a mass audience and popularized “ cultural relativism,” the notion that cultures cannot be ranked hierarchically. Although her research was infl uential, Benedict experienced sexual discrimination throughout her career. Columbia University assumed that her husband earned a sufficient income as a biochemist, and consequently refused to pay her for her work as a lecturer. Only after Benedict and her husband separated in 1931 (by which time she was an assistant professor) did the university begin paying her a salary. Thereafter, despite her landmark research, Columbia continued to deny her promotion to full professor. During WORLD WAR II Benedict worked in the Office of War Information (OWI). The research she conducted there served as the basis for an examination of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). Following the war, Benedict returned to Columbia, where she headed the Research in Contemporary Cultures project and fi nally won promotion to full professor in July 1948. Benedict never taught in that capacity, however, as she died of a coronary thrombosis only two months later, on September 17, 1948.

 BERRY, MARY FRANCIS

(b. 1938) Educator, author, and civil rights leader. Mary Francis Berry was born on February 17, 1938, in Nashville, Tennessee. After attending local public schools, she graduated from Howard University and then received a doctorate as well as a law degree from the University of Michigan. Dr. Berry served as provost of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, then was appointed Chancellor of the University of Colorado. From 1977 to 1980, Dr. Berry was assistant secretary for education in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, and in 1980 President Carter appointed her as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. President Ronald Reagan dismissed Dr. Berry after she expressed criticism of his positions on civil rights. She took legal action against the president and was returned to the commission. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her chairperson of the commission, and she was

reappointed to that position in 1999. She is also a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of seven books, including The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present and Long Memory: The Black Experience in America.

 BETHUNE, MARY M LEOD

C (1875– 1955) Educator and social activist. Patsy McLeod was reportedly surprised that Mary, her fi fteenth child, was a girl, for she had asked God “ to send us a child who would show us the way out.” Mary McLeod had many barriers to overcome. She was born black, poor, and female in South Carolina, yet she would become one of the most respected and prominent African-American leaders—man or woman—of the twentieth century. McLeod’s parents wrung enough money from their farm to send their precocious daughter to a nearby mission school. She later won a scholarship to Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and spent a year at Dwight L. Moody’s religious institute in Chicago, then she became an educator. In 1898 she married Albertus Bethune, with whom she had one child before he left her.

“ If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything. . .that smacks of discrimination or slander.” – – Mary McLeod Bethune, “C ertain Unalienable Rights” (1944)

Bethune’s star was by this time rising. She founded Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls, which would eventually merge with another institution and become Bethune-Cookman College. In 1917 she became president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. In 1924 she was named president of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COLORED WOMEN, which gave her a national platform. In

BONNIN, GERTRUDE SIMMONS

(ZITKALA-SHA)

F U RT H ER R EA D I N G

McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, and Elaine M. Smith, eds. Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World: Essays and Selected Documents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

 BLACK, CATHLEEN

Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the nation’ s most respected and prominent African-American leaders.

1935, she founded the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN. She became a Democrat in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her into his administration, where she headed the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs, a position that made her the highest-salaried African American in government. She organized the National Conference on the Problems of the Negro in 1937, played a crucial role in mobilizing African Americans during World War II, and spoke and wrote frequently and eloquently on a wide range of economic and political issues that affected African Americans. McLeod Bethune was more pragmatic than radical. She emphasized conciliation and cooperation. An ardent patriot, she believed strongly in the democratic promise of the United States. She counseled African Americans to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and reportedly liked to remark, “ I have faith in God and in Mary Bethune.” But she also resolutely and repeatedly opposed white supremacy, from lynching to segregation. A tireless and gracious leader, McLeod Bethune was extremely popular. The poet Langston Hughes remarked that chickens became nervous upon her approach, sensing that “ some necks would be wrung in her honor to make a heaping platter of southern fried chicken.” Her very presence, along with her many accomplishments, made African Americans feel proud and strong.

(b. 1944) A Chicago native, Cathleen Black began her career selling advertising for magazines such as Holiday, Travel & Leisure, and New York. She helped launch MS. MAGAZINE and later became associate publisher. She became the fi rst woman to publish a weekly consumer magazine when she was named publisher of New York magazine in 1979. In 1983, she moved to USA Today, helping to raise its circulation to 1.8 million readers. Eight years later, Black became the president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, the newspaper industry’s largest trade group, where she served for fi ve years before joining Hearst. In 1995, she was hired to run Hearst Magazines, the largest publisher of monthly magazines in the world. Its 16 publications include Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Good Housekeeping. Her focus has been on promoting growth in licensing and new media in the international market. Black is a graduate of Trinity College, Washington, D.C. She serves on the board of the Hearst Corporation, IBM, and the Coca-Cola Company. She is married with two children.

BONNIN, GERTRUDE  SIMMONS (ZITKALA-SHA) (1876– 1938) Writer, musician, and Native American activist. Gertrude Simmons was born in 1876 to a white father and Sioux mother on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. She left home at the age of eight to attend a Quaker school in Indiana for NATIVE AMERICANS, but at her mother’s behest, she returned home to fi nish her schooling. In 1895, Simmons entered another Quaker institution in Indiana, Earlham College, where she won an oratory contest. After graduation, she taught at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania but was disheartened by the conditions of Native American students there and left after two years. In 1900, she published articles under her pen name, Zitkala-Sha (Red Bird), criticizing

4

B R I C E , FA N N Y

Carlisle for degrading Native Americans and their cultures through forced conversions to Christianity. Simmons excelled at the violin and entered the Boston Conservatory of Music. In 1900, she toured Paris as a soloist. She would eventually coauthor an opera in 1913 entitled “ Sun Dance” with William Hanson. She was also active as a writer, contributing to Harpers and The Atlantic. Simmons married Captain Raymond Bonnin, a mixed-blood Nakota who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in 1902. She gave birth to a son, Ohiya, and for 14 years, they lived on the Ute reservation in Utah, where she worked as a clerk and teacher. The Bonnins moved to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of Native Americans. Gertrude was elected secretary of the Society of American Indians in 1916 and edited American Indian Magazine. She assisted with the passage of Indian Citizenship Bill in 1924 through a grassroots campaign in which she urged Native Americans to support the bill and accept the responsibilities of suffrage. In the same year, she coauthored a history of the exploitation of Oklahoma Native Americans by the U.S. government. An advocate of pan–Native American power, she sought to build unity among tribes and, in 1926, formed the National Council of American Indians, over which she presided until her death in 1938.

 BRICE, FANNY

(1891– 1951) Singer and comedian whose career took her from the stage to radio and fi lm. Born Fannie Borach on New York City’s Lower East Side, Brice’s earliest success came at age 13 when she won fi rst prize singing “ When You Know You’re Not Forgotten by the Girl Who Can’t Forget” in a contest. In an effort to break into show business, she worked as a pianist, singer, and assistant projectionist in a movie house. She was fi red from the chorus line of the show Talk of the Town when it was quickly discovered that she could not dance. Brice joined the famous Ziegfeld Follies musical variety show in 1910. A plain woman with a remarkable voice, Brice used her comedic skills to create a unique stage personality. Immensely popular for her amusing routines, she became a star in 1921 for her rendition of “ My Man,” a song that became her trademark. She was also known for the songs “ Second-Hand Rose,” “ I Should Worry,” and “ Rose of Washington Square.”

Brice made her fi rst fi lm, My Man, in 1928; she also appeared in Be Yourself! (1930), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and Everybody Sing (1938). Brice introduced “ Baby Snooks,” a character she created on the stage, to radio audiences in 1936, and played the role almost continuously until her death. In 1964, BARBRA STREISAND starred as Fanny Brice in the Broadway musical Funny Girl. She went on to reprise the role in the 1968 fi lm and in the 1975 sequel Funny Lady.

 BROOKS, GWENDOLYN

(1917– 2000) Poet. Gwendolyn Brooks is known as “ Chicago’s poet,” as she lived there most of her life. She was born to David and Zeziah (Williams) Brooks on June 17, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. The family moved to Chicago soon after her birth. Brooks attended three separate high schools, including Hyde Park High School, an all-white school; Wendell Phillips High School, an African-American school; and fi nally, Englewood High School, which was integrated. She graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. Gwendolyn Brooks is known for her poetry about the urban experience. Her style ranges from traditional ballads and sonnets to blues rhythm and free verse. Her experimental poetry expresses the problems of everyday life in inner-city neighborhoods. Her fi rst poem, “ Eventide” (1930), was published in American Childhood Magazine when she was 13 years old. By 1934, she was writing a weekly poetry column called “ Shadows and Light” in The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. After winning the 1943 Midwestern Writer’s Conference Poetry Award, Brooks published her fi rst book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She drew the subjects of the poems in this collection from her experiences in urban Chicago. Her second collection of poems, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the fi rst African-American woman to win this prestigious award. From 1963 until her death, Brooks taught creative writing at various colleges throughout the United States. In 1994, she was named the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award for humanities given by the U.S. government. In addition, she was Illinois Poet Laureate, a position she held from the time of Carl Sandburg’s death in 1968 until her own death from cancer in 2000.

BROWNMILLER, SUSAN

 BROWN, HELEN GURLEY

(b. 1922) Writer, editor. Helen Gurley was born into a poor rural Arkansas family on February 18, 1922. She graduated from Texas State College for Women in 1941 and then took a job as an advertising copywriter. Because of her talent, she progressed quickly in the fi eld, and by 1958, she had won two Frances Holmes Advertising Copywriter awards. Helen Gurley married David Brown, a movie producer, in 1959. Together, they created the idea for a new type of women’s magazine, one that would go beyond the typical women’s magazines of the era that focused on cooking and sewing. They planned to focus on issues confronted by the modern “ working girl.” Lacking the resources to realize this dream, Brown instead devoted her talents to writing a book, Sex and the Single Girl. Released in 1962, it became a best-seller, and Brown left her job in advertising. The Hearst Corporation took notice of Brown’s ideas, and in 1965, named her editorin-chief of its fl oundering Cosmopolitan magazine. The magazine was redesigned to appeal to the 18-to-35-year-old single career woman and included articles about women at work, consumerism, and dating. Under Brown’s editorship, Cosmopolitan’s circulation rapidly increased to 3 million copies per year, outselling its competitors. Although her editorship ended in 1996, Helen Gurley Brown remains editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan international editions. See also: Entrepreneurs.

 BROWN, RITA MAE

(b. 1944) Writer, women’s rights activist. Rita Mae Brown was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, on November 28, 1944. She was later adopted by Ralph and Julia (Buckingham) Brown, who moved her to Florida. Brown attended Fort Lauderdale High School, where she excelled in both academics and athletics. Brown entered the University of Florida on a scholarship, which was revoked in 1964 because of her involvement in the CIVIL RIGHTS movement and the fact that she was a lesbian. The dean of the college called her “ a neurotic, a lesbian, and demented.” Unable to pay tuition, Brown hitchhiked to New York City and acquired a scholarship to New York University.

There she studied English and the classics, and founded the Student Homophile League. After receiving her B.A. in 1968, she attended the Manhattan School of Visual Arts and became certifi ed in cinematography. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from Federal City College in Washington, D.C., in 1976. As a women’s rights activist, Brown cofounded the fi rst women’s center in New York City and was an early officer of the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW). However, she was forced to resign from NOW because of her outspokenness on lesbian issues. In response, she cofounded several feminist/lesbian organizations including the Radicallesbians, the Redstockings, and the Furies, the last of which was a female separatist commune. In the 1970s, Brown also worked with the National Gay Task Force and the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S POLITICAL CAUCUS. As a writer, Brown has created novels, essays, and screenplays. Like her best-selling novel RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE (1973), her writing focuses on contemporary feminism, lesbianism, and the Southern identity. Her other works include A Plain Brown Rapper (1976), a collection of political essays; The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), a fi lm; and the NBC television miniseries The Long Hot Summer (1985). Brown makes her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, and lists her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, as coauthor of some of her works.

 BROWNMILLER, SUSAN

(b. 1935) Journalist, author, and feminist. Susan Brownmiller was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 15, 1935. She attended Cornell University from 1952 to 1954 and became a writer for several magazines, including Coronet and Newsweek. She left journalism to join the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was registering African Americans to vote in the South during the 1960s. In the the late 1960s, she returned to journalism, working for the New York Times, Vogue, and The Nation, among other publications. She also became active in the feminist movement. In 1975, she published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, an examination of the history of rape that explains how women have been exploited by men over time. In 1999, Brownmiller published In Our Times: Memoir of a Revolution,

BUSH, BARBARA PIERCE

an account of her experiences in the feminist movement. She is a lecturer on sexual assault as well as the women’s movement.

 BUSH, BARBARA PIERCE

(b. 1925) First lady (1989– 1993), wife of the forty-fi rst U.S. president and mother of the forty-third president. Barbara Pierce was born on June 8, 1925, in New York City, the daughter of a publishing executive. She grew up in Rye, New York, and graduated from Ashley Hall, a boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. After attending Smith College for one year, she married George Herbert Walker Bush in 1945. They would have six children; one daughter died of leukemia in 1953. Bush accompanied her husband to his military postings and during his college education and oil industry employment. She supported his political aspirations and moved with him to Washington, D.C., in 1967, after he was elected to Congress. She relocated upon his assignment to various other political posts, including diplomatic liaison to China in 1974. As the wife of a prominent political leader, Barbara Bush became an active supporter of community service and promoter of volunteerism. She initiated a national literacy program during her husband’s eight years (1981– 1989) as vice president under Ronald Reagan. After her husband became president in 1989, she established the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. In 1992, she became the fi rst wife of a presidential candidate to make a major speech at a party convention. Her nurturing, empathetic image, and loyalty to her family resulted in her being among the nation’s most popular fi rst ladies. Her son George Walker Bush was elected president in 2000, and Bush became the only former fi rst lady to witness her son’s inauguration.

library science at the University of Texas at Austin. She worked as a teacher and school librarian prior to marrying George W. Bush, an oil executive, in 1977. They have twin daughters. Laura Bush fi rst campaigned for her husband in his unsuccessful bid for a seat in Congress in 1978. In 1987 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where she helped her husband work on his father’s victorious presidential campaign. After the 1988 election, the Bushes relocated to Dallas, where George became the managing partner of a major-league baseball team. With Laura supporting his return to politics, George W. Bush defeated incumbent Texas Governor Ann Richards in 1994 and was reelected in 1998. As the governor’s wife, she was instrumental in promoting the humanities in education and organizing the Texas Book Festival. She was also an active supporter of breast cancer research. In 1998, Laura Bush launched a statewide early-childhood development initiative, emphasizing family literacy and preschool reading programs. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush advised her husband on his speeches and choice of running mate. She campaigned vigorously for the votes of women and arranged for her hus-

BUSH, LAURA LANE  WELCH

(b. 1946) First lady, wife of the forty-third U.S. president. Laura Lane Welch was born on November 4, 1946, in Midland, Texas, the daughter of a homebuilder. In 1968, she earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Southern Methodist University. In 1973, she completed a master’s degree in

Laura Bush is an avid supporter of teaching humanities in education.

BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY

band’s highly successful appearance on the television talk show, “ Oprah.” As fi rst lady, Bush has continued her advocacy of EDUCATION and literacy, and introduced Texas themes to entertainment and social events at the White House. She has stated in televised interviews that she does not favor the overturning of ROE v. WADE.

BUSINESS AND  INDUSTRY Women have always worked, but the biggest change in the twentieth century was in the percentage of white mothers in the labor force; black mothers and many immigrant women had long worked the double shift of work and family. A second major change was the emergence of female professionals, the fi rst generation of women graduates.

Women in Industry

7

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Born to wealthy parents in Oakland and raised to be a “ lady” Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1 972) became world famous as the “ First Lady of Engineering.” Part of the scientific management movement, she has been described as the “ human face” of Taylorism, a system of time and motion study. In 1900 she was the first woman to speak at graduation at Berkeley, started on a doctorate, but abandoned it to marry Frank Bunker Gilbreth. She bore 13 children over the next 17 years. Meanwhile, she found time to write two doctoral dissertations on the application of psychology to management problems and partnered with her husband in studying work and training industrial workers. Gilbreth combined career and family to an extraordinary degree. After her husband’s sudden death in 1924, she put her 11 surviving children through college. She continued to work until she was 90. She headed her own consultancy firm, Gilbreth Inc., and applied motion study to numerous places where women worked— kitchens, fast-food outlets, and department stores and offices as well as factories. During World War II she helped keep “ Rosie the Riveter” fit to work by organizing calisthenics classes. She served five presidents on commissions dealing with civil defense, war production, aging, and rehabilitation of the physically handicapped. She was the first female professor of management at Purdue University, and received 23 honorary degrees and numerous gold medals from engineering societies worldwide.

In 1900 wages were low and conditions harsh for all workers, male and female. About 5 million women worked, many of them in Southern mills which paid as little as a dollar a day. Others worked in sweatshops and laundries. Industrial accidents were common: 146 women died in 1911 in the TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST COMPANY FIRE in New York City. Labor union membership was low, partly because women were denied apprenticeships and the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR did not recruit unskilled or semiskilled workers. Efforts by the National Women’s Trade Union League helped little in this regard. Although women were active in some strikes, notably the Lawrence “ Bread and Roses” strike of 1912, efforts at pay parity were unsuccessful, and reformers tried another approach, namely PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION: a Supreme Court decision in 1908, MULLER V. OREGON, limited women’s working hours and regulated conditions. During the WORLD WAR I labor shortage, women moved into men’s jobs and received equal pay. These gains were short-lived, however, and most munitions workers either returned

home, took low-paying unskilled factory jobs, or moved into the service sector. Most black women were still confi ned to housework. During the GREAT DEPRESSION some married women were dismissed, but many others became the family breadwinner if their husbands were unable to fi nd work. Between 1940 and 1945, during WORLD WAR II the number of employed women rose from 14 million (26 percent of the total workforce) to 19 million (36 percent). Almost one quarter were married, compared with 15 percent in 1940. Women took over “ male” jobs, and “ Rosie the Riveter” working in the shipyard became a popular icon. Although many were laid off in 1945, by 1951 the number of women in the workforce was higher than it was at the end of the war though almost 75 percent of them were in unskilled or semiskilled traditionally “ female” jobs in textiles and jewelry assembly work.

CABLE ACT

Women in Business Until the 1960s the term businesswoman usually denoted a clerical worker, a telephone operator, or a department store saleswoman. Such “ pinkcollar” jobs became reserved for women and were relatively low paying. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century did women achieve some kind of parity of access to corporate and managerial jobs, though the “ GLASS CEILING” and the “ mommy track” prevent a proportionate number from reaching the top. Though most businesses were run by men, a few women became very successful. They included African Americans, such as Maggie Lena Walker, a banker, and Madame C. J. Walker (no relation), who manufactured hair products for African-American women. They also included Jewish immigrants and their daughters, such as Estee Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon, and Lena Himmelstein Bryant, who headed Lane Bryant, a producer of women’s clothing. As three of these four examples suggest, women found it easier to compete in “ feminized” areas of the economy. Similarly some jobs in commerce and industry became the province of women, notably personnel work, public relations, advertising, and department store buying. By century’s end women ran a majority of small businesses, and a few women led their own large fi rms. They include OPRAH WINFREY in entertainment, MURIEL

SIEBERT in fi nance, and KATHARINE GRAHAM in publishing. The WOMEN’ S BUREAU, created in 1920, gathered statistics and agitated for protective legislation; although NEW DEAL agencies did little specifi cally for women, postwar administrations supported the principle of equal pay. TITLE VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on sex. President Lyndon B. Johnson then created the EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC). Its lack of success in promoting equality for women contributed to the formation of the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) in 1966. The ratio of women’s to men’s earnings remains low in almost all sectors of the economy. This refl ects women’s continuing domestic responsibilities, their choice to work part time (which often means loss of benefi ts), and gender discrimination. See also: Arden, Elizabeth; Ash, Mary Kay; Division of Labor, Sexual; Earhart, Amelia; Entrepreneurs; Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 1974; Equal Pay Act of 1963 and 1972; National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs; Perkins, Frances; Petersen, Esther; President’s Commission on the Status of Women.

Jane Lancaster

C  CABLE ACT

Passed by Congress in 1922, it entitled women to their own rights of citizenship, independent of the citizenship of their husbands. Also known as the Married Women’s Act, the Cable Act repealed a 1907 law that stated that women acquired their husband’s nationality on marriage. Under the 1907 law, a woman born in the United States forfeited her citizenship if she married a non– United States citizen. With the Cable Act, women could not lose their citizenship on marriage. Furthermore, the act loosened the natu-

ralization process for immigrant women. If a husband obtained citizenship, his wife simply had to petition for citizenship. She did not have to follow the entire naturalization process. The Cable Act was the fruit of lobbying efforts by the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. Dedicated to the legal protection of women and children, league leaders, such as Maud Wood Park, advocated and obtained a number of signifi cant pieces of legislation in the 1920s, including the MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT of 1921 and the Cable Act. Together, these laws protected

C ALIFORNIA FEDER AL S AVINGS AND LOAN v. GUERR A

married women and authorized federal aid for mothers and children.

 CADET NURSES CORPS

A program established in 1943 by Congress to encourage young women between the ages of 17 and 35 to enter nursing schools. At the time, more than 20 percent of the country’s nurses were in the armed forces. Consequently, there was a tremendous shortage of nurses for the civilian population. To ease this shortage, Congress passed the Bolton Act, which provided federal funds for tuition, books, monthly stipends, and uniforms for women who enrolled in undergraduate nursing schools. In addition to providing more nurses, the program changed the face of nursing education by requiring nursing schools to upgrade their curricula and facilities to meet federal standards. The Cadet Nurses Corps was administered by the U.S. Public Health Service and ended in 1949.

CALDERONE, MARY  STEICHEN

(1904– 1998) Physician, writer, and crusader for sex education. Mary Steichen was born on July 1, 1904, in New York City. Her father was the great photographer Edward Steichen and her uncle was the poet Carl Sandburg. Steichen graduated from Vassar College in 1925 and became a stage actress. She eventually decided to pursue a career in medicine and received her medical degree from the University of Rochester in 1939. As a physician, Calderone served as medical director of Planned Parenthood– World Population from 1953 to 1964. In 1954 she cofounded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) and served as its executive director from 1964 to 1982. The organization distributed materials on contraception and sex education. Calderone strongly believed that young people should understand their own sexuality, and that with adequate sex education in school they might avoid many unwanted pregnancies. Calderone published the Manual of Family Planning and Contraceptive Practice in 1970 and Talking with Your Child About Sex: Answers for Children from Birth to Puberty in 1983. She died on October 24, 1998.

9

CALDICOTT, HELEN  BROINOWSKI

(b. 1938) Physician and antinuclear activist. Helen Mary Broinowski was born in Melbourne, Australia. In 1956, she was among the fi rst women to be accepted to the Medical School at the University of Adelaide, where she specialized in pediatrics. After graduation, she married William Caldicott, a doctor. In 1966, the Caldicotts moved to Massachusetts so Helen Caldicott could work at Harvard Medical Center, treating children with cystic fi brosis. In 1975, she returned to Australia and founded the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic in Adelaide. During the 1970s, Caldicott led the opposition to the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. She returned to the United States in the late 1970s and helped organize Physicians for Social Responsibility, which later became International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. For its work alerting the world to the dangers of nuclear weapons, the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Caldicott has written several books, including Nuclear Madness (1979) and If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth (1992). During the 1990s, Dr. Caldicott returned to the United States and continues to lecture.

CALIFORNIA FEDERAL  SAVINGS AND LOAN . GUERRA

V A 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case that helped to end discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. Mark Guerra was the director of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. In 1982 a receptionist at the California Federal Savings and Loan Association (Cal Fed) took a disability leave because she was pregnant. When she later notified Cal Fed that she was able to return to work, she was told that her job had been filled and no similar jobs were available. She filed a complaint with the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, charging that Cal Fed had violated the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. This act requires employers to provide leave and reinstatement to employees on maternity leave. Before action was taken on the complaint, Cal Fed went to federal district court, arguing that the California law was inconsistent with TITLE

CALLAS, MARIA

VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, and with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which says that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on pregnancy. Cal Fed argued that if discrimination based on pregnancy was against federal law, then any law (such as the California law) that required Cal Fed to treat pregnant women as a separate, distinct class of persons contradicted federal law. The district court agreed with Cal Fed, but the court of appeals reversed the district court. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that reversal, saying that the two laws were not inconsistent. In its decision, the Court restated one of the goals of Title VII: “ to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifi able group of . . . employees over other employees.” The Cal Fed case made it clear to employers that they could not discriminate against pregnant women.

 CALLAS, MARIA

(1923– 1977) Opera singer. Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria Kalogeropoulos was born in New York City to a Greek immigrant family on December 2, 1923. She returned to Greece with her mother in 1937 and soon afterward began her operatic training at the Elvira de Hidalgo in Athens, appearing in the operetta Bocaccio in 1940. Two years later she appeared in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca at the Athens opera. During the 1940s she sang in the Venice opera, performing works by Richard Wagner. On April 21, 1949, she married Giovanni Battista Meneghini in Verona, Italy. In 1950, she sang the leading role in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida at Milan’s famous La Scala opera house. During the 1950s, Callas performed in the United States, singing the lead roles in operas such as Madame Butterfl y and Norma. In 1959, Maria separated from her husband and began a nine-year relationship with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate. Meanwhile, she continued her singing career, performing at La Scala and the Paris opera during the 1960s. In 1970, a reported suicide attempt halted her career; however, she may have only taken an overdose of sleeping pills by mistake. She began a comeback in 1973, singing in Germany, the United States, and Japan. Callas died on Sep-

tember 16, 1977. She is considered one of the great opera sopranos of the twentieth century.

 CAMP FIRE GIRLS

National, nonsectarian community and service organization for girls. In 1910, in Thetford, Vermont, William Chauncy Langdon organized a group he called the Camp Fire Girls as an alternative to the Boy Scouts. At the same time, Charlotte and Luther Halsey Gulick expanded the vacation they ran each year for their four daughters at Lake Sebago, Maine, into a summer camp. The camp was called “ WoHeLo,” a word Charlotte Gulick created out of the fi rst two letters of each of the principles she wanted the camp to embody: work, health, and love. The Gulicks and Langdon met in a group with other educators and decided to form the Camp Fire Girls, which was officially incorporated in 1912 in Washington, D.C., with Luther Gulick serving as the fi rst president. They chose the name Camp Fire Girls because a camp fi re symbolized the foundation of the fi rst community and the centrality of domestic life. The group emphasizes family, youth leadership, community, youth–a dult partnership, and inclusiveness through a program of youth education and outdoor activity. In 1954, the Camp Fire Girls issued a statement of its commitment to diversity and inclusiveness, and in 1975, the organization expanded to include boys. Today, the Camp Fire Boys and Girls serve approximately 650,000 youth each year, nearly half of which are boys. The Camp Fire Girls and Boys do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. The organization is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri.

 CANNON, ANNIE JUMP

(1863– 1941) Preeminent woman astronomer, known for her work on the classifi cation of stellar spectra. Annie Jump Cannon was born on December 11, 1863, in Dover, Delaware, the daughter of a politician. Her mother encouraged her to stargaze by converting the family attic into an observatory. Cannon studied astronomical research methods at Wellesley College, graduating in 1884. A decade later, after devoting herself to the piano and photography, Cannon returned to

CARSON, RACHEL

Wellesley as a researcher in the physics laboratory. Studying astronomy at Radcliffe College with Edward C. Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, Cannon was hired in 1896 to assist in the study of stellar spectra. Based on studies of photographic spectra obtained by Pickering, Cannon developed the Harvard classifi cation, which was based on spectral colors, temperature, and brightness determined by the radiation and wavelengths emitted by the stars. Cannon demonstrated that the spectra of stars could be classifi ed into a continuous sequence of categories. Her system defi ned ten categories identifi ed by letters instead of numerals. The International Solar Union accepted Cannon’s classifi cation system for standard use by observatories, and leading astronomers from around the world visited her to learn the methodology. An important aspect of Cannon’s work was the classifi cation of some 350,000 stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Catalogued in The Henry Draper Catalogue (1924) and the two-volume Henry Draper Extension (1925– 49), her classifi cations provided accurate, consistent information that helped elevate astronomy from amateur to professional status. She also discovered 300 variable stars, fi ve novas, and a double star. In 1931, Cannon became the fi rst woman to receive the National Academy of Science’s prestigious Draper Medal. In 1933, she established the Annie Jump Cannon Prize of the American Astronomical Society to support research by women astronomers. And in 1938, she was named the William Cranch Bond Astronomer at Harvard, with the rank of professor. Cannon died on April 13, 1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. See also: Science and Technology.

 CARPENTER, CANDICE

(b. 1952) A cofounder of iVillage.com. iVillage.com is a website that publishes articles on subjects of interest to women 18 and over, provides opportunities for women to communicate with one another through the Internet, and provides access to experts via online resources. With the site’s launch in 1995, Carpenter became a media in-

novator for women’s interests and education in technology, and a leader in Internet business ventures. Prior to iVillage.com, Carpenter was president of Q2, an arm of the QVC, Inc., shopping channel. She was also an executive with Time Warner and won an Emmy Award for the 1995 NBC documentary series Lost Civilizations. Carpenter grew up in Florida, received a bachelor’s degree in human biology at Stanford University and an MBA at Harvard Business School. While at Stanford, she became an instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Landor, Wyoming. Carpenter is a single mother with two daughters.

 CARSON, RACHEL

(1907– 1964) A marine biologist, writer, and environmentalist. Carson’s most famous and infl uential work is Silent Spring (1962). This provocative study of the dangers of certain chemical insecticides is generally acknowledged to have stimulated the modern environmental movement. The book aroused worldwide concern for nature, demonstrating that DDT and other chemicals that were being widely used to enhance agricultural productivity were poisoning America’s lakes, rivers, and oceans and ultimately affecting water supplies for humans. Carson grew up in the small town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College), studied at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received a master’s degree in zoology from The Johns Hopkins University. Carson began her career as a professor of zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to 1936. She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts and also wrote feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. Carson eventually became editor-in-chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and published several books on the sea— Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), for which she was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in nonfi ction, and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Shy by nature, Carson devoted much of her writing to teaching people about the wonders of nature. When she realized that aerial spraying of DDT had killed birds in a neighbor’s sanctuary, Carson thoroughly researched the impact of

CARTER , ROSALYNN SMITH

chemicals on the environment and became alarmed at the results. She was publicly criticized and attacked by the chemical industry, agricultural scientists, and some government officials for her “ alarmist” writings. She died before seeing DDT banned from use in the United States, but because of Carson, “ environment” and “ ecology” became household words.

CARTER, ROSALYNN  SMITH

(b. 1927) First lady of the United States (1977– 1981) and wife of James Earl “ Jimmy” Carter, Jr., the nation’s thirty-ninth president. Rosalynn Smith was born in Plains, Georgia, on August 18, 1927, the oldest of four children. Her father died when she was 13, and she helped her mother, who had become a dressmaker, to support the family. In 1944, Rosalynn enrolled in Southwestern College in Americus, Georgia, where she met Jimmy Carter in 1945. The couple was married in 1946. Since Jimmy Carter was a naval officer, the couple were stationed in different parts of the world. After the death of his father, Carter left the navy in 1953 to run the family agricultural business. Rosalynn handled the fi nances. Rosalynn Carter helped her husband win a seat in the Georgia Senate in 1962 and campaigned with him when he successfully ran for governor of Georgia in 1970. She also delivered speeches on the campaign trail in 1976, when Carter ran for president. As fi rst lady, Rosalynn Carter strengthened the nation’s commitment to the performing arts and programs to help the mentally ill and the elderly. The Carters returned to Plains in 1981, where Rosalynn Carter wrote her autobiography, First Lady from Plains, published in 1984. She has also written Helping Yourself Help Others (1995). Rosalynn Carter is vice chairperson of The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, which promotes world peace.

braska would provide settings for most of her novels. As a young woman, Cather found that she could express herself best through writing. Not only did she become an important magazine writer and editor, but she also won a Pulitzer Prize. While a student at the University of Nebraska, Cather wrote and edited the Hesperian, the university’s literary magazine. As part of the increasing number of women attending colleges and universities in the late 1800s, she used her education to become a social critic of both industrialization and the destruction of the U.S. frontier. After graduating in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to become the editor of a magazine for women, Home Monthly. In 1901 she began teaching high school English, and in 1903 her fi rst book, The Troll Garden, was published. In 1906, Cather began writing for McClure’s, a New York monthly magazine dedicated to exposing social inequalities, dangerous working conditions, and mistreatment of workers. Cather’s writing abilities and her knack for recognizing a good story helped her rise to the position of managing editor with McClure’s.

 CATHER, WILLA

(1873– 1947) An accomplished muckraking journalist and feminist author. Born on December 7, 1873, in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1884. Later in life, her experiences in Virginia and on the frontier of Ne-

Willa Cather, journalist and author, wrote novels about pioneering and independent women.

CHILD CARE

Although Cather enjoyed working for McClure’s, she disliked urban living. “ I like trees,” she told one reporter, “ because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.” In 1912, she left McClure’s and New York City to become a full-time novelist. Over the next ten years, she published several highly acclaimed books, including O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), the Pulitzer-Prize winning One of Ours (1922), and A Lost Lady (1923). In these novels, Cather created pioneering and independent women who strove to tame the prairies. By placing women as central fi gures in the West, she showed how women were critical in agriculture and westward expansion. In an era when many people viewed women as weak and passive, Cather’s strong-willed and persistent heroines controlled their homes and, through perseverance, mastered the land. Cather’s fi nal novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Shadows on the Rock (1931), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), described the pioneering spirit of French and English travelers to North America. Cather’s writing earned her honorary doctoral degrees from some of the most prestigious institutions in the United States, including the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale. In the 1940s, poor health hindered her writing, and on April 24, 1947, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in New York City. One obituary simply and eloquently summed up Cather’s life in a way that she likely would have appreciated: “ She was an artist in telling a story simply.”

CHAVEZ-THOMPSON,  LINDA

(b. 1944) Labor union activist. Chavez-Thompson was born to parents who worked as sharecroppers in Lubbock, Texas. One of eight children, she toiled along with her siblings in the cotton fi elds, dropping out of school in the ninth grade to help her parents support the family. At 19, she married her fi rst husband and cleaned houses for a living. Chavez-Thompson joined the Laborers’ International Union in 1967 and served as secretary and as a union representative for the HispanicAmerican members. In 1971, she became a representative of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)

and later rose to the position of vice president, directing the union’s activities in seven western states considered unfriendly to labor. In 1995, Chavez-Thompson became the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, the highest-ranking woman in the labor movement. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the President’s Initiative on Race, and in 1998 was elected vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. In her leadership position, ChavezThompson worked to forge closer ties between the labor movement and women and minorities. Chavez lived in San Antonio, Texas, prior to moving to Washington, D.C., in 1998. She is a widow and has two children.

 CHICANA

A term that refers to Mexican-American women living in the United States. (A Mexican-American male would be called a “ Chicano.” ) Originally an informal expression in both English and Spanish, it became a term of ethnic pride in the context of literary and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Because of its strong political associations, Mexican Americans do not uniformly accept the term “ Chicana” . Chicana is therefore not synonymous with Latina (short for latinoamericana, meaning person from Latin America) or with Hispanic (from the Latin word for “ Spain,” meaning a Spanishspeaking person). In 1972 the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) was founded to encourage academic research and advance political awareness and engagement in the Mexican-American community. Prominent Chicanas include political journalist, television commentator, and former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Linda Chavez; DOLORES FERNANDEZ HUERTA, cofounder of the United Farm Workers; and artist, scholar, and curator Amalia Mesa-Bains.

 CHILD CARE

Working mothers and the need for child care have been closely associated in the United States. Although both grew much more common during the twentieth century, the nation has remained ambivalent over both.

4

CHILD CARE

The nation’s fi rst day-care centers appeared in the mid-nineteenth century in Eastern cities. They were founded by wealthy women concerned over the plight of poor children, whose mothers often worked outside the home.

Child Care for Impoverished Mothers Day nurseries grew rapidly around the turn of the twentieth century, as immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe flocked to large cities. The founders of these institutions hoped to take the children of poor, working mothers off the street so that they could learn, as one philanthropist put it, the “ habits of truthfulness, honesty, and cleanliness.” Indeed, staff members of day nurseries inspected their charges daily, and many also bathed them and changed their clothes. They investigated each family that applied and were especially concerned that mothers worked only out of dire economic necessity. As these practices suggest, the well-todo women in charge of these institutions generally distrusted the mothers whose children they cared for. They also, as historian Sonya Michel points out, tended to see child care as a “ temporary expedient” to be discarded once families attained a state of “ normalcy,” with mothers at home rather than at work. AfricanAmerican club women also started day nurseries, but were more accustomed to and less critical of employed mothers than were their white counterparts. Although the day nurseries were free, most impoverished mothers both detected and resented the staff ’s criticism of their parenting. Working mothers usually relied on family, neighbors, and daughters over the age of six to care for their young children. Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century proposed a different solution for working mothers: MOTHERS’ PENSIONS. Though the program was poorly funded and administered, the federal government began paying mothers whose husbands had died or deserted them so that these women could stay home to raise their children. Growing numbers of well-to-do mothers, on the other hand, were concluding that their preschool children required exposure to child experts. They paid to send their sons and daughters to nursery schools, where psychologists and other professionals both molded children and advised mothers.

Nurseries expanded during the GREAT DEand WORLD WAR II, but largely from necessity. Increasing numbers of mothers worked during the 1930s as many husbands lost their jobs. The federal government began involving itself with child care by funding Emergency Nursery Schools, which employed out-ofwork teachers. These institutions were intended to be educational, but economic need was the primary criterion for admission. An acute shortage of wartime workers prompted the federal government to advocate that women workers place their children in nurseries during World War II, and many women—able to make a good wage for the fi rst and last time in their lives— heeded the call. Although day-care facilities expanded dramatically, most working mothers had to scramble. Finding adequate child care was especially difficult for women who left home to take jobs in distant cities. Some African-American mothers tried to solve the problem by leaving their children with relatives in the South.

PRESSION

The Struggle for Universal Child Care Many working mothers returned to their homes after World War II, but many did not. Such mothers were the fi rst to advocate for what historian Elizabeth Rose terms “ a right to day care.” Increasing numbers of wives and mothers were working to increase their families’ standard of living. Some public child-care centers in large cities responded to this pressure by staying open, but the great majority were closed by the early 1950s. In an era in which both the birthrate and the cult of motherhood was increasing, working mothers and public day care enjoyed little public support. Child care was transformed in the last four decades of the twentieth century as women fl ooded into the workplace. In 1950 about 12 percent of mothers with children under age six worked for wages. By the late 1980s more than half did. This led to an explosion of all sorts of day care: large centers run by nonprofi ts or private businesses, small operations located in homes, and worksite centers operated by large employers. Only care by family members declined. Still, the federal government balked at providing universal day care. In 1965 it began Head Start, an ambitious program that functioned as a preschool for children at risk of doing poorly in elementary school. The federal government

CHILD CUSTODY

also allowed parents to deduct childWOMEN’S FIRSTS care expenses from their incomes but was hesitant about instituting a Arthur Wright, a Baptist minister, reacted to segregation by comprehensive program. building a park for African-American children behind his Feminists in particular urged universal child care as a way of prochurch in Bennettsville, South Carolina. His youngest daughmoting women’s economic and social ter Marian (b. 1939) took note and would become one of the rights. But they were opposed by nation’s leading advocates for children. many members of the religious right, Marian Wright was an excellent student. She was valedicwho encouraged mothers of young torian of her class at Spellman College and then got her law children to remain in the home. degree at Yale University in 1963, later becoming the first Conservatives were eager to put black woman to pass the Mississippi bar. Long involved in the some children in day care: the sons civil rights movement, she soon put her law degree to work in and daughters of welfare mothers. the South, serving as an attorney for the National Association Welfare reform in the 1990s forced for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1968 she growing numbers of mothers into moved to Washington, D.C., to work on Martin Luther King’s the workplace and their children Poor People’s March, and married Peter Edelman, with whom into child care. Elizabeth Jones, an she had three children. African-American single mother of As the civil rights movement declined, Wright Edelman three children in the District of Coturned her energies to poor children. She advocated for Head lumbia, had been on welfare for nine Start and founded and headed the Children’s Defense Fund, years when she began working outwhich became the nation’s leading lobbying group for impovside the home. By the end of the erished children. twentieth century she was successful Wright Edelman believes passionately that government can but logging so many hours to keep and ought to play a role in improving the lives of poor famiher family’s fi nances afl oat that durlies. Sharply critical of federal budget priorities and bloated ing most days she saw her children defense budgets, she has been a tireless advocate for expanded only in passing and found it “ hard child care, prenatal care, and a wide variety of other antinot to think sometimes about a life poverty programs. where I could have real time” with Among Wright Edelman’s many honors is the Albert them. As the twenty-fi rst century began, Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize and the Presidential Medal of the nation’s day-care system was a Freedom, which she received in 2000. She has written five massive and diverse patchwork of books and remains a powerful and articulate advocate for programs. The quality of care varied people too young to speak for themselves. greatly. Well-to-do parents hired nannies or sent their children to facilities staffed by well-trained profesCHILD CUSTODY sionals and characterized by low teacher-to-stuUntil the middle of the nineteenth century, fadent ratios. But most families had to rely upon thers were almost always granted custody when overcrowded centers or homes staffed by poorly couples divorced. But by 1920, the situation had trained providers. Meanwhile the proportion of reversed, and women were usually granted cuschildren who spend their days in child care contody of children in divorce situations. Many factinues to grow. tors infl uenced this gradual change. Family life David Peterson del Mar had undergone profound changes as a result of the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (see Volume 2). FURTH ER REA D ING Whereas fathers once worked either at home or Michel, Sonya. Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The close to home, they increasingly worked long Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy. New Haven: days in factories far from home, leaving mothers Yale University Press, 1999. in charge of the domestic sphere. Judges began Rose, Elizabeth. A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, to grant custody to women, especially when the 1890–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, children were young. 1999.



CHILD LABOR

Beginning in 1920, the right to vote gave women an enhanced legal status, which, in turn, led to legislation that favored women in custody cases. Freudian psychology, which stressed the importance of the mother’s role, had a signifi cant impact on social philosophy beginning in the 1940s, further strengthening mothers’ claims to their children in custody cases. The trend began to change again in the 1960s, as divorce rates began to climb. Fathers began to claim that the automatic preference accorded to mothers constituted sex discrimination; women began to enter the workforce in greater numbers; and feminists asserted that parenting should be shared by fathers and mothers alike. Laws favoring women in custody cases were replaced by gender-neutral laws. The Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act of 1970 established a new standard for custody decisions. Custody decisions were no longer made based on who was the primary caregiver but on the basis of the “ best interests” of the child. Also in the 1970s fathers began to campaign for joint custody. In 1979, California, Kansas, and Oregon enacted laws that made joint custody an option in divorce cases. By 1991 more than 40 states had laws that not only allowed but actually preferred joint custody. In practice, most divorced parents who have joint custody actually have joint legal custody but physical custody arrangements in which the children actually live more than half the time with one parent, usually the mother. Some feminists have begun to question the current preference for joint custody. Women, who usually earn less than men, are often disadvantaged by such arrangements, since CHILD SUPPORT may be limited or not granted at all. It can be confusing for children to move back and forth between two “ homes,” especially as they grow older. Sometimes joint custody arrangements that are imposed on parents by courts, actually increase confl ict between parents, which can be damaging to children.

very young ages. With the advent of the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, children were sent to work in textile mills and factories. Although social reformers began to question the wisdom of child labor in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that concerted efforts were made to eliminate the practice. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) formed in an effort to end child labor. This group hired Lewis Hine to photograph “ breaker boys” working in mines, “ newsies” peddling papers on city streets, and tiny children working in cotton fi elds in the South. Through publicizing these pictures, writing pamphlets, and lobbying, the NCLC infl uenced many state legislatures to pass laws restricting child labor. Federal child labor legislation was enacted in 1916 and 1918 but were quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, because judges felt that regulation of child labor should be done at the state level. The first successful federal legislation prohibiting child labor was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which prohibited children under the age of 16 from working in manufacturing and mining. While this law substantially eliminated child labor in the United States, problems still exist. The children of migrant farm workers work long hours and are directly exposed to dangerous pesticides. And the children of recent immigrants still labor in the garment industry, working at home in an effort to circumvent the law.

 CHILD LABOR

Work for children that harms or exploits them. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, child labor was common and expected. Children helped their parents with farming and household chores and were apprenticed to trades at

In the early 1900s, child labor was still prevalent in the United States.

CHILDREN’S BUREAU

 CHILD SUPPORT

In earlier centuries, the issue of child support centered on illegitimate children. Communities pressured men to marry women who were pregnant, precisely so the children would not become burdens on the community. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most states attempted to deal with the financial problem of illegitimate children by criminalizing desertion and nonsupport. Even with strict laws, however, few fathers were successfully prosecuted for nonsupport, and most illegitimate children of poor mothers eventually became wards of the state. When AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN was adopted as part of the Social Security Act in 1935, Congress initially regarded the program as assistance to children whose fathers had died and the law allowed states to determine eligibility requirements. Many states withheld aid based on the so-called moral character of the mother, which left many illegitimate children without aid. Some states also withheld aid if there was a man living in the house, on the assumption that a mother’s current boyfriend was obligated to support her children whether he was the father or not. In 1968, however, the Supreme Court invalidated such state-imposed barriers to aid, stating that “ immorality and illegitimacy should be dealt with through rehabilitative measures rather than measures that punish dependent children.” The court also held that states could not use the income of a man in the household who was not the father of the children to deny aid to the children. As barriers to aid were relaxed, lawmakers began to strengthen legislation to ensure that absent fathers paid child support. A similar process occurred with respect to court-ordered child support following a divorce. Early in the twentieth century, when women began to be awarded CHILD CUSTODY, few men were were obliged to pay child support. Many courts reasoned that a father who was “ deprived” of the “ services” of his children was not obliged to support those children. As divorce became more common, courts began to order child support in cases where they once might have ordered alimony. By 1986, however, it had become clear that children in America were increasingly living in poverty, that these poor children were likely to be living in singleparent families, usually headed by a woman, and that the failure of noncustodial parents, of-

7

ten fathers, to pay child support was part of the problem. It was also clear that courts were not ordering noncustodial parents to pay enough in support. By the late 1990s, courts were increasingly using a model to determine support payments that tried to maintain something like a predivorce standard of living for children. Organizations such as Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES) have helped custodial parents, often mothers, collect back child support. Federal laws now help to track and punish parents who do not pay courtordered support. As part of the 1996 welfare reform law, a Directory of New Hires was established to help match delinquent parents with wage records. The Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act of 1998 made it a felony to cross state or county lines to evade child support. Willfully failing to pay child support for more than two years was also made a felony. Also beginning in the 1990s, men’s groups mounted campaigns to change how child support is awarded, claiming that men are disadvantaged by the current system. Men’s groups advocate “ shared parenting” as preferable for children, but it is also increasingly used as a way of avoiding the obligation to pay child support. Men’s groups also claim that failure to pay child support is most often a result of inability to pay— either because the awards are unreasonable or because the noncustodial parent is unemployed or poorly paid. See also: Child Custody.

 CHILDREN’S BUREAU

A federal agency designed to collect and publish research on public policy issues concerning children and families. Established in 1912, the Children’s Bureau is the oldest federal agency serving children. Today part of the Department of Health and Human Services, its mission is to help states strengthen families and protect children by providing grants to prevent child abuse and neglect and by funding foster care and adoption programs. The bureau hired women to conduct surveys and analyze data for its research projects. Benefi ting from an entire generation of women who graduated from college as well as graduate programs—a fi rst in U.S. EDUCATION —the bureau has the distinction of being the fi rst federal

CISNEROS, SANDRA

tion. These pamphlets were infl uential in the passage of the SheppardTowner Act of 1921, which provided Julia Clifford Lathrop (1858-1932), the first head of the for state programs to disseminate inChildren’s Bureau (and the first woman appointed by a presformation about nutrition and hygiene, to train midwives, and to ident to head a federal bureau) grew up in Rockford, Illinois, provide visiting nurse services to the eldest of five children. After graduating from Vassar pregnant women and new mothers. College in 1880, she worked as a secretary in her father’s law The bureau’s 1914 pamphlet “ Infant office, but at 32, in 1890, she joined JANE ADDAMS (see Care” became the best-selling govVolume 2) at the newly founded HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2), ernment publication ever. From where she lived and worked for 20 years. In 1893 she was ap1912 to 1930, rates of infant death pointed to the Illinois Board of Charities and undertook a dewere reduced by half, in large part tailed study of county farms and almshouses throughout the due to the efforts of the bureau. state. This experience led her to campaign vigorously against The bureau also enforced the the grouping together in state institutions of the young and Keating-Owen Act (1916), which the old, the physically and the mentally ill, and to work to imlimited CHILD LABOR. This involveprove the caliber of staff in such institutions. In 1903 she ment angered some poor women, helped to organize the Chicago Institute of Social Science who felt that their families’ survival (later the School of Social Service Administration of the Unidepended on the fi nancial contribuversity of Chicago). Lathrop also helped create the world’s tion of children. first juvenile court system, in Cook County, Illinois, and During the Depression of the helped to found the Immigrants’ Protective League. 1930s, the bureau played a crucial After President Taft appointed her to the Children’s Burole in the push to include AID TO reau in 1912, Lathrop worked tirelessly with her staff of 15 DEPENDENT CHILDREN (ADC) within to investigate the incidence and causes of infant mortality and the Social Security Act. The bureau to ensure that all births were registered through birth certifihad provided parties interested in cates. Reappointed by President Wilson, she commissioned the MOTHERS’ PENSIONS programs studies on CHILD LABOR, juvenile delinquency, and MOTHER’S with volumes of research when it PENSIONS, and worked in support of the Sheppard-Towner was a local and state program. This MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT. information was applied to NEW DEAL initiatives for impoverished Lathrop resigned from the Children’s Bureau in 1921 bechildren. The Children’s Bureau cause of ill health. She died in Rockford, Illinois, on April 15, also helped to secure funding to 1932. help states provide maternity services to the wives of military men and to provide grants to universities to help them establish public health agency headed and staffed by professional programs. women. The fi rst director, Julia Lathrop, and her successor, GRACE ABBOTT, had earned advanced degrees and had gained experience in social research during their stay at HULL HOUSE (see VolCISNEROS, SANDRA (b. 1954) ume 2) in Chicago. Chicana novelist and poet whose writing refl ects Three major initiatives in the early years of her identity as a woman and an Hispanic. Cisthe bureau’s existence demonstrate the applicaneros was the only daughter in a family of seven tions of social research to policy. The fi rst supchildren. She was born in Chicago, but her parported efforts to reduce infant and maternal ents shuttled the family between the north and mortality; the second focused on child labor; and Mexico City. Cisneros often felt isolated, and the third—the nationwide campaign to register found companionship in books; she began to births—became a standard public health responwrite poetry while still in high school and earned sibility. her M.A. from the Writers Workshop at the UniThe results of bureau research were pubversity of Iowa. Before moving to San Antonio, lished as pamphlets to educate women in new Texas, Cisneros worked in Chicago, teaching scientifi c knowledge about hygiene and nutri-

TRAILBLAZERS



CONGRESS, WOMEN IN

high-school dropouts and absorbing to the voices of young Latinas in the barrio. Cisneros’s fi rst book, The House on Mango Street, received critical acclaim, winning the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1985. It is the story of a young female writer struggling with life in a large city and her Hispanic community. In 1987 published a collection of poems, My Wicked Wicked Ways. Cisneros received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, for fi ction (1982) and poetry (1987). Her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991) won the PEN Center West award for best fi ction that year. Other awards followed, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995. Cisneros is a member of the writers’ group PEN and the women’s peace group, Mujeres por la paz.

CLINTON, HILLARY  RODHAM

(b. 1947) Lawyer, fi rst lady (1993– 2001), wife of President Bill Clinton, U.S. senator. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a long list of achievements in the areas of politics, law, and social activism. Hillary Rodham was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 26, 1947, and had a middle-class, suburban upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois. In high school, she excelled in academics, music, dance, sports, debate, and student government. Upon her graduation she was voted “ most likely to succeed” in her class. As a teenager she campaigned for 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater; like her parents, she was a staunch Republican. Rodham continued her education at Wellesley College, where she was head of the college’s Young Republicans. However, her political views changed in the late 1960s. After living through the assassinations of leaders like President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Rodham was inspired to take on social causes. She organized antiwar protests and began a campaign to enroll more black students at Wellesley. She also began her work for children’s rights and is still involved in the Children’s Defense Fund, a group that lobbies for children’s rights. After earning her degree in political science, Rodham moved on to Yale Law School in 1969. There she did extensive research on the legal rights of children, especially in regards to education and health care. She graduated in 1973.

9

After law school, Rodham served on the 1974 Impeachment Inquiry Staff of the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon hearings. In 1975, she married Bill Clinton, also a graduate of Yale Law School, and moved to Arkansas, where both taught at the University of Arkansas. She founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children, was chairperson of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, and introduced a home instruction program for preschoolers. After her husband was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978, she continued her work at Rose Law Firm, but also served as chairperson of the Arkansas Rural Health Advisory Committee. When Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States in 1993, he appointed Rodham Clinton the head of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform—which ultimately failed in its effort to revamp the nation’s health-care system. She has been twice named among the most infl uential lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal. In 2000, she was elected U.S. senator for the state of New York. F U RT H ER R EA D I N G

Clinton, Hillary Rodham. The Unique Voice of Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Portrait in Her Own Words. New York: Avon Books, 1997. Milton, Joyce. The First Partner, Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Morrow, 1999.

 CONGRESS, WOMEN IN

In 1916, four years before the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution gave women nationwide the right to vote, Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, became the fi rst woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Rankin achieved her unique status because Montana had granted women suffrage when it achieved statehood in 1889. Rankin was reelected in 1940. The fi rst woman to serve in the Senate, Georgia Democrat Rebecca L. Felton, served for a single day. Appointed in 1922 to fi ll a vacancy, she resigned to make way for the man who had been elected to fi ll the opening. In the 80th Congress (1947– 1949), there were seven women members of the House and one woman in the Senate, MARGARET CHASE SMITH of Maine. More than 75 years after Rankin’s fi rst election victory, the 102nd Congress (1991– 1993) included only two women senators and 28 representatives.

7

CONSENT L AWS, AGE OF

The 1992 election saw a record-breaking number of women elected, leading to the 103rd Congress boasting six women senators and 47 women members of the House of Representatives. Several factors accounted for this increase. A large number of incumbent members of Congress retired, thus providing opportunities for newcomers, and the 1990 reapportionment created new seats in the South and West. At the same time, the public’s general dissatisfaction with government allowed women to portray themselves as outsiders. Perhaps most signifi cant was the reaction to the televised confi rmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The public, seeing the all-male Senate Judiciary panel brusquely question Anita Hill, a law professor who accused Thomas of sexual misconduct, highlighted the low number of women in Congress. Still, after the 1992 election, women continued to hold only about 10 percent of the congressional seats, despite making up more than 50 percent of the population. By the 107th Congress (2001– 2003), however, there were 61 women in the House and 13 women in the Senate. Many women began their congressional careers through the “ widow’s mandate.” Through this practice, widows of congressmen were appointed to fi ll their late husband’s seats, often until a special election could be called. This custom often allowed state leaders more time to choose a successor. Sometimes the widow was chosen to run for the office by party leaders so that a sympathy vote would help her eventually win the seat. Several outstanding women came into office through this tradition. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine fi lled her husband’s House seat in 1940 and went on to serve four terms in the Senate. Others include Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, Senator Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, and Representative Corrine “ Lindy” Boggs of Louisiana. As women have become more politically active, the role of the widow’s mandate has faded. In 1978, Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas became the fi rst woman elected to the Senate without coming in through the mandate; in 1992, only one of the women elected to Congress—Cardis Collins of Illinois—had been appointed to fi ll her late husband’s seat. Also in 1992, California became the fi rst state to send two women senators to Washington (Barbara Boxer and DIANNE FEINSTEIN), and CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN of Illinois became the fi rst AFRICANAMERICAN woman elected to the Senate.

F U RT H ER R EA D I N G

Thomas, Sue. How Women Legislate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. White, Florence M. First Woman in Congress, Jeanette Rankin. New York: J. Messner, 1980.

 CONSENT LAWS, AGE OF

Laws that determine the age at which any person may consent voluntarily to sexual activity. Sexual intercourse with a person under this age is known as statutory rape. Although age-ofconsent laws now protect both male and female juveniles, they were originally established for the protection of women. The notion of “ consent,” like so many American legal ideas, is derived from English common law, which set the age of consent at ten years of age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, attitudes toward sexual activity began to change. Ten-year-old girls were no longer regarded as mature enough to make such decisions. California was one of the fi rst states to change the age of consent, raising it to 15 in 1889, 16 in 1897, and to 18 in 1913. A number of other states followed, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Tennessee took the most extreme position, making it a felony to have sex with any woman under the age of 21. At present there is no agreement at the national level as to the age at which a person can reasonably be expected to make an adult decision about sexual activity. Age-of-consent laws vary considerably from state to state and are subject to revision. These laws do not have any direct relationship, moreover, to laws governing a person’s right to marry without his or her parents’ consent.

COOLIDGE, GRACE  GOODHUE

(1879– 1957) First lady of the United States (1923– 1929) and wife of Calvin Coolidge, the nation’s thirtieth president. Grace Anna Goodhue was born in Burlington, Vermont, on January 3, 1879. She attended the University of Vermont, graduating in 1902, and taught at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. While teaching at the Clarke School, she met Calvin Coolidge in 1904, and the couple were married on October 4, 1905. They had two sons. Her husband pursued a political career, becoming mayor of Northampton in 1910 and gover-

DANCE

nor of Massachusetts in 1919. In 1920, he was elected vice president of the United States on the Republican ticket with Warren Harding. When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge became president. Grace Coolidge was a popular hostess for her husband in Washington and served as a volunteer for the Red Cross and other charities. After Coolidge left the White House in 1929, the couple retired to Northampton. In 1931 Grace Coolidge was honored as one of America’s 12 greatest living women by the National Institute of Social Sciences because of her “ fi ne personal infl uence exerted as First Lady of the Land.” After her husband’s death in 1933, Grace Coolidge continued her charity work, serving as a trustee of the Clarke School. She died on July 8, 1957.

 COONEY, JOAN GANZ

(b. 1929) Television executive. Nearly any American born in the last three decades of the twentieth century can identify “ Bert and Ernie,” “ Big Bird,” and “ Oscar the Grouch” as part of their memories of Sesame Street. But when Sylvan and Pauline Ganz looked at their newborn child, Joan, on November 30, 1929, they could not have anticipated that she would grow up to revolutionize educational mass media. After all, television had not even been invented yet. Ganz became interested in social and political issues as a teenager. Deeply infl uenced by one of her teachers, she came to believe that “ if the right thinking people don’t get into mass communications, the other will.” Therefore, after earning a bachelor’s degree in education from the Uni-

7

versity of Arizona in 1951, she became a newspaper reporter, and later a publicity writer for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Between 1962 and 1967, Cooney wrote and produced several documentaries for public television. It was during that time that she began to study the use of public television in preschool education. Her research revealed three important statistics. In 1966, 96 percent of American families owned television sets. In homes with children, the television was on up to 60 hours per week. And educational research suggested that children needed to begin formal learning earlier than the typical age of fi ve or six years old. Cooney concluded that television was a viable form of educational media for preschoolers. Her report, “ The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education” (1966), was the fi rst step toward the creation of the new broadcasting company, Children’s Television Workshop. On November 10, 1969, the company aired the fi rst episode of Sesame Street. The creators of Sesame Street had the following goals for children who watched the series: recognition of letters and numbers, beginning reasoning skills, and increased self-awareness. The show relied on color, humor, fast action, and catchy music to hold the attention of its young viewers. The show received immediate rave reviews. Today, Sesame Street has an estimated 235 million viewers in 85 countries. Joan Ganz Cooney has won several awards, including the Daytime Emmy of Lifetime Achievement (1989), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995), and the Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Medallion of Excellence in the Field of Mass Communication (1998). She is the president of the Children’s Television Workshop, a position she has held since 1970.

D  DANCE

A series of movements, performed in patterns, and set to music. Dance may be performed alone, with another person, or as part of a group. It is an art form that celebrates the emotional, mental, and physical self.

Dance is part of every society’s culture and at times has tested society’s tolerance. The Turkey Trot was considered risqué in the 1910s. When the Twist was introduced in the 1960s, it was considered indecent because of the suggestive movement of the dancer’s hips. Yet, unlike many other

7

DANCE

dances, people did not dance close to each other when they danced the Twist. Eventually, this innovative dance created a new, informal style. One no longer needed a partner to hold onto, and because there were no formal steps, anyone could get on the fl oor and simply move to the rhythm. During the early part of the twentieth century, the Charleston was the rage. Its roots date back to WORLD WAR I, when African Americans left Southern states to work in Northern factories. Their high-stepping dance style was featured in African-American musicals such as “ Runnin’ Wild.” The dance peaked during the 1920s, a decade that also introduced the Shimmy, the Toddle, and the Black Bottom, all refl ecting the rhythms of Dixieland jazz. Musical productions were at their peak from the late 1920s through the 1930s, and showgirls often wore elaborate costumes as they danced in groups, creating fl owers, fans, or other patterns by positioning themselves on stage. Some became parts of huge, revolving Ferris wheels or abstract designs, while others managed to position themselves to spell words. One popular group of these showgirls was the Ziegfeld Follies. Often hundreds of showgirls were used to make a single motion picture. Warner Brothers used 500 women for the movie The Show of Shows. According to the December 1929 issue of Photoplay, the ideal movie chorus girl dancer possessed “ a 3221 inch bust, 23 inch waist, 34 inch hips, 1221 inch calf, [and] 721 inch ankle.” BETTY GRABLE and Lucille Ball were two women who started their careers as dancers and went on to Hollywood fame. Katherine Dunham created an original dance technique in the 1930s by combining ballet with African and Caribbean dance movements. Noted for its creative interpretations of black dance in the West Indies and United States, her pioneering technique soon became part of mainstream modern dance. Ginger Rogers (1911– 1995) became an international star of ballroom dancing through her fi lms with Fred Astaire, setting standards of style with her graceful movement. By the 1940s, Esther Williams was dancing in water to elaborate production numbers. Couples were moving to the Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop. The 1950s brought rock and roll. Dancing to this strong beat required no physical contact, something that appealed to adolescents. Broadway was alive with musicals such as West Side Story, famous for its lavish dance numbers. By the 1960s,

some women were working as go-go girls, dancing solo inside cages, wearing miniskirts, and displaying a frenzy and assertiveness that refl ected the anxieties and excitement of the time. In the 1970s, the movie Saturday Night Fever helped create the disco dance craze, bringing young people to discotheques where dancing either stylishly with a partner or by oneself was in vogue. On August 1, 1981, MTV (short for “ Music Television” ) was born. An entire television channel was now devoted to bringing a variety of music, dance styles, and fashion into people’s living rooms every day. In particular, MTV was instrumental in bringing the dance form called hip hop to mainstream America. This African-American style of dance, said to have been born on city streets, featured dance movements that stressed head, hand, and feet action as well as spinning on fl oors and even rolling over. Dancers moved to the steady rhythms of hip hop (or “ rap” ) songs that often addressed the turmoil of city life.

Maria Tallchief (b. 1924) is an Osage Indian whose work with choreographer George Balanchine brought her international acclaim and helped make ballet a beloved American dance form.

D A Y, D O R O T H Y

 DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS

Founded in the mid-1950s in San Francisco and named after a poem, this was the fi rst organized group of LESBIANS in the United States. It began as a social organization to give middle-class lesbians a place to meet and soon became the center of a growing political movement. Joining this organization required a great deal of courage. In the 1950s, women suspected of being lesbians were routinely fi red from their jobs, especially if they were public employees. The Daughters of Bilitis worked hard to keep their membership lists secret, but they were only partially successful. The FBI and the CIA infi ltrated their meetings, and at the organization’s fi rst national convention, in 1960, attendees were greeted by San Francisco law officers who asked if they supported cross dressing. This sort of harassment kept the organization’s membership small. The Daughters of Bilitis began with the modest political goal of winning acceptance from mainstream society. Members were urged to avoid “ butch haircuts and mannish manner[s]” that might alienate heterosexuals. The Daughters of Bilitis became bolder in the 1960s. They helped organize the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which drew support from some liberal Protestant clergymen. The organization’s magazine, The Ladder, began exhorting its members to resist oppression, in the manner of other persecuted minorities. In the 1970s more radical organizations formed and took over the work of advocating for lesbian rights. By 2000 the Boston Daughters of Bilitis claimed to constitute the only surviving chapter of what had once been a national organization. Nevertheless, the Daughters of Bilitis had accomplished a great deal under extremely hostile conditions.

 DAVIS, ANGELA

(b. 1944) Educator, author, advocate of Black Power. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Yvonne Davis was the daughter of two teachers. In 1959, she was sent to New York City by her parents to attend an integrated high school instead of the segregated schools of Birmingham. From there she enrolled at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, graduating in 1963. In 1968, Davis joined the Black Panther Party (a group that advocated Black Power) and the Communist Party. She believed that these orga-

7

nizations would enable African Americans to liberate themselves from the white majority in the United States. From 1969 to 1970, she taught philosophy at the University of California, but she was fi red because of her communist beliefs. In 1970, Davis was accused of supplying weapons to prisoners trying to escape from a courtroom. Four people were killed, including a judge. Davis went into hiding, but she was fi nally arrested after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She spent 16 months in jail but was found not guilty of all charges after a wellpublicized trial. In 1980 and again in 1984, she ran for the office of vice president of the United States as a communist. Meanwhile, Davis continued her career in education, at San Francisco State University from 1979 to 1991 and since then at the University of California.

 DAY, DORIS

(b. 1924) Actress and singer. Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff was born on April 3, 1924, in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a child, she had hoped to become a ballet dancer, but a serious automobile accident ended her plans. By the 1940s, Day was singing with the Bob Crosby and Les Brown big bands. After she appeared on the Saturday Night Hit Parade with Frank Sinatra, he suggested that Day audition for movie roles. In 1948, she appeared in her fi rst fi lm, Romance in the High Seas. Building an image as a blonde, sweet “ goodgirl,” with a pleasant personality, Day became a star during the 1950s, appearing in such fi lms as Calamity Jane (1953), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and the musical The Pajama Game (1957). During the 1960s she appeared in a series of fi lms with Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. Her last fi lm was With Six You Get Eggroll (1968). During the late 1960s, Day starred in a television show that remained on the air until 1973. Day has been married four times. Since the 1980s, she has run the Doris Day Animal Foundation in Carmel, California, an advocacy group for effective pet care.

 DAY, DOROTHY

(1897– 1980) Journalist, religious leader, pacifi st. Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897, in Brooklyn,

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DELORIA, ELLA CARA

New York. When she was a child, her family moved to Chicago, where her father, John Day, worked for a newspaper. Dorothy entered the University of Illinois in 1914 but left after two years to become a reporter on a socialist newspaper in New York. As a young woman, she had learned how the poor lived by traveling to their neighborhoods, and she wanted to help them. Socialism seemed to be the best answer. Day lived with Forster Batterham from 1924 until 1928, and the couple had one child, Tamar Theresa, born on March 3, 1927. Although she had been raised an Episcopal, Day began attending the Roman Catholic Church while working as a New York journalist during this period, and eventually converted. In 1932, in the depths of the GREAT DEPRESSION, Day reported from Washington, D.C., on a hunger march staged by thousands of unemployed workers. She was greatly moved by the march and the plight of the poor. On December 9, 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, a former Catholic clergyman, and the two founded a newspaper called The Catholic Worker. It was fi rst published on May 1, 1933, and called on Christians to help the homeless and the unemployed. Day’s articles led to a series of Catholic Worker houses opening across America to help the poor. Over the next few decades The Catholic Worker took a strong position in support of pacifi sm and against war. Day and her editors found themselves in jail repeatedly for their antiwar statements. In 1963 and again two years later, Day traveled to Rome as part of an effort to promote world peace. Day is considered one of the great pacifi sts and religious leaders of the twentieth century. She died on November 29, 1980. She has become a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.

 DELORIA, ELLA CARA

(1889– 1971) Author, teacher, linguist, and anthropologist. Ella Cara Deloria was born on a Yankton Sioux reservation near Lake Andes, South Dakota. A Native American, her Dakota name, Yankton Dakota, means Beautiful Day. She attended a mission school on the reservation, then enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1910. The following year, she transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, and fi nally to Teacher’s College at

Columbia University in New York City, where she worked with the anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and from which she received a bachelor’s degree in 1915. Deloria pursued a career in education, teaching at the All Saints Episcopal High School in Sioux Falls, North Dakota from 1915 to 1919 and at the Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas, from 1923 to 1927. That year, at Boas’s request, she returned to Columbia to teach American Indian dialects. Her early life among the Dakotas motivated her to conduct fi eldwork among the tribe to record information about their language and culture. These studies led to several books, including 1932’s Dakota Texts, which presented stories from Dakota culture. In 1941, she coauthored Dakota Grammar, and in 1944 published Speaking of Indians. Following publications of her anthropological works, she became director of St. Elizabeth’s mission school in South Dakota, in 1955. In 1984, 13 years after her death, Deloria’s novel Waterlily was published. It describes life among the Dakota.

 DEL RIO, DOLORES

(1905– 1983) Mexican screen actress who became internationally famous, Del Rio was a source of national pride for many Mexican immigrants in the United States. Lolita Dolores Asún solo Ló pez Negrete was born on August 3, 1905. The only child of wealthy Mexican parents, she grew up on her family’s Durango estate and attended European schools. In 1920, when she was 15 years old, her parents arranged her marriage to Jaime Martinez del Rio. Del Rio was considered to be a very beautiful woman, which brought her both opportunities and challenges. In 1925 Hollywood director Edwin Carewe, after meeting her at a party, offered her a contract to act in his fi lms. Del Rio starred in fi ve major motion pictures between 1926 and 1929. Fluent in English, she made a successful transition from silent to talking movies. From 1930 to 1942, Del Rio struggled to develop her career. She wanted to play modern and sophisticated women characters similar to her own background. Instead the Hollywood studios promoted her as Spanish rather than Mexican, and offered her stereotypical parts as exotic

DIVISION OF L ABOR , SEXUAL

femmes fatales or wealthy European beauties. Because of these experiences, Del Rio sympathized with the problems of Mexican immigrants in the United States and helped raise money for Mexican-American civil rights organizations. In 1942 Del Rio, frustrated with the roles available to her in Hollywood, returned to Mexico. She soon became that country’s leading movie star. Del Rio earned four Ariels and one Quixote (Mexican and Spanish “ Oscars,” respectively). In her Spanish-language fi lms, Del Rio expressed her talents and Mexican immigrants in the United States found positive images of Mexican women and national identity. She died April 11, 1983. Del Rio’s career is commemorated in a Hollywood, California, mural created in 1990 by Alfredo de Batuc.

 DE VARONA, DONNA E.

(b. 1947) Olympic swimmer and sportscaster. Donna de Varona was born on April 26, 1947, in San Diego, California. In 1960, at the age of 13, she was selected to become a member of the U.S. Olympic team competing at the summer games in Rome, Italy. Although she did not win any medals that year, de Varona did become the youngest person ever to compete for the United States. Over the next few years, de Varona won a number of national championships, including the 100-meter backstroke in 1962, the 200meter individual medley in 1963 and 1964, and the 200-yard butterfl y in 1964. That same year, at the Olympics in Amsterdam, Netherlands, de Varona won two gold medals, in the 400-meter individual medley and in the freestyle relay event. She retired in 1964, after winning a total of 37 national championships. In 1965, de Varona became a network sportscaster, the fi rst woman to hold this position. De Varona later worked at ABC Sports for 26 years but lost her job in 2000. She sued the network for age and sex discrimination.

DEWSON, MARY WILLIAMS  (MOLLY)

(1874– 1962) Economist, social reformer. Molly Dewson was born to Edward and Elizabeth (Weld) Dewson on February 18, 1874, in Quincy, Massachusetts. She attended Wellesley College and graduated in 1897.

7

Dewson began her career as a social reformer in 1912, when she joined a full-time campaign to establish a minimum wage law for women workers in the United States. Between 1912 and 1917, Dewson and her life partner, Polly Porter, ran a dairy farm in Massachusetts and both became highly active in the women’s SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. After spending 15 months working for the Red Cross Bureau of Refugees in France during WORLD WAR I, Dewson became a research secretary for the NATIONAL CONSUMER’ S LEAGUE. Again she wrote in support of a minimum wage for women and promoted changes in labor organization that would benefi t women on a national level. While fi ghting for social reform in New York, Dewson met ELEANOR ROOSEVELT in 1928. By 1932, Dewson was organizing women to campaign for presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt. After his election, she ran the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, where she promoted the equal representation of women in political parties. She used her friendship with the Roosevelts to lobby for the appointments of women to high-level positions in the NEW DEAL administration. Dewson also used her skills as an economic advisor to infl uence the creation of the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT and served on the Social Security Board until 1938. After retiring in 1940, Dewson lived with Porter in Maine and New York. She died on October 22, 1962.

DIVISION OF LABOR,  SEXUAL The way work is divided between the genders; the difference in job opportunities available to men and women. At the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of women still worked as caretakers and HOMEMAKERS, tending to their homes and raising children while their husbands went off to work. Some of the wealthier women hired nannies and maids––m any of them young immigrant women––t o perform these duties for them. Of the relatively few educated women who were not married, many worked as schoolteachers. In cities, uneducated unmarried women typically worked in factories, in DOMESTIC SERVICE, or as CLERICAL WORKERS. Even though woman factory workers were paid meager wages and

7

DIVORCE L AWS

often labored under terrible conditions, some people believed that women should not work at all, because hiring them meant taking jobs away from men who needed to support families. In 1903 working women joined forces with upperclass women to form the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) to persuade companies to hire more women, increase their pay, and improve working conditions. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, women were active in the formation of UNIONS and the spread of the labor movement, but improvements were slow in coming. 1911 Katherine Gibbs created the fi rst school for women who wanted to become secretaries and office clerks, and this became an expanding opportunity for women through the course of the century. In the office as in the home, however, low-wage female workers played a supporting role to that of men, who were the bosses. The situation remained largely unchanged until the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In the male-dominated professional fi elds, opportunities for women also remained scarce for much of the twentieth century. The ranks of doctors, lawyers, professors, and scientists had included notable women since the mid-1800s, but openings in professional education– –a nd the recognition of peers– – were largely reserved for men until the late 1900s. It was commonly held that this division of labor best served the traditional male responsibility for family income. WORLD WAR II marked an important transition in the sexual division of labor. Six million women entered the industrial workforce, contributing directly to the manufacture of war materiel and domestic goods. Nevertheless, men retained most of the supervisory positions and, when the war was over, women were forced to forfeit their jobs to returning veterans. The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s both refl ected and engendered a change in social values and gender stereotypes, by which women now were entitled to––a nd sought––t he same employment opportunities as men. Legislative and judicial action dismantled barriers based on gender and required equal employment opportunity in new ways. In 1991, for example, Congress passed the Non-Traditional Employment for Women Act, requiring maledominated industries to train women for such jobs as truck driving, construction work, and carpentry. In the white-collar world, the GLASS CEILING that blocked women from advancement

Many women took factory jobs during World War II, but supervisory positions were still largely reserved for men.

slowly gave way. At the end of the century, however, top-level executive positions still remained heavily male and women were paid less, on average, than men with similar positions. In the year 2000, more than 60 percent of American women were in the labor force, compared to 38 percent in 1960. Women accounted for more than 47 percent of all employed workers, up from 33 percent four decades earlier

 DIVORCE LAWS

A divorce is a court judgment that ends a marriage. Divorce laws have changed dramatically in the past 200 years. During the early history of the United States, a man virtually owned his wife and children as he did his material possessions. Until the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States, grounds for divorce were limited to adultery and cruelty. Divorces could only be granted by legislative action. New laws substituted judicial for legislative divorce and broadened the grounds of divorce to include desertion. In the 1970s, feminists advocated for “ no-fault” divorce and new laws were passed. These laws no longer required proof of marital misconduct by one spouse or the other. By the 1990s, every state and the District of Columbia had enacted “ no-fault” divorce laws. Ever since the liberalization of the laws in the mid-nineteenth century, divorces have been eas-

DOMESTIC SERVICE

ier to obtain, and more of them have been granted to women. Nevada has the most relaxed divorce laws, requiring that the plaintiff only live in the state for six weeks before fi ling for divorce. Divorce was relatively rare in the United States (although there were surges after each world war) until the mid-1960s. By the 1990s, the rising divorce rate led many states, including Iowa, Idaho, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, to reexamine their legislation and consider restoring the assignment of fault. Other states, such as Minnesota and Michigan, have introduced bills mandating premarital counseling. Bills in Colorado, Washington, West Virginia, and Minnesota allow couples to enter a voluntary agreement to make their marriages harder to dissolve. By 2000, Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas had enacted covenant marriage laws, which allowed couples to enter into a stronger marital contract than a standard state contract. Some states, including Iowa, require divorcing parents to take classes to help them understand the emotional impact of divorce on their children. See also: Child Custody.

DOLE, ELIZABETH  HANFORD

(b. 1936) A lawyer and government official who served in fi ve U.S. presidential administrations and ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000. Mary Elizabeth Hanford was born on July 29, 1936, in Salisbury, North Carolina, the daughter of a fl ower wholesaler. In 1958, she graduated from Duke University, where she was student government president. She earned a master’s degree in 1960 and a law degree in 1965 from Harvard University. Hanford began her government service as a Democrat, working on a presidential consumer affairs commission (1968– 1971) and, as an Independent in the administration of President Richard Nixon, in the White House Office of Consumer Affairs (1971– 1973). In 1975, during a six-year appointment to the Federal Trade Commission (1973– 1979), she married Senator Robert J. Dole and registered as a Republican. President Ronald Reagan named Dole secretary of transportation in 1983, making her the fi rst woman to hold that job. During her tenure, she won legislation that required automobile manufacturers to add a third brake-light and air bags as basic equipment and stressed road safety

77

and airport security. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed her secretary of labor, a role in which she was credited with peacefully resolving an Appalachian coal strike. In 1991, after Bush left office, Dole accepted the position of president of the American Red Cross. She took a leave of absence in 1996 to devote her energies to her husband’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republic presidential nomination. Dole then returned to the Red Cross, resigning in August 1999 to seek the 2000 Republican nomination in her own right. Short of funds, she withdrew from the race two months later. She was suggested as a potential running mate for George W. Bush but not selected.

