In Antebellum America, gender roles were an important factor in how society ran socially and politically. A middle to upper class woman in the North would rarely be seen outside her home. Women were to be submissive, fragile and stay inside the bounds of their private sphere, which was the home. Men were to be the breadwinners, masculine, and politically engaged. Gender roles in the South were somewhat different than that of the North, but were still heavily patriarchal. Women had little to no say in anything in their personal lives as well as politically because they did not have the right to vote. However, in the mid 1830’s to 1840’s, different moral reform movements such as temperance, sexual morality and abolition swept the Middle-Atlantic …show more content…
Women were to operate on a completely separate sphere than their husbands. A woman’s place according to the cult of domesticity was in the home where everything in her life would be completely privatized. Women had no say in anything politically, that was the man’s job. Women were to Under this thought process, women were “designed exclusively” to be good wives and mothers. Women were expected to be seen and not heard. Women were valued for their purity, piety, and …show more content…
However, in the 1830s and 1840s some women got a chance to receive some freedom from the realms of the home. Early Antebellum America was characterized by prostitution, disease, crime, and violence. These problems afflicted pretty much the entire nation, but hit large cities like New York extremely hard. This made moral reform one of the most predominant movements during the Antebellum Era. In 1834, the New York Female Moral Reform Society was established under the leadership of Lydia A. Finney, the wife of Second Great Awakening revivalist Charles Finney.1 The New York Female Moral Reform Society’s main goal was to reform the prostitution problem in America. In a pamphlet printed by the society, under the heading that is labeled “Our Objective” the reformers included this line, “When the husbands and fathers and sons will come up to this work with the noble spirit they evince in other labors of Christian philanthropy, the wives and mothers and daughters will gladly retire from their present prominent station in the cause of Moral Reform, and become, as they were designed to be, the efficient helpers of the stronger sex.” The reformers made sure to make it evident that although women were helping in the reform movement and stepping outside their boundaries a little bit, that
Their methods to achieve their goals were raising public awareness for women suffrage, and creating a social organization to help the poor out. All in this proves in the 1800’s and early 1900’s reformers in the unites states had their own goals and trying different methods to advance the
In the mid-1800s, many Americans had concerns about the issues occurring and the impact they made on the United States. To put an end to these numerous issues, many Americans decided to form groups, organizations, and also individuals. They would come up with a variety of strategies to make a change. One of the many issues was women rights. In the mid-1800s, women had a hard time being a woman back then.
The next chapter highlights the gendered division of labor and the difficulty to keep a family as a slave. Chapter six and seven moves on to the eighteenth century and shows how women have improved in areas such as more political participation and increasing social class of
Specifically, southern white women used this period to elevate their social status so that they could climb the social tower to gain power and compare to men. Southern women wanted to get out of the ideal that women should only be housewives, so they used slaves to relieve themselves of house chores, which brought them away from just being housewives. This elevated them socially because instead of being ridden with housework, they were give leisure time and time to focus on their husbands and wives. Slaves were thought to benefit because slave owners would take care of the slaves and that they would be better off being a slave than running around Africa. Slave owners would give slaves food, shelter, and clothing, take care of their children, and teach them christianity (Jones, 102).
While reading about American history the thing that I found most appealing was the limited rights that women had during this era. Although women gave the early settlers longer life expectancy and brought hope to their future, women still were not considered equal to a man. Women were discriminated against and didn’t play an important role in early American history. Generally, women had fewer legal rights and career opportunity than men because they were considered weak and not able to perform certain tasks. Different women came from different ethnic backgrounds and were all created equal in the eyes of men.
For women in the Southern Colonies had very few legal rights such as not being able to vote or preach. Most women had difficult jobs most of the women 's jobs were being homemakers. Life for the women were hard and unforgiving. Life for the colonial women had to work on farms.
Women in the 1600s to the 1800s were very harshly treated. They were seen as objects rather than people. They were stay-at-home women because people didn’t trust them to hold jobs. They were seen as little or weak. Women living in this time period had to have their fathers choose their husbands.
Women finally got the freedom to have a choice as well as options on things in their lives. “The best-remembered antebellum reforms was a women’s rights movement, its arrival signaled by a stirring “Declaration of Sentiments” issued in 1848 by a convention in Seneca
The Cult of Domesticity goal was to involve women in the public world where they had no status. Angelina Grimke states, “Now, I believe it is woman’s right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is governed, whether in Church or State”(Doc. C). This quote further shows that women didn’t have many rights beyond the home even though they belonged to her as much as they did to a man. Women expressed their grievances through writing to reveal the reality of their life.
The life of Women in the late 1800s. Life for women in the 1800s began to change as they pushed for more rights and equality. Still, men were seen as better than women, this way of thinking pushed women to break out from the limitations imposed on their sex. In the early 1800s women had virtually no rights and ultimately were not seen as people but they rather seen as items of possession, it wasn’t until the late 1800s that women started to gain more rights. The Civil War actually opened opportunities for women to gain more rights, because with many of the men gone to war women were left with the responsibilities that men usually fulfilled during that time period.
Boydston writes, “But if middle-class women were encased in the image of the nurturant (and non laboring) mother, working-class women found that their visible inability to replicate that model