 DOMESTIC SERVICE

Paid employment for work done within the home by nonfamily members. Domestic service may include cooks, washerwomen, maids, housekeepers, and nannies. Domestic service employed more women than any other nonagriculture occupation in the early twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tradition of apprenticing young girls in the homes of neighbors to learn domestic skills had given way to paid employment for specifi c ethnic groups. Many families in the Northeast preferred to hire single Irish women, either immigrants or the daughters of immigrants. They lived in and were on call throughout the day. In the mid-Atlantic and Southern states, AfricanAmerican girls and women were exclusively hired for domestic work. In the mining camps of the West, Asian men worked as cooks, laundry men, and house servants, until young women of Asian, Native American, and Mexican descent fi lled the ranks of domestic workers. In fact, the education for Native American and African-American girls included domestic service training because of the job segregation at the time. New job opportunities during the 1940s made domestic service unappealing and the supply of workers dried up. Teenagers fi lled some of the gap, taking on babysitting, house cleaning, and even ironing jobs as more women entered the workplace. Domestic service also became commercialized, and businesses replaced individual workers with commercial laundries, home-cleaning services, window washing companies, and day-care centers. By the 1980s, equal employment laws changed the job landscape. The need

7

D R E W, N A N C Y

for domestic workers continued, but a formal employment structure of agencies supplying workers replaced the informal structure of hiring “ help.”

 DREW, NANCY

A fi ctional teenage detective and the lead character in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. Nancy Drew was “ born” in 1930 with the publication of The Secret of the Old Clock, published by Grosset & Dunlap. The character was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, owner of Stratemeyer Syndicate and creator of other popular series and characters for young readers such as the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and the Hardy Boys. He hired a young journalist to write the stories based on plotlines he gave her. Independent, smart, and daring, Nancy Drew challenged the stereotype of females as the weaker, meeker sex and provided young girls with a new role model. And Nancy Drew has grown with the times. Her image was updated in 1986 to appeal to adolescent readers in a new series called Nancy Drew Files. In the 1990s, Nancy Drew went off to college. Millions of copies of her books are read each year by young and teenage girls.

 DUNCAN, ISADORA

(1878– 1927) Dancer. Angela Duncan was born on May 27, 1878, in San Francisco, California. Raised in poverty, she began dancing as a child, developing a free-form style of dance that was not then popular with American audiences, so at 21 Duncan traveled to England, where she began appearing at private gatherings. It was during this period that Duncan changed her name to Isadora. Duncan went to Russia in 1905, where she danced in sheer garments, sometimes barefoot. Meanwhile she had begun a series of love affairs, first with the stage designer Gordon Craig and later with Paris Singer, the sewing machine heir. She had one child by each man. In 1913, both children were tragically killed in an automobile accident. Duncan tried to overcome her grief by touring South America, Germany, and France. In 1920 she opened a ballet school in Moscow where she taught her students the free forms of ballet that she had made famous. Two years later she married the Russian poet Sergey Aleksandrovich

Yesenin, who was much younger than Duncan. They toured the United States, then returned to the Soviet Union, where Yesenin committed suicide in 1925. Duncan herself was killed in a freak accident on the French Riviera in 1927 when her scarf became tangled in the wheel of the convertible in which she was riding, strangling her. Her innovative forms of dance were the forerunner of modern ballet.

 DUNIWAY, ABIGAIL SCOTT

(1834– 1915) Advocate of women’s rights. Born in a log cabin in a recently settled part of Illinois in 1834, Abigail Scott crossed the Oregon Trail as a child, married in Oregon, and labored many hard years on an isolated homestead. She eventually became the most prominent and determined advocate of women’s rights in the Pacifi c Northwest. Duniway forcefully entered public life in 1870, at age 36, founding Oregon’s fi rst suffrage association and laying the groundwork for New Northwest, a newspaper devoted to women’s rights, which debuted on May 5, 1871. She was soon criss-crossing the region—“ by stage, rail, steamer, buggy, buckboard and afoot” —to speak, sell subscriptions, gather material, and exhort all manner of Pacifi c Northwest women to better themselves and their communities. At the close of 1886 she paused to recount the previous year’s work: 181 lectures and 3,000 miles, all in the face of “ more than the usual quota of persecution, hypocrisy, malice, gossip and hate.” Duniway advocated a wide range of reforms. She argued that men should not monopolize well-paying professional positions and that wives ought to have more control over their earnings. But the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT remained her central concern. In 1912, more than four decades after Duniway had begun her work, Oregon’s voters at last gave women the vote. Two years later, shortly before her death, she at last cast a ballot.

 DYK, RUTH BELCHER

(1901– 2000) Women’s rights advocate. Ruth Belcher was born in Portland, Maine, on March 25, 1901. Her mother, Annie Belcher, had been a student at Tufts Medical School in the late nineteenth century and inspired Ruth Belcher to follow a pro-

E A R H A RT, A M E L I A

fessional career. Her father, Arthur Belcher, was a lawyer. She graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts during the 1920s and did graduate work at Simmons College in Boston, as well as at the University of Wisconsin. Ruth Belcher and her mother campaigned for the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.

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Dyk eventually became a psychiatric social worker, specializing in the treatment of delinquents in upstate New York. In 1950, she published Anxiety in Pregnancy and Childbirth, followed by Left Handed in 1980. Meanwhile, she worked closely with her husband, anthropologist Walter Dyk, studying the Navajo Indians. She died on November 18, 2000.

E  EAGLE FORUM

A conservative Christian women’s organization founded by PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY in 1972. Schlafl y founded the Eagle Forum upon unofficially breaking from the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) after being passed up for the presidency of the organization by a more liberal candidate. She felt that the NFRW was becoming too liberal and sought to promote more conservative values. The Eagle Forum promotes traditional Christian family values. Its 80,000 members, both men and women, believe that women should not be held fi nancially responsible for their families and that men ought to be the heads of their households. Eagle Forum opposes “ radical feminism” and the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT on the premise that such an amendment would send women into combat in war and has the potential to legalize homosexual marriages. The organization is also against ABORTION. In EDUCATION, the Eagle Forum opposes contemporary methods such as “ Outcome Based Education,” which abandons traditional methods such as teacher-centered classrooms, student testing, and memorization of factual knowledge. The organization demands a rise in public education standards. Also, it calls for the freedom of students to practice Christian religious values in school. The Eagle Forum condemns the use of learning materials that promote “ alternative lifestyles, profanity, and immorality.” It also op-

poses materials that are “ anti-biblical” or promote New Age religious practices. The Eagle Forum promotes capitalism. It believes in military isolationism, although it supports the buildup of a strong ballistic missile defense. Its members oppose a strong central government and believe legislative power should be left in the hands of the states.

 EARHART, AMELIA

(1897– 1937) Aviator. Amelia Earhart was born on June 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, to Edwin and Amy (Otis) Earhart. Her maternal grandparents were wealthy and paid for Amelia and her sister Muriel to attend private schools. When she was ten years old, Earhart saw her fi rst airplane at the Iowa State Fair. However, it was not until she was in her twenties that she got the urge to fl y one. In 1921, Earhart met Neta Snook, the fi rst woman graduate of the Curtis School of Aviation. Snook became her teacher, and Earhart worked odd jobs to pay for fl ying lessons. In 1922, Earhart purchased her fi rst plane, a yellow Kinner Canary. Earhart’s name is associated with many “ fi rsts” in aviation. She was the fi rst woman to fl y a plane at altitudes over 14,000 feet. In 1932, she was the fi rst woman to fl y solo across the Atlantic Ocean; that same year, she broke the women’s transcontinental speed record. She helped found the

E D U C AT I O N

Amelia Earhart was a woman of many “ firsts” in aviation.

Ninety Nines, Inc., a women’s fl ying organization, and was the fi rst female vice president of the National Aeronautics Association. The big mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart is her fi nal fl ight in 1937. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were attempting to circumnavigate the world. The plane was scheduled for a refueling stop on Howland Island in the Pacifi c Ocean. However, after their last radio transmission on July 2, 1937, Earhart, Noonan, and the plane were never heard from again. Neither the plane nor the passengers were ever found, despite a search over 250,000 square miles at the cost of $4 million. Most believe that Earhart’s plane simply ran out of gas during the dangerously long stretch from New Guinea to Howland Island, although more colorful theories involve Earhart being captured by the Japanese. Whatever the circumstances surrounding her death may have been, Earhart and her navigator took them to the grave.

 EDUCATION

Education has played a key role in the advancement of women in the twentieth century. Throughout the 1900s increasing numbers of

girls and women attended high school and college, and by the end of the century female graduates outnumbered male graduates. In 1997– 1998, women earned 57 percent of master’s degrees and 42 percent of doctorates. By 2000, the majority of students were female at all three levels—primary, secondary, and higher. One of the most important laws expanding educational opportunity for women was the CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex in public accommodations, employment (TITLE VII), and public education (TITLE IX). Amended in 1972, Title IX countered sex discrimination against students and employees in educational institutions. Since 1988, Congress has made it clear that Title IX covers all areas within institutions including fi nancial aid, admissions (except for private undergraduate and single-sex institutions), employment, and extra-curricular activities. Title IX especially opened up ATHLETICS to women and resulted in a huge increase in the number of women participating in intercollegiate athletics. Courts opened up military academies to women. The development of community colleges by local and state governments encouraged more high school graduates, especially females and minorities, to continue on to college. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN (AAUW), have promoted education and equality for girls and women. At fi rst concerned with the status of women in higher education, the AAUW has provided fi nancial assistance to individuals charging discrimination and has awarded fellowships. Recently it has focused on equity issues of girls in elementary and secondary schools. In the early 1970s, the AAUW worked with the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS and the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN to support Title IX and the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. Women have traditionally entered sex-segregated occupations such as NURSING and TEACHING. At the end of the twentieth century, over two-thirds of elementary school teachers were women, and as many women as men entered secondary school teaching. Teaching as a profession continued to suffer from low status and pay. On the college level, women instructors were few until the women’s movement of the 1960s. Governmental affirmative action programs also helped women gain access to research

E I S E N S TA D T v. B A I R D

and teaching. However, men still dominate fulltime, tenured, and full professor positions and earn higher salaries. Fewer women than men enter administration. This has been attributed to discrimination, family obligations, and lack of experience. Principals are more likely to be male. About 30 percent of college administrators are female, mostly at lower echelons and salaries. Administrators often have higher salaries and status than teachers and professors. Approximately 20 percent of college presidents are women; few of them are at major research universities. The WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT that followed the civil rights drive of the 1960s led to demands for changes in curricula at all levels. Women’s history courses began in 1969. There are currently more than 30,000 WOMEN’ S STUDIES courses in the United States. Most scholars viewed coeducation as positive for women, but proponents of single-sex classrooms and colleges point out that in such settings girls and women seem to gain more self-confi dence and achieve more. The increasing education of women and access to the same curricula and schools as men has meant a betterment of women’s social and economic positions in America. American women have provided leadership for women around the world. Women have increasingly entered the labor force, and the higher the level of education the more likely women are to work. However, many women, especially non-Hispanic, white females, still do not pursue math, science, technology, computer science, and engineering, which locks them out of higher paying jobs. Gender discrimination and social traditions still undermine advancement and performance. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Eisenmann, Linda. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. Solomon, Barbara M. In the Company of Educated Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

EISENHOWER, MARY  (MAMIE) GENEVA DOUD (1896– 1979) Wife of Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirtyfourth president of the United States. Mamie Geneva Doud was born in Boone, Iowa, the

daughter of a meatpacking plant owner. She married Eisenhower, a young army officer, in 1916. They had two sons. Eisenhower usually traveled wherever her husband was posted. During WORLD WAR II, she lived in Washington, D.C., performing volunteer work for military organizations while her husband commanded Allied troops in Europe. She moved to New York City when her husband was named president of Columbia University in 1949 and to France when he became supreme commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in 1950. Eisenhower also accompanied her husband on his 1952 presidential whistle-stop campaign across the country. Serving two terms as fi rst lady, from 1953 to 1961, she focused her energies on domestic life within the White House. Emphasizing simplicity and frugality, she directed menu planning, budgeting, and housekeeping, and was considered a gracious hostess. She preferred to avoid involvement in political issues and, at press conferences, refused to answer political questions. Withstanding the crises of her husband’s military and political careers, as well as his heart attack, she earned the admiration of the American public. Her banged hairstyle and pink clothing became popular fashions. After leaving the White House in 1961, Eisenhower settled on a farm with her husband in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She died on November 1, 1979, in Washington, D.C.

 EISENSTADT

V. BAIRD U.S. Supreme Court case. Eisenstadt v. Baird, which the Supreme Court decided in 1971, was one of a series of cases in the 1960s and early 1970s affecting reproductive rights. The case arose when William Baird was arrested and convicted of violating a Massachusetts law forbidding the distribution of contraceptives—in this case, contraceptive foam—to unmarried persons. He named the arresting officer (Thomas S. Eisenstadt) in appealing his conviction. Like an earlier case, GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT (1965), this case involved birth control. But while Griswold focused on the distribution of contraceptive devices and information to married people, Eisenstadt arose because of a statute that prohibited distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people. The Supreme Court found this statute was unconstitutional because it violated

EMILY’S LIST

the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In reaching its decision, the Court said that it was unable to fi nd any way to distinguish between the use of birth control by married and unmarried people. The Court rejected the idea that the purpose of the statute was to prevent premarital sexual relations, for that would imply that the legislature wanted to punish unmarried people for having sex by forcing unwanted children on them. In sum, the Court’s decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird more fi rmly established a right of privacy and equal protection in matters of contraception and sexual behavior.

 EMILY’S LIST

A political action committee (PAC) that raises money for women candidates for political office. In 1985, discouraged by the low numbers of women in elective office and recognizing the role played by money in successful candidacies, political activist Ellen Malcolm founded EMILY’s List. “ EMILY” is an acronym for the expression “ Early Money Is Like Yeast.” “ Just as yeast makes dough rise,” Malcolm says, “ early money helps women raise more money and become credible candidates.” Representative Barbara Mikulski of Maryland was the fi rst to receive support in her ultimately successful bid for the Senate in 1986. In 1992, in what was called “ The Year of the Woman,” EMILY’s List helped elect four prochoice women to the Senate and 20 women to the House of Representatives. Since then EMILY’s List has supported hundreds of politically liberal, prochoice women in their bids for the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and governorships. EMILY’s List invites women (and men) to join, requiring not only a membership fee of $100 but also a pledge to contribute at least $100 to at least two women on a list of approved candidates. Since 1996, EMILY’s List has expanded its goals beyond fund-raising to include the training of campaign managers, fund-raisers, and press secretaries for women candidates.

 ENDO, MITSUYE

(b. 1920) Japanese American who challenged the constitutional right of the United States to imprison Americans of Japanese heritage during WORLD WAR II. When the Japanese bombed the U.S.

military base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mitsuye Endo was a U.S. citizen living in Sacramento, California, and working as a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the removal of all “ enemy aliens” of Japanese descent from “ military areas” and U.S. territory bordering the Pacifi c Ocean. Shortly thereafter Endo was among thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast sent to internment camps. In July, from the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in Newell, California, Endo fi led a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds of illegal imprisonment. Endo’s petition was denied and shortly thereafter she was sent to the Central Utah Relocation Center near Delta, Utah. In 1944 her appeal was heard by the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor. On December 18, Justice William O. Douglas read the majority opinion, declaring that Endo could not be held any longer in the Relocation Center, and that it was beyond the power of the War Relocation Authority “ to detain citizens against whom no charges of disloyalty or subversiveness have been made for a period longer than that necessary to separate the loyal from the disloyal.” After this judgment, on January 2, 1945, all Japanese Americans forcibly interned in the camps were allowed to return to their homes.

 ENTERTAINMENT

Amusement and the enjoyment of the arts. The emergence of electronic media in the twentieth century brought about a profound change in entertainment patterns. Sound recordings, radio, and television brought entertainment into the home and reduced the need to create one’s own music or go out to seek it. LITERATURE remains a primary source of enjoyment for many, and ATHLETICS has acquired a new importance for women. Still there is no doubt Americans depend on television as their primary source of entertainment, and much of society’s ideas about women’s roles are infl uenced by this powerful medium. During the mid– twentieth century, women on television were portrayed as housewives who obeyed their husbands, catered to men’s needs, and raised children. They were often depicted wearing attractive dresses, makeup, and jewelry, even when cleaning the house.

E N T E R TA I N M E N T

While some women were powerTRAILBLAZERS ful and self-sufficient off camera, they still earned success portraying The controversial pop singer and movie actress Madonna has helpless housewives. One of televibeen called both the ultimate feminist and the ultimate tramp. sion’s most famous shows, I Love Lucy, which fi rst aired in 1951, feaEnormously successful since the 1980s, she has been outspotured Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, a ken on behalf of women’s rights and unafraid to speak her real-life married couple who also mind on and off stage. At the same time, she has reinvented played a married couple on the her public image as a sex symbol in guises ranging from street show, which ran until their divorce waif to glamour girl. A pioneer of the music video, she has dein 1957. On television, Ball porrived much of her success from sexually charged performances trayed a ditzy woman who got herby scantily clad women— most notably herself. self into outrageous situations beMadonna staunchly defends her portrayal of women, saycause of her inability to foresee the ing that she’s just doing what she wants to do. When a televiconsequences of her actions, but in sion reporter asked her about her appearance in the music real life Ball was a tough, successful video Express Yourself— in which she crawls on the fl oor wearbusinesswoman who succeeded in a ing chains— she responded, “ Isn’t that what feminism is all fi eld dominated by men. After her about, you know, equality for men and women? And aren’t I divorce, Ball emerged as president of in charge of my life, doing the things I want to?” Of the chains, Desilu Productions, went on to star she said, “ I have chained myself. There wasn’t a man that put in The Lucy Show for six years, then that chain on me. . . . I do everything of my own volition. I’m sold the business for $17 million. in charge.” Among the many feminist thinkers who support Her next sitcom, Here’s Lucy, ran unMadonna’s art and image, the cultural critic Camille Paglia til 1974. Although Lucy’s character says that the singer combines “ a full female sensuality with a was a working woman in these later masculine political astuteness.” shows, this was not because her charMadonna Louise Ciccone was born on August 16, 1958, in acter craved a career—we were to Bay City, Michigan. She worked as a singer, drummer, dancer, assume she was a widow forced to reand model before rising to stardom in 1985 with her second turn to work for fi nancial reasons. album, Like a Virgin. That record became the first by a feWomen were not portrayed as male artist to sell more than 10 million copies since Carole single and successful, pursuing careers by choice, until The Mary Tyler King’s 1971 album Tapestry. In addition to her many hit reMoore Show emerged and dominated cordings and music videos, Madonna is known for her roles in the CBS Saturday-night lineup dursuch movies as Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Dick Tracy ing the 1970s. Paving the way was (1990), A League of Their Own (1992), and Evita (1996). Diahann Carroll, who broke televiWhether one considers her a pioneer of women’s freedom sion’s color barrier in 1968 when she or a supporter of sexism and denigration, one thing about became the fi rst black actress to have Madonna is certain: She loves the controversy. In her docua show built around her character. mentary film Madonna, Truth or Dare (1991), she says, “ I Playing a nurse on NBC’s Julia, she know I’m not the best singer. I know I’m not the best dancer. portrayed a single mom who had to But I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in pushing peowork to support her son. ple’s buttons.” In MUSIC, many lyrics from songs of the 1950s and 1960s refl ect the concept of women in supporting Have Fun,” and “ Express Yourself ” refl ect these roles, dependent upon men to feel complete. ideals. At the end of the century, there was much Songs that come to mind are “ Bobby’s Girl,” “ My controversy about lyrics that condoned violence Boyfriend’s Back,” and “ Goin’ to the Chapel.” toward women, portraying them only as objects But during and after the women’s movement of of sexual pleasure. But while artists like Eminem the 1960s, songs that emphasized women’s were singing about women in derogatory ways, strength and independence emerged—certainly the female group Destiny’s Child was singing the songs such as “ You Don’t Own Me,” “ I Am praises of “ Independent Women.” Woman,” “ I Will Survive,” “ Girls Just Wanna

4

ENTREPRENEURS

Music Television—MTV—began on August 1, 1981, courtesy of cable television, forever replacing whatever images listeners may have carried in their heads with the specifi c pictures that fl ashed across the television while the music blared. Visions such as Madonna wearing pointy brassieres will forever be associated with her songs. MTV not only revolutionized the music industry, it infl uenced fashion and culture. Cable television grew because many wanted MTV. It provided another medium through which women would be scrutinized.

 ENTREPRENEURS

Those who assume the responsibility and the risk for a business with the expectation of making a profi t. Entrepreneurs develop new products, fi nd new markets, or invent new means of production. While the American business world has not always welcomed women into the workplace, a number of women have gained respect, infl uence, and wealth in creating businesses of their own, often developing goods and services tailored to the “ women’s market” and focused on women’s unique concerns. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce there were 5.4 million womenowned businesses in the United States in 1997. Madame C. J. Walker (1867– 1919) was the fi rst African-American businesswoman to become a millionaire. In 1914, ELIZABETH ARDEN (1878– 1966) founded what would become a multimillion-dollar cosmetics empire. In 1944, Helen Valentine addressed the need for a magazine devoted to young women, founding Seventeen magazine and serving as editor-in-chief until 1950. To supplement her new husband’s small salary, Lillian Vernon (b. 1927) started a mail-order company under her name in 1951, providing monogrammed accessories for young women. Martha Stewart (b. 1941) built a catering business begun in the late 1970s into an empire of “ lifestyle” businesses. Financial independence was often beyond the reach of many women. Shortly after the end of WORLD WAR I, sisters Lillian and Clara Westropp opened the Women’s Savings and Loan Company in Cleveland, Ohio. They employed only women, provided loans to women, and by 1965 the institution had amassed assets of $137 million. In 1932, during the GREAT DEPRESSION, Tillie Lewis (1901– 1977) made $12,000 selling securities in New York City. In 1934 she brought

the Italian tomato industry into the United States and earned a fortune of $100 million. Margaret Fogarty Rudkin (1897– 1967) likewise found opportunities in the food industry in those dismal economic times and in 1938 launched her baking company, Pepperidge Farm. Entrepreneurs looked at the office as well as the kitchen: In 1956, Bette Clair Nesmith Graham (1924– 1980) invented Liquid Paper, a correcting fl uid that soon became indispensable to offices everywhere. Perhaps the greatest entrepreneurial phenomenon of the twentieth century, OPRAH WINFREY, parlayed her success as a talk-show host into Harpo Entertainment Group, a conglomerate including fi lm, television, and video production and magazine publishing.

THE EQUAL CREDIT  OPPORTUNITY ACT A 1974 federal statute stating that individuals cannot be denied credit because of sex, marital status, race, religion, color, or national origin. In part, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was designed to redress the unfair treatment of women who were denied credit because they were female and/or single and not considered good risks by lending institutions. ECOA prevents lenders from asking personal questions of a prospective borrower that may have nothing to do with her creditworthiness, including whether the woman intends to eventually have children and may even consider leaving the workplace.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT  OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION A federal commission that investigates discrimination in employment based on age, disability, race, color, religion, gender, or national origin. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established by TITLE VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began operation in July 1965. If the commission fi nds evidence of discrimination, it issues a “ notice of right to sue” that enables the charging party to bring an individual action in court. The commission began as a way of addressing the growing unrest in the nation over racial discrimination and segregation. In the struggle

E Q U A L PA Y A C T S O F

WOMEN’S FIRSTS Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker— Madame C. J. Walker— was one of the first women in the United States to become a millionaire through her own efforts and ingenuity. Born in Louisiana on December 23, 1867, Walker parlayed her hair-care treatments for black women into an international cosmetics empire. This daughter of former slaves began selling her treatments— a regimen of vigorous brushing, shampoo, and a medicinal pomade worked through the hair with a hot comb— in 1905 in St. Louis, Missouri. She moved the following year to Denver, Colorado, where she became “ Madame C. J. Walker” after her marriage to Charles J. Walker. In 1908 she opened a second office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then consolidated her operations in 1910 in Indianapolis, Indiana. By 1919, Walker claimed that more than 20,000 agents sold her products in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. She preached “ cleanliness and loveliness” as a matter of selfrespect and also as a means to improve the attitudes of white people toward African Americans. Walker set high standards of hygiene and social responsibility for her agents, encouraging them also to support black philanthropies. Walker moved to New York in 1916 and built a mansion known as the Villa Lewaro in Irvington-on-Hudson. Walker’s philanthropies were many. She helped save the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and several organizations in St. Louis and Indianapolis, and funded scholarships at the Tuskegee Institute. When she died on May 25, 1919, Madame C. J. Walker was a millionaire and one of the most successful businesspeople of the early twentieth century. In 1997, Walker was honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a commemorative postage stamp.

to pass the legislation, Congress reached a compromise that eliminated enforcement authority for the EEOC. Instead, the commission is only able to receive, investigate, and conciliate complaints where it fi nds reasonable cause to believe that discrimination has occurred. If the EEOC is not able to negotiate an agreement between the two parties, the statute provides only that individuals may bring private lawsuits and where EEOC fi nds evidence of “ patterns or practices” of discrimination, EEOC can refer these matters to the Department of Justice for litigation. In its fi rst year, 8,852 charges were fi led. One-third of these

1963

AND

1972

charges alleged sex discrimination. To gauge possible discriminatory practices, in 1966, the EEOC began requiring companies to submit reports that showed the representation of men and women in fi ve racial/ ethnic groups in nine basic job categories. Through its guidelines the EEOC has ruled it a violation of equal employment opportunity to classify jobs as male or female, light or heavy, or to maintain separate seniority lists. In addition, the EEOC has made clear that it is illegal to refuse to hire or promote a woman because she is married or has children, unless men are similarly treated. The Supreme Court endorsed this interpretation when it held in Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp. (1971) that employers could not have hiring policies for women with young children that differed from those for men with children of a similar age. In the 1990s, Congress expanded EEOC’s authority with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Older Workers Benefi t Protection Act of 1990, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

EQUAL PAY ACTS  OF 1963 AND 1972

Federal laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in the payment of wages. Although legislation had been initially proposed in 1945, it was not until the 1963 act that it became illegal to pay women at a lower rate than men for the same work. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of wives who went to work increased from 21 percent to 30 percent. Greater numbers of working women and their greater involvement in unions encouraged the WOMEN’ S BUREAU, headed by ESTHER PETERSON, to promote the policy of equal pay. Women and men did not work in similar jobs in 1960. Several versions of the bill appeared before Congress in 1961 and 1962 that emphasized

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

“ comparable work” requiring “ comTRAILBLAZERS parable skills,” rather than “ equal work.” After several amendments Alice Paul (1885– 1977), a lawyer and social reformer, advoand much compromise, the Equal cated the use of militant tactics to publicize the need for an Pay Act of 1963 was passed. In 1972 the legislation was exEqual Rights Amendment. Paul was involved in both the panded to include more of the workBritish and American woman suffrage movements, particuforce and more than 171,000 women larly in Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffrage demonstrations in received more than $84 million in England. Paul was arrested and jailed on six occasions for increased wages. Two court cases furleading political protests but was never swayed from her dedther established the power of the ication to the feminist cause. acts. In Schultz v. Wheaton Glass ComPaul headed the Congressional Commission of the National pany (1970), a federal circuit court American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1912. In ruled that jobs needed to be “ sub1913, she founded the Congressional Union for Woman’s Sufstantially equal but not identical” to frage, which merged with the Woman’s Party in 1917 to form be included under the act. In Cornthe NATIONAL WOMAN’S PARTY. As a leader of the National ing Glass Works v. Brennan (1974), the Woman’s Party, Paul led the first picket protest ever held in U.S. Supreme Court ruled that emfront the White House. In 1923, Paul drafted the Equal Rights ployers cannot pay women lower Amendment and campaigned for its ratification until her wages because they had been paid death. previously under the “ going market Paul was a member of various women’s rights organizations rate.” throughout her life. She was chairperson of the Women’s ReThis legislation did not challenge search Foundation (1927– 1937) and a member of the Nationdiscrimination in the types of jobs ality Committee of the International American Committee of women took, but it did mark the fi rst Women (1930–1 933). time that the federal government defended women’s right to equal pay in employment. It prevented employers from reducing the wages of either sex to Opposition to the ERA began immediately equalize pay between men and women. The legafter its introduction to Congress. Trade unions islation also made it a violation when a different and women’s groups such as the LEAGUE OF wage was paid to a person who worked in the WOMEN VOTERS opposed the ERA on the same job before or after an employee of the opgrounds that it might invalidate female-specifi c posite sex. Many states and communities have PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION that had already their own fair employment laws and agencies that enforce equal pay protections and other prohibitions against sex discrimination on the job. These laws are similar to and sometimes stronger than federal laws.

EQUAL RIGHTS  AMENDMENT The proposed Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to outlaw sexual discrimination in the United States. Alice Paul, leader of the NATIONAL WOMAN’ S PARTY and author of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA; see Documents), saw her idea fi rst introduced to the U.S. Congress in 1923. The ERA intended to end discrimination on the basis of sex, and specifi cally to end special treatment for women based on sexual difference.

After approval by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment was the subject of nationwide ratification marches. By the 1982 deadline, however, the necessary three-fourths of states had not ratified.

FA M I L Y A N D M E D I C A L L E A V E A C T

been passed, such as minimum wage requirements and maximum hour laws. However, the FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT (1938), which granted the same protection to men as to women, eased these uncertainties and working-class women became more supportive of the ERA. But the ERA was never ratifi ed. After years of deliberation, the U.S. Senate defeated the bill for the fi rst time in 1943. Alice Paul reintroduced the ERA at every new session of Congress, albeit to no avail. The ERA fi nally received house approval in 1971 and Senate approval in 1972. When it went to the states to be ratifi ed by the mandatory three-fourths majority by the 1982 deadline, the ERA fell short by three states. Credit for the defeat of the ERA has been given to PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, who founded the NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO STOP ERA. This committee argued that the biological and psychological differences between men and women are natural, and that the ERA would ruin marriage,

7

family, and the “ benefi ts” of economic dependence of women on men. Despite its defeat, the ERA continued to be introduced at every new session of Congress. Beginning in 1995, the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN, which has advocated the ERA since 1966, worked to expand the amendment under the new title “ The Constitutional Equality Amendment.” The purpose of the proposed law was extended to prohibit discrimination not only against women, but also against race, sexual orientation, marital status, ethnicity, age, and disability. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Berry, Mary Frances. Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Mansbridge, Jane J. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

F FAIR LABOR  STANDARDS ACT U.S. federal legislation enacted in 1938 that established minimum wages and maximum hours for many workers in companies involved in interstate commerce. A centerpiece of late NEW DEAL economic reform, the Fair Labor Standards Act affirmed federal responsibility for maintaining purchasing power and ensuring a minimal standard of living for employed workers. The law set a minimum wage of $.25 per hour in 1938 (increased gradually over the years) and prohibited the employment of children under age 16 during school hours or under 18 in dangerous working conditions. Amendments to the legislation have extended its protections to more lowincome workers and reduced the number of hours that could be worked without mandatory overtime time (from 44 to 40). The law also requires equal pay for equal work without regard to gender.

The mandatory minimum wage has been opposed by some economists, who argue that it limits job opportunities for minorities and young people entering the workforce. For women, the establishment of a minimum wage proved benefi cial to the millions who took manufacturing jobs during WORLD WAR II, and the requirement of equal pay for equal work mirrored a tenet of the women’s rights movement into the twenty-fi rst century. See also: Infant and Child Health.

FAMILY AND MEDICAL  LEAVE ACT Federal legislation passed in 1993 that protects the jobs of employees who must leave work temporarily to care for family members. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 is one of

FA S H I O N

several labor laws that attempt to equalize treatment of men and women in the workplace. In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, unions pushed for and succeeded in obtaining protective labor legislation, laws designed to protect workers against exploitation in the workplace. Many of these laws were specifi cally intended to protect women as well as poor, unskilled, and immigrant workers, but some had unwanted consequences. For example, laws forbidding employers to force women to lift heavy loads were used to keep women from better-paying jobs. The Family and Medical Leave Act, however, applies equally to men and women and provides for both men and women to take time off work to deal with family medical issues, such as the birth of a child or the illness of a family member. Before the passage of this legislation, employers were more likely to expect women to be caregivers. Many threatened men with job loss if they took time off, in essence forcing women to take charge in most medical situations. Before the passage of this and similar legislation, many women lost their jobs when they took time off to have and care for newborn babies or when ill children or spouses needed their attention. Unions such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which is mostly composed of women and men of color, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) were among organizations that worked for the passage of this law. FMLA provides that eligible employees may take a leave of up to 12 weeks in a 12-month period to take care of a newborn baby, a newly adopted child, or a sick family member, or to recover from illness or surgery, without jeopardizing his or her job or medical benefi ts. The employee is granted the right to return to his or her original position or an equivalent one at the end of the leave. The law also provides that the employer must maintain health benefi ts during the employee’s absence and also allows the employee to work a part-time schedule if needed so that he or she can be available to manage a family medical situation. The law applies to all public-sector employers and private-sector employers who have 50 or more workers. Employees must have worked for the employer for at least 12 months (at least 1,250 hours) prior to requesting the leave. They must also provide the employer with as much advance notice as possible and may be required to

submit proof from a physician of the need for the leave. Since the passage of this law, many men have been allowed to take time off work when a child is born, a benefi t that had generally not previously been available to most families.

 FASHION

Fashion design, unlike architecture, landscaping, and other design areas from which women were excluded, was from the onset a fi eld in which women fi gured prominently. American women had long been making clothing for themselves, their families, and for others, so at the turn of the twentieth century, designing clothing professionally was seen as an appropriate “ feminine” career choice for the middle-class woman, one that could provide her with a means of income. Until the second half of the twentieth century, women who were not a part of the white middle class generally did not have access to a professional career in fashion design. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paris was the undisputed center of fashion. Charles Frederick Worth established haute couture, the professional art of custom clothing design. Working-class women, unable to afford dressmakers who might copy couture styles, wore manufactured clothing. It was American designers who would introduce the concept of democracy with ready-to-wear clothing, extending fashion to the average woman.

American Women Designers While WORLD WAR II disrupted Paris’s couture industry, it ushered in the age of the American designer. Dorothy Shaver, the vice president of Lord & Taylor, had set the stage a few years earlier when she began crediting American designers (instead of manufacturers) with clothing creations. In 1941, when contact with Paris was severed, the American designer gained prominence. American fashion designers can trace their beginnings to dressmakers in the nineteenth century, most of whom were female. Dressmakers worked in relative anonymity, on their own or for dress shops or department stores. Ellen Curtis Demorest, known as Madame Demorest, was one of the fi rst dressmakers to attain national stature. In addition to managing her own store in New York beginning in 1860, she invented the

FA S H I O N

mass-produced paper clothing pattern and published a quarterly fashion magazine. Hattie Carnegie was to further advance fashion as a business in the United States. Starting out in 1909 by pinning hats in a millinery workroom, in 1915 she and a partner opened a custom dressmaking salon in New York. Carnegie soon bought out her partner to gain sole ownership of the business, which grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Carnegie was known for quality fabrics, fi ne workmanship, and sophisticated designs. Two important American designers, Pauline Trigè re and Clair McCardell, worked for Hattie Carnegie early in their careers. Twenty-year-old Trigè re, married with two children, had come to New York from Paris in 1932. She became an assistant designer at Hattie Carnegie and in 1942 opened her own business. Trigè re worked directly from fabric, cutting and draping. Her designs, simple in appearance, are noted for their intricate artistry. Claire McCardell is regarded by many as the most important twentieth-century American ready-to-wear designer. During the 1940s, McCardell was infl uential in establishing a unique style referred to as the “ American Look.” McCardell’s designs were intended to be both fashionable and comfortable. McCardell worked with carefree materials such as denim, ticking, gingham, and jersey wool. California native Bonnie Cashin was a dressmaker’s daughter. Cashin is considered one of America’s most innovative designers. Rather than looking to Paris for inspiration, she designed functional clothing for women’s active lifestyles. Her clothing allowed for a woman’s individual expression, she often said. After 1952, Cashin did freelance work for companies interested in manufacturing her designs. By the 1950s women were increasingly recognized as accomplished designers, yet men too gained ground. The spotlight turned to Parisian male couturiers, most notably Christian Dior. Contrary to the more egalitarian attitude refl ected in the clothing of the female American designers, Christian Dior’s designs were seen as more elitist, ignoring the practical needs of everyday life. In the early 1960s, London designers captured the fashion world’s attention by adapting the youthful nonconformity of street dress into their designs. People were called upon to reject commercial fashion in favor of their own natural look, epito-

9

mized by “ hippie” styles. American women designers of this decade responded by making clothing that met the needs of the modern woman, as had their predecessors. Anne Klein designed practical and elegantly tailored separate skirts and blouses for the businesswoman, as well as sophisticated sportswear. Liz Claiborne and Donna Karan (Anne Klein’s former assistant) continued, each in her own way, in this direction. Liz Claiborne, Inc., formed in 1976, found success by providing women with moderately priced career clothing. Claiborne’s intuitive understanding of her customer and keen management skills made hers the fi rst business started by a woman to become a Fortune 500 company. In 1985 Donna Karan left her longtime position of chief designer at Anne Klein to launch her own company. Taking a more daring turn than her mentor, Karan found immediate success with her body suits. Karan describes her designs as simple, savvy, sophisticated, and easy to wear. In the early 1970s, Betsy Johnson saw the fashion garment industry and the country as a whole as uninspired and conservative and she decided to act as a balance to this trend. Johnson’s designs use elements of popular culture in innovative ways. She has found a niche with the teenage market. From the 1980s on, American fashion became more diverse. Asian-American designers Vera Wang, Anna Sui, and Vivienne Tam achieved international recognition. As fashion’s scope continues to broaden, women designers from underrepresented groups will fi nd greater acceptance. While female designers span the creative range from the conservative tailored-style to fashions that are on the cutting edge, there is a commitment to making clothes that are versatile and attractive. Clothing that is sexually objectifying, exaggerated, and overly restrictive is not associated with female designers. Male designers tend to concentrate on the total visual effect, one that intends to dazzle or excite the viewer. Ruth Rubinstein contrasts the overtly sexual and aggressive male approach to design with the sensual, gentler effect created by women designers. Veronica Manlow F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Rubinstein, Ruth P. Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

9

FEINSTEIN, DIANNE GOLDMAN

FEINSTEIN, DIANNE  GOLDMAN

(b. 1933) Politician. Dianne Emiel Goldman was born in San Francisco, California, on June 22, 1933. She entered Stanford University, graduating in 1955 with a B.S. in political science and history. A year later, she married lawyer Jack Berman. The couple were divorced in 1959. During the 1960s, Diane Goldman was involved with the California prison system, serving as chair of the San Francisco Advisory Committee for Adult Detention. In 1962, she married Bertram Feinstein and began pursuing a political career. In 1969 she was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the governing body for the city. As president of the Board of Supervisors, Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco after the assassination of Mayor George Moscone in 1978. The following year, she was elected mayor in her own right and continued to hold the office until 1988. Meanwhile, her husband had died, and she remarried in 1980. Feinstein and Richard C. Blum have one daughter, Katherine. In 1992, Feinstein was elected to the U.S. Senate from California, fi lling the fi nal two years of the unexpired term of Pete Wilson, who had just been elected governor. Feinstein was reelected in 1994 and 2000. As California’s senior senator, she serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

 FEMINISM, RADICAL

The belief that women constitute an oppressed group and that the oppression of women constitutes the fi rst oppression in society. Radical feminism was articulated as a theory in the second wave of feminism that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Women are seen as a class, much like a social class, although radical feminists reject the idea that capitalism has created (or that socialism would solve) women’s oppression. Instead, they examine patriarchy, a universal system of male dominance created by men to subordinate women. Radical feminists argue that this system is prevalent throughout the world (although it takes on different forms in different places) and believe that the oppression of women crosses boundaries of race, class, geography, and culture. As a theory, radical feminism rejects reform. Radical feminists do not believe that having

women adapt to the existing system is a solution. Instead they demand revolution, a complete change in the structures of society. They argue that in order to undermine patriarchy, women must come together as a group and act rather than theorize. For radical feminists, examining oppression is not enough—action must be taken.

 FERRARO, GERALDINE

(b. 1935) The fi rst female vice presidential candidate nominated by a major party, Geraldine Ferraro was born in Newburgh, New York, and educated at Marymount College (B.A., 1956) and Fordham University Law School ( J.D., 1960). Before beginning her political career, Ferraro worked as a teacher in Queens, New York, and with the New York Investigations Bureau. She also worked for the Special Victims Bureau, where her experiences with abused women and children compelled her to move into politics. In 1978, Ferraro became the fi rst woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s Ninth Congressional District. She was reelected in 1980 and 1982. In 1982, she cosponsored the Economic Equity Act, which achieved many of the aims of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. After chairing the 1984 Democratic Platform Committee (the fi rst woman to hold this position), Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale chose her as his running mate. Ferraro’s politics were liberal and profeminist. However, she was criticized for her lack of experience in both military and foreign affairs. On the other hand, she was popular with many women and received $4 million in campaign contributions from women alone. Mondale and Ferraro lost the 1984 presidential election, but Ferraro set a precedent for future female candidates. In 1992, Ferraro ran in the primary race for the Democratic Senate nomination for New York state, but lost to Robert Abrams. In 1993, she served as the U.S. representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. She lives with her husband, John Zaccaro, in New York.

FIORINA, CARA  CARLETON S.

(b. 1954) A leader and innovator in telecommunications and technology. Carly Fiorina, as she is known, received a bachelor’s degree in medieval history

FLORENCE CRITTENDON HOMES

and philosophy from Stanford University in 1976 and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1980. She began her career at telecommunications giant AT&T as an account executive and rose to hold a number of senior positions with that company. In 1996, Fiorina helped manage the spinoff from AT&T of Lucent Technologies, a company specializing in broadband and mobile Internet technology. She spearheaded the initial public offering of Lucent stock and for two years served as president of Lucent’s global service provider business, selling equipment to telephone companies. In 1999, Fiorina became chief executive officer and president of HewlettPackard, the world’s second-biggest manufacturer of computers. By becoming one of only a few women to hold top positions in the technology fi eld, Fiorina helped shatter the GLASS CEILING keeping women from leading large companies.

 FITZGERALD, ELLA

(1917?– 1996) Jazz singer and lyricist. Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25th in Newport News, Virginia. Sources disagree on her actual year of birth. It is assumed she lied about her age when she began her career because of child labor laws. Also in question are facts about her father, William Fitzgerald. Some sources claim he died when she was an infant, while others state that he never married her mother, Temperance Williams, and he disappeared soon after Ella’s birth. When Fitzgerald was 15, her mother died, and Fitzgerald lived many places, including with her maternal aunt, in an orphanage, and at a girls’ school, from which she ran away. She lived on the streets of Harlem and made money tap dancing. Ella Fitzgerald’s career began on a dare. Her friends convinced her to enter a talent contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She was supposed to dance, but changed her mind at the last minute and sang “ The Object of My Affection” instead. She won fi rst place. Afterwards, she won various other amateur talent contests before being discovered by bandleader Chick Webb, who hired her as the vocalist for his band. Within a few short years she earned the title “ The First Lady of Song.” In addition to singing and popularizing scat, a freeform jazz vocal style, Fitzgerald wrote lyrics. Her fi rst major songwriting success was

9

Ella Fitzgerald became known as “ The First Lady of Song.”

“ A Tisket, A Tasket” (1938). Her songs were recorded by Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, and BILLIE HOLIDAY. In 1943, she was the youngest person ever to be inducted into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Fitzgerald’s Songbook Recordings repopularized the songs of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. She also added fi lm to her list of achievements when she appeared in Pete Kelley’s Blues (1955) and St. Louis Blues (1958). She continued her work as a vocalist into the 1980s, performing 40 weeks a year despite health problems. In 1986 she had open heart surgery, and in 1987 her legs were amputated below the knees due to complications with diabetes. Fitzgerald retired in 1994, two years before her death on June 15, 1996. In her lifetime, she earned eight honorary doctorates in music and humane letters, although she only had a tenth grade education. She also received various lifetime achievement awards.

FLORENCE CRITTENDON  HOMES A nonprofi t organization to assist women in need. When wealthy businessman Charles Crittendon lost his daughter, Florence, to scarlet fever in 1882, he underwent a religious conver-

9

FORD, ELIZABETH

(BETTY)

BLOOMER

sion that led him to become a philanthropist. While doing missionary work in New York City’s red light district, Crittendon encountered two prostitutes and convinced them to seek comfort in Christianity as he had when his daughter died. Within a year, Crittendon founded the “ Florence Night Mission” for women seeking shelter and other assistance. In 1893, the organization changed its name to the “ Florence Crittendon Mission” and opened several branches in various parts of the United States. Florence Crittendon Homes became well known for assisting unwed pregnant women. In the 1950s and 1960s, some parents sent their daughters to Crittendon facilities to hide unwanted pregnancies. When the babies were born, they were usually adopted. Today, Florence Crittendon Homes still assist unwed mothers and function as adoption agencies. In addition, they also offer emotional counseling to teenage girls, parenting classes for young mothers, and substance abuse services for mothers and their unborn babies.

FORD, ELIZABETH (BETTY)  BLOOMER

(b. 1918) The wife of Gerald R. Ford, the thirtieth-eighth president of the United States. Elizabeth Ann Bloomer was born on April 8, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of a traveling salesman. She grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After studying DANCE at Bennington College, she became a member of the MARTHA GRAHAM professional company and a FASHION model. Bloomer married William Warren in 1942 but was divorced fi ve years later. She married Ford in 1948, during his fi rst campaign for Congress. They would have four children together. Betty Ford raised the children and supported her husband during his 26 years in Congress. He became vice president of the United States following the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973 and president one year later, when the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to leave the White House. Betty Ford was fi rst lady from 1974 to 1977—and highly visible. Within months of moving into the White House, Ford underwent breast cancer surgery. Her candid discussion of the disease and mastectomy raised public awareness and led to a sharp increase in the number of women who requested mammograms. As fi rst lady, Ford ac-

tively promoted women’s rights, calling for more career opportunities for women, supporting legalized abortion, and urging passage of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. Her candor regarding consultations with a psychiatrist and her concern for personal HEALTH issues led the public to identify with her as with few other fi rst ladies. During the 1960s, while suffering from a pinched nerve, Ford had become addicted to prescription painkillers and alcohol. In 1976, when her husband lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter, Ford intensifi ed her alcohol and pill consumption. After a family intervention in 1978, she sought treatment. As a result of her experiences, Ford dedicated her efforts to combatting chemical dependencies. In 1982 she established the Betty Ford Center, a well-known and highly respected alcohol and addiction treatment facility in Michigan.

 FRANKLIN, ARETHA

(b. 1942) Singer. When she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942, Aretha Franklin’s parents had no idea that she would one day earn the title “ Queen of Soul.” The daughter of a minister, Franklin had her musical start in her father’s parish choir. After her mother abandoned the family, Franklin was cared for and inspired by many of her father’s colleagues, including such gospel greats as Mahalia Jackson. With a vocal range spanning fi ve octaves, Franklin landed her fi rst recording contract at the age of 14. Franklin dropped out of high school in 1958 to have a baby. She moved to New York three years later and by 1961 she had a recording contract with Columbia Records. However, her biggest success occurred in 1967 when she gained platinum sales (1 million records sold) with the single “ I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” on the Atlantic label. Soon afterward, “ Respect” became her fi rst international hit. Her career with Atlantic Records pushed her into the spotlight as a crossover artist, as she gained a broad white audience. Between 1967 and 1974, Franklin won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Female an astonishing eight times. Between 1975 and 1985, Franklin’s musical career was subdued. When her father was shot by a burglar in 1979 and went into an irreversible coma, Franklin cared for him. By the time he

FRONTIERO v. RICHARDSON

died fi ve years later, she had spent countless hours and over half a million dollars for his care. During this period she married actor Glynn Turman. Including her previous children (one from a marriage to her former manager, Ted White), the couple raised four sons. During Franklin’s musical hiatus she played a role in the 1980 fi lm The Blues Brothers. Then, in 1985, she made a comeback with Who’s Zoomin’ Who, her biggest album since Lady Soul in 1968. Two years later, she became the fi rst woman ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Franklin’s other achievements include a Lifetime Achievement Grammy (in addition to her other 15 Grammy Awards) and an honorary doctorate from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where she was raised. In 1986, the state of Michigan proclaimed Aretha Franklin’s voice one of the state’s “ natural resources” as a tribute to America’s Queen of Soul.

FRIEDAN, BETTY  GOLDSTEIN

(b. 1921) Feminist, social reformer. Friedan was born Betty Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921. Throughout her childhood, Friedan experienced anti-semitism fi rst hand, which prompted her early interest in social issues. As a high school student, she edited her high school newspaper and a student literary magazine, which she cofounded. In 1942, Friedan received her B.S. in psychology from Smith College, where she also edited the student newspaper and founded a literary magazine. She studied for a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley, but completed only one year before moving to New York City to write for a workers’ newspaper. While covering strikes and labor issues, Friedan noticed discrimination against women and became politically active in the fi ght for women’s rights. When Friedan and her then–h usband, actor Carl Friedan, were expecting their second child in 1949, she was fi red from her job at the newspaper because of her pregnancy. She was a stayat-home mother for several years, over which time she developed her theory on feminism. She argued against the notion that women should choose between a career and a family. Curious about how other women felt, Friedan surveyed Smith College graduates and found that many of them suffered depression as a result of giving

9

up their careers to become homemakers. From her data, Friedan penned an article and submitted it to the Ladies’ Home Journal. The story was rejected by the male editors. Undiscouraged, Friedan spent fi ve more years completing her research. The result was a book entitled The Feminine Mystique (1963) (see Documents), her name for the suffering women endured due to the social convention that women should remain in the home rather than pursue careers. The book sold three million copies by 1966 and made Friedan the “ Mother of the Feminist Movement.” The positive public response to The Feminine Mystique prompted Friedan to work with others to found the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) in October 1966. As the president of the organization, she wrote a feminist magazine column in McCall’s and lectured extensively until 1970. That year she left NOW. Betty Friedan was named Humanist of the Year in 1975, and today she continues to write, lecture, and teach. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Friedan, Betty. Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

 FRONTIERO

V. RICHARDSON Supreme Court case (1973) involving gender discrimination. The case involved the right of a woman (Sharron Frontiero) in the armed forces to claim her husband as a dependent for the purpose of obtaining a larger housing allowance and covering him under her medical and dental benefi ts. Under federal law at the time, a serviceman could automatically claim his wife as a dependent, whether or not she was employed, but a servicewoman had to prove that her husband was dependent on her for over half his support. With just one dissenting vote, the Court ruled that by setting up an arbitrary distinction based on sex, the law violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court did not strike down all classifi cations based on sex but said that any classifi cation of who was a dependent and who was not had to serve a legitimate legislative purpose. As in Reed v. Reed the Court was showing a growing willingness to strike down state and federal laws that it found discriminatory.

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GARLAND, JUDY

G  GARLAND, JUDY

(1922– 1969) Singer and actress. Judy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm to Frank Gumm and Ethel Milne, vaudevillian actors. In 1926, her family moved from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to Hollywood. There they performed a family act with the three daughters as “ The Gumm Sisters.” When they were incorrectly introduced as “ The Garland Sisters” in 1934, the name stuck. At age 13, Garland signed her fi rst contract with MGM studios. She is most remembered for her role as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Following this success, Garland worked a rigorous schedule, making two to three fi lms per year in the 1940s. She starred in many popular movies, including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Royal Wedding (1950) with Fred Astaire. Overworked, by age 21 Garland had become addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines, prescribed to aid her constant hyperactivity and insomnia. Later addictions to diet pills and alcohol caused many downfalls and comebacks in her career. By 1959, she was a semi-invalid because of liver damage and had attempted suicide. She died of a barbiturate overdose in London on June 22, 1969. Her legacy lives on through her fi lms, her vocal recordings, and her daughters.

 GIBSON, ALTHEA

(b. 1927) Professional tennis player and golfer. Althea Gibson was the fi rst African American to compete in the U.S. Nationals and break the color barrier at the Wimbledon Championships in lawn tennis in London. Tennis, like many amateur and professional sports, was segregated before 1950. Gibson was interested in sports from an early age, fi rst playing basketball, then paddle tennis. She took up tennis after a friend gave her a racquet. During high school, Gibson began playing tennis in the nearly all black American Tennis Association in New York. She won the national black women’s tennis championship twice but, because of segregation, was not invited to the U.S. Championships at Forest Hills until 1950, after white tennis champion Alice Marble ad-

vanced her cause in American Lawn Tennis magazine. Despite the fact that she was not allowed into the clubs where the tournaments were held and hotels often refused her rooms, Gibson persisted in tennis and in the 1960s joined the professional golf tour. Althea Gibson paved the way for other black athletes, such as Arthur Ashe, Venus Williams, and Tiger Woods. Gibson lives in East Orange, New Jersey, where she is reclusive after suffering a series of strokes.

 GINSBURG, RUTH BADER

(b. 1933) U.S. Supreme Court justice. Ruth Joan Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, to Nathan and Cecelia (Amster) Bader. Cecelia Bader, who supported women’s rights, encouraged her daughter to excel in academics. At age 12, Ruth wrote an essay entitled “ Landmarks for Constitutional Freedom,” which was published in her school newspaper and showed her early interest in justice. Bader received her bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University in 1954, just before her marriage to Martin Ginsburg. Martin was drafted into the military soon after the wedding. As a military wife, Ruth Ginsburg encountered sexual discrimination for the fi rst time. Upon applying for a GS-5 (government servant, level 5) position, she was demoted to GS-2 when her pregnancy was discovered. The GS-5 position went to another woman who was also pregnant but lied in order to get the job. After her husband’s discharge, Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women at the school. Because men at the law school were taken more seriously than women, Ginsburg was determined to prove her academic worth. Her perseverance earned her the nickname “ Ruthless Ruthie.” When her husband acquired new employment in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia University Law School in 1958. One year later she graduated as valedictorian of her class. Within a few years she became the second woman to join the faculty at Rutgers University

GLASS CEILING

Law School. By the late 1960s, the American Civil Liberties Union was referring its sexual discrimination cases to Ginsburg—not because she expressed interest in them, but because she was a woman. However, upon becoming involved in the discrimination lawsuits, Ginsburg became an advocate of the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT. Ginsburg’s fi rst important case was REED v. REED in 1971. As a result of this case, the Supreme Court overturned an Idaho law granting preference to men over women as administrators of estates. Over the course of the 1970s, Ginsburg argued six sexual discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won fi ve of them. Her successes prompted President Jimmy Carter to nominate her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., in 1980. On August 3, 1993, she was confi rmed as the 107th Supreme Court Justice, the second female jurist in U.S. history. Her other achievements include the founding of the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION Women’s Rights Project (1972) and several articles in support of abortion rights, gay rights, and affirmative action.

 GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA

A social and service organization for girls founded in 1915. When an educated woman of diverse interests named Juliette Low met Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement and the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in England, she wanted to establish a similar group for girls in the United States. With the Girl Scouts of America (GSA), she hoped to follow BadenPowell’s example and establish an organization encouraging the development of morals and citizenship through the study of nature. She began in her own backyard, holding troop meetings in the stable of her Savannah, Georgia, home. In 1913, she published an adaptation of the English “ Girl Guides” handbook entitled How Girls Can Help Their Country. The Girl Scouts was incorporated as an organization in 1915. In 1938, the GSA expanded to accommodate different age groups and in the 1960s and 1970s expanded their scope of membership and social awareness. Predicated on the idea of preparing girls for the responsibilities of womanhood and citizenship in a rapidly changing world, the Girl Scouts offers education on a broad variety of subjects. With an emphasis on outdoor education and

9

The Girl Scouts is a worldwide organization that encourages self-sufficiency and cooperation.

mental and physical health, the Girl Scouts provides activity, community, and purpose for girls from all racial, religious, and economic backgrounds. A range of programs, such as the Daisy Scouts for girls aged fi ve to seven, Brownies for girls seven to ten, and Seniors, for high school girls, provides opportunities for positive activity within a community of girls throughout a girl’s development.

 GLASS CEILING

Term signifying the invisible, extra-legal barriers preventing the upward mobility of women and minorities, particularly in corporate environments. Journalists Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt originally coined the term in 1986 to connote the absence of women in upper-level management and executive jobs in corporate America. Since then, the defi nition has grown to include the same phenomenon in other industries, as well as the exclusion of minorities from high-level positions. While the disparity is shrinking, women overall as a group are still only making 75 percent of men’s salaries. One reason for this is that women are denied access to the positions that offer higher salaries. This is known as a job segregation effect, in which women are corralled into lower-level staff positions that afford little room for growth. Other names given to this phenomenon that helps to keep the glass ceiling intact are “ sticky fl oor” and “ pink ghetto.” Positions that offer the possibility

9

GOLDMAN, EMMA

of promotion frequently fall outside the gendered division of labor adopted by many companies. Other contributing factors to the glass ceiling within companies are sex discrimination and racism in hiring and promotion practices, sexual harassment, the exclusion of women and minorities from the communication networks of higher-level management, a “ glass wall” that discourages the lateral movement of women and minorities from staff to management-track positions, and unfair standards in performance evaluations and salary decisions. In 1989, the Department of Labor Glass Ceiling Commission began an investigation of the phenomenon. In 1991, it issued fi ndings that concluded that corporations were not committed to ending gender and race discrimination in the workplace. It identifi ed a low priority placed on equal access, no appraisal systems and record keeping of access monitoring, and informal practices such as “ old-boy” networks (all-male cliques) as key problem areas. Also, they found that minorities hit a ceiling even lower than women, which disadvantaged women of color in particular. In 1993, the commission issued directives for companies such as eliminating barriers for women and minorities to management-track positions, cultivating high-potential women and advocating support from high-level management for the directives. The glass ceiling has only been broken to a signifi cant extent in a few instances. In 1999, CARLY FIORINA became the fi rst woman CEO of a Fortune 500 Company when she joined Hewlett-Packard. In 1999, women held still only 11.2 percent of executive-level positions in Fortune 500 Companies, and only 7 percent of women served as officers.

 GOLDMAN, EMMA

(1869– 1940) Anarchist. Born June 27, 1869 in Kovono, Lithuania, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885 to live with her sister in Rochester, New York. As a garment worker, Goldman participated in a strike for the eight-hour workday in 1886, just three days before Chicago’s famous Haymarket strikes, in which anarchists were blamed for a bomb that killed seven during a clash between police and workers protesting the eight-hour workday. She rapidly became active in social politics. In 1887, she gained U.S. citizenship by marrying fellow factory worker Jacob Kersner, whom she divorced a year later. In 1889, Goldman met

Alexander Berkman, who became her lover and ideological partner. Together, they fought for many causes. In 1890, she launched a lecture tour, espousing beliefs such as free speech, workers’ rights, and anarchism. Her impassioned speeches and bold oration skills on behalf of the anarchist cause earned her the nickname “ Queen of the Anarchists.” Goldman’s beliefs in anarchism and communism emphasized absolute liberty and freedom from all institutions. For this reason, she did not support the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. Her anarchism was closely tied to other feminist beliefs, however, and she wrote and lectured extensively on birth control and LESBIAN rights, and likened MARRIAGE to the degradation of PROSTITUTION. In 1892, Berkman attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the plant manager of Carnegie Steel in Pennsylvania, to avenge the deaths of nine striking workers killed by plant guards. He was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in prison, and Goldman was implicated in the crime. In 1901 she was linked with President McKinley's assassination by an anarchist. In New York in 1893, Goldman gave a trademark incendiary speech urging hungry workers to steal bread and was sentenced to prison. The U.S. government viewed her as a highly dangerous agitator and, in 1909, invalidated her ex-husband’s citizenship, on which her own was based. Goldman was sentenced to prison once more in 1917 for antidraft agitation. A few months after her 1919 release, she and Berkman were deported. She returned to Russia but was disappointed by corruption within the leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Revolution incited a “ Red Scare” throughout Europe, as countries feared Marxist revolt. This made it difficult for Goldman as she traveled through Europe advocating on behalf of her many causes. Eventually, she settled in Canada. Although Goldman died there on May 14, 1940, she was buried in Chicago, next to her Haymarket heroes.

 GRABLE, BETTY

(1916– 1973) Film and stage actress. Ruth Elizabeth Grable’s mother primed her in dance, song, and saxophone, and she began her career in vaudeville at age fi ve. At the age of 13, Grable and her mother moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Los Angeles, where Grable signed her fi rst contract with 20th Century Fox. She was soon dismissed,

GRAHAM, MARTHA

however, because she was underage. She signed with MGM Studios three years later. Grable was a major sex symbol of the WORLD WAR II era. A common slogan of the 1940s was “ As American as apple pie and Betty Grable.” Her image, borrowed from her fi lm Pin-Up Girl (1944), was painted on World War II fi ghter planes. She was especially noted for her legs, which were insured for $1 million by her fi lm studio. Grable’s many fi lm credits include The Gay Divorcee (1934) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). She spent a great deal of her career starring in musical fi lm and was the highest paid woman in the United States in the mid-1940s. She died in Santa Monica, California, of lung cancer on July 2, 1973.

GRAHAM,  KATHARINE MEYER (1917– 2001) Newspaper publisher. Katharine Meyer was born on June 16, 1917, in New York City. Her father, Eugene Meyer, a wealthy fi nancier, bought the Washington Post newspaper in 1933. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1938, Katharine Meyer became a reporter at the Post. Two years later, she married Philip Graham, who became publisher of the Post in 1946. Although Graham was an effective publisher, he and Katharine had an unhappy marriage. He was a heavy drinker who abused his wife and carried on affairs with other women. Graham was also afflicted with manic depression and eventually committed suicide in 1963. Following his death, Katharine Graham took over running of the Post. “ I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing,” she wrote in her autobiography, “ so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.” Under her leadership, the newspaper enlarged its circulation and became one of the most powerful publications in America. Defying the government, Graham published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing secret information about U.S. conduct of the VIETNAM WAR. Post reporters

97

also investigated the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Graham served as chair and CEO of the paper from 1973 until 1991. In 1999, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her autobiography, Personal History. She died on July 17, 2001, of a brain hemorrhage.

 GRAHAM, MARTHA

(1894– 1991) Pioneer of modern dance. Born on May 11, 1894, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to a doctor with puritanical views, Martha Graham arrived relatively late to the art of dance. After attending

TRAILBLAZERS A one-time student of Martha Graham’s, Twyla Tharp has been a leader in the modern dance movement. Born July 1, 1941, in Indiana, Tharp’s mother encouraged her daughter in the arts at an early age. A serious and driven student, Tharp excelled in school and extracurriculars. She transferred to Barnard College from Pomona College and received a degree in art history but discovered her desire to become a dancer. Tharp immersed herself in the study of dance, training formally with masters of both classical and modern dance such as Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, and Merce Cunningham. She gave her first concert on April 29, 1965, in a Hunter College performance space. The entire performance lasted seven minutes and was entitled “ Tank Dive.” Not long thereafter, Tharp assembled her own group of four women dancers. In 1967, they were commissioned to create and perform at the Bang Festival in Richmond, Virginia. Her style was an energetic, highly physical blend of modern dance and classical ballet. And while the dances were deeply expressive, Tharp maintained a very cool facial demeanor which puzzled some critics. Nonetheless, as she gained exposure, she began to receive favorable reviews. Seen as a daring and avantgarde artist, she was frequently approached to choreograph projects in collaboration with other artists. Among the more notable of these collaborations were Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet; Push Comes to Shove for Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose first experience in avant-garde dance with Tharp prompted a newfound love for modern dance; Hair, for the film director Milos Forman; and The Catherine Wheel with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Tharp continues to direct and choreograph for her own dance company, as well as for film and television.

9

GRASSO, ELLA

an arts high school and junior college, she joined the Denishawn Dance Company at age 22. In 1923, she moved to New York to dance with the Greenwich Village Follies and left in 1925 to teach at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Dance, where she choreographed her fi rst solos. She approached the Follies for support. The Follies agreed, but on the condition that Graham return to it for another year if she did not achieve success. However, her fi rst performance in 1926 earned promising reviews and a small following, so she established her own company in 1929, which would later produce dancers such as Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, and Twyla Tharp. In 1935, Graham established a school of modern dance at Bennington College in Vermont. Graham created many dances based on famous women and accompanied her work with music by modern composers such as Aaron Copland and sets created by avant-garde sculptor Isamu Noguchi. She viewed dance as a means of expressing her heart, and created and performed with a passion and fi erce physicality that would both enchant and unsettle critics. Most of her pieces were too austerely modern and too volatile to endure, but she also choreographed classics such as Appalachian Spring, a celebration of a Quaker wedding. This piece remains as a hallmark of a remarkable career at the forefront of modern dance. Graham danced until age 74 and continued to choreograph until her death on April 1, 1991. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976.

 GRASSO, ELLA

(1919– 1981) The fi rst woman to win a state governorship on her own merits. Ella Grasso rose to national prominence through devotion to her roots in her local community. Her accessibility, her honesty, and her plain-spoken style ensured that she never lost an election. Born in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, Grasso graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1940. She became involved in politics in 1943, when she joined the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. She served on the Windsor Locks Democratic Town Committee, then was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1952 and again in 1954. Her children were small then, and she relied on her extended family in Windsor Locks for help with child care. She was appointed

Connecticut’s secretary of state in 1958, and served for three terms. In 1970 and again in 1972, she was elected to the U.S. Congress, where to make herself accessible to her constituents she set up a 24-hour toll-free “ Ellaphone.” In 1974 she ran successfully for governor of Connecticut. She won a second term in 1978, but had to resign in 1980 because of illness; she died on February 5, 1981.

 GREAT DEPRESSION

The worldwide economic disaster of the 1930s. The 1920s were a time of prosperity in the United States. Wages were high, businesses made large profi ts, retail sales boomed, and many people invested money in the stock market. However, the farming market was shrinking. This collapse in the farming industry, along with the failure of 600 banks in the 1920s and the stock market crash of 1929, contributed to the Great Depression. By 1930, more than 6 million people in the United States were jobless. By 1933, over 14 million Americans were without work. Because of the sexual segregation of labor, women were more likely to remain employed than men because clerical positions, which were predominantly held by women, were not hit as hard as unskilled labor and the trades. However, working-class women suffered because people could not afford their services (such as domestic service and laundries). The Great Depression also affected housewives. Homes were overcrowded because poor families shared residences. Those housewives who remained in the home found themselves responsible for more cooking, cleaning, and care taking than before the Depression. Some housewives entered the labor force when their husbands lost their jobs. However, some businesses refused to hire married women. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election on the promise of a NEW DEAL for people of the United States. Roosevelt assured voters that he could provide economic relief, recovery, and reform. By the time he became president in 1933, the unemployment rate was an astounding 25 percent—the highest during the twentieth century. Government aid such as grocery vouchers, used clothing, and coal rations helped families maintain their homes and provide for their chil-

GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT

99

contract negotiator for the Army Ordinance in Detroit. In 1946 she opened her own legal office, and two Dorothea Lange (1895– 1965) depicted the desperation of the months later her husband, Hicks G. Great Depression and influe nced other photographic journalGriffiths, joined her. With a former college classmate they formed the ists. Her black and white photographs of homeless men, such Legal Offices of Griffiths, Williams, as White Angel Breadline (1932), were so poignant that the and Griffiths. federal Resettlement Administration hired her to visually docGriffiths, a Democrat, was elected ument the hopelessness of the impoverished, thus giving the to the Michigan House of Represendilemma mass public attention. Her photographs of migrant tatives in 1948. During her two workers, captioned with the words of the workers themselves, terms, she sponsored liberal causes were so moving that they prompted the state of California to such as the Unemployment Comestablish migrant camps to help the homeless. Her most fapensation Act. Because of her abilimous portrait, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) ties, the Capitol Press Corporation now hangs in the Library of Congress. named her one of Michigan’s ten Dorothea Lange received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 best legislators in 1951. but quit after Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941 In 1953, Griffiths became the fi rst to photograph the 1942 evacuation of Japanese Americans to woman appointed recorder and detention camps. Her collection of Depression photographs, judge of the Detroit Recorder’s entitled An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion Court. She was noted for her keen (1939) is one of the most emotive and infl uential records of sense of justice and her consistency the people of the United States in the twentieth century. in acting in the best interest of the community. In 1953 alone, Griffiths See also: Photographers. presided over 430 criminal investigations, including a teamsters’ conspiracy case. After two grassroots campaigns, in 1954 Grifdren. However, under the New Deal, only heads fi ths became the fi rst woman from the sevenof families, who were usually men, were eligible teenth district in Michigan to be elected to the for direct cash assistance. In addition, the public U.S. House of Representatives. During her 20works projects designed to relieve unemployyear tenure in Congress, she introduced bills to ment were more available to men than women. increase the pay of government employees, disMany women were active in Depression relief tribute food stamps, and provide low-income efforts. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, wife of President housing for the elderly. However, her addition to Franklin Roosevelt, had an active role in the New the 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT is considered her most Deal administration. FRANCES PERKINS, the secretary of labor, led efforts to pass the SOCIAL notable accomplishment—it was her idea to inSECURITY ACT of 1935, which introduced unemclude the prohibition of sexual discrimination. ployment insurance, aid to dependent children, In 1983, the year she was inducted into the and old-age insurance. National Woman’s Hall of Fame, Martha Griffi ths was elected the fi rst woman lieutenant governor of Michigan. She held this position until 1991. Griffiths currently lives in Detroit, MichiGRIFFITHS, MARTHA gan, where she practices law with her husband. WRIGHT (b. 1912) Lawyer, U.S. congresswoman, lieutenant governor of Michigan. Martha Wright was born on January 29, 1912, in Pierce City, Missouri, to Charles GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT Elbridge and Nell (Sullinger) Wright. She was edU.S. Supreme Court case (1965) that overturned ucated at the University of Missouri (A.B., 1934) a Connecticut law banning the distribution of and the University of Michigan (LL.B., 1940). birth control devices. Estelle Griswold, a doctor Griffiths’s was admitted to the Michigan bar and an executive of the Planned Parenthood in 1941. During the war years, she worked as a League, appealed to the Supreme Court after

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H A L E Y, M A R G A R E T

being convicted for distributing information and medical advice to married couples about the use of contraceptives. In 1961 the Supreme Court had heard a similar case, Poe v. Ullman, which challenged a Connecticut law banning the use of birth control devices. The Court, however, did not overturn the law, primarily because it did not believe Connecticut intended to enforce it. The Court was wrong, and it grappled with the issue once again in Griswold v. Connecticut. In its decision the Court held that the Connecticut law violated married persons’ right of privacy. The Court’s landmark decision effectively ended laws interfering with the right to

use or distribute information about birth control. The decision also set the stage for the Court’s historic 1973 decision in ROE v. WADE. Griswold v. Connecticut was an important case in judicial history because the U.S. Constitution does not expressly recognize a “ right to privacy” —a right that in effect was created by Justice William O. Douglas in this case. In nowfamous language, Douglas wrote that several express guarantees in the Bill of Rights create “ penumbras” (or shadows) and “ emanations” that strongly imply such a right. Following Douglas, the Supreme Court has been more willing to recognize a right of privacy in personal affairs.

H  HALEY, MARGARET

(1861– 1939) Educator and labor leader. Margaret Angela Haley was born in the Chicago suburb of Joliet and attended both public and Catholic schools. She joined the fl edgling Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF) soon after it was formed in March 1897, taking an active role as an advocate for teachers and battling the Chicago Board of Education for promised wage increases. Haley became district vice president in 1900 then left teaching in 1901 to work full time for the CTF. Among her successes were the enactment of the Illinois State Pension Plan for teachers in 1907 and the 1915– 1917 effort to ensure tenure for the state’s teachers. Haley also edited and wrote for the CTF Bulletin from 1901 to 1908. Haley’s leadership was felt nationally as president of the National Federation of Teachers (NFT). She rallied the NFT membership to exert its infl uence on the larger National Education Association (NEA), which was at that time dominated by college administrators. In the early 1900s Haley used her infl uence to build support for a number of social causes, including woman suffrage and CHILD LABOR laws. Haley also joined the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S TRADE UNION LEAGUE, and in 1916 she helped organize the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS. She

continued to write, publishing Margaret Haley’s Bulletin in 1915– 1916 and again from 1925 to 1931.

 HAMER, FANNIE LOU

(1918– 1977) Civil rights activist. Fannie Lou Townsend was born in poverty as the youngest of 20 children to sharecroppers in Ruleville, Mississippi. Mississippi at the time was still heavily segregated, and AFRICAN AMERICANS were disenfranchised through a number of formal and informal practices, many of which were constitutionally unsound. Although she dropped out of school at an early age, Townsend attended church regularly. She married Pap Hamer in 1944, and together they worked on a Ruleville plantation. She was 44 before she began civil rights work. Groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) sought to educate rural African Americans about civil rights. In 1962, Hamer volunteered to register to vote and was denied when she took a citizenship test designed to intimidate African Americans. When the bus home was stopped by police for a bogus violation, she led the riders in song. Hamer’s employer fi red her, and Pap was fi red when Hamer fi nally registered successfully on her

HARDING, FLORENCE KLING

third attempt in 1963. Although she endured death threats and a beating in jail by police because of her civil rights activities, Hamer would not be deterred and began serving as an SCLC fi eld secretary. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention. Hamer was elected vice chair and was one of the six representatives to the convention. She spoke before the Credentials Committee. COFO leaders were forced to accept a 2-seat compromise proposal that was in part negotiated by Hubert Humphrey. Hamer, angered by the compromise by both African-American leaders of COFO and by the DNC, held a vigil in protest. By 1968, Hamer had registered 42 percent of African Americans in her county. She served as an official delegate to the 1968 DNC convention and also promoted community welfare with Head Start programs and established a county farm cooperative. She also helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, but often felt that the political needs of women of color were overlooked. Hamer died in poverty in Ruleville on March 14, 1977.

 HAMILTON, ALICE

(1869– 1970) A pioneer in the study of industrial working conditions, ailments, and poisons. Alice Hamilton was born in New York City and raised in Indiana. Her family was well-to-do, and after graduation from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1893, Hamilton became a professor of pathology at Woman’s Medical School of Chicago’s Northwestern University. She chose medicine because, “ as a doctor I could go anywhere I pleased—to far-off lands or to city slums—and be quite of use anywhere.” While in Chicago, Hamilton lived at HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2). During this time, Hamilton ran a clinic for infants and treated people for diseases associated with their occupations. Increasingly she began to notice that lead poisoning was a significant problem in many industrial workers, and so she turned her attention to investigating toxic substances in factories. In 1911, the U.S. Bureau of Labor appointed her a special investigator, and as a result of her surveys of occupational dis-

eases, Illinois established job-related safety measures. Harvard University selected Hamilton to become its fi rst woman faculty member in 1919. Because of Hamilton’s research and social reform activities, Americans began to benefi t from safety standards in the workplace.

HARDING, FLORENCE  KLING

(1860– 1924) First lady, wife of Warren G. Harding, U.S. president from 1921 to 1923. Born in Marion, Ohio, Florence Kling grew up in luxury; her father was a leading banker in Marion. As a girl, she loved the piano and took part in music classes, but at 19 she gave up a musical career to elope with Henry De Wolfe. A spendthrift and an alcoholic, he abandoned her and their child in 1882. After the divorce, Florence De Wolfe moved back to Marion and taught piano. There she met Warren Harding, the owner and editor of a local newspaper, the Daily Star. After a quick courtship, they wed in 1891. She joined her husband in running the newspaper. She managed the circulation department. “ No pennies escaped her,” a friend recalled, and the paper prospered. Ohioans recognized that Florence Harding deserved credit for the Star’s accomplishments. As one remarked “ Florence Harding . . . [r]uns her house; runs the paper . . . runs Warren; runs everything but the car, and could run that if she wanted to.” At the same time, Warren Harding pursued a political career. He became senator from Ohio in 1914 and in 1920 accepted the Republican nomination for president. The Hardings moved into the White House in 1921, and the new fi rst lady made the mansion into a prime location for social gatherings. During the day, the grounds were open to the public; at night, the Hardings and their friends relaxed by playing poker, listening to jazz, and drinking alcohol (although the Eighteenth Amendment made alcohol consumption illegal). In 1922, evidence began to appear that some of the Hardings’ friends, who held high governmental positions, had been guilty of bribery and graft. Before the scandal hit, the Hardings, both in poor health, left for a vacation in Alaska. Warren Harding died on the way back, in San Francisco in August, 1923. Returning to Washington, D.C., Florence Harding destroyed all of the papers that she believed might have humiliated Warren Harding. She passed away the following year.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

 HARLEM RENAISSANCE

A cultural movement by AFRICAN AMERICANS in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was predicated on revising African-American racial identity by exploring vernacular cultures and spinning them into new forms. The brightest African-American writers, artists, and intellectuals, dubbed the “ Talented Tenth” by historian W. E. B. DuBois, fl ocked to New York’s Harlem neighborhood to participate in this powerful rebirth, although the cultural revival fl ourished in other cities across the country as well. Two magazines associated with African-American organizations served as mouthpieces and chronicles of the movement: the National Urban League’s The Opportunity and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s The Crisis. Although the more high-profi le leaders of the movement were men such as Alain Locke, a Howard philosophy professor and poet Langston Hughes, women were an important driving force. One of the fi rst books associated with the Harlem Renaissance, There Is Confusion, was written by a woman, Jessie Fauset, in 1924. Fauset also edited The Crisis and nurtured the careers of Hughes and Jean Toomer. Another woman, Dorothy West, won second place in The Opportunity’s fi rst writing contest. One of foremost authors of the Harlem Renaissance was ZORA NEALE HURSTON, who wrote prolifi cally about identity and Southern African Americans, though to mixed reception. Playwright and writer Marita Bonner was another important voice for Southern African Americans. Her essay, “ On Being a Young Woman and Colored” is also well known for its discussion of race and gender. Like Bonner, many women of the Renaissance felt a special responsibility to address the particular challenge of being both African American and women. Elise Johnson McDougald wrote an essay entitled The Task of Negro Womanhood that contrasted race and gender struggles. Not all women addressed gender issues, however. Many of the poets wrote traditional romantic poetry, such as Anne Spencer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Other writers of note were novelist Nella Larsen, poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and Angelina Weld Grimké (the mixed-race great-niece of ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD—see Volume 2). The Harlem Renaissance was not only a literary movement; singers like BILLIE HOLIDAY and Bessie Smith and sculptor Augusta Savage

each captured the spirit of the Renaissance with their unique styles of art and performance. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Lewis, David Levering. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking, 1994.

 HARVEY GIRLS

Young, single women who worked as waitresses for the Fred Harvey chain of restaurants located at major stops on the Santa Fe Railway. Between 1880 and 1950, approximately 100,000 women left their families and friends to “ go West,” earn a decent wage, and have a little adventure. Nearly half of them stayed in the Southwest after their work for Harvey was over. Until the 1930s the railroad was the main way Americans traveled long distances across the country. Accommodations were rough until Fred Harvey started his chain of hotel-restaurants. To create the image he wanted, Harvey insisted that the women employed in his restaurants be called Harvey Girls rather than waitresses. Reminiscent of the LOWELL MILL WORKERS (see Volume 2), they lodged together, kept a strict schedule, and followed detailed dress codes. Very few women of color became Harvey Girls and held jobs in the public eye. They did worked in the kitchens and housekeeping departments, however. Harvey wanted his “ girls” to not only serve meals to travelers but also create an image of a hospitable and safe West that would enhance tourism. Eventually, automobile and air travel began to replace trains in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, and Harvey’s customer load dropped, leaving entire communities with little employment. Harvey’s food service business continued in the dining cars of trains, but the era of Harvey Houses and Harvey Girls ended forever.

 HEALTH

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many companies made unsafe products, and progressive and reform-minded women used their roles as guardians of their families’ health and welfare to justify their involvement in the political process. Mothers, teachers, social workers, nurses, and concerned citizens worked tirelessly to ensure standards for food and drugs: Women wanted to buy fl our that actually contained fl our, not talc, calcium carbonate, or wood shavings; meat that

H E A LT H

was not chemically treated to disguise spoilage; and drugs without alcohol or addictive substances. When President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, he credited the women of this country for making these laws reality. Throughout the twentieth century, patients, particularly women, became more active in their own health care and sought to improve health and health services for themselves, their families, and others. Their efforts, paired with technological advances and scientifi c breakthroughs changing how we understand the body and health led to improved health care for all, and each succeeding generation has had a longer life expectancy than the previous generation. Advances in medical knowledge affected women’s reproductive health perhaps more than any other area. An emphasis on scientifi c study coupled with technology utilizing the new scientifi c knowledge led to improved medical treatment. This occurred fi rst in larger urban areas and gradually became the norm. In childbirth, for example, doctors (but not midwives) had access to equipment such as medical forceps, which could aid in the delivery process. This in and of itself was not enough to convince women to give birth in a sterile, clinical, and isolated hospital setting rather than the comfortable and familiar home environment. When childbirth remained in the home, it was part of the life cycle, something that could be done without technological intervention, and was seen as a “ natural” process in that is was nonmedicalized. In 1902, however, a new drug, scopolamine, was developed in Germany. For many women, the drug promised to make childbirth less painful and prolonged. To get access to scopolamine, women needed to give birth in a hospital. Scopolamine caused several cases of death and paralysis and was eventually withdrawn from the market. Despite this, more and more women gave birth in hospitals. As with all health care, there were geographic and racial variations: Middle- and upper-class women and women who lived in or near cities of some size were more likely to go to a hospital to give birth. In the 1950s, at the height of the baby boom, the approach to childbirth shifted again. Childbirth stayed in hospitals but new attitudes emerged regarding pain medications. The publication of Dick Grantly-Read’s Natural Childbirth; approaches to childbirth, such as Lamaze and controlled breathing; and a reemphasis on breast-feeding

rather than reliance on formula encouraged women to try to experience “ natural” or drugfree childbirth. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was an increase in the use of MIDWIFERY. In response to fi nancial concerns from insurance and managed care companies and patient demand, hospitals built birthing suites as an alternative to traditional delivery rooms. Midwives, once fully outside the purview of accepted medical practice, are now often part of an obstetrical practice. The twentieth-century focus on pregnancy has also had other health implications for women. German scientists in the 1930s determined women’s hormonal cycles, which had implications for our understanding of menstruation, menopause, and birth control. Medical opinion on physical activity shifted from the 1940s view that women should avoid activity during menstruation to the 2000 view that they should exercise throughout the month. Ailments such as premenstrual syndrome ceased being thought of as psychosomatic illnesses and gradually became accepted medical diagnoses. Menopause and the physiological consequences for a woman’s body as hormone levels shift has received scientifi c attention as well; drugs are now formulated expressly for women to combat potential medical problems caused by the onset of menopause, such as heart disease. Accurate information about hormonal cycles has made reliable contraceptive birth control: Pharmaceutical discoveries make it possible to induce an artifi cial pregnancy state in the body, thus preventing contraception and implantation of a fertilized egg. One of the most notable features of health care in the twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries has been the increasing role the patient has played in medical decisions. In the early 1970s, a self-health movement swept parts of the country. Patients started to question physicians, read more about medical procedures, and learned about their own bodies. At a time when many people were questioning authority and authority fi gures, patients became informed consumers who were unwilling to blithely accept what a medical (or any other) authority told them was the “ right” treatment. Patients wanted to be involved in their medical decisions. This change in perceptions about health care can be seen in the publication of OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (see Documents), written by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective; in the growth of natural or health food stores replete with natural remedies;

4

H E A R S T, P H O E B E A P P E R S O N

in a resurgence of interest in alternative medicines, including homeopathy and chiropractic; and, indirectly, in a shift in how health care is provided. Women’s involvement in the health care system and their willingness to question and challenge traditional assumptions about health care, research, and proper medical treatment is visible in the fi ght against breast cancer. The activism and organization of women to push for better treatment, less radical surgery, and earlier diagnosis has led to increased federal funding, increased awareness, numerous foundations awarding research monies, and, hopefully, a drop in the number of women diagnosed with late-stage cancers each year. In addition, the cadre of women involved in women’s health issues has changed some federal policies regarding drug trials. Where women were once excluded from drug trials because of changing hormonal levels over the course of a month (which would render them unstable participants in tests for new drugs), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now mandates that women be included in studies for promising drugs. If women are to be recipients of these drugs, the NIH and others have argued, they need to be part of the trial period as well. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Apple, Rima. Women, Health and Medicine: A Historical Handbook. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Leavitt, Judith Walzer, ed. Women and Health in America: Historical Readings. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

HEARST, PHOEBE  APPERSON

(1842– 1919) Philanthropist. Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson was born in Missouri in 1842 to a wealthy farming family. At age 20, she married her cousin, George Hearst. Because he was a miner who had made his fortune in the West, the couple settled in San Francisco in 1862. Hearst shared her wealth generously. Her charitable work began on her honeymoon, when she agreed to sponsor a young painter, Orrin Peck. She also donated money to the YWCA, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco Children’s Hospital. Hearst was the founder of the Children’s Milk

Fund and sponsored free kindergarten in California before kindergarten was part of the public school system. In all, it is estimated that by the time she died in 1919, Phoebe Hearst had donated an estimated $25 million to charity. Phoebe Hearst is the woman behind the success of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, her son. During his youth, she surrounded him with prominent artists and leading politicians to foster in him a sense of culture. When he wanted to start his publishing company, Hearst sold her husband’s Anaconda mine for $7.5 million and gave the money to her son.

 HEIGHT, DOROTHY IRENE

(b. 1912) Civil rights leader. Dorothy Irene Height was born on March 24, 1912, in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother, Fannie, was a nurse and her father, James, was a builder. As a young girl, Height became involved in volunteer activities through her church. She won a scholarship to New York University because she was such a good speaker and graduated in 1932 with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in educational psychology. During the 1930s Height became an active member of the YOUNG WOMEN’ S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION (YWCA), focusing her efforts on improving wages for black domestic workers. Shortly afterward, she joined the NATIONAL COUNCIL OF NEGRO WOMEN (NCNW) and worked to obtain equal pay and employment for women. In 1957, Height became president of the organization, a position she held until 1998. As head of the NCNW, Height was a leader in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, spearheading the struggle to register black voters in the South. She also lobbied Congress to acquire funding for women who needed job training or wanted to open their own businesses. During the 1970s, the NCNW began programs to provide food, housing, and child care to the poor. Meanwhile, Height served as a member of the national staff of the YWCA, initiating its Center for Racial Justice in 1965. In 1989, Height received the Citizens Medal Award from President Ronald Reagan for her community work. Five years later she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

H E P B U R N , K AT H A R I N E H O U G H T O N

 HELLMAN, LILLIAN

(1906– 1984) Playwright and writer. Born on June 20, 1906, in New Orleans, Lillian Hellman moved to New York City with her family at age six. She studied at both Columbia University and New York University but did not earn a degree. She worked in publishing, occasionally reviewing books and publishing short stories. In 1925, she married Arthur Kober and moved with him to Hollywood, where she became a reader for MGM.

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’ s fashion.” —Lillian Hellamn, letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1952

Hellman hated Hollywood and began to drink heavily. In 1930, she met mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, 11 years her senior. She divorced Kober in 1932 and continued what would be a tumultuous affair with Hammett until his death in 1961. They moved back to New York, and Hellman published more stories before completing her fi rst dramatic work, The Children’s Hour, in 1934. Filled with irony, the play was well reviewed. It is still performed. Hellman and Hammett were both politically radical. Hellman participated in Marxist study groups while writing her play The Little Foxes in 1938 and was included on Hollywood’s blacklist of suspected communist sympathizers. In 1951, Hammett was jailed for communist activity, and in 1952, Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refusing to answer questions about Hammett and others. Hellman often staged revivals of her plays to earn money. In 1960, she regained popularity with Toys in the Attic, a play about two Southern sisters and their relationship with their difficult brother. She also began work on her memoir trilogy, which eventually produced three volumes, An Unfinished Woman, Penitmento, and Scoundrel Time. In 1964, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Hellman continued to write and teach until her death on June 30, 1984.

Lillian Hellman, playwright and writer, was known for her politically radical ideas.

HEPBURN, KATHARINE  HOUGHTON

(b. 1907) Actress. The eldest of six children, Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born to Thomas Hepburn, a urologist, and Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a feminist, in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 12, 1907. Although Hepburn was shy in her early years at Bryn Mawr College, she became involved in campus drama productions. Immediately after graduating with honors in English, she lined up a job acting in Baltimore. In 1932, she appeared as an Amazon in The Warrior’s Husband on Broadway. That same year, Hepburn arrived in Hollywood aggressive and determined, and negotiated her fi rst paycheck, for David O. Selznick’s Bill of Divorcement, up from $500 to $1,500 a week. The fi lm would be the fi rst of many collaborations with director George Cukor. In 1933, Hepburn starred in Morning Glory, for which she won the 1934 Oscar for Best Actress. This was the fi rst of 12 Oscar nominations. Hepburn would win

H I S PA N I C A M E R I C A N S

three more times, for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). She also won an Emmy for a television production of Love Among the Ruins. Hepburn was known for her crisp New England accent and commanding presence on-screen. True to her off-screen personality, Hepburn often played strong, independent, stubborn women who came to terms with their fl aws. Intensely private, Hepburn shielded from the public her 1928 marriage to Ludlow Ogden Smith until they divorced in 1934. Hepburn would carry on a lifelong affair with actor Spencer Tracy from their fi rst meeting in 1941, before they co-starred in Woman of the Year, until Tracy’s death in 1967, through nine co-starring roles. Today, Hepburn lives in New York City.

 HISPANIC AMERICANS

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thousands and thousands of Mexicans emigrated to the United States, pushed by poverty and the Mexican Revolution and drawn by opportunities in mining, transportation, farming, and other industries. In the Southwest they found Mexican-American communities that dated from as early as the late sixteenth century. Unlike the newcomers—mostly young men— these communities were dominated by families. Mexican-American women of the Southwest enjoyed substantial status and power. In New Mexico, brides were as likely to live with their parents as with their husbands’ families. Molesting a woman or whipping a wife were punishable crimes. Women often kept property separately from their husbands. The poverty that dogged most MexicanAmerican families required fl exible gender roles. Women often headed households while men traveled to fi nd work. A Latino from the vicinity of the New Mexican and Colorado border later recalled that “ when the men came back, they were kind of like guests.” The GREAT DEPRESSION and WORLD WAR II profoundly affected Mexican-American communities. During the Depression of the 1930s, about one-third of the nation’s Mexican Americans went to Mexico, including many U.S. citizens. Some were forced to leave so that they would not compete with Anglo Americans for jobs that had become scarce. Then, during the labor shortages of World War II, the federal government and

Hispanic-American children celebrate their heritage.

private employers drew Mexicans northward. Both of these movements affected men more than women, as single males were the most likely to cross the border. Among those who stayed in the United States, a second generation of more independent Mexican Americans arose who struggled for more autonomy from their parents, created a vibrant, consumer-oriented subculture, and formed labor UNIONS. The Hispanic community became much more diverse in the last half of the twentieth century as immigrants from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and many other parts of Latin America settled in the United States. In 2000, people of Latin-American descent constituted 13 percent of the nation’s population. The Hispanic community also became more militant. A CHICANA feminist movement appeared around 1970, even though some Hispanics argued that it threatened family stability and ethnic solidarity. Many Latinas have led the way to a more prosperous and stable future. By the 1990s Hispanic women outnumbered Hispanic men in both colleges and professions. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Ruiz, Vicki L. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.

 HOLIDAY, BILLIE

(1915– 1959) Infl uential jazz vocalist. By most accounts, Eleanora Holiday was born to a young mother

HOME ECONOMICS

7

Beloved by her fans but frequently betrayed by managers, lovers, and friends, Holiday died nearly destitute on July 15, 1959, from complications to her liver and heart. As a testament to the impact of her music, a crowd of 3,000 attended her funeral in New York.

 HOLLANDER, NICOLE

Billie Holiday struggled against racism and other personal trials but is remembered for her remarkable voice.

in Baltimore on April 7, 1915. Although her childhood was unhappy and fi lled with abuse and exploitation, she was close to her struggling and devoted mother and maintained contact with her absent guitarist father. Born into a hard life, Holiday was blessed with a remarkable voice. She adopted the name Billie after her favorite movie star, Billie Dove, and began performing at age 15. She had her fi rst professional engagement at a club known as Pod’s and Jerry’s. At a running engagement at this club, many important events occurred: She earned the nickname “ Lady,” had her fi rst love affair (with resident pianist Bobby Henderson), and was discovered by critic John Hammond, who effectively launched her career. Holiday’s career spanned both incredible highs and heartbreaking lows. Her legendary recordings with tenor-saxophonist Lester Young are still noted today for their perfectly complementary sound, as is her potent rendering of “ Strange Fruit,” the song about the horror of LYNCHING (see Volume 2) chosen especially for her voice. However, Holiday struggled against pervasive racism in the entertainment industry and personal trials with drug and alcohol addiction, as well as a number of highly publicized and disastrous romantic relationships.

(b. 1940) Writer, cartoonist. Nicole Hollander, the daughter of a carpenter and a hospital administrator, was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois, majoring in art. She also received a masters in fi ne arts from Boston University. Married in 1962 to Paul Hollander, she was divorced four years later. Hollander’s fi rst job was as a graphic designer in Chicago, where she began creating illustrations that she eventually turned into a comic strip. Hollander is best known for her cartoon character Sylvia, who sprang to life in 1979. Sylvia is a quick-witted feminist who smokes cigarettes and wears outlandish clothes. Hollander’s fi rst book of cartoons featuring Sylvia was titled I’m in Training to Be Tall and Blonde (1979). This was followed by other books, such as Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (1980) and Mercy, It’s the Revolution and I’m in My Bathrobe (1982). Hollander has also created other characters as part of the strip, including “ The Love Cop,” and “ The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You.” Her cartoon strip is syndicated in newspapers throughout the United States, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. In 1991, Hollander’s musical about Sylvia opened in Chicago to “ enthusiastic” reviews from audiences. She also creates humorous books about cats, like Everything Here Is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior.

 HOME ECONOMICS

Also known as “ domestic science,” the scientifi c study of all aspects of homemaking and child rearing. The fi eld of home economics was founded by ELLEN SWALLOW RICHARDS (see Volume 2). Richards organized a conference in Lake Placid, New York, in 1899, from which emerged standards for teacher training and certifi cation in a new fi eld of study she dubbed “ home economics.” Those who attended the conference founded the American Home Economics Association in 1908

HOMEMAKER

and named Richards its fi rst president. Richards also established the Journal of Home Economics in 1910. The idea behind home economics was to improve home life in America through the application of scientifi c principles to homemaking. Although many women today regard home economics as part of an effort to confi ne women to the domestic sphere, the fi eld has made an impressive contribution to research in subjects ranging from nutrition to child development, from fi ber science to consumer economics. From its founding, the fi eld of home economics was part of a progressive movement to improve life in cities, especially for poor and immigrant women. Outreach programs helped women in rural settings. The fi eld of home economics also opened up many educational and employment opportunities for women. Graduates of home economics programs found jobs in agricultural extension services, the government, hospitals, restaurants, and teaching. Activists in the woman SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT worked closely with leaders of the home economics movement for their allied goals. From 1914 through the Great Depression, several federal laws infl uenced the development of the fi eld of home economics. In 1914, the SMITHLEVER ACT encouraged home economics instruction through the provision of federal funds to colleges. The Purnell Act of 1925 provided federal money to study vitamins and rural home-management. In 1935, the Bankhead-Jones Act provided funding to study nutritional needs. Home economists infl uenced how women managed homes and children through magazine articles in popular women’s magazines, “ how-to” pamphlets, and radio broadcasts. Their research infl uenced health and hygiene practices in rural and urban homes, helped set social welfare practices, and became the basis for many federal policies dealing with women and children. Home economists researched such topics as nutrition, food storage, stain removal, and household design. Throughout the century, home economists helped when the nation was in crisis. During the infl uenza epidemic of 1917, women trained in home economics served as hospital dietitians. During WORLD WAR I, nutritionists helped to design food rationing programs. During the GREAT DEPRESSION, home economists helped poor women learn how to feed and clothe their families inexpensively. Home economists planted

“ victory gardens” during WORLD WAR II to help families ensure a supply of fresh fruits and vegetables despite rationing. The Vocational Act of 1963 provided funds for secondary and vocational schools to make the study of home economics more widely available. By the 1970s, however, the fi eld of home economics had fallen out of favor with many women because it seemed to support traditional gender stereotypes. Many home economics departments renamed themselves in an effort to refl ect new attitudes toward women and homemaking. Today graduates from colleges of “ Human Ecology” across the country work in such fi elds as textile design, nutrition, interior design, journalism, and child development. Departments today often focus less on “ how to” than on the “ why” of the various subject areas included in home economics. Students also study global issues including poverty, domestic life in developing countries, and overpopulation. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Matthews, Glenna. “ Just a Housewife” : The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Ogden, Annegret S. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776–1986. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.

 HOMEMAKER

The role of the homemaker changed drastically from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end. First among the factors that led to change was the ability to limit the number of children a woman bore, thanks to modern methods of contraception. While Americans once viewed a wife’s primary role in a marriage as procreation, birth control led to a different notion of marriage and a woman’s role. The ideal of marriage changed from one based on children, according to Marilyn Yalom, to one based “ on the ideal of a union based on love, companionship, and the enjoyment of sex.” Another change came with WORLD WAR II, when women were needed in the workforce. When the war was over, some women found that they enjoyed the freedom they earned with their pay checks. Nevertheless, most women quit their jobs to make room for returning soldiers, and the 1950s saw most women back home keeping house and raising children. The ideal home-

HORNE, LENA

9

Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

political equality of women, yet she did not participate in SUFFRAGE activities and disagreed with the tactics, such as hunger strikes, civil disobedience, or getting arrested, used by radical suffrage groups. Her major voluntary activities revolved around the National Amateur Athletic Federation (NAAF) and the Girl Scouts of America. In 1923, as the vice president of NAAF, Hoover established a women's division to set policy for women's involvement in ATHLETICS. A number of debates surrounded women's participation in competitive sports, and the organization opposed women's involvement in the Olympics. Hoover also served on the national board of the Girl Scouts of America from 1917 to 1944 and was elected president twice. Lou Hoover presided as the fi rst lady of the White House between 1929 and 1933 and continued her voluntary activities. When she left the White House, she spent her time in Palo Alto and New York. She died in New York City on January 7, 1944.

 HOOVER, LOU HENRY

 HORNE, LENA

maker of the era worked to stay beautiful and alluring for her husband, entertained to advance his career, kept a spotless house, and raised 2.5 clean-cut, obedient children. Of course, reality did not always correspond to the ideal. Many women found this role stifl ing, and they were ignited to action when BETTY FRIEDAN’s Feminine Mystique (1963; see Documents) exposed the frustrations that many homemakers experienced. Thanks to the “ second wave of feminism,” sparked by Friedan’s book, women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers in the 1970s, a trend that continues to the present day. Although most homemakers now work outside the home, studies suggest that women still perform most of the homemaking duties they did when husbands were the primary breadwinners. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

(1874– 1944) First lady, wife of Herbert Hoover, the thirty-fi rst president of the United States. She was an advocate for physical fi tness and the GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA. Born in Iowa in 1874, Lou Henry moved with her family in 1884 to California and settled in Monterey a few years later. Both parents encouraged her interests in outdoor activities and intellectual pursuits. She attended Stanford University and became the fi rst woman in the United States to receive an A.B. degree in geology in 1898. While at Stanford, she met Herbert Hoover. They married in 1899. Over the next two decades Herbert Hoover’s work as a mining engineer took them around the globe. They were in London when England entered WORLD WAR I. They moved back to the United States in 1917. That year, President Woodrow Wilson asked Herbert to head the U.S. Food Administration and take charge of the fl ow of food to Europe from the United States. Lou Hoover worked on a parallel project, speaking on food conservation to women’s groups during wartime shortages. Although Lou Hoover advocated traditional family roles, she believed that women should participate in civic life. She supported the social and

(b. 1917) Actress and singer. Born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York, Lena Horne was raised by her grandmother, a civil rights and woman suffrage activist. Because of fi nancial difficulties, she left school to work as a chorus dancer at Harlem’s Cotton Club at age 16. Horne developed her voice through singing lessons and in 1934, performed in Dance with Your Gods on Broadway. She then moved to Philadelphia to sing with Noble Sissle’s Society Orchestra, where she was reunited with her estranged father and met Louis Jones, the son of a minister, whom she married in 1937. After two children, the couple divorced in 1941. Horne appeared in another Broadway show before becoming the lead singer in 1940 in Charlie Barnett’s Band and a performer at Cafe Society Downtown. During this time, she met activist and scholar Paul Robeson and became involved in the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE. Horne moved to southern California to perform and signed a movie contract with MGM Studios. Conscious of the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes of AFRICAN AMERICANS in fi lms, Horne stipulated in her contract that she would not play stereotypic roles. In 1942, she won her fi rst lead role in Cabin in the Sky, a musical about

HOYT

V

.

FLORIDA

an African-American woman who is intent on her husband's salvation in church. In 1947, she appeared in her landmark role in Stormy Weather. It was during the fi lming that she met her second husband, Lenny Hayton, whom she married the same year. Because ANTIMISCEGENATION sentiment prevailed at the time, they did not make their marriage public until 1950. Horne continued to be active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In 1956, she took a break from Hollywood to concentrate on Broadway and singing. She returned to Hollywood in 1969, in Death of a Gunfighter, and again in 1978, in The Wiz. Horne captured and performed the highlights of her legendary song and dance career in the Broadway one-woman musical, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which began in 1981 and became the longest-running one-woman show on Broadway.

 HOYT

V. FLORIDA A 1961 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the justices upheld arbitrary classifi cations of people based on gender. The U.S. Supreme Court had a long history of allowing states to pass laws that were based on gender classifi cations. As far back as 1873, for example, it refused to overturn an Illinois statute that prohibited women from obtaining licenses to practice law. Hoyt v. Florida concerned the issue of jury duty. It arose when a Florida woman named Hoyt was convicted of murder by an all-male jury and argued that she had not been judged by a jury of her peers. Under Florida statute, every man was eligible for jury duty unless he requested an exemption. Women, however, were automatically granted an exemption from jury duty unless they waived the exemption. The distinction was based on the belief that men were better suited than women to participate in civic affairs. In its decision the Court did not address the issue of whether a state could constitutionally restrict jury duty to males. Instead, it addressed the narrower question of whether the exemption for women was based on a reasonable classifi cation. The Court found that the Florida statute was, saying that “ despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly consid-

ered to be reserved to men, woman is still regarded as the center of the home and family life.” The Court concluded that the Constitution did not prohibit a legislature from exempting all women, even those without family responsibilities, from jury duty. It would be another ten years before the Court would fi nally strike down arbitrary gender classifi cations in REED v. REED.

HUERTA, DOLORES  FERNANDEZ

(b. 1930) Mexican-American labor leader and activist. Born in Dawson, New Mexico, on April 10, 1930, Huerta was raised by her mother in Stockton, California. Although separated from her father, she stayed in touch with him as he went from being a migrant worker to a union activist to an elected member of the New Mexico state legislature. After graduating from the University of the Pacifi c’s Delta Community College, she taught elementary school in Stockton. Discouraged by the poverty of her students, she decided to concentrate her efforts on improving the lives of their parents, most of whom were farm workers. Huerta went to work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a social service agency for the Mexican-American community in Stockton, in 1955. She managed a number of community empowerment projects and later acted as the group’s lobbyist in Sacramento, the state capital. Around 1960, she joined the Agricultural Workers Association, and met the CSO director for California and Arizona, Cesar Chavez. Frustrated by the lack of attention given to the treatment of migrant farm workers, the two founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers [UFW]) in 1962. Since then, Huerta has been a union leader and champion of migrant workers’ rights, lobbying against the use of toxins and pesticides, leading strikes, and organizing boycotts. One of her greatest achievements came when California governor Jerry Brown signed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. It was the fi rst bill of rights for farm workers in the United States, granting them the right to form unions. Huerta is known for her uncompromising and tenacious style, but has always advocated nonviolence as a means to effect change. In 1988, she was injured by San Francisco police officers

HYDE AMENDMENT

during a protest against labor policies. It was one of more than 20 arrests during her career. She has received numerous awards for her contributions to labor and women’s rights. She holds high positions in the UFW, the California AFL-CIO, the Labor Coalition of Women, and the Feminist Majority, and is the mother of 11 children.

 HURSTON, ZORA NEALE

(1891?– 1960) African-American writer who portrayed Southern black culture. Hurston grew up in in the allblack township of Eatonville, Florida, in stable conditions until, when she was 13, her mother died. She shuttled among relatives after her father’s remarriage, but left Eatonville at 14 with a traveling theatrical troupe. Over the next 15 years she managed to get a high school diploma and took courses at Howard University, where she published her fi rst stories in the literary journal. In 1925 Hurston moved to New York City and became involved in the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Her stories were published in Charles Johnson’s journal Opportunity and in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, and won her a scholarship to Barnard College, which she entered in 1925 as its fi rst African-American student. After graduating in 1928 she went on to graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas, who encouraged her to return to Eatonville to collect folklore. She traveled throughout the South, collecting material that was published in her 1935 book, Mules and Men. She later took two collecting trips to the Caribbean, funded by Guggenheim Fellowships, and published her fi ndings in Tell My Horse (1938). Hurston’s personal life took a backseat to her career; two marriages were short-lived. She worked as a dramatist, teacher, and writer. She published four novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), about an adulterous Southern Baptist preacher; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), considered her best novel, a tribute to the independence and vitality of African-American women; Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), in which she defi ed expectations by focusing on a white protagonist, a woman who strives for a sense of self. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), is more folklore than fact, containing proven inaccuracies and omitting whole areas of

her life, such as her marriages. It was well received and won the Anisfi eld-Wolf Award for its contribution to race relations. It is notable for refusing to focus on the negative side of black experience in America—a refusal running through all her work, which drew criticism from AfricanAmerican contemporaries. Hurston suffered public humiliation in 1948, when she was accused of child molestation. Although she disproved these charges, she left New York and spent her fi nal years in Florida, living off odd jobs and infrequent sales of magazine articles. After suffering a stroke in 1959, she entered a public nursing home and died on January 28, 1960, penniless and alone. Hurston was forgotten until the 1970s, when writers such as ALICE WALKER began rediscovering her writing. Today she remembered as the most accomplished African-American woman writer of her period. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Walker, Alice, ed. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing— and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979.

 HYDE AMENDMENT

Passed by Congress in 1976, it denied funding for abortions in health-care services provided to low-income people by the federal government through Medicaid. Part of the legislative battle over ABORTION, the Hyde Amendment immediately came under fi re from organizations like the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN and the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION. These organizations argued that such legislation discriminates against low-income women and makes it too difficult for them to control and protect their bodies. After a series of court cases, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment in 1980. In 1997, Congress altered the amendment by allowing Medicaid funds for abortions in cases of rape, incest, or if the woman’s life is endangered from illness or injury. In step with the national government, most state legislatures have also banned abortions from their medical funding. At present, 35 of the 50 states refuse public funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and physical danger.

I M M I G R AT I O N A N D N AT U R A L I Z AT I O N

I IMMIGRATION AND  NATURALIZATION Coming to another country to live and becoming a citizen. In the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century, immigration legislation began to place limits on who could enter the United States. The fi rst restrictive immigration legislation, the PAGE ACT of 1875 (see Volume 2), attempted to discourage Chinese women suspected of “ immoral purposes” from entering the country. In the early years of the twentieth century, further restrictions were added, which in some cases placed women at a disadvantage. Immigration legislation passed in 1917, for example, excluded, among others, people who could not read, making immigration more difficult for many women and members of the peasant class. In 1924, a quota system was established that ranked immigrants by country of origin. Before 1930, more men than women emigrated to the United States. Since then women have accounted for a little more than half of all the immigrants coming into the United States. The increase in the number of female immigrants can be attributed to three factors. First, many more American men than women marry foreign brides. Many women have entered the United States as “ mail order brides” or “ war brides.” In fact, the WAR BRIDES ACT made it easy for the foreign-born brides of American servicemen to become citizens. Second, as immigration laws began to promote the unifi cation of families, many foreign-born women were able to join husbands and children who had immigrated some years earlier. Third, as women gained political and economic freedom around the world, they were able to emigrate on their own instead of coming with husbands or fathers. Until women were granted the right to vote, there was little incentive for married immigrant women to naturalize, or apply for citizenship. Legislation enacted in 1855 provided that a “ woman who is . . . married to a citizen of the United States . . . shall be deemed a citizen.” While this made

citizenship automatic for many women, this law also had negative consequences in that if a husband chose not to apply for citizenship, his wife could not apply on her own. After 1907, the reverse situation held for native-born women who married foreign men; these women lost their U.S. citizenship. Thus, for the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, a married woman’s citizenship depended on her husband. These laws were changed only when they began to create disadvantages for men. When women were granted the right to vote, some judges began to refuse citizenship to men because their wives could not read or speak English and yet would automatically become citizens when their husbands were naturalized. In 1922, Congress passed the Married Women’s Act, or CABLE ACT, legislation that for the fi rst time allowed women to naturalize on their own and allowed women who married foreign men to retain their citizenship. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Seller, Maxine Schwartz. Immigrant Women. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

INFANT AND CHILD  HEALTH As woman reformers began to effect social change in the United States in the late 1800s, they focused increasing attention on the wellbeing of children. The idea for a government agency devoted to children’s issues has been attributed Lillian Wald, whose plans and lobbying efforts ultimately resulted in the establishment of the CHILDREN’ S BUREAU in 1912. The fi rst director of the agency was Julia Lathrop, who chose infant and maternal mortality rates as her fi rst area of study. Initial studies revealed that the United States had one of the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality of any industrialized nation. The major cause, the bureau demon-

I N FA N T A N D C H I L D H E A LT H

strated, was poverty. Realizing there TRAILBLAZERS was little the agency could do to increase wages, it focused its efAs a prominent physician once said, “ Every baby born in a forts on education. Lathrop pubmodern hospital anywhere in the world is looked at first lished a series of easy-to-read pamphlets to teach mothers how to take through the eyes of Virginia Apgar.” This is because Apgar care of themselves during pregnancy developed the system that is used around the world by obsteand how to care for their newborn tricians to evaluate the health of newborn babies. Until Apgar babies. The pamphlets were impioneered her method, newborn babies were assumed to be mensely popular and were still being healthy unless they showed obvious signs of distress. Unfortudistributed in the 1950s. (See Docunately, doctors often missed subtle signs of circulatory or ments for letters from mothers to the respiratory problems. Apgar’s method helps doctors discern bureau.) internal problems right away. The maximum Apgar score is ten The next major advance in infant points, with up to two points assigned for each of the followand child health was the MATERNITY ing five factors: heart rate, muscle tone, refl exes, color, and resAND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT of piration. Infants are evaluated at one minute after birth and 1921, which provided federal matchat five minutes after birth. The maximum score of ten is almost ing funds for state services on behalf never given; an infant with a score of 7 is generally considered of pregnant women and new mothto be healthy. Apgar’s scoring system has saved many lives since ers. States that chose to participate she first introduced it to physicians in 1953. typically hired public health nurses Virginia Apgar graduated from MOUNT HOLYOKE College who traveled from town to town, of(see Volume 2) in 1929 and received her medical degree from ten on horseback, to educate pregColumbia University in 1933. She studied surgery but nant women and to persuade local switched to anesthesiology after two years of surgical interndoctors to volunteer their services. ship. She was eventually appointed the first full professor of These nurses also established peranesthesiology at Columbia. She completed a master’s degree manent clinics. in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in 1959. That The Children’s Bureau and the same year she was appointed Director of the March of Dimes, Maternity and Infancy Protection and she devoted the rest of her life to the work of preventing Act were largely responsible for a birth defects. She died in 1974. major decline in infant mortality in the 1920s. To combat child labor, meanwhile, Congress had passed the Child Labor Act of 1916; but it was declared unconstitutional six years for indigent children and later was expanded to later. In 1924, Congress passed a constitutional include preventive health services. In 1972, the amendment to make child labor illegal, but it Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, failed to be ratifi ed by the states. Finally, in 1938, Infants, and Children (WIC) provided the fi rst the FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT struck a sucmajor nutritional support for mothers and chilcessful blow at child labor—and for child dren. And in 1998, federal legislation provided health—by prohibiting manufacturing and minstates with $48 billion over ten years to broaden ing companies that engage in interstate comefforts to provide children with health insurance. merce from employing workers under the age of Advances in medical science and general im16, or under 18 in hazardous conditions. provements in living conditions have contributed A variety of federal programs and initiatives most directly to improvements in infant and in recent decades have focused specifi cally on inchild health. From 1940 to 2000 alone, the infant and child health. The Medicaid program, enfant mortality rate in the United States dropped acted in 1965 as an extension of the SOCIAL SEfrom 47 per 1,000 to about 7 per 1,000. CURITY ACT of 1935, provided medical services

4

JAZZ

J  JAZZ

Since the early 1900s, many musical styles have been called “ jazz,” and all of them have benefi ted from the labor, artistry, and contributions of women. Socially acceptable roles for women in jazz have been primarily restricted to vocalists, sometimes pianists; it is in these areas that women musicians have received greatest recognition. Yet woman musicans have played every instrument, in every style and era of jazz history. The earliest manifestations of the diverse musical lineages we now call jazz emerged in the early 1900s from a number of musical sources, including African-American forms, such as spirituals, work songs, and blues, as well as African, European, and Latin-American infl uences. These combinations took place in contexts of African-American social, cultural, and economic life in the years following the demise of RECONSTRUCTION, the rise of segregation, and AfricanAmerican urban migration. African-American women were prominent actors in the musical forms that infl uenced jazz, including vodun (voodoo) chants and drumming in New Orleans; spirituals and gospel; and the blues. African-American and white women were among the pianists and composers of the ragtime craze of the early 1900s, and many women played piano, as well as brass, reeds, bass, and drums (instruments traditionally associated with men) in family bands––i n circuses, carnivals, and minstrel and tent shows. In the 1920s, African-American female vocalists made the earliest blues records. “ Blues queens,” such as Mamie Smith (singer on the fi rst vocal blues recording, “ Crazy Blues,” 1920), BESSIE SMITH, and GERTRUDE “ MA” RAINEY, recorded with well-known jazz instrumentalists, mostly men, but sometimes women, including pianist Lovie Austin. Austin, as well as Emma Barrett and Lil Hardin (later Armstrong) were among the most highly regarded pianists in early jazz bands. Less remembered, but celebrated in their day, were female cornetists, trumpet players, and saxo-

phonists, including the trumpet-playing mother and daughter team, Dyer and Dolly Jones. Women instrumentalists often played in “ all-girl” bands such as the Fourteen Bricktops. In the 1930s, female jazz vocalists, and some pianists, continued to garner notoriety, but women played other instruments as well. Arguably the most highly regarded vocalist in jazz history, BILLIE HOLIDAY gave some of the most celebrated live and recorded performances. Pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams brightened the swinging Kansas City sound. Jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow played to international acclaim. All-woman bands of the 1930s included Ina Ray Hutton’s Melodears, the Harlem Playgirls, and in the later part of the decade, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, whose popularity would increase during WORLD WAR II. The Sweethearts’ inclusion of Asian-American, Latin-American, and Native American, as well as African-American women, refl ected the ethnic variety that existed on the “ colored” side of Southern segregation. After 1943 the Sweethearts and several other African-American all-woman bands sometimes broke the color line by covertly traveling through the South with one or two white members. Other all-woman bands of the 1940s included the Darlings of Rhythm, the Prairie View Co-eds, and Ada Leonard’s “ All-American” Girls. The war opened opportunities for women in men’s bands: Woody Herman hired trumpet player Billie Rogers and vibist Marjorie Hyams; Gerald Wilson hired trombonist/arranger Melba Liston. As in other industries, not all American women jazz musicians had the option or desire to leave paying jobs behind after the war ended. Female vocalists, whose artistry could be more easily imagined as refl ecting domesticity of postwar gender ideology, continued to be popular. Some women who had played big band instrumental jazz throughout the war spent the 1950s working in nightclubs in solo acts or all-woman combos. Some found music-related employment in fi elds thought to be more “ feminine” , such as music education, or traded their horns for piano or Hammond organ. The emergence of televi-

JEWISH AMERICANS

sion brought employment for some white women musicians in the show bands of Ina Ray Hutton and Ada Leonard. Jazz played a key role in the CIVIL RIGHTS and Black Power movements of the transformative 1960s, and included powerful contributions by vocalists Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone, pianist/harpist/percussionist/composer Alice McLeod Coltrane, and pianist/organist Amina Claudine. The WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT in the 1960s and 1970s brought new interest in women’s achievements, and thus, a new audience for women in jazz. The fi rst Women’s Jazz Festival was held in Kansas City in 1978, followed by the fi rst New York Women’s Jazz Festival. Allwoman groups founded in the 1970s include Sisters in Jazz (New York, 1974– 1977) and Maiden Voyage (Los Angeles, 1979– present). Despite high profi les and multiple recordings of contemporary women musicians in the 1980s and 1990s, including drummer Teri Lyne Carrington, saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, violinist Regina Carter, and the all-woman big band, Diva, there remains overwhelming evidence that women jazz musicians do not receive the same encouragement or opportunities as do men of their skill levels. Organizations attempting to correct these inequalities include the International Association of Jazz Educators, Sisters in Jazz, International Women in Jazz, and the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. Sherrie Tucker F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Press, 1998. Gourse, Leslie. Madame Jazz: Contemporary Women Instrumentalists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Handy, D. Antoinette. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm. rev. ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

 JEFFERSON, MILDRED

(b. 1927) A leader in conservative political and social causes and founding member (in 1973) of the NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE. Mildred Faye Jefferson received her A.B. from Texas College, her M.S. from Tufts University, and in 1951

became the fi rst African-American woman to be granted an M.D. by the Harvard Medical School. From 1973 to 1995 she was assistant clinical professor of surgery at Boston University. In 1994 Jefferson waged an unsuccessful campaign in the Republican primary in Massachusetts, hoping to unseat Democratic senator Edward Kennedy. In addition to being a former president and cofounder of the National Right to Life Committee, Jefferson is former chairperson of the National Right to Life Crusade. She is one of the Conservative Digest’s Ten Most Admired Women and the only woman to receive the Lantern Award for patriotism from the Massachusetts Council of the Knights of Columbus.

 JEWISH AMERICANS

Jewish Americans comprise one of the smallest ethnic groups in the United States; however, their contributions to American culture, politics and industry far outweigh their numbers. Throughout their history in the United States, Jews, like other minority groups, have had to fi nd ways to balance the push toward assimilation with their desire to preserve a distinct identity. Notable Jewish American women have resolved this problem in a variety of ways. In the early part of the century, the identities of many Jewish American women were still closely linked to their immigrant origins, and many women settled in the cities of the East Coast where they could fi nd jobs in the garment industry. Most of the families who settled in the cities of the East Coast traced their roots back to Eastern Europe, and their European ancestry deeply affected their lives in the United States. Living in urban poverty and under the shadow of the persecution and hardship they had experienced in Russia and Eastern Europe, many Jewish women became politically radicalized and chose to express their commitment through their political work. J. Edgar Hoover called EMMA GOLDMAN, the garment worker, activist and anarchist the “ most dangerous woman in American” during her deportation hearings in 1919. Ethel Rosenberg (1915– 1953), a labor organizer, was sentenced to death along with her husband for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. Golda Meir (1898– 1978), an educator and labor activist, became Israel’s

JOHNSON, CLAUDIA

(LADY

B I R D ) A LTA TA Y L O R

fourth prime minister in 1969. Meir emigrated with her family from Russia to Milwaukee in 1906. Childhood memories of Russian pogroms infl uenced Meir to become a Zionist, and by 1921 her Zionism and socialism compelled her to settle in Palestine. Beginning at mid-century, Jewish Americans began leaving the urban centers where they had lived, and joined other Americans in the movement toward SUBURBANIZATION. As opportunities for women and Jewish Americans broadened, the linkages with their Eastern European past weakened, and the impulse toward assimilation strengthened. The events of WORLD WAR II and the Holocaust, however, brought to the fore the situation of Jewish groups all over the world, and Jewish Americans were forced to consider their role in the sphere of world politics. In the 1950s, more and more Jewish American women attended prestigious educational institutions and went on to occupy powerful positions in the government. Jewish American RUTH BADER GINSBURG attended Harvard and Columbia law schools in the 1950s and was appointed a Supreme Court justice by President Bill Clinton in 1993. In the mid-1990s, U.S. Secretary of State MADELEINE ALBRIGHT held a press conference to announce the discovery of her Jewish roots. BETTY FRIEDAN, author of the groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique (see Documents), was a founder of the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT. Feminist activist GLORIA STEINEM founded MS. MAGAZINE in 1972. Jewish Americans have also made their mark as pioneers in the sphere of arts and culture. Theda Bara, one of the most glamorous and successful silent fi lm stars of the 1910s, was born in a largely Jewish suburb of Cincinnati. Born in 1901 in Russia, author Ayn Rand emigrated to the United States in her twenties and went on to become famous for her novels and her Objectivist philosophy. Cosmetics mogul Esté e Lauder was born in New York City in 1910 and opened her fi rst office in 1946. World famous entertainer BARBRA STREISAND has won innumerable awards for her work in music, screen, and stage. Goldie Hawn, Roseanne Barr, and Bette Midler have been recognized for their contributions to fi lm and television. Contemporary poet ADRIENNE RICH has published more than 20 volumes of poetry and was a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship.

JOHNSON, CLAUDIA (LADY  BIRD) ALTA TAYLOR

(b. 1912) Wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, near Karnack, Texas, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her nursemaid gave her the childhood nickname “ Lady Bird.” After earning two bachelor’s degrees in liberal arts and journalism from the University of Texas, she married Johnson in 1934. They had two daughters. Outgoing, intelligent, and ambitious, Johnson was a vital asset to her husband’s rise in politics. With her support, he was elected as a congressman from Texas in 1937. She managed his congressional office during his service in WORLD WAR II and purchased a radio station in Austin, Texas, that they developed into a multimilliondollar broadcasting corporation. Lady Bird Johnson fi rst campaigned for her husband in the 1948 Senate election and assisted his staff in 1955 when he suffered a heart attack. In 1960, when her husband was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, she campaigned for the ticket throughout the country. As wife of the vice president, Johnson visited 33 foreign countries. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Johnson helped with the transition to her husband’s administration and his reelection in 1964. As fi rst lady, she promoted the Head Start program for preschoolers and became best known for her national beautifi cation program. Originally focused on the nation’s capital, her plans soon expanded to the national level. The program included federal legislation for highway beautifi cation. Returning to Texas when her husband’s term expired in 1969, Johnson wrote a book and was the subject of documentary and television movies. She established the National Wildfl ower Research Center in 1982.

 JOHNSON, SONIA

(b. 1936) A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Sonia Johnson began speaking out in support of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA, see Documents) in 1977. She became known nationally with her 1978 testimony in front of the U.S. Senate’s Constitutional Rights Subcommittee. At the congressional hearing,

JORDAN, BARBARA

7

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) squared off against Johnson, a HOMEMAKER, who had been born and raised in Logan, Utah, and was an active Mormon. Her strong testimony in support of the ERA caught media attention and she became a lightning rod for Mormon and other religious supporters of the amendment. She also spoke out against Mormon groups that opposed the ERA. A well-publicized church trial in 1979 led to Johnson being excommunicated from the Mormon Church. She then became president of the Mormons for ERA group. After being married for 20 years, she announced she was gay. Her book about her embrace of feminism, From Housewife to Heretic, was published in 1981. She went on to write several other books about feminism and lesbianism.



JOPLIN, JANIS

(1943– 1970) Singer. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin grew up in a traditional home, but never felt that she fi t in at her high school. She fl aunted a bohemian, wild, and original style. The “ bad girl” reputation she gained at that time would later become an asset in the world of the 1960s acid rock. After training as a secretary, Joplin moved to Los Angeles. She returned to Texas but soon grew bored with small-town life. She experimented with drugs and sex, moved to Austin with her high school boyfriend, and eventually enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. She was at the center of the 1960s counterculture at the conservative campus and soon became popular as a local folk singer. After several trips between Texas and California, Joplin joined a band called Big Brother and settled in San Francisco. By 1967, she played regularly on the city circuit with the Grateful Dead, the Paul Butterfi eld Blues Band, and Jefferson Airplane. In 1968, Joplin and Big Brother signed with Columbia Records, but the band split up soon after. Joplin then formed the Kozmic Blues Band and enjoyed relative success, but in 1970 they also disbanded. Throughout her life, Joplin was insecure about her looks and was vulnerable in her love relationships with men and women. Infi delity, jealousy, and passion characterized those relationships. She also struggled with drug and al-

Janis Joplin is remembered for her folk and blues music.

cohol addiction. In 1970, Joplin went to Rio to get clean. When she returned, she formed a new band, Full Tilt Boogie, reunited with Big Brother, and toured the East Coast. She performed what would be her last live concert at Harvard Stadium in Massachusetts. After attending her high school reunion, she recorded Pearl in Los Angeles. On October 3, 1970, she was to record the vocal of the album’s fi nal track, but she died at 1:40 a.m. on October 4 of a heroin and alcohol overdose. Joplin is remembered for her passionate personality and folk- and blues-infl uenced rock in songs such as “ Me and Bobby McGee” and “ Piece of My Heart” even more than for her tragic end.

 JORDAN, BARBARA

(1936– 1996) Lawyer, Congresswoman. Barbara Charline Jordan was born on February 21, 1936, in Houston, Texas, to Benjamin and Arlyne (Patten) Jordan. As a high school student, Jordan excelled in speech and debate, winning fi rst place in a national speech contest in 1952. Her senior year she decided to become an attorney after hearing a lawyer speak at a career day assembly.

JOURNALISM

Jordan earned a B.A. in political science and history from Texas Southern University in 1956 and an LL.B. from Boston University Law School in 1959. Her fi rst legal office was her parents’ dining room, where she worked at the table until she could afford an office in downtown Houston. Jordan’s interest in politics began in 1960, when she campaigned for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. Eager to hold a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, she ran unsuccessfully in 1962 and 1964. When she was fi nally elected in 1966, she became the fi rst AfricanAmerican state senator in Texas since 1883. While in the Texas senate, Jordan served on the fi rst Fair Employment Practices Commission to fi ght discrimination in the workplace. She was also instrumental in the passage of Texas’s fi rst minimum wage law and organized a department to deal with urban affairs. When she was elected president pro tem of the Texas legislature in 1970, she became the fi rst African-American woman in U.S. history to preside over a legislative body. In 1973, Jordan was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. At the federal level, she continued to focus on humanitarian and racial issues as she had in Texas. But she did not gain national renown until she made a compelling speech at President Nixon’s impeachment hearing in 1974. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan argued that the evidence against Nixon was so powerful that if he were not impeached, the “ Eighteenth Century Constitution should be abandoned in the Twentieth Century paper shredder.” When casting her vote for his impeachment, she stated, “ My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.” Jordan left Congress in 1979 to teach political science at the University of Texas in Austin. Although she denied it, she retired from public office because of her health. She suffered from both multiple sclerosis and leukemia. She was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 (as she had been in 1976, when she was the fi rst African American to be selected to deliver such a speech). She remained in Austin until her death, caused by viral pneumonia, on January 17, 1996. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Rogers, Mary Beth. Barbara Jordan: American Hero. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.

 JOURNALISM

The art and profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, and the broadcast media to inform and educate the public. Journalism in the twentieth century underwent a major transformation from purely print-based media to instantaneous global transmission of electronic text and images. Women played a central role in this evolution throughout the century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as American women were fi ghting for equal rights, higher pay, and access to higher EDUCATION, coverage of their plight was still largely confi ned to specialized publications with limited readership. One such publication was the Woman’s Journal, a newspaper founded in 1870 and edited by Alice Stone Blackwell until 1916. Its articles and editorials helped give the women’s rights movement the exposure sought by its leaders, leading to passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT (granting the right to vote) in 1920. Other woman journalists, meanwhile, had been infl uential in the general press. NELLIE BLY (see Volume 2) had become a star newspaper reporter in the 1880s and 1890s, writing on such subjects as slum life, divorce, and conditions inside insane asylums. Following her tradition, IDA TARBELL became a prominent muckraker. Her magazine articles and book on the Standard Oil Company (1904) led to federal action limiting the operations of that giant corporation. Dorothy Thompson earned acclaim as a foreign newspaper correspondent in Europe during the years leading up to WORLD WAR II. Martha Gellhorn and Marguerite Higgins were award-winning journalists who earned their stripes covering the war in Europe. And Margaret Bourke-White pioneered the fi eld of photojournalism in the 1930s and 1940s. From Dorothy Dix, Hedda Hopper, and Liz Smith to Ann Landers, Abigail Van Buren, and Erma Bombeck, women have also won vast newspaper audiences with advice and society columns. The achievements of women in newspaper journalism have come despite professional and social barriers, including limited placement in schools of journalism and a distinctly male culture in many offices and newsrooms. KATHARINE GRAHAM took over the reins of the Washington Post after the death of her husband in 1963, but she soon gained the respect of the entire industry for her independent editorial judgment. Gradually,

KELLER, HELEN

more and more newspaperwomen, such as New York Times executive editor Gail Collins, rose to top positions on the strength of their talent and experience. MAGAZINE journalism is one fi eld in which women have been especially prominent during the twentieth century—from writers and editors to publishers and owners. Notable fi gures include Clare Booth Luce, a top editor at Vanity Fair; HELEN GURLEY BROWN, the longtime chief editor of Cosmopolitan; GLORIA STEINEM, a cofounder and the editor of MS. MAGAZINE; and Tina Brown,

head of the venerable New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. Although the prominent fi gures in early television journalism were men, the opportunities for women opened up signifi cantly—along with those in other professional fi elds—beginning in the 1970s. Led by BARBARA WALTERS, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Cokie Roberts, and other women broadcasters, coverage of major events, primetime broadcasts, and editorial comment were increasingly handled by women. See also: Photographers; “ Women and the Media,” p. 27.

K  KELLER, HELEN

(1880– 1968) Activist. Helen Keller was born in Alabama on June 27, 1880. When she was just 19 months old, she was struck deaf and blind by an illness. She went untutored until age seven, when ANNIE SULLIVAN became her teacher in 1887. Sullivan taught Keller by outlining the shapes of letters on her hands; within three months, Keller knew the alphabet and obtained basic spelling skills. Within three years, Keller was lipreading and learning to speak, as well as learning to read and write using Braille. Keller, with Sullivan’s assistance, completed her schooling and attended Radcliffe College, graduating with honors in 1904. Keller is best known for her lectures and writings. Her writings were initially shunned, because many people believed that the ideas of a deaf and blind woman had to be intellectually worthless. She proved them wrong. In addition to writing, Keller advocated women’s rights and was a spokesperson for the American Foundation for the Blind. She was also a member of the Socialist Party and promoted labor unions and aid to the disadvantaged. She is noted for her fund-raising efforts for blind people. Keller died on June 1, 1968.

9

Helen Keller, a deaf and blind woman, lectured and wrote, advocating women’ s rights.

K E L L E Y, F L O R E N C E

 KELLEY, FLORENCE

(1859– 1932) Labor activist and socialist, born in Philadelphia to an activist family. Kelley’s father was a congressman and abolitionist, and her great-aunt, Sarah Pugh, was the president of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and a close friend of LUCRETIA MOTT’s (see Volume 2). Kelley entered Cornell University in 1876 at age 16 but contracted diptheria in 1879 and was unable to return. She still completed her senior research project on the correlation between women’s rights and the legislative history of children in the United States. The resultant thesis was published in the International Review. After graduation, Kelley taught history and published articles addressing how health affected working women’s labor prospects, and asserting women’s rights to protection from exploitative labor. She left the United States for the University of Zurich after the University of Pennsylvania denied her admission to graduate school because of her gender. She often corresponded with women’s rights leader SUSAN B. ANTHONY (see Volume 2) regarding working women. Her growing anger over the condition of women in the United States pushed her toward socialism and its egalitarian tenets. She married a Russian-born member of the Socialist Labor Party, Lazare Wischnewetzky, in 1884, and together they joined the Social Democratic Party. Kelley collaborated closely with Friedrich Engels and translated his famous tract The Condition of the Working Class in England into English in 1887. Shortly thereafter, Kelley moved to New York with her family, and then to Chicago in 1891 without Wischnewetzky, who was abusive. She took refuge in JANE ADDAMS’s HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2), and quickly became involved in labor reform work. She pushed for legislation to combat the horrifying conditions of Chicago’s sweatshops, and was appointed by the governor of Illinois to be the fi rst chief factory inspector in 1893. In 1894, she scored a major victory when the state legislature passed labor laws ensuring the eighthour workday for women and children. Kelley continued to work for her PACIFIST, egalitarian, and socialist beliefs and lobbied for a minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. She helped found the NATIONAL CONSUMERS LEAGUE, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and, in 1909, the National Association for the Ad-

vancement of Colored People. She also served as the president of the Socialist Party of America and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley died in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on February 17, 1932.

 KING, BILLIE JEAN

(b. 1943) Tennis champion and outspoken advocate of the rights of women tennis players. King was born in Long Beach, California. At a young age, she showed exceptional skill in softball, but there was no signifi cant career for a woman in that sport, so her parents introduced her to tennis. In 1962, at the age of 18, King won the Wimbledon Championship in lawn tennis in London, upsetting Margaret Smith Court, the leading women’s tennis player in the world at that time. King went on to become the fi rst woman player since 1939 to win the triple crown of singles, doubles, and mixed doubles in both American and British tournaments. In 1967, King was named Outstanding Female Athlete of the World, and fi ve years later she was named Sports Illustrated magazine’s Sportsperson of the Year, the fi rst female to receive that honor. In 1971, she became the fi rst woman athlete to earn $100,000 in a single year. King is perhaps best known for her victory in 1973 over former men’s tennis star Bobby Riggs in a much-hyped exhibition match called the “ Battle of the Sexes.” This was in the early days of the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT, and King had long advocated equal payment for women players. Riggs had beaten Margaret Smith Court earlier the same year and declared that he wanted a match with Billie Jean King saying, “ I want the women’s lib leader.” That match set a record for the largest tennis audience and called attention to women’s ATHLETICS. King was one of the founders of the Women’s Tennis Association and served as its fi rst president. In 1984, she retired from competitive tennis and became the commissioner of the World Team Tennis League, the fi rst woman commissioner in professional sports.

 KING, CORETTA SCOTT

(b. 1927) African-American activist. Coretta Scott was born in Marion, Alabama. She attended Antioch College, where, despite the college’s liberal origins,

K I R K PA T R I C K , J E A N E J O R D A N

she still faced discrimination and racism as the fi rst AFRICAN-AMERICAN woman to major in elementary education. After graduation, she studied voice at the New England Conservatory. It was through a conservatory classmate that she met Martin Luther King, Jr., then in graduate school at Boston University. They married in 1953 and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, after completing their studies. King worked alongside her husband and made signifi cant contributions to women and civil rights. She gave Freedom Concerts which chronicled the civil rights movement through intertwined narrative and song and eventually raised over $50,000 for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King was also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in 1962, was a delegate to the Women’s Strike for Peace’s Geneva conference on atomic test-bans. After her husband was fatally shot before a march in Memphis on April 4, 1968, King continued in his spirit, marching in Memphis four days after his death. She continued to work for the SCLC, and later, for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change. A passionate activist in her own right, today King continues to lobby for peace and against the death penalty.

 KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG

(b. 1940) Writer. Maxine Hong was born on October 27, 1940, the oldest of six children to Chinese immigrant parents. In 1958, she entered Berkeley on a full scholarship. She majored in English and was active in campus politics. In 1962, she graduated and married Earll Kingston. Hong Kingston taught high school and gave birth to a son in 1963. The Kingstons were active in California’s counterculture and Hong Kingston actively opposed the Vietnam War. However, in 1967, they became disillusioned with the movement and moved to Hawaii. There, she continued to teach and began writing. In 1976, Hong Kingston wrote her fi rst book, Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The book was based on her mother’s life and addressed issues of racial and gender identity. The book won critical acclaim and is considered a seminal work in Asian-American literature. In 1979 Time magazine named it one of the top ten books of the decade.

She continued to write books that portrayed the human victims of racial and gender inequalities. China Men (1980) looked at Chinese immigration from the male perspective. In 1989, she wrote her fi rst novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. She also published several other works of nonfi ction. Hong Kingston has won many awards for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the National Humanities Medal. She is also politically active, teaching writing workshops for Vietnam veterans.

KIRKPATRICK, JEANE  JORDAN

(b. 1926) First woman to serve as permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations. Born on November 19, 1926, in Duncan, Oklahoma, Jordan was the daughter of an oil drilling contractor. She transferred from Stephens College in Missouri to graduate from Barnard College. She earned a masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University. There, she studied European war refugees, and developed a deep opposition to totalitarianism, which she held responsible for the refugees’ appalling condition. Before receiving her Ph.D., she worked in the research and intelligence bureau at the State Department, where she met and married a colleague, Evron Kirkpatrick, in 1955. After receiving her doctorate and having three children, she taught at Georgetown University, where she eventually received an endowed chair. She published a number of scholarly works, including Political Woman, a study of women in state legislatures. However, it was an article for Commentary that changed the course of her life. When Ronald Reagan read her article urging the United States to carefully distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian states in determining its foreign policy, he asked Kirkpatrick, then a Democrat, to join his campaign as foreign policy adviser. He later appointed her ambassador to the United Nations, the fi rst woman to hold the job. Although Kirkpatrick met with fi erce opposition from administration insiders, her principled handling of foreign affairs at the end of the Cold War era earned her the respect of others. After resigning from the post in 1985, she continued

KUHN, MARGARET

to work in politics, serving as advisers to both Bob and Elizabeth Dole’s campaigns for president. Currently, she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

 KUHN, MARGARET

(1905– 1995) Social activist who organized the Gray Panthers. Margaret Eliza Kuhn was born on August 3, 1905, in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of an office manager. In 1926, she graduated from Case Western Reserve University where she had organized a chapter of the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. Kuhn worked for the YOUNG WOMEN’ S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION in Cleveland for 11 years and became familiar with members’ problems. Because many of the members held low-paying jobs with few benefi ts, Kuhn assisted them in forming UNIONS to address their concerns. Kuhn next worked as associate secretary and editor of the Social Progress magazine for the United Presbyterian Church in New York City. Angry that the church’s policy required her to retire at age 65, Kuhn directed her energies toward combating ageism in society. She met with retirees to discuss their experiences with geriatric discrimination. In 1971, Kuhn organized the Consultation of Older and Younger Adults for Social Change, which a journalist nicknamed the “ Gray Panthers.” The group, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, joined with others in protesting the VIETNAM WAR but soon focused its efforts on ending housing and employment discrimination against the elderly.

Margaret Kuhn was a social activist who organized the Gray Panthers.

Kuhn campaigned for a national HEALTH care system and sought legislation assuring free care for the elderly. She demanded protection for Social Security benefi ts and implementation of federal nursing home reform. She also defended the image of senior citizens by criticizing the media for bias and stereotypes in its portrayals. Kuhn died on April 22, 1995, in Philadelphia. See also: Old Age and Mortality.

L LEAGUE OF WOMEN  VOTERS Founded in 1920, the successor to the N ATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE A SSOCIATION (see Volume 2), the league (LWV) is a nonpartisan political organization that informs

citizens and encourages them to participate in government. With the ratification of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, the old suffrage organizations shifted their attention to the needs of the new woman voter. Having gained the right to vote,

L I T E R AT U R E

women needed to use it wisely, and local leagues assumed the duties of educating women about the political process. They published booklets describing the structure and function of local government. They held candidate forums around elections. As a nonpartisan organization, they advocated for issues that they believed benefited women. The League was one of several national women’s organizations to form the WOMEN’ S JOINT CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE and to support passage of the MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT. For a brief period, it was among the most influential lobbies in Washington, D.C. The LWV not only provided voters with information on issues and candidates, but also became the training ground for women to run for political office. During the years after W ORLD WAR II and before the Second Wave of the women’s movement, many female officeholders said it was the League of Women Voters that gave them their initial political education. Among the guiding principles of the modern organization are universal protection of the right to vote, free public EDUCATION, and equal opportunity free from discrimination. Over the past 80 years, it has also developed positions on broad, national issues through a process of research, discussion, and consensus. Local and state chapters have put these principles into action by supporting projects such as campaign fi nance reform, environmental cleanup, civil rights, and the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (see Documents).

 LESBIANS

Women whose sexual preference is other women. Lesbians have played infl uential roles throughout the history of the United States, although their sexuality was often kept a secret. Lesbians entered the twentieth century as members of a taboo underground and emerged as a diverse and powerful lobbying force, promoting freedom of sexual preference and frequently, women’s rights. By the 1920s, lesbians had articulated an identity based on sexual difference and the idea of sexual choice. FEMINIST groups such as Heterodoxy had formed, and many of its members were openly lesbian. A lesbian counterculture began to emerge. In popular culture, lesbian characters began appearing in plays and novels. These representations were not always created

by lesbians or gay-friendly individuals, and reception was mixed. Lesbian bars provided space for lesbians to build a community. Mona’s, which opened in 1936 in San Francisco, is thought to be one of the fi rst. Also, publications serving the lesbian community emerged. The fi rst was Edythe Eyde’s Vice Versa, published under the pseudonym Lisa Ben, in 1947. It was not until the 1950s that lesbian and gay organizations gained higher visibility. One of the fi rst groups to promote a homosexual collective history and identity was the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950. In 1955, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon formed the DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS (DOB) in San Francisco. Originally a social club, the DOB quickly became political. Its goal was to fully integrate lesbians into society and to fi ght stereotypes and discrimination. As the 1960s liberalizing mood prevailed, a gay rights movement emerged alongside the civil rights movement. The fi rst mass lesbian and gay public protest was by the New York League for Sexual Freedom in 1964, against recent military discharges for homosexuals. A watershed in lesbian and gay rights were the Stonewall riots. When police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969, the crowds fought back and smaller riots fl ared up afterwards. Today, there are lesbian groups to advocate on behalf of a diverse population. From militant lesbian groups to organizations for lesbians of color, they aggressively lobby for exposure, resources, and rights. Openly lesbian entertainers, politicians, religious leaders, and other public fi gures push for recognition and equality. Despite continued prejudice, homosexuals have won small legislative victories. Hawaii and Vermont now allow same-sex marriage, and many companies and corporations have adopted antidiscrimination policies against gays and lesbians, as well as domestic partnership policies.

 LITERATURE

The literature of the United States in the twentieth century can be characterized overall as a break from traditional themes and writing conventions, infl uenced by the perceived disorder of the world. As a result of WORLD WAR I and the GREAT DEPRESSION, American culture turned from idealism to cynicism where people

4

L I T E R AT U R E

questioned tradition and the “ AmerTRAILBLAZERS ican Dream.” Whereas the United States had once been perceived as a The first African-American woman to have a play produced on land of opportunity where anyone Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Lorraine Vivian who worked hard could gain wealth, status, and a higher standard of livHansberry brought to the American stage a realistic perspecing, this optimism was crushed untive on black life that began a vigorous movement in the nader disillusionment. tion’s theater arts. The success of her play also opened the way The literature of the early twenfor black writers, actors, and producers in unprecedented tieth century was dominated by male numbers. The story of a family in Chicago that attempts to move writers and mirrored changes in into a white neighborhood, A Raisin in the Sun— with Sidney American values, philosophies, and Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ruby Dee, and Louis Goslifestyles. PROHIBITION in the 1920s sett– – won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best gave rise to gangsterism and moral play of 1959. It was later made into a movie (1961) and a stage corruption. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s musical (1973). Hansberry’s only other finished work, The Sign novel The Great Gatsby summed up in Sidney Brustein’s Window, had a brief run in 1964. “ The Jazz Age” and criticized a sociWhile never militant, Lorraine Hansberry was committed ety obsessed with wealth and status, to civil rights throughout her life. Born on the South Side of neither of which seemed to bring Chicago in 1930, she was the daughter of a real estate broker anybody happiness. Fitzgerald’s and banker who challenged the city’s discriminatory housing wife, Zelda, was also a capable writer policies. When Lorraine was eight years old, the family moved but was unrecognized for her talents into a formerly segregated until the 1970s. The stock market neighborhood and was crash of 1929 and the rise of Marxsubjected to ridicule, vioist socialism threatened the capitalislence, and, finally, eviction. tic ideal. As a result, more and more Her father sued and evenwriters began to question industrialtually prevailed in a landization. With the rise of the “ protest mark Supreme Court rulnovel,” authors like John Steinbeck ing against restrictive cove(The Grapes of Wrath, 1939) quesnants, Hansberry v. Lee tioned the quality of life in a country where the lives of working-class (1940). Lorraine studied people were reduced to poverty. In drama at the University of psychology, Sigmund Freud’s theory Wisconsin and moved to of the subconscious caused anxiety New York to pursue her cathat people might not be in complete reer as a playwright. She control over their minds. Its infl uwas married to the songence on literary form is most notable writer and music publisher in the use of stream of consciousness Robert Nemiroff, who edited narration and nonchronological her autobiographical writLorraine Hansberry’ s A Raisin in the plots, which forced the reader to ings for the posthumous Sun (1959) was the first play by an piece together fragments of percepTo Be Young, Gifted, and African-American woman to be tion and time. Such techniques were Black (1969). Hansberry produced on Broadway. It was used by fi ction writers such as died of cancer in 1965 at released as a motion picture in Katherine Ann Porter and William age 34. 1961. Faulkner, whose stories focused on the disintegration of the American South, a society both unable to grasp Northern industrialism and unable Imagist poets, led by Ezra Pound, felt that imto let go of traditional customs. agery alone could carry a poem’s emotion and In poetry, the focus moved away from tradimessage, and attempted to outline an exact vitional metrics, stanza patterns, and themes. sual image through use of precise language and

LOPEZ, JESSIE DE LA CRUZ

poetic images. Other notable imagTRAILBLAZERS ists include Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and GERTRUDE STEIN. In 1993, Toni Morrison (b. 1931) became the first AfricanAt the same time, Modernism was American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrising in popularity with its experimental forms and themes, and the rison’s characters struggle to find their own cultural identities HARLEM RENAISSANCE was occurring, within the confines of an unjust society. The Swedish Acadgiving African Americans a voice in emy of Letters, in awarding Morrison the Nobel Prize, deAmerican literature. The stories of scribed her style as poetic, an exploration of “ the language itZORA NEALE HURSTON, including her self, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race.” most famous work, Their Eyes Were Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987) reWatching God (1937), borrowed heavlies on the supernatural and African-American folklore to conily from African-American folk travey the story of a runaway slave who, at the point of capture, ditions. Themes in the literature of kills her newborn daughter to spare the child a life of slavery. Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Morrison’s use of violence to communicate the black struggle Sun, 1959) often focused on feelings in a racist society is also used in her first novel, The Bluest of alienation. Eye (1970). The protagonist, a young girl victimized by her After WORLD WAR II, disillufather, is obsessed with white standards of beauty; her only sionment turned to a fascination wish is to have blue eyes. Yet while Morrison’s work always with the chaotic and irrational. contains the rage and despair that accompany social deterWriters turned to dark humor and minism, it also embraces hope. absurdism to convey the times in Toni Morrison earned her B.A. in English from Howard which they lived. Flannery O’ConUniversity in 1953 and her M.A. in English from Cornell Uninor, a writer of the Southern Gothic versity in 1955. She currently teaches creative writing at genre, wrote about violence and Princeton University, and was named the Robert F. Goheen the grotesque in collections such as professor in the Council of Humanities in 1989. She has also A Good Man is Hard to Find. Also folheld teaching positions at Yale University and the University lowing the gothic tradition is conof New York at Albany. Her many works also include Sula temporary writer Joyce Carol Oates (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Jazz (1992) (Where Are You Going, Where Have and Paradise (1998). You Been?, 1993), whose stories analyze the sociopathy and psychology of everyday life in the United States. The 1960s saw a rise in confessional poetry, in picted the world as they knew it; irrational, unwhich authors such as SYLVIA PLATH and Anne predictable, and in need of reform. Sexton penned frank poems about their own lives. It also saw a rise the amount of published See also: Brown, Rita Mae; Cather, Willa; Kingston, literature written by women, and by the 1980s, Maxine Hong; Walker, Alice; Wharton, Edith. women of various cultural backgrounds were thriving in the book industry. Today, some of the best-known woman authors include AMY TAN LOPEZ, JESSIE DE LA CRUZ (The Joy Luck Club, 1989); Jamaica Kincaid (Annie (b. 1919) John, 1986); Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace, Labor organizer. Born in 1919 to a single mother 1994); SANDRA CISNEROS (The House on Mango in Anaheim, California, Jesusita Lopez was Street, 1984); and Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, unable to attend school. Instead, she worked 1970). The writings of these and other women year-round as a migrant worker to support her have increased awareness of multicultural issues family. in the United States. In 1938, she married another migrant Overall, the literature of the twentieth cenworker, Arnold de la Cruz. Together they had tury refl ected a constant fl ux in economic, social, fi ve children and followed crops for work in scientifi c, and personal issues. Its pioneers de-



LORDE, AUDRE

California. In December 1964, they met with labor organizer Cesar Chavez, who recruited Arnold to join the farm workers organizing movement. Chavez occasionally used Jessie’s home to hold meetings, and she eventually became an organizer for the farm workers union also, traveling to promote it and collect dues. Between 1965 and 1972, Lopez signed more members than any other organizer. In September 1965, Lopez joined Chavez’s American Farm Workers (AFW) in a Filipino grape farm workers’ strike in Delano, California. In 1966, after grape growers sprayed striking workers with agricultural poisons, Chavez organized a 250mile march from Delano to Sacramento in protest, which Lopez also joined. In 1966, Lopez began teaching practical engineering to help grow better crops and hosted a show on Fresno public television. She also continued to organize for the AFW. In 1971, DOLORES FERNANDEZ HUERTA asked for her help to negotiate with Christian Brothers growers. In 1972, Lopez represented the growers at the fi rst convention of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) in Fresno. That same year, she was a delegate to the Democratic national convention. Lopez and her husband purchased their own acres for a cooperative farm that supported equitable practices and fair payment for labor in 1974. Arnold died in 1990 and Chavez in 1993, but Lopez continues to support and organize for the UFW while sitting on the Board of California Rural Legal Assistance and living in Fresno.

 LORDE, AUDRE

(1934– 1992) African-American feminist writer. Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934, to immigrants from Granada. She attended Manhattan Catholic schools and graduated from Hunter College in 1959. She received a masters in library science from Columbia in 1961. While working as a librarian, she married Edward Ashley Rollins in 1962. They had two children but divorced in 1970. In 1968, Lorde’s life changed dramatically when she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She became the poetin-residence at Tougaloo College a small AFRICAN-AMERICAN college in Mississippi. There, she published her fi rst book of poems, The First Cities, in 1968. Her most popular volume is the

1978 The Black Unicorn, poems of empowerment for African-American women that draw on images of African goddesses. Another volume, From a Land Where Other People Live, was nominated for a 1974 National Book Award. Lorde described herself as a black, feminist, lesbian, mother poet. This characterization indicates her strong commitment to exploring her various identities while fi ghting against the marginalization of each. She wanted to give a voice to African-American women and lesbians, and fi ght against racism and sexism. Lorde chronicled another battle, her fi ght against breast cancer, in 1980 in The Cancer Journals. Although she survived breast cancer, she died of liver cancer on November 17, 1992, in New York.

 LOVING

V. VIRGINIA A 1967 Supreme Court case reversing the ruling against interracial marriage by a Virginia court. In June 1958, neighbors and teenage sweethearts Mildred Jeter, an AFRICAN-AMERICAN woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, married in Washington, D.C., because Virginia law banned interracial marriage. Shortly after they returned home to Virginia, they were arrested for “ unlawful habitation” and charged in the circuit court with violating Virginia’s ANTI-MISCEGENATION law. They were sentenced to one year in prison in 1959 by presiding Judge Leon Basile who based his ruling on an alleged separation of the races as ordained by God. Later, Basile suspended the sentence, providing that the Lovings left the state of Virginia and not return for 25 years. The Lovings moved to Washington, D.C., but returned to Virginia and were forced to live apart. In 1963, the Lovings fi led a motion to vacate their sentences in the Virginia Supreme Court, which upheld the previous court's ruling. With the help of the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, the Loving case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion reversing the decision, he wrote that the Lovings were deprived their due process rights and that the freedom to marry was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Loving case led to 16 states abolishing their anti-miscegenation laws, and states who did not were unable to enforce such laws in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

M CDA N I E L , H AT T I E

 LYND, HELEN MERRELL

(1894– 1982) Sociologist. Lynd and her partner husband were the fi rst to apply the methods of cultural anthropology to the study of urban life. During the 1920s, Helen M. and Robert S. Lynd examined the social makeup and traditions of Muncie, Indiana. As part of their survey, they looked at the changing roles of women and men in marriage and family life. They reported that all of the social classes they studied believed that romantic love was the only basis for marriage, but that after marriage husbands and wives typically had few interests in common and were as emotionally distant as married couples of the 1800s. The

7

Lynds wrote about their Muncie research in Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929)—what they called an examination of “ pure” American life “ unpolluted” by racial and religious minorities. Later, they studied the social changes that took place as a result of the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s and the advent of the automobile in Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Confl icts (1937). These books became classics. Lynd taught at Sarah Lawrence College in New York from 1929 to 1964. She also wrote, independently of her husband, such books as On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958) and Toward Discovery (1965).

M  McCLINTOCK, BARBARA

(1902– 1992) Scientist. Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Cornell University, from which she received her bachelor’s degree in 1923 and a doctorate in Botany in 1927. She taught and conducted research at Cornell from 1927 to 1931 and from 1934 to 1936. In between she was a fellow at the National Research Council and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1936, she became an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. During these years, McClintock was studying genes in maize kernels. In 1942, she joined the staff of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Her continued genetic research there proved that genes can move on chromosomes and between them. At fi rst, other scientists did not believe her fi ndings, but eventually further research proved them true. McClintock’s work, which helped researchers understand how genetic traits are inherited, won her a Nobel Prize in 1983. She was the fi rst American woman to win the prize on her own, not as part of a scientifi c team. McClintock continued working as a member of the staff at Cold Spring Harbor until she died in 1992.

 McDANIEL, HATTIE

(1895 – 1952) Singer, composer, radio performer, and actress. She was the fi rst African American to receive an Oscar. Hattie McDaniel became one of the most widely recognized and controversial American entertainers. McDaniel was born on June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas. She was the thirteenth child of Henry McDaniel, a Baptist minister and minstrel performer, and Susan Holbert McDaniel. In 1908, when she was 13 years old, McDaniel began her professional career. She performed in minstrel shows, a popular form of vaudeville that depicted African-American songs and dances in stereotypical ways. She dropped out of high school in 1910 to perform full time with minstrel groups throughout the Western states, often with her father’s “ Henry McDaniel Minstrel Show.” During the 1920s McDaniel developed her singing career through the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) and recorded her original compositions on the Okeh and Paramount labels. After the 1929 stock market crash the TOBA folded, leaving McDaniel without work. In 1931 she moved to Los Angeles.

MAGAZINES, WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’

In California McDaniel worked washing dishes while she picked up radio show and movie parts playing housemaids, almost the only roles available to African-American actresses at that time. At fi rst she earned just $5.00 per fi lm and radio show. McDaniel’s talents earned her the parts of Mom Beck in The Little Colonel (1935) with Shirley Temple, Malena Burns in Alice Adams (1935) with Katharine Hepburn, and Queenie in Showboat (1936). These roles in major Hollywood movies gave McDaniel national prominence. By 1937 she had appeared in more than 50 feature fi lms and shorts. In 1939 McDaniel received the part of Mammy, a loyal house slave, in David Selznick’s fi lm adaptation of the best-selling novel, Gone with the Wind, by MARGARET MITCHELL. The role earned McDaniel $500 a week, an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and a highprofi le position in Hollywood’s romanticized depiction of racial oppression during slavery. Her Mammy role typecast McDaniel and made her a prime target for African-American leaders’ criticism of actors who perpetuated racist stereotypes. During the 1940s McDaniel struggled to maintain her professional success and improve her reputation among African-American leaders. She achieved both with “ The Beulah Show,” a nationally broadcast radio program that aired from 1947 to 1952 and later became a television show. In Beulah, the fi rst starring role on radio for an AfricanAmerican woman, McDaniel had a chance to play a complete character instead of a racial stereotype. Throughout her life, McDaniel’s success was tempered by professional and personal difficulty. She appeared in over 300 fi lms, but most often in housemaid roles. McDaniel defended her career by saying that she would rather play a maid than be one. She endured four failed marriages and serious depression in 1944 following a false pregnancy. McDaniel died of breast cancer on October 26, 1952.

MAGAZINES, WOMEN’S  AND GIRLS’ Throughout the twentieth century, women’s mass-circulation magazines played a major role in the lives of millions of American women. Advertisers realized that women made many of the buying decisions in their households, and

publishers realized that there were few publications aimed at women. Two of the most popular magazines early in the century were the Ladies’ Home Journal, which began in 1883, and Good Housekeeping, which began in 1885. The Delineator, which ran from 1863 to 1937, introduced the fashion magazine. In the second half of the twentieth century, seven titles (known as the Seven Sisters) became the largest circulators: Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook, and Women’s Day. These magazines published reliable service departments, fi ction, and investigative reporting. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (see Documents), which examined the messages found in 1950s women’s magazines. She compared these feminine stereotypes with those of the preceding decades, and she discovered what she called “ the problem that had no name,” an epidemic of unhappiness among largely college-educated women who seemed to have it all. Joanne Meyerowitz has argued that Friedan selectively cited fi ction articles, overlooking prewar stories lauding housewifery and postwar stories praising career women. The dominance of the Seven Sisters came to an end in the late 1970s due to a change in women’s lifestyles and the appearance of audience-specifi c magazines. The number of girls’ magazines grew in the 1980s and 1990s. Magazines like Teen, Seventeen, and YM had dominated the market. Trying to reach as many girls as possible, media companies launched a new series of magazines aimed at teens such as Teen People and Cosmo Girl! Women’s and girls’ magazines have come under fi re for presenting superfi cial topics and unrealistic body images. Fashion magazines have received the most criticism, although beginning in the late 1970s, more diverse models began appearing on the cover of major magazines. But for all the negative images of women in the media, the trend is slowly reversing. A growing niche market has meant new publications for women that have rejected sexist images and stereotypes. Magazines like Jane and Marie Claire have been credited with stretching the boundaries of the traditional women’s magazine with more thoughtful articles. In addition, there are more business publications aimed at women, such as Working Woman, founded in 1975.

MARRIAGE

9

MANA, A NATIONAL  LATINA ORGANIZATION Founded in 1974 as the Mexican American Women’s National Association, this nonprofi t advocacy organization has expanded to include all Latinas within its membership and agenda. Originally, the organization provided a platform for Mexican-American women, but today the organization has a mission that is both more encompassing and better defi ned. An autonomous organization committed to social activism and self-defi nition, MANA supports educational opportunities for women and girls, helps develop leadership skills, promotes community service, and shares knowledge about Latin cultures and women’s contributions to them. The organization sponsors a program, “ Las Primeras,® ” to recognize Latinas who have been the fi rst to achieve recognition in their fi eld. Members also serve as mentors to young women in the program HERMANITAS® (little sisters).

 MARRIAGE

Magazines for women and girls played an important role in American culture throughout the twentieth century.

Mass market magazines aimed at AfricanAmerican women achieved prominence in the 1970s with Essence Magazine. Similar publications were introduced in the 1980s. Feminist publications saw growth in the late 1960s before seeing circulation drop off in the 1980s. GLORIA STEINEM founded MS. MAGAZINE in 1972 as a feminist publication and later converted it to a noadvertising publication to avoid the impact of sexist advertising on its content. After several years of struggling for funding, Steinem took control in 1999 and stopped advertising, relying largely on subscription revenues. See also: “ Women and the Media,” p. 27. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.

When a man and a woman, in a religious or civil ceremony, vow to live together as husband and wife. During the early part of the twentieth century, many women aspired only to be married. Woman had few career options, and fi nding men to support them was essential to economical survival. Divorce was not common. Married women tended the house and raised their children while husbands worked outside the home. Today, according to the 2000 Census, only 25 percent of the population is composed of married couples who live with children of that marriage. Blended families, single parents, and people living on their own make up the rest. While the median marriage age for women in 1970 was about 21 years old, by 2000 it was 25.1. Furthermore, 22 percent of women ages 30 to 34 have never married. In 1970 that fi gure was only 6 percent. Many women are opting to stay single because they have more education and career options than previous generations and can, therefore, support themselves fi nancially. Attitudes about marriage and the role of women changed gradually and are still evolving, but one person credited for bringing the topic of marriage to the world’s attention is BETTY FRIEDAN, author of The Feminine Mystique (see Documents). This 1963 book depicted many

MARTIN, ANNE

women who were dissatisfi ed working as housewives. Many felt they had sacrifi ced their personal dreams to fulfi ll family obligations. Friedan criticized advertisers who portrayed women as subservient housewives in television commercials, promoting the concept that women were satisfi ed with this role. Her book helped start a revolution, and Friedan would become the fi rst president of the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW). The organization pushed for equal pay, equal job opportunities, access to birth control, and legalized abortion. By the latter part of the twentieth century, many married women were working outside the home. But now they found themselves doing everything—going to work for several hours a day, then coming home at night to cook dinner, clean house, and tend to their children as well as their husbands. The changing concept of marriage and its responsibilities created friction in households. Divorce became more common, and therefore more socially acceptable. In 1970 there were 3 million single mothers; in 2000 there were 10 million.

 MARTIN, ANNE

(1875– 1951) Suffragist, feminist, author. Anne Henrietta Martin was an important leader in the Western campaigns orchestrated by the NATIONAL WOMAN’ S PARTY. She led Nevada’s successful suffrage campaign in 1914 and ran for the U.S. Senate unsuccessfully. Born in Empire City, Nevada, in 1875, Martin received bachelor’s degrees from both the University of Nevada and Stanford University. In 1897, she completed an A.M. in history at Stanford. She founded and led the history department at the University of Nevada. Then in 1909 she departed for Europe to participate in the militant branch of the British SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. After two years, she returned to the United States to continue her work for women’s right to vote. She assumed the presidency of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society in 1912 and led the victorious state campaign in 1914. She coordinated a drive to defeat candidates of “ the party in power” as president of the Woman’s Party of Western Voters in 1916 and was elected vice chair of the new National Woman’s Party in 1917. In 1918 and 1920, Martin campaigned for the U.S. Senate as an Independent from Nevada. She lost

but drew 20 percent of the vote with a platform that supported sexual equality, prohibition, and public ownership of utilities. During the 1920s and 1930s, Martin devoted her time to PACIFIST activities and worked with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She moved to California in 1921 and died in Carmel in 1951.

 MARTIN, LYNN MORLEY

(b. 1939) Politician and educator. Judith Lynn Morley was born in Evanston, Illinois, and went to the University of Illinois, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1960. That same year she married John Martin and over the next nine years the couple had two children. Martin taught school before entering politics in 1972, when she was elected to the Winnebago County Board. Four years later, Martin, a Republican, won a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. In 1978, she became a state senator and helped reform conditions in Illinois nursing homes. In 1980, when the congressman in her district retired, Martin won the election to fi ll his seat in Congress where she served for ten years. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush appointed her secretary of labor. As secretary, Martin helped enlarge vocational training programs and also established the Glass Ceiling Commission to study the barriers to women who sought promotion in corporations and other organizations. After leaving office, Martin became a professor at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

 MATERNALISM

The belief that motherhood ascribes special rights, responsibilities, and authority to women. The idea gained tremendous popularity during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, although strands of maternalism may be found throughout the 1900s. Maternalism incorporates a set of ideas and corresponding values that reinforce essentialist ideas about the sexes. The primary assumption underpinning maternalist views is the idea that one’s sex carries social and cultural characteristics that are specifi c and different from the opposite sex. For example, if women have the nat-

MERITOR S AVINGS BANK v. VINSON

ural potential to give birth, all women are more nurturing than men, better able to care for and raise children, and born with a greater aptitude to understand and conduct the workings of a family. It reinforced ideas that society’s interests were best served when women became mothers and used their talents to rear children. A public aspect of maternalism exists as well. Those who believed that women had innate qualities that made them better qualifi ed to care for children and families would, by extension, fi nd women best suited for jobs as teachers, healers, sanitation directors, and community welfare directors, for example. Similarly, women’s organizations or individuals used maternalist arguments to further civic causes, such as clean water and public sanitation, or the benefi ts of programs such as MOTHERS’ PENSIONS and AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN. During the second half of the 1900s, one could still fi nd maternalist arguments in movements to end nuclear testing, the war in Vietnam, or drunk driving. See also: National Congress of Mothers.

MATERNITY AND INFANCY  PROTECTION ACT The fi rst federally funded social welfare legislation in the United States. The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 was written by Julia Lathrop, the fi rst director of the CHILDREN’ S BUREAU, and introduced in the House of Representatives by Jeannette Rankin, the fi rst woman to serve in Congress. President Warren Harding signed the act into law in 1921, shortly after taking office in the fi rst election in which women could vote. The purpose of the legislation was to provide federal matching funds to states so they, in turn, could provide services to mothers and their children. States used the funds to establish standards for infant care, education for pregnant women and new mothers, and training for midwives. The Sheppard-Towner Act was repealed in 1929 as a result of pressure from the American Medical Association and other groups that feared this law was the fi rst step toward socialized medicine. Although short-lived, the law marked the fi rst time the federal government accepted responsibility for the welfare of women and children. Some of the provisions of the law found

their way into NEW DEAL programs during the Depression. Later efforts by the Children’s Bureau led to funding of maternity services for the wives of military men and other public health initiatives aimed at mothers and children.

 MENOPAUSE

Often called “ change of life,” menopause is the cessation of ovulation and menstruation in middle-aged and older women. In a broader sense, menopause is a time when women begin to experience changes in the production of sex hormones, and this frequently begins with a change in menstrual patterns. There may be a signifi cant reduction in monthly discharge, and monthly periods may be skipped or become irregular. Eventually, menstruation stops entirely. These changes may also be accompanied by other physical characteristics. Some women experience “ hot fl ashes,” the sensation of feeling warm when environmental conditions do not warrant it. Others experience mood fl uctuations, headaches, dizziness, or weakness. Some symptoms are severe enough to warrant medical attention. Estrogen Replacement Therapy is a treatment in which women are given estrogen, balanced with progesterone, in pill form, to replace the loss of the estrogen hormone and thus alleviate some of these symptoms. It is important to note that many women who experience menopause do so without any of the problems described above. In fact, some women are relieved to stop menstruating and enjoy the freedom that comes with no longer having to be concerned about getting pregnant.

MERITOR SAVINGS BANK  VINSON

V.

A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case that played a key role in the fi ght against SEXUAL HARASSMENT in the workplace. The case was brought by Mechelle Vinson, a teller at Meritor Savings Bank, who claimed that her manager coerced her into having sex with him. In 1986, the Court ruled against Meritor Savings Bank, saying that the bank was responsible for the sexual harassment of its employees. In reaching its decision, the Court relied on guidelines the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had issued in 1980. The Court noted that there are two types of sexual harassment. One

MIDWIFERY

is called quid pro quo (“ something for something” ); for example, a supervisor attempts to trade promotions, higher pay, or more favorable work assignments for sexual favors. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, though, strengthened laws protecting workers from another form of sexual harassment: the “ hostile work environment.” This term refers to an ongoing pattern of verbal or physical sexual conduct that a “ reasonable” person would fi nd offensive. Examples include making comments about one’s anatomy; displaying pornographic material; telling off-color jokes; referring to women in a derogatory way; or touching, pinching, or slapping. After Meritor, employees subjected to a hostile work environment could sue for damages without having to show that they were required to submit to sexual advances as a condition of employment.

 MIDWIFERY

From colonial times through the eighteenth century, most babies born in America were delivered by midwives. Beginning in about 1760, doctors became more involved in the birthing process, and by the end of the nineteenth century, most middle-class women chose doctors to deliver their babies. By the fi rst quarter of the twentieth century, only poor and immigrant women continued to use midwives. In 1925 the Frontier Nursing Service, founded by Mary Breckinridge, introduced the British model of the nurse-midwife in the United States, and in 1931 a program at the Lobenstine clinic was founded to educate nurse-midwives to care for disadvantaged women in New York City. Despite these initiatives, from the 1930s through the 1960s, midwife-assisted births were primarily confi ned to poor TRAILBLAZERS African-American and Hispanic women. By the early 1970s, though, some Descended from a distinguished Kentucky family– – her father women had become dissatisfi ed with was a congressman and her grandfather, John Cabell Breckthe medical model of childbirth, leadenridge, had been vice president of the United States under ing to a renewed interest in midJames Buchanan––Ma ry Breckinridge (1881–1 965) overcame wifery. Today there are two primary tragedy in her own life to become a pioneer of public-health kinds of midwives: nurse-midwives, nursing and midwifery services for rural America. After the who are medically educated, and lay deaths of her husband and her two children, she devoted her midwives, who have learned their energies to nursing and “ raising the status of childhood everycraft by experience. A number of where.” She studied nursing at St. Luke’s Hospital in New studies conducted in the 1980s and York City and traveled to France as a Red Cross volunteer af1990s confi rm that there are no ter WORLD WAR I. The success of visiting nursing services for health risks to mothers or babies aswomen and children in Europe convinced her that public sociated with midwife-assisted delivhealth and midwifery programs could––a nd should–– eries. In fact, midwife-assisted debe established in the rural United States. liveries may even confer certain In 1925, Breckinridge started the Kentucky Committee for advantages. For example, recent Mothers and Babies in eastern Kentucky. Introducing familystudies have shown that babies delivered by midwives weigh more at birth health, prenatal, and midwifery services to poor, isolated arand that mothers are less likely to eas in the Appalachian Mountains, the organization sent have Cesarean sections. nurses on horseback to remote outposts, set up district nurs-

ing facilities, and eventually built a teaching hospital– – today the Mary Breckinridge Hospital in Hyden. Renamed the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in 1928, the organization reached more than 1,000 rural families in the first five years. Breckinridge kept careful records on childbirth mortality and demonstrated the success of her services. The rate of death in childbirth for Leslie County, Kentucky, fell from the highest in the country to below the national average. “ The glorious thing,” she said on her deathbed, “ is that it works!”

 MILITARY SERVICE

Although women had participated in every American war since colonial days, their formal entrance into the U.S. military began at the start of the twentieth century. In 1901, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Congress created the Army Nurse Corps (ANC). The 1,600 civil-

M I L I TA R Y S E R V I C E

ian women who had contracted with the military as nurses in that war proved vital, and the War Department recommended the ANC's creation to Congress. Based on the assumption that all nurses are female, the aim of the legislation was to make these women quickly available to the military command when the next emergency occurred. The peacetime planning for war and the inclusion of women continued with the 1908 authorization of the Navy Nurse Corps (NNC). The NNC differed signifi cantly from the ANC in that the women had greater responsibility and higher status; instead of carrying bedpans and changing sheets, NNC women supervised male paramedics who did the menial tasks. Nurses spent their time as administrators and especially as teachers; they trained the young men who would work on combat ships where women were not allowed. Members of both the ANC and NNC were treated as officers, but equality with men was far from complete. Nurses had to meet more stringent educational and age requirements; they were not officially commissioned, did not receive full benefi ts, and faced many rules that did not apply to men. Nor did the women who had the difficult assignment of creating these unprecedented corps receive the support they merited. Neither Dita H. Kinney, the fi rst head of the ANC, nor Esther Vorhees of the NNC had any official rank; instead, both were genteelly addressed as “ director.” WORLD WAR I began less than a decade later. Although it was little noted, a number of women joined the military itself during this war. The Navy, desperate for clerical workers in Washington, D.C., researched its enlistment law and discovered that there was no legal barrier to recruiting women. The call went out, and some 12,500 women quickly enlisted, beginning in August 1918. The war ended that November, but the women worked on clearing the paperwork through 1919. The Navy’s law also applied to the Marine Corps, and thousands of women applied; the corps accepted only 305. Both these “ Marinettes” and the Navy’s “ Yeomen” (females) dressed in skirted khaki uniforms and performed in marches and drills. This highly visible training, which took place on parade grounds in Washington, was not necessary to the women's jobs but was used as a recruiting ploy to lure men into enlisting. Both the Marine and Navy groups were dissolved after the war ended, but the two NURSING corps continued. With the onset of WORLD WAR

II, the model for non-nursing women was quickly revived by those who remembered it from the previous war, including fi rst lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT and several congresswomen. Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced legislation to create the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC); Maine Representative MARGARET CHASE SMITH would become known as the mother of the Navy’s WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR EMERGENCY VOLUNTEER SERVICE (WAVES); and Representative Frances Bolton of Ohio functioned in the same role for the nursing corps. Rogers introduced her bill to create the WAAC in May 1941, but it was not until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December that the War Department took it seriously. Congressional hearings were held in March 1942 and, after extensive debate, both the House and Senate passed the bill by May. The new law preserved the auxiliary status of the corps, a serious fl aw in the eyes of many, but that did not deter the thousands of women eager to join. By mid-1943, when Congress reconsidered its decision and renamed it the WOMEN'S ARMY CORPS (WAC), tens of thousands of women had enlisted. The woman appointed to head the new institution was Oveta Culp Hobby of Texas, who was heavily scrutinized and highly praised for her efforts. Benefi ting from the Army’s experience, the Navy bypassed the auxiliary status of its women and the pejoratives associated with Army term “ wack.” The Navy’s female unit would be called WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR VOLUNTARY EMERGENCY SERVICE (WAVES). The third women’s military unit was the Coast Guard's SPARS, which began November 22, 1942. (SPARS is an acronym of the fi rst letters of the Coast Guard motto, “ Semper Paratus,” and its English translation, “ Always Ready.” ) Like the Coast Guard itself, the SPARS remained small, with fewer than 10,000 members, compared with more than 100,000 each in the WAC and WAVES. Like the Coast Guard, the Marine Corps was a subdivision of the Navy. The Marines were the last U.S. military service to create a unit for women. Called simply the Women’s Marines, it was launched on January 28, 1943. Some 20,000 women enlisted, despite notoriously tough training requirements. The WAVES and SPARS did not accept black women until late in the war and the Women Marines never did, but Oveta Hobby assured a

4

M I L I TA R Y S E R V I C E

place for them in the WAC immediately on its formation; moreover, she saw to it that black WACs were assigned to occupational, rather than menial, categories. Navy women were not permitted to go abroad until late in the war, when they were sent to relatively safe areas, but WACs were on the beachheads of North Africa as early as 1942. Some landed in Italy with the men, while others moved from camps in Great Britain to the Normandy invasion; still others served in the Pacifi c theater. WACs worked as radio transmitters, translators, air controllers, mechanics, photographers, cartographers, and other specialists, often only a few miles from front lines. The women most likely to be closest to battle, of course, were the Army Nurse Corps, who served throughout the world. Almost 100 ANC women spent the war fi ghting off starvation in a Manila prisoner-of-war camp; they had been captured early in 1942, when Corregidor fell. The Air Force was still part of the Army during World War II, and the two units that used the skills of female fl iers had only a quasi-military status. The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) began in September 1942 under veteran pilot Nancy Harkness Love; it was eventually absorbed by the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) under aviation legend Jacqueline Cochran (who won several major races in the 1930s). By the spring of 1944, WASPs had fl own 30 million dangerous miles. The requirements for joining this elite group were so high that there were never more than about 2,000 WASPs, but more women died in this unit than in any other. Thirty-eight were killed in the line of duty; their families received no benefi ts, and in at least one case, WASPs had to take up a collection to pay for a comrade’s funeral. The War Department canceled the program at the end of 1944. With victory in sight, male pilots sought the most prestigious fl ying assignments. Most Americans expected that all non-nursing women's units would be disbanded when the war was over, but military commanders found repeatedly that while they wanted to discharge women in general, there was a reason why this or that particular woman was an asset to the task at hand. By 1948, three years after the war’s end, Congress passed the WOMEN’ S ARMED SERVICES INTEGRATION ACT, formalizing the place of non-nursing women in the peacetime military. At the same time, the Air Force separated from the Army, and its female unit was renamed the Women’s Air Force (WAF).

Although the 1948 legislation was a milestone, women were limited to 2 percent of total U.S. armed forces, and their rank and occupational choices were restricted. Women’s place in the military was to be a narrow one, and few noticed President Harry S Truman’s 1950 appointment of Anna Rosenberg as assistant secretary of defense. Nevertheless, military women continued to push for an expansion of their service opportunities. The Korean War set a precedent. For the fi rst time in U.S. history, women were called to involuntary duty like men, and 13 platoons of Women Marines were mobilized. Between 1950 and 1955, 120,000 women served. Most were stationed on U.S. soil, but nurses assigned to Korea saw tremendous action. This was especially true for Air Force nurses who worked evacuation units. The VIETNAM WAR was the last in which women served in a clearly secondary, gender-segregated capacity. To have women killed in this highly unpopular war would have been politically damaging. Most of the approximately 11,000 women who went to Vietnam were nurses; about 250,000 women served elsewhere during the war. At the same time, the women's movement was creating far-reaching change in civilian society, and the military followed suit during the 1970s and 1980s. The fi rst visible change was in the rank of commanders. Hundreds of thousands of women had served in the ANC since its creation in 1901, and the chiefs of the WAC and the WAVES during World War II had each commanded 100,000 women. Still, no women had been promoted beyond colonel, a rank sometimes held by officers who command as few as 500 men. On June 11, 1970, ANC chief Anna Mae Hayes and WAC commander Elizabeth P. Hoisington were promoted to brigadier generals. The Air Force followed the next year by promoting Jeanne Holm to director of the WAF and in 1973 to major general. The Navy was last, promoting Alene Duerk, commander of the Navy Nurse Corps, to the rank of admiral in 1972. The Marine Corps did not promote a woman to its highest ranks but did set a precedent in 1971 when barracks were gender-integrated and the fi rst women were allowed to remain on active duty during pregnancy. When the draft ended in 1972, the need for recruits led to many changes benefi cial to women. Women no longer had to meet higher standards than men to enlist and, for the fi rst time, their dependents became eligible for benefi ts. The Navy, which had long recognized the need for nurses on

M I S S A M E R I C A PA G E A N T

ships, now allowed other women to serve at sea. Women also became eligible for Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), which paid expenses for college students who received formal training and were commissioned at graduation. In 1973, the Coast Guard’s SPARS unit was abolished and women were merged into the regular corps; Captain Eleanor L’Ecuyer became the fi rst woman to command a Coast Guard division. That same year, Marine Colonel Mary E. Bane took command of a nearly all-male battalion at California’s Camp Pendleton, despite what a journalist called “ astonishing furor.” New precedents followed rapidly in subsequent years, with the fi rst woman to pilot a helicopter, the fi rst female aviator in the Navy, and so forth. The year 1978 was especially meaningful: The Marine Corps became the last service branch to promote a woman to general; the Navy Nurse Corps gained its fi rst AfricanAmerican captain; and, most signifi cantly, the Army abolished the WAC and integrated women into its regular forces. The 1980s began with the fi rst admissions of women to the prestigious military academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs. Prodded by Representative PATRICIA SCOTT SCHROEDER, the House Armed Services Committee held its fi rst hearings on sexual harassment in the military in 1980. The public also recognized Admiral Grace Hopper, the nation’s oldest military officer, when she fi nally retired in 1986 at age 79; the Navy had found Hopper’s pioneering computer work so valuable that it routinely exempted her from mandatory retirement rules. The Panama invasion in 1989 and especially the Persian Gulf War two years later fi nally featured a military in which women were allowed to work to capacity. Women fl ew planes, won medals, and gave their lives. More than 40,000 women, many of them young mothers, were deployed with Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Among the milestones of the 1990s were the cancellation of the official ban on women in combat aviation positions and the Navy’s deployment of women on combat ships. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Sheila A. Widnall as secretary of the Air Force, the highest Pentagon position a woman had ever held. As the century drew to a close, a monument and museum built by Women in Military Service to America was opened at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C. Its location in America’s most sacred military burial ground serves as enduring testimony to the

fact, as well as the recognition, of the role of women in U.S. military service. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

DePauw, Linda Grant. Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Herbert, Melissa S. Camoufl age Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

MILLETT, KATHERINE  MURRAY

(b. 1934) Feminist author and artist. Katherine Murray Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. A graduate of the University of Minnesota in 1956, she received a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, England, in 1958. In Harlem, New York, she worked as a kindergarten teacher, then taught English at the college level in Tokyo, Japan. In 1965, she married sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. They were divorced 20 years later. In 1970, Millett received a doctorate from Columbia University and published her doctoral thesis, Sexual Politics, which examined how women had been systematically exploited in a society run by males. Sexual Politics rapidly became one of the most infl uential books in the feminist movement. In 1974, Millett published Flying, an autobiography in which she revealed she was a LESBIAN. Later books included Going to Iran (1982) and a memoir of her own psychiatric treatment, The Loony Bin Trip (1990). As an artist, Millet has displayed her works throughout the world.

 MISS AMERICA PAGEANT

One of the best-known beauty pageants in the world. It has been an American institution since 1921. It has helped to define the nation’s definition of beauty, identity, and the roles of women, as well as created controversy. It began as an East Coast business marketing campaign to attract tourists to Atlantic City. During the 1940s, pageant organizers wanted to expand the influence of the contest and help contestants go to college as a scholarship program for winners. Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish winner of the crown, won the first scholarship in 1945. In 1954, the pageant reached a nationwide audience, appearing on television for the first time.

MITCHELL, JONI

The Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, has been a cultural institution since 1921.

Over the years, the pageant came under fi re for reducing women to sexual objects. Opera singer Yolanda Betbeze, Miss America 1951, refused to wear a bathing suit in public after her crowning. In 1968 feminists demonstrated at the pageant, dumping items such as girdles and padded bras into a “ freedom trash can.” The pageant has defended its position by focusing on its role as a scholarship provider. In the early 1990s, the swimsuit competition was debated. A call-in vote was conducted in 1995 to decide whether to keep the competition. The callers voted to keep swimsuits. The 1974 Miss America, Rebecca King, used her winnings to go to law school, and Miss America 1975 earned a doctorate with her award. In 1970, the fi rst African-American state winner, Cheryl Brown of Iowa, competed in the pageant. The fi rst African-American Miss America, Vanessa Williams, was crowned in 1983 only to lose the crown soon after when it was revealed that she had posed for sexually explicit photos. The same year, Suzette Charles was named the fi rst African-American runner-up. Heather Whitestone, who is hearing impaired, was the fi rst disabled woman to win the title, when she won in 1994 after performing a ballet routine to music she could not hear.

 MITCHELL, JONI

(b. 1943) Singer-songwriter and artist. Joni Mitchell, considered to be one of the most infl uential singer-

songwriters in popular music, was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, Canada, on November 7, 1943. She began her folksinging career in 1963, when she performed in coffeehouses. In 1964, after leaving the Alberta College of Art, she wrote her fi rst song, “ Day After Day.” In 1965, Anderson met and married folksinger Chuck Mitchell and moved with him to Detroit, where they performed together. There, she had her fi rst commercial release with “ Urge for Going,” performed by George Hamilton IV. In 1967, after divorcing Chuck, Joni met musician David Crosby and moved to New York City. Crosby helped Mitchell release her fi rst album, Song to a Seagull, which was distinguished by the high, lilting voice, intricate melodies, and poetic verse that would become her trademarks. Mitchell’s career took off, and in 1969, she played at Carnegie Hall and in 1970, her album Ladies of the Canyon went gold (sold more than 500,000 copies). Her next album, Blue, in 1971, is one of her most famous. In 1975, with The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she began to move toward a much jazzier sound, an experimentation that culminated in her 1979 collaboration with jazz composer Charles Mingus on Mingus. Mitchell has continued to experiment with her style and has collaborated with a diverse range of musicians to achieve different sounds. She has also painted many of her album covers.

 MITCHELL, MARGARET

(1900– 1949) Novelist. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Margaret Mitchell began writing at age 12. She wrote her fi rst story at age 16, based on an early love. It was recently rediscovered and published as Lost Laysen. Mitchell entered Smith College in 1918, but withdrew upon her mother’s death and that of her fi ancé , Clifford Henry, in World War I. She began feature writing at the Atlanta Journal Sun Magazine in 1922 and married Red Upshaw that same year, but divorced in 1924 after a short and abusive marriage. In 1925, she married Upshaw’s best man, John Marsh. In 1926, Mitchell quit her job to research the Civil War for a novel she wished to write. That novel was completed in 1932. Margaret was secretive about the novel and was reluctant to let an editor see it. It was eventually accepted by a

MORGAN v. VIRGINIA

Macmillan editor in 1935. Gone With the Wind, Mitchell’s story of a woman’s experience of the Civil War and the aftermath of Reconstruction, would be her only novel. It was published in 1936 to rave reviews and tremendous fanfare. Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. In 1939, David O. Selznick released the screen adaptation of Gone With the Wind. Beginning in 1940, Mitchell devoted her life to community service and philantrophy, donating time and money to hospitals and other charities. She died at 49 when she was hit by a car.

 MONROE, MARILYN

(1926– 1962) Actress. Born Norma Jean Baker Mortensen on June 1, 1926, Marilyn Monroe was the daughter of a Los Angeles fi lm cutter. Monroe’s father was never positively identifi ed, and her mother was unstable. Therefore, from the time she was two weeks old, young Norma Jean lived mainly in orphanages and foster homes. Lack of stability left her with a lifelong sense of insecurity and fear of abandonment. In 1942, at 16, she escaped another orphanage by marrying James Dougherty. She dropped out of high school, and when Dougherty went off to WORLD WAR II, she took a job inspecting parachutes in an arms factory. In 1946, the year she and Dougherty divorced, she had her fi rst screen test. She signed with 20th Century Fox and took on the pseudonym Marilyn Monroe. Her roles were small until the 1950s. She was usually typecast in “ dumb blonde” roles such as her character Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). This bothered her and she strove to act in more serious roles. When 20th Century Fox failed to take her talent seriously, she ended her contract in 1955. Monroe’s life was engulfed in controversy. In 1954, she married and quickly divorced baseball star Joe DiMaggio. From 1956 to 1961, she was married to playwright Arthur Miller. In addition, she suffered chronic health problems and could not conceive a much desired baby. These stresses, along with her life long psychological problems, may have contributed to her death on August 5, 1962. Officially, Monroe’s death is listed as a suicide. However, some argue that she may have accidentally overdosed on drugs prescribed by her psychiatrist or been murdered. Marilyn Monroe may be most widely known as a sex symbol, but she wanted to be known as

7

a serious actress. In her fi nal interview with Life magazine, she said to the reporter, “ Please don’t make me a joke.” A few of her many fi lms include The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1958), and The Misfits (1961).

 MORENO, LUISA

(1907?– 1992) Labor organizer. Luisa Moreno was born in Guatemala and emigrated to the United States. During the 1930s, she organized other Latino immigrants in New York City to protest brutality by the police. In 1937, she moved to San Diego, California, where she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). Moreno wrote articles for the union newspaper and helped organize workers in the fi sh canneries in San Diego and Los Angeles. During WORLD WAR II, as American workers enlisted in the armed forces, many Mexicans came across the border to work in the canneries. However, the United States would not allow them to become citizens. Moreno protested this treatment. As she told an interviewer many years later in 1971, “ California has become prosperous with the toil and sweat of Mexican immigration attending to its number one industry, agriculture. Now they have sustained a true and lasting patriotism to a democratic country that refuses to give them citizenship or even basic civil rights.” During the 1940s, Moreno became a labor consultant and continued to champion the cause of Mexican civil rights. However, as the Cold War began between the United States and the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, some labor leaders were suspected of being communists. As a result, Moreno was deported in 1950. She died in Guatemala on November 4, 1992.

 MORGAN

V. VIRGINIA A 1946 U.S. Supreme Court case that helped end legal racial segregation in the United States. At the time, Virginia law segregated passengers by color on public transportation. To avoid friction between the races, a bus driver could instruct any passenger to change seats to prevent adjoining seats from being occupied by white and “ colored” passengers. Irene Morgan, an African-American woman, refused to change her seat and was found guilty of a misdemeanor. The Supreme

MOSELEY-BRAUN, CAROL

Court of Appeals in Virginia affirmed her conviction, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed it. The Court, however, did not base its decision on the belief that racial discrimination was unconstitutional. Rather, it relied on a clause in the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. The Court concluded that the Virginia law placed an “ undue burden” on transportation, for it required bus drivers to constantly shuffle people around as the passenger makeup changed during the bus’s journey, leading to delays. While the Court’s decision did not outlaw racial discrimination, it was one success on the part of an African American to resist a Jim Crow law in the South. Later, in 1955, ROSA PARKS, an African-American woman, refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her action touched off a 381-day boycott of the city bus system and helped set in motion the modern civil rights movement.

 MOSELEY-BRAUN, CAROL

(b. 1947) Democrat from Illinois, and fi rst African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Raised on Chicago’s South Side, where she attended public schools, Moseley-Braun received her B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1969, and her J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972. She served three years as a prosecutor in the Office of the U.S. Attorney, and then was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Moseley-Braun ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992 and was among several women elected in what was described as “ The Year of the Women.” While a senator from 1993 to 1999, MoseleyBraun served on the Special Committee on Aging, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the committees for Finance, Banking, and Housing and Urban Affairs. She is particularly well known for her arguments against the display of the Confederate fl ag. Defeated in her attempt at reelection in 1998, she was named by President Bill Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand.

 MOTHERS’ PENSIONS

Also called Mothers’ Aid, the fi rst publicly funded welfare policy to recognize the value of a mother’s work to raise her children. In the early 1900s, ad-

vocates compared the services given by soldiers to their country with those services given by mothers in time, dedication, and sacrifi ce. In 1911, Illinois passed the fi rst state law authorizing counties to spend public funds to subsidize the income of mother-only families. Other states rapidly adopted the policy, but not all counties in these states dispersed mothers’ pension funds. Local control allowed signifi cant discretion in the way the policy actually worked. Most of the women who received mothers’ pensions were widows who lived in urban areas and were either native-born or Western European immigrants. Local programs frequently rejected the applications of unmarried mothers or women whose husbands had deserted the family. African-American and Mexican-American women rarely received these funds because of local prejudices and dependence on their wage labor as servants or fi eld workers. Scholars credit women’s organizations for building popular support for mothers’ pension laws. National organizations with local and state branches such as the GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’ S CLUBS (see Volume 2) and the NATIONAL CONGRESS OF MOTHERS lobbied for these provisions. Essential support also came from juvenile courts and the budding social work community. During the GREAT DEPRESSION, funding for the state-level programs dried up, but the policy of AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN, Title IV of the federal SOCIAL SECURITY ACT continued the policy.

 MOTHERS, UNMARRIED

A major change in family structure during the twentieth century was the large increase in unmarried women with children. By the year 2000, 7.5 million American families were headed by unmarried females, an increase of 25 percent since 1990. Almost one-third of all children were born to unmarried mothers at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, approximately a tenfold increase since 1940. For decades, the stereotype of an unmarried mother was a teenage girl pregnant out of wedlock. However, that stereotype accounts for only about 13 percent of children born to single mothers, or approximately 375,000 births annually. By the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, the average unmarried mother was in her late twenties. Some had never been married. Ap-

MOVIES

9



proximately 40 percent of these unmarried MOVIES mothers were living with a man. Some of these Motion pictures. In 1896, Alice Guy Blache, secmen were the fathers of the children. The 2000 retary to photography equipment salesman Census showed a 72 percent increase since 1990 Leon Gaumont, shot a short fi lm sample to in couples living together outside of marriage. demonstrate a new invention to the world: the Some single women have adopted one or motion picture. The fi rst motion pictures were more children or been artifi cially inseminated, black and white silent comedies fi lled with slapwhile others have been married and divorced. stick and fast-paced action, and often took ACThe divorce rate in the United States is approxTORS from the vaudeville stage and made them imately one out of every two marriages. into movie stars. Experts explain the increase in the numbers But prior to 1920, acting was not the primary of unmarried mothers in various ways. Throughrole for a woman in the fi lm industry; there were out the twentieth century, there was a steady rise in the divorce rate. The stigma attached to divorce gradually TRAILBLAZERS disappeared, and state laws made divorce easier to obtain. The average age of marriage for women inIn 1922, film found its first sex symbol in a 16-year-old Brookcreased from 20 in 1960 to 25 in lyn girl. Clara Bow (1905–1 965) would be emulated for 2000. Some sociologists believe that decades, most notably by MARILYN MONROE and MADONNA. this change is due to women’s fears Bow’s mother was mentally ill, and her father was seldom of divorce and their hesitancy to enaround. Hoping to fl ee home, she entered her picture in a magter into marriage. As a result, more azine contest and won. Her prize was a role in the 1922 film women are cohabiting with men unBeyond the Rainbow. When the film was edited, however, her til they determine whether the relaperformance had been cut. Fortunately, another film director tionship will work. Almost 40 percast her in Down to the Sea in Ships (1922). This time, she cent of births to unmarried women did not end up on the cutting room fl oor. occur during the period of cohabiIn 1923 Bow signed with Preferred Pictures. Her films The tation. Adoption laws have also Plastic Age and Mantrap transformed her into the model of changed, making it possible for sinsexual moral freedom of the 1920s, and by 1926 she was regle women to raise children. ceiving over 40,000 fan letters a day. But Bow’s greatest fame Some studies show that children came from the 1927 film It. “ It,” defined by the screenwriters raised by single mothers may be at as “ general sex appeal,” described Bow perfectly, and she begreater risk than children in twocame “ The It Girl.” Women plucked their eyebrows to look parent families. According to a relike hers, stores sold Clara Bow style hats, and America’s fl apport by the Heritage Foundation, pers wanted to be Bow. these children are more likely to exBy 1930, Bow had made 52 films. But the onset of “ talkies” perience emotional and disciplinary problems. Approximately 35 percent sent her into a nervous breakdown. Bow, who had suffered a of single-parent families, usually slight speech impediment as a child, was nervous about speakheaded by women, are living in ing on screen. Additionally, she had become notorious for bePOVERTY —more than twice the overing a “ wild” woman who hosted poker parties, bootleggers, all poverty rate for the general popand various suitors. The 1931 trial of her former secretary ulation. In addition, the children of for misappropriating funds furthered her despair, and soon unmarried mothers are more likely she became known as “ Crisis-a-Day Clara.” The media exto drop out of school and fi nd themploited her personal affairs, and that year she was fired by selves on WELFARE as adults. Paramount studios because of her unsavory reputation. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Worth, Richard. Poverty. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1997. – . Single Parent Families. New York: Franklin Watts, 1992.

Bow acted in a few “ talkies” in the mid-1930s but retired soon afterward. Like her mother and grandmother, she suffered mental breakdowns for the rest of her life. She died of a heart attack in 1965.

4

MS. MAGAZINE

which was directed by Virginia Van Upp. Because of the success of Gilda and Van Upp’s portrayal of female characters in positions of social power, Van Upp was promoted to vice president of Columbia Pictures in 1945. From 1940 to 1970, the woman’s role in the fi lm industry remained primarily in the fi eld of acting. Some of the most famous women of fi lm were MARILYN MONROE, BETTE DAVIS, KATHARINE HEPBURN, JUDY GARLAND, and BETTY GRABLE. However, by the 1970s women were again welcomed behind the scenes of Hollywood pictures. In 1971, Elaine May directed A New Leaf and more women began directing fi lms. Other actresses who gained popularity during the 1970s were Jane Fonda and BARBRA STREISAND, who eventually moved into the production and directing fi elds. Today, as in the early days of motion pictures, women work in various fi elds both in front of and behind the camera.

Clara Bow, one of the very first movie stars, has been emulated by many over the years.

more women behind the scenes of motion pictures in the early 1900s than at any other time in movie history. Women worked as producers, directors, screenwriters, and editors, while some even owned movie studios. In the 1920s, Mary Pickford became the fi rst woman president of a motion picture studio, Lois Weber was the highest paid director of silent fi lm, and Mabel Normand was the woman behind the genius of silent fi lm star Charlie Chaplin––s he taught him many of his routines and directed many of his comedies. After 1920, if they could not act, women were pushed out of the movie business. Maledominated unions placed men in positions formerly held by women. The only female director in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s was Dorothy Arzner, who also invented the boom microphone and the movie crane. Among the actresses who dominated the “ silver screen” in the 1930s and 1940s were MAE WEST and RITA HAYWORTH. West, known for her humor and her sex appeal, wrote her own comedy routines. Hayworth’s success arrived after she performed a “ striptease” (which merely involved her removing her gloves) in Gilda (1946),

 MS. MAGAZINE

A national magazine by, for, and about women. In December 1971, Ms. made its fi rst appearance as an insert in New York magazine. The insert was followed by 300,000 test copies in January 1972 that sold out in eight days. This success allowed GLORIA STEINEM, Pat Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and the other founders to publish the fi rst regular issue in July 1972. The WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT had helped create an audience for serious coverage of feminist issues. Ms. answered to this audience. The magazine ran articles about ABORTION, the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, domestic violence, and other issues that received little coverage elsewhere. All the articles were written by women. In addition to its regular contributors, over the years Ms. has featured writers such as ALICE WALKER, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Susan Faludi. Despite its early success, rising publication costs and advertiser resistance have at various times forced Ms. to the brink of folding. After being briefl y suspended in 1989 and again in 1998, a group of women dedicated to keeping Ms. alive formed Liberty Media for Women. Liberty Media for Women included founding editor Gloria Steinem, current editor Marcia Gillespie, as well as feminist activists and businesswomen. The consortium purchased Ms. and began to publish the magazine again in 1999.

M U R R A Y , PA U L I

Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine honor Sally Ride.

Currently, Ms. is published bimonthly and remains dedicated to examining the lives and struggles of women throughout the world. Since 1990, Ms. has been free of advertising. Readers alone support the publication. See also: Magazines, Women’s and Girls’; “ Women and the Media,” p. 27.

 MULLER

V. OREGON (1908) U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the right of the state of Oregon to pass a minimum wage law for women (see Documents). In 1903 Oregon had passed a law establishing a ten-hour workday for women in laundries and factories. Business owners opposed the law, saying that it was not needed to protect the health or safety of women. The case arrived at the Supreme Court after the state in 1905 fi ned Curt Muller, a laundry owner, for allowing a supervisor to require a woman to work more than ten hours. To defend the law before the Supreme Court, Oregon hired a noted Boston attorney Louis D. Brandeis, who later would serve as a Supreme Court justice. Attached to his legal brief were more than 100 pages of sociological, economic, and physiological data about the effects of long working hours on the health of women. The Supreme Court heard Muller v. Oregon at a time when the nation was trying to deal with some of the worst effects of industrialization. After the CIVIL WAR, many Americans worked long hours under dangerous conditions, and business generally remained free of government and court regulation. But between the end of the nineteenth century and WORLD WAR I the Progressive movement in American politics enjoyed increasing success in fi ghting for laws that pro-

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tected consumers, the environment, and especially workers. Reformers persuaded state legislatures to pass factory-safety and minimum-wage laws, create workers’ compensation programs for persons injured on the job, and regulate the maximum number of hours employees could be required to work. Many of these laws were passed over stiff opposition from business owners who believed that the laws interfered not only with private property rights but with the ability of workers to enter freely into contracts with employers. An earlier Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York (1905), set the stage for Muller v. Oregon. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that a New York law limiting bakery workers to a ten-hour workday was unconstitutional. The Court, however, did say that any similar law could be constitutional if the state could show that the law was necessary to protect the health and safety of workers. That opening led to the Court’s decision in Muller v. Oregon. Brandeis, and the state of Oregon, won the case. In its decision the Court referred to the “ proper discharge” of women’s “ maternal functions” and the “ well-being of the race.” The Court concluded that a woman “ is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men, and could not be sustained.” At the time Progressives felt that they had won a major victory: The Court had upheld a state law passed to protect the health and safety of workers. Muller v. Oregon was also one of the earliest cases in which the Court considered not only the law but other information about the effects of its decisions in the real world and on the lives of everyday people. Later reformers relied on the case in efforts to change social and political conditions—for example, laws affecting the health and safety of workers. Many feminists, though, were troubled by the decision, because the Court had extended protection to women by reinforcing gender stereotypes. They believed that the decision would ultimately restrict economic and professional opportunities for women.

 MURRAY, PAULI

(1910– 1985) Activist, author, lawyer, priest. Murray grew up an orphan and poor but aggressively pursued an EDUCATION and civil rights. She lived with her

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grandparents in Durham, North Carolina, and graduated from the city’s segregated black high school in 1926. Despite a poor high school education, she took additional coursework to be admitted to Hunter College in New York City. Murray wanted to be a lawyer and pursue a career working for social justice and civil rights. In 1941, Howard University Law School admitted her with a scholarship. It took only a few months for Murray to discover that racial prejudice would not be the only limit on her opportunities. At the historically black law school,

as with other private law schools of the era, discrimination on the basis of sex was common practice. Murray repeatedly said that although she entered law school to fi ght for racial justice, she left law school an avowed feminist. During her legal career, she had many opportunities to advance the cause of equality. In addition, she served as a consultant to the PRESIDENT’ S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN for its landmark 1963 report. She also cofounded the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN. Murray wrote about her remarkable life and that of her family in two books. Proud Shoes (1954) tells the story of her family’s heritage as descendants of TRAILBLAZERS slaves, freeborn AFRICAN AMERICANS, slaveholding whites, and Cherokee Indians. Song in a Weary Throat: An Singer Marian Anderson (1897-1993) made her first public American Pilgrimage (1987) recounts singing appearance in 1903 at age six. Twenty-seven years her personal struggles and accomlater, she was performing at Carnegie Hall. Although she was plishments. Her other publications heralded as one of the world’s greatest contraltos, Anderson include a volume of poetry and a repeatedly faced and overcame racial prejudice. In high massive reference work on state laws school, she tried to enroll at a local music school but was rerelating to race. jected because she was an African American. In 1938, while In 1977, Murray was ordained as negotiating for a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, one of the fi rst women Episcopal D.C., the venue, owned by the Daughters of the American Revpriests.

olution (DAR), threw in a contractual clause stating that only white artists could perform there. But Anderson did not give in easily; with the help of first lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, who resigned her DAR membership in protest, Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead. Critics didn’t know how to describe Anderson’s distinctive vocal style, so they labeled it “ The Negroid Sound,” a classification that was as nebulous as it is unacceptable today. Later, critics described her voice, which spanned a range of five octaves, as mysterious and a wonder of nature. One thing was certain: Her audience loved her voice. When she became the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1955, she answered eight curtain calls. Anderson accumulated many awards and honors in her lifetime. In 1921 she won the National Association of Negro Musicians competition. From 1940 to 1946, she was named U.S.A. Radio’s foremost woman singer every single year. She won the Spingarn Medal (NAACP), the Handel Medallion, the Page One Award (Philadelphia Newspaper Guild), and the National Medal of the Arts. In addition, she received 24 honorary doctorates, and a 750-seat theater at the City College of New York was named in her honor. Her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning (1956), serves as an inspiration to aspiring singers who face difficult odds.

 MUSIC

American women in the twentieth century, especially singers, made a mark on every variety of music. MARIA CALLAS thrilled opera lovers; MA RAINEY was for many the embodiment of the blues; BILLIE HOLIDAY contributed to the golden age of JAZZ; ARETHA FRANKLIN pioneered the sixties soul sound; JOAN BAEZ was a leader of the folk revival; JANIS JOPLIN was the queen of rock; and Patti Smith mixed spoken word performance with punk rock. In the nineties, Queen Latifah, Salt ‘ n’ Pepa, and Jill Scott became especially visible as part of a second wave of rap and hip-hop artists. Some women sought a less commercial, independent scene—like the fusion of feminism and punk known as “ riot girl.” Throughout the century, it was diffi cult for women who were not singers

N AT I O N A L A B O RT I O N A N D R E P R O D U C T I V E R I G H T S A C T I O N L E A G U E

to achieve recognition in any genre. In the fi eld of classical music, the compositions of such women as Amy Beach, Peggy Glanville Hicks, and Ruth Crawford Seeger were respected but not played as often as they deserved, and it was hard for woman conductors to gain exposure. The Women’s Philharmonic orchestra of San Francisco was founded in 1981 to address this problem. Because men have dominated the recording industry, it was and remains difficult for women to retain control over their work. Annual conventions such as the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, started in 1976, became an important way for women artists and bands to develop their fan bases. The nineties saw the development of many independent woman-owned recording labels,

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such as Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records and Madonna’s Maverick Records. See also: Anderson, Laurie; Entertainment; Fitzgerald, Ella; Garland, Judy; Horne, Lena; Mitchell, Joni; Smith, Bessie; Streisand, Barbra; West, Mae. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Betrock, Alan. Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound. New York: Delilah Books, 1982. Citron, Marcia J. Gender and the Musical Canon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. O’Brien, Lucy. She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul. New York: Penguin, 1995. Whiteley, Shelia. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge, 2000.

N NATIONAL ABORTION AND  REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ACTION LEAGUE Political organization devoted to securing and defending women’s REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. Founded in 1969, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) publicized the effects of abortion laws—dangerous back-alley abortions and unwanted births—and helped build grassroots support for change in the law, which came in 1973 with ROE V. WADE. The passage of the HYDE AMENDMENT in 1977 restricted Medicaid funds for abortion, with the result that though abortions were still legal they were no longer available for poor women. Women who could not afford legal abortions turned again to the back alleys. The fi rst woman known to have died from an illegal ABORTION because of the Medicaid cutbacks was Rosie Jimenez, who died in 1979 at age 27. NARAL set up a fund in her honor to help provide abortions for low-income women. Kate Michelman, NARAL’s president since 1985, experienced the difficulties of a pre-Roe

abortion in 1970. She had to get the written consent of the husband who had deserted her and their three young children, as well as the approval of an all-male hospital panel. This degrading experience motivated her to work to ensure that other women responding to crisis pregnancies in a responsible way were not humiliated. She spearheaded NARAL’s 1988 “ Silent No More” campaign, which featured women telling their own stories about dealing with unintended pregnancies. NARAL, under its new name, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, and with nearly 300,000 members and state affiliates across the nation, now divides its efforts among three arms. NARAL, Inc., is an advocacy group that lobbies legislators. NARAL-PAC is a political action committee that works to help elect prochoice candidates for political office. The NARAL Foundation is a charitable organization that performs research on reproductive issues, mounts public education campaigns, and provides leadership training for activists, working to keep abortion legal and available and also to make it less necessary.

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NATIONAL ASSOCIATION  OF COLORED WOMEN The NACW began in 1896 as a self-help organization focusing on issues related to employment, including job training, equal pay, and child care for working mothers. Its fi rst president was MARY CHURCH TERRELL (see Volume 2). Unlike white women’s organizations in the early 1900s, the NACW did not separate issues of race and gender, as they believed the two were inseparable. Most members also believed that women had a special place in society rooted in the home and based on the supposed moral superiority of women. These beliefs did not, however, keep them from active public roles. With the motto, “ Lifting as we climb,” the middle-class African-American women who belonged to the NACW were convinced that the lower social classes needed to adhere to middleclass standards for their people to advance. The NACW therefore founded schools and provided scholarships and loans for African-American women to attend college. Members founded settlement houses to aid in job placement and provide training for African Americans. They also worked to improve the conditions in many poor African-American neighborhoods, spoke out against segregated transportation, and advocated black pride. The NACW continued to serve the needs of its community through the twentieth century. At present, it is the oldest African-American secular institution in existence. The women of the organization continue to work to lift the standards of home and community.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION  OPPOSED TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE Organization founded in 1911 by Josephine Dodge, who was married to Arthur M. Dodge, to fi ght the women’s SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was organized in New York City during an antisuffrage convention. Members included women, political leaders, and Catholic clergy. The group’s opposition to suffrage was ostensibly based on the belief that equal rights, including the right to vote, would diminish women’s ability to affect social reform, and that suffrage should be considered a state’s rights is-

sue. The organization moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., in 1918, and disbanded in 1920 after passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT. NAOWS published a newsletter called Woman’s Protest, later renamed Woman Patriot. Woman Patriot continued to be published through the 1920s as an antifeminist periodical.

NATIONAL COMMITTEE  TO STOP ERA Organization founded in 1972 to oppose passage of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA). The National Committee to Stop ERA was founded and led by PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, who described the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT as an assault on American women’s roles as wives and mothers, as well as an assault on the family. Together with political and commercial allies on the right, including the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and insurance and service industries for whom discrimination was profi table, the organization gained ground in the 1970s and 1980s by arguing not about the merits of equal rights for women, but that the ERA would result in gay rights, women in combat, and unisex toilets. The Republican Party joined the movement in 1982 (after supporting the ERA for decades) and despite much public support, the ERA was defeated that same year.

NATIONAL CONGRESS OF  MOTHERS Formed in 1897 to improve home life, child rearing, and the status of mothers in society. The National Congress of Mothers (NCM) worked toward these goals by establishing thousands of local mothers’ clubs to study the latest scientifi c and psychological research on child development. Eventually, they saw the merit of extending “ mother-work” into the public sector and formed committees at the state and national level to pass new legislation such as MOTHERS’ PENSIONS and the MATERNITY AND INFANCY PROTECTION ACT. Their efforts to reassert the value of traditional mothering had tremendous appeal at the turn of the twentieth century. Membership reached 190,000 by 1920. NCM founders Alice Birney and PHOEBE APPERSON HEARST attracted to the group men and women who believed in distinct and separate roles for men and women in society. As mothers,

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women had natural skills and talents best suited for the home and family. This did not diminish women’s role but rather should elevate it because of the importance of a stable family to a secure society. Women’s authority and power came from their child-rearing practices and their ability to shape their children’s lives. The NCM leadership worked to elevate these maternal skills rather than to eliminate barriers to women’s opportunities outside the home.

NATIONAL CONSUMERS  LEAGUE

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“ mainstreaming” the new research into university courses in WOMEN’ S STUDIES. The NCRW distributes research and other news in a variety of formats. The publication Women’s Research Network News provides brief overviews of center news, policy issues, and research in progress. More in-depth analysis may be found in Issues Quarterly.

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF  AMERICAN INDIANS

Founded in 1899, the National Consumers League (NCL) sought to use the power of the pocketbook to promote the sale of healthy and quality goods. At the same time it used its members’ purchasing power to lobby for improved working conditions, better wages, and limited working hours. Social reformer FLORENCE KELLEY led the organization and helped create the “ white label.” Only employers who passed the NCL standards received this seal of approval. The organization continues today as a membership group offering consumer advocacy on issues of child labor, food safety, and medical information. It operates a National Fraud hotline and monitors fraud on the worldwide web through the Internet Fraud Watch.

Based in Washington, D.C., the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) is the oldest, largest, and most representative national organization serving the needs of both American Indian and Alaska Native governments. Founded in 1944, it revived a group by the same name established by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN in 1928. The NCAI stresses the need for unity and cooperation among 250 tribal governments. It serves to secure for the original members and their descendants the rights and benefi ts to which they are entitled; to enlighten the public toward better understanding of the Indian people; to preserve rights under Indian treaties or agreements with the United States; and to promote the common welfare of American Indians and Alaska Natives.

NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR  RESEARCH ON WOMEN

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF  NEGRO WOMEN

Founded in 1982 as a working alliance of nearly 80 centers, the focus of which is research, policy analysis, and educational programs for women and girls. University research centers are well represented on the council, as are educational coalitions and policy organizations. In addition, 1,700 organizations in 15 countries have become affiliate members. The collaborative research fostered by the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) has produced new information on some of the most vital issues faced by women during the late twentieth century. Among these issues are the balance of work and family, SEXUAL HARASSMENT, advances in higher EDUCATION, and providing educational and employment opportunities across all social groups. In the early years of the council’s work, numerous projects focused on

A nonprofi t membership organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for African-American women, their families, and the community, founded in 1935 by educator MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE and headquartered in Washington, D.C. The motto of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) is “ Commitment, Unity, Self Reliance” and it sponsors a variety of selfhelp projects on a national level as well as educational, social, economic, and scientifi c projects in communities throughout the United States. Under the leadership of DOROTHY IRENE HEIGHT, the NCNW focused on issues critical to African-American families. The NCNW receives its funding from membership dues, private donations, and grants from foundations, corporations, and the federal and state governments. It consists of 38 affiliated na-

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tional organizations, 250 community-based sections chartered in 42 states, 20 college-based sections, and 60,000 individual members. Some of its affiliates include the National Assembly of Voluntary Health and Social Welfare Organizations, the National Council of Women of the United States, the International Council of Women, the National Women’s Business Council, the Alliance for Volunteerism, the Black Leadership Forum, and the National Committee on Concerns for Hispanics and Blacks.

NATIONAL EDUCATION  ASSOCIATION The world’s largest and oldest professional organization for teachers, school administrators, and other educators. The National Education Association (NEA) was established in 1857 in Philadelphia as the National Teacher’s Association (NTA). In 1870 the NTA merged with two other education organizations and became the NEA. Since then, the group has worked to increase the professionalism of teaching and protect the welfare of its members. Anyone who works for a public school district, college, or university is eligible for membership. The purpose of the NEA is to promote public education in the United States. At the local level, affiliates organize professional workshops and negotiate contracts for school district employees. At the state level, affiliates lobby legislators for school resources and campaign for higher professional and academic standards. At the national level, the NEA conducts research, develops new projects, and fi ghts federal attempts to privatize education. Membership in the NEA, which exceeds 2.5 million as of the year 2001, far outweighs that of its parallel organization, the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS. The two unions, which essentially serve the same purposes, proposed an unsuccessful merger in the 1990s.

NATIONAL FEDERATION  OF BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL WOMEN’S CLUBS A group dedicated to improving the lives of working women through economic empowerment, pay equity, focus on women’s health and family issues,

and insurance reform. The National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW) was founded in May 1918 when the War Department invited two representatives from each state to plan a national committee that would coordinate the efforts of the numerous women’s groups organized in response to WORLD WAR I. Despite the end of the war six months later, the committee continued as a support for peacetime endeavors. In July 1919, the fi rst national BPW convention was held in St. Louis, Missouri. During the 1920s the BPW was infl uential in the enactment of CHILD LABOR laws; it assisted government relief agencies and helped create employment opportunities during the GREAT DEPRESSION; and in May 1937, it was the fi rst women’s organization to endorse the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. During WORLD WAR II, it supported the establishment of women’s branches of the armed services; during the 1960s it led the fi ght for the Equal Pay Act; and in the 1970s it worked for the passage of TITLE IX and the prohibition of sexual harassment. Based in Washington, D.C., the BPW strives to improve the future of women in the workplace through community awareness, legislation, education, and personal and professional development. The BPW includes 3,000 local organizations in 53 state federations, including the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

NATIONAL ORGANIZATION  FOR WOMEN Women’s rights organization. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 by BETTY FRIEDAN, ANNA PAULI MURRAY, and 26 other women. Its main purpose is to battle sexual discrimination in education, the workplace, and wages, and to support such measures as child-care laws and pregnancy leave to enable women to compete with men in the workforce. In addition, for decades NOW has supported the ratifi cation of the proposed EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, which would make all sexual discrimination unconstitutional. From its earliest days, NOW has been involved in political lobbying. It has consistently supported awareness about violence against women. Its other causes include the eradication of SEXUAL HARASSMENT and the promotion of multiculturalism, affirmative action, and WELFARE rights.

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NOW’s fi rst campaign began in 1967, when NOW members demanded the legalization of ABORTION, which was realized in the landmark Supreme Court decision ROE v. WADE in 1973. The March for Women’s Lives, the largest abortion rights demonstration in U.S. history, was organized by NOW in 1992. Over 750,000 people attended the protest in Washington, D.C. In 1971, NOW became the fi rst general women’s organization to support LESBIAN rights. NOW was also infl uential in the 1979 Belmont v. Belmont case, which defi ned lesbian partners as a family with the right to the custody of children. The plaintiff of this case, Rosemary Dempsey, was NOW’s Action Vice President from 1989 to 1997. In addition to lobbying for legal action, NOW also advocates women’s rights by promoting the election of women to government offices. By lending fi nancial support to female candidates who support its goals, NOW hopes to equalize power in government so that women’s issues will receive greater attention than in the past. At over 250,000 members nationwide, the National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States as of the year 2001.

NATIONAL RIGHT TO  LIFE COMMITTEE Lobbying organization working to ban ABORTION and some forms of contraception, as well as euthanasia. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) began as a predominantly Catholic organization, founded in 1973 in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in ROE v. WADE. Together with fundamentalist and evangelical groups, it became part of “ The New Right” that rose to prominence in American politics during the 1970s and 1980s. Today the NRLC is the nation’s largest and most infl uential anti-abortion group, with more than 3,000 local chapters.

NATIONAL WOMAN’S  PARTY Women’s rights organization founded in 1916 by Quaker lawyer and social reformer Alice Paul (1885– 1977). The fi rst goal of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) was SUFFRAGE (see Volume 2) for American women—the right to vote. In pursuit of this goal, NWP members engaged in speaking tours to educate both men and women

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and employed a strategy of dramatic, nonviolent protest that included parading, picketing, civil disobedience, and hunger strikes. Participants faced brutal attacks, arrest, and unpleasant prison conditions. Alice Paul was jailed for obstructing traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. The NWP achieved its fi rst goal in 1919 with the ratifi cation of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT. In 1923, the NWP under Paul’s leadership launched a campaign to pass the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, an effort to win full equality for women. This divided women’s organizations between those supporting PROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION and those supporting equal treatment under the law. From the beginning, the organization has wielded considerable infl uence on elections—in 1928, for instance, the NWP endorsed presidential hopeful Herbert Hoover, who became known as “ the women’s candidate” —and has also led the fi ght for international women’s rights, assisting suffrage campaigns in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Paul and the NWP were instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of language regarding women’s equality in the United Nations Charter and were an infl uential force in establishing a permanent U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Today, the NWP continues its efforts to wipe out all forms of discrimination so that all people may achieve full legal, economic, and social equality. The group’s headquarters are in the Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C., purchased in 1929 when Congress demolished the Old Brick Capitol, their original headquarters, to make way for the construction of the U.S. Supreme Court. The house is named for Robert Sewall, who built it in 1799, and for Alva Vanderbilt Belmont (1853– 1933), a major supporter of the NWP. When it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972, it was the only site in the United States dedicated to the contemporary women’s movement.

NATIONAL WOMEN’S  CONFERENCE The National Women’s Conference (NWC) was fi rst held in November 1977 in Houston, Texas. Established by the federal government and chaired by former congresswoman BELLA ABZUG (D-NY), the conference, which was attended by approximately 20,000 women and men, assessed the legal

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and social status of American women, identifi ed impediments to women’s full participation in public and private life, and made recommendations to the U.S. Congress and the president. The NWC grew largely out of action taken by the United Nations in 1972 when it declared 1975 International Women’s Year and the years 1975 to 1985 the Decade for Women. The United Nations World Conference on Women, held in 1975 in Mexico City, established goals for achieving gender equity in member countries. In 1975 President Gerald Ford established the bipartisan National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, and in 1976 Congress passed Public Law 94-167 to extend the commission and have it organize a national women’s conference. President Jimmy

Carter expanded the commission in 1977, and named Abzug chair. As a follow-up to conventions held in the states and territories, the National Women’s Conference convened in Houston and presented its fi ndings that American women suffered as a result of discriminatory practices and a lack of representation in politics, law, business, and media. The NWC adopted a national plan of action designed to eliminate violence against women and children, end discrimination against women in education and employment, establish quality child care, and move toward more equitable representation in all fi elds by 1985. While some goals established in 1977 have been achieved, such as moving toward more equitable representation, many have not, including eliminating gender-based violence and establishing quality child care. The NWC continues to hold annual meetings TRAILBLAZERS to assess progress, as well as to train activists and facilitate networking Wilma Mankiller’s great-grandfather was one of the thousands among organizations working to imof Cherokees who walked the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma durprove the status of women.

ing the INDIAN REMOVAL (see Volume 2). By 1945, when Mankiller was born in Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, the Cherokees were settled in Oklahoma, but the struggle with poverty was hard, and when she was ten Mankiller’s father, Charlie Mankiller, moved his family to California. Mankiller graduated high school and went to San Francisco State College, where she met and married Hugo Olaya de Bardi; their daughters were born in 1964 and 1966. The occupation of the prison island of Alcatraz by Richard Oakes and his “ All Tribes” group in 1969–1 971 awakened Mankiller’s sense of Native American pride. She became involved in activism for California’s Native Americans. In 1971 her father died, and the family took his body back to Oklahoma for burial. Though she returned to California, Mankiller determined to go back to her native soil to live. Her marriage had suffered from her new sense of independence and purpose, and when she finally went back to Oklahoma in 1976 it was as a single mother. Despite personal tragedies and health problems, she became active in the Cherokee community. In 1983 she ran successfully for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma on a ticket with Principal Chief Ross Swimmer. When Swimmer moved to Washington to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Mankiller took over as principal chief, the first woman in modern history to head a major tribe. She was reelected in 1985 and 1991, but resigned in 1995 because of her health. She has worked tirelessly to develop the economy of the Cherokee Nation and to raise awareness across the United States of Native American issues and achievement.

NATIONAL  WOMEN’S POLITICAL CAUCUS The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) was established in 1971 to recruit, train, and support prochoice women seeking political office regardless of political party. The caucus agenda seeks to help end sexism, racism, poverty, and violence. It also works to provide quality dependent care and reproductive choice. The organization also advocates for women to be named to public offices and policy-making posts. It is a membership organization open to anyone who agrees with the mission and goals. Among its accomplishments, the NWPC points to the dramatic increase in women officeholders.

NATIVE  AMERICANS In the early twentieth century, the longstanding policy of assimilating Native Americans and expunging

NEVELSON, LOUISE

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ber of self-defi ned Native Americans from the previous decade’s counts. (In 1990, the fi gure was 190,000.) The 1960s saw the rise of the Red Power movement, spearheaded in many cases by women such as Cherokee Wilma Mankiller and Menomonee Ada Deer. Cheyenne Susan Harjo has been an effective lobbyist for Indian interests in Washington. Women writers have contributed much to the new awareness of Native American identity and strength, among them the Creek poet Joy Harjo and the Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich. See also: Bonnin, Gertrude (Zitkala-Sha); Silko, Leslie Marmon.

 NEVELSON, LOUISE

Four generations of Native American women from the Arapaho tribe

their traditions began to change, and in fact was reversed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the “ Indian New Deal” of the 1930s. Among the groups calling for change was the NATIONAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN’ S CLUBS (see Volume 2). Efforts were made to restore independence and self-determination for the different tribes. One result of the new attitude to Native American culture was a fl owering of traditional crafts; rugs, basketry, and pottery, mostly made by women, brought new income and a renewed pride to Indian reservations. Among the more famous craftswomen of this revival was Maria Martinez, whose black on black pottery can be found in museums worldwide. Native American self-awareness grew throughout the century. Evidence of this is found in the decennial census counts of the last half of the century, which show almost double the num-

(1900– 1988) Sculptor. Born Louise Berliawsky in the Ukraine, Nevelson came to the United States in 1905 with her parents and settled in Rockland, Maine. Her father was in the lumber business, and her fi rst art works were made of lumber scraps. At 20, she married Charles Nevelson and moved to New York, where she studied singing and drama as well as drawing and sculpture, and gave birth to a son, Myron. The marriage failed in 1931. Nevelson took Myron to her parents in Maine, and went to Europe to continue her art studies in Munich; after six months the Nazi government closed her school. Before returning to the United States she saw in Paris an exhibition of African masks and sculpture that greatly infl uenced her. From 1932 to 1933 she worked as an assistant in Diego Rivera’s New York City studio and worked with him on WPA mural projects. Shortly after that she turned to sculpture. In the 1950s she became the fi rst artist to use discarded materials to create large-scale works, using scrap wood to create large wall sculptures and painting the whole work in one color, usually black or white. Nevelson always devoted herself full time to her art, even when it brought in barely enough money to eat. She later suggested that her fl amboyant personal style and fl air for clothes, combined with her gender, may have made it hard for the art world to take her seriously. But recognition began to reach her. In 1959 she participated in her fi rst important museum exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Martha

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Jackson Gallery gave her a solo show. Her fi rst major museum retrospective took place in 1967 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nevelson was actively engaged in making art out of a wide range of materials until her death in 1988.

 NEW DEAL

Term for the social programs created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to combat the devastating effects of the GREAT DEPRESSION. The New Deal was a turning point in twentieth-century history because it laid the foundations of many of the social programs that continue today. Perhaps the most well known New Deal program is Social Security. Roosevelt fi rst used the term new deal while campaigning for president in 1932. After winning the election, he began his legislative program with a fl urry of activity. In the fi rst three months of office—known as the “ First Hundred Days” —he pushed through Congress a vast number of bills that formed the foundation of the New Deal. Among these were laws that reformed banking, legalized the sale of alcohol, established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and created a series of public-works programs. Other laws reformed American industry to create a more productive and more humane economy and still others set up relief programs to aid the unemployed. Women directly benefi ted from these aspects of the New Deal. The cornerstone of the New Deal’s social insurance program was the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT of 1935. It provided a federal system of insurance based on contributions for those unable to work, the elderly, and the unemployed. FRANCES PERKINS, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the fi rst woman cabinet member, played a key role in the development and writing of the social security bill. Amendments passed in 1939 extended benefi ts to the spouse and minor children of a retired worker (dependents benefi ts), and survivors’ benefi ts were paid to the family in the event of the premature death of a covered worker, thus providing more benefi ts for women. Other important New Deal legislation included unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and the right of workers to join unions. The New Deal fundamentally changed the federal government by expanding its role in society. With the passage of New Deal programs, many people came to believe that the federal

government had the responsibility to take an active role in solving the nation’s problems. Although the New Deal was created to end the Great Depression, it was only mildly successful. It was not until 1939 and 1940, with the onset of heavy defense spending before WORLD WAR II, that prosperity returned. See also: Bethune, Mary McLeod; Children’s Bureau; Perkins, Frances; Roosevelt, Eleanor.

 THE NEW WOMAN

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the term New Woman referred to a woman who sought new roles in American society. While there was no simple defi nition of a New Woman, she asserted her independence and her abilities in many spheres. No longer believing that marriage and family was the ultimate goal in her life, she could be found in many places. She might be a reformer, a political activist, or a professional. While she might marry, many New Women remained single or even divorced. Some New Women were most concerned with changing society and the way it looked at gender; others were more focused on achieving personal freedom and happiness. However, all New Women recreated Americans’ perceptions of the concept of womanhood. As writer Margaret Deland described her, the New Woman “ occupies herself passionately, with everything, except the things that used to occupy the minds of girls.” New Women attended college in greater numbers. By the end of nineteenth century, close to 20 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded were to women; that percentage rose to close to 35 percent by 1920. These women often applied their newfound knowledge outside of the family circle. They began to make modest entries into professional jobs, particularly teaching, NURSING, and SOCIAL WORK. Many women used their education to further their efforts for social reform. Working as volunteers and careerists, these women formed clubs and organizations to contribute to the betterment of society. Some women sought to reform the workplace and campaigned successfully for laws that restricted child labor and improved conditions for women workers. Others focused on moral reform, particularly prohibition. Still others were most concerned with making urban areas healthier, and worked to improve housing and public health standards.

NINETEENTH ADMENDMENT

The SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT was perhaps the largest reform movement in which New Women participated. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1890, attempted to achieve woman suffrage through laws enacted at the state level. Suffragists began fi ghting for a constitutional amendment in 1914, and the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT giving all women the right to vote was ratifi ed in 1920. In the initial years following the amendment’s passage, the newly enfranchised formed political groups like the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS to lobby for specifi c causes of particular concern to women. Some New Women, however, were less interested in bringing about social or political changes than in enjoying and even fl aunting their personal freedom. New Women did so by exchanging restrictive Victorian garments for looser-fi tting, more androgynous clothing. New Women also challenged traditional ideas of proper behavior. They smoked in public, drank alcoholic beverages, wore makeup, and bobbed their hair. They became more active in ATHLETICS. Many sought sexual freedom. The New Woman who embraced these lifestyle changes culminated in the image of fl apper of the 1920s.

Male and female champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly and used a variety of strategies.

used tactics such as parades, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Often supporters met fi erce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically attacked them.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. —Nineteenth Amendent to the U.S. Constitution (1920)

 NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

Added to the Constitution in 1920, this amendment guarantees women’s right to vote. Although some localities allowed women to vote in school board elections as early as the 1830s, full voting rights came much later. The SENECA FALLS CONVENTION of 1848 (see Volume 2) included woman SUFFRAGE (see Volume 2) on the list of rights women sought. During the debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments in the 1860s— designed to prevent states from abridging the rights of former slaves—suffragists tried unsuccessfully to include women. In 1869 Wyoming became the fi rst territory to grant women equal voting rights with men, which were extended upon statehood in 1890. Male and female champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly and used a variety of strategies. Since the eligibility of voters was determined by each state, some advocated a stateby-state approach, which achieved some success as nine Western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others, such as SUSAN B. ANTHONY (see Volume 2), challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. More militant suffragists

By 1916 most suffrage organizations united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. After New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance tipped. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and two weeks later the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, it pushed the amendment over its fi nal hurdle of obtaining ratifi cation by three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certifi ed the ratifi cation on August 26, 1920. Women nationwide voted for the fi rst time in the election of 1920. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Dubois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

NINETY-NINES

 NINETY-NINES

Founded in 1929, an organization of women aviators started for mutual support and advancement in the fi eld of aviation. In 1929 only 117 women held pilot licenses in the United States. Twenty-six of those pilots met in November of that year to discuss the needs of women pilots. After recruiting additional members, the group adopted the name Ninety-Nines in recognition of the original number of its members. One of the cofounders, AMELIA EARHART, served as the group’s fi rst president. Other members included Louise Thaden, who, in 1936, received the Harmon Trophy recognizing her as the world’s outstanding fl ier. Another notable member, Jacqueline Cochran, supervised hundreds of women pilots during WORLD WAR II as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, Women’s Division and the WOMEN’ S AIRFORCE SERVICE PILOTS (WASPs). A third member, Ruth Cheney Streeter, became the director of the Women’s Marine Corps. Today, the Ninety-Nines continues to support women in aviation with scholarships and programs. Approximately 6,500 international members support the group.

 NIXON, PATRICIA RYAN

(1912– 1993) First lady of the United States (1969– 1974) and wife of Richard Nixon, the nation’s thirty-seventh president. Thelma Catherine Ryan was born in Ely, Nevada, on March 16, 1912, the day before St. Patrick’s Day. When her father came home from his job as a miner early the next morning and heard that he had a new daughter, he said, “ St. Patrick’s babe in the morn.” She was thereafter called Pat. The Ryans moved to California. When Pat Ryan was 13, her mother died and she thereafter ran the family household for her father and her two older brothers. She lost her father fi ve years later. She put herself through the University of Southern California, graduating in 1937, and became a teacher in Whittier, California. She met Richard Nixon when they performed together in an amateur theater. The couple married on June 21, 1940, and had two children. Mrs. Nixon campaigned with her husband, helping him win election to Congress in 1946 and to the U. S. Senate four years later. In 1952, Nixon was elected vice president of the United

States and served for eight years. Although defeated for president in 1960, Nixon ran again and won his race for the presidency in 1968. As fi rst lady, Mrs. Nixon lent her strong support to volunteering, which she called “ the spirit of people helping people.” She also invited a wide range of artists, from pop to classical, to perform at the White House. She accompanied her husband to China and traveled to Africa. Mrs. Nixon left the White House in 1974 after her husband resigned from the presidency during the Watergate crisis. She suffered strokes in 1976 and 1983, and died on June 22, 1993, in Park Ridge, New Jersey.

NORTON, ELEANOR  HOLMES

(b. 1938) A nonvoting delegate since 1991 to the U.S. House of Representatives from the District of Columbia. Norton helped achieve the fi rst (ultimately failed) congressional vote on statehood for the District in 1993 and a restructuring of the fi nancial relationship between Congress and the District. “ As commissioner, I will attempt to see that no man is judged by the irrational criteria of race, religion, or national origin. And I assure you that I use the word ‘ man’ in the generic sense, for I mean to see that the principle of nondiscrimination becomes a reality for women as well.” —Eleanor Holmes Norton, on becoming head of New York City’ s Commission on Human Rights, 1970

After graduating from Antioch College in Ohio in 1960, Norton attended Yale Law School, from which she earned her law degree in 1964. Norton holds a tenured law professorship at Georgetown University. She has fought for her constituents in the District of Columbia, which is not accorded all the rights and privileges of the 50 states. People living in the District pay federal taxes without having full representation in the Senate and the House. In 1993, Norton achieved the fi rst right to vote on the House fl oor for the District representative, but the vote was rescinded in 1995 when the Republicans gained

NURSING

control of Congress. Also a civil rights advocate, Norton was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

 NOVELLO, ANTONIA

(b. 1944) The fi rst woman and the fi rst Latina to hold the position of surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service. Appointed U.S. surgeon general in 1990 by President George Bush, Dr. Novello held that position until June 1993. Born in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Novello graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a B.S. degree in 1965 and an M.D. degree in 1970. She held her internship and residency at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also received a M.P.H in public health from The Johns Hopkins University in 1982. In addition to a private pediatric practice, Novello worked as a project officer at the National Institutes of Health and as Coordinator for AIDS research in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In 1984, she contributed to the draft of the Organ Transplantation Procurement Act. Her tenure as surgeon general drew attention to the health issues of women, children, and minorities, but her most important legacy may be in her campaign against underage smoking. She challenged the tobacco industry’s use of cartoon images, Joe Camel for example, to attract children; a campaign that ended with the removal of such images. In 1999, she was appointed as the New York State Health Commissioner.

in something so unquestionably her own special fi eld as nursing. . . . Medicine and nursing are not the same; and how-ever [sic] much we may learn from the physician about disease and its treatment, the whole fi eld of nursing—as nursing is realized by the patient (the centre of the question)—is unknown to him.” Dock’s words encapsulate the tension that existed throughout the twentieth century between the sense of nursing as essentially women’s work and the sense of its being at least as important as medicine to the patient’s well-being. Dock believed nurses deserved professional recognition and pay. The gender divide between doctors and nurses became less rigid in the course of the century. Early in the century a woman who was interested in health care was likely to be barred from entering medical school—most medical schools would not allow more than 5 percent of their classes to be women—so she might fall back on nursing. At the end of the twentieth century little stood in the way of a woman who wanted to become a doctor, but the battle for recogni-

 NURSING

The nurses of the early twentieth century were an impressive group, fervently committed to bettering society through education and caring. They included such women as Lillian Wald, the founder of New York’s Henry Street Settlement; MARGARET SANGER, who, like the other public health nurses of the period, climbed tenement stairs to bring not only care but also education and hope to the desperately poor; and the radical suffragist Lavinia Dock. In 1901 Dock wrote in an editorial in American Journal of Nursing, “ Nothing . . . is more trying to one’s toleration than to see men—most of whom never did and never can comprehend what a woman’s work really is, what its details are, or how it ought to be done—undertaking to instruct and train women

Nursing was among the first professional opportunities available to women in America.

4

O’CONNOR, SANDRA DAY

tion of the unique value of a nurse’s work was far from over. Nursing changed a great deal in the course of the century as health care moved more into hospitals and as technology became more important. In 1903 a nurse might spend hours coaxing a dehydrated patient to take liquid from a spoon. In 1953 she would be more likely to open a vein, attach an intravenous drip, and move on to the next patient. The patient of 1953 might be more effectively rehydrated, but the human connection between nurse and patient was in danger. The 1950s were a time when great efforts were made to streamline nursing; the most highly trained nurses were appointed “ team leaders,” often responsible for managing the care of 50 patients, and it was the student nurses and aides who did the intimate bed care that patients experienced as “ nursing.” Nurses tended more and more to be seen as merely executing a doctor’s orders. A backlash against this was the “ primary nursing” movement of the 1960s, articulated by Lydia Hall at Montefi ore Hospital in New York, which aimed to set up the nurse as the primary factor in patient care, who coordinates the efforts of the patient and family to solve problems that might hinder recovery, and who brings in the help of doctors as needed. Ironically, the successes of twentieth-century medicine gave rise to a greater need for tradi-

tional nursing care. Fewer patients died of acute infections, and advances in pharmaceuticals and surgery allowed more to survive with potentially fatal conditions. AIDS is the most dramatic example. The rise in the numbers of patients with chronic illness has reemphasized the importance of “ caring” as opposed to “ curing” —and most people associate curing with doctors, caring with nurses. As the twentieth century drew to a close, women had many other career choices open to them, and men had yet to turn to nursing in signifi cant numbers—in 1999, less than 6 percent of nurses were men, and the average age of a registered nurse was 48. Some experts predicted that by 2020 there would be a signifi cant shortage of nurses. Perhaps the law of supply and demand will gain nurses greater recognition and compensation for their work. See also: Military Service. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Donahue, M. Patricia. Nursing: The Finest Art. 2nd ed. St. Louis: Mosby, 1996. Sandelowski, Margaret. Devices and Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Schorr, Thelma M. 100 Years of American Nursing: Celebrating a Century of Caring. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1999.

O  O’CONNOR, SANDRA DAY

(b. 1938) First woman to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sandra Day was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas, and grew up on her family’s cattle ranch in Arizona. She attended Stanford University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a law degree two years later. In 1952 she married John Jay O’Connor, III, and eventually gave birth to three sons. After graduating from law school she could not fi nd a job in private practice because few law fi rms at the time were willing to hire women, so she turned to government service, eventually becoming assistant attorney general for Arizona in

1965. During those years she was active in civic affairs and Republican Party politics, and in 1969 the Arizona governor appointed her to a vacant seat in the state senate. She won election in her own right in 1970, and after her reelection in 1972, became the fi rst woman in U.S. history to serve as a majority leader in a state senate. In 1974 O’Connor was elected a county superior court judge. Five years later she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. While on the court, she remained active in the Republican Party and was an early supporter of Ronald Reagan for president. When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart retired, President Reagan nominated her for the vacant seat, and in 1981 the U.S. Senate

ONA SSIS, JACQUELINE KENNEDY

overwhelmingly confi rmed her. During her early years on the Court, her voting record was consistently conservative, but in later years she became more centrist and was regarded as a crucial “ swing vote” in closely decided cases, sometimes voting conservatively, sometimes joining a more liberal majority. She showed her moderation in a pivotal 1989 case when she wrote a controversial majority ruling that the guaranteed channeling of city funds to minority-owned public works contractors is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

 OLD AGE AND MORTALITY

Because women live an average of seven years longer than men, the majority of the elderly are women. Thus the problems and challenges of aging are, in large measure, women’s issues. For a variety of reasons, aging women have been and are still regarded more negatively than aging men. While an older man with graying temples—especially if he is powerful or wealthy—is still considered sexually attractive, for example, an older woman is generally regarded as almost “ gender neutral” —unless, like some models and movie stars, she has managed to preserve the appearance of youth with plastic surgery. Old women also tend to be more impoverished than older men. Because of cultural attitudes that kept most women in the home or in low-paying jobs throughout the fi rst 70 years of the twentieth century, many older women today do not have pensions and are entitled to less Social Security than men who earned more throughout their lives. Since women live longer, they must make what pensions they do have “ stretch” over a longer period of time. In seventeenth-century America, many historians assert, the old were revered for their wisdom. But during the eighteenth century, respect for the elderly eroded. Historians are still debating about when the transformation occurred and what caused it, but it is clear that the economic power of the elderly was substantially reduced when retirement became the norm in the world of work. While an old farmer might continue to work for many years, factory workers were often retired at a specifi ed age—sometimes with no pension. Also, America was a place of rapid change, and Americans came to value change over stability. Especially in a world driven by technology, the knowledge of the old became simply outdated, the ideal of wisdom replaced by the ideal of being modern. Americans

value energy, vitality, and physical prowess, all characteristics that seemed to decline with age. The SOCIAL SECURITY ACT of 1935 was designed to help older Americans economically, but it also had a negative impact, in that it helped to create a perception of the elderly as dependent and unable to care for themselves. In fact, the Social Security Act, according to Brian Gratton, actually served to encourage retirement, something the elderly in earlier periods may not have considered. The study of aging evolved in the twentieth century. Scientists have redefi ned what is and is not “ normal” in the aging process. Senility, once seen as an inevitable part of the aging process, is now regarded as the exception, rather than the rule. In the last decade of the twentieth century, medical studies focused on wellness issues, and researchers discovered that resistance training, for example, can strengthen muscles at any age and allow individuals to be more mobile and active as they age. Hormone replacement therapies and medication for osteoporosis have mitigated age-related medical problems for some women. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Cole, Thomas R. The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Doress-Worters, Paula B., and Diana Laskin Siegal. The New Ourselves, Growing Older. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Haber, Carole, and Brian Gratton. Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

ONASSIS, JACQUELINE  KENNEDY

(1929– 1994) First lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963 and wife of the nation’s thirty-fi fth president, John F. Kennedy. Onassis was born in Southampton, New York, and raised in wealthy, cultured surroundings. She attended Vassar College and graduated from George Washington University in 1951. While working for the Washington Times-Herald in 1952, Onassis interviewed Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. They married a year later, and Kennedy ran for president in 1960. Perhaps because Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected president, he, his wife, and their two small children—Caroline and John Jr. (another child died two days after birth)—brought to the office the idealism of youth.

O ’ R E I L L Y, L E O N O R A

As fi rst lady, Onassis devoted much time to making the White House a showplace and gave the fi rst televised tour of the house in 1962. She turned traditional state dinners into elegant but more casual affairs, with guests that included artists, writers, and musicians. The way she dressed, especially the pillbox hats she wore, became fashionable. Most important of all, Onassis was relaxed conversing with people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, and her charm was instrumental in contributing to the popularity of her husband’s presidency. Onassis was beside her husband in an automobile when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. In 1968 she married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate 23 years older than she. He died in 1975, and Onassis moved to New York. Working as an editor at Doubleday, she fought hard to keep a low profi le, but the public was always intrigued by her style and inner strength. She died May 19, 1994, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to John Kennedy.

 O’REILLY, LEONORA

(1870– 1927) Born in New York City, labor organizer Leonora O’Reilly began working in a collar factory when she was 11 years old. At 16 she joined the Knights of Labor and later she organized a female chapter of the United Garment Workers of America. Through the aid of wealthy reformers, she attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Her training led to a teaching position at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, where she taught from 1902 to 1909. She became vice president of the New York chapter of the National Women’s Trade Union League in 1909. She was involved in the shirtwaist workers’ strike in 1909 in which nearly 30,000 sweatshop workers walked out to protest

labor conditions. She helped lead an investigation into the TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE that killed 146 workers. In later years, she was involved in the suffrage movement as president of the Wage Earners’ League. She helped to publicize International Women’s Day to recognize the contributions of women. She was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of the Socialist Party of America.

 OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

A groundbreaking book about women’s health published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970. (See Documents.) The idea for Our Bodies, Ourselves grew from a 1969 WOMEN’ S LIBERATION conference. At a workshop about women’s bodies, a number of women shared their frustrations with the largely male-dominated medical profession. After a series of meetings, this group published the fi rst version of the book as a course booklet titled Women and Their Bodies. The renamed fi rst edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves was published in 1973 and sold 250,000 copies in its fi rst three years of publication. It focused on reproductive health and sexuality, and also provided feminist critiques of women’s oppression. The authors urged women to take control of their bodies and their health. They also candidly addressed lesbianism, masturbation, abortion, and other issues of sex and sexuality that were then considered taboo. For many women, Our Bodies, Ourselves remains a valuable resource. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective has continued to publish updated versions, the most recent edition titled Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book By and For Women.

P  PACIFISM

The belief that disputes between nations should be settled peacefully. Perhaps because of their roles as mothers, women have long been leaders in movements to limit war and promote peace-

ful settlements to confl icts. In the twentieth century, American women founded a number of organizations that promoted the cause of peace at home and abroad.

PA C I F I S M

7

Shortly after the outbreak of WOMEN’S FIRSTS WORLD WAR I in 1914, more than 3,000 women met in Washington, A legislator, lifelong pacifist, and advocate of women’s rights, D.C., to form the fi rst independent Jeannette Rankin (1880–1 973) stood alone on political and women’s peace group, the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP). JANE ADDAMS social issues throughout her six decades in public life. In (see volume 2) was elected the 1916, when few states allowed women to vote, she ran as a group’s fi rst chair, and she was Republican for Montana’s at-large seat in Congress and joined in her efforts by such promiwon– – becoming the first female member of the U.S. House of nent women as Jeanette Rankin, Representatives. She served only one term but won reelection CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT (see Volume 25 years later, representing Montana again from 1941 to 1943 2) and Sophonisba Breckinridge. In before losing a bid for a U.S. Senate seat. alliance with the International ConBorn in Missoula, Montana, on June 11, 1880, Rankin gradgress of Women, the Woman’s Peace uated from the University of Montana and spent the next sevParty called for mediation to end the eral years doing social work and participating in the woman war and opposed the United States’ SUFFRAGE movement. As a member of Congress, she sponsored entry into the confl ict. Former Preslegislation to provide federal voting rights and health services ident Theodore Roosevelt attacked to women. Ever committed to the cause of peace, she voted the WPP in the press, labeling memagainst U.S. entry into WORLD WAR I. During her second term, bers “ hysterical pacifi sts.” Once the she was the only member of the House of Representative to United States actually entered the vote against the declaration of war on Japan at the start of war in 1917, many of the 40,000 WORLD WAR II. WPP members dropped their oppoRankin devoted the rest of her life to the causes of peace, sition and instead worked to help feminism, and disarmament. Her extensive travels abroad invictims of the war and conscientious cluded the study of nonviolence with Mohandas Gandhi in Inobjectors. dia. At age 86 she headed the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in the After World War I, women estab1965 March on Washington to protest U.S. involvement in the lished four organizations promoting VIETNAM WAR. Rankin died on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, peace: the Women’s International California. League for Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Peace Society, the Women’s Peace Union, and the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW). The NCCCW successfully supported cribs and nursed their infants during the hearratifi cation of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an ings. This group was also instrumental in perinternational treaty that condemned “ recourse to suading President John F. Kennedy to sign the war for the solution of international controverNuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. During the sies,” but the agreement never had any real imVIETNAM WAR, WSP worked with draft resisters, pact on world peace. In the years between World counseling more than 100,000 men on their War I and WORLD WAR II, some of the women rights. A small organization called Another who led peace organizations were denounced as Mother for Peace also lobbied against the war, communists and spied on by the newly created coining the famous slogan “ War Is Not Healthy Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There for Children and Other Living Things.” were, for example, extensive FBI fi les on both In 1980, a group called Women’s Pentagon AcJane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. tion marched on the Pentagon with huge lifeAfter World War II, Women Strike for Peace sized puppets and posters shaped like grave(WSP) was founded in opposition to nuclear teststones to demand “ no more amazing inventions ing. This organization was responsible for a onefor death.” Many women were arrested when day strike that occurred on November 1, 1961, they attempted to block entrances to the buildwhen approximately 50,000 women protested ing by weaving brightly colored strands of yarn radioactive contamination of milk and other hazacross the doorways. This group and others that ards associated with nuclear testing. When infollowed have been labeled “ ecofeminists,” bevestigated by the House Un-American Activities cause their concerns include not only issues of Committee, WSP members brought babies in war and peace but also of the environment. Many

PA R K E R , D O R O T H Y

ecofeminists maintain that there are parallels between male domination of women, imperialism, and male domination of the environment. From the mid-1980s forward, women’s groups have called for more women to be involved at the highest levels in decisions about war, peace, economic development, and the environment. In 1995, at the Fourth World Congress on Women, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), led by former congresswoman BELLA ABZUG, called for 50-50 participation of men and women in all governmental bodies. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Confl ict Resolution). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.

 PARKER, DOROTHY

(1893– 1967) Writer and humorist. Dorothy Rothschild was born on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey. After attending private schools, Dorothy took a job as a piano player to accompany students who were enrolled in a dance school. At the same time she was writing poetry, and in 1915 her poem “ Any Porch” was published by Vanity Fair magazine. A year later she was hired by the magazine as one of their writers. In 1917, Dorothy married Edwin Pond Parker, but the couple divorced 11 years later. Meanwhile, she had become the fi rst female drama critic in New York, and in 1919 she helped found the famous Algonquin Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel. There she joined other writers, such as Robert Benchley and James Thurber, in literary discussions. During the 1920s, Parker cowrote her fi rst play Business Is Business and published poetry and short stories. She was awarded the O.Henry award for her story “ The Big Blonde” in 1929. During the 1930s, Parker wrote screenplays for Hollywood movies and won an Academy Award in 1937 for coauthoring A Star Is Born. She married Alan Campbell in 1933. Above all, Parker was known for her sharp wit. “ Wit has truth in it,” she once wrote, “ wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” Parker continued publishing plays, stories, and poems during the 1940s and 1950s. She was

also a book reviewer for Esquire magazine. She died on June 7, 1967.

 PARKS, ROSA McCAULEY

(b. 1913) Civil rights activist. When she was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley’s parents had no idea that their daughter would one day be credited with beginning a major civil rights movement. Growing up in the South, Rosa witnessed frequent Ku Klux Klan activity in her own neighborhood. It was a childhood of constant fear that prepared her for adult fearlessness. Rosa McCauley attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls; she cleaned classrooms to pay tuition. After graduating from Alabama State College (now University), she married Raymond Parks, a barber and activist, in 1932. Like her husband, Rosa was active in various black rights organizations. In 1943, she became the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But it was a bus ride on December 1, 1955, that made Rosa Parks the “ Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” At that time, the buses in Montgomery had segregated seating. The fi rst ten seats on the bus were reserved for white riders, whether or not there were whites on the bus. Blacks who sat there—knowingly or not—were threatened by white bus drivers. On that particular morning, Parks and three other blacks were seated in the fi rst seat behind the white section. A white rider entered the bus, but there were no more white seats. Parks and the other blacks were told to move so the white rider could sit down. Recognizing the driver as one who had evicted her from a bus a year earlier, Parks refused to move. The driver called the police, and Parks was arrested, fi ngerprinted, booked, jailed, and fi ned $14.00. Her bail was posted by her husband, and she was released the same day. This incident prompted the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted until December 21, 1956. Because 70 percent of the ridership was black, and so many African Americans refused to ride the buses, the bus company lost revenue and went bankrupt. In addition, bus segregation was banned, and the Montgomery Improvement Association was founded with Martin Luther King, Jr., as its fi rst president.

PERKINS, FRANCES

Her refusal to give up a bus seat made Rosa Parks a pioneer of civil rights in America.

Following the bus incident, Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957 to work with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1965 she became administrative assistant to Congressman John Conyers, Jr. Additionally, Parks founded the Institute for Leadership and Career Training for young blacks in 1987. She continues to live in Detroit and lectures approximately 25 times per year. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Parks, Rosa. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial Books, 1992. Siegel, Beatrice. The Year They Walked: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

 PARSONS, ELSIE CLEWS

(1875– 1940) Sociologist and anthropologist. Elsie Clews was born on November 27, 1875, in New York City. Her father was a successful banker, and her mother was a descendant of President James Madison. Elsie Clews became one of the early women graduates from Barnard College in New York City in 1896, then attended Columbia University, where she received a Ph.D. three years later in sociology. Over the next six years, Clews taught at Barnard. In 1900, she married Herbert Parsons.

9

Even after the couple had their fi rst child, Parsons wrote and published books on sociology. Each of them examines the impact of society on the behavior of individuals. She published The Family in 1906, The Old Fashioned Woman in 1913, and Social Freedom in 1915. In her books she proposed that women should be the social and political equal of men. She also wrote about the controversial idea of trial marriage for couples. Parsons also conducted anthropological studies of various American cultures. Among her major interests were the Pueblo Indians. In 1939 she published Pueblo Indian Religion. In addition she studied Mexican village culture and AfricanAmerican folklore, and conducted fi eldwork in the Caribbean. Beginning in 1933, she published a three-volume work, Folk-Lore of the Antilles. Parsons died in December 1940 in New York City.

 PERKINS, FRANCES

(1882– 1965) American reformer, and the fi rst woman to hold a Cabinet-level post in the U.S. government. Perkins grew up in a middle-class family in Worcester, Massachusetts, and got her A.B. from MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE (see Volume 2) in 1902. For a few years she taught at various girls’ schools in Massachusetts and then Illinois; she volunteered at a settlement house in Worcester, and then at Chicago’s HULL HOUSE (see Volume 2). In 1909 she went to New York to study political science at Columbia University, completing her master’s degree in 1910. While working for the New York Consumers League and living in Greenwich Village she witnessed the TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE, which painfully confi rmed her commitment to fi ghting the conditions that allowed such a tragedy to happen. 1913 she married Paul Caldwell Wilson, a progressive economist who agreed that Perkins should continue to use her own name. Their home became a gathering place for reformers. Of their two daughters, only one survived infancy. In 1918 Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown, and for the rest of his life Perkins was the family’s main breadwinner. Shortly afterward Alfred E. Smith, the newly elected governor, invited Perkins to become a member of the New York State Industrial Commission. She was a key member of Smith’s team throught his three-term administration. When Smith was succeeded as governor by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1929,

PETERSON, ESTHER EGGERTSEN

PETERSON, ESTHER  EGGERTSEN

Frances Perkins was the first woman appointed to a cabinet position.

Perkins was appointed to head the Industrial Commission, the fi rst woman to serve in any governor’s cabinet, and she had the task of leading the state’s response to the onset of the GREAT DEPRESSION. Upon Roosevelt’s election to the presidency, he asked Perkins to serve as his labor secretary. Despite the objections of labor, who wanted a male union activist, and of businesspeople, who thought she was too pro-labor, she took the job (stipulating only that she must be free to spend weekends with her family), and held it for 12 years—longer than any other U.S. cabinet member. She developed many of Roosevelt’s NEW DEAL programs to help workers through the Depression. The SOCIAL SECURITY ACT of 1935 was her most important achievement. She also rooted out corruption the the Labor Department and revitalized offices such as the WOMEN’ S BUREAU and the CHILDREN’ S BUREAU. Her record and her insistence on communicating directly with workers about their rights eventually won labor leaders over, as they confi rmed the enmity of the right-wing business community. In 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee brought an impreachment proceeding against her. It failed for lack of evidence, and she served six more years. In 1945 she led the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Conference in Geneva. In her last years she taught at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She died at 85.

(1906– 1997) Teacher, union organizer, consumer advocate. Esther Eggertsen was born on December 9, 1906, in Provo, Utah. She graduated from Brigham Young University in 1927 then moved to New York City where she received a master’s degree from Columbia Teachers College. In 1932, she married Oliver A. Peterson, who was a member of the Socialist Party in the United States. Esther Peterson taught school in Boston from 1932 to 1937 then became a union organizer for the American Federation of Teachers. In 1938, she took a similar position in New York with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). During the 1940s, she served as a union lobbyist, urging Congress to increase the minimum wage. During the 1950s, she continued her lobbying activities with the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (AFL-CIO), arguing for the rights of workers. President John F. Kennedy named Peterson assistant secretary of labor and director of the WOMEN’ S BUREAU in 1961. She led efforts to secure equal pay for equal work for women. During the 1960s and 1970s, she served as special assistant for consumer affairs in the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. As a consumer advocate, Peterson helped achieve such improvements as truthful advertising for food products and nutritional labeling on food packages. In 1981, Peterson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died on December 20, 1997.

 PHOTOGRAPHERS

Since the invention of photography in 1839, women have played leading roles in the advancement of the art. Gertrude Kä sebier (1852– 1934) and Anne W. Brigman (1868– 1950) made impressionistic images including interiors, landscapes, and portraits. Called “ Pictorialists,” they were part of the avant-garde art circles in New York City during the fi rst years of the twentieth century. Imogen Cunningham (1883– 1976) fi rst worked in the Pictorialist style as well. In 1930 however, as a founding member of the f/64 group in San Francisco, she was among the fi rst to pro-

PHOTOGRAPHERS

mote a new approach to photography. Her sharply detailed, close-up images of fl owers bring together a range of tones from the brightest whites to the most velvety blacks. She received many awards during the course of her long career. From the 1930s onward, Dorothea Lange (1895– 1965) and Margaret Bourke-White (1906– 1971) were pioneers of documentary photography and JOURNALISM. Lange’s image of a tired woman surrounded by her small children, the Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), has become an icon of the hardships of the GREAT DEPRESSION. Berenice Abbott (1898– 1991) belonged to the circle of surrealist artists working in Paris in the 1920s. She returned to the United States in 1929 and began to produce the photographs that both documented and celebrated the rapidly changing appearance of New York City. Diane Arbus (1923– 1971) concentrated on the social “ misfi ts,” photographing the many unusual people she encountered. Contemporary documentary photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark (b. 1940) continue to be inspired by their examples. Women have also made great contributions to contemporary art and advertising. Olivia Parker (b. 1941) works in both black-and-white and color, creating dreamlike still lifes of ordinary objects. Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) produces enormous Polaroid photographs of herself disguised as famous actresses, stereotypical American women, and even homeless or abused women. Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) brings art and journalism together, saying, “ my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of AfroAmericans in our country.” Annie Liebowitz (b. 1949) is best known for the portraits of celebrities she made for magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.

TRAILBLAZERS Prior to the 1930s and before the work of photographer and social activist Margaret Bourke-White (1904– 1971), the journalistic “photo -essay,” a group of photographs accompanied by short texts, did not exist. A photo-essay combines words with pictures, placing the news into context and providing readers with more personal access to events in the world around them. Born in 1904, Bourke-White studied biology and technology before attending the Clarence White School of Photography at Columbia University in New York City in the 1920s. She worked first as a freelance photographer of architecture and industrial structures, later joining the staff of publisher Henry Luce. On November 23, 1936, the first issue of Life magazine hit the stands. On its cover was a dramatic image of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The “ first” was but one of many that BourkeWhite would go on to claim. She was the first woman photographer hired by Fortune magazine (in 1929) and was one of the first four staff photographers hired by Life. She was the first American photographer permitted to take pictures in the Soviet Union, in 1930, the first female war correspondent in World War II, and the first to be allowed to work in combat. Bourke-White was there to record the horrors when American soldiers liberated the prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on April 11, 1945. Margaret Bourke-White died on August 27, 1971, after a 19-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. She published a number of books of her photographs, including six about her international travels. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums and archives.

Margaret Bourke-White, photographer and social activist, was one of the first to create a photo-essay.

P L A N N E D PA R E N T H O O D

 PLANNED PARENTHOOD

considered obscene at the time and against the law. The clinic was closed and Sanger spent a month in jail for the “ crime.” Twenty years later, a United States Circuit Court of Appeals removed the classifi cation of birth control information as obscene. Thirty years after that (1966) the Supreme Court case GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT (1965) found in favor of married couples who wanted to obtain contraceptives from their doctor. Sanger had never stopped her work to support research and education on birth control. Many joined her in the work. The Birth Control League, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, funded research that led to the development of the birth control pill in 1960 and supTRAILBLAZERS ported clinics around the country. Planned Parenthood has been at the center of political controversy Infl uenced by Sylvia Plath, her friend, and Robert Lowell, because of its pro-choice position on with whom she studied, the poet Anne Sexton (1928– 1974) is ABORTION. During the 1980s and often regarded as a member of the “ confessional school” for 1990s, the Right to Life movement her intimate, unsentimental portrayals of personal anguish in held vigils outside Planned Parentverse form. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back hood offices in an attempt to dis(1960), is a harrowing account of her depression, mental courage women from getting aborbreakdown, and partial recovery. All My Pretty Ones (1962) tion information. The more radical pursues the themes of personal anguish and collapse. Live or anti-abortionists attacked clinics and Die (1966), widely considered her best work, was awarded a doctors and in a few cases murdered Pulitzer Prize for its stark evocation of mortal truths. Yet Sexclinic workers and doctors. In 2001, ton’s interest as a poet, she said, was less rooted in personal President George W. Bush restricted confession than in her experience as a woman– – her loves, chilthe funding for international dren, parents, breakdowns, and physical existence. Among the Planned Parenthood because it prosubjects treated in her poems are menstruation, abortion, and vided women with information drug addition– – “ reality and its hard facts,” as she put it. about abortions. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, she was The world’s largest and oldest sent to prep school at age 17 for her undisciplined behavior; family planning organization, it was there that she began writing poetry. After attending GarPlanned Parenthood today serves more than 5 million women and land Junior College for one year, she married Alfred Muller men in the United States and develSexton at age 19 and gave birth to the first of their two daughoping countries. It operates 875 afters in 1953 (the second two years later). She suffered her first fi liate health centers in 49 states and breakdown in 1954 and battled depression throughout the rest the District of Columbia. of her life. Amid frequent hospitalizations and several suicide An organization founded as the Birth Control League in 1921 to provide women with information about their sexual health and reproductive choices. Although women have shared information with each other on ways to prevent pregnancy for centuries, the organized and scientifi cally-informed dissemination of birth control information took an enormous step forward in 1916 when MARGARET SANGER opened a clinic in Brooklyn, New York, to provide the poor and largely immigrant women of the neighborhood with information about preventing an unwanted PREGNANCY. Providing such information was

attempts, she found an outlet in her poetry and the support of mentors and friends (Plath, Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, Maxine Kunin, and others). Her last book, The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), was published after her final, successful attempt at suicide at age 46. Although her poetry was criticized in some circles for its raw subject matter, its skillfulness and power have earned her a place among the enduring voices of modern American poetry.

See also: Reproductive Rights.

 PLATH, SYLVIA

(1932– 1963) Poet, whose work is known for its painful imagery and its themes of self-destruction.

PORNOGRAPHY

As a young girl growing up in Massachusetts, Plath was popular and bright. She entered Smith College in 1950 and before graduating summa cum laude had published many poems and stories. Plath demonstrated signs of depression early on, however, even attempting suicide, an experience later described in her 1963 autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. She received a Fulbright scholarship to attend Cambridge University in England, and while there married the English poet Ted Hughes. Plath’s fi rst book of poems The Colossus was published in 1960, the year her daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes, was born. Their son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, arrived in January 1962, by which time the two had formally separated. Plath’s story was one of hardship. She wrote incessantly, often completing a poem a day. In 1963 Plath attempted suicide again, this time successfully. Her posthumous publications include a collection of poems called Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees (1971). Other works include a selection of letters written to her mother, Letters Home (1975), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes (1981). Sylvia Plath is buried in Heptonstall Churchyard in Yorkshire, England. On her tombstone is written words from a sixteenth-century Chinese story: “ Even amidst fi erce fl ames– – the golden lotus can be planted.”

 PORNOGRAPHY

The representation of erotic behavior in writing, visual arts, or media intended to cause sexual excitement. The word pornography, derived from the Greek porni (“ prostitute” ) and graphein (“ to write” ), was originally defi ned as any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes. Gradually, pornography began to refer to a much broader range of erotic representations, and in the contemporary United States, debates continue over the defi nition of pornography and its role and function in the public sphere. The current judicial guideline for determining whether material is obscene was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. California (1973). Material is obscene, the Court held, if the average person, applying contemporary “ community standards,” fi nds that it appeals to prurient interest.

Public attitudes toward and legislation on pornography in the United States, however, have not been consistent over the past century. Instead, attitudes have wavered depending on the nature of the material and the political climate. Books widely regarded as classics, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), were at one time or another banned from publication in the United States based on passages defi ned as pornographic. Some critics have accused contemporary photographer Sally Mann of child pornography based on the nude photos of her preadolescent children in her book Immediate Family (1992). Prior to the nineteenth century, pornographic representations were limited to the written word and the visual arts of sculpture, painting, and drawing. The nineteenth-century inventions of photography and fi lm had a profound impact on sexual representations, allowing for a kind of accuracy and immediacy previously unavailable, and allowing pornography to reach an unprecedented mass audience. The expansion of pornography in the nineteenth century was accompanied by increasing attempts at controlling its publication and consumption. The fi rst raid on a pornographic fi lm occurred in Pennsylvania in 1915 because the movie contained images of a pregnant woman. Despite the moral condemnation of pornography, it has continued to proliferate in American society. In 1953, Hugh Hefner challenged prevailing standards when he began Playboy magazine. Hefner, who produced the debut issue in his kitchen, eventually built Playboy Enterprises, into a leading player in the multibillion-dollar pornography industry. By the 1970s, Penthouse and Hustler appeared, offering readers even more risqué images. As the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT gained momentum in the 1960s, some women began to speak out against the development of pornography. GLORIA STEINEM gained attention in 1963 with her article “ I Was a Playboy Bunny,” which recounted her experience as a waitress at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club. Steinem’s concern with pornography focused on the industry’s attempt to control and demean women. In 1972 the adult fi lm Deep Throat debuted and made a star of female actress Linda Lovelace. Although Deep Throat was her only feature, Lovelace became a widely recognizable fi gure in the world of pornography. Deep Throat became

4

POVERTY

the target of censorship throughout the United States in the 1970s on the grounds of obscenity. In 1979, the group Women Against Pornography was organized by feminist author SUSAN BROWNMILLER, who also authored the widely anthologized article “ Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet,” in which she insists that she is opposed not to sex and desire but to any sexual representation that humiliates, degrades, or dehumanizes men and women. A decade after Deep Throat’s debut, Lovelace spoke out against the fi lm industry that created her fame, and revealed years of abuse and exploitation. Interviewed by LESBIAN scholar Andrea Dworkin in her classic anti-pornography treatise, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), Lovelace is quoted as saying, “ Every time someone watches that fi lm, they are watching me being raped.” Lovelace’s claim has been reinforced by the feminist lawyer, author, activist, and professor Catherine MacKinnon, who argues that pornography not only represents violence but is violence. In the mid-1970s, MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for SEXUAL HARASSMENT as a form of sex discrimination, and later formulated laws, with the help of Dworkin, recognizing pornography as a violation of civil rights. Aided in part by twentieth-century media such as video and the Internet, pornography is more widely available for private use than ever before. There are many men and women who defend the existence of pornography as a manifestation of the American right to choice and free speech. Some go further and advocate the visibility of sex in society in the form of pornography and fantasy as a natural and healthy element of human life. Some pornography actresses insist that the pornography industry is free from coercion and note that jobs related to pornography offer one avenue to fi nancial independence for women. Apart from fi gures in the mainstream pornography business, radical feminists, lesbian feminists, and sex radicals such as Susie Bright, Carol Queen, and Pat Califi a have long defended the right of individuals to read and view explicitly sexual material, irrespective of the type of activity portrayed. These women have chosen to reject the idea of pornography as inherently patriarchal and have instead created erotic material that more closely refl ects their audience’s needs and desires. On Our Backs, an erotic magazine by and for lesbians, published its fi rst issue in 1984.

Lesbian author, activist, journalist, and sex educator Pat Califi a (b. 1954) has written sex-positive essays since the 1970s and has promoted pornography for the liberation of human sexuality. See also: Feminism, Radical; Ms. Magazine; Rape; Sexual Revolution; Women’s Liberation Movement; Women’s Studies. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Slade, Joesph W. Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLI0, 2000.

 POVERTY

The vast majority of Americans who can be classifi ed as poor are women. The causes of poverty among women are many and complex, but most of them are related to gendered stereotypes and expectations. Women are expected to take care of young children, but if there is no father in the house, the mother must also earn a living. Because women are typically paid less than men, many working women are hard pressed to pay for child care, which can take up to half of a lowwage worker’s salary. If single women stay home to take care of their children and collect WELFARE, they are branded as lazy– – and even then often do not have enough to live decently. Elderly women are also confronted with poverty. When a single woman who has worked a low-wage job all her life retires, her benefi ts are signifi cantly less than those of high-paid workers, leaving her to face an impoverished old age. Many widows live on pension amounts that do not bring them above the poverty line. The threat of poverty and the structure of the welfare system make it clear that society expects women to marry and stay married if they want economic security. Many women remain in abusive marriages because they are frightened by the economic consequences of not having access to their husband’s income. The poor in America have long been regarded as completely unlike those who have the good fortune not to be poor. As Susan Holloway and her colleagues point out, “ Even though about 60 percent of welfare recipients leave the rolls within two years, they are frequently identifi ed as laggards or portrayed as eager to have more babies and lacking motivation to piece together a better life.” This point of view was given scholarly support in the 1950s by anthropologist

P R E S I D E N T ’ S C O M M I S S I O N O N T H E S TA T U S O F W O M E N

bility Act, which placed time limits on how long a person could collect welfare and reduced federal protection for poor people, leaving many women in extremely difficult situations. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Abramovitz, Mimi. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Holloway, Susan D., et al. Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Poverty and homelessness among women remains a problem in contemporary America.

Oscar Lewis. He coined the term “ culture of poverty” to describe his theory that poverty is not caused by economic difficulties alone. He believed that families evolved norms, or ways of behaving, that kept them in poverty generation after generation. According to this theory, a mother who believes there is little hope of doing better passes this view on to her children, who simply assume they will always be poor and on welfare. Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America (1963) had a profound infl uence on President Johnson’s War on Poverty, held essentially the same view: “ Poverty in the United States is a culture, an institution, a way of life.” Americans did not always see the poor through this lens. When women’s BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES (see Volume 2) began to organize and help poor women in the 1800s and after, many made the point explicitly that anyone could fi nd themselves in economic difficulties. “ There but for the grace of God go I,” was the motivating principle for many charitable actions undertaken by these groups. But as the theory of the culture of poverty took hold and as more minority women entered the ranks of the poor, people began to treat the poor as being different from, and inferior to, people who were more affluent. Thus programs designed to help poor women, and especially poor women with children, were stigmatized and resented by many Americans. The most signifi cant welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), ended in 1996 with the passage of the Personal Responsi-

 PREGNANCY

Until the late 1930s, most pregnant women in the United States gave birth at home without pain medications. Other women usually attended the birth. By the 1940s women began giving birth at hospitals with male physicians attending the births. Women were often anesthetized. In the 1950s, the Lamaze method became popular in the United States. The method, developed by Dr. Ferdinand Lamaze, was based on a series of breathing patterns to use during labor. Another method popular at this time was the natural childbirth technique, the Bradley Method. This method, also known as HusbandCoached Childbirth, emphasized education, controlled breathing and relaxation, breastfeeding, and no drugs. Natural childbirth and medication-free childbirth became popular in the 1970s. Although more women were giving birth naturally, physicians were making advances in pain control during labor. The development of the epidural altered the birth experience for mothers who used medications. By 2000, more than 90 percent of American women delivered in hospital settings and most women use obstetricians. A small number of women use midwives and deliver in birthing centers or at home.

PRESIDENT’S  COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN A group of 20 legislators and philanthropists who were active in women’s rights issues, organized to study the work status of women. President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in December

PROSTITUTION

1961. Former fi rst lady ELEANOR ROOSEVELT chaired the commission until her death in 1962. The primary goal of the commission was to examine public policies and their impact on the ability of women to achieve full participation in American life. Among the practices examined by the group were labor laws relating to hours and wages, the quality of legal representation for women, the obstacles to education for women, and federal insurance and tax laws that affected women’s economic status and income. In a report to the president, the commission documented widespread discrimination against women in the workplace and recommended several charges, including provision of affordable child care for all income levels, hiring practices that promoted equal opportunity for women, and availability of paid maternity leave. The report also called for the establishment of a Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women. The council would recommend coordination of activities with private institutions and organizations, review the progress of women’s participation in American economic life, and consider new methods of advancing the status of women. Though the report itself did not bring about immediate changes, many states set up similar commissions on the status of women, and these state-level commissions played a critical role in promoting more equal economic opportunities. The president’s committee was terminated in October 1963 after the submission of the fi nal report.

 PROSTITUTION

The performance of sexual acts in exchange for money. Prostitution is often associated with the sexual exploitation of women. It is a result of economic dependency. In the early 1800s, moral reform crusaders began pushing to end prostitution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the progressive reformers also campaigned to end prostitution. One criticism of the bias in state laws made throughout the century is the prosecution of prostitutes while their male customers were allowed to go free. In the United States, only part of Nevada permits legal prostitution. In 1949, the United Nations adopted a resolution to decriminalize prostitution. Fifty countries ratifi ed the resolution, although the United States did not. In 1973 the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN passed a resolution sup-

porting the decriminalization of prostitution. The National Task Force on Prostitution (NTFP), founded in 1979, serves as an umbrella organization for prostitutes and prostitutes’ rights organizations across the United States. It expanded its purpose in 1994, to involve organizations and individuals who support the rights of prostitutes and other sex workers. Prostitutes’ rights organizations, such as COYOTE and the NTFP, have advocated for unionization. Poverty, drugs and violence are often associated with prostitution. The women’s movement has been split on the topic. Some, like legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and author Andrea Dworkin, believe that prostitution perpetuates the victimization of women. Others follow the principle of “ a woman’s body, a woman’s right,” and insist that the choices a woman makes about her own body must be accorded full legal protection. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. Seagraves, Anne. Soiled Doves: Prostitutes in the Early West. Hayden, ID: Wesanne Publishers. 1994.

PROTECTIVE LABOR  LEGISLATION Legislation requiring such worker protections as minimum wages or maximum legal hours in a workweek. Protective labor legislation fi rst appeared in England in the early 1800s and was designed to limit the hours worked by children. In the 1840s protective legislation was extended to women to limit the number of hours they could work for pay, and bar them from working in certain jobs. These measures purportedly aimed at protecting women’s health and morals, but they also limited women’s employment opportunities. Many of the jobs from which women were barred tended to be relatively high paying. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a maximum-hours law for male mine workers in 1898 (Holden v. Hardy) but seven years later struck down a similar law in Lochner v. New York on the basis that such laws impinged on individual liberty by restricting the freedom to contract. In 1905, the United States began passing protective legislation aimed at women, often under the guise of protecting the nation’s reproduc-

Q U I LT S

tive forces. The resulting restrictions increased women’s reliance on lower-paid service-sector jobs and work that could be done in the home (legislators did not restrict the hours women could spend on unpaid domestic labor). Most men and many LABOR UNIONS supported the restrictions. Women’s rights advocates were divided. Some supported minimum wages for women, since employers tended to pay women less than men; others opposed them out of the belief that laws should treat women and men equally. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a maximum-hours law for women in MULLER v. OREGON (see Documents), on the basis that fundamental differences between women and men (i.e., women’s “ delicacy” ) warranted the restric-

7

tions, but in 1923 it struck down a minimumwage law for women in ADKINS v. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, arguing that freedom of contract was protected under the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. Again, in 1936, the Court struck down a minimum-wage law covering female laundry workers in Morehead v. New York, but within a year reversed itself and upheld a minimum-wage law in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish on the basis that reasonable regulations did not violate due process and that government could protect workers’ health and safety. Today’s protective labor laws generally cover men and women equally, and those that focus on women are more likely to bar differential treatment than to mandate it.

Q  QUILTS

A form of the textile arts that is centuries old and most often created by women. A quilt is distinguished from other textile forms by a fabric top (pieced or appliqué ), a fi ller referred to as batting, and a backing. The three layers are held together with stitching that secures the fabric layers and enhances the pattern of the overall piece. For those who view quilts as an art form, the artistry of the overall design and the mastery of the quilted stitch size and pattern determine the quality of the piece. Some quilt makers simply tie the layers together with colored thread using a blanket or similar piece of solid fabric as the batting. Tying was frequently used in the fancy quilts of the early 1900s. Quilts provide historians with information about the daily lives of average women, HOMEMAKERS, and community life in various regions of the country. This is particularly true for the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Women made the majority of quilts for practical purposes: to warm their families’ beds and to recycle worn clothing in an efficient use of domestic resources. Women saved pieces of fabric from men’s shirts and ties, women’s housedresses, children’s clothes, kitchen toweling, and fl our sacks for the piecework of quilt tops. They used spare mo-

ments of “ rest” to cut the patterns and piece the tops. Many women brought their quilts to quilting bees where they were assisted by neighbors, relatives, or friends. Women of privileged classes made parlor quilts pieced of velvet and silk, and stitched together with fancy embroidery that emphasized their handiwork skills. Quilting became less common during WORLD WAR II and the postwar decades. The increase in married women workers and the wide availability of low-priced goods diminished the production of quilts as objects of necessity. Yet these trends also produced two reactions that reignited the interest of Americans. Collectors began acquiring and preserving the fi nest examples of American quilts. As quilts began to move from domestic craft to contemporary textile, artists reinvented this traditional art form. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Cooper, Patricia, and Norma Bradley Buferd. The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1977. Dewhurst, C. Kurt, et al. Artists in Aprons: Folk Art by American Women. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979. Ferraro, Pat, et al. Hearts and Hands: The Infl uence of Women and Quilts on American Society. San Francisco: The Quilt Digest Press, 1987.

R A I N E Y, M A

R  RAINEY, MA

(1886– 1939) Known as the “ Mother of the Blues” for her infl uential role in shaping the genre of blues music. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rainey was among the fi rst black performers in the emerging black entertainment industry. She was born Gertrude Pridgett to parents who performed in minstrel shows, and fi rst appeared on stage in 1900. In 1904, still a teenager, she married Will Rainey and toured with him as “ Ma and Pa Rainey, the Assassinators of the Blues.” By the 1920s she had become a solo star on the vaudeville circuit. Rainey was signed by Paramount in 1923 and recorded 100 songs for them between 1923 and 1928. Like the female blues singers who followed her, Rainey explored the themes of race and gender in her music. Her songs refl ected the experiences of many African-American women, and, like many other blues songs, often focused on violent relationships with men. Despite the fact that many of Rainey’s songs focused on relationships with men, she also sang about her attraction to women. Rainey’s colleagues knew that she was sexually involved with women. She sang about this involvement in “ Prove It on Me Blues,” a song she composed. See also: African Americans; Holiday, Billie; Lesbians; Music; Smith, Bessie.

 RAPE

Forced sexual intercourse. In many jurisdictions, the term “ sexual assault” has replaced the term “ rape” in statutes and includes forced sodomy (oral or anal sexual acts), child molestation, incest, and fondling. Rape laws changed signifi cantly throughout the twentieth century. The concept of rape in marriage, for example, was dismissed as something imagined by the wife. It was not until the 1970s that society began to acknowledge that rape in marriage could occur and that laws were passed to criminalize marital rape. Another reform included rape shield laws that prevented the accuser’s sexual history from being presented at trial. Prior to this law, jurors

Public protest against sexual assault has led to important changes in law and institutional policies.

and judges could use previous sexual history as justifi cation for the rape. Also, the invasion of privacy made women reluctant to report rapes. Part of the credit for the increased public attention and assault legislation in the 1970s goes to the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT. Authors such as Susan Griffin argued that rape was a crime of control rather than passion; and Susan Brownmiller hypothesized that acts of rape, much like acts of terrorism, created a “ rape culture” that kept women in fear. Date rape was also recognized in the late 1970s. Rape prevention programs now are used on many college campuses, and rape counseling centers are available across the country. In 1974, Ann Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom developed a model called the Rape Trauma Syndrome to describe some of the experiences sexual assault victims may go through following an assault. Enactment of the federal Violence Against Women Act in 1994 (see Documents) helped to strengthen rape laws.

 REAGAN, NANCY DAVIS

(b. 1921) Actress, fi rst lady (1981– 1989), and wife of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Nancy Davis Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins in New York

RELIGION

City. Her father left the family and Nancy spent her early years with her grandmother while her mother, Edith Luckett, toured as an actress. When her mother married neurosurgeon Loyal Davis, she became Nancy Davis. Davis earned a drama degree from Smith College in 1943, then acted on Broadway until signing with the MGM movie studios in 1949. In 1952, her name showed up erroneously on a list of communist sympathizers, and Davis was referred to Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. The two met, fell in love, and married in 1952. When Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966, Nancy Reagan began her role as the politician’s wife––a role that would extend all the way to the White House. She was very involved in her husband’s 1980 campaign for U.S. president and had a signifi cant infl uence on his presidency. During her time in the White House, Nancy Reagan sponsored various social programs. The best-known was the “ Just Say No” foundation, an antidrug program for juveniles for which she won various honors and awards. Her memoir, My Turn, was published in 1989.

 REED

V. REED U.S. Supreme Court case in 1971 that overturned a state law because the law discriminated on the basis of gender. In March 1967 a child named Richard Lynn Reed died in Idaho. Richard died intestate, meaning that he did not leave a will. Since there was no will, there was no one to ensure that any money or property he owned was distributed as he would have wished. About seven months after his death, his adoptive mother, Sally Reed, fi led a petition with the probate court (the court that deals with cases involving wills, estates, and the like), asking to be named administrator of the boy’s estate. Before the court could act on her petition, the boy’s adoptive father, Cecil Reed, who had separated from Sally Reed before their son’s death, fi led a competing petition. The probate court would have to decide between the two. At the time, Idaho law listed several classes of people who might be entitled to administer an estate. One of those classes was “ the father or mother” of the deceased. Both Sally and Cecil Reed qualifi ed. But the code went on to state, “ Of several persons claiming and equally entitled

9

to administer, males must be preferred to females.” Therefore, the court named Cecil Reed administrator of his son’s estate. The court did so without conducting a hearing to decide whether he was the more capable of the two to carry out the responsibilities of administrator. Sally Reed appealed the probate court’s decision to the district court of Idaho. She argued that the Idaho legal code violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The basis of her argument was that the code treated similarly situated men and women differently. She won the appeal, but Cecil Reed appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, citing the “ mandatory” provision of Idaho law. The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Sally Reed’s favor. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the decision that declared the Idaho code unconstitutional: “ To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other . . . is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Reed v. Reed was thus an important case in the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to combat gender discrimination. It was also one of the fi rst gender-discrimination cases in which the Court refused to uphold a state law.

 RELIGION

The history of religion in America, as historian Ann Braude points out, is the history of women’s involvement. From the colonial period on, women have constituted the majority of churchgoers in America. Braude also notes that it is primarily women who raise the next generation of churchgoers, thus keeping religion alive. Although women have loyally supported religions, most denominations largely excluded them from positions of authority until the 1970s. In the nineteenth century women began to assert moral authority. By founding a variety of BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES (see Volume 2) women promoted religious values. They moved from the domestic into the public sphere to work for the ABOLITION of slavery and for TEMPERANCE (see Volume 2). And they formed MISSIONARY organizations that exerted considerable infl uence, especially in Protestant denominations. In fact, women’s missionary societies were so successful

7

RELIGION

those religions that still do not allow women to join the clergy, women have been able to draw attention to In 1989, Barbara Clementine Harris was named a bishop of the issue and institute debate and the Episcopal Church, the first women elevated to such a podiscussion. Women have also infl uenced change in the language of sition in any of the three largest Christian branches––A nglihymns and the liturgy to refl ect the canism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. idea that God is not a man but a spirWhile many people, including many women, were delighted itual being who encompasses both with Harris’s appointment, other church members were very male and female characteristics. unhappy. Traditionalists labeled the ordination “sa crilegious,” Thanks to the efforts of feminists, while others were concerned because Harris’s background was many religions have begun to refer so unusual. A divorced woman without a college education, to God as “ mother” as well as “ faHarris had been a businesswoman for most of her life. She ther,” emphasizing God’s nurturing, was, however, active in her church for many years before she forgiving, loving nature. Feminist chose the religious life. theologians, such as Catholic femiHarris’s business career began after her high school gradnist Rosemary Radford Ruether, uation in 1948. She took a position with a public relations have begun to exert an infl uence on firm, where her job was to help white-owned companies marthe nature of religious belief. ket their products and services in black communities. She was Ruether emphasizes the relationship so successful that she was eventually named president of the of Christian theology to issues of sofirm. In 1968, she went to work for Sun Oil and ultimately becial justice, including sexism. Elisacame head of community relations. Throughout her business beth Schüs sler Fiorenza examines career, Harris was active in her church as a volunteer and biblical texts and church history civil rights advocate. from a feminist perspective and chalHarris began to study for the priesthood in 1976, taking lenges many assumptions about reliclasses in the evenings and on weekends. She was ordained a gion, the Bible, and religious audeacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980, among the first women thority. In 1989, Barbara Harris to be ordained in the Episcopal church. She served as a parish became the fi rst woman in any of the priest for four years and then was appointed director of the major religious denominations to be Episcopal Church Publishing Company. In that role, she ordained a bishop. Since then, several others have followed. edited and wrote for the Witness, a church journal known for While women have been orits liberal leanings. In 1989, after much controversy within dained and elevated into positions of the church, Harris was appointed suffragan (assistant) bishop leadership in many Protestant defor Massachusetts. In an interview for the Boston Globe in nominations, they are still excluded 1998, Harris told reporter Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez that she acfrom positions of leadership in the tually got death threats when she was selected. Rodriguez notes Catholic church. Nevertheless, that Harris “ stopped to grin, and added, ‘ All in the name of women have deeply infl uenced the Lord, of course.’ ” Catholicism. The I RISH IMMIGRANTS Since Harris became a bishop, sixteen other women in the who swelled the ranks of CATHOLICS Episcopal church have been named bishops. in the nineteenth century (see Volume 2) and deeply infl uenced the direction of American Catholicism that some male church leaders felt threatened by were largely female. With the establishment of them. Eventually, they brought women’s societies parochial schools in the 1800s, lay women and under the control of more general groups. Even nuns became the primary educators of Catholic so, women remained a powerful force in religion children. Nuns far outnumbered priests and exin the fi rst half of the twentieth century. erted a much greater infl uence on the day-toBeginning in the 1970s women began to seek day practice of religion. In addition, in the early ordination as ministers in greater numbers, and days of parochial education, girls were more more churches began to accept them. By the likely to attend Catholic schools than boys be1980s women made up half of all the ministercause boys were sent into the workforce. These ial students in many denominations. Even in girls, in turn, raised their children in the faith.

TRAILBLAZERS

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Feminists in Judaism have also worked to change the language of prayers that portray women in a negative light and have feminized certain aspects of the liturgy. Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative Jews now ordain women as rabbis. Only the Orthodox do not. While it has always been true that American women fi lled the pews while men held sway in the pulpits, a shift seems to be under way as more women are elevated to positions of power and infl uence in their churches. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Braude, Ann. “ Women’s History Is American Religious History.” In Thomas A. Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Schüs sler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1994.

 REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

The right of a person to decide if, when, and how to have children. Although couples practiced contraception in ancient Greece and Rome, the modern birth control movement began in the late nineteenth century. In 1916, the fi rst U.S. birth control clinic was established in Brooklyn, New York, by MARGARET SANGER. At the time, contraception was illegal. State laws essentially forced women who were sexually active to conceive children, whether they wanted to or not. Sanger’s clinic was quickly closed by police, and Sanger herself was sentenced to 30 days in jail. In 1917, she founded the National Birth Control League, which eventually became PLANNED PARENTHOOD. Sanger and her organization campaigned to legalize contraception and worked to overcome the objections of nearly every major religion. In 1930, the Church of England was the among fi rst organized religions to allow the use of contraception by married couples. Almost all Protestant denominations followed suit, but the Roman Catholic church continued to condemn the practice. Despite years of pressure from Planned Parenthood and many Catholic couples, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church’s teachings against contraception in his 1968 Humanae Vitae (On Human Life). Margaret Sanger and a friend fi nanced research that led to the fi rst oral contraceptive, the birth control pill, which led to what has been called the SEXUAL REVOLUTION of the 1960s. For

7

the fi rst time in history, women could engage in sexual activity without the fear of becoming pregnant. Because they no longer needed to fear unwanted pregnancy, many women felt freer to engage in sex outside of marriage. In the 1960s and 1970s, several Supreme Court decisions helped void state laws that made contraception illegal. In GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT (1965), the Court ruled that states could not prevent the distribution of contraceptives to married couples. In EISENSTADT v. BAIRD (1972), it ruled that states could not prevent the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people. In both cases, the Court based its decision partially on the right to privacy granted by the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1977, the Court extended the right to access contraceptives to minors, in Carey v. Populations Services. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, abortions were performed by women themselves or by midwives and were not illegal in the United States. But after the Civil War, many state legislatures passed laws making ABORTION a crime. Thus a pregnant women had no legal choice other than to bear the child, unless her life was threatened by the pregnancy. Laws against abortion did not stop women from terminating pregnancies, but they did force women to obtain the procedure illegally. These “ back alley” abortions were often performed by unqualifi ed persons, resulting in permanent physical damage to some women and death to others. By the mid-1960s, some states had liberalized abortion laws, but abortion was still illegal in most of the country. Two landmark Supreme Court cases decided in 1973, ROE V. WADE and Doe v. Bolton, struck down state laws that criminalized abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing the Roe decision, declared that the constitutional “ right of privacy is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy.” The debate over reproductive rights continues. Groups who oppose abortion and advocate criminal penalties actively pursue their agenda in the courts and the press. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Davis, Susan E. Women under Attack: Victories, Backlash, and the Fight for Reproductive Freedom. Boston: South End Press, 1988. Hartman, Betsey. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Boston: South End Press, 1994.

7

RICH, ADRIENNE

 RICH, ADRIENNE

(b. 1929) Poet. Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, poet W. H. Auden selected one of her poems for publication in Yale University’s Younger Poet Series. It was her fi rst published work, and a huge honor for Rich. Rich married Alfred Conrad in 1953, and the couple had three children before Rich left her husband in 1970; later that year, he committed suicide. Throughout her marriage, Rich had continued writing poetry, publishing several collections of her works, including The Diamond Cutters (1955) and Necessities of Life (1966). She published The Will to Change in 1971 and in 1974 received the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck, accepting the honor on behalf of all women. Also in 1974, Rich became a professor of English at City College in New York. Her 1976 book Twenty-One Love Poems describes her lesbian relationship. Additional volumes of poetry appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, as did several books of nonfi ction, including Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986). She has received numerous prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award.

 RIDE, SALLY

(b. 1951) The fi rst American woman in space. When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) put out a call for astronauts in 1976, more than 8,000 men and women applied to the program. Of the 35 who were accepted, six were women, among them Sally Ride. Ride was not the fi rst woman in space—that honor belongs to a Soviet cosmonaut—but she did pioneer space travel for American women, serving as missioncontrol communications officer during the second and third fl ights of the space shuttle Columbia in 1981 and 1982. In 1983, she became the fi rst American woman in space, fl ying as a mission specialist aboard the shuttle Challenger. She fl ew again on Challenger the following year, and after the 1986 Challenger explosion was appointed to the presidential commission that investigated the accident. She resigned from NASA in 1987 and became director of the California Space Institute. In 1999 she joined space.com, a Web site about the space industry.

ROCKEFELLER, ABBY  ALDRICH

(1874– 1948) Philanthropist. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Abby Greene Aldrich was the daughter of Nelson Aldrich, a U.S. Senator from 1881 to 1911, and Abby Pearce Chapman. After graduating from Miss Abbott’s School for Young Ladies in Providence in 1893, Abby traveled to Europe. A year later, she met John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The couple were married in 1901. During WORLD WAR I, Mrs. Rockefeller did extensive volunteer work with the American Red Cross, and in 1918 wrote “ Suggestions for Housing Women War Workers,” which led to the development of federal standards for housing women who worked at American factories during the war. A year later, she began efforts to improve the living conditions for employees at a New Jersey refi nery owned by Standard Oil, her husband’s company. This led to the building of homes and a community center. Much of Rockefeller’s philanthropic work was focused on the arts. In May 1929, she helped found the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in 1935 donated more than 180 paintings to its collection. Four years later, several years after Williamsburg, the former capital of Virginia, had been restored with fi nancial assistance from her husband, Abby Rockefeller donated her collection of American folk art to the city. A museum of folk art at Colonial Williamsburg was subsequently named after her. She died on April 5, 1948.

 ROE

V. WADE A 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the fi rst trimester of pregnancy, profoundly changing the lives of women and societal attitudes toward women’s reproductive rights. Few decisions in judicial history have been as divisive. In 1970 “ Jane Roe” (a pseudonym designed to protect the identity of a Texas woman named Norma McCorvey) sued Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney, in federal court. McCorvey had been pregnant and sought an abortion, a procedure that was illegal in most of the United States and that subjected women and their doctors to arrest. In her suit, McCorvey argued that the Texas law criminalizing abortion was unconstitutional. The lower court agreed, but the state appealed the case to the U.S.

R O O S E V E LT , E L E A N O R

Supreme Court. In its 7-to-2 decision, the Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling, saying that the Texas law was unnecessarily restrictive and violated a woman’s constitutional right to privacy. Writing for the Court majority, Justice Harry A. Blackmun stated, “ This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action . . . or in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Blackmun went on to say that “ the detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent,” including a “ distressful life and future” and “ psychological harm” to unwilling mothers and unwanted children. The Court, however, declined to say that the right to an abortion was absolute. Any state law restricting abortion had to serve a “ compelling state interest.” It also had to balance the rights of pregnant women with the state’s interest in both the health of the woman and the potential life of the fetus. The Court thus concluded that to protect the health of the mother the state could limit abortions after the fi rst trimester, or three months, of pregnancy; it could assert its right to protect fetuses at the point when the fetus was viable, or had “ capability for meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.” In the years that followed numerous efforts were mounted to overturn Roe v. Wade, including a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or to put in place a constitutional amendment that would prohibit abortions. Nearly 30 years after Roe v. Wade, Americans remain deeply divided over the issue of abortion rights. See also: Griswold v. Connecticut; Planned Parenthood. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Faux, Marian. Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Decision That Made Abortion Legal. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.

ROOSEVELT, EDITH  KERMIT CAROW

(1861– 1948) First lady and wife of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Edith Kermit Carow was born in Norwich, Con-

7

necticut, the daughter of shipping magnates. Growing up in New York City, she befriended Roosevelt and married him in 1886, after his fi rst wife died. They had fi ve children, in addition to his daughter from his previous marriage. Roosevelt was fi rst lady from 1901 to 1909, during which time she molded the role expected of modern presidential wives. Overseeing White House social activities and managing the Roosevelt children—with their menageries of pets— she carried out her public and private duties with efficiency and grace. Though the family was under constant public scrutiny, she managed to keep their private lives private. She was responsible for separating family quarters from administrative areas within the White House, ensuring a measure of privacy for all future fi rst families. Striving to achieve order and professionalism in the White House, Roosevelt was the fi rst presidential wife to employ a personal secretary to assist her with social planning and correspondence, and hire caterers to help with the extensive entertaining required in the White House. She distributed family photographs to the press, scheduled interviews, gave her husband news articles that she considered important, and created a White House portrait gallery of fi rst ladies. Upon leaving the White House, the Roosevelts returned to the family residence at Oyster Bay, New York. Edith Roosevelt performed charity work, traveled, and wrote several books. A staunch Republican, she publicly opposed her husband’s cousin, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the presidential campaign of 1932. She died at Oyster Bay on September 10, 1948.

 ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR

(1884– 1962) Humanitarian, feminist, fi rst lady (1933–1 945), and diplomat. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York to an aristocratic family (her father was President Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother), but had an unhappy childhood and was orphaned by the time she was 11. A relationship with Marie Souvestre, a teacher at the boarding school she went to in London when she was 14, gave her a sorely needed emotional connection; in later years she attributed much of her achievement to her three years of contact with Souvestre’s “ liberal mind and strong personality.”

74

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

Eleanor Roosevelt was a humanitarian who worked hard to promote the New Deal programs.

Back in New York, even as she embarked on the social life of a debutante and a secret courtship with her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she began her activist career, joining the NATIONAL CONSUMERS LEAGUE and volunteering in the SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT (see Volume 2). She married her cousin in 1905, and the two settled in New York City in a household dominated by Franklin’s mother. Although Roosevelt loved the six children who were born to them between 1906 and 1916 (one of whom died in infancy) it was not a happy time. The beginning of Franklin’s political career and the start of WORLD WAR I opened new possibilities for her. She visited wounded soldiers and coordinated Red Cross activities. After the war she joined the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. When Franklin contracted polio, in 1922, she became his political representative, speaking in his behalf before women’s groups across the state. By 1928 she was speaking on her own account as well, advocating reform issues such as equal pay legislation, and had a rich network of activist friends. Many of these women went with her to Washington when Franklin became the thirty-second president in 1933, and it was largely due to Roosevelt’s infl uence that women achieved an unprecedented level of power in government in Franklin’s administration. Roosevelt coordinated the 1936 reelection campaign, and became part of the everyday life of millions through her syndicated column, “ My Day” (see Documents).

Although the president and fi rst lady worked together to promote the NEW DEAL, and although Franklin respected his wife and relied on her judgment, on a personal level they were at odds. His exuberant personality and her more serious one seemed to confl ict. Also, during World War I he had begun a relationship with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer, that drove a wedge between them. At the family’s Hyde Park, New York, estate, Roosevelt moved out of the main house and settled in a cottage on the grounds with two of her friends. There and in Washington she found emotional support in friendship. In addition to supporting her husband’s political initiatives, Roosevelt mounted her own campaigns, especially on behalf of civil rights for AFRICAN AMERICANS. In the constant visits she made to meet those she was concerned about––s triking miners, wounded soldiers, welfare mothers, children in trouble with the law––s he had a genius for making those people feel that she cared. Far from retiring from public life after her husband’s death in 1945, she deluged President Truman with advice about civil rights, fair employment practices, and world peace. Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations, where she drafted and lobbied for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in 1948. Her last public office was as chair of the PRESIDENT’ S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN, under John F. Kennedy. She died in New York at 78, having played a part in almost every signifi cant social movement of her lifetime. See also: Music; “ Women and the Media,” p. 27. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Black, Allida M. Casting her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

 RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

First novel by RITA MAE BROWN, published in 1973. Rubyfruit Jungle is the coming-of-age story of smart, funny, and LESBIAN Molly Bolt. Although there had been lesbian novels written before this time, Rubyfruit Jungle, unlike many of its predecessors, is fi lled with humor and positive portrayals of lesbian life, and launched Brown’s writing career.

SAGE, MARGARET SLOCUM

Although the book’s protagonist is a lesbian, the work appeals to a broad audience. Brown always insisted that she wanted her novel to be read and enjoyed by everyone. The fact that Rubyfruit Jungle is a classic American rags-toriches story may account for some of its appeal. Molly Bolt, born poor and of uncertain parentage, makes it on her own in a life full of adventure. She has been compared to the quintessential American character Huck Finn.

 RUKEYSER, MURIEL

(1913– 1980) Poet, educator, political activist. A prolifi c poet and author, Rukeyser may have been the most widely published female poet at mid-century. Her writings included biography, children’s books, and translations as well as her betterknown poetry and prose. Her achievements in

7

poetry were matched by a lifelong interest in and commitment to social justice. Born in New York City, Rukeyser spent most of her life there and received degrees from Vassar College and Columbia University. She taught at both alma maters and Sarah Lawrence College where she mentored Alice Walker. Although Rukeyser received prestigious awards recognizing her writing, such as the Guggenheim Award and the Yale Younger Poets Prize, she also experienced censorship because of her political support for women’s rights, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. Her commitment to human rights led her to support Spanish loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, oppose the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and protest the harassment of artists around the world. In 1977, the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society recognized her accomplishments by awarding Rukeyser their national poetry awards. She died in New York City on February 12, 1980.

S  SABIN, FLORENCE RENA

(1871– 1953) Medical researcher. Florence Rena Sabin was born in the mining community of Central City, Colorado, on November 9, 1871. She graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1893 and attended The Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland. After earning her medical degree, she stayed on to do research and in 1901 published An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. It became a standard textbook in the fi eld. In 1917, Sabin became the fi rst woman to be named a full professor at Johns Hopkins. She conducted research on the body’s blood circulation and lymphatic system, and in 1925 became the fi rst woman on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in New York. Sabin left the institute in 1938 and moved to Denver, Colorado. In 1944, she was asked by the governor to reform the state’s public health system, and in 1948 she was named head of the Colorado health department. She served fi ve years in that

post, resigning just before her death on October 3, 1953.

 SAGE, MARGARET SLOCUM

(1828– 1918) Philanthropist. Margaret Olivia Slocum was born on September 8, 1828, in Syracuse, New York. After graduating from the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, in 1847, Margaret pursued a teaching career for more than 20 years. She married Russell B. Sage, a wealthy banker and fi nancier, in 1869. Under Margaret Sage’s infl uence, her husband became a philanthropist, giving fi nancial support to programs in education and health care. After his death in 1906, she used his $63 million estate to continue these philanthropic activities. In 1907, with $10 million, she set up the Russell Sage Foundation, whose goal was “ the improvement of social and living conditions” throughout the United States.

7

SAGER, RUTH

Sage also used her wealth to fi nance new buildings for the Emma Willard School, donate gifts to universities such as Harvard and Yale, and provide fi nancial support to the YMCA and YWCA. At her death on November 4, 1918, she had donated a total of $75 to $80 million to worthy causes.

 SAGER, RUTH

(1918– 1997) Geneticist. Sager, sometimes called the “ High Priestess of the Second Genetic System,” was born in Chicago on February 7, 1918. She was educated at the University of Chicago, Rutgers University, and Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. in genetics in 1948. Her discovery of the non-chromosomal gene composed of DNA revolutionized genetics. In 1951, Sager was appointed to the research staff at the Rockefeller Institute, where her research debunked the Mendelian genetic theory, which asserted that transmission of inherited characteristics is controlled by chromosomes inside the nucleus of the cell. However, Sager’s research with alga Chlamydomonas in 1953 proved that genes outside the chromosome can pass on inherited characteristics. These nonchromosomal genes are resistant to environmental change and can be passed on for generations. Sager’s research proved that every cell contains duplicate genes, one chromosomal and one non-chromosomal, that work in tandem to pass on characteristics. Her discovery that non-chromosomal genes are composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) changed the face of genetics forever. Dr. Sager worked with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute from 1975 until her death from cancer in 1997. She also served as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School from 1975 to 1988. In 1988, she was recognized for her research by the National Academy of Sciences.

 SALT OF THE EARTH

A 1954 feature fi lm about a Mexican-American community’s response during a prolonged mining strike in New Mexico. Filmed during the height of Cold War anticommunist fervor, the fi lm was banned from theater distribution in the United States in 1954 because of its purported communist propaganda. In retrospect,

the Library of Congress recently identifi ed it as one of the nation’s top 100 fi lms for posterity. The fi lm tells the story of labor confl ict through the eyes of one family. As the strike wears on, the women of the families replace the men in the picket line. By doing so, the women surprise themselves, challenge their husbands’ views of women’s roles, and temporarily confuse the mine owners. Hollywood did in fact view the fi lm’s content as communist propaganda. The fi lm was blacklisted from distribution in the United States for nearly 30 years. The fi lm presents a rare example of a community’s successful challenge to dominant sex hierarchies during the Cold War as well as an all too rare depiction of public activism on the part of Latinas.

 SANGER, MARGARET

(1879– 1966) Founder of the U.S. birth control movement. Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, New York, the sixth of 11 children. Although Higgins was infl uenced by her father’s radical ideals, she resented him when her mother died of tuberculosis and the doctor indicated that frequent pregnancy also contributed to her death. After attending a progressive boarding school in Hudson, New York, Higgins entered the White Plains Hospital to study NURSING in 1900. In 1902, she met architect William Sanger, whom she married six months later. In 1903, she gave birth to a son. The Sangers moved to Hastingson-Hudson, New York, where Margaret had two more children, but they tired of suburban life and returned to New York City in 1910. They immersed themselves in bohemian culture by attending Liberal Club meetings, organizing for the Socialist Party, and meeting intellectuals such as EMMA GOLDMAN. Margaret worked as a nurse in Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurse Service. Her experiences tending to pregnant women who could not afford children and women who died from self-induced ABORTIONS reinforced her belief in the need for birth control. In 1912, Margaret began writing a column entitled “ What Every Girl Should Know” for The Call, a Socialist daily. Because it was illegal under the 1873 COMSTOCK LAW (see Volume 2) to disseminate any information about birth control through the media or mail, she avoided direct

S C H L A F L Y , P H Y L L I S S T E WA R T

77

support for her cause from the medical community and make legislative strides. She met with leaders around the world, including Mohandas Gandhi. More conservative members joined the movement and eventually Sanger was seen as too radical. By 1942, she had effectively retired from the movement. Months after GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT made contraception legal in Connecticut, Sanger died in Tucson. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Kennedy, David M. Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Sanger, Margaret. Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography. New York: Norton, 1938.

SCHLAFLY, PHYLLIS  STEWART

Margaret Sanger believed women should have accurate information about birth control.

mention of birth control, but discussed the reproductive process. In 1914, she published a feminist magazine, The Woman Rebel (see Documents), and was arrested for publishing obscene material. Sanger viewed birth control both as a health issue and a social issue. She believed that poor women were economically oppressed by unwanted pregnancies and that birth control would liberate them. After printing a pamphlet entitled “ Family Limitation” under an alias, she fl ed to Europe, where contact with radical intellectuals expanded her argument on birth control as a means for women’s sexual liberation and enjoyment. In 1916, Sanger opened the fi rst birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, which also resulted in her arrest. A year later, she published a new journal, Birth Control Review. In 1921, she established the American Birth Control League. Estranged from her husband, she had a number of affairs before marrying oil magnate James Noah Slee in 1922. Sanger continued to fi ght for

(b. 1924) Writer, conservative activist. Phyllis Stewart was a studious child from a conservative St. Louis family. Well educated, she earned a J.D. from Washington University Law School and an M.A. in political science from Radcliffe College. Schlafl y entered politics in the 1940s with her fi rst job as a researcher in Washington, D.C. She also worked as a congressional campaign manager and as the editor of a fi nancial institution’s newsletter. After marrying lawyer John Fred Schlafl y, Jr., in 1949, she took time off from her job to do volunteer work for various Christian organizations. However, she reentered politics in the 1950s, conducting research for Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1952 and 1970, Schlafl y ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress. During that time, she published several books on conservative issues and held the position of fi rst vice president of the National Federation of Republican Women. She also established a women’s organization now known as the EAGLE FORUM. In 1972, Schlafl y made her fi rst attack on the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT and founded the NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO STOP ERA, arguing that the ERA would destroy the traditional family structure. Schlafl y published The Power of the Positive Woman, her response to feminism, in 1977. In 1985 President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. She was voted Illinois Mother of the Year in 1992. Schlafl y continues to be one of the leading conservative activists in the country.

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S C H R O E D E R , PA T R I C I A S C O T T



SCHROEDER, PATRICIA SCOTT (b. 1940) Member of the House of Representatives for 24 years and the fi rst woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee. As chair of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families from 1991 to 1993, she was responsible for the passage of Family and Medical Leave Act. Schroeder was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1940. During World War II, she and her family moved frequently as they followed her father, a fl ight instructor for the Army Air Corps. She went on to attend the University of Minnesota and Harvard Law School, where she was one of 15 women in a class of more than 500 men. While at Harvard, she met and married classmate Jim

Schroeder. After graduation, they moved to Denver to raise their two children. She challenged an incumbent Republican for Colorado’s First Congressional District seat in 1972. While she was recruited by a group of Democratic liberals in Denver, the Democratic National Committee refused to support her campaign that year. Her grassroots campaign led to her victory with 52 percent of the vote. She was an early supporter of legalized abortion and sponsored legislation making it a federal crime to prevent access to abortion clinics. She considered running for president in 1987 but then withdrew from the race. After leaving Congress in 1997, she went on to become president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers, a national trade organization for U.S. book publishers.

TRAILBLAZERS “ Amazing Grace” Brewster Hopper, mathematician and an officer in the United States Navy, has been described as a futurist in the world of computing. She was born in New York City in 1906, the eldest of three children, and received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1934. She married educator Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930, and took a job teaching mathematics at VASSAR COLLEGE (see Volume 2). In 1943 she joined the WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY SERVICE (WAVES) where she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. Hopper’s first job was to learn how to program the electromechanical Mark I computing machine; she later produced the first manual that outlined the operating principles of computers. Hopper worked with early machines that were crude by twenty-first-century standards, yet she anticipated in her programming most of the capabilities that digital computers now have. She was one of the first software engineers and her bestknown contribution to computing was the invention of a program or “ compiler” that translates English language instructions into the language with which the computer is programmed. She is credited with coining the term “ bug” when she traced an error in the Mark II computer to a moth trapped in a relay. After the end of WORLD WAR II and the death of her husband, Hopper joined the Harvard faculty as a research fellow and worked concurrently for a series of high-technology firms. She also remained in the Navy where, in December 1983, she was promoted to commodore and later admiral. Admiral Hopper was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors on January 7, 1992.



SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY In fi elds historically dominated by men, women have numbered among the leaders in the twentieth century. The past few decades, moreover, have seen a new emphasis on science and technology education for girls. Fanny Cook Gates, Ph.D. (1872– 1931), was an educator as well as physicist, and advanced understanding of radioactivity through her discoveries about the exact nature of radioactive materials. Anna J. Harrison, Ph.D. (1912– 1998), became the fi rst female president of the American Chemical Society in 1978. Surgeon and anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, M.D. (1909– 1974), made a mark on the field of INFANT AND CHILD HEALTH in 1959 by inventing the system now called the “ Apgar Score.” This score, still in use today, evaluates the developmental status and health of newborn infants. The chemist Gertrude Belle Elion, M.S. (1918– 1999), eventually held 45 patents on processes and materials connected to her research. Best known for her discovery of a number of antiviral and cancer drugs, in 1988 she shared with two others the Nobel Prize in medicine.

SEXUAL REVOLUTION

Women have been important participants in the American space program as well. In 1983, astrophysicist turned astronaut, writer, and educator SALLY RIDE, Ph.D. (b. 1951), became the fi rst woman to go into space. Women have also accepted the same dangers in the fi eld as have men. Judith A. Resnick, Ph.D. (1949–1 986), was a biomedical engineer with NASA and went to space on two missions; she was among the seven who died in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Currently, more than two dozen women are qualifi ed astronauts or candidates undergoing training. Engineer, industrial psychologist, and mother of 12, Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1 972) was called the “ Mother of Modern Management” and helped pioneer the fi eld of “ efficiency engineering.” In 1926 Gilbreth also became the fi rst woman member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. As a consultant she worked with fi rms like General Electric to improve the design of kitchens and household appliances; she also created new techniques to help disabled women accomplish common household tasks. According to the Society for Women Engineers, the percentage of women among those who earned doctoral degrees in engineering rose from 2 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 1997, and the women among employed engineers rose from 5.8 percent in 1983 to 10.6 percent in 1999. Signifi cant numbers of women now work as aerospace, chemical, civil, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineers. Organizations like the Advocates for Women in Engineering, Science and Mathematics (AWESM) founded in 1994 work to improve opportunities for women in all branches of mathematics and science. See also: Aviation and Space; Business and Industry; McClintock, Barbara; Sager, Ruth; Taussig, Helen Brooke. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Gornick, Vivian. Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Wasserman, Elga. The Door in the Dream: Conversations With Eminent Women in Science. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2000.

 SEXUAL HARASSMENT

A form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is defi ned as unwelcome sexual advances; requests for sexual favors; and other conduct of a sexual nature

79

that explicitly or implicitly affects an employee’s employment, interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment. Women did not have a term to describe the experience of sexual harassment until 1976, although the fi ght against sexual harassment began with the women’s movement in the early 1960s. Women fought to be hired in positions that had been reserved for men and to be paid the same as men for equal work. As more women entered the workforce, new positions were established that challenged gender roles. Many feminists, including Catherine MacKinnon, fought for legal remedies for harassment. In the 1980’s, the courts ruled that sexual harassment was unacceptable in the workplace. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confi rmation hearings brought national attention to the issue. During the hearings, law professor Anita Hill came forward with allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her during his tenure as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Despite outrage from women’s groups, he was later confi rmed. The nationwide discussion uncovered instances of sexual harassment in schools, although the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) prohibits sex discrimination, including sexual harassment. Many universities established rules prohibiting harassment. The military also set new standards after studies found instances of sexual harassment. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Altbach, Philip, ed. Sexual Harassment and Higher Education: Refl ections and New Perspectives. New York: Garland Publishing. 1998. Shaw, Victoria. Coping with Sexual Harassment and Gender Bias. New York: Rosen Publishing. 1998.

 SEXUAL REVOLUTION

A movement that changed American society in the 1960s and 1970s. The invention of the birth control pill, the rise of feminism, and the growing acceptance of commercial pornography stimulated an unprecedented period of sexual openness and experimentation in American society. The most infl uential of these changes for women was the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the contraceptive pill. The pill came on the market in 1961, priced between $10 and $15, making it affordable for most women. By reducing the possibility of pregnancy, women

SHALALA, DONNA

could plan pregnancy and enjoy sex as men had been able to do. The 1960s refrain “ Make Love, Not War” symbolized the approach to the complicated events of the time, as well as the beginning of the sexual revolution. The combination of student protests, counterculture movements, and the emerging women’s movement created the context for a break with the values of the past that confi ned women’s sexual pleasure to heterosexual marriage. It was not until the 1970s that women’s sexuality outside marriage became widely accepted. The sexual revolution reduced barriers and spawned the political mobilization of the gay and lesbian movements. Reforms in the legal and medical regulation of sexuality kept the revolution alive, including the legalization of abortion in 1973 with ROE v. WADE. Society and the media began to incorporate the changes. Fashion, television, music, and movies changed, and sexuality became more visible than before. Women’s MAGAZINES, such as Cosmopolitan, began printing sex tips for women in the 1960s, which would have been unheard of in the past.

 SHALALA, DONNA

(b. 1941) United States secretary of health and human services under President Bill Clinton. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shalala received her Bachelor’s degree from Western College for Women in 1962, and volunteered for the Peace Corps. After spending two years teaching in Iran, she began graduate studies at Syracuse University, and got her Ph.D. in Public Affairs in 1970. Over the next ten years she divided her time between college teaching (at New York’s Baruch College and Columbia University) and public service, serving as the director and treasurer for New York City’s Municipal Assistance Corporation during the city’s economic crisis of the 1970s and working in the Carter administration from 1977 to 1980 as assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1980, Shalala was appointed president of New York City’s Hunter College. From there she moved, in 1988, to be chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison—the fi rst woman to head a major state university. She served as secretary of Health and Human Services for Bill Clinton’s entire eight-year term, the longest anyone has held that post. She was in charge of Clinton’s WELFARE reform process; she also extended health insurance for children, raised child immunization

levels to the highest level in history, and brought about reforms at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

 SIEBERT, MURIEL

(b. 1932) Financial analyst, fi rst woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Siebert attended Western Reserve University briefl y, and in 1954 moved to New York with $500 to look for a job. Hired at fi rst as a trainee, she quickly proved herself at several brokerage fi rms and rose to partnership at one. Yet when, in 1967, she decided to apply to purchase a seat on the Stock Exchange, she was laughed at by many brokers, and nine of the fi rst ten she asked refused to sponsor her application. She would not give up, and was fi nally elected to membership on December 28, 1967. For the next ten years she remained the only woman on the exchange. In 1969 she started the fi rst brokerage fi rm to be headed by a woman, Muriel Siebert and Company, which is still fl ourishing. In 1975 she announced its transformation into one of the fi rst discount commission houses. Wall Street reacted with hostility, but Siebert led her company to remarkable success. In 1977 Siebert became New York’s fi rst woman Superintendent of Banking. While many banks nationwide were going bankrupt, Siebert implemented new measures, and no New York banks failed. In 1982 she resigned to campaign for U.S. Senate; she placed second of three candidates in the primary, and returned to the leadership of her company. In 1990 Siebert started the Siebert Entrepreneurial Philanthropic Plan (SEPP) to share with charities half her fi rm's net profi ts from new securities underwitings. In the next ten years SEPP’s donations to charities across the nation totaled $4 million dollars. Siebert has received offers from companies interested in purchasing her fi rm, but she feels that as long as it is the only woman-owned fi rm on Wall Street she must hold on to it.

 SILKO, LESLIE MARMON

(b. 1948) NATIVE AMERICAN poet and novelist whose writing illuminates the images and beliefs of her Laguna Pueblo heritage. Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo with a mixed heritage of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and Anglo

SMITH, BESSIE

cultures. Her father managed the Marmon Trading Post, a business established generations earlier by her Anglo relatives who moved to the area after the Civil War and married Laguna women. Silko grew up listening to family stories of her people and learning about Laguna culture from her great-grandmother. She graduated with honors in English from the University of New Mexico in 1969 and began the American Indian Law Program there. She soon switched to the school’s Creative Writing Masters program. Silko began to receive wide public attention when she published Ceremony in 1977. The novel describes a returning veteran’s path to recovery with the assistance of a tribal healer. The book communicated Laguna ideas on health, war, healing, and cosmology without romanticizing or victimizing the subjects. Her poetry, short stories, and other novels have continued these and other native themes. Silko received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship to support her writing. She has also held a variety of teaching positions. Today she is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

 SMEAL, ELEANOR CUTRI

(b. 1939) Feminist leader. Eleanor Marie Cutri was born in Astabula, Ohio. She graduated from Duke University in 1961, and in 1963 earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Florida. That same year she married Charles R. Smeal, an engineer. During the 1960s, she became active in the women’s movement for equal rights in Pennsylvania, campaigning for equal opportunity for girls in ATHLETICS. In 1970, she joined the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) and served two terms as president of the organization (1977– 1982). She became president for a third term from 1985 to 1987. As president of NOW, Smeal led the fi ght for ratifi cation of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. The amendment was eventually defeated, but Smeal had more success with her campaign to ensure that women continued to have the right to an ABORTION. This right was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, although it is still under attack by many conservatives. In 1987 Smeal cofounded the Feminist Majority Foundation, which is dedicated to securing leadership roles for women in government, education, and business. The foundation helps

organize feminist groups on campuses to support choices for women, including reproductive choices, career choices, and leadership choices.

 SMITH-LEVER ACT

A federal law that created a partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and colleges in order to provide instruction and practical demonstrations in agriculture and home economics. Signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, the Smith-Lever Act created the Cooperative Extension Service, the function of which was to provide informal education that would help people help themselves. This education was focused on fi nding solutions for the various problems people—particularly residents of rural areas—encounter on a daily basis. The Smith-Lever Act was named for two congressmen, Senator Hike Smith of Georgia and Representative A. F. Lever of South Carolina. The Smith-Lever Act provided signifi cant resources and opportunities for advancement to women. The science of HOME ECONOMICS, far from focusing only on homemaking skills, provided an avenue for women into higher EDUCATION and positions of leadership in education, government, and industry.

 SMITH, BESSIE

(1894– 1937) Blues singer, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her parents died when Bessie was a child, and she was raised by her sister. Eventually she joined the vaudeville show in which her brother Clarence performed and began dancing and singing. The great blues singer MA RAINEY was a member of the same show and probably infl uenced Smith’s singing style. Smith became a singing sensation in the South and, in 1921, traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two years later she made a recording for Columbia Records that featured two songs: “ Gulf Coast Blues” and “ Down Hearted Blues.” The record became a hit and made Smith a star. During the 1920s she was earning as much as $2,000 a week, making her the nation’s most successful black star. She sang with jazz great Louis Armstrong and others. During the 1930s, blues began to decline in popularity and Smith’s career went downhill. She began a comeback, but in 1937 was killed in an automobile crash.

SMITH, MARGARET CHASE

 SMITH, MARGARET CHASE

(1897– 1995) Political leader. Margaret Madeline Chase was born on December 14, 1897, in Skowhegan, Maine. She completed high school in 1916, became a schoolteacher, and in 1930 married Clyde H. Smith, a newspaper owner. Mrs. Smith served on the state Republican committee in Maine, then became her husband’s secretary after he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936. Congressman Smith died in 1940, and Margaret Smith won a special election to take his seat in Congress. She served until 1948, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. Smith is best known for her denunciation in 1950 of the campaign waged by fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin to brand many government officials, writers, and artists as communists. Smith issued her declaration of conscience in a speech in the Senate. It said, in part, “ I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching . . . on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.” In 1964, Smith became the fi rst woman to have her name placed in nomination for president by the Republican Party at its convention. She lost to Senator Barry Goldwater. During her long career, Margaret Smith was admired for her outspokenness and courage. She retired from the Senate in 1973 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989. She died on May 29, 1995.

 SOCIAL SECURITY ACT

In early 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced his proposed Social Security bill, a key part of the NEW DEAL, to both houses of Congress. FRANCES PERKINS, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, played a key role in the writing of the bill that would become the Social Security Act. President Roosevelt signed the act into law on August 14, 1935. In addition to several provisions for general welfare, the new act created a social insurance program designed to pay workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement. Grace D. Owen of Concord, New Hampshire, received the lowest social security number, 00101-0001. She applied for her number on November 24, 1936, and was issued the fi rst card, typed in Concord. On January 31, 1940, the fi rst monthly retirement check was issued to Ida May

Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, in the amount of $22.54. Miss Fuller, a legal secretary, retired in November 1939 and started collecting benefi ts in January 1940 at age 65. She lived to be 100 years old, dying in 1975. The original act provided only retirement benefi ts, and paid them only to the worker. In 1939, two amendments made a fundamental change in the program, adding two new categories of benefi ts: payments to the spouse and minor children of a retired worker (dependents’ benefi ts) and survivors’ benefi ts paid to the family in the event of the premature death of a covered worker. This change transformed Social Security from a retirement program for workers into a family-based economic security program. Today, nearly every American has Social Security protection, either as a worker or as a dependent of a worker. When the program began in 1935, most women did not work outside the home. The role of women is far different now. Nearly 60 percent of all women are in the nation’s workforce, and many women work throughout their adult lives. Thus, although Social Security always has provided benefi ts for women, it has now taken on added signifi cance. More women work, pay Social Security taxes, and earn credit toward a monthly income for their retirement. Working women with children earn Social Security protection for themselves and their families. This means monthly benefi ts for a woman and her family if she becomes disabled and can no longer work. If she dies, her survivors may be eligible for benefi ts. Although some women choose lifetime careers outside the home, many women work for a few years, leave the labor force to raise their children, and then return to work, and some women choose not to work outside their homes. They usually are covered by Social Security through their husbands’ work and can receive benefits when he retires, becomes disabled, or dies. Whatever a woman’s situation, it is important that she knows exactly what Social Security coverage means to her.

 SOCIAL WORK

The organized activities intended to improve the social conditions of a community and its disadvantaged members. The term itself was coined in 1890 to describe professionals who conduct investigations, secure treatment for the ill, provide

STEIN, GERTRUDE

care for abused or neglected chilTRAILBLAZERS dren, and extend material aid to the poor, disabled, and elderly. While soIn 1946 Emily Greene Balch (1867– 1961), peace advocate, social workers concentrated at fi rst on cial reformer, and economist, was awarded the Nobel Peace short-term solutions to specifi c problems, they soon expanded their foPrize for her service to world peace and woman suffrage, the cus beyond practical action. Acadefirst Bostonian to be so honored. mic researchers began to identify Balch graduated from BRYN MAWR COLLEGE (see Volume 2) and analyze the ongoing social and with its first graduating class, in 1889. She went on to study economic structures that underlay poverty alleviation policy in France, on a European Fellowproblems, and activists agitated for ship from Bryn Mawr. On her return, in 1892, she became innew state and federal legislation. volved in the SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT (see Volume 2). She Today, social work is rooted in the founded Denison House, Boston’s first settlement house, and philanthropic activism of such ninelived there as its head for several months. In 1896, convinced teenth-century fi gures as JANE ADof the need to recruit for the social reform movement among DAMS (See Volume 2). WELFARE bethe new generation of femal college students, she joined the came a federal program in 1935 faculty of WELLESLEY COLLEGE (see Volume 2), to teach ecoduring the GREAT DEPRESSION when nomics and sociology. An outstanding teacher who insisted on Congress enacted AID TO DEPENDENT the importance of firsthand observation she was also active in CHILDREN (ADC), a program focused the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT and in the campaigns for racial jusprimarily on widows, orphans, ditice and against CHILD LABOR. vorced or deserted mothers, and After the outbreak of WORLD WAR I she was among the deltheir children. EDITH ABBOTT, an egates from 12 countries attending an International Congress economist and the dean of the School of Women in 1915 at The Hague, Netherlands. She campaigned of Social Service and Administration aggressively against America’s entry into the war, and along at the University of Chicago from with JANE ADDAMS helped to found the Women’s International 1924 to 1942, stressed the responsiLeague for Peace and Freedom in 1919. Her activism cost her bility of the state in relation to social her position at Wellesley. She took an editorial position at the problems and helped create generaliberal weekly The Nation, and continued to work for peace. tions of professional social workers. During WORLD WAR II, however, Balch’s fundamental comHer sister, GRACE ABBOTT was an advocate for children as director of the mitment to human rights overcame her PACIFISM. She spoke Child Labor Division of the United out against Hitler’s anti-Semitism and domination of Europe, States CHILDREN’ S BUREAU from 1931 and supported America’s entry into the war after the bombto 1934. ing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The professional organization of social workers is the National Association of Social Workers, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, which pubcoming a doctor. Her writings from this time relishes the quarterly magazine Social Work Journal veal depression caused by her inability to fi t into and the Encyclopedia of Social Work. traditional women’s roles. Stein and her brother, Leo, moved to Paris in 1903. In Europe, they began collecting modern STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874– 1946) art. Their home became a meeting place for Writer, art collector, critic. Although Gertrude artists and intellectuals such as Pablo Picasso, Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she Ernest Hemingway, and Mabel Dodge Luhan, the spent the fi rst fi ve years of her life traveling in Euwoman who published Stein’s early poems. Evenrope with her parents. She moved several times tually Stein moved into a new home with her partupon returning to the United States, fi nally setner, Alice B. Toklas. The couple remained totling in Baltimore with her grandmother. Stein gether until Stein’s death from cancer in 1946. graduated from Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe The poetry, drama, and prose of Gertrude College) in 1898 and attended Johns Hopkins Stein attempted to do for writing what cubism Medical School until 1902, but decided against beand abstraction did for painting. Her unique



4

STEINEM, GLORIA

style is characterized by unconventional plot and dialogue, elimination of punctuation and capitalization, and repetition of words and phrases, as exemplifi ed through her most famous poem, which states: “ A rose is a rose is a rose.” Her numerous works included fi ction, poetry, biography, nonfi ction, and opera.

 STEINEM, GLORIA

(b. 1934) Feminist, author, editor, and public speaker. Gloria Steinem gained prominence in the WOMEN’ S LIBERATION MOVEMENT in 1971 as a cofounder of MS. magazine with Dorothy Pitman Hughes and co-founder of the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S POLITICAL CAUCUS with BELLA ABZUG, Shirley Chisholm, and BETTY FRIEDAN. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem spent her early childhood traveling with her family through the Midwest as her father bought and sold antiques. Her mother, who suffered from depression, remained a distant fi gure. At the age of ten, Steinem’s parents split up, and she assumed the role of primary caretaker for her mother. Despite this early adversity, Steinem did well in school and read voraciously. Her diligence paid off when Smith College accepted her for undergraduate work in 1952. The college shaped Steinem’s intellectual development and provided a secure and stable environment in which to thrive. She studied politics and developed her writing skills with the student newspaper. She graduated from Smith College in 1956, spent the next two years in India, and then returned to the United States to look for work as a journalist. Steinem found employers reluctant to hire women, but she persisted, and by the early 1960s she published articles as a freelance writer. It took several more years to establish her reputation in political reporting. In 1968, she was one of the few women in television writing when the political assignment she had been working for came through. She was assigned to follow George McGovern’s presidential campaign. That work led to her next position as an editor with New York magazine. From that point forward, she selected her own stories to cover the political movements of the decade. She also began to identify herself as an activist for women’s rights. Steinem wanted to bring the issues of racial justice and sexuality to the forefront of the

women’s movement. Her friend and colleague, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, an African-American activist, had profoundly infl uenced her ideas on feminism. They traveled the country together on speaking tours and raised the central issues of the women’s liberation movement: legalized abortion, equal pay for equal work, and passage of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. By 1971, they began to plan the publication of their own magazine and in January 1972 the fi rst issue of MS. magazine—a forum for feminist issues—was published. Steinem also published several books including a collection of her essays Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) that examined the critical role of self-esteem in young girls’ development. She continues to write and speak on women’s issues today.

 STREISAND, BARBRA

(b. 1942) Singer and actress. Barbra Streisand was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Diana and Emmanuel Streisand in 1942. Just a year and a half later, Emmanuel died, leaving Diana to care for Barbra and her brother, Sheldon. Streisand left home as soon as she graduated from high school to pursue her dream of being a singer and actress. Her big break came when she was cast as Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She was such a hit that the part was expanded for her, and new songs were added. In 1963, she married Elliott Gould, who was the male lead in Wholesale. The couple had one son and divorced in 1971. In 1964, Streisand opened on Broadway in the musical Funny Girl and released The Barbra Streisand Album, which remained at the top of the popular music charts for 18 months and sold more than a million copies. In 1968, Streisand starred in the movie version of Funny Girl, for which she won an Academy Award as best actress. In 1983, with the fi lm Yentl, Streisand became the fi rst woman to produce, direct, write, and star in a major motion picture. Since then she has produced, directed, and starred in three other fi lms, Nuts, Prince of Tides, and The Mirror Has Two Faces.

SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

Streisand is one of only a few individuals to win an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy. In 1998, Streisand married actor James Brolin. Four concerts in September 2000 were promoted as “ the end of her concert career.”

 SUBURBANIZATION

 SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

The movement to guarantee women the right to vote. It may have begun with ABIGAIL ADAMS’s 1776 appeal to her husband John to remember the ladies’ in the laws he was writing for the second Congressional Congress (see Volume 1). But the appeal for woman SUFFRAGE did not become a battle until the SENECA FALLS CONVENTION of 1848 (see Volume 2). The battle was waged through many disappointments for the rest of the nineteenth century. The only real successes were achieved in the West: By 1900, women had the vote in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. In 1890, the movement, which had split over the strategy question of whether to pursue suffrage state by state or work at the national level for a constitutional amendment, found unity by

The development of residential areas beyond city centers that increasingly took place after the end of WORLD WAR II. The creation of suburbs was a central part of late-nineteenth century urban planning. The “ baby boom” of the 1950s and 1960s, however, along with the prosperity of the postwar years, contributed to their explosive growth in the United States. The growth of the suburbs was fueled by the promise of a middle-class lifestyle. Americans envisioned well-educated TRAILBLAZERS people living in comfortable, singlefamily homes surrounded by lawns, gardens, and trees. Suburbanites A daughter of suffragist ELIZABETH CADY STANTON and abolihad easy access to good schools and tionist Henry Brewster Stanton, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch shopping, as well as to city employ(1856– 1940) was a leading women’s rights activist and, in 1907, ment opportunities and cultural atfounder of the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women tractions. (later renamed the Women’s Political Union). The social impact of the suburbs After graduating from Vassar College in 1878, she traveled has long been the subject of debate. and studied in Europe and assisted her mother in compiling Some argue that the suburbs develthe monumental History of Woman Suffrage (1881). She maroped as close-knit, supportive comried an Englishman, William Henry Blatch, in 1882 and lived munities, and others argue that they in England for the next 20 years. Inspired by the success of enforce a stultifying sameness and women’s rights organizations among factory workers and mill destroy cultural diversity. hands there, she returned with her family to the United States In the suburbs of postwar Amerin 1902 and immediately began working for the political enica, the women tended typically to be franchisement of women. The Equality League attracted some HOMEMAKERS, staying at home, car20,000 women workers and launched a massive drive for a ing for their breadwinner husbands New York state constitutional amendment for woman SUFand their children, and building a social structure largely comprised of FRAGE. Their efforts in New York inspired suffragist campaigns other women like themselves. Volin a number of other states. unteerism in schools, churches, and As Blatch and her organization shifted their attention to youth groups was the norm rather the drive for a federal suffrage amendment, the Women’s Pothan the pursuit of a career. More relitical Union became the nucleus of the NATIONAL WOMAN’S cently, with the rise in numbers of PARTY. Working as an administrator of government agencies women working outside the home, during WORLD WAR I, Blatch enlisted the support of Amerithis stereotype is no longer as prevacan women on behalf of the U.S. military effort. After the war, lent. In the 1990s, the traditional she continued her work for women’s rights and was active in suburban housewife took on a new the Progressive and Socialist parties. Her autobiography, identity as a political force, as “ socChallenging Years, was published in 1940. She died later that cer moms” ran for elective office and year, on November 20. fought for environmental and educational causes.

TA F T , H E L E N H E R R O N

America’ s first large-scale suffrage parade took place in New York City in 1913.

merging into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with ELIZABETH CADY STANTON as president and SUSAN B. ANTHONY as vice president (see Volume 2). Stanton retired in 1900, and was succeeded by CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT. But a new generation of suffragists called for new tactics. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Stanton’s daughter, returned from a trip to England inspired by the militance of the “ suf-

fragettes,” and founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women in 1907 to reach out to the working class. In 1910, the League (now renamed the Women’s Political Union) organized America’s fi rst large-scale suffrage parade, in New York City. In 1913 another militant, Alice Paul, organized a parade in Washington that drew 8,000 women. Later suffrage demonstrations led to arrests and to hunger strikes by jailed activists. The Western states had continued one by one to grant woman suffrage, Nevada and Montana in 1914. In 1916, Montana elected suffragist Jeannette Rankin to the House of Representatives, its fi rst woman member. The entry of the United States into WORLD WAR I in 1917 changed the situation. Grateful for the support of women’s organizations for the war effort, President Woodrow Wilson became more favorably disposed to their cause. In 1918 he issued a statement supporting a federal amendment, and Jeanette Rankin opened debate on the amendment in the House of Representatives. The amendment passed in the House relatively easily, but it did not pass in the Senate until 1919. The suffragists began their ratifi cation campaign, which fi nally bore fruit with the ratifi cation of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT in 1920.

T  TAFT, HELEN HERRON

(1861– 1943) Wife of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States. Helen “ Nellie” Herron was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Harriet and John Herron. Herron met William Taft in 1883 and married him three years later. They had three children. William always credited his wife with pushing him into politics and encouraging him to strive for more prestigious appointments and political offices. While he would have been content to pursue a career in the law, Taft encouraged him to accept various political appointments, including the governorship of the Philippines. She pushed him to make his successful run for the presidency in 1908.

Taft was delighted to be fi rst lady, and immediately began a round of entertaining. Soon after moving into the White House, however, she suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. Still, during her term as fi rst lady, Nellie was responsible for importing the Japanese cherry trees that surround the Refl ecting Pool in Washington, as well as for constructing a bandstand in Potomac Park where the Marine Band gave regular concerts. After serving one term in office (1909– 1913), the Tafts retired to New Haven, where William taught constitutional law at Yale University. They returned to Washington in 1921, when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court. William died there in 1930 and Helen in 1943.

TA R B E L L , I D A M I N E R VA

 TAN, AMY

(b. 1952) Novelist. Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. During Tan’s adolescence, she and her mother were in almost constant confl ict because Amy wanted to be as American as possible, while her mother wanted her to behave like a good Chinese daughter. Tragedy struck the Tan family when Amy was fourteen years old. Both her father and her brother Peter died of brain tumors. After her father’s death, Tan discovered that she had three half sisters living in China, children of her mother’s fi rst marriage. Tan was surprised to fi nd that she felt jealous of her sisters. “ Three obedient daughters, beautiful girls who could speak Chinese. I was crushed. I didn’t see them as anything but competition.” In 1986, Daisy Tan was hospitalized with heart problems. During her stay in the hospital, she and Amy had an argument during which Daisy told her daughter, in broken English, “ You don’t know little percent of me.” Tan promised herself that if her mother survived, she would try to get to know her better. In 1987, the pair

Amy Tan’ s novel The Joy Luck Club was a New York Times best-seller longer than any other ChineseAmerican novel.

7

traveled to China to visit Daisy’s other daughters. Tan was delighted to fi nd that she and her half sisters had a great deal in common. Out of this trip came Tan’s fi rst novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), a series of interconnected stories about four Chinese mothers and their four American daughters. The novel stayed at the top of the New York Times best-seller list longer than any other Chinese-American novel had before. Since then, Tan has written three other novels: The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001). She has also written children’s books.

 TARBELL, IDA MINERVA

(1857– 1944) Journalist who exposed business corruption. Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in Hatch Hallow, Pennsylvania, the daughter of an oil producer and a teacher. The family moved to Titusville, a booming oil town, where Ida attended public school and, as a teenager, became enamored of the women’s rights movement. In 1880 she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Allegheny College, where she was one of only fi ve women students. Unable to secure employment as a biologist, she worked as a teacher and began her career in JOURNALISM on the staff of The Chatauquan monthly. While studying feminist history in Paris, she supported herself by writing for several American MAGAZINES AND PERIODICALS (see Volume 2). Her articles came to the attention of the young publisher Samuel S. McClure, who asked Tarbell to write for his new publication, McClure’s. Excelling at the brand of scholarly journalism promoted by McClure, she penned a serial biography of Napoleon that was a success for the magazine and was later published as a book. Her biographical articles on Abraham Lincoln, collected in book form in 1900, were based on new documentation that separated fact from myth. In 1900, Tarbell began researching the Standard Oil Company, and her investigative reports on company practices began appearing in the magazine two years later. Embittered because Standard Oil’s practices had forced her father out of business, Tarbell scoured legal documents and interviewed oil industry executives in building her case against the company. Her indictment,

TA U S S I G , H E L E N B R O O K E

TRAILBLAZERS The first English-language woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (1938), Pearl S. Buck was cited by the Swedish Academy for “ her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” Of her more than 70 books— including novels, story collections, biographies, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translations from Chinese— the most popular was The Good Earth (1931). The first novel of her “ House of Earth” trilogy, it recounts the changing fortunes of the peasant family of Wang Lung. Awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and made into a major motion picture in 1937, the best-selling book introduced traditional Chinese life and customs to mainstream American audiences. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries on furlough from their station in China at the time of her birth. The family returned to China three months later, and Pearl spent most of the next 40 years of her life there. She was taught at home by her mother and a Chinese tutor, and spoke English and Chinese from childhood. After four years at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, she returned to China in 1915 and married an agricultural economist, John Lossing Buck, two years later. The couple moved to a village in rural Anhui Province, which was the inspiration for The Good Earth and other works; they had one daughter and adopted another. From 1920 to 1934 they lived in Nanjing, where they both held university teaching positions. In the 1920s, Buck began publishing stories and articles in such magazines as Nation and Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, appeared in 1930, followed by The Good Earth. Twin biographies of her mother, The Exile, and father, Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Fighting Soul, appeared in 1936 and contributed to the reputation that earned her the Nobel Prize. The Bucks moved permanently to a farm in Green Hills, Pennsylvania, in 1934, where they adopted six more children. She published her autobiography, My Several Worlds, in 1954 and died on March 6, 1973.

which appeared in book form as The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), revealed how the company had manipulated rates and policies to dominate the oil industry. Tarbell’s work, a classic of “ muckraking” journalism, increased public awareness of company practices and convinced Congress to pass antitrust legislation to break Standard Oil’s monopoly. In 1911, the U.S.

Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the Standard Oil holding company. Later, writing for The American Magazine, Tarbell focused her attention on the subject of tariffs, which she opposed as another advantage for corporate trusts. In a series about the women’s movement, Tarbell stressed her disapproval of the SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. Her many books include an autobiography, All in the Day’s Work (1939). Tarbell died on January 6, 1944, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.



TAUSSIG, HELEN BROOKE (1898– 1986)

Physician best known as the pioneer of a surgical technique that saves the lives of “ blue babies.” Helen Brooke Taussig was born into an academic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 24, 1898. After earning her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921, she attended Harvard Medical School but left because of gender discrimination; she earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1927. In 1930, the same year in which she went deaf, Taussig became head of the Johns Hopkins pediatric heart clinic, a position she held until her retirement in 1963. In the early 1940s, Taussig began studying an infantile heart malformation called pulmonary stenosis (constriction of an artery), which prevents the baby’s heart from pumping oxygen into the blood, causing the fatal “ blue baby” syndrome. In collaboration with surgeon Alfred Blalock, Taussig developed an artifi cial duct—called the Blalock-Taussig shunt—that could be surgically implanted to carry blood past the constricted part of the artery. The surgery, which the team fi rst performed in 1944, would save thousands of lives. Taussig’s research spurred the development of other surgical treatments for heart disorders.

TELEVISION AND RADIO

Throughout her life, Taussig worked to protect the health of woman and children. In 1962 she began alerting doctors to the dangers of thalidomide, a tranquilizer prescribed for pregnant women that was later proved to cause serious deformities in newborns. Her efforts led the United States to ban the drug. In recognition of her lifelong achievements, Taussig received numerous honors, including the Medal of Freedom in 1964 and election as the fi rst female president of the American Heart Association in 1965. She was killed in an automobile accident on May 21, 1986.

 TAYLOR

V. LOUISIANA A 1975 Supreme Court case that affirmed the right to trial by a jury that fairly represents the population of the community. In 1971, Billy J. Taylor was tried and convicted of aggravated kidnapping in St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana. He appealed his conviction because there were no women on the jury that convicted him. At the time, few women in Louisiana served on juries because of a state law that removed a woman from the jury pool unless she had submitted a written declaration agreeing to serve. When Taylor’s case reached the Louisiana Supreme Court, the judges ruled that the state law was constitutional and refused to overturn Taylor’s conviction. Taylor appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was heard in October 1974 and decided in January 1975. The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in Taylor’s favor, saying that a system based on the idea “ that it would be a special hardship for each and every woman to perform jury service” was not justifi able. The Court further ruled that Taylor had been deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to trial “ by an impartial jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community.” The Court noted that Taylor did not have to be a member of the affected group (women) to bring a case alleging discrimination against that group. The Court added that while juries must be drawn from pools that fairly represent the community, any particular jury of 12 did not have to be representative.

 TELEVISION AND RADIO

Communications media that changed the way people learned about news and the ways they

9

were entertained. Early radio programs included some targeted to the female listener. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) became the fi rst radio network in 1926. By the 1930s, household product advertisers sponsored serialized dramas, or soap operas, in the daytime hours. The narratives of these shows often revolved around female characters. By 1932, radio networks had begun their own news gathering operations. In local news radio of the 1940s and 1950s, women’s voices were seldom heard except on specifi c “ women’s news programs,” which included mostly housekeeping tips. Television sets went on sale in New York in 1938. By 1941, the fi rst year of television’s commercial operation, 10,000 sets had been sold. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put news experimentation on hold during World War II, although by 1945, NBC created an organization for production of news fi lm. By the early 1950s, the networks produced 15minute news programs. In the 1940s, the radio soap operas made the transition to daytime television. Another program format that proved popular with women was the call-in talk show, most often associated with Donahue, which started in 1967 in Dayton, Ohio. Aired during a time of political and social unrest and change, by 1980 it was carried on 218 stations around the country. In 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went national, not only beating Donahue in the ratings, but also becoming the third-highest rated show in syndication. Prime-time programming did not appeal to women in the same way. Most 1950s and 1960s comedy shows focused on the family, where women were seen mainly as wives, mothers, and daughters. Programs in the 1970s introduced independent, working women. Some of the programs continued into the 1980s and 1990s, yet many television producers during this period created family sitcoms that banished women to roles as mothers. Feminist Susan Faludi has suggested that the programming of network television in the 1980s was an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women, thereby countering the effects of the women's movement. In 1970, the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN formed a task force to study and change the derogatory stereotypes of women on television, and in 1972 it challenged the licenses of two network-owned stations on the basis of their sexist programming and advertising practices. In

9

TENAYUCA, EMMA

about the struggles of working people. Tenayuca joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was active in the Comedic actress and businesswoman Lucille Ball was one of Worker’s Alliance of America, an orthe first women to ever run a multimillion dollar corporation. ganization founded in 1933 to aid those unemployed during the GREAT While she was successful in business, she is better known for DEPRESSION. her comedic timing which became the model for other female In 1938, San Antonio’s pecan comedians to follow. shellers went on strike when their Ball was born in 1911 in suburban New York. She left high wages were cut in half. At the time, chool at 15 to attend a New York City drama school and bepecan shelling was the city’s largest fan modeling under the name Diane Belmont. This lead to her industry. Because of her promiappearance in more than 60 films by the late 1940s. During nence in several labor organizations, that time, she performed in the musical “ Too Many Girls,” Tenayuca was asked to represent with popular Cuban band leader, Desi Arnaz. The two marthe shellers in negotiations with ried and in 1950, they formed their own production company, company owners. The strike lasted Desilu Productions. Its first production was “ I Love Lucy,” several months and turned violent. which starred the couple. By the end of the 1950s, Desilu had Eventually the Texas Industrial became a powerful corporation, producing such hit TV shows Commission held hearings on the as “ Star Trek” and “ Mission Impossible.” strikers’ grievances, and wages were Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960 and Ball bought out her returned to prestrike levels. husband’s half of their business. She starred in “ Here’s Lucy,” On August 25, 1939, during from 1962 until 1974. In 1967, she sold Desilu Productions Tenayuca’s appearance at a meeting for $17 million. Ball married again in 1968 to Gary Morton. at San Antonio’s Municipal AuditoMorton, a former comedian, worked with Ball to help create rium, about 5,000 anticommunist Lucille Ball Productions. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, protesters attacked the building. The Ball made sporadic, guest-star appearances on television. She police kept Tenayuca safe, but afterdied in 1989. ward she was the victim of death threats and was unable to fi nd work. Tenayuca left San Antonio, ending her activity in the labor movement, 1984, the fi rst cable network for women, Lifeand settled in California, where she received her time, was launched. teacher certifi cation from San Francisco State When it came to television news operations, College in 1952. In 1974, Our Lady of the Lake few women were seen on-air prior to 1970. This University awarded her a master’s degree in edchanged due to the FCC’s affirmative action rule ucation. Tenayuca taught reading until her rewhich required women be treated equally as emtirement in 1982. ployees. More women were hired as news reporters and anchors through the 1980s and 1990s, although few rose into management TITLE VII ranks. The section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination in employment based See also: Walters, Barbara; Winfrey, Oprah; “ Women on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. and the Media,” p. 26. The original text of Title VII did not include the word “ sex.” The ban on employment discrimiTENAYUCA, EMMA nation was added almost as an afterthought, just (1916– 1999) before the bill was voted on in the House of RepLabor organizer who raised the political awareresentatives. In fact, many historians have noted ness of Mexican-American workers. Tenayuca that the addition of the word “ sex” to the text of was one of 11 children born to a poor family in Title VII was part of an attempt to scuttle the San Antonio, Texas. She grew up in her grandCivil Rights Act, not an attempt to gain equality parents’ home in an integrated neighborhood in the workplace for women. Representative on San Antonio’s West Side, where she learned Howard W. Smith of Virginia, an opponent of

TRAILBLAZERS





TOMLIN, LILY

the Civil Rights Act, acting at the behest of the NATIONAL WOMEN’ S PARTY, proposed that the word “ sex” be added because he assumed that more people would vote against the legislation if equal employment for women was at issue. A debate followed, which was later referred to as “ ladies day in the House” because some of those present treated the idea of employment equality for women as a joke. Opponents of equal employment opportunity for women included people who regarded women as inferior or unfi t for the world of business. But labor unions, many politicians, and many women also opposed workplace equality because they feared it would end protective legislation. During the early years of the twentieth century, reformers had fought long and hard to pass legislation that limited the hours women could work and the amount of weight they could be required to lift. While these laws did protect many women from exploitation by unscrupulous employers, they were also used to prevent women from taking higher-paying jobs. Despite the addition of the word “ sex” to Title VII, the legislation did pass, helped along by Congresswoman Martha Griffiths (D-MI). Title VII was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC), which was created to enforce its provisions, did not enforce the ban on gender discrimination. Representatives of state commissions on the status of women were so dissatisfi ed with the EEOC and the national commission that they created an organization to work for equality in other ways. As a result, the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) was formed to put pressure on the EEOC to enforce the law. Over the past four decades, Title VII has helped women on the journey toward equity in career advancement. It has also been interpreted as prohibiting sexual harassment, allowing women redress behavior in the workplace that demeans or threatens them. See also: Weeks v. Southern Bell.

 TITLE IX

A section of a federal law, passed in 1972, that bars discrimination in federally funded educational programs, including ATHLETICS.

9

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial funds. —Title IX (1972)

When this legislation was before Congress, colleges, coaches, and some members of Congress warned that the law would lead to such “ evils” as unisex locker rooms and the destruction of sororities and fraternities. After the law was passed, high schools and colleges complained that boys’ sports would be penalized if athletic programs for girls received equal funding. Under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Title IX enforcement was lax. A Supreme Court decision in Grove City College v. Bell (1984) also weakened the law by ruling that Title IX did not cover entire institutions but only programs that were federally funded. However in 1988, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which outlawed sexual discrimination for the entire institution if any part of the institution receives federal funds, and restored Title IX to its original scope. In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools that victims of sexual discrimination could be awarded monetary damages. This decision put teeth into Title IX and led to many changes in funding, admissions policies, and educational choices that benefi t women. Although there are still inequities, Title IX has had a very positive impact on opportunities for women. Many more women participate in sports today—nearly ten times more than before Title IX. Women’s enrollment in law schools has increased from 6.9 percent to nearly 50 percent at many colleges, and pregnant students are allowed to remain in school.

 TOMLIN, LILY

(b. 1939) Actress and comedian. Lily Tomlin was born Mary Jean Tomlin in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939. She attended Wayne State University, where she was a premedical student until she discovered the theater, at which point she began acting and fi rst developed one of her signature characters,

9

T R I A N G L E S H I R T WA I S T FA C T O R Y F I R E

“ The Tasteful Lady.” Lily left college in her junior year and moved to New York City, where she worked in cabarets and clubs. In 1969 she joined the cast of the television series Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Characters such as the child Edith Ann and the adenoidal telephone operator Ernestine made Tomlin a star.

TRAILBLAZERS

After Laugh-In Tomlin did several television specials, for which she won Emmy Awards in 1973, 1975, and 1981. Tomlin has also won two Tony Awards, one in 1977 for Appearing Nitely, her fi rst Broadway show, and one for The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe in 1985. She has appeared in several fi lms, including Nashville, 9 to 5, All of Me, and The Kid. Tomlin is recognized as a supporter of feminist causes and gay rights.

Pauline Newman emigrated from Lithuania to the United States in 1901, when she was just 11 years old. She got a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory but left before the deadly fire. Her letters detailed conditions at the factory and explained why workers were willing to accept such unpleasant conditions. When Newman got her job at Triangle, the foreman told her that she was lucky to work in a place with plenty of business year-round. The workday began at 7:30 A.M. and was supposed to end at 6:00 P.M., but on most days workers were required to put in as many as three hours of overtime. Newman noted with irony that the company gave workers “ a piece of apple pie for supper instead of additional pay” for the extra hours they worked. The workweek was often seven days long, and Pauline earned only a dollar and a half a week. She pointed out that it did no good to protest against these conditions— anyone who objected was fired and replaced by another willing immigrant who needed the money to support a hungry family. Newman also noted that friendships among the workers kept people at exploitative jobs. Like many other young children, Newman worked as a “ cleaner,” trimming threads off shirtwaists. The shirts were stored in high cases, tall enough for all the underage children to hide in when the inspectors came by to check on working conditions. Employees were constantly watched by supervisors and penalized with deductions from their paychecks if they stayed too long in the rest room or came to work a minute late. Newman’s account of her experiences in the factory was eventually published in a Jewish newspaper called The Forward. “ In a small way,” she said, “ I became the voice of the less articulate young men and women with whom I worked and with whom later I was to join in the fight for improved working conditions and a better life for us all.” By the time of the fire, Pauline had become an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and was no longer working in the factory. She became the ILGWU’s first full-time organizer, founded the union’s health center and served as its first director, and acted as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Labor.

TRIANGLE  SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at 4:40 in the afternoon, a fi re broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located on the eighth fl oor of a ten-story building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in New York City. Many of the workers in the building had gone home by that hour, but there were still about 600 people in the building, mostly girls and young women working as seamstresses making shirtwaists, a popular ladies’ garment. A spark from one of the sewing machines may have set fi re to the oil that was used to lubricate the moving parts, but no one is sure. However the fi re started, it spread with deadly speed, igniting the garments hanging from the ceiling and the fabric scraps that littered the fl oor. The building did not have enough staircases, and the elevator cables soon burned through. Only one fi re escape existed—which melted during the fi re; the doors opened inward (which made opening them difficult amid the crush of people), and none of the young women had ever practiced a fi re drill. Within minutes, desperate young women began hurling themselves out of windows on the eighth, ninth, and tenth fl oors onto the pavement below. Others were pushed by coworkers who were trying to escape.

UAW v. JOHNSON CONTROLS

9

but it also led to reforms that improved workplace safety. The commission established to investigate the fi re advocated new laws that gave greater power to the New York fi re commissioner to enforce safety codes.

TRUMAN, ELIZABETH  VIRGINIA WALLACE

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire caused more than 100 deaths, but it led to reforms that improved safety in the workplace.

Many of the bodies fell to the ground wrapped in fl ames. When the fi re department arrived, they held blankets and nets for the women to jump into, but these proved too weak to hold the weight of bodies falling from such a height—the victims simply fell through to their deaths. Because the fi re department’s ladder only reached to the sixth fl oor, women threw themselves out the windows trying to reach the ladder. The fi re department extinguished the fi re within a half hour. In addition to the 50 or 60 bodies that lined the streets, fi remen found many people horribly burned inside the building, some still sitting at their machines. The elevator shaft alone held 30 bodies. Experienced fi refi ghters and police officers said they had never witnessed such a scene. The dead numbered 146, including 125 young women. The Triangle fi re has gone down in history as one of the worst industrial fi res of the century,

(1885– 1982) First lady, wife of Harry S Truman, the thirtythird president of the United States. Elizabeth Virgina “ Bess” Wallace was born in Independence, Missouri, the daughter of David and Madge Wallace. She met Harry Truman in the fi fth grade and graduated with him from Independence High School in 1901. They were married in 1919, just after Harry’s discharge from the army following WORLD WAR I. They had one child, Mary Margaret. The young family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1934, when Harry Truman was elected senator from Missouri. When he was appointed chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, Bess joined his staff as a clerk. In 1944, Harry Truman was elected vice president. When President Franklin Roosevelt died in office in April 1945, Truman became president. Bess was unprepared for the role of fi rst lady, but she is remembered as one of the hardest working White House hostesses. She was scrupulous about answering all her mail and was much loved for her down-to-earth attitudes. She served as fi rst lady from 1945 to 1953. When Bess Truman was asked by a reporter what she and the president would do after he retired, she said, “ Return to Independence.” This was exactly what they did. After he died in 1972, she continued to live in the same house until her own death at the age of 97.

U UAW . JOHNSON  CONTROLS V

A 1991 U.S. Supreme Court case that was important in the history of American law for banning discrimination against women in the work-

place. It began in 1982, when the Johnson Controls Corporation, which manufactured batteries, announced a “ fetal protection policy” for its workforce. Under this policy, all women except those who could provide medical evidence that

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UNIONS, LABOR

TRAILBLAZERS At the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the women working in the garment industry were Jewish immigrants; most of these were between 16 and 25 years old. The women worked in terrible conditions for 12- and 15-hour days. Often, the factories where women cut cloth, sewed buttons, hems and trimming were filthy, and it was easy to contract communicable diseases. Many women, paid a paltry wage, would take work home and work into the night, often with the help of their children and other family members. Conditions were terrible across the garment industry, and on June 3, 1900, the United Brotherhood of Cloak Makers New York union made a public call for a convention to improve conditions. Only 11 delegates showed up to represent seven East Coast unions, but the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union was established with Herman Grossman as the first president. The first years were ineffective and lifeless, and membership was unremarkable. However, this changed in 1909 when female garment workers went on strike. The women were exploited under a subcontracting system in which wages were paid to a man in charge of a group of women, who would then distribute the wages to the women under him. Many women earned less than three dollars a week in this system. Women were docked for broken needles, and sometimes for the cost of electricity in the factory. In addition, sexual harassment was rampant. At a meeting organized to address the shirtwaisters’ grievances, a working girl named Clara Lemlich stood up and called for a general strike. From November 15 to December 25 of 1909, the women of one of the largest shirtwaist factories, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, went on strike. In the course of the strikes, women were harassed and abused on the picket line and 723 women were arrested. This strike rejuvenated the garment labor unions. In 1920, David Dubinsky, one of the best-known of the ILGWU’s presidents, fought communist takeover of the union. He won, but membership dipped. However, under President Franklin Roosevelt’s labor policies, the membership swelled again to 300,000 in 1942. Later, the ILGWU fought against issues like the mass exportation of labor to other countries and illegal sweatshops with inhumane conditions. In 1995, the ILGWU’s 125,000 members merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

they could not bear children were barred from jobs that exposed them to high levels of lead, an element known to cause birth defects. The United Auto Workers (UAW), the labor union representing the women, challenged the policy, arguing that it violated TITLE VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it discriminated against women in the workplace. The problem faced by Johnson Controls and its employees was a difficult one. On the one hand, the company could be sued if employees’ children were born with birth defects caused by the company’s manufacturing processes. On the other hand, the jobs from which the women were excluded were relatively high-paying ones that traditionally had been held by men. Further, male workers exposed to high levels of lead ran the risk of fathering children with birth defects, yet the company did not exclude them from the jobs in question. In sum, the company’s policy seemed to suggest that women were marginal workers whose primary role was to bear children. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed and in its 1991 decision struck down the Johnson Controls policy, saying that it violated laws against gender discrimination.

 UNIONS, LABOR

Much as it had in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the participation of women in the labor movement during the early twentieth century was centered in the textile and clothing industries. Mainstream unions, representing skilled and industrial workers, were established chiefl y for the benefi t of white men. The AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL), formed in 1886, excluded women, blacks, and immigrants for decades. Nevertheless, women made major contributions to the rise of unions in America. The establishment of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers

U R B A N I Z AT I O N A N D I M M I G R AT I O N

Union (ILGWU) in 1900 and the International Workers of the World (IWW), a socialist union for unskilled workers (many of them immigrants), in 1904 helped provide the organizational strength to force labor reforms on behalf of women. The ILGWU negotiated the settlement of a strike by New York City shirtwaist workers in 1909– 1910—called the “ Uprising of the 20,000” —that raised wages, reduced working houses, and provided for the resolution of disputes by impartial arbitration. The TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY FIRE of 1911, which killed 146 workers, led to additional reforms and stricter building codes. Both events attracted new union members, many of them women. In 1912, the IWW took control of a walkout by textile workers—many of them women and immigrants—in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and organized the famous “ Bread and Roses” strike. The job action forced union recognition and also attracted many new members. Another important organization in the twentieth-century women’s labor movement was the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), established in 1903 to educate women about the advantages of union membership, raise awareness about the exploitation of women workers, and support demands for reform. Founders included JANE ADDAMS (see Volume 2), Sophinisba Breckinridge, ALICE HAMILTON, FLORENCE KELLEY, and MARY KENNEY O’ SULLIVAN (see Volume 2). The WTUL was a major participant in the American labor movement until its demise in 1950. Today, women make up nearly half of the U.S. labor force and represent a powerful voice in the labor movement. Millions belong to industrial, trade, and white-collar unions in the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (AFL-CIO), including the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, the AMERICAN A SSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN, and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Among the many prominent women in the contemporary labor movement are LINDA CHAVEZ-THOMPSON, elected executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, and DOLORES FERNANDEZ HUERTA, a cofounder (with Cesar Chavez) and leader of the United Farm Workers of America. The specifi c interests of women in unions and the labor force are addressed by such organization as the Coalition of Labor Union Women, founded in 1973 and comprising women from more than 60 U.S. and international unions, and the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN.

9

URBANIZATION AND  IMMIGRATION Each time there has been a wave of immigration to the United States, the results have been most visible in urban centers. As the immigrants’ geographic point of origin shifted throughout twentieth century, the urban areas most affected shifted as well. Most immigrants have chosen to locate either in their port of entry or in another city with an established community from their country of origin. Politics and economics have long driven immigration. People often chose to leave their homeland for life in the United States because of the freedom and opportunities this country seemed to offer. Women who immigrated were critical to keeping family bonds, preserving an ethnic heritage and identity, and oftentimes helping fi nancially to support the family. The fi rst large infl ux into the United States in the twentieth century was from southern and eastern Europe, as part of a trend that had begun in the 1880s. This group, unlike previous immigrants, looked distinctly different from most native-born Americans and were considered “ less desirable” immigrants by many nativeborn and fi rst-generation Americans. The sheer volume of new immigrants—40 million arrived between 1880 and 1914—made them easy targets for racial, ethnic, and job discrimination, even as they helped staff factories in an increasingly urban and industrialized economy. Twothirds of all immigrants were single men between the ages of 14 and 30; the exception was Jewish families fl eeing religious persecution and ethnic killings in Russia. For women immigrants, the journey meant an opportunity for a whole new life, free from many of the restrictions of family and community. Female immigrants often found employment in female-dominated surroundings, with many established immigrants eager to share knowledge about their new country. Although much attention on immigration focuses on the Northeast, there was also signifi cant immigration on the West Coast and across the U.S.–M exican border. Immigration from Japan and China was extremely difficult: Congress had passed increasingly discriminatory and restrictive rules regarding immigration from these countries in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The San Francisco earthquake and fi re of 1906, however, destroyed many official records, thus making it easier for illegal immigrants, particularly

9

U R B A N I Z AT I O N A N D I M M I G R AT I O N

women who came as prostitutes or picture brides, to suddenly become “ legitimate” citizens. Immigration declined during WORLD WAR I, and in the early 1920s Congress passed several laws to limit the number of people permitted to enter the country each year. Legislation in 1921 and 1924 set quotas on immigrants, based proportionally on their presence in the United States. To limit immigrants from “ undesirable” areas—specifi cally southern and eastern Europe—quotas were based on 1890 census data, before the big wave of immigration from these areas began. Thus, quotas were highest for countries in northern and western Europe, and lowest for those in southern and eastern Europe. The one loophole was the lack of regulation on migration from other countries on the North American continent. As a result, immigration from Mexico and Canada continued without restriction and cities in the Southwest continued to grow, with a heavy Mexican infl uence, particularly in border towns in Texas and California. There was little immigration during the GREAT DEPRESSION and WORLD WAR II because of the lack of job opportunities, the cost of travel, and the difficulties and hazards of travel. In addition, during the Depression many immigrants decided to return to their native countries rather than stay in America; in the 1930s more people left the nation than entered it. In World War II, immigration patterns and rules altered. A 1942 agreement between the United States and Mexico, the Bracero Program, permitted Mexicans to enter the country for a limited amount of time. Although the hope was that many would fi nd employment as migrant farmworkers, most Mexicans who arrived under this program got factory jobs. For women, the family dynamic began to shift, as women became wage earners even as they sought to retain their native cultures. The limited immigration during the war was more than compensated for by the internal migration spurred by war production. Companies converted their factory processes for wartime production or increased their size to accommodate defense contrasts. Approximately 10 percent of the population moved during World War II, either because they were searching for better economic opportunities or because they were assigned to one or another base for military service. The war provided a bonanza of job opportunities for women in industries that were never previously open to them, such as automobile and

naval construction. Cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Seattle grew quickly as a result of the infl ux of people working in defense industries. Japanese-American women, with forced internment, found their traditional gender roles subverted in the camp environment. After the war, immigration picked up again, and migration continued. Quotas were relaxed, partly to atone for the government’s refusal to admit Jews during the war. However, given the fi nancial problems of most European countries in the immediate postwar years, most immigration occurred only when American relatives sent money or tickets to their families overseas. Cities and suburbs grew in the early postwar years. The advent of the air conditioner for home use, a national highway system, and continued defense work helped spark a boom in the Southwest. Immigration quotas were relaxed in the 1960s. Quotas by country shifted to quotas by hemisphere. New laws also created exemptions for people to join their spouses, children, or parents. The biggest shift in immigration occurred in the 1970s, with increased immigration for Mexico, Central America, and Asia, especially from the war-torn countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This wave of immigration affected cities on the West Coast, including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. Like most immigrants at the beginning of the century had, these new immigrants chose to settle where communities had already been established. Data from the 2000 Census reveal that immigration patterns have, on the whole, remained unchanged. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other large urban areas continue to attract many immigrants, with ethnic groups migrating to established enclaves—as the Hmong and many West Africans have done in Minneapolis, for example. More immigrants arrive from Central and South America than from Europe, and immigration from Africa and Asia continues to increase, stretching the limits of the country-bycountry quota (or lottery system) for a green card. Gwen Kay F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Danquah, Meri Nana-Ama, ed. Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Gabaccia, Donna. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the United States, 1820–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

V I E T N A M WA R

97

V  VANDERBILT, GLORIA

(b. 1924) Artist, actress, and author. Gloria Vanderbilt, the great-great-granddaughter of the railroad fi nancier Cornelius Vanderbilt, was born in 1924. Her father, the avid sportsman Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt, died when she was just 18 months old, and at the age of ten she became the the subject of a custody battle between her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and her paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Her aunt won custody by proving that Gloria’s mother was an alcoholic who had pilfered her daughter’s inheritance. Gloria was taken not only from her mother but also, and perhaps more importantly, from her nurse, Dodo, the only person she really trusted. Vanderbilt studied drawing and painting, and in 1952 was featured in a one-woman exhibition in New York. Many other exhibits of her paintings followed. Vanderbilt worked as an actress in television plays in the 1950s and also created her own clothing and cosmetics line. She is credited with creating the fi rst designer blue jeans. Her personal life has been tragic. Her fi rst three marriages ended in divorce, and her fourth, to actor and writer Wyatt Cooper, was happy but brief. Cooper died in 1979, leaving Vanderbilt with two sons. In 1988, her son Carter committed suicide at 24. Eight years after his death, Vanderbilt wrote about her despair and recovery in A Mother’s Story (1996). She believes now that her son’s actions may have been the result of a reaction to an allergy medication. Vanderbilt has written a two-volume autobiography and has contributed articles to many fashion and women’s magazines.

 VAN KLEECK, MARY

(1883– 1972) Social researcher and reformer. Mary Abby Van Kleeck was born in New York to Robert and Eliza Van Kleeck. She went to public schools in Flushing, New York, and graduated from Smith College in 1904. Just out of college, Van Kleeck conducted research on young women who worked in New York City factories and on CHILD LABOR.

In 1908, she joined the staff of the Russell Sage Foundation, which supported her research on women’s employment for many years and encouraged her to found and direct a department of industrial studies. During WORLD WAR I, Van Kleeck helped to establish labor standards for women working in war industries and was appointed director of the Department of Labor’s Women in Industry Service Agency (later the U.S. Women’s Bureau). Van Kleeck returned to the Russell Sage Foundation after the war, where she studied employee relations issues. By the GREAT DEPRESSION, Van Kleeck had become a socialist and supporter of Soviet-style socialism, which advocated state ownership of farms and factories. In 1934, she wrote Miners and Management, in which she advocated the socialization of all industry. Van Kleeck became interested in international workers’ organizations because she believed that the causes of worker problems were global. From 1928 to 1948, she directed the International Industrial Relations Institute. After her retirement from the Russell Sage Foundation, she made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from New York as the American Labor Party candidate. Her socialist sympathies resulted in her being subpoenaed to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. Van Kleeck died in Kingston, New York, in 1972, just before her eighty-ninth birthday.

 VIETNAM WAR

An undeclared war between the United States and North Vietnam from the early 1960s to 1975. Women, military and civilian, served in Vietnam in almost all capacities: as support staff, in hospitals, on medical evacuation fl ights, with Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units, in operations groups, in information offices, and in untold other clerical, medical, and intelligence positions. All of these women volunteered for duty, mostly in the early part of the war, since women could not be drafted. The U.S. military cannot say with certainty how many women actually served in Vietnam, but

9

WA L K E R , A L I C E

Women also suffered the same poor treatment and indignities as their male counterparts upon their return A 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University, the Chito the United States. Like many Vietnese-American Ohio native Maya Lin (b. 1959) launched her nam veterans, these women have been haunted by their experiences in fi ghtprofessional career and earned instant celebrity in 1981, when ing an unpopular war; they do not feel her design was chosen for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in officially recognized and have been reWashington, D.C. Prompted by an assignment for her class on luctant to seek help. Some have been funerary architecture, the design was selected by a panel of plagued by symptoms of posttraujudges from more than 1,400 submissions. Dedicated on Nomatic stress syndrome and exposure vember 13, 1982, the memorial features a V-shaped black marto chemicals. Others have hidden ble wall inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 U.S. their service like a shameful secret. service personnel who died or remain missing from the war in In the years following the confl ict, Indochina. The stark, austere design initially drew protests the United States desperately tried to from several groups, but today it is one of the most visited— put Vietnam behind it. Finally dediand moving— landmarks in the nation’s capital. cated in 1982, the dramatic black In the years since, Lin has completed a host of other acgranite Vietnam Veterans Memorial claimed projects. Among these are the Civil Rights Memorial includes the names of the eight mili(1989) at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, tary women who died in Vietnam. BeAlabama; the Museum for African Art (1993) in New York lieving that the wall and other memoCity; and a giant elliptical clock with moving shafts of light as rials did not sufficiently honor the the hands (1994) in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The women who served, Diane Carlson daughter of academics— her father is a ceramist and dean of Evans, a former army nurse, founded fine arts at Ohio University, and her mother is a professor of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial literature—Lin has also exhibited large sculptural installaProject in 1984. For the fi rst time in tions and smaller-scale studio sculptures at a number of muAmerica’s history, a memorial that seums and galleries. honors women’s military service was erected in the nation’s capital. The multifi gure bronze monument, designed by New Mexico sculptor Glenna Goodacre, portrays three Vietnam-era the most common estimate is 7,500. The women women, one of whom is caring for a wounded who served included officers as well as enlisted male soldier. personnel. They ranged from young women in their early twenties with barely two years in the service to career women over the age of 40. The F U RT H E R R E A D I N G women who went to Vietnam suffered the same Gruhzit-Hoyt, Olga. A Time Remembered: American hardships as men and were not sheltered from Women in the Vietnam War. Navato, CA: Presidio the dangers of combat. However, they were not Press, 1999. allowed to fi ght, nor could they carry weapons Van Devanter, Lynda, and Joan A. Furey, eds. Visions to defend themselves—despite having received of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War. New York: Warner Books, 1991. basic training with M-16 and M-14 assault rifl es.

TRAILBLAZERS

W  WALKER, ALICE

(b. 1944) Writer. Alice Walker was one of eight children born to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah (Grant) Walker, poor sharecroppers living in Eatonton,

Georgia. When she was eight, one of Walker’s brothers accidently shot her in the eye with a BB gun. She lost sight in one eye and was disfi gured by scar tissue around the wound. Ashamed of

WEEKS v. SOUTHERN BELL

her appearance, Walker began to withdraw from social contact. Ironically, this period in her life turned out to be important because it led her to become an avid reader and writer. When she was 14, Walker had surgery to remove the scar tissue. Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and then Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. After spending a summer in Uganda, Walker discovered she was pregnant. Terrifi ed of her parents’ reaction, she had an ABORTION, which was followed by a period of intense depression. Later Walker published the poems she had written during this bleak period in a volume entitled Once (1968). Walker’s fi rst novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), tells the story of two generations of African-American men who, brutalized by society, take out their frustrations on the women in their lives. It is a scenario that is repeated in several of Walker’s novels, where her female characters are sympathetic while some of her male characters rape and beat women. Despite the protests of African Americans who believe that Walker betrays her race, she refuses to compromise her vision. “ It happens,” she says. Walker’s best-known book, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983, making Walker the fi rst African-American women to win the award. The novel was also made into a fi lm by Steven Spielberg.

 WALTERS, BARBARA

(b. 1931) America’s fi rst regular network anchorwoman. Walters was working as host of NBC’s Today Show when, in 1976, ABC offered her a record million-dollar salary to become coanchor of the network’s nightly news program. The deal drew criticism from some male co-workers. Broadcast journalism was at that time a male-dominated fi eld, and men were not earning this much money. Her contract was viewed by many as evidence of the commercialization of TV news. Walters is perhaps best known for her candid interviews with entertainment celebrities and political leaders. Conducted in cozy, intimate settings and a personal, conversational style, her interviews often lead her subjects to reveal more about themselves than they had expected to. In 1977, Walters arranged the fi rst joint interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In 1991, she was the fi rst person to interview General Nor-

99

man Schwarzkopf, who commanded U.S. armed forces in the Gulf War; during the course of the conversation, Schwarzkopf confi ded that he believed the war had ended too soon. Walters has interviewed every American president since Richard Nixon, as well as countless foreign leaders, movie stars, musicians, and other celebrities. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Walters began her broadcast career as a producer at WNBCTV in New York and a writer for CBS News. She joined the Today Show in 1961 as a writer and reporter-at-large, and by 1965 she had become assistant host. From 1971 to 1976, while still with the Today Show, she hosted her own syndicated series for NBC, Not for Women Only. With ABC in 1984, she joined Hugh Downs as cohost of the weekly magazine show 20/20, helping make it a prime-time hit for nearly two decades. Among Walters’s many professional honors was her 1990 induction into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame as one of “ television’s most respected interviewers and journalists.”

 WAR BRIDES ACT

A federal law that facilitated the immigration process for foreign women who married American servicemen during and after WORLD WAR II. Specifi cally, the act—which was passed on December 28, 1945—waived all immigration requirements except for meeting “ physical and mental” standards. The legislation expired after three years, in December 1948. New York, February 10: One of the greatest overseas journeys of women and children in history ended today as the quaint Queen Mary docked at Pier 90 with 1,666 wives of American servicemen and their 668 children. . . . The ship was met by a neat white Army Transportation Corps vessel aboard which a band played “ Roll out the Barrel” and “ Here Comes the Bride.”

As many as one million women from Europe and Asia married American servicemen during the 1940s. In 1946, newspapers across the country printed this Associated Press report, detailing the arrival of one group of war brides:

 WEEKS

V. SOUTHERN BELL A 1969 appellate court decision that affected protective labor laws. Lorena Weeks, a clerical em-

7

W E L FA R E

ployee who worked for Southern Bell Telephone Company, applied for a better-paying job as a switchman. She was denied the job because the company said switchmen had to lift equipment that weighed more than thirty pounds. The company further maintained that only men could lift such heavy loads. Thus, the company said, being male was a “ bona fi de occupational qualifi cation” (BFOQ) for the job. (A BFOQ is a characteristic or ability that is required to do a particular job.) NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) attorney Sylvia Roberts took the case to the U.S. Fifth Circuit court in 1969, claiming that keeping women from certain jobs was a violation of TITLE VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination in hiring, fi ring, promotion, and the terms and conditions of work based on race, sex, or national origin. The Court ruled in Weeks’s favor in 1969. It rejected Southern Bell’s assumption “ that few or no women can safely lift thirty pounds, while all men are treated as if they can.” The justices held that Title VII “ rejects just this type of romantic paternalism as unduly Victorian and instead vests the individual woman with the power to decide whether or not to take on unromantic tasks.” Since this ruling, other courts have invalidated protective laws that were originally enacted to protect women from sweat shop conditions but which in modern times have been used to keep women from fairly competing with men for high-pay or high-prestige jobs.

 WELFARE

Aid in the form of money for those in need. Linda Gordon, in her book Pitied But Not Entitled, notes that the way welfare is structured and administered in the United States has denigrated and marginalized poor women. She notes that women, especially single mothers, have been the primary recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program that most people associate with welfare in the United States. But, she points out, the government also gives aid in a number of other ways, which are not labeled as welfare, including “ home mortgage tax deductions, business expense deductions, medical expense deductions, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, government college scholarships and loans, capital gains tax limits, Social Security old-age pensions, and Medicare.”

These kinds of aid tend to benefi t men and the middle class. The distinction between welfare and other social-insurance programs, such as “ old-age insurance,” has led to stigmatizing welfare recipients and to constant attempts to cut such programs out of the federal budget. The beginnings of modern welfare programs can be traced to the early days of the twentieth century when women’s groups sought to provide aid to single women with children, usually widows. By 1920, 41 states had MOTHERS’ PENSION laws designed to keep impoverished mothers from having to give up their children. Those who promoted the legislation convinced states of the need for aid by dividing the poor into two distinct classes: the “ deserving” and the “ undeserving.” These distinctions were never very clear, however, and people tended to think of all poor people as somehow responsible for their own situation. And the vast majority of poor people in America have always been women with children. There was considerable resistance to a federally funded welfare program until the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s. As part of the SOCIAL SECURITY ACT of 1935, however, the program fi rst known as AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN was established. Gordon notes that the social insurance programs established by the Roosevelt administration during the depression covered women only as dependents of husbands and fathers. Only Aid to Dependent Children was designed to help single mothers. Beginning in the 1950s, women on welfare began to demand better treatment. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded in 1966, fought to improve the lot of welfare recipients. Because AFDC was designed to help only single mothers, it was not unusual for social workers to arrive unannounced at the homes of welfare recipients to search for evidence of a man living in the home. If there was evidence, even if the man living in the home was not the father of the children, welfare could be cut off on the basis of the “ man-in-the house rule” – – the assumption that any man living in the home could and should support the family. Beginning in 1970, however, the Supreme Court made several rulings that helped mothers on welfare. The Court said that welfare benefi ts could not be arbitrarily cut off without a hearing, that welfare recipients had a right to privacy and their homes could not be entered without warrants, and that only fathers had the obligation to support children.

WHARTON, EDITH JONES

7

Between 1950 and 1990 welfare mothers were caught in a contradiction. On the one hand, welfare rules kept women out of the labor force by punishing anyone who earned money by taking away welfare payments. On the other hand, welfare mothers were stigmatized as lazy because they did not work or as cheaters if they worked and tried to hide the extra income. Over the years many attempts were made to reform the welfare system. During his administration, Richard Nixon pressed for passage of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would have allowed payments to the working poor. There was a great deal of resistance to Nixon’s plan from all sides– – some saying that the payments were too little and others objecting to federal money being giving to working people. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected partly on a promise to “ end welfare as we know it.” In 1996, he signed legislation that requires welfare recipients to look for work and ended guaranteed cash assistance to the poor. See also: Poverty.

Mae West wrote her own material and created characters for herself.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Abramovitz, Mimi. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South End Press, 1988. Gordon, Linda. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

 WEST, MAE

(1893– 1980) Film star and writer. Mae West was born in Brooklyn, New York. She began her theatrical career in burlesque at a very young age. In her twenties, she began writing, directing, and acting. Her fi rst Broadway play, Sex (1926), resulted in her arrest on obscenity charges. Diamond Lil (1928), which she wrote and performed in, was a big hit and made West into a Broadway star. In 1932, West signed a contract to act in fi lms for Paramount. She insisted on writing her own material, and she created a character for herself who was brazenly seductive and witty—and who always “ got her man.” Her dialogue was full of sexual innuendo, and her witty one-liners—such as “ It’s better to be looked over than overlooked” —are still quoted. Her fi rst starring role was in in She Done Him Wrong (1933), which was such a success at the box office that it saved Paramount from being sold to MGM. Other hit fi lms for West included

I’m No Angel (1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), and Klondike Annie (1936). By the mid-1930s, West was the highest-paid woman in America. She was so popular that sailors named the infl atable life jacket after her. West’s witty sexuality brought her detractors as well as fans. The fi rst motion picture code was established partially to restrict West, and as popular tastes became more conservative, West’s career declined. West’s autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, was published in 1959. She died in 1980.

 WHARTON, EDITH JONES

(1862– 1937) Novelist. Edith Newbold Jones was the only daughter born to a wealthy and socially prominent New York family. She was educated by governesses and tutors in the skills considered at the time to be appropriate for a young lady, but she also read voraciously in the family’s extensive library. In 1885, Jones married Edward Robbins Wharton, a wealthy banker many years older than she. The marriage was not a happy one and the couple had no children. Edith took up writing to help her deal with what she called her “ moral solitude.”

7

WILDER, LAURA INGALLS

Edith Wharton wrote about independent women making their way in her novels.

Wharton’s fi rst major novel, The House of Mirth (1905), placed her among the fi rst ranks of American authors. The story of Lily Bart, an independent young woman caught between the modern world and the old New York society, refl ected Wharton’s intimate knowledge of this group, as did her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Wharton was prolifi c, publishing more than 50 books, including travel books, collections of short stories, and criticism. Wharton divorced her husband in 1913. She was living in France at the time and remained there for the rest of her life. During WORLD WAR I, she worked with refugees, at one time feeding and housing six hundred war orphans. Wharton died in St. Brice, France, at the age of 75. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

 WILDER, LAURA INGALLS

(1867– 1957) Writer. Laura Ingalls was born in Wisconsin in 1867 to Caroline and Charles Ingalls. The family moved many times during her childhood as

her father searched for better farmland. They fi nally settled in South Dakota. Because the family moved so much, Ingalls was not able to attend school regularly until she was nearly 13 years old. Still, two months before her sixteenth birthday, she was certifi ed as a teacher and took a position at a school near her home. When Almanzo Wilder, a young man who had moved from New York in search of good farmland, proposed to her, Laura was reluctant to accept his offer. Having lived on farms her whole life, she knew how hard farm life was for a woman. But she overcame her reservations, and the couple married in August 1885. Unfortunately, her fears were well founded. In the fi rst few years of their marriage the couple encountered many hardships, including the death of a son and a bout with diphtheria from which Almanzo Wilder never fully recovered. In 1894, the family, which now included her daughter Rose, moved to Missouri, where they raised chickens and fruit on a large farm. Wilder wrote columns about farm life for a Missouri newspaper and also sold articles to McCall’s and Country Gentleman. Encouraged by her daughter, Wilder began to write about her childhood. Her fi rst book, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932 and was an immediate and enduring success, as were the six other “ Little House” books. Laura Ingalls Wilder died in Missouri in 1957. A television series based on her books, Little House on the Prairie, debuted in 1974 and can still be seen in syndication.

 WILLIAMS, CLAUDINE

(b. 1921) First woman to become president and general manager of a casino. Williams grew up near Shreveport, Louisiana, and took her fi rst job at age 12. She helped her mother in the lunchroom fi nishing table settings and other odd jobs. She continued to work parttime while attending school to help support her mother and sister. By age 15, she talked her way into a job at a new dinner club and learned the table games from her co-workers. During the Depression a good job took priority over her high school education and she left school. Williams continued to learn the gambling business, moved to Houston, and owned her fi rst club by the time she turned 20. Shortly thereafter, she met Shelby

W I N F R E Y, O P R A H

Williams who became her best friend, business partner, and future husband. While in Texas, Claudine and Shelby Williams followed the development of the gambling industry in Las Vegas and decided to move there in 1964. They bought the Silver Slipper Hotel and Casino, revitalized its business, and sold it to Howard Hughes in 1969. They built the Riverboat Casino (Holiday Casino), also in Las Vegas, and operated it for ten years (1973– 83). The Williamses’ partnership ensured that they both understood the business operations. When Shelby’s health failed, their decades of experience allowed her to assume greater duties in the casino eventually becoming president and general manager, a fi rst in the industry. Williams became a pioneer once again in 1981 as the fi rst woman in Nevada history to chair a bank board of directors. Williams, who once received a bank loan to build a club by giving only her word as collateral, now led a venture to provide specialized banking services for Las Vegas businesses. Williams has given back to the community that was good to her and her businesses. She is a generous benefactor to numerous organizations and schools, including the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. She wants to ensure that young people have the opportunities for formal education that she had to forego.



WILSON, EDITH BOLLING GALT (1872– 1961) First lady of the United States (1915– 1921) and wife of Woodrow Wilson, who served as twentyeighth president from 1913 to 1921. Edith Bolling was born on October 15, 1872, in Wytheville, Virginia. She received her early education at home, then attended Martha Washington College in Abington, Virginia. In 1896, she married Norman Galt, a well-to-do jewelry store owner, who died in 1908. Early in 1915, Galt met President Woodrow Wilson, whose wife had died a year earlier. The president and Galt were attracted to each other, and they married on December 8, 1915, at her home. Wilson was reelected president in 1916, and the following year the United States entered WORLD WAR I. In 1918, after the war ended, Wilson went to France with her husband to attend the peace conference at Versailles. The president believed strongly that a League of Nations might help

7

prevent future wars. On October 2, 1919, while on a campaign swing across the nation to gather support for U.S. entry into the League, the president suffered a stroke. Wilson was rushed back to the White House, where his wife helped him through the illness. She read many of the important papers coming before him, decided who should be allowed to see him, and for many months, conducted much of the business of the office. The American public never knew the extent of Wilson’s illness. Wilson left the White House in 1921 and died three years later. Edith Wilson died on December 28, 1961.

WILSON, ELLEN LOUISE  AXSON

(1860– 1914) First lady of the United States (1913– 1914) and wife of Woodrow Wilson, who served as twentyeighth president from 1913 to 1921. Ellen Louise Axson was born on May 15, 1860, in Savannah, Georgia. She graduated from the Rome Female College in Georgia and attended the Art Students League in New York. A gifted painter, she displayed and sold some of her works. In 1883, Axson met Woodrow Wilson in Rome and the couple married two years later. They had three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson pursued an academic career as a professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and then at Princeton University, of which he became president in 1902. Wilson later resigned, was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, and was elected president of the United States in 1912. Mrs. Wilson had been actively exhibiting her paintings since 1910, but after her husband’s election in 1912 she devoted herself to her duties as fi rst lady. She worked to improve the housing conditions of the poor who lived in Washington D.C., and also established the Rose Garden at the White House. During her husband’s fi rst term, Wilson developed Bright’s disease (an infl amation of the kidney) and other health problems. She died on August 6, 1914.

 WINFREY, OPRAH

(b. 1954) Talk-show host, publisher, and philanthropist. Oprah Winfrey was born to unwed teenage parents in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on January 29, 1954. As a child, she was uprooted several times,

7 4

W I N F R E Y, O P R A H

fi rst living with her grandmother, then with her mother, and fi nally with her father. While living with her mother, Winfrey was sexually molested by male relatives. In 1968, Winfrey settled down with her father in Nashville, Tennessee. At the age of 19, she became the youngest woman and fi rst African-American woman to anchor the news on a Nashville television station. Her next job was as a news anchor in Baltimore, Maryland. When that did not work out, the station asked Winfrey to host a talk show.

After seven years in Baltimore, Winfrey moved to Chicago to host a morning talk show called AM Chicago. She was an immediate success, and before long the show was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. By 1987, Winfrey was the highest-paid performer in show business; by 2000, her show was the highest-rated talk show ever. Over the years, Winfrey has used her show to advance various causes in which she believes. In 1996, for example, she began a book club designed to get her audiences excited about reading. In 1997, she began the Angel Network, which has collected money to fund college scholarships and now also underwrites $100,000 grants to people who “ use their lives” TRAILBLAZERS to help others. In addition to her work as a talkshow host, Winfrey has also worked The appointment of Tina Brown (b. 1953) as editor of the as an actor. In 1985, she played the prestigious New Yorker magazine in September 1992 caused role of Sophia in The Color Purple, a a rare stir in the quiet world of publishing. It was not so much part for which she received nominathat she was a woman and an English citizen— though certions for an Academy Award and a tainly that rankled some— but that she had earned a reputaGolden Globe. Since then Oprah has tion for favoring popular culture, contemporary fashion, and acted in several made-for-television commercial content over “ serious” magazine journalism. The movies and in the fi lm version of New Yorker, which had earned its reputation on sophisticated, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which high-brow articles and humor, had been suffering declines in Winfrey also produced. Winfrey is circulation and advertising revenue that led owner Samuel I. also a successful businesswoman. In Newhouse to seek new blood. 1986, she founded Harpo ProducAn Oxford graduate, Brown had gone directly from unitions (“ Harpo” is Oprah spelled versity to Fleet Street, the heart of newspaper and magazine backwards), which owns and propublishing in London. She wrote for the venerable humor duces The Oprah Winfrey Show and weekly Punch and other magazines in the mid-1970s and was many of Winfrey’s other projects. named editor of Tatler, another British magazine institution, Thus she became one of the few in 1979. Having raised the circulation of Tatler by 300 perwomen to own a major studio. In cent, she was hired by Newhouse in 1984 to revive his strugApril 2000, she launched her own gling monthly Vanity Fair in New York. With her signature successful monthly publication, O, blend of contemporary design and popular, youth-oriented The Oprah Magazine. Winfrey is also an educator, social content, she succeeded again in reversing the decline of a maactivist, and philanthropist. She has jor publication. taught a course called “ The DynamDeclaring herself an editor, not a “ curator,” Brown brought ics of Leadership” at the Kellogg changes to The New Yorker that attracted new readers but Graduate School of Management at alienated many long-time subscribers. Photographs and color Northwestern University. As part of art were introduced, younger writers were hired, and coverher continuing fi ght against child age of current events, popular culture, and contemporary abuse, she testifi ed before Congress fashion was expanded. The results were mixed: Circulation on behalf of the National Child Proand advertising revenues increased, but not to the point of tection Act of 1991, which came to profitability. Brown resigned her editorship in 1998 to become be called “ Oprah’s bill.” And she has chair of a new media venture by Disney’s Miramax Films and donated large sums of money to varedit its magazine, Talk. She is married to Harold Evans, a ious causes and charities, including publishing executive. her own foundation, called Family for Better Lives.

WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY SERVICE F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Brooks, Philip. Oprah Winfrey: A Voice for the People. New York: Prentice Hall, 2000.

 WOMANIST

Term coined by the author ALICE WALKER to distinguish the differences of AFRICAN-AMERICAN women’s experiences from what she perceived to be those of middle-class white feminists. In the preface to her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Walker described womanist as a “ black feminist or feminist of color who possesses strength and persistence for personal development.” The theoretical frameworks developed by feminist theorists and RADICAL FEMINISTS to explain sexual inequality during the second wave of feminism became too academic and removed from daily life according to Walker. Furthermore, feminist theory did not address the commitment African-American feminists had to the survival of their community—black men and women. The term womanist derives from the word womanish used by U.S. southern blacks to describe a girl who “ insists on asking questions, demanding answers, and speaking in her own voice.” It is the opposite of girlish, however, indicating a seriousness and boldness learned for survival. The term womanist has been widely adopted by women of color.

( WA V E S )

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WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR  VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY SERVICE (WAVES) The U.S. Navy’s fi rst body of female members. On July 30, 1942, as World War II got under way in earnest, the Navy began allowing women 20 years of age and older to volunteer. (However, no African-American women accepted until 1944.) The fi rst commander was Mildred McAfee, former president of Wellesley College. Woman volunteers attended military training schools and boot camp. During World War II, around 100,000 WAVES served in a variety of jobs. While many WAVES were assigned administrative or clerical work, other worked in jobs previously reserved for men, such as pilot or weapon instruction, aircraft repair, cryptology, or air traffic control. The Navy also recruited college-educated women with backgrounds in science, mathematics, and engineering to work on planning bombing operations and on the early efforts at computer programming. However, WAVES were not allowed to serve in combat, or overseas until 1944. The 4,000 WAVES who did serve overseas were mostly in Hawaii. With the passage of the WOMEN’ S ARMED SERVICES ACT in 1948, the WAVES became a permanent component of the Navy. The name

 WOMAN’S PEACE PARTY

Activist group established in Washington, D.C., in 1915 in response to the beginning of WORLD WAR I in Europe. The party grew out of a meeting organized by feminist Jane Addams to call for arms limitations, mediation of the European confl ict, a solution to economic issues, and a call for woman suffrage. The organization held a meeting in the Netherlands in April 1915 to call for international peace. As the United States entered the war, the group divided as some members turned to war relief and others opposed the war. Later, the remaining group members formed the new Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). It sought to encourage “ movements to further peace, internationalism and freedom of women.” The U.S. branch of the WILPF is the longest-lasting women’s peace organization in the United States.

WAVES handle many of the traditionally male jobs in the U.S. Navy.

7

WOMEN AIRFORCE SERVICE PILOTS

WAVES was dropped as an official title in 1972, when restrictions on the jobs that Navy women could hold were lifted and certain male and female units were combined.

WOMEN AIRFORCE  SERVICE PILOTS (WASPS) A military unit established during WORLD WAR II that included the fi rst women to serve in the United States Airforce. More than 1,000 took part in the program. They fl ew more than 60 million miles and 38 women lost their lives in service. WASPs underwent the same training as the male pilots, except for acrobatics and combat fl ying. WASPs were involved in ferrying aircraft, target towing, training gunners, testing new planes, tracking and searchlight missions, simulated strafi ng, smoke laying, and other chemical missions, radio control fl ying, basic and instrument instruction, engineering test fl ying, administrative and utility fl ying. When the war came to an end, the program was eliminated over a worry that women would take men’s jobs. It was not until 1977 that the women were acknowledged as veterans.

WOMEN’S ARMED  SERVICES INTEGRATION ACT 1948 law allowing women to serve permanently in the U.S. armed forces. While some women had served in the U.S. armed forces prior to 1948, they were only allowed to serve when the nation was at war. After World War II, several leaders of all-female units championed a more permanent status for women in the military. The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act was written by Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. While it met little resistance in the Senate, it faced considerable opposition in the House, particularly among members of the House Armed Services Committee. After two years of debate, the bill was passed into law and signed by President Harry S Truman on June 12, 1948. The law authorized regular and reserve status for women in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. It limited number of women in each branch to 2 percent of the total forces and allowed each branch only one female colonel. In 1967 the two-percent cap was lifted, as were many promotional restrictions. By 1998,

( WA S P S )

when the Act’s fi ftieth anniversary was celebrated, about 200,000 women were serving on active duty, making up 14 percent of the force.

 WOMEN’S ARMY CORPS

A military unit that included the fi rst women, other than nurses, to serve in the United States Army. In May 1941, Congress began consideration of a bill, introduced by Edith Nourse Rogers, that would establish a women’s auxiliary army corps (WAAC). The bill stalled until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor raised concerns over a potential manpower shortage. The legislation gave WAACs official status but few of the benefi ts granted to male soldiers. The Director of the WAAC, Oveta Culp Hobby, was assigned the rank of major. WAAC fi rst, second, and third officers served as the equivalents of captains and lieutenants in the regular Army but received less pay than their male counterparts of similar rank. In July 1943, the “ auxiliary” designation was dropped after thousands of women enlisted. From that time forward members of the Women’s Army Corps received full U.S. Army benefi ts. Enlisted women were ranked as master sergeant through corporal and private, the same as their male counterparts. Much of the Women’s Army Corps was demobilized along with the rest of the Army starting immediately after V-E Day in Europe. By December 1946, the number of WACs dropped under 10,000. The majority of those WACs held stateside duty and hoped to be allowed to stay in the Army. More than 150,000 women served in the WAC during WORLD WAR II, in North Africa, Europe, and Asia. The WAC remained a separate unit of the U.S. Army until 1978, when male and female forces were integrated through the WOMEN’ S ARMED SERVICES INTEGRATION ACT.

WOMEN’S BASEBALL  LEAGUE The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) operated from 1943 to 1954. It was started by Philip K. Wrigley, the chewinggum tycoon who had inherited the Chicago Cubs major league baseball franchise from his father. He believed that famous managers, such as Hall of Fame players, would draw fans to the new

WOMEN’S INDEPENDENT FORUM

league. When the league began, the athletes were actually playing fast-pitch softball using an underhand pitching delivery but with changes to make the game faster. After the 1944 season when it became clear major leagues baseball would not be affected by the war, Wrigley sold the AAGPBL to Chicago advertising executive Arthur Meyerhoff. In the fi rst three years after World War II, between two and three thousand fans attended a single game. The AAGPBL peaked in attendance during the 1948 season, when ten teams attracted 910,000 paid fans. However, attendance declined in the following years and the league eventually disbanded.

 WOMEN’S BUREAU

An agency established by Congress in 1920 to address issues concerning working women. One of the agency’s fi rst victories was the inclusion of women under the FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 1938 which set minimum wages and maximum working hours. As the bureau gained power, more protection was offered to women. It helped to establish skills training, higher wages, and better working conditions for the growing female workforce during WORLD WAR II. In the early 1960s, ESTHER PETERSON directed the Women’s Bureau and helped the EQUAL PAY ACT (1963) pass Congress. The bureau’s early studies and publications addressed unique workplace issues faced by women and continues to do so today. The agency studied contingent female workers in the 1980s and child-care options in the 1990s. The bureau has increasingly focused on workers’ concerns over balancing job and family responsibilities. It introduced an initiative to encourage employersponsored child care in 1982, the establishment of a multimedia Work and Family Clearinghouse in 1989, and advocated passage of the FAMILY AND MEDICAL LEAVE ACT OF 1993. In 1994, the Women’s Bureau launched the Working Women Count survey through which more than a quarter of a million women told policymakers what they did and did not like about their jobs. The next year, President Bill Clinton accepted a set of 14 policy recommendations designed to address the concerns women raised, such as CHILD CARE. The survey also led the Bureau to create the Working Women Count Honor Roll that encouraged employers, organizations, and individuals to implement new policies and programs in

7 7

the areas working women said they were most concerned about: improving pay and benefi ts, building the family-friendly workplace, and valuing women’s work through training and advancement.

WOMEN’S EQUITY  ACTION LEAGUE A politically conservative offshoot of the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW) founded in 1968 by women who did not wish to confront the issue of abortion rights but sought to work for equal opportunities for women in education and employment. Notable members of the organization include attorney Sonia Pressman Fuentes, a founding member of both WEAL and NOW; Lucy Hargrett Draper, who also served as president; Joline Moore Ohmart; and attorney Elizabeth Boyer. In 1970, WEAL fi led a class-action complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor in support of Bernice R. Sandler, who in 1969 challenged discriminatory hiring practices at the University of Maryland. The action culminated in the passage of TITLE IX, which bars gender discrimination in education facilities that receive federal funds. Based in Washington, D.C., WEAL publishes a number of guides (including Better Late Than Never: Financial Aid for Re-Entry Women Seeking Education and Training), regional newsletters, and national periodicals, including the WEAL Washington Report, the WEAL National Newsletter, and a free quarterly national newsletter, In The Running, which focuses on sex discrimination in sports.

WOMEN’S INDEPENDENT  FORUM A politically conservative, nonprofi t, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C. Established in 1992, WIF dispels the myth that women exist as a single, united, and politically liberal interest group. Like the WOMEN’ S EQUITY ACTION LEAGUE, WIF eschews the issue of abortion rights, choosing its causes based on what is “ best for society as a whole, and not only for ‘ women.’” In the past, WIF has fi led briefs in several landmark court cases. It supported the Virginia Military Institute in its claim that single-sex colleges were not discriminatory. WIF also argued, in reference to Brown University’s allocation of

7

WOMEN’S JOINT CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE

fi nancial resources between men’s and women’s athletic programs, that it is counterproductive to require absolutely equal opportunities in sports (and athletic scholarships) without considering the level of interest in and demand for a particular sport. WIF publishes a journal, The Women’s Quarterly, and a newsletter, Ex Femina.

WOMEN’S JOINT  CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE Committee of the U.S. Congress founded by suffragist Maud Wood Park (1871– 1955) as a means of exerting infl uence on the federal legislative process. The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) evolved from the congressional committee of the NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION as a response to the introduction of the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA). The ERA was perceived as a threat to the protective labor legislation that members of the NAWSA had fought for years to secure. Before its demise in the 1930s, the membership of the WJCC peaked at 21 member organizations from the original 17. Among the early successes of the WJCC was the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, authorizing federal aid to states for maternity, child health programs, and welfare. The WJCC also supported the CABLE ACT (1922), which granted married women citizenship regardless of the status of their husbands. As a result of the efforts of the WJCC, presidents Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding appointed women to positions on federal courts and commissions.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION  MOVEMENT A movement started in the 1960s that is often referred to as the second wave of the women’s rights movement that began in the nineteenth century and continued with the right to vote. In the 1960s, the emphasis moved to gaining independence in all areas of women’s lives. Supporters came to the women’s movement from a variety of paths. Those involved in the civil rights movement began to challenge their own limitations. They questioned why few women held positions of authority in schools, courts, or businesses. Many middle-class white

women were drawn into the movement after reading the 1963 best-seller The Feminine Mystique by BETTY FRIEDAN (see Documents), which described their discontent and sense of underutilization. Working women liked the efforts to increase wages and end segregation in jobs. As women’s liberation became a mass movement, many issues and subgroups spun off. The mainstream sector of the movement that focused on legislative reform was the NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN, organized in 1966. This organization sought equality for women in government, private-sector employment, and throughout society. MS. MAGAZINE was launched in 1972 by journalist and feminist leader GLORIA STEINEM as a feminist publication designed to reach a mass audience. Other sectors included radical FEMINISM, which wanted to change the basic elements of power differences between men and women. They reached a nationwide audience with a demonstration at the MISS AMERICA PAGEANT in 1968. Perhaps the most far-reaching impact came out of consciousness-raising groups that concentrated on changing aspects of personal, social, and cultural life and dismantling the patriarchal power structure. These groups focused on issues that had not been previously considered political, such as housework, beauty, reproductive rights, violence, and sexuality. The introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961 and the fi ght to legalize ABORTION brought more women into the women’s movement. Equal pay legislation was passed and discrimination in the workplace began to be investigated. The fi rst March for Women’s Equality took place in August 1970 in New York, demonstrating that the movement was in full force. By the early 1970s, the movement spread beyond the white, middleclass basis of the formal women’s liberation movement. The black feminist initiatives were growing, soon joined by Latina, Asian American, and Native American feminist organizations. Activism was central to the movement. Women’s liberation leaders started women’s shelters, expanded accessibility to birth control, fought for women’s participation in sports, and criticized sexist images in the media. WOMEN’ S STUDIES departments and women’s history classes were instituted in colleges across the country. Women’s liberation victories included the legalization of abortion in 1973 with ROE V. WADE and federal guidelines against coercive sterilization. One setback was the EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT, which

W O M E N ’ S S P O RT S F O U N DAT I O N

7 9

failed in 1982, just three states short of the required three-quarters majority. No longer referred to today as “ women’s liberation,” the movement has evolved into the wide-ranging, multifaceted pursuit of the “ feminist” agenda. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000.

WOMEN’S NATIONAL  BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION The Women’s National Basketball Association introduced the United States to women’s professional team sports at a level of organization, media support, and popular interest never seen before. Although there had been attempts at women’s professional basketball leagues in the past, the WNBA was the fi rst to attract a large following and obtain television coverage. Financial backing by the National Basketball Association and the attention garnered by the U.S. women basketball team’s 1996 Olympic gold assured the WNBA a foundation that previous leagues did not have. Women fi rst played basketball at Smith College in 1892, using rules adapted from the men’s game. It wasn’t until 1971 that a fi ve-player, full-court game and a 30-minute shot clock were introduced. By 1972, TITLE IX assured female athletes equal opportunities in educational institutions and the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women held its fi rst collegiate basketball championship. Women’s basketball debuted at the Olympics in 1976 and 18-year-old Nancy Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal when the United States took a silver. A decade later, Lieberman became the fi rst woman to play in a men’s professional basketball league when she joined the USBL’s Springfi eld Fame. A year later she joined the Washington Generals, which toured with the Harlem Globetrotters. In 1992, the Women’s World Basketball Association (WWBA) was launched in the Midwest with six teams. It folded shortly thereafter. The NBA Board of Governors approved of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) concept in 1995. By October of 1996, the fi rst players, Rebecca Lobo and

The Women’ s National Basketball Association introduced women’ s professional team sports to the United States.

Sheryl Swoopes, were signed to play in the eightcity WNBA league. The next spring, the WNBA, overseen by President Val Ackerman, held its draft for college players and unsigned veterans. The inaugural WNBA season began in 1987 and was seen on the NBC, ESPN, and the Lifetime channels. In the fi rst four years, the league averaged about 10,000 fans per game. This was considered a success as it took the NBA 29 years to reach an average attendance of 10,000. The league now has 12 teams: Charlotte Sting, Cleveland Rockers, Detroit Shock, Houston Comets, Los Angeles Sparks, Minnesota Lynx, New York Liberty, Orlando Miracle, Phoenix Mercury, Sacramento Monarchs, Utah Starzz, and Washington Mystics. Each team includes a major star.

WOMEN’S SPORTS  FOUNDATION A charitable and educational organization that focuses on increasing the physical fi tness of girls and women, their participation in sports, and

7

WOMEN’S STUDIES

creating a more educated public that supports gender equity in all sports opportunities. Founded in 1974 by tennis great BILLIE JEAN KING and located in East Meadow, New York, the WSF sponsors privately funded programs in participation, education, advocacy, research, and leadership. The foundation conducts research and publishes reports on a variety of related subjects. It recognizes outstanding journalism in women’s sports, coaching, and other signifi cant accomplishments. It provides grants and scholarships to girls and women in sports, as well as information about other sources of funding. The foundation includes a speaker service through which champion female athletes, businesswomen, scholars, and legal and health experts conduct programs and give talks on health, fi tness, nutrition, marketing, motivation, and the business and politics of sports.

 WOMEN’S STUDIES

Women’s studies grew out of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s as faculty and students saw that women’s social and political experiences were not a part of the curriculum or research priorities in higher education. The fi rst women’s studies program was established in 1970 at San Diego State University. The National Women’s Studies Association was founded in 1977. The women’s studies journal Feminist Studies began publication in 1972. In 1975 there were 150 programs in women’s studies. The number of programs doubled in the next fi ve years. By 2000, more than 700 colleges and universities offered women’s studies courses. Scholarship in women’s studies includes virtually every academic discipline. Interdisciplinary perspectives include English, history, political science, fi ne arts, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and the physical sciences. Women’s studies programs examine women’s roles, achievements and experiences, historically and across cultures. Courses in these programs examine the contributions, perspectives, and status of women. The programs usually take diverse approaches to gender studies and the intersection of gender with other social identities such as class, race, sexual orientation, ability, age, and ethnicity. While women’s studies began as a political movement, it has developed an intellectual approach and now offers doctoral degrees.

WOMEN’S TRADE UNION  LEAGUE See also: O’R EILLY, LENORA; UNIONS, LABOR.

 WORLD WAR I

A major confl ict between the Allies (Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and later the United States) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) that raged between 1914 and 1918. The desperate needs arising from this terrible catastrophe spurred the advancement of women’s rights. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, hundreds of thousands of men joined the military, leaving women to fi ll their jobs, as well as new war-related jobs that were created. Many women were left at home to provide for themselves and their families. Women’s roles as employees, volunteers, and military nurses gave them confi dence and pride in their work. A new area of work for women was in the military. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was a leader in the placement of women in the military, though he had no intention of making women soldiers, but rather clerks. During World War I more than 11,000 women joined the U.S. Navy. The Marines did not open their doors to women until 1918, and the U.S. Army did not enlist women during World War I except as nurses, and then without rank or benefi ts. More women served in military-related jobs than in the actual military. American women were employed in munitions plants and factories even before the United States entered the war, but the number increased rapidly once Congress declared war on Germany. As the demand for war materiel increased, The New York Times defended the increasing number of working women: “ The fi ltering of the fi ne screw and the insertion of tiny springs in the assembling of parts of a shell made the sensitive touch perception and delicate handling of a woman’s hands . . . really needed.” Volunteer work, certainly not new to women, expanded considerably during World War I. Before the war, women were involved in volunteer work concerning temperance, suffrage, the poor, and other issues. After the United States entered the war, more attention was turned toward aiding soldiers in various ways, such as in the preparation of bandages and “ comfort bags.” The Red

W O R L D WA R I I

Cross trained nurses to go to France as well as to work on the homefront. Among them were 1,000 AFRICAN-AMERICAN women who were trained by the Red Cross, but not allowed to go overseas because “ separate but equal” accommodations were not available. Despite discrimination, World War I provided job opportunities for African-American women and allowed them to gain confi dence in their own abilities. Although at the end of the war African-American women suffered setbacks in employment options—they were frequently the fi rst let go from jobs—it was not nearly to the point of prewar discrimination. African-American women’s exposure to varied work during the war gave them even more incentive to pursue equal employment rights for African Americans and women. While there had been a growing trend in female employment before World War I, most of that growth was in the same type of menial positions women had held for centuries. The shortage of men during World War I allowed women to see for themselves that women could perform in jobs previously restricted to men. Once given this taste of economic freedom, many women would never again be satisfi ed being the domestic property of men. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Zeiger, Susan. In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers With the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

 WORLD WAR II

A major confl ict between the Allies (Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China) and the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) that raged from 1939 to 1945 and was the largest, deadliest, and most violent armed confl ict in the history of humanity. More than 150,000 American women served in the WOMEN’ S ARMY CORPS (WAC) during World War II. They were the fi rst women other than nurses to serve within the ranks of the U.S. Army. At fi rst, both the Army and the American public had difficulty accepting women in uniform. Political and military leaders, however, were faced with fi ghting a two-front war in Europe and Asia, supplying men and materiel for the war, and sending lend-lease material to the Allies. They quickly realized that women could pro-

7

vide the additional resources so desperately needed by the military and by industry. Given the opportunity to make a major contribution to the national war effort, women seized it. In 1941, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a bill to establish an Army women’s corps, separate and distinct from the existing Army Nurse Corps. Rogers remembered that the female civilians who had worked with the Army under contract and as volunteers during World War I were not entitled to the disability benefi ts or pensions available to veterans. She was determined that if women were to serve again they would receive the same legal protection and benefi ts as their male counterparts. Although Rogers believed the women’s corps should be a part of the Army so that women would receive equal pay, pension, and disability benefi ts, the Army did not want to accept women directly into its ranks. A compromise created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which was established to work with the Army, “ for the purpose of making available to the national defense the knowledge, skill, and special training of the women of the nation.” The Army would provide food, uniforms, living quarters, pay, and medical care for up to 150,000 “ auxiliaries,” as the women were known. Women officers would not be allowed to command men. The military ranks of the women were equivalent to that of the men in the regular Army, but women received lower pay than their male counterparts. Oveta Culp Hobby was appointed director of the WAAC, and she immediately began organizing the WAAC recruiting drive and training centers. Fort Des Moines, Iowa, was selected as the site of the fi rst WAAC training center. Applicants had to be U.S. citizens between the ages of 21 and 45 with no dependents, be at least fi ve feet tall, and weigh 100 pounds or more. The fi rst auxiliary units and officers to reach the fi eld went to Aircraft Warning Service (AWS) units in the United States. WAACs plotted and traced the paths of every aircraft in their area. Later graduates were sent to Army Air Forces (AAF), Army Ground Forces (AGF), or Services of Supply (renamed Army Service Forces [ASF] in 1943) fi eld installations. Initially, most auxiliaries worked as fi le clerks, typists, stenographers, or motor pool drivers, but gradually each service discovered an increasing number of positions WAACs were capable of fi lling.

7

W O R L D WA R I I

tower operators. By January 1945, only 50 percent of AAF WAACs held traditional assignments such as fi le Rosie the Riveter was a fictional American woman featured on clerk, typist, and stenographer. posters during WORLD WAR II as part of a government camA few AAF WAACs were assigned fl ying duties. Two WAAC radio oppaign to encourage women to enter the workforce to assist with erators assigned to Mitchel Field, the war effort and fill jobs left vacant by men. The image was New York, fl ew as crewmembers based on Norman Rockwell’s famous Saturday Evening Post on B-17 training fl ights. WAAC cover of May 1943, showing a strong woman dressed in work mechanics and photographers also clothes and a bandana. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 6 made regular fl ights. Three were million women responded to the government’s appeal to paawarded Air Medals, including one triotism and joined the workforce. Although most of these in India for her work in mapping women lost their jobs when men returned from the war, a “ The Hump,” the mountainous air legacy of the campaign was to lessen the stigma of employment route fl own by pilots ferrying lendfor middle-class women. lease supplies to the Chinese Army. The fi rst WAAC unit overseas, the 149th Post Headquarters Company, reported in 1943 to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers. One of the most famous WAAC units to serve in the North African and Mediterranean theaters was the 6669th Headquarters Platoon, assigned to Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army. This unit became the Army’s “ experiment” in the use of female units in the fi eld. The 6669th accompanied Fifth Army headquarters from Mostaganem, Algeria, across the Mediterranean to Naples and eventually all the way up the boot of Italy. Unit members remained six to thirteen miles behind the front lines, moved with the headquarters group, and worked in traditional female jobs. The unit included telephone operators, clerks, clerk-typists, and stenographers. Even so, these jobs were vastly different from those in the United States. For example, clerk-typists plotted the locations and movements of the troops and requisitioned and tracked the delivery of crucial supplies. The WAACs’ success in the North African and Mediterranean theaters led to an increasing number of requests for This woman is drilling rivet holes in airplanes to keep WAACs. business moving. Congress opened hearings in March 1943 on the conversion of the WAAC into part of the Regular Army. Army leaders asked for the authority to convert the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps into the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which The AAF was especially eager to obtain would be part of the Army itself rather than WAACs, and each unit was eagerly anticipated and merely serving with it. The WAAC had been an very well treated. Eventually the Air Force obunqualifi ed success, and the Army received retained 40 percent of all WAACs. Women were asquests for more WAACs than it could provide. signed as weather observers and forecasters, crypAlthough WAACs were desperately needed overtographers, radio operators, sheet metal workers, seas, the Army could not offer them the protecparachute riggers, bombsight maintenance spetion that regular soldiers received if captured, or cialists, aerial photograph analysts, and control

TRAILBLAZERS

W O R L D WA R I I

the benefi ts they received if injured. On July 3, 1943, the WAC bill was signed into law. All WAACs were given a choice of joining the Army as a member of the WAC or returning to civilian life. About 75 percent decided to enlist. In July 1943 the fi rst battalion of WACs arrived in London. These 557 enlisted women and 19 officers were assigned to duty with the Eighth Air Force. Later, a detachment of 300 WACs served with the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Originally stationed in London, these WACs accompanied SHAEF to France and eventually to Germany. As stenographers, typists, translators, legal secretaries, cryptographers, telegraph and teletype operators, radiographers, and general clerks, these women assisted in the planning of D-day and all subsequent operations up to the defeat of Germany. In February 1945 a battalion of AFRICANAMERICAN WACs received its long-awaited overseas assignment. Organized as the 6888th Central Postal Battalion and commanded by Major Charity Adams, these 800 women were stationed in Birmingham, England, for three months; moved on to Rouen, France; and fi nally settled in Paris. The battalion was responsible for the redirection of mail to all U.S. personnel in the European theater of operations, including Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Red Cross workers—a total of more than 7 million people. In general, WACs in the European theater, like those in the North African and Mediterranean theaters, held a limited range of job assignments. About 35 percent worked as stenographers and typists, 26 percent were clerks, and 22 percent did communications work. Only 8 percent were assigned jobs considered unusual for women—mechanics, draftspeople, interpreters, and weather observers. By the time of Germany’s surrender in 1945, there were 7,600 WACs throughout the European theater, stationed across England, France, and the German cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Heidelberg. In the Southwest Pacifi c Area (SWPA), the need for WACs became acute by mid-1944. Because this was one of the last theaters to request and receive WACs, skilled office workers were scarce. Thus, the women drivers and mechanics were quickly retrained as clerks and typists. Eventually 70 percent of the 5,500 WACs who served in the Pacifi c theater worked in adminis-

7

trative and office positions, 12 percent were in communications, 9 percent worked in stockrooms and supply depots, and 7 percent were assigned to motor transport. WACs in the SWPA endured a highly restricted lifestyle. Fearing incidents between the women and the large number of male troops in the area, theater headquarters directed that WACs, as well as Army nurses, be locked within barbed-wire compounds at all times, except when escorted by armed guards to work or to some approved recreation. No leaves or passes were allowed. Military regulations did not permit women of the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard to serve overseas until the war was almost over, but Navy nurses were serving on board hospital ships and eventually everywhere in the Pacifi c theater. Along with the other women’s military groups and the Army as a whole, much of the Women’s Army Corps was demobilized starting immediately after the surrender of Germany. Not all the women were allowed to return home immediately, however. In order to accomplish its occupation mission, the Army granted its commanders the authority to retain some specialists, including WACs, as long as they were needed. By December 1946, WAC strength was under 10,000. The majority of these women held stateside duty and hoped to be allowed to stay in the Army. Earlier in 1946, the Army had asked Congress for the authority to establish the Women’s Army Corps as a permanent part of the Regular Army. This is the greatest single indication of the success of the wartime WAC: The Army acknowledged a need for the skills society believed women could provide. Although the bill was delayed in Congress for two years, it fi nally became law in June 1948. With the passage of this bill, the Women’s Army Corps became a separate corps of the Regular Army. It remained part of the U.S. Army until 1978, when its existence as a separate corps was abolished and women were fully assimilated into all but the combat branches of the Army.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

Keil, Sally V., et al. Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines: The Unknown Heroines of World War Two. New York: Four Directions Press, 1994. Tomblin, Barbara Brooks. G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

7 4

Y A L O W, R O S A L Y N S U S S M A N

Y YALOW, ROSALYN  SUSSMAN

(b. 1921) Scientist, second woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. Rosalyn Sussman was born in New York City to Clara and Simon Sussman. Neither of her parents had a high school education, but both were determined that their children would get as much education as they could. Sussman attended Hunter College, where she was inspired to study physics after attending a colloquium given by Enrico Fermi on nuclear fi ssion. After her graduation from Hunter in 1941, Sussman applied to several graduate schools but assumed she would not be accepted because of her gender, so she took a job as a secretary. She was pleasantly surprised when the University of Illinois not only admitted her but offered her a teaching assistantship in physics. In 1943 she married fellow student Aaron Yalow, with whom she had two children. In 1945, armed with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, Yalow returned to New York City and accepted a position at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. There she met Dr. Solomon Berson, who became her research partner and who worked with her until his death in 1972. Together they refi ned a technique called radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of using radioisotopes to measure the amount of various substances in the blood. Yalow and Berson’s work was primarily devoted to measuring the amount of insulin in the blood of diabetic patients. In 1977, Yalow became the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize for medicine. (The fi rst was Gerty Theresa Cori in 1947.) In her acceptance speech, Yalow encouraged women to help one another succeed, because “ the world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half of its people.” Yalow remained affiliated with the Bronx V.A. Hospital until her retirement in 1991. She had also taught at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx (1979–85) and was chairman of the clinical science department at Montefi ore Hospital and Medical Center in the Bronx (1980– 85).

YOUNG WOMEN’S  CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION International social justice organization that began in the United States. The fi rst association in New York City provided a boardinghouse for young women in 1860. The fi rst student association was established in 1873 at Illinois State University. To address racial injustice, institutes on racism were held throughout the country. By 1875 there were 28 YWCAs in cities in the United States, and 15 years later the total of student associations had reached 106. Fighting discrimination has been part of the YWCA’a mission since its beginning. In 1890, the student division of the YWCA organized a program for Native American women at the Haworth Institute (Chilocco, Oklahoma) Indian School after learning about discrimination against Native Americans. By 1936, the YWCA held its fi rst coed, intercollegiate, interracial seminar at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. During WORLD WAR II when many Japanese Amercians faced discrimination and lost their homes, YWCAs in the Midwest opened their facilities and took part in relocation services. In 1965 the Office of Racial Justice was established at the National Board offices. In the 1990s, the YWCA developed resources for communities to eliminate racism. The YWCA has also supported measures to legalize ABORTION and to oppose mandatory parental consent. The YWCA defi nes its purpose as: peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all people.

 YOUTH CULTURE

Term encompassing the popular practices, ideas, values and organizations of young people in society. A valuable method for studying ADOLESCENTS is examining their culture and the ways in which they interact with it. During the twentieth century, the study of a distinct set of adolescent values and cultural behaviors that deviated signifi cantly from those of their parents became prevalent. Reasons for interest in youth culture ranged from parental concern for the

ZAHARIAS, MILDRED

moral health of their children to a desire to capitalize on consumer marketing to this increasingly powerful demographic group. Most early studies of youth culture focused on teenage boys, and particularly the link between culture and a high rate of delinquency. Girls were thought to lie outside of this pattern of delinquency and were thus neglected as subjects. However, delinquency is only one consequence of youth culture. The youth cultures of young men and women differ signifi cantly because of gendered notions of self. As the world changed and opened up for women in terms of political rights, educational opportunities, and careers, a new generation of girls gained a radically different perspective in terms of their possibilities. The traditional formulations of gendered identity and behavior began to lose appeal. In the 1950s, many high school girls still participated in activities geared toward their gender, and held traditional values, such as wanting to get married and raise a family. However, an increasing number of girls began to look outside of these traditional identities and rebelled against them. Even girls who epitomized feminine qualities and played to gender stereotypes began to demand recognition in their own right as girls. Teenagers became a highly volatile group, frequently alienated from and alien to their own parents. They became associated with fast cars and loud rock and roll, and parents worried about their daughters’ chastity.

“BABE”

DIDRIKSON

7

These phenomena opened up a unique marketing niche. Not only was rock and roll a highly lucrative business, but the culture surrounding it was as well. Consumer companies began to target teenagers and their allowances and afterschool jobs. In the 1960s, some girls joined the political movement of liberal and radical politics. Bohemianism became synonymous with youth. The counterculture that surrounded the politics, including free love and drug use, overturned the restrictive mores of the 1950s. The feminist movement also gained momentum. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s popular culture and the marketplace fl uctuated wildly, sending mixed messages to girls about independence and peer pressure. Despite feminism and the expanding women’s rights movement, girls’ obsession with their physical appearance reached a fever pitch. Feminist groups and youth organizations are trying to counteract destructive elements of youth culture, particularly ones that hurt girls’ self-esteem. Groups such as the the GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA present positive options and foster community and strength in young girls. Young feminist magazines, both print and online, also counteract the often harmful effects of the teen consumer market by emphasizing community service, activism, education and independent thought.

Z ZAHARIAS, MILDRED  “BABE” DIDRIKSON

(1914– 1956) Athlete, Olympic gold medalist, and a founder of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Mildred Ella Didrikson was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1914. From the time she was a very young girl, she played sports; she played sandlot baseball so well, in fact, that her teammates called her “ Babe” after the famous baseball player Babe Ruth, and the nickname stuck.

Didrikson dropped out of high school to work for the Casualty Insurance Company in Dallas, Texas. Although she was hired as a stenographer, her real job was playing for the company basketball team, which went on to win the national championship in 1931. At the same time, she played baseball in the city league and ran for the insurance company’s track team. In 1932, Didrikson competed in track and fi eld at the Olympics and won gold medals in javelin and

7

ZAHARIAS, MILDRED

“BABE”

DIDRIKSON

hurdles. After the Olympics, she took up golf, the game that made her famous. In 1938, Didrikson married professional wrestler George Zaharias, who retired to manage his wife’s career. In 1946, she won the U.S. Women’s Amateur tournament, and in 1947 she won 17 championships. In that same year, she helped to found the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). Zaharias was the leading money winner in the LPGA in 1949, 1950, and 1951. In 1950, she was voted outstanding woman athlete of the century by the Associated Press. Zaharias was diagnosed with cancer in 1952. After radical surgery she recovered quickly enough to return to the golf circuit in 1954, winning the United States’ Women’s Open title that year. But the cancer returned and she died in Galveston, Texas, in 1956.

Athlete Mildred “ Babe” Zaharias was an Olympic gold medalist and champion golfer.

Part 3 Documents

7

M U L L E R V. O R E G O N (1908)

Excerpts from

Muller v. Oregon (1908) In a landmark ruling for women workers, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 1903 Oregon law that limited the workday of women laundry workers to ten hours. The case involved a laundry owner named Craig Muller (referred to below as the “ defendant” ), who had been fined $10 for requiring a female employee to work more than ten hours. The conviction was upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court, and Muller appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. His attorneys argued that the ten-hour limit was unconstitutional, because it deprived both laundry owners and women employees of their Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of “ life, liberty and property.” The rights of employers and employees to agree upon a labor contract are both a liberty and a property right that may not be infringed. But the justices ruled to the contrary, holding that the state’s interest in the health of women as potential mothers overrides the right and freedom of a business owner to hire and make contracts with employees. This case ushered in protective labor laws— based on sex— and legitimated different treatment for men and women.



Decided February 24, 1908

MR. JUSTICE BREWER delivered the opinion of the court. . . . The single question is the constitutionality of the statute under which the defendant was convicted so far as it affects the work of a female in a laundry. . . . Constitutional questions, it is true, are not settled by even a consensus of present public opinion, for it is the peculiar value of a written constitution that it places in unchanging form limitations upon legislative action, and thus gives a permanence and stability to popular government which otherwise would be lacking. At the same time, when a question of fact is debated and debatable, and the extent to which a special constitutional limitation goes is affected by the truth in respect to that fact, a widespread and long continued belief concerning it is worthy of consideration. We take judicial cognizance of all matters of general knowledge. It is undoubtedly true, as more than once declared by this court, that the general right to contract in relation to one’s business is part of the liberty of the individual, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution; yet it is equally well settled that this liberty is not absolute and extending to all contracts, and that a State may, without confl icting with the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, restrict in many respects the individual’s power of contract. Without stopping to discuss at length the extent to which a State may act in this respect, we refer to the following cases in which the question has been considered: Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578; Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366; Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45.

M U L L E R V. O R E G O N (1908)

That woman’s physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. Even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon the body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race. Still again, history discloses the fact that woman has always been dependent upon man. He established his control at the outset by superior physical strength, and this control in various forms, with diminishing intensity, has continued to the present. As minors, though not to the same extent, she has been looked upon in the courts as needing especial care that her rights may be preserved. Education was long denied her, and while now the doors of the school room are opened and her opportunities for acquiring knowledge are great, yet even with that and the consequent increase of capacity for business affairs it is still true that in the struggle for subsistence she is not an equal competitor with her brother. Though limitations upon personal and contractual rights may be removed by legislation, there is that in her disposition and habits of life which will operate against a full assertion of those rights. She will still be where some legislation to protect her seems necessary to secure a real equality of right. Doubtless there are individual exceptions, and there are many respects in which she has an advantage over him; but looking at it from the viewpoint of the effort to maintain an independent position in life, she is not upon an equality. Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained. It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that she still looks to her brother and depends upon him. Even though all restrictions on political, personal and contractual rights were taken away, and she stood, so far as statutes are concerned, upon an absolutely equal plane with him, it would still be true that she is so constituted that she will rest upon and look to him for protection; that her physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal functions—having in view not merely her own health, but the wellbeing of the race—justify legislation to protect her from the greed as well as the passion of man. The limitations which this statute places upon her contractual powers, upon her right to agree with her employer as to the time she shall labor, are not imposed solely for her benefi t, but also largely for the benefi t of all. Many words cannot make this plainer. The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing, the infl uence of vigorous health upon the future wellbeing of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights, and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence.

7 9

Not upon an equality means at a natural disadvantage.

7

A NEW CONSCIENCE

AND AN

ANCIENT EVIL (1912)

This difference justifi es a difference in legislation and upholds that which is designed to compensate for some of the burdens which rest upon her. We have not referred in this discussion to the denial of the elective franchise in the State of Oregon, for while it may disclose a lack of political equality in all things with her brother, that is not of itself decisive. The reason runs deeper, and rests in the inherent difference between the two sexes, and in the different functions in life which they perform. For these reasons, and without questioning in any respect the decision in Lochner v. New York, we are of the opinion that it cannot be adjudged that the act in question is in confl ict with the Federal Constitution, so far as it respects the work of a female in a laundry, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Oregon is Affirmed.

In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court ruled that women were entitled to all the “ privileges and immunities” of men and competent to contract for their own employment.

Excerpts from

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912) With the rapid growth of American cities in the last decades of the nineteenth century came an increase in the number of women who secured a livelihood by resorting to prostitution. In Chicago, a report by the city Vice Commission in 1900 declared prostitution a rampant “ social evil,” raising public concern and leading to a major police crackdown. Throughout the Progressive Era, reformers and law-enforcement officials in major U.S. cities targeted prostitution along with such other “ vice crimes” as gambling, drunkenness, drug use, and confidence games. But as some feminists argued— and studies confirmed— the problem was directly related to the dire working conditions and meager wages of young women employees. The social reformer and women’s rights advocate Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House settlement, addressed the problem in her 1912 book A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.



The fi fth volume of the report of “ Women and Child Wage Earners” in the United States gives the result of a careful inquiry into “ the relation of wages to the moral condition of department store women.” In connection with this, the investigators secured “ the personal histories of one hundred immoral women,” of whom ten were or had been employed in a department store. They found that while only one of the ten had been directly induced to leave the store for a disreputable life, six of them said that they had found “ it easier to earn money that way.” The report states that the average em-

Immoral women refers to prostitutes.

A NEW CONSCIENCE

AND AN

ANCIENT EVIL (1912)

ployee in a department store earns about seven dollars a week, and that the average income of the one hundred immoral women covered by the personal histories, ranged from fi fty dollars a week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional cases. It is of these exceptional cases that the department store girl hears, and the knowledge becomes part of the unreality and glittering life that is all about her. Another class of young women which is especially exposed to this alluring knowledge is the waitress in down-town café s and restaurants. A recent investigation of girls in the segregated district of a neighboring city places waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest on the list of “ previous occupations.” Many waitresses are paid so little that they gratefully accept any fee which men may offer them. It is also the universal habit for customers to enter into easy conversation while being served. Some of them are lonely young men who have few opportunities to speak to women. The girl often quite innocently accepts an invitation for an evening, spent either in a theatre or dance hall, with no evil results, but this very lack of social convention exposes her to danger. Even when the proprietor means to protect the girls, a certain amount of familiarity must be borne, lest their resentment should diminish the patronage of the café . In certain restaurants, moreover, the waitresses doubtless suffer because the patrons compare them with the girls who ply their trade in disreputable saloons under the guise of serving drinks. . . . All girls who work down town are at a disadvantage as compared to factory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to the temptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also have the protection of working among plain people who frankly designate an irregular life in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catches sight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in all the wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts of the city. As she passes the opening doors of a disreputable saloon she may see for an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor upon men tired out with the long day’s work and already sodden with drink. As she hurries along the street on a rainy night she may hear a sharp cry of pain from a sick-looking girl whose arm is being brutally wrenched by a rough man, and if she stops for a moment she catches his muttered threats in response to the girl’s pleading “ that it is too bad a night for street work.” She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders as he crosses the street, and she vaguely knows that the sick girl has put herself beyond the protection of the law, and that the rough man has an understanding with the officer on the beat. She has been told that certain streets are “ not respectable,” but a furtive look down the length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its “ denizens,” although she may have known a neighbor’s daughter who came home to die of a mysterious disease said to be the result

7

Segregated district: In the first years of the twentieth century, authorities in Chicago dealt with prostitution by designating areas in which brothels were permitted but subject to strict controls and limitations.

7

THE WOMAN REBEL (1914)

of a “ fast life,” and whose disgraced mother “ never again held up her head.” Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervous energy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and the speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any moment so register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl as to overcome her powers of resistance. Many a working girl at the end of a day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soon as they have eaten their suppers. They are too tired to go from home for recreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep. A humane forewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in which hundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, were standing: “ I hate to think of all the aching feet on this fl oor; these girls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spending the entire evening bathing them in hot water.” But aching feet are no more usual than aching backs and aching heads. The study of industrial diseases has only this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless as more is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, many moral breakdowns will be traced to this source. It is already easy to make the connection in defi nite cases: “ I was too tired to care,” “ I was dog tired and just went with him,” are phrases taken from the lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situation in which they fi nd themselves. . . . Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime often fi nd their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said that she had fi rst yielded to temptation when she had become utterly discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save enough for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly wage of six dollars adequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle; to use her own contemptuous phrase, she “ sold out for a pair of shoes.”

Excerpts from

The Woman Rebel (1914) In March 1914, after returning from a trip to Europe to study contraceptive methods, Margaret Sanger began publication of an eight-page monthly newspaper called The Woman Rebel. A crusader for birth control and a passionate voice for women’s rights, Sanger intended for the paper to unite women around the issues of gender and class oppression, sexual and

Addams, Jane. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. New York: Macmillan, 1912.

THE WOMAN REBEL (1914)

7

reproductive freedom, marriage, prostitution, and the direction of the feminist movement itself. It was in the pages of The Woman Rebel that Sanger coined the term “ birth control.” Defiant in tone and radical in opinion, the publication was prohibited from mail distribution on the grounds of obscenity because it contained articles on sexuality and contraception. Sanger continued publication and was indicted by federal authorities. She fl ed to Europe for 13 months and returned home in October 1915 to face trial; the charges were later dismissed. Following are two unsigned articles, presumably written by Sanger, from the inaugural March 1914 issue of The Woman Rebel.



The New Feminists That apologetic tone of the new American feminists which plainly says “ Really, Madam Public Opinion, we are all quite harmless and perfectly respectable” was the keynote of the fi rst and second mass meetings held at Cooper Union on the 17th and 20th of February last. The ideas advanced were very old and time-worn even to the ordinary church-going woman who reads the magazines and comes in contact with current thought. The “ right to work,” the “ right to ignore fashions,” the “ right to keep her own name,” the “ right to organize,” the “ right of the mother to work” ; all these so-called rights fail to arouse enthusiasm because to-day they are all recognized by society and there exist neither laws nor strong opposition to any of them. It is evident they represent a middle class woman’s movement; an echo, but a very weak echo, of the English constitutional suffragists. Consideration of the working woman’s freedom was ignored. The problems which affect the working girl who slaves in the home or the nurse girl who spends her days and nights in the care of the babies of the feminists, were not dwelt upon. The freedom which the new feminists expound can only be obtained through a greater enslavement of the already enslaved workingwoman, and “ where slavery is there liberty cannot be.” Instead of launching a movement for woman’s freedom the impression gained was that they aimed to combat the contentions of the conventional anti-suffragists. To those who have been on the fi ring line for woman’s freedom for the past several years, the new movement is sadly lacking in vitality, force, and conviction. Any movement with fear lurking in the background, fear of the press, of public opinion, or our neighbors, or of the enemy, cannot have that spirit which fearlessness of opposition brings. It is not for rights women should ask; all rights are here—rather is it for you to inculcate into her the desire to get these rights. Feminists—Come out from under the cover of morbid respectability and let’s get a look at you!

Cooper Union is a private, coeducational university in New York City where people often assembled to hear speeches. It was founded in 1859 as a tuition-free night school for the working class.

“Where slavery is there liberty cannot be” is a famous quote from an 1864 speech by Senator Charles Sumner, an ardent abolitionist.

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MOTHERS’ LET TERS TO THE U.S. CHILDREN’S BUREAU (1916, 1920)

The Prevention of Conception Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, scientifi c, harmless information on how to prevent conception? Everybody is aware that the old, stupid fallacy that such knowledge will cause a girl to enter into prostitution has long been shattered. Seldom does a prostitute become pregnant. The women of the upper middle class have all available knowledge and implements to prevent conception. The woman of the lower middle class is struggling for this knowledge. She tries various methods of prevention, and after a few years of experience plus medical advice succeeds in discovering some method suitable to her individual self. The woman of the people is the only one left in ignorance of this information. Her neighbors, relatives and friends tell her stories of special devices and the successes of them all. They tell her also of the blood-sucking men with M.D. after their names who perform operations for the price of so-and-so. But the working woman’s purse is thin. It’s far cheaper to have a baby, “ though God knows what it will do after it gets here.” Then, too, all other classes of women live in places where there is at least a semblance of privacy and sanitation. It is easier for them to care for themselves whereas the large majority of the women of the people have no bathing or sanitary conveniences. This accounts too for the fact that the higher the standard of living, the more care can be taken and fewer children result. No plagues, no famines or wars could ever frighten the capitalist class so much as the universal practice of the prevention of conception. On the other hand no better method could be utilized for increasing the wages of the workers. As is well known, a law exists forbidding the imparting of information on this subject, the penalty being several years’ imprisonment. Is it not time to defy this law? And what fi tter place could be found than in the pages of the WOMAN REBEL?

Excerpts from

Mothers’ Letters to the U.S. Children’s Bureau (1916, 1920) The oldest federal agency dedicated to the welfare of children, the U.S. Children’s Bureau was established in 1912 as part of the Department of Labor. (It is now part of the Department of Health and Human Services.) With a mandate to monitor and promote “ the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people,” the bureau was headed from 1912 to 1921 by Julia Clifford Lathrop, the social reformer associated with Hull House in Chicago and a moving force in the creation of the first juvenile court in the United States. Among the bureau’s efforts to combat infant mortality was the dissemination of information on child care, health, and nutrition. Women from throughout the country sent letters requesting advice on pregnancy, childbirth, and neglectful husbands. Their correspondence underscores the plight of povertystricken mothers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Electronic Edition: Margaret Sanger and The Woman Rebel, 1914-1916, Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter Engelman, eds. Columbia, SC: Model Editions Partnership, 1999. Electronic version based on the microfilm edition of The Papers of Margaret Sanger [accessed: October 8, 2001] Available from http://adh.sc.edu.

MOTHERS’ LET TERS TO THE U.S. CHILDREN’S BUREAU (1916, 1920)



Mrs. M. R., Idaho ( January 4, 1916) Dear Madame. I would like to know if your people can give me a answer on this. What I am to do I don’t know. I am living 25 miles away from any Doctor. We have 4 small children, my husband is only making 1.35 a day, and every thing is so high it takes all he makes to keep our babys in cloths and food, as we have evry thing we put in our mouths to buy. I am looking for the stork about the 19 of aprial, and all I can do is to get a few outing [fl annel] slips and a few Dipers. So hear is what I would like for yous to answer if you can: how am I going to get 35 dollar to have a doctor, for he will not come for less and not unless we have the cash. Talk about better babys, when a mother must be like some cow or mare when a babys come. If she lives, all wright, and if not, Just the same. The nearest one that lives is 1 mile and a 1/2 and my oldest child is 9 years old. My husband only come home onest a week, that is on saterday. I have my own wood to cut by my self so how can there be better babys when they must come in to this world like a calf or colt I would like to know. So please answer me if you can. You may send me a copie of Bulletin and if I live [through] it, then I will try to [follow] it as close as I can. Yours truly, answer at [once].

Mrs. H. B., Illinois (February 28, 1916) . . . I love my children and willing would have as many as possible but never before have I dreaded the ordeal of child birth, as I am afraid to look upon its little face. How can it be human and a perfect child after all that I have been through this last time? Each place I have asked for advice what to do, or for to compel my husband to work and provide for me and the children, the best I receive is, “ why do you live with him and have children for such a man? You deserve no pity.” Nice advice to poor mothers, who are nothing but fools for men but to bear their children for them, and then afterwards neglect them to go out to work for to buy their food. God help the poor mothers of today. The cry is Save the babies, but what about the mothers who produce these babies? Now, Dear Sirs, No hard feeling for what I have written. But would it not be better to enact a law that, when a man marries a woman and she bears his children for him, that he be compelled to provide for the babies he caused to be brought into the world, and permit mothers to properly care for their babies, and give [a man] a life sentence for bringing home disease and infl icting his wife with it. And if possible start an association to protect mothers who are to give birth and after that help them to help themselves, and enable them to do for their babies? Abuse, torture, slurs, that is the best they receive. Men in long service receive their pension. Mothers deserving receive nothing. Now I hope some evening to pick up a newspaper and be able to read that your department, that you will punish men to severely who neglect their wife and children that their will be less need

7

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“MY

DAY” (1939-1962)

of advice to mothers. Only I beg of you to do something to protect mothers in the pitfall I fi nd myself in. When my baby is born, will I be able to feed it? Or will I be compelled again to leave my infant and work, for to buy for the other 3 as well as the new one—and have to pay some one else to look after the little one I love to put to my breast and let it grow and live? Or will it mean starvation again as before? The time is drawing near, but I would sooner go through the fi res of H than the misery I have had to go through. . . . I also have a little girl 8 years old who is frail, and the school doctor tells her to eat fresh eggs and drink fresh milk and lots of it, but where am I to get it? I can see her going into decline right along, but what am I to do? Think it over gentlemen. See if you cant make men do a little different, and then there will be better babies, better mothers, better grown children, and a better country, and less human beings in the penatentierey. I trust you will look at this in the right light and excuse for crying out my soul to you. Sincerely yours,

Mrs. H. R., Georgia ( June 14, 1920) Dear Madame I need advise. I am a farmers wife, do my household duties and a regular fi eld hand too. The mother of 9 children and in family way again. I am quarlsome when tired & fatigued. When I come in out of the fi eld to prepare dinner my Husband & all the children gets in the kitchen in my way. I quarrel at them for bening in my way. I tell them I will build them a fi re if they are cold. I also threaten to move the Stove out on the porch. What shall I do? My husband wont sympathise with me one bit but talks rough to me. I get tired & sick of my daily food & crave some simple article, should I have it? I have [helped] make the living for 20 years. Should I be [de]nied of a few simple articles or money either? Does it make a Mother unvirtuous for a man physician to wait on her during confi nement? Is it Safe for me to go through it Without aid from any one? Please give me Some advise. There isent any mid wives near us now. I am not friendless but going to you for advise too keep down gossip. Yours.

Excerpts from

“My Day” (1939-1962) From 1935 to 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a syndicated newspaper column called “ My Day.” The column appeared consistently six days a week, interrupted only briefl y after the death of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1945. Over the course of those 27 years, she shared her views with millions of Americans in some 2,000 columns. Her subjects ranged from historical events— such as the Depression, the

Molly Ladd-Taylor. Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

“MY

DAY” (1939-1962)

7 7

attack on Pearl Harbor, the explosion of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War— to social and political issues and her own life. She was a popular advocate for a wide range of social causes, including civil rights, child care, and the plight of women. Following are some of her columns on this last subject.



Women and Employment HYDE PARK, JULY 13, 1939 Yesterday, with great interest, I read Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt’s appeal to the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. It seems to me so obvious that married women should not be discriminated against, that I cannot imagine anyone who would really consider such a proposition. It seems this discussion was given impetus by a rule in the federal government during the Depression, forbidding two married people to hold government positions. Now that the emergency is over, that rule has been rescinded, but there is, I think, one consideration in government employment that does not exist in private employment. The government wants to prevent the building up of a family bureaucracy. It seems to me that if a generous sum is set, on which an adequate standard of living may be preserved for the average family that it might be well, if one member of the family earns that amount, to bar the employment of any other member of the family in government service. If a man and his wife together earn that amount, children who live in the same household should be barred from government employment. Such a rule would not be directed at women particularly, married or single, but, if adopted by the federal government, it should be very carefully considered for the same pattern might easily be followed by state and local governments. I see by the morning papers that the Senate Committee has voted for delay on neutrality. One vote makes this important decision. These gentlemen must go on the theory that if you delay making up your mind long enough, perhaps you may never have to, for somebody else may make it up for you. My own experience is that the things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was. I would not weep over the difficulties of the gentlemen who made this decision, were it not for the fact that the results of their decision may not rest on their heads alone but may affect innocent people in our country and other countries.

Women and Work HYDE PARK, AUGUST

5, 1939 The other day I was sent a most amusing page from a magazine called “ Future: The Magazine for Young Men.” An article by Dr. S. N. Stevens, which contains the following quotation, was marked for my attention:

Neutrality: Beginning in 1935, Congress had passed a series of acts to restrict U.S. participation in foreign conflic ts. In early 1939, as the Nazi threat intensified in Europe, President Roosevelt urged a lifting of the restrictions but was turned down.

7

“MY

DAY” (1939-1962)

“ Women are generally more intuitive than empirical. In other words, they play hunches instead of examining facts in the evaluation of a situation. And I have never yet seen one who, in a tight spot, didn’t try to take advantage of the fact that she was a woman.” I am willing to agree to the fi rst part of the paragraph, women have so much intuition and are so much quicker to feel things than men are that they occasionally count too much on that particular gift. However, the woman who has trained herself has the advantage over a man in that she still has her intuition, but to it she has added his gift of examining facts and evaluating all the factors entering into a situation. As to the second half of his statement, I’ll grant some women do it, but they are never the women who succeed in their jobs. They are the ones who always preyed on men and always will, for that is a job in itself. There are so many occasions when a woman is in a tight spot which only she herself can face, that it is rather rare to fi nd her trying to share her burden or ask for assistance on the ground that she is a woman. What good would it do to try to get someone else to stand by when you are about to have a baby? What good would it do to turn to anyone else if your husband drank and you had to try to collect his wages before they were all spent? A woman may use her womanly wiles to help her in tight spots, but she isn’t trading on being a woman, she is just handling the job which is hers, and frequently it is the job of handling a man and making him think he isn’t being handled. These doctors and editors who write for magazines like this are very clever, but they should know a little more about women and real life before they venture to write about them.

Equal Rights HYDE PARK, MAY

14, 1945 I have been getting a good many letters of late about the Equal Rights amendment, which has been reported out favorably to the House by the House Judiciary Committee. Some of the women who write me seem to think that if this amendment is passed there will be no further possibility of discrimination against women. They feel that the time has come to declare that women shall be treated in all things on an equal basis with men. I hardly think it is necessary to declare this, since as a theory it is fairly well accepted today by both men and women. But in practice it is not accepted, and I doubt very much whether it ever will be. Other women of my acquaintance are writing me in great anxiety, for they are afraid that the dangers of the amendment are not being properly considered. The majority of these women are employed in the industrial fi eld. Their fear is that labor standards safeguarded in the past by legislation will be wrecked, and that the amendment will curtail and impair for all time the powers of both state and federal government to enact any legislation that may be necessary and desirable to protect the health and safety of women in industry. I do not know which group is right, but I feel that if we work to remove from our statute books those laws which discriminate

“MY

DAY” (1939-1962)

against women today we might accomplish more and do it in a shorter time than will be possible through the passage of this amendment.

Housewives NEW YORK, OCTOBER

17, 1955 Recently I received a letter which raised a question of interest to many women. It reads as follows: “ Reading your article in the August Safeway Magazine gives me the inspiration and opportunity I have long been looking for, namely to ‘ speak’ to you regarding the word ‘ housewife,’ used to defi ne the greatest profession we women perform. QUESTION:

What is your occupation? Housewife, wife of a house. QUESTIONING A CHILD: What does your father do? ANSWER: He is a lawyer on Wall Street, N.Y.C. QUESTION: What is your mother’s occupation? ANSWER: Oh, she is just a housewife. ANSWER:

I have heard this on TV. I am sure other women have cringed at the term. The dictionary defi nes the word as ‘ the woman in charge of a household.’ ‘ Wife’ is defi ned as ‘ a woman joined in marriage to a man as husband.’ Surely there is another name for us. How do you feel about it? Why not write an article which will bring opinions from other married women?”

I must confess that in days gone by I have often entered myself on questionnaires as “ housewife” without feeling the slightest embarrassment. Now I put down “ writer” or “ lecturer,” because the major part of my life is taken up in this way rather than in running a home and watching over the daily needs of a household and children plus guests, as it used to be in earlier days. I am not sure, however, that I did not feel more useful when I had to be home the greater part of the time. I had to make very careful plans when I left home so that all would go on in the same way while I was gone. I was limited in my free time. One could never be sure that there would not be sudden illness which would make a change in plans inevitable, or that home tasks would not clash with some demands outside my family—and of course, the demands outside the family were always secondary. Those were the days when on a questionnaire I would put down “ housewife” and feel very proud of it, and I am quite sure that no woman has any reason for feeling humiliated by the title. It is one of the most skilled professions in the world. When one adds to the business of running a house the care and bringing up of children, there is so much needed preparation for this occupation that I think it could be classed today among the most skilled occupations in the world. To be sure, there are good and bad homes; and there are children who are well brought up and children who are badly

7 9

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THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963)

brought up. This happens in any business or professional activity. But when one adds up what it means to a nation, one must concede that the well-run home and the well-brought-up children are more important even than a well-run business. More people are affected by the occupation of a housewife and mother than are ever touched by any single business, no matter how large it may be.

Reprinted from “ My Day” columns by Eleanor Roosevelt http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ eleanor/sfeature/myday.html.

Excerpts from

The Feminine Mystique (1963) Instrumental in reviving the American feminist movement in the 1960s, Betty Friedan’s best-selling The Feminine Mystique (1963) called attention to what she believed to be the boredom and alienation suffered by middle-class housewives and mothers in the postwar era. The “ housewife syndrome,” she wrote, is not a problem of individual adjustment but one of societal identity and restrictive gender role. In this infl uential work, as well as in her reform efforts over the years, Friedan, a “ founding mother” of the women’s liberation movement, called for sweeping changes in the structure of society and the role of women.



The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question— “ Is this all?” For over fi fteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfi llment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who

Fifteen years refers roughly to the period since the end of World War II. Freudian refers to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856– 1939) concerning the unconscious mind, sexuality, and their cultural infl uences.

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963)

wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the oldfashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fi fties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to fi nding a husband and bearing children. . . . The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfi llment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of. In the fi fteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfi llment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen fl oor. . . . Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have fi ve children and a beautiful house, their only fi ght to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “ Occupation: housewife.” . . . Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America. . . . I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft’s. The groping words I heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late, I think I understood fi rst as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications. Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say “ I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.” Or she would say, “ I feel as if I don’t exist.” Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe. . . .

7

Census blank refers to the demographic questionnaire distributed in the national census-taking every ten years.

Schrafft’s was a chain of family restaurants.

7

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963)

Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife? When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur, expert on interior decoration, child care, appliance repair, furniture refi nishing, nutrition, and education? Her day is fragmented as she rushes from dishwasher to washing machine to telephone to dryer to station wagon to supermarket, and delivers Johnny to the Little League fi eld, takes Janey to dancing class, gets the lawnmower fi xed and meets the 6:45. She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the children to bed. . . . It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off. . . . I think the experts in a great many fi elds have been holding pieces of that truth under their microscopes for a long time without realizing it. . . . I became aware of a growing body of evidence, much of which has not been reported publicly because it does not fi t current modes of thought about women—evidence which throws into question the standards of feminine normality, feminine adjustment, feminine fulfi llment and feminine maturity by which most women are still trying to live. I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breastfeeding; suburban conformity, and the new neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old problems that have long been taken for granted among women: menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy fears, childbirth depression, the high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their twenties and thirties, the menopause crises, the socalled passivity and immaturity of American men, the discrepancy between women’s tested intellectual abilities in childhood and their adult achievement, the changing incidence of adult sexual orgasm in American women, and persistent problems in psychotherapy and in women’s education. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (1923, 1972)

their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “ I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

Text of

The Equal Rights Amendment (1923, 1972) The proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution was drafted by suffragist Alice Paul in 1921 and introduced in every session of Congress since 1923. A revised version was finally passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification. At the end of the ten-year limit, the amendment had been ratified by 35 states— still three short of the 38 (three-quarters of all the states) needed for adoption. Following are the original text as drafted by Paul and the text passed by Congress in 1972. Following these are lists of the ratifying and nonratifying states.



Original ERA text, introduced in Congress in 1923 • •

Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

ERA text passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratifi cation. Ratifying States (35)

Nonratifying States (15)

Alaska California Colorado Connecticut Delaware

Alabama Arizona Arkansas Florida Georgia

7

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.

7 4

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (1970)

Ratifying States (35)

Nonratifying States (15)

Hawaii Idaho Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Montana Nebraska New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Dakota Ohio Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Dakota Tennessee Texas Vermont Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Illinois Louisiana Mississippi Missouri Nevada North Carolina Oklahoma South Carolina Utah Virginia

Excerpt from

Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) From its initial publication in 1970, the groundbreaking Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women has provided a definitive resource on women’s health and sexuality. Researched and written by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, a nonprofit organization dedicated to women’s health education and advocacy, the book offers guidance, information, and additional resources on topics ranging from body image and healthy living to childbearing, birth control, aging, and the health-care system. Published in 19 languages, the work has been updated and reissued as The New Our Bodies, Ourselves (1984) and Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century (1998). The following excerpt on body image is from Chapter 1 of the 1998 edition.

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (1970)



Take a moment to close your eyes and visualize your body. How do you feel about what you see? Are your breasts too big or too small? Your butt too big or too fl at? What about your stomach or thighs—too fat? Is your nose too broad? Do you wish you were taller or more petite? Is your body too hairy or your skin too dark? If you’re like most women, you answered yes to some of these questions. Almost every woman judges some part of her body— sometimes all of it—as not quite right. Think about the tremendous diversity of female bodies: we are tall, short, thin, fat, large-boned and hefty, tiny and frail; our eyes vary in color and shape; our skin color ranges from blue-black or ebony to deep browns to copper to olive to pink; our hair is manycolored and has an almost infi nite range of textures. Yet, we are all measured against unrealistic standards promoted by the advertising and beauty industries and grounded in fantasies about how a woman should look and behave. A woman who recently quit her job, after a manager told her to change her braided hairstyle or leave, refl ects: Everybody talks about diversity, but if everybody has to fit a certain mold, well, that’s not wanting diversity. It’s asking people to change who they really are. What are the forces that lead us to believe we’re not okay the way we are? What do we think would change in our lives if we could change our bodies and our looks? What would being more “ attractive” give us? More friends? More self-confi dence? A better job? How can we learn to feel better about our bodies and more loving toward ourselves and other women despite the onslaught of messages about how we “ should” look? Just imagine what would happen if we were to take all the energy we expend trying to conform to society’s standards of beauty and direct it elsewhere. What else could we be doing with our time? Our money? Our energy? . . . How we feel about our looks and how at home we feel in our bodies is complex and develops in response to the many and often contradictory messages we get from society at large and in response to our actual experiences living in our bodies. Some of the pressure to be different from the way we are comes from outside ourselves, from the media images that constantly bombard us, and from the reactions we get from others; some of the pressure comes from deep inside ourselves, from how we internalize our experiences as females in this culture. Too often our experiences living in our bodies make it difficult for us to accept ourselves. Many of us have experienced violence and abuse that make us feel unsafe in our bodies. One in four women will be raped in her lifetime; one in three girls is sexually abused by age 18. Virtually all of us have experienced unwanted attention from men, whether in the form of compliments, derisive comments, or unsolicited touching. Every woman of color will experience racism. If our culture has different ideals of female beauty from those of the dominant Euro-American culture, the messages

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OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (1970)

we receive from parents and relatives may contradict those of our peers and the media and may cause us additional pain and confusion. As a result of these violations, many of us have come to feel that our bodies—as they are—are not safe places to be. We may respond by wanting to look like the woman on the cover of a glossy beauty magazine, thinking that if we had the perfect body, we would be shielded from insults to our sense of self and from discrimination. Or we may respond by rejecting our female bodies, feeding our hunger for acceptance with bags of junk food or starving ourselves so that our bodies take on the shapes of preadolescent girls. We are wounded when a physical characteristic or set of characteristics is loaded with negative expectations. If we have black skin and African features, or olive skin and Asian features, or dark curly hair and a prominent nose as do many Jews and Arabs, or if we have a visible disability, or if we are perceived as “ overweight,” our experiences from an early age may be marked by other people’s negative reactions to our physical selves. We may have come to dislike, mistrust, or even hate our bodies as a result, feeling that they, rather than the society we live in, have betrayed us. . . . Every society throughout history has had standards of beauty, but at no other time has there been such an intense media blitz telling us what we should look like. Magazine covers, fi lms, TV shows, and billboards surround us with images that constantly reinforce the idea that “ beauty” is everything. But what is “ beauty” and what does it mean to strive to be “ beautiful” ? The current ideal woman portrayed in the dominant American culture is white, thin, able-bodied, shapely, muscular, tall, blond, smooth-skinned, and young. The list of what a woman must do to achieve the perfect look is endless, yet paradoxically, it is absolutely essential that in the end she look totally natural! . . . Never before have there been so many businesses dedicated to selling “ beauty” and so many women willing to buy their products. We are sold an infi nite array of products and programs to alter our appearance. Almost everywhere we look we receive similar messages: without these jeans (and the skinny body in them), you’ll never fi nd a man; without straight, bright, white teeth you’ll never fi nd success. The pressure to conform is promoted by a market whose success depends on convincing us that we don’t look good enough and is reinforced by employers and others who have control over where we work, where we live, and our opportunities to enjoy good health. Many of us spend precious time, money, and emotional energy trying to make our bodies conform to standards that have little to do with who we are or what our bodies actually look like. The cost, both economical and psychological, is enormous. We may expose ourselves to serious health hazards: dangerous chemicals in cosmetics, hair products, depilatories, and vaginal deodorants; malnourishment caused by low-calorie diets; skin disorders caused by skin lighteners and suntanning. We may wear clothes and shoes that severely hamper our freedom of movement, making it difficult

Depilatories are hair-removal agents.

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES (1970)

for us to defend ourselves if threatened; have tattoos or piercings done in nonsterile environments, putting ourselves at risk of contracting hepatitis or HIV; or undergo highly risky cosmetic surgery to radically change the shape of our eyes, our noses, our faces, our breasts, or our thighs. We all participate in maintaining the popular myths and fantasies of how we should look. Not only do most of us try in one way or another to conform, but we have learned to judge others by the same standards we use to judge ourselves. We look at each other in school, on the street, at work, at the gym and compare: we want to know how well we are doing in the competition for female perfection. Sometimes we reject the dominant fantasies about how we should look only to create an alternative ideal, wanting ourselves and our friends to fi t other, equally oppressive stereotypes like the Amazon or Earth Mother. . . . Most of us will, at times in our lives, make some concessions to the dominant ideals for reasons of economic and social survival. If we can recognize, however, when we are reshaping our bodies to fi t someone else’s demands, we can begin to develop a different relationship to ourselves. As we become conscious of the model body image and the forces that push us to emulate that image, we can learn to know the differences between our authentic selves and the compromises we make with the outside world. We can start feeling freer to make our own choices. There are many ways to begin this journey. We can explore ways to feel attractive and appreciated that nurture us and respect our integrity as persons. We can fi nd ways of ornamenting our bodies that do not expose us to health risks. We can take the time to learn to appreciate the sheer pleasures of being in our bodies. We can explore ways to enjoy the sensuality of our bodies, through being outdoors, walking, swimming, dancing, taking a hot bath, or getting a massage. We can focus more of our energy on developing other aspects of ourselves through involvement in our communities and through learning and sharing what we know with those around us. We can talk with other women about body image and begin to name the deadly assumptions underlying the standards of female beauty. We can recognize how we’ve accepted these ideals and how our buying into them reinforces their power. Thankfully, growing numbers of women question our need to change our bodies to fi t the ideals. Many of us are fi nding power in defi ning our own standards of beauty. As more of us learn to love and value ourselves and each other just as we are, and as we begin dismantling the stereotypes that equate physical characteristics with our value as persons, media images and social messages will have a lesser impact on our sense of self. Finding new and positive ways of thinking about our bodies allows us to extend the same accepting attitudes to other women and also affects how others perceive us. No matter what our size, shape, color, or physical ability, if we love ourselves and believe in our own beauty, we are more likely to fi nd that others see that beauty, too. And if they don’t, believing in ourselves gives others less power over us.

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HIV stands for “ human immunodeficiency virus,” the cause of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

Boston Women’ s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. Copyright © 1970, 1984, 1992, 1998. All rights reserved. Published by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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Excerpts from

Testimony of Anita Hill before Senate Judiciary Committee (1991) In the fall of 1991, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate opened confirmation hearings on the nomination of federal judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the course of the hearings, law professor Anita Hill— an AfricanAmerican woman who had worked as Thomas’s assistant— testified that Thomas, also an African American, had repeatedly pressured her for dates and made lurid comments to her. Hill’s three days of testimony, heard live on national television, raised a storm of controversy. Thomas vigorously denied the charges, calling the proceedings a “ high-tech lynching.” Many women in Congress, in executive offices, in factories, and in kitchens said of the all-male panel questioning Hill’s veracity, “ They just don’t get it.” The committee eventually confirmed Thomas’s nomination; Hill went on the lecture circuit and returned to teaching law. In the aftermath of the hearings, sexual harassment became a widely debated issue throughout the country. In 1992 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reported a 50 percent increase in formal complaints of sexual harassment. Professor Hill delivered the following prepared statement to the Judiciary Committee on October 11, 1991.



Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, Members of the Committee, my name is Anita P. Hill, and I am a Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma. I was born on a farm in Okmulge, Oklahoma in 1956, the 13th child, and had my early education there. My father is Albert Hill, a farmer of that area. My mother’s name is Erma Hill, she is also a farmer and housewife. My childhood was the childhood of both work and poverty; but it was one of solid family affection as represented by my parents’ religious atmosphere in the Baptist faith and I have been a member of the Antioch Baptist Church in Tulsa since 1983. It remains a warm part of my life at the present time. For my undergraduate work I went to Oklahoma State University and graduated in 1977. I am attaching to this statement my ré sumé with further details of my education. I graduated from the university with academic honors and proceeded to the Yale Law School where I received my J.D. degree in 1980. Upon graduation from law school I became a practicing lawyer with the Washington, D.C. fi rm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross. In 1981, I was introduced to now Judge Thomas by a mutual friend. Judge Thomas told me that he anticipated a political appointment shortly and asked if I might be interested in working in that office. He was in fact appointed as Assistant Secretary of Education, in

T E S T I M O N Y O F A N I TA H I L L B E F O R E S E N A T E J U D I C I A R Y C O M M I T T E E ( 1 9 9 1 )

which capacity he was the Director of the Office for Civil Rights. After he was in that post, he asked if I would become his assistant and I did then accept that position. In my early period, there I had two major projects. The fi rst was an article I wrote for Judge Thomas’ signature on Education of Minority Students. The second was the organization of a seminar on high-risk students, which was abandoned because Judge Thomas transferred to the EEOC before that project was completed. During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive. I had a good deal of responsibility as well as independence. I thought that he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment. After approximately three months of working together, he asked me to go out with him socially. I declined and explained to him that I thought that it would only jeopardize what, at the time, I considered to be a very good working relationship. I had a normal social life with other men outside of the office and, I believed then, as now, that having a social relationship with a person who was supervising my work would be ill-advised. I was very uncomfortable with the idea and told him so. I thought that by saying “ no” and explaining my reasons, my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying “ no” to him. These incidents took place in his office or mine. They were in the form of private conversations which would not have been overheard by anyone else. My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects or he might suggest that because of time pressures we go to lunch at a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work he would turn the conversation to discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. . . . Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about those subjects. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to nonsexual personal matters such as his background or beliefs. My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful. Throughout the period of these conversations, he also from timeto-time asked me for social engagements. My reaction to these conversations was to avoid having them by eliminating opportunities for us to engage in extended conversations. This was difficult because I was his only assistant at the Office for Civil Rights. During the latter part of my time at the Department of Education, the social pressures and any conversations of this offensive kind ended. I began both to believe and hope that our working relationship could be on a proper, cordial and professional base. When Judge Thomas was made Chairman of the EEOC, I needed to face the question of whether to go with him. I was asked

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to do so. I did. The work itself was interesting and at that time it appeared that the sexual overtures which had so troubled me had ended. I also faced the realistic fact that I had no alternative job. While I might have gone back to private practice, perhaps in my old fi rm or at another, I was dedicated to civil rights work and my fi rst choice was to be in that fi eld. Moreover, the Department of Education itself was a dubious venture; President Reagan was seeking to abolish the entire Department at that time. For my fi rst months at the EEOC, where I continued as an assistant to Judge Thomas, there were no sexual conversations or overtures. However, during the Fall and Winter of 1982, these began again. The comments were random and ranged from pressing me about why I didn’t go out with him to remarks about my personal appearance. I remember his saying that someday I would have to give him the real reason that I wouldn’t go out with him. He began to show real displeasure in his tone of voice, his demeanor and his continued pressure for an explanation. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive. The incidents occurred in his inner office at the EEOC. . . . At this point, late 1982, 1 began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take it out on me by downgrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might fi nd an excuse for dismissing me. In January of 1983, I began looking for another job. I was handicapped because I feared that if he found out, he might make it diffi cult for me to fi nd other employment and I might be dismissed from the job I had. Another factor that made my search more diffi cult was that this was a period of a government hiring freeze. In February, 1983, I was hospitalized for fi ve days on an emergency basis for an acute stomach pain which I attributed to stress on the job. Once out of the hospital, I became more committed to fi nd other employment and sought further to minimize my contact with Thomas. This became easier when Allyson Duncan became office director because most of my work was handled with her and I had contact with Clarence Thomas mostly in staff meetings. In the Spring of 1983, an opportunity to teach law at Oral Roberts University opened up. I agreed to take the job in large part because of my desire to escape the pressures I felt at the EEOC due to Thomas. When I informed him that I was leaving in July, I recall that his response was that now I “ would no longer have an excuse for not going out with” him. I told him that I still preferred not to do so. At some time after that meeting, he asked if he could take me to dinner at the end of my term. When I declined, he assured me that the dinner was a professional courtesy only and not a social invitation. I reluctantly agreed to accept that invitation but only if it was at the very end of a workday. On, as I recall, the last day of my employment at the EEOC in the summer of 1983, I did have dinner with Clarence Thomas. We went directly from work to a restaurant near the office. We talked about the work I had done both at

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT

Education and at EEOC. He told me that he was pleased with all of it except for an article and speech that I done for him when we were at the Office for Civil Rights. Finally, he made a comment which I vividly remember. He said that if I ever told anyone about his behavior toward me it could ruin his career. This was not an apology nor was there any explanation. That was his last remark about the possibility of our going out or reference to his behavior. In July 1983, I left the Washington, D.C. area and have had minimal contact with Judge Clarence Thomas since. . . . It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone, except my closest friends. Telling the world is the most difficult experience of my life. I was aware that he could affect my future career but did not wish to burn all my bridges. I may have used poor judgment; perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps, both when I was in the agency or after I had left it, but I must confess to the world that the course I took seemed the better, as well as the easier approach. I declined any comment to newspapers, but later, when Senate staff asked me about these matters, I felt that I had a duty to report. I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas. I seek only to provide the Committee with information which it may regard as relevant. It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when I was asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth.

Excerpts from

Violence Against Women Act (1994) Among the notable legislative successes of the feminist movement in the 1990s was the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. A comprehensive federal law enacted as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, VAWA provided a variety of safeguards for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Among the provisions were a doubling of prison terms authorized by state statute for repeat offenders; protection of victim confidentiality; grant appropriations for counseling, education, prevention, shelters, information programs and criminal databases, and other measures. At the heart of the legislation was the classification of gender-related crimes as a civil rights violation. Thus, perpetrators would be liable to claims for damages in civil court as well as to criminal prosecution.

(1994)

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Reprinted from the University of Maryland Women’ s Studies Database, www.inform.umd .edu/EdRes/Topic/WomenStudies.

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(1994)



Subtitle C (Sec. 40302) Civil Rights (a) PURPOSE —Pursuant to the affirmative power of Congress to enact this subtitle under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, as well as under section 8 of Article I of the Constitution, it is the purpose of this subtitle to protect the civil rights of victims of gender motivated violence and to promote public safety, health, and activities affecting interstate commerce by establishing a Federal civil rights cause of action for victims of crimes of violence motivated by gender. (b) RIGHT TO BE FREE FROM CRIMES OF VIOLENCE —All persons within the United States shall have the right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender (as defi ned in subsection (d)). (c) CAUSE OF ACTION —A person (including a person who acts under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State) who commits a crime of violence motivated by gender and thus deprives another of the right declared in subsection (b) shall be liable to the party injured, in an action for the recovery of compensatory and punitive damages, injunctive and declaratory relief, and such other relief as a court may deem appropriate. (d) DEFINITIONS —For purposes of this section— (1) the term ‘ crime of violence motivated by gender’ means a crime of violence committed because of gender or on the basis of gender, and due, at least in part, to an animus based on the victim’s gender; and (2) the term ‘ crime of violence’ means— (A) an act or series of acts that would constitute a felony against the person or that would constitute a felony against property if the conduct presents a serious risk of physical injury to another, and that would come within the meaning of State or Federal offenses described in section 16 of title 18, United States Code, whether or not those acts have actually resulted in criminal charges, prosecution, or conviction and whether or not those acts were committed in the special maritime, territorial, or prison jurisdiction of the United States; and (B) includes an act or series of acts that would constitute a felony described in subparagraph (A) but for the relationship between the person who takes such action and the individual against whom such action is taken.

A cause of action is the legal grounds for a civil suit or criminal prosecution.

Under color of here means in legal reliance on, or under the supposed authority of.

Animus is an underlying spirit or motivation.

Section 16 of Title 18, United States Code: The U.S. Code is the complete compilation of federal statutes. Title 18 includes all laws on crime and criminal procedures. Section 16 defines crimes of violence.

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Culley, Margo, eds. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985. Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. DePauw, Linda Grant. Founding Mothers: Women in America in the Revolutionary Era. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. DePauw, Linda Grant, and Conover Hunt. Remember the Ladies: Women in America 1750–1815. New York: Viking, 1976. Diamant, Lincoln, ed. Revolutionary Women in the War for American Independence. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998. Dunn, Richard S. Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Earle, Alice M. Two Centuries of Costume in America. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Eldridge, Larry D., ed. Women and Freedom in Early America. New York: New York University, 1997. Evans, Elizabeth. Weathering the Storm: Women of the American Revolution. New York: Scribner’s, 1975. Evans, Sarah M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc., 1989. Fine, Elsa H. Women and Art. Montclair, London: Allanheld and Schram/Prior, 1978. Garrett, Clarke. Spirit Possession and Popular Religion: From the Camisards to the Shakers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Gunderson, Joan R. To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740–1790. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Hawke, David Freeman. Everyday Life in Early America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Heinemann, Sue. Timelines of American Women’s History. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1996. Heyrman, Christine L. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Hoffer, Peter Charles. Law and People in Colonial America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———, ed. Colonial Women and Domesticity. New York: Garland, 1988. Hoffman, Ronald, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Hoxie, Frederick E., ed. Encyclopedia of North American Indians. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. Hymowitz, Carol, and Michael Weissman. A History of Women in America. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Ines, Stephen. Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England. New York: Norton, 1995. James, Edward T., et al. eds. Notable American Women 1607–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

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Jensen, Joan M. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987. Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. ———. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. ———, and Jane Sherron De Hart eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Klein, Laura F., and Lillian A. Acerman, eds. Women and Power in Native North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Larson, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1711–1775. New York: Knopf, 1999. Lerner, Gerda. The Woman in American History. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, 1971. ———, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Levy, Barry. Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1779–1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Marsh, Lori. Sentimental Materialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. McHenry, Robert, ed. Famous American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Dover Publications, 1980. ———, ed. Liberty’s Women. Springfi eld, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1980. Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson. The Puritans. New York: Harper & Row, 1938. Mullin, R. B. Dictionary of Christianity in America. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1990. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. ———. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Knopf, 1996. Ogilvie, Marilyn B. Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Ohles, John F. Biographical Dictionary of American Educators. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. Peterson, Karen, and J. J. Wilson. Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Plane, Ann Marie. Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “ Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Richey, Russel E. Early American Methodism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991. Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Rowaldson, Mary. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowaldson. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1930. Saari, Peggy. Colonial America Almanac. Detroit: UXL, 2000. ———. Colonial America: Primary Sources. Detroit: UXL, 2000. Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. New York: Knopf, 1992. Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Selvidge, Marla J. Notorious Voices: Feminist Biblical Interpretations, 1500–1920. New York: Paragon House, 1996. Sher, Lynn, and Kazickas, Jurate. Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks. New York: Times Books, 1994. Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. Sobel, Mechal. Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an AfroBaptist Faith. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Sochen, June. Herstory: A Record of the American Woman’s Past. 2nd ed. Sherman Oaks, CA: Alfred Publishing, 1981. Soltow, Lee, and Edward Stevens. The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Spruill, Julia C. Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938. Stanton, Lucia. Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000. Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Terkel, Susan Neiburg. Colonial American Medicine. New York: Franklin Watts, 1993. Tillson, Christiana H. A Woman’s Story of Pioneer Illinois. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650– 1750. New York: Knopf, 1983. ———. The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Knopf, 1990. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Warner, Julia S. The Primitive Methodist Connexion: Its Background and Early History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. White, Deborah G. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Williams, Selma R. Demeter’s Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587–1787. New York: Atheneum, 1976. Young, Alfred F., ed. The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Amott, Teresa L., and Julie A. Matthaei. Race, Gender & Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1996.

Barthelme, Marion K., ed. Women in the Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Bordin, Ruth B. Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. Braden, Donna R. Leisure and Entertainment in America. Dearborn, MI: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfi eld Village, 1998. Braude, Ann. Women in American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Brodie, Janet Farrell. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970.

Bryan, Mary L. M. and Allen F. Davis, eds. 100 Years at Hull–House. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Butcher, Patricia S. Education for Equality: Women’s Rights Periodicals and Women’s Higher Education, 1849–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitution in the American West, 1865–1890. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Butler, John and Harry S. Stout, eds. Women in American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Butruille, Susan G. Women’s Voices from the Oregon Trail. Boise, ID: Tamarack Books, 1993. Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Cimbala, Paul A., and Randall M. Miller, eds. Against the Tide: Women Reformers in American Society. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Clinton, Catherine, and Christine Lunardini. The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Clinton, Catherine, and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Cooper, Anna J. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “ Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

———, Jeanne Boydston, Ann Braude, Lori Ginzberg, and Molly Ladd-Taylor, eds. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women, 2nd ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Creese, Mary R. S. Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

Davis, Allen F. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, ed. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Knopf, 1994. Drachman, Virginia. Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862–1969. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Drimmer, Frederick. Until You Are Dead: The Book of Executions in America. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1990. Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826– 1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Dubois, Ellen. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Dubois, Ellen C. Woman Suffrage & Women’s Rights. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Dunn, Mary M. Women of America: A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Edmonds, Sarah E. Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse, and Spy: A Woman’s Adventures in the Union Army. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. Elaw, Zilpha. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Giele, Janet Z. Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism. New York: Twayne Publishing, 1995. Gordon, Ann. American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary. Westbury, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Hagan, William T. The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882–1904. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

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Hall, Richard. Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War. New York: Paragon House, 1993.

Hardesty, Nancy A. Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Nashville, TN: Abigdon Press, 1984. Hersh, Blanche G. The Slavery of Sex: FeministAbolitionists in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1993. Howard, Angela M., and Frances M. Kavenik, eds. Handbook of American Women’s History. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000. James, Janet W. Women in American Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976.

Jensen, Joan M. With These Hands: Women Working on the Land. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1981. Kerber, Linda K., and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ketchem, Lisa. The Gold Rush. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. Kerr, Laura N. The Girl Who Ran for President. New York: T. Nelson, 1947. Kinchen, Oscar. Women Who Spied for the Blue and Gray. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1972. Langley, Winston E., and Vivian C. Fox, eds. Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Leavitt, Judith W. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Leonard, Elizabeth D. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York: Norton 1999. Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Confl ict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Levine, Susan. Hand in Hand: Episodes in the History of Women and the Trade Union Movement. New York: The Institute for Research in History, 1978. Luchetti, Cathy. Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West. New York: Villard, 1993. Magill, Frank N., ed. Great Lives from History: American Women Series. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995. Margo, Elizabeth. Women of the Gold Rush. New York: Indian Head Books, 1955. Markle, Donald E. Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994.

Massey, Mary E. Bonnet Brigades. New York: Knopf, 1966. Mayberry, B. D. The Role of Tuskegee University on the Origin, Growth and Development of the Negro Cooperative Extension System 1881–1990. Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee University Cooperative Extension Program, 1989. Morello, Karen B. The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America: 1638 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1986. Morris, Charles. American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Murolo, Priscilla. The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender and Working Girls’ Clubs, 1884–1928. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Preston, Samuel H., and Michael R. Haines. Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Reverby, Susan M. Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Reynolds, Moria D. American Women Scientists: 23 Inspiring Biographies, 1900-2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999. Riley Patricia, ed. Growing Up Native American: An Anthology. New York: William Morrow, 1993. Ruiz, Vicki L., and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1994. Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers and the American State, 1877–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Schmidt, Jean M. Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism, 1760–1939. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996. Scipio, L. Albert, II. Pre-War Days at Tuskegee: Historical Essay on Tuskegee Institute (1881–1943). Silver Springs, MD: Roman Publications, 1987. Sigerman, Harriet. An Unfinished Battle: American Women 1848–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Smith, Jessie C., ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth-Century. New York: Norton, 1997. Still, William. The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authoritative Narratives, Letters, Etc. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872. Wakin, Edward. Enter the Irish-American. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976. Ward, Geoffrey C. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, An Illustrated History. New York: Knopf, 1999. Welter, Barbara. Religion in American History: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. White, Deborah. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985. Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984. Woloch, Nancy. Early American Women: A Documentary History, 1600–1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. ———, Women and the American Experience. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Yung, Judy. Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Zophy, Angela H., ed. Handbook of American Women’s History. New York: Garland Reference, 1990.

Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1960. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Amott, Teresa, and Julie Matthaei. Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States, rev. ed. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Anderson, Karen. Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II. Westport: Greenwood, 1981. Anthony, Carl S. America’s First Families: An Inside View of 200 Years of Private Life in the White House. New York: Touchstone, 2000. Bailey, Beth, and David Farber. The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Boris, Eileen, and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds. Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book by and for Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House, 1997 Caffrey, Margaret. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Camhi, Jane J. Women against Women: American Antisuffragism, 1880–1920. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1994. Caroli, Betty B. First Ladies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, DC, 1910–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994. Cobble, Dorothy Sue. Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cohen, Miriam. Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Davis, Allen. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. DuBois, Ellen Carol, and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters : A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. New York: Routledge, 1990. Edwards, Rebecca. Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review, 1985. Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering & Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915– 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991. Filler, Louis. The Muckrakers. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Finnegan, Margaret. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Gamber, Wendy. The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997. Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Glickman, Lawrence. Consumer Society in American History: A Reader. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Gluck, Sherna B. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Golden, Claudia. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Goodwin, Joanne L. Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Gordon, Linda. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880–1960. New York: Viking, 1988. Hadley-Garcia, George. Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures. New York: Carol Publishing, 1990. Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in American 1930’s. Athens: University of Georgia, 1995. Hareven, Tamara. Family Time and Industrial Time. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Harrison, Cynthia. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940’s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Hine, Darlene C., and Kathleen Thompson, eds. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Hochschild, Arlie R. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead, a Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990. Jacobs, Margaret. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures 1879–1934. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

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Jackson, Carlton. Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1990. James, Edward T., Janet W. James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds. Notable American Women, Vol. III. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1971. Jameson, Elizabeth, and Susan Armitage, eds. Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Kochersberger, Robert C., ed. More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1998. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau 1915–1932. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ———, and Lauri Umansky, eds. ‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Lehrer, Susan. Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925. Albany: State University of New York, 1987. Lerner, Gerda. The Majority Finds Its Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Mankiller, Wilma, et al., eds. The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Matsumoto, Valerie J. Farming the Homeplace: A JapaneseAmerican Community in California, 1919–1982. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Mead, Margaret. Ruth Benedict. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1944. Meyers, Karen. Lives and Works. New York: Grolier, 1999. Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987. Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press, 1988.

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina M. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Morris, Sarah P. Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia. New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1993. Moynihan, Ruth Barnes, Cynthia Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker, eds. Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women, Vol. II. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Paradis, Adrian A. Ida M. Tarbell, Pioneer Woman Journalist and Biographer. Chicago: Children’s Press, 1985. Peiss, Kathy L. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Peterson del Mar, David. Violence and Power: An Intimate History of the North Pacific Slope. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000. Ruiz, Vicki L. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Satter, Beryl. Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875– 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Scanlon, Jennifer, ed. The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Schechter, Susan. Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1982. Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol H. Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Sidel, Ruth. Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War on the Poor. New York: Penguin, 1996. Smith, Jessie C., ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit: Gale, 1992. Ware, Susan. Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Weiner, Lynn. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Yung, Judy. Chinese Women of America: A Pictorial History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.

GENERAL INDEX

Numbers in bold indicate volume numbers and main entries; i indicates illustration.

A Abbott, Edith, 3:530 Abbott, Grace, 3:530, 530– 31, 568, 683 Abolition, 1:101, 2:241–42, 255, 258, 261, 271, 278–79, 285, 287, 329, 341 Abortion, 1:9, 39, 2:250, 280– 81, 281i, 315, 3:512, 514, 531 legality of, 2:386, 416 legalization of, 3:647 opposition to, 3:579

See also Roe v. Wade

Abzug, Bella Savitsky, 3:531– 32, 531i, 647, 658, 684 Acculturation, 2:281 Actors, 1: 116, 144, 149, 2: 366367, 3:532–34, 532i, 639 Adams, Abigail Smith, 1:7, 19, 39–40, 40i, 175, 2:253 correspondence of, 1: 70, 82, 135, 174, 226–30 Adams, Eva B., 3:534 Adams, Hannah, 1:69i, 70 Adams, John, 1:39–40, 135, 174, 181, 226–30 Adams, John Quincy, 1:35, 40– 41, 2:281 Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson, 1:40–41, 41i Adams, Marian Hooper, 2:281– 82 Addams, Jane, 2:282–283, 283i, 293, 314, 353–54, 395, 421, 3:551, 704

Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 3:534–35, 667

Adolescence, 1:41, 3:535–36, 541 Adultery, 1:46, 49, 101, 2:283, 383, 390 Advice books, 2:245, 283– 84, 318, 386 African Americans, 1:13-14, 109, 2: 281, 284-285, 3:507, 521, 527, 536–37, 609

American Revolution and, 1:45 childbirth and, 2: 306 civil rights, 2:243, 3:517–21, 580, 599 in Congress, 3:537, 570 as domestic servants, 1:183, 2:265, 325 education, 2:290–91, 313, 316, 327, 427, 445 feminism and, 3:705 free, 1:97, 103, 203204, 2:332 preachers, 1:165, 2:409, 443– 44 in military service, 3:713 religious life, 1:18, 82 sexuality, viewed by whites, 1:187–188, 2:289, 334, 413 voluntary organizations, 1:52, 2:315, 391-392, 3:529, 647 Western expansion and, 2:265 See also Anti-miscegenation laws; Civil rights movement; Lynching; Slavery African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2:261, 285 Ah Choi, 2:309 Ah Tsun, 2:285, 410, 463 Aid to Dependent Children, 3:530, 537–38, 567, 631, 638, 683, 700 Aitken, Jane, 1:41–42 Albright, Madeleine, 3:616 Alcott, Louisa May, 2:286, 286i, 296, 398 Alexander, Mary Spratt Provoost, 1:42 Algonquin household economy, 1:42–43 Alston, Theodosia, 1:43, 43i American Anti-Slavery Society, 2:253, 279, 286– 87, 431, 451 American Association of University Women, 3:538, 580

American Civil Liberties Union, 3:595, 611, 626 American Equal Rights Association, 2:287, 289, 431 American Federation of Labor, 3:557, 694 American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations, 3:539, 660 American Federation of Teachers, 3:539, 600, 646 American Revolution, 1: 43–46 citizenship and, 1:31– 32, 2:253 consequences for women, 1:4– 6, 84, 94, 107, 140, 167, 174–175, 184, 200, 2:248 religion and, 1:17, 46, 61, 113, 142 role of African Americans, 1:103 role of Native Americans, 1:56–57, 137 role of women, 1:49, 69–70, 74, 106, 110, 117, 137, 159, 181–182, 197, 199 American Woman Suffrage Association, 2:254, 257, 287– 88, 289, 353, 375 Anderson, Laurie, 3:540 Anderson, Marian, 3:642 Anderson, Mary, 3:540 Angelou, Maya, 3:540, 541i Anglicans, 1:4, 14, 46, 69, 140, 145 Anorexia nervosa, 3:541 Anthony, Susan B., 2: 288289, 288i, 340, 376, 383, 434 abolition movement and, 2:279, 457 Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and, 2:304 labor movement and, 2:314, 357 suffrage movement and, 2: 254, 304, 319, 388, 408 Anti-miscegenation laws, 1:46– 47, 2:289–90, 3:541–42, 610, 626

749

750

GENERAL INDEX

Antislavery petitions, 2:279, 290 Apgar, Virginia, 3:613 Apprenticeships, 1:47, 66, 123 Arden, Elizabeth, 3:542, 584 Arnold, Benedict, 1:47, 186 Arnold, Peggy Shippen, 1:47– 48, 186 Arthur, Ellen Lewis Herndon, 2:290 Artists, 1:156–157, 2:403, 3:542– 43 Arts, patrons of the, 1:48 Ash, Mary Kay, 3:543–44 Asian Americans, 3:529, 544–45 Athletics, 3:501, 545–47, 580, 582, 611, 620, 681 Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, 2:290–91 Avery, Byllye, 3:547 Aviation and space, 3:547–48

B Bache, Deborah Franklin, 1:45 Bache, Sarah Franklin, 1:49, 49i, 70, 102, 1 59 Bacon’s Rebellion, 1:7, 52 Baez, Joan, 3:548, 642 Bagley, Sarah G., 2:257, 271, 291, 447 Bailey, Abigail Abbot, 1:25, 49, 83 Bailey, Lydia R., 1:47, 49–50 Baker, Ella, 3:520, 536, 549 Baker, Josephine, 3:549–50, 549i Baker, Louisa. See Brewer, Lucy Balch, Emily Greene, 3:683 Ball, Lucille, 3:583, 690 Ballard, Martha, 1:8, 50, 65, 83, 147, 178 Baptists, 1:4, 17, 18, 50–51, 67, 69, 73, 128, 173, 2:291, 320, 3:527 African Americans and, 2:261, 285 Barbie, 1:54–55 Barnard, Hannah Jenkins, 1:51, 165 Barnett, Ida B. Wells, 2:249, 254, 292–93, 292i, 365, 378– 79, 382, 463, 471–72, 3:524, 527 Barry, Leonora Marie, 2:293, 367 Barton, Clara, 2:293–94, 294i Bates, Katharine Lee, 2:463

Beach, Amy, 3:643 Beard, Mary, 1:55 Beecher, Catharine Esther, 1:18, 2:246, 253, 294– 95, 324, 351,432, 460–61 Benedict, Ruth Fulton, 1:55– 56, 56i Benevolent associations, 1:26, 51–52, 159, 197 2:244, 253, 279, 295– 96, 392 Berkeley, Lady Frances Culpeper, 1:7, 52 Berkin, Carol, 1:80, 110, 164 Berry, Mary Francis, 3:552 Bethune, Joanna Graham, 1:51, 52–53, 71, 113, 2:255 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 3:503, 528, 536, 552–53, 553i, 645 Bible, 1:28, 42, 51, 60, 73, 113, 204 American Revolution and, 1:20 Creation story, 1:53, 66, 67, 68, 73, 174, 184 subordination of women and, 1:53–54, 54i Bickerdyke, Mother, 2:418 Bill of Rights, 1:54 Bingham, Anne Willing, 1:54– 55, 55i Birth control. See contraception Black, Cathleen, 3:553 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 2:313–14, 320, 321 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 1:147, 2:296– 97, 297i, 348, 454 Blake, Lillie Devereux, 2:297–98 Blatch, Harriot Eaton Stanton, 3:685 Bleecker, Ann Eliza, 1:55 Bloomer, Amelia, 2:257, 298, 314, 326, 336 Bly, Nellie, 2:298, 365, 3:524, 618 Bonney, Mary Lucinda, 2:355 Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Sha), 3:553–54, 645 Bourke-White, Margaret, 3:543, 661 Bow, Clara, 3:533, 639, 640i Boyd, Belle, 2:298–99, 311, 428 Bradford, Ann Smith, 1:8 Bradford, Cornelia Smith, 1:8, 55–56, 166

Bradley, Lydia Moss, 2:299 Bradley, Myra Colby, 2:299–300 Bradstreet, Anne Dudley, 1:15, 25, 56, 73, 104, 134, 163 poetry of, 1:218–23 Bradwell, Myra, 2:368–69 Brant, Mary, 1:46, 56–57 Braun, Carol Moseley, 3:570 Breckinridge, Mary, 3:632 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 2:369, 369i Brent, Margaret, 1:7, 26, 57, 61, 104, 105, 191, 197 Brewer, Lucy, 1:57–58 Brice, Fanny, 3:554 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 3:554–55 Brooks, Maria Gowen, 1:58 Brown, Charlotte Hawkins, 2:300, 343 Brown, Helen Gurley, 3:555, 619 Brown, Olympia, 2:300, 409 Brown, Phoebe Hinsdale, 1:58– 59 Brown, Rita Mae, 3:555, 674 Brown, Tina, 3:704 Brown, William Hill, 1:153 Brownmiller, Susan, 3:555– 56, 664, 668 Bryn Mawr College, 2:300– 01, 313, 418, 442 Buck, Pearl S., 3:688 Bundling, 1:59, 122 Burroughs, Nannie, 3:527 Bush, Barbara Pierce, 3:556 Bush, Laura Lane, 3:556– 57, 556i Business and industry, 3:557–58 See also Trade and Retailing Businesswomen, 1:42, 158, 160– 61 See also Entrepreneurs

C Cable Act (1922), 3:503, 558– 59, 612 Cabrini, St. Frances Xavier, 2:301 Cadet Nurses Corps, 3:559 Calderone, Mary Steichen, 3:559 Caldicott, Helen Broinowski, 3:559

California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra, 3:559–60 California Gold Rush, 2:301– 02, 308 Callas, Maria, 3:560, 642

GENERAL INDEX Calvert, Leonard, 1:57 Calvinism, 1:14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 174, 2:383, 432 Camp Fire Girls, 3:560 Canada, 1:3, 12, 16, 56, 71 Cannon, Annie Jump, 3:561 Captivity narratives, 1:16, 59– 60, 60i, 78, 199 Carcom, Lucy, 2:368 Carlisle School, 2:254, 302– 03, 355 Carpenter, Candice, 3:561 Carson, Rachel, 3:561–62 Carter, Rosalynn Smith, 3:562 Cary, Alice, 2:462 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 2:435 Cassatt, Mary, 2:303, 403, 461 Cather, Willa, 3:562–63, 562i Catholics, 1:4, 57, 60–62, 82, 126, 142, 177, 2:259, 275, 303–04 Hispanic Americans as, 2:352 Irish immigrants as, 2:359– 60, 3:670 as missionaries, 1:15, 147 Native Americans and, 1:16, 168, 191–92 Catt, Carrie Clinton Lane Chapman, 2:287, 304, 393, 435, 3:502, 657, 686 Centennial Exhibition of 1876, 2:304 Chapman, Maria Weston, 2:287, 305, 306 Charters, colonial, 1:61–62 Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 3:540, 563 Cherokee tribe, 1:29, 62, 63, 104, 106, 204, 3:642 Nancy Ward’s message to, 2:450–51 Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller, 2:305, 321 Cheyenne tribe, 2:263 Chicago Women’s Club, 2:305– 06, 392 Chicanas, 3:511, 529, 563, 606 Child, Lydia Maria Francis, 2:258, 279, 284, 287, 305, 306, 339, 398, 400 Childbearing years, 1:62–64 Childbirth, 1:23, 64–65, 81, 85, 93, 105, 117, 178, 195, 2:250, 306, 390 Child care, 3:501, 506, 528, 564– 65

Child custody, 1:65, 2:250, 306– 07, 3:504, 513, 565–66, 567 Childhood, 1:66–67, 2:307– 08, 307i, 357, 3:612–13 Child labor, 2:335, 422, 3:499, 521, 536, 566–67, 568, 646 Children, 1:88, 96 divorce laws and, 1:84–85 in factories, 1:95 literacy and, 1:133 as property, 2:412 Children’s Bureau, 3:502, 528, 568, 612, 631, 660, 683 mothers’ letters to, 3:708–10 Child support, 3:566, 567–68 Chinese Exclusion Act, 2:254, 275–76, 308, 402 Chinese immigrants, 2:266, 308– 09, 308i, 388, 410, 417 Chisholm, Shirley, 3:520, 537, 537i Choctaw tribe, 1:67, 204 Chopin, Kate O’ Flaherty, 2:309, 398 Christianity, 1:14, 15, 53, 67– 68, 164, 167, 184 Church membership, 1:15, 25, 68–69, 68i, 87, 186 Church of England. See Anglicans Ciccone, Madonna Louise, 3:583, 639 Cisneros, Sandra, 3:568–69, 625 Citizenship, 1:31–36, 2:252–54 Civic life, 1:49, 69–71, 69i Civil rights movement, 3:517–21, 580, 599 Civil War, 1:47, 74, 83, 101, 117, 120, 146, 187, 188, 2:258, 276, 309–11, 3:517 divided families and, 1:74, 2:374 female spies in, 2:299, 311, 346 industrialization and, 2:271 journalism and, 2:365 nurses in, 2:286, 294, 298, 314, 324, 362, 449 Quakers and, 2:278 Sanitary Commission and, 2:417 woman suffrage and, 2:434 women as soldiers in, 1:89 women factory workers and, 2:333 women’s role in, 2:242–43

751

Clapp, Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith, 2:302 Clarke, Sara Jane, 2:381 Clerical work, 2:312, 312i, 386, 448, 3: 507, 508, 575 Cleveland, Emeline Horton, 2:347 Cleveland, Frances Folsom, 2:312 Clinton, Bill, 3:569 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 3:569 Cockacoeske, 1:71 Colleges, 1:71, 2:312– 14, 391, 420, 451 Collins, Jennie, 2:314 Colonial household economy, 1:71–72, 72i Colorado Cottage Home, 2:262 Colored Women’s League, 2:315 Common law, 1:3–4, 9–10, 39, 72, 75, 91, 135, 167, 200, 2:250 coverture concept, 1:8, 23, 76–77, 2:248 Comstock law, 2:250, 280, 315, 3:514, 676 Congregationalists, 1:14, 16, 69, 73, 128, 164, 165 Congress, women in, 3:569–70 Connecticut colony, 1:11, 12, 61 Consent, age of, 2:257–58, 3:570 Constitution of the United States, 1:34, 54, 73–74, 143, 174 Consumer society, 3:509–12 Contraception, 1:64, 2:247, 250, 315–16, 390, 3:499, 501, 662, 676-677 Cooke, Harriet B., 1:74 Coolidge, Ellen Randolph, 1:74 Coolidge, Grace Goodhue, 3:570–71 Cooney, Joan Ganz, 3:571 Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood, 2:315, 316 Corbin, Margaret Cochran, 1:74– 75 Corey, Martha, 1:75 Corn Mothers, 1:15 Cotton, John, 1:73, 121, 136, 169 Courts, 1:23, 75–76, 75i Courtship, 1:76, 2:247, 249– 50, 316–17 Coverture, 1:8, 21, 32, 65, 72, 76–77, 100, 107, 2:383 divorce laws and, 1:84–85

752

GENERAL INDEX

history of, 1:23 marriage laws and, 1:141 in nineteenth century, 2:248 patriarchy and, 1:157–58 U.S. Constitution and, 1:73– 74 widowhood and, 1:29, 2:452 Crandall, Prudence, 2:256, 279, 317 Creek tribe, 1:63, 183, 204 Crimes against women, 1:76, 77– 78 Crocker, Hannah Mather, 1:78 Croly, Jane Cunningham, 2:317– 18, 342, 427, 455 Cummins, Maria Susanna, 2:397 Cushman, Pauline, 2:428 Custis, Eleanor Calvert, 1:78– 79, 133

D Dall, Caroline Healey, 2:318, 321 Dame schools, 1:28, 41, 79 Dance, 3:544, 571–73, 572i Dare, Virginia, 1:64, 65i Darragh, Lydia Barrington, 1:79–80 Daughters of Bilitis, 3:504, 573, 623 Daughters of Liberty, 1:21, 70, 197 Daughters of St. Crispin, 2:318, 379, 424, 433 Daughters of the American Revolution, 1:75, 3:642 Davis, Angela, 3:573–74 Davis, Bette, 3:532i, 533, 640 Davis, Paulina Kellogg Wright, 2:314, 318–19 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 2:319 Dawes Act (1887), 2:319, 356, 361, 442 Day, Doris, 3:574 Day, Dorothy, 3:574 Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, 1:46– 47 Death and funerals, 1:80, 93, 2:399–400 Declaration of Independence, 1:10, 21, 26, 36, 74, 80–81, 87, 119, 166 divorce laws and, 1:84 Declaration of Sentiments (1848), 2:253, 257, 408, 463– 65 Deer, Ada, 3:649

Delaware tribe, 1:62, 126 Deloria, Ella Cara, 3:574–75 Del Rio, Dolores, 3:575 Democratic-Republican party, 1:138 Denominationalism, 1:17, 81– 82, 2:319–21 De Varona, Donna E., 3:575 Dewson, Mary (Molly) Williams, 3:503, 575–76 Diaries and journals, 1:82– 83, 82i, 2:247, 301, 321, 462 Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth, 2:321–22 Dickinson, Emily, 2:322– 23, 322i, 462 DiFranco, Ani, 3:643 Diseases, 1:83– 84, 86, 117, 143, 2:302, 323, 3 90, 396 Division of labor, sexual, 3:576, 576i See also Separate Spheres Divorce, 2:246, 250, 256–57 adultery and, 2:283 legality of, 2:423 on Western frontier, 2:452 Divorce laws, 1:10, 12, 19, 23, 49, 65, 84–85, 101, 141– 42, 2:242, 323, 430, 3:576–77 reform of, 2:386 Dix, Dorothea Lynde, 2:256, 311, 323–24, 358, 398 Dole, Elizabeth Hanford, 3:577 Domestic arts, 1:85– 87, 86i, 194, 198, 2:324– 25, 324i, 462, 3:510 Domestic life, 1:10-14, 86– 89, 2:245-247, 3:520-523 Domestic servants, 1:183, 189, 198, 200, 2:245, 249, 265, 271, 325, 343, 357, 386, 459, 3:498, 506, 521, 575, 577–78 immigrants as, 2:360, 449 Industrial Revolution and, 2:358 training for, 2:396 Doolittle, Hilda, 3:625 Douglass, Frederick, 2:249, 254 Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 2:325– 26 Dow, Peggy, 1:89, 146 Dower rights, 1:8, 19, 90, 141, 158, 164, 167 Dowries, 1:76

Dress reform, 2:257, 326, 335, 430 Drew, Nancy (fictional character), 3:578 Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwich, 1:45, 83, 90 Duchesne, Rose Phillippine, 1:90, 147 Duncan, Isadora, 3:578 Duniway, Abigail Scott, 3:578 Duston, Hannah, 1:78, 96, 97i Dutch household economy, 1:91 Dyer, Mary, 1:101, 170, 185 Dyk, Ruth Belcher, 3:578–79

E Eagle Forum, 3:579, 677 Earhart, Amelia, 3:547, 579– 80, 580i, 652 Edelman, Marian Wright, 3:565 Eddy, Mary Baker, 2:326–27 Edmonds, S. Emma, 2:311, 327, 428 Education, 1:80, 105, 161, 198– 99, 2:246, 252, 294, 314, 327– 28, 3:498, 504, 521, 538, 580– 81 African American women and, 2:284–85, 445 civil rights and, 3:518 journalism and, 3:618 See also colleges; dame schools; schools; teaching Edwards, Sarah Pierpont, 1:73, 91, 101 Eisenhower, Mary (Mamie) Geneva Doud, 3:581 Eisenstadt v. Baird, 3:581– 82, 671 Elaw, Zilpha, 2:285, 328–29 Eldridge, Elleanore, 1:91–92 Elizabeth I, Queen, 1:3, 6, 23, 46, 64, 121, 7 Ellet, Elizabeth Fries Lummis, 2:329 Emancipation Proclamation, 2:243, 329– 30, 362, 411 Emerson, Mary Moody, 1:92 Emily’s List, 3:582 Endo, Mitsuye, 3:582 Enlightenment, 1:22 Entertainment, 1:92– 93, 104, 2:330, 3:582–84

GENERAL INDEX Entrepreneurs, 1:93– 94, 176, 2:331– 32, 331i, 3:508, 584 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 3:584 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 3:508, 528, 558, 584–85 Equality of female intellect, 1:94 Equal Pay Acts (1963 & 1972), 3:504, 528, 585–86 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 3:500, 503, 507, 527, 532, 586–87, 587i, 717–18 opposition to, 3:579, 644, 677 Equal Rights Party, 2:332, 376, 458 Erdrich, Louise, 3:625, 649 Estaugh, Elizabeth Haddon, 1:94–95 Etiquette, 2:332, 445

F Factories/factory workers, 1:95– 96, 2:240, 333– 34, 333i, 390, 3:507 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 3:503, 528, 587, 613, 707 Family and Medical Leave Act (1993), 3:523, 587–88, 707 Family life, 1:10–14, 2:245, 248251, 3:521–23 colonial, 1:96 free black, 1:96–97 Hispanic, 2:351–52 middle-class, 2:248 Native American, 1:97– 98, 2:393–95, 393i nuclear and extended, 2:334– 35 republican, 1:98–99 on Western frontier, 2:452, 452i Family wage system, 2:272, 335, 424 Farley, Harriet, 2:457 Farnham, Eliza, 2:456 Farrar, Elizabeth Ware Rotch, 1:99 Fashion, 1:99–100, 2:335– 36, 335i, 3:588–89 Feinstein, Dianne Goldman, 3:570, 590

Female Union Society for the Promotion of SabbathSchools, 1:53 Feme covert, 1:32, 88, 158, 204, 2:412 Feme sole trader acts, 1:8, 77, 100, 158, 194

Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 3:522, 593, 611, 616, 714–17 Femininity, 1:20, 2:252, 344, 427 Feminism, 1:44, 111, 3:501, 508, 514, 526–30, 623, 636, 715 radical, 3:590, 705, 708 See also Women’s liberation movement; Women’s rights movement Ferguson, Catherine, 2:406 Ferguson, Elizabeth Graeme, 1:100 Fern, Fanny, 2:336, 398, 462 Ferraro, Geraldine, 3:590 Fillmore, Abigail Powers, 2:336– 37 Fiorina, Cara Carleton S. (Carl), 3:590–91, 596 First Generations (Berkin), 1:80, 110, 177 Fisher, Mary, 1:100–101 Fitzgerald, Ella, 3:591, 591i Fitzgerald, Zelda, 3:624 Florence Crittendon Homes, 3:591–92 Foote, Mary Hallock, 2:337, 382 Ford, Elizabeth (Betty) Bloomer, 3:592 Fornication, 1:8–9, 11, 46– 47, 101, 132, 184 Foster, Abigail Kelley, 2:337–38 Foster, Hannah Webster, 1:101– 2, 135, 154 Fox, George, 1:53, 170, 185 Fox, Margaret Askew Fell, 1:53, 171 Franklin, Ann Smith, 1:8, 102 Franklin, Aretha, 3:592–93, 642 Franklin, Benjamin, 1:88, 110, 112, 134, 143, 160, 166, 182, 207 Franklin, Deborah Read, 1:46, 49, 88, 93, 102–3, 117i, 166 Free black communities, 1:103, 145, 203 Freedmen’s aid societies, 2:320, 338 Freedmen’s schools, 2:256, 292, 338–39, 445

753

Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 2:339 Frémont, Jessie Ann Benton, 2:339–40 French and Indian War, 1:42, 60, 103, 104, 148, 149 French household economy, 1:104–5 Friedan, Betty Goldstein, 3:504, 522, 528, 593, 609, 616, 629, 646, 684, 714 Friendship, 1:104–5, 2:340 Frontier life, 1:104, 105– 6, 2:452, 452i Frontiero v. Richardson, 3:593 Frowne, Sadie, 2:475–80 Fuller, Margaret, 2:318, 321, 340–41, 340i, 365, 382,405

G Gage, Frances Dana Barker, 2:341 Gage, Margaret Kemble, 1:106 Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 2:304, 341–42 Gallagher, Susan VanZanten, 1:59 Galloway, Grace Growdon, 1:106–7 Games, 1:66, 104, 107, 190 Garfield, Lucretia Rudolph, 2:342 Garland, Judy, 3:594, 640 Garrison, William Lloyd, 2:241, 325 Gayle, Sarah Ann Haynesworth, 2:342 Gender and English identity in the seventeenth century, 1:108 and racial differences, 1:108– 9, 119 in revolutionary era, 1:19–22 Gender frontiers, 1:109–10, 109i General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 2:317, 342–43, 354, 394, 427, 455–56, 3:638,649 General Washington’s Sewing Circle, 1:70 Gentility, 1:20, 110–11 George III, King, 1:21 Georgia colony, 1:46, 126 German immigrants, 1:111, 2:274, 343 –44 Gibson, Althea, 3:594

754

GENERAL INDEX

Gibson Girls, 2:344, 3:512 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller, 3:557 Gilman, Caroline Howard, 1:82i, 83 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 2:344, 395, 398, 3:52 6 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 3:539, 594–95, 616 Girl Scouts of America, 3:595, 595i, 715 Glass ceiling, 3:525, 544, 558, 595–96 Gleaner, The (Sargent), 1:231– 34 Goddard, Mary Katherine, 1:81, 111 Goddard, Sarah Updike, 1:8, 44, 81, 111, 166

Godey’s Lady’s Book, 2:317, 344–45, 349,

365, 381, 425, 447, 463 Goldman, Emma, 3:527, 596, 615 Gossip, 1:55, 111–12, 173, 177, 2:252 Gould, Hannah Flagg, 1:112 Grable, Betty, 3:533, 572, 596– 97, 640 Graham, Isabella Marshall, 1:51, 52, 71, 112–13, 2:255, 305, 364i Graham, Katharine Meyer, 3:526, 558, 597, 618 Graham, Martha, 3:533, 597–98 Grant, Julia Dent, 2:345 Grasso, Ella, 3:598 Gratz, Rebecca, 1:126i, 127, 2:345, 406 Great Awakenings, 1:17, 26, 51, 73, 91, 113–14, 160, 164, 197, 2:241, 246, 259– 61, 376, 420–21 Great Depression, 3:499, 502, 503, 506, 522, 525, 528, 557, 564, 574, 584, 598–99 documentary photography and, 3:661 Mexican-Americans and, 3:606 New Deal and, 3:650 Green, Anne Hoof, 1:114, 166 Greene, Catharine Littlefield, 1:114 Greenhow, Rose O’Neal, 2:311, 345–46, 428 Greenleaf, Anna, 1:114

Griffiths, Martha Wright, 3:599 Grimké, Sarah Moore, 2:247, 255, 279, 305, 346– 48, 346i, 420, 453–56

Griswold v. Connecticut, 3:581, 599–

600, 662, 671 Gynecology, 1:115, 2:348, 351, 3 84, 395

H Hale, Sarah Josepha, 2:246, 335– 36, 345, 349, 349i, 381, 447, 463 Haley, Margaret, 3:540, 600 Hall, Thomas/Thomasine, 1:116 Hallam, Mrs. Lewis, 1:116 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 3:504, 519, 536, 600–01 Hamilton, Alexander, 1:43, 116, 135, 156 Hamilton, Alice, 3:601 Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler, 1:116 Hansberry, Lorraine Vivian, 3:624 Hanson, Harriet, 2:377 Harding, Florence Kling, 3:601 Harjo, Joy, 3:649 Harjo, Susan, 3:649 Harlem Renaissance, 3:602, 611, 625 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 2:349–50 Harris, Barbara Clementine, 3:670 Harris, Emily Lyles, 2:310 Harrison, Anna Symmes, 1:117, 2:350 Harrison, Caroline Lavinia Scott, 2:350 Hart, Nancy, 1:44, 117 Harvey Girls, 3:602 Hawaii, 1:129–30, 2:266, 363 Hayden, Sophia, 2:461 Hayes, Lucy Ware Webb, 2:350– 51 Hayworth, Rita, 3:640 Health, 1:117– 18, 118i, 2:351, 3:504, 512, 602–04, 622 Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 3:604, 644 Heck, Barbara Ruckle, 1:118, 145

Height, Dorothy Irene, 3:604, 645 Hellman, Lillian, 3:605, 605i Hemings, Sally, 1:118–20 Hepburn, Katharine Houghton, 3:533, 605– 06, 640 Hibbins, Ann, 1:120 Hicks, Peggy Glanville, 3:643 Hill, Anita, 3:722–25 Hill, Frances Mulligan, 1:148 Hispanic Americans, 2:264– 65, 3:507, 606, 606i Hispanic family life, 1:189190, 2:351–52 Holiday, Billie, 3:591, 606– 07, 607i, 614, 642 Hobby, Oveta Culp, 3:633–34 Hollander, Nicole, 3:607 Home economics, 2:325, 415, 3:510, 607–08, 681 Homemakers, 3:506, 510, 528, 608–09, 617, 667, 685 Home Protection Ballot, 2:352, 438 Homestead Act, 2:352 Hoover, Lou Henry, 3:609 Hopkins, Ann, 1:169–70 Hopper, “Amazing Grace” Brewster, 3:678 Horne, Lena, 3:609–10 Hosmer, Harriet Goodhue, 2:402 Housework, 2:240, 245, 271, 352–53, 367, 382, 3:521 Howe, Julia Ward, 2:258, 353, 396 Hoyt v. Florida, 3:610 Huerta, Dolores Fernandez, 3:563, 610– 11, 626, 695 Hull House, 2:282, 314, 353– 54, 354, 369, 401, 422, 431, 3:530, 620, 708 Hume, Sophia Wigington, 1:120, 164 Hurston, Zora Neale, 3:602, 611, 625 Hutchinson, Anne Marbury, 1:24–25, 54, 67–68, 82, 121–22, 121i, 164, 170, 171 court examination of, 1:213– 17 Hyde Amendment, 3:611, 643

GENERAL INDEX

I Illegitimacy, 1:8–9, 122 See also Mothers, unmarried Illinois Women’s Alliance, 2:273, 354 Immigration, 1:122–23, 2:274– 76, 3:612 Indentured servitude, 1:9, 47, 105, 111, 123, 201, 2:268 Indian removal, 2:263, 354– 55, 3:648 Indian rights movement, 2:355– 56 Indian tribes. See Native Americans Industrial Christian Home, 2:281, 356, 414 Industrialization, 2:271-273 Industrial Revolution, 2:243, 245, 271, 274, 333, 356– 58, 356i, 3:509, 565 child labor and, 3:566 housework and, 2:352–53 Infancy, 1:86, 124, 2:358, 3:612– 13, 678 Infanticide, 1:7, 8 Infant School Society, 1:53 Insanity, 2:348, 358– 59, 358i, 424 Irish immigrants, 2:245, 274, 343, 359–60, 371, 378, 433, 3:670 Iroquois tribe, 1:42, 57, 62, 98, 124, 148, 204

J Jackson, Andrew, 1:48, 124 Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, 2: 258, 263, 360–61 Jackson, Rachel Donelson Robards, 1:112, 124–25 Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 2:361 Jacob, Mary Corinna Putnam, 2:361 Jacobs, Frances Wiesbart, 2:361– 62 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 2:269, 362 Jay, Sarah Livingston, 1:125 Jazz, 3:614–15 Jefferson, Martha Wayles Skelton, 1:125, 172 Jefferson, Mildred, 3:615 Jefferson, Thomas, 1:21, 79, 80, 84, 135, 163, 176 friendships with women, 1:55, 74, 138

Hemings and, 1:118–20 views on women, 1:5, 163, 181 Jemison, Mary, 1:45, 125– 26, 151–52 Jewett, Helen, 2:251, 362 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 2:363 Jewish Americans, 1:4, 14, 15, 28, 69, 126–27, 126i, 2:261, 273, 276, 363,426, 3:511, 615–16 Johnson, Claudia (Lady Bird) Alta Taylor, 3:616 Johnson, Eliza McCardle, 2:363– 64 Johnson, Sonia, 3:616–17 Johnston, Henrietta Deering, 1:156, 171 Jones, Mary Harris “Mother,” 2:360, 364– 65, 364i, 367 Jones, Rebecca, 1:127–28, 164 Joplin, Janis, 3:617, 617i, 642 Jordan, Barbara, 3:617–18 Journalism, 2:292, 298, 317, 365, 382, 3:523525, 618–19 Judson, Ann Hasseltine, 1:128– 29, 128i, 148, 165 Judson, Sarah Hall Boardman, 1:129

K Kaahumanu, 1:129–30 Kearney, Belle, 2:366 Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs, 2:366 Keller, Helen, 3:539, 619, 619i Kelley, Florence, 3:511, 527, 551, 620, 645 Kemble, Frances Anne, 2:257, 366–67 Kennedy, John F., 3:534, 569 Kerber, Linda K., 1:32, 45, 73 Kincaid, Jamaica, 3:625 King, Billie Jean, 3:546, 620, 710 King, Coretta Scott, 3:620–21 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 3:569 King Philip’s War, 1:16, 60, 130, 134, 199 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 3:621 Kirkpatrick, Jeane Jordan, 3:621–22 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 1:94, 130–31, 135 Knights of Labor, 2:273, 285, 293, 364, 367, 371, 433, 460

755

Kuhn, Margaret, 3:622, 622i

L Labor force, women in, 3:505509 Labor organizing/unions, 2:273, 3:66 7 Labor Reform Association, Female, 2:257, 271, 378, 367– 68 Lafayette, Marquis de, 1:99, 156 Lalor, Alice, 1:131 Laney, Lucy Craft, 2:368 Lange, Dorothea, 3:543, 599 Lathrop, Julia Clifford, 3:568, 708 Law, Elizabeth Custis, 1:131–32 Law, the, women and, 1:6-10, 23, 72, 75-76 See also Common Law; Lawyers; Litigation Lawyers, 1:57, 61, 75–76, 2:368– 69, 369i, 386, 3:507 Lazarus, Emma, 2:370, 370i League of Women Voters, 2:288, 3:500, 503, 558, 622–23, 651 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and, 3:586 Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens, 2:370–71, 408 Lee, Eliza Buckminster, 2:371 Lee, Hannah Farnham Sawyer, 1:132 Lee, Jarena, 1:146, 165, 165i, 2:371–72, 385 Lee, Ann, 1:17, 26, 164–65, 168, 173, 185, 188, 201, 206, 2:247 Legal participation, 1:23 Lesbians, 1:132– 33, 2:340, 372, 3:513, 573, 623, 635, 674 Letters, 2:372–73, 453– 56, 462, 465–66, 3:708–10 Lewis, Eleanor Parke Custis, 1:133 Lewis and Clark expedition, 1:178–79 Liberty figure, 1:19, 20, 32, 33i

Liberty’s Daughters (Norton), 1:69, 76,

85, 86, 141, 165, 167 Life stages, 1:27-31 Liliuokalani, Queen, 2:266, 373, 373i

756

GENERAL INDEX

Lincoln, Abraham, 2:243, 310– 11, 324, 362, 462 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 2:366, 373– 74 Lind, Jenny, 2:374 Literacy, 1:28, 133–34, 180 Literature, 1:134–35, 2:246, 462463, 3:623–25 Litigation, 1:135–36 Livermore, Harriet, 2:374–75 Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice, 2:296, 375, 455 Locke, John, 1:124, 140, 143 Lockwood, Belva, 2:332, 375–76 Logan, Deborah Norris, 1:136 Logan, Martha Daniell, 1:136–37 Lopez, Jessie de la Cruz, 3:625– 26 Lorde, Audre, 3:626 Louisiana Purchase, 1:61, 178 Love, romantic, 1:153154, 2:248, 376, 382, 376i Loving v. Virginia, 3:542, 626 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 2:296, 376–77 Lowell mill workers, 2:271, 272, 357, 377–78, 382, 433, 3:602

Lowell Offering (magazine), 2:457–

60 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 3:543 Lutherans, 1:69 Lynching, 2:244, 249, 378– 79, 391, 472- 475, 3:527, 607 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 3:627 Lynn shoe workers, 2:273, 379, 379i Lyon, Mary, 2:246, 313, 328, 379–80, 391, 447

M McCauley, Mary Ludwig Hays. See Pitcher, Molly McClintock, Barbara, 3:627 McClintock, Mary, 2:463 McCord, Louisa Cheves, 2:380 McCrea, Jane, 1:137 McDaniel, Hattie, 3:627–28 McKinley, Ida Saxton, 2:380–81 Madison, Dolley Payne Todd, 1:137–39, 137i, 148 Madison, James, 1:138, 153, 189 Madonna, 3:583, 639 Magazines and periodicals, 1:21, 42, 55-56, 2:246, 344,

365, 381–82, 3:506, 523–24, 526, 628–29, 629i, 679 Magic and astrology, 1:139–40 MANA (Latina organization), 3:629 Mankiller, Wilma, 3:648 Maria del Occidente. See Brooks, Maria Gowen Marriage, 1:67, 77, 88, 168, 171, 184, 204-205, 2:246, 250, 316, 320, 376, 382–83, 3:504, 505, 513, 521, 629–30 ceremonies, 1:140 companionate, 1:140– 41, 154, 2:250 divorce laws and, 1:84–85, 99 laws, 1:8, 23, 141–42, 2:256, 383- 384, 457 prostitution and, 3:596 slavery and, 1:142, 187 violence in, 3:515 Martin, Anne, 3:630 Martin, Lynn Morley, 3:630 Martinez, Maria, 3:649 Maryland colony, 1:7, 13, 26, 46, 57, 61, 70, 114, 123 domestic life in, 1:12, 80 religion in, 1:15, 69, 142 slavery in, 1:13 Masculinity, 1:20, 21, 2:252 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1:11, 39, 75, 78, 94, 101, 133, 169, 3:515 Hutchinson banished from, 1: 24–25, 67–68, 69, 135–36, 170 Maternalism, 3:499, 630–31 Maternity and Infancy Protection Act (1921), 3:503, 528, 530, 558, 568, 613, 631 Mather, Cotton, 1:41, 59, 82, 118, 134, 160 Mathews, Ann Teresa, 1:142–43 Matrilineal families, 1:62, 108, 183 Mayflower Compact, 1:143 Mead, Margaret, 3:535 Mecom, Jane Franklin, 1:143 Medical College of Pennsylvania, Female, 2:384 Medicine, 1:143–44, 2:252, 323, 351, 384, 384–85, 456, 3:513, 602-604, 653-654 Menopause, 3:631

Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 3:631–32

Merry, Ann Brunton, 1:144

Methodists, 1:17–18, 69, 118, 144–46, 2:320, 328, 385– 86, 398i African Americans and, 2:261, 285 Mexican-American War, 1:18 Mexico, 1:13, 2:263 Michelman, Kate, 3:643 Middle class, 2:245, 248, 271, 285, 330, 357, 386 Midwifery, 1:115, 144, 146– 47, 195, 198, 2:386–87, 3:508, 603, 632 Midwife’s Tale, A (Ballard), 64, 161 Military service, 3:501, 502, 503, 632–35 Millerites, 2:260 Millet, Katherine Murray, 3:635 Miner, Myrtilla, 2:387 Mining camps, 2:302, 387– 88, 410 Minor v. Happersett, 2:388, 459 Miss America pageant, 3:512, 635–36, 636i Missionaries, 1:5, 18–19, 73, 128–29, 145, 147–48, 153, 165, 180, 2:255, 388– 89, 391, 3:669 Quakers as, 1:171 sexual freedom and, 1:184 Spanish, 1:168 training of, 2:427 Missouri v. Celia, 2:389 Mitchell, Joni, 3:636 Mitchell, Margaret, 3:628, 636– 37 Mitchell, Maria, 2:389, 420, 447 Mohawk tribe, 1:46, 57, 191–92 Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright, 1:148 Monroe, James, 1:40, 48, 148, 181 Monroe, Marilyn, 3:533, 637, 639, 640 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 1:111 Montour, Madame, 1:148–49 Moody, Lady Deborah Dunch, 1:149 Moore, Marianne, 3:625 Moravians, 1:17, 69, 71, 82, 173– 74, 198–99 Mordecai, Rachel, 1:27–29 Moreno, Luisa, 3:637 Morgan v. Virginia, 3:637–38

GENERAL INDEX Mormons, 1:18, 2:250, 260, 265, 356, 389–90, 397 Morris, Elizabeth Carrington, 1:149 Morrison, Toni, 3:625 Morse, Rev. Jedidiah, 1:70 Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp, 1:135, 149–50 Moseley-Braun, Carol, 3:638 Moslems, 1:4 Motherhood, 2:245, 390, 390i, 4 45 Mothers, unmarried, 3:638–39 Mothers’ pensions, 3:502, 530, 537, 564, 568, 638 Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 2:253, 255, 256, 279, 287, 391, 457, 463, 3:620 Mount Holyoke Seminary, 2:300, 313, 322, 328, 379–80, 388, 391, 420 Movies (motion pictures), 3:639– 40, 640i Ms. magazine, 3:524, 529, 553, 616, 619, 629, 640–41, 641i

Muller v. Oregon, 3:507, 641, 667, 702–

04 Murray, Judith Sargent Stevens, 1:19, 26, 80, 94, 135, 150, 182, 231–34 Murray, Pauli, 3:504, 641–42, 646 Music, 3:583, 642–43 “My Day” (E. Roosevelt), 3:710– 14

N Nanye-hi. See Ward, Nancy Nation, Carry, 2:257, 439 National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, 3:529, 643 National Association of Colored Women, 2:315, 350, 379, 391–92, 394, 416, 3:502, 527, 552, 643–44 National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 3:644 National Black Feminist Organization, 3:529 National Committee to Stop ERA, 3:587, 644, 677 National Congress of Mothers, 3:502, 638, 644–45

National Consumers League (NCL), 3:502, 511, 575, 620, 645, 674 National Council for Research on Women, 3:645 National Council of American Indians, 3:645 National Council of Jewish Women, 2:306, 392, 461 National Council of Negro Women, 3:504, 553, 604, 645–46 National Education Association, 3:540, 646 National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, 3:646 National Organization for Women (NOW), 3:504, 508, 528, 532, 558, 593, 642, 646– 47 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and, 3:587 position on prostitution, 3:666 National Right to Life Committee, 3:615, 647 National Woman’s Party, 3:500, 507, 527, 586, 630, 647, 685 National Woman Suffrage Association, 2:254, 257, 319, 341–42, 388, 392– 93, 392i, 416, 435 National Women’s Conference, 3:647–48 National Women’s Political Caucus, 3:532, 555, 648, 684 Native Americans, 1:15, 42–43, 52, 61, 64, 83, 95, 107, 114, 130, 151–52, 151i, 178, 180, 2:258, 302-303, 320, 3:648–49, 649i American Revolution and, 1:56–57, 137 captivity narratives and, 1:59– 60, 60i education of, 3:553 family life, 2:393–95, 393i in French and Indian War, 1:118, 148–49 frontier life and, 1:12-13, 105–6 Indian removal, 2:354–55 Indian rights movement, 2:355–56 interracial marriage and, 1:3, 12–13 in King Philip’s War, 1:130

757

missionaries and, 1:5, 18, 147, 2:388 status of women among, 1:86– 87, 108, 109-110, 204, 2:263 westward expansion and, 1:26–27, 2:241, 275

See also specific tribes

Neff, Mary, 1:60, 96 Neurasthenia, 2:395 Nevelson, Louise, 3:543, 649–50

New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, A (Addams), 3:704–06

New Deal, 3:503, 528, 558, 568, 575, 598, 631, 650 Newell, Harriet Atwood, 1:18, 128, 148, 152–53, 165 New England Female Medical College for Women, 2:395– 96, 456 New Hampshire colony, 1:11 New Jersey colony, 1:70 Newman, Angie, 2:397 Newman, Pauline, 3:692 New Netherland, 1:15, 202 Newspapers, 1:42, 55–56, 3:526, 597 New Woman, 3:521, 650–51 New York Children’s Aid Society, 2:396 New York colony, 1:168, 191 New York Female Moral Reform Society, 2:396– 97, 404, 410, 448 Nineteenth Amendment, 1:36, 2:254, 287–88, 421, 3:499, 503, 507, 527, 575, 622, 651, 651i, 686 National Woman’s Party and, 3:647 Ninety-nines, 3:548, 652 Nixon, Patricia Ryan, 3:652 North Carolina colony, 1:52, 60 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 3:652– 53 Norton, Mary Beth, 1:45, 69, 76, 85, 86, 136, 141, 165, 167 on colonial domestic life, 1:12 Novello, Antonia, 3:653 Novels, 1:153–54, 2:397– 98, 415, 462, 3:624, 625 Nurse, Rebecca, 1:154–55, 203 Nursing, 2:242, 311, 323, 360, 398, 3:498, 507, 580, 653–54, 653i

758

GENERAL INDEX

O Oakley, Annie, 2:330, 399 Oates, Joyce Carol, 3:625 Oberlin College, 2:255, 284–85, 313, 316, 328, 399, 420 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 1:158–59 O’Connor, Flannery, 3:625 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 3:543, 543i Old age and mortality, 1:155– 56, 2:399–400, 400i, 3:655 Omaha tribe, 2:258 Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1:159–60 O’Neale, Margaret L., 1:112, 2:400–01 Oregon Trail, 2:401 O’Reilly, Leonora, 1:160 Original sin, 1:66, 82 Orphan Asylums, 1:113, 116, 189 O’Sullivan, Mary Kenney, 2:360, 401, 440 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 3:513, 529, 656, 718–21 Outwork, 2:273, 401–02, 3:506

P Pacifism, 3:620, 630, 656–58, 683 Packard, Elisabeth, 2:383 Page Act (1875), 2:308, 309, 402– 03, 3:612 Paine, Thomas, 1:21 Painting and sculpture, 1:156– 57, 2:403, 3:542-543 Paiute tribe, 2:258, 394 Parker, Cynthia Ann, 2:403 Parker, Dorothy, 3:658 Parks, Rosa McCauley, 3:504, 518–18, 536, 638, 658– 59, 659i Parrish, Anne, 1:157 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 3:551, 659 Passionlessness, 2:247, 248, 403– 04, 462 Paternalism, 2:404 Patriarchy, 1:10, 23, 98, 109, 110, 111, 133, 157–58, 174 American Revolution and, 1:21 marriage and, 1:140 Old Testament and, 1:12 paternalism and, 2:404 radical feminist critique of, 3:590 Patrilineal society, 1:62 Patterson, Mary Jane, 2:315, 404–05

Paul, Alice, 3:502, 527, 586 Pawnee household economy, 1:158 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 2:405 Pelham, Mary Singleton Copley, 1:158 Penn, Hannah Callowhill, 1:159 Pennsylvania colony, 1:61, 106, 111, 159, 194 religion in, 1: 4, 69, 126, 204 Perkins, Elizabeth Peck, 1:45, 159 Perkins, Frances Peck, 3:503, 528, 599, 650, 659– 60, 660i, 682 Perkins, Maria, 2:465–66 Peterson, Esther Eggertsen, 3:504, 585, 660 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 2:405, 450 Philanthropy, 1:159– 60, 2:381, 405–06 Philipse, Margaret H., 1:160– 61, 194, 200 Photographers, 3:525, 660– 61, 661i Piecework, 2:249, 406, 440, 449, 3:510 Pierce, Jane Means Appleton, 2:406–07 Pierce, Sarah, 1:71, 161 Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, 1:93, 106, 161–62 Pinkham, Lydia, 2:331, 331i Pinney, Eunice Griswold, 1:156, 162 Pitcher, Molly, 1:44, 110 Planned Parenthood, 3:662, 671 Plath, Sylvia, 3:625, 662–63 Plessy v. Ferguson, 2:407 Plymouth Colony, 1:11, 3:515, 508 Pocahontas, 1:151i, 152 Poetry, 1:56, 59, 82, 112, 135, 149–50, 162– 64, 162i, 166, 2:370 of Bradstreet, 1:218–23 of Wheatley, 1:224–27 Polk, Sarah Childress, 2:407 Poor laws, 1:164 Populism, 2:371, 407–08 Pornography, 3:515, 529, 663–64 Porter, Katherine Ann, 3:624 Post, Amy Kirby, 2:279, 408 Poverty, 3:639, 664–65, 665i

Preaching, 1:15–16, 164– 65, 2:246, 388, 408– 10, 409i, 423, 453 Pregnancy, 1:39, 41, 122– 23, 165– 66, 178, 2:306, 3:523, 665 in colonial period, 1:62–63, 63, 65 slavery and, 2:269 Presbyterian Mission Home, 2:281, 285, 309, 321, 388, 410, 414, 463 Presbyterians, 1:14, 69 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, 3:642, 665– 66, 674 Prince, Lucy Terry, 1:166 Printing and publishing, 1:114, 166– 67, 176 See also Literature; Magazines and periodicals; Newspapers Prior, Margaret Barrett Allen, 1:167 Prohibition, 3:624 Property, 1:51, 167–68 children as, 1:65 coverture and, 1:72 gender identity and, 1:108 right to vote and, 1:73 women’s ownership of, 1:7–8, 62, 77, 91, 98, 106–7, 159, 204, 2:253 Property rights, 1:26, 2:352, 376 Prophesying, 1:168, 185 Proprietary colonies, 1:61, 173 Prostitution, 1:167, 168, 173, 2:2 56, 262, 302, 308, 387, 410, 459, 3:666 laws and, 2:423 marriage and, 3:596 moral reform and, 2:397, 404, 440 Protective labor legislation, 2:273, 354, 411, 3:499, 507, 511, 527, 557, 647, 666–67 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and, 3:586–87 Protestants, 1:22, 46, 50–51, 61, 148, 2:259, 261, 303, 320 Public life, women in, 2:252254, 3:502-505 Pueblo household economy, 1:168–69

GENERAL INDEX Puritans, 1:4, 46, 51, 56, 121– 22, 169–70, 184i captivity narratives and, 1:59– 60 children and, 1:66–67 Congregationalism, 1:73 courts and, 1:75 denominationalism and, 1:81– 82 experience of grace and, 1:14 family relations and, 1:11–12 fornication and, 1:101 Jews and, 1:126 literacy and, 1:180 marital relations and, 1:24 patriarchy and, 1:158 predetermination, doctrine of, 2:260 prophesying and, 1:168 scarcity of women and, 1:3 view of magic, 1:139 view of marriage, 1:140 view of motherhood, 1:63 view of women, 1:53, 68 Purvis, Harriet Forten, 2:411

Q Quakers, 1:4, 44, 51, 53, 69, 100–101, 120, 127–28, 145, 149, 170–72, 173, 190, 207, 2:247, 317, 411–12 abolitionism and, 2:256, 278 Betsy Ross and, 1:87 care of widows and, 1:200 denominationalism and, 1:81, 82 gender equality and, 1:14 preaching and, 1:15–16, 164– 65 prophesying and, 1:168 punishment of, 1:25 Second Great Awakening and, 2:260 status of women and, 1:204 tolerant attitude of, 1:126 view of magic, 1:139 women in congregational office, 1:67 Quebec, 1:15, 16, 104 Quilts, 3:667 Quinton, Amelia Stone, 2:355

R Radcliffe College, 2:313, 412 Rainey, Gertrude “Ma,” 3:614, 642, 668, 681

Ramsay, Martha Laurens, 1:172 Randolph, Martha Jefferson, 1:74, 119, 172 Randolph, Mary, 1:172–73 Randolph, Nancy, 1:173 Rankin, Jeannette, 3:657, 686 Rape, 1:7, 9, 46, 72, 77, 188, 2:389, 412–13, 3:515, 529, 668, 668i false accusations of, 2:292 laws concerning, 2:423 lynching and, 2:378 as political metaphor, 1:19 racial fears and, 2:249 Ray, Charlotte E., 2:284 Reagan, Nancy Davis, 3:668–69 Reconstruction, 2:243, 254, 272, 279, 413–14, 3:517 failures of, 2:284 jazz and, 3:614 religion and, 2:261–62 Reed, Esther De Berdt, 1:45, 49, 70 Reed v. Reed, 3:610, 669 Reform, women and, 2:255-258 Religion, 1:14-19, 70, 169, 173– 74, 185, 201, 2:241, 246, 259– 62, 3:669–71 See also Great Awakenings; Missionaries; Preaching; and specific

denominations

Reproductive rights, 3:504, 512, 514, 524, 643, 671 Republicanism, 1:158, 174–75 Republican motherhood, 1:21, 26, 32, 44, 174, 175– 76, 2:246, 253, 259, 272–73 Rescue homes, 2:414 Restell, Madame, 2:280, 281i Rhode Island colony, 1:11, 17, 51, 61, 151, 171, 191 Rich, Adrienne, 3:616, 672 Richards, Ellen Swallow, 2:414– 15, 3:607 Richards, Linda, 2:415 Ride, Sally, 3:548, 641i, 672, 679 Rind, Clementina, 1:166, 176 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 3:672 Roe v. Wade, 3:514, 529, 531, 557, 643, 672–73 See also abortion Rogers, Mary, 2:415–16 Roosevelt, Edith Kermit Carow, 3:673

759

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 3:500, 503, 524–25, 528, 537, 575, 599, 633, 673–74, 674i, 710–14 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 3:537, 598 Rose, Ernestine Louise Potowski, 2:416 Rosenberg, Anna, 3:634 Ross, Betsy, 1:44, 86i, 87 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1:141 Rowlandson, Mary White, 1:16, 60, 60i, 78, 134, 199 Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 1:71, 135, 154, 175, 176– 77, 190i, 192, 206, 210 Royall, Anne Newport, 1:177

Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown), 3:674–75 Rudolph, Wilma, 3:546 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 2:391, 396, 416 Rukeyser, Muriel, 3:675 Rural life, 1:177– 178, 2:271, 416–17, 417i

S Sabin, Florence Rena, 3:675 Sacagawea, 1:178–79, 193i Sadlier, Mary Anne, 2:359 Sage, Margaret Slocum, 3:675– 76 Sager, Ruth, 3:676 Salt of the Earth (film), 3:676 Sampson, Deborah, 1:132–33 Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins, 1:180 Sanger, Margaret, 3:499, 514, 524, 653, 662, 671, 676– 77, 677i, 706 Sanitary Commission, 2:258, 281, 296, 311, 341, 375, 417– 18, 438, 454 Say, Lucy Sistare, 2:418–19 Schlafly, Phyllis Stewart, 3:579, 587, 677 Schools, 1:4, 22, 45, 51, 94, 180– 81, 180i, 192 freedmen’s, 2:256, 292, 338– 39, 445 girls’ attendance, 1:66 Jewish children and, 1:127 parochial, 1:61, 62 See also Colleges; Dame schools; Education Schroeder, Patricia Scott, 3:635, 678

760

GENERAL INDEX

Schuyler, Catherine Van Rensselaer, 1:44, 181–82, 196i Schuyler, Louisa Lee, 2:419, 454 Science and technology, 1:180, 182– 83, 2:418, 419–20, 3:678–79 Second Great Awakening, 2:246, 259–61, 319, 389, 420–21, 437 Sedgwick, Catharine, 2:398, 421 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 3:643 Seminole household economy, 1:183 Seneca Falls Convention (1848), 1:35–36, 2:242, 253, 256, 257, 296, 298, 421, 457, 463, 3:651 woman suffrage and, 3:685 Seneca tribe, 1:29, 45, 126 Separate spheres, ideology of, 2:240, 245–47, 252, 380, 382 Seton, Elizabeth, 1:51, 62 Settlement house movement, 2:282, 421– 23, 3:674, 683 Seventh-Day Adventism, 2:240, 423 Sexton, Anne, 3:662 Sexton, Lydia Cadas Cox, 1:184 Sexual harassment, 1:9, 3:508, 645, 664, 679 Sexuality, regulation of, 1:184– 85, 2:250, 422–23 Sexual revolution, 3:513, 671, 679–80 Shakers, 1:17, 26, 54, 82, 164– 65, 168, 173, 185–86, 188, 201, 206, 2:247, 250, 2:260 Shalala, Donna, 3:680 Shammas, Carole, 1:167 Sharecropping, 2:243, 271, 414, 424, 441 Sharples, Ellen Wallace, 1:156 Shaw, Anna Howard, 2:409 Shawnee tribe, 1:43, 204, 186 Shippen, Anne (Nancy) Home Livingston, 1:76, 83, 186–87 Shoe industry, 2:424–25 Siebert, Muriel, 3:680 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 2:246, 425 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 3:680–81 Slander, 1:8–9, 75, 187 Slave family structure, 1:13, 187, 2:249 Slavery, 1:3, 26, 45, 46-47, 62, 104, 108, 123, 177, 187–

88, 2:265, 268-271, 310, 404, 425–26, 425i Emancipation Proclamation and, 2:329 religion and, 1:18, 145, 172, 2:259, 261 Underground Railroad and, 2:446 U.S. Constitution and, 1:73 Slocum, Frances, 1:188–89 Smeal, Eleanor Cutri, 3:681 Smith, Bessie, 3:614, 681 Smith, Margaret Bayard, 1:189 Smith, Margaret Chase, 3:575, 633, 682 Smith, Sophia, 2:426, 426 Smith College, 2:301, 426 Smith-Lever Act (1914), 3:608, 681, 686 Sobel, Mechal, 1:13 Social control, 1:23–27 Socialism, 3:697 Social Security Act (1935), 3:500, 503, 537, 575, 599, 613, 638, 650, 682 older Americans and, 3:655 Social work, 3:650, 682–83 Society for the Promotion of Industry among the Poor, 1:53 Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, 1:51, 67, 127 “Solitude of Self ” (Stanton), 2:467–71 Solomon, Hannah Greenebaum, 2:392, 426– 27, 461 Sorosis, 2:317, 342–43, 427 South Carolina colony, 1:52, 69, 126, 161-162,184, 194 Southern ladies, 2:242, 299, 427 Spanish household economy, 1:189–90 Spelman Seminary, 2:427 Spies, Civil War, 2:242, 252, 311428 Spiritualism, 2:428–29, 429i, 459 Sports, 1:190 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 2:252, 253–54, 255, 256, 279, 287, 288, 298, 299, 429– 31, 430i, 463, 467, 3:502, 686 Centennial of 1876 and, 2:304 dress reform and, 2:326 friendship and, 2:340 marriage and, 2:383

marriage laws and, 2:384 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and, 2:391, 412, 434, 1823 Women’s National Loyal League and, 2:457 Starbuck, Mary Coffyn, 1:190 Starr, Ellen Gates, 2:314, 353, 422, 431 Stein, Gertrude, 3:625, 683–84 Steinem, Gloria, 3:524, 529, 616, 619, 629, 640, 684 Playboy magazine and, 3:663 Steves, Nettie, 2:418 Stewart, Maria Miller, 2:279, 431 Stone, Lucy, 2:254, 255, 314, 353, 399, 431–32, 435 Stoneman, Abigail, 1:191 Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher, 2:246, 294, 330, 361, 363, 380, 432–33, 462 Streisand, Barbra, 3:554, 616, 640, 684–85 Strikes, 2:257, 433–34 Stuart, Gilbert, 1:55, 138 Suburbanization, 3:522, 616, 685 Suffrage, woman, 1:5, 34–35, 52, 191, 2:243, 254, 257, 318, 434–35, 434i, 3:499, 502, 511, 527, 630, 685–86, 686i abolitionist movement and, 2:287 African-American women and, 2:293 temperance movement and, 2:453 See also Voters, woman Sullivan, Annie, 3:619 Supreme Court, 1:39 Swisshelm, Jane Grey, 2:365

T Taft, Helen Herron, 3:686 Talbot, Marion, 2:313 Tallchief, Maria, 3:572i Tan, Amy, 3:544, 625, 687, 692i Taney, Mary, 1:45, 82 Tarbell, Ida Minerva, 2:382, 3:524, 618, 687-588 Taussig, Helen Brooke, 3:688–89 Taylor, Margaret Mackall Smith, 2:436 Taylor, Susie King, 2:436 Taylor v. Louisiana, 3:689

GENERAL INDEX Teaching, 1:5, 2:253, 271, 293, 316, 336, 436–37, 3:507 as women’s profession, 2:368, 386, 3:580 See also Education Tekakwitha, Catherine, 1:191–92 Television and radio, 3:689–90 Temperance, 1:18, 35, 2:241, 253, 257, 261, 274, 296, 317, 318, 330, 336, 351, 437– 39, 437i, 447, 3:503 Tenayuca, Emma, 3:690 Tenements, 2:421, 439–40, 439i Tenney, Tabitha Gilman, 1:192 Terrell, Mary Church, 2:315, 391, 440–41, 3:527, 644 Tevis, Julia Hieronymous, 1:18, 181, 197 Textbook writing, 1:192 Textile industry, 2:271, 335, 343, 357, 441 Tharp, Twyla, 3:597 Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton, 2:441 Thomas, Martha Carey, 2:441– 42 Thompson, Sarah, countess of Rumford, 1:192–93 Tibbles, Susette La Flesche, 2:258, 442 Tillson, Christiana Holmes, 2:442 Timothy, Ann Donovan, 1:193, 200 Timothy, Elizabeth Ann, 1:193 Title IX, 3:539, 546, 580, 646, 691, 709 Title VII, 3:504, 528, 558, 559– 60, 580, 584, 690-691 Tituba, 1:75, 193–94, 203 Tomlin, Lily, 3:691-692 Towle, Nancy, 2:443 Trade and retailing, 1:61, 194 Transcendentalism, 2:321, 405

Treatise on Domestic Economy, A (Beecher), 2:246, 460–63 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 3:557, 656, 659, 692693, 693i Troy Female Seminary, 1:5, 2:255, 313, 328, 388, 429, 443, 453 Truman, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, 3:693 Truth, Sojourner, 2:252, 270, 285, 443–44, 443i, 457

Tubman, Harriet, 2:252, 311, 444–45, 444i Turell, Jane Colman, 1:194 Tuskegee Institute, 2:445 Tuthill, Louisa Caroline Huggins, 1:66 Tyler, Letitia Christian, 2:445 Tyler, Mary Hunt Palmer, 1:194–95

U UAW v. Johnson Controls, 3:693-694 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 1:12, 50, 63, 161

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 2:246

Underground Railroad, 2:252, 311, 341, 350, 391, 408, 446 Harriet Tubman and, 2:444, 446 Oberlin College and, 2:399 Unions, labor, 2:273, 367368, 3:694- 695 Unitarians, 1:73, 180 United Tailoresses Society, 2:451–53 Urbanization, 2:274–76, 3:695696 Urban life, 1:195

V Van Buren, Hannah Hoes, 1:195–96 Vanderbilt, Gloria, 3:697 Van Kleeck, Mary, 3:697 Van Rensselaer, Maria Van Cortlandt, 1:196, 200 Vassar College, 2:313, 389, 420, 447 Vickery, Sukey, 1:196 Vietnam War, 3:548, 622, 697– 98 pacifism and, 3:657 women’s military service in, 3:634 Violence Against Women Act (1994), 3:725–26 Virginia colony, 1:7, 46, 66, 70, 109, 123, 168 domestic life in, 1:12, 13, 772, 76, 80 Virginia Company, 1:61 brides, 1:196 proceedings of, 1:210–13 Voice of Industry, 2:447, 463

761

Voluntary associations, 1:4, 22, 175, 196–97, 2:253, 405, 417, 447–48 Voters, woman, 1:44, 50, 54, 57, 197 See also suffrage, woman

W Wage earners, 1:198, 2:271, 448– 50 Wakefield, Priscilla Bell, 1:183 Wald, Lillian D., 2:422 Walker, Alice, 3:611, 640, 698699 Walker, Sarah Breedlove McWilliams, 3:585 Walters, Barbara, 3:525, 619, 699 Wampanoag tribe, 1:60, 130, 199 War Brides Act, 3:612, 699 Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 2:450 Ward, Nancy, 1:63, 104, 106 message to Cherokee Council, 2:450–51 Warner, Susan, 2:246, 398, 450 War of 1812, 1:53, 58, 74, 114, 128, 138 Warren, Mercy Otis, 1:21, 44, 174, 235–38 Washington, Booker T., 2:445 Washington, George, 1:21, 49, 70, 78–79, 90, 112, 132 in French and Indian War, 1:117, 175 Washington, Margaret James Murray, 2:445 Washington, Martha, 1:78–79, 84, 90, 159, 175 Washington, Mary Ball, 1:198 Watteville, Henrietta Benigna Justine Zinzendorf von, 1:198–99 Webster, Delia, 2:446 Weeks v. Southern Bell, 3:699700 Weetamoo, 1:199 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 2:247, 255, 279, 305, 347, 420, 450– 51 marriage and, 2:383 Welfare, 3:639, 646, 664, 700701 Wellesley College, 2:301, 313, 451, 3:683 Wells, Rachel Lovell, 1:199

762

GENERAL INDEX

West, Mae, 3:640, 701, 701i Western expansion, 2:263-267 Western frontier, family life, 2:452, 452i Wharton, Edith Jones, 3:701702, 702i Wheatley, Phillis, 1:104, 135, 163 poetry of, 1:224–27 White, Helen Magill, 2:328 White, John, 1:64 White women, 1:45, 73, 105, 187–88 anti-miscegenation laws and, 1:46–47, 2:290 captivity narratives and, 1:78 defense of slavery in South, 2:242 fertility rates (nineteenth century), 1:11 friendship with slaves, 1:104 moral authority and, 2:324 rape and, 2:413 status of, 1:204–5 on Western frontier, 2:452 westward expansion and, 2:262 Widowhood, 1:24, 199– 200, 204, 2:452–53, 458 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 3:702 Wilkinson, Eliza Yonge, 1:200– 01 Wilkinson, Jemima, 1:17, 26, 44, 82, 165, 168, 201, 2:420 Willard, Emma Hart, 1:5, 181, 2:246, 255, 313, 443, 453, 435 Willard, Frances Elizabeth Caroline, 2:257, 352, 365, 375, 385, 438, 453–54, 455 Williams, Claudine, 3:702-703 Williams, Frances Barrier, 2:306, 454 Williams, Roger, 1:51, 69, 151 Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt, 3:703 Wilson, Ellen Louise Axson, 3:703 Wilson, Sarah, 1:201 Winfrey, Oprah, 3:558, 584, 703–05 Winnemucca, Sara, 2:394 Winthrop, Elizabeth Fones, 1:201–2 Winthrop, Margaret Tyndal, 1:105, 201, 202 Witch trials, Salem, 1:8, 68, 75, 78, 105, 154, 193, 202–3, 216i Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1:26

Womanist, 3:705

Woman Rebel, The (newspaper), 3:706–08 Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women, 2:361 Woman’s Peace Party, 3:705 Women, status of, 1:3–4, 203–5 Women Accepted for Emergency Volunteer Service (WAVES), 3:633, 705706, 705i Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS), 3:652, 706 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act (1948), 3:634, 705, 706 Women’s Army Corps (WAC), 3:633, 706 Women’s Baseball Leauge, 3:706-707 Women’s Bureau, 3:528, 558, 585, 660, 707 Women’s Central Association of Relief, 2:377, 418, 419, 454 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 2:257–58, 262, 350, 352, 365, 375, 453, 454–55 Women’s club movement, 2:305– 06, 427, 455–56 Women’s Equity Action League, 3:707 Women’s Independent Forum, 3:707-708 Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), 3:623, 708 Women’s liberation movement, 3:504, 529, 581, 708-709 art world and, 3:544 athletics and, 3:620 jazz and, 3:615 pornography and, 3:663 rape and, 3:668 Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, 2:384, 385, 456-457 Women’s music festivals, 3:529 Women’s National Basketball Association, 3:709, 709i Women’s National Indian Association, 2:355 Women’s National Loyal League, 2:456, 457, 457 Women’s Philharmonic, 3:643

Women’s rights movement, 1:18, 2:242, 252, 255, 312, 317, 357, 386, 412, 438, 457–58, 3:515 Women’s Sports Foundation, 3:709-710 Women’s studies, 3:501, 529, 645, 710 Women’s Trade Union League, 3:502, 541 Wood, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating, 1:205–6 Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, 2:250, 252, 332, 390, 458, 458–59, 459, 459i, 463

Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 2:458, 459, 463

Working class, 2:249, 253, 271, 333, 357, 358, 439, 459– 260, 3:507 Working Girls’ Clubs, 2:455, 460 Working Women’s Protective Union, 2:408, 460 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 2:300, 392, 460–61 World War I, 2:298, 3:499, 506, 527, 539, 548, 575, 646, 672, 710-711 African-American women and, 3:536 pacifism and, 3:657, 683 women in military during, 3:633 women’s organizations and, 3:686 World War II, 3:500, 502, 503, 505, 506, 513, 522, 525, 528, 711-713, 712i African-American women and, 3:536 entertainment and, 3:550 fashion and, 3:588 internment of Japanese Americans, 3:582 jazz and, 3:614 pinup girls, 3:533, 597 quilting and, 3:667 sports and, 3:544 women pilots in, 3:548, 652 women’s employment during, 3:557, 576, 576i, 608, 637 women’s role in, 3:633–34 Wright, Frances, 2:251, 461–62 Wright, Lucy, 1:17, 206 Wright, Martha, 2:463

GENERAL INDEX

Y Wright, Patience Lovell, 1:157, 206–7 Wright, Susanna, 1:207 Writers, 1:134-135, 2:246, 462– 63, 3:626-628 Wu Tien Fu, 2:410, 463–64

Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman, 3:714 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 2:312, 464, 3:604, 622, 714 Youth culture, 3:714-715

763

Z Zaharias, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, 3:544, 715716, 721i Zakrewska, Marie, 2:384 Zane, Elizabeth “Betty,” 1:44, 208 Zenger, John Peter, 1:42, 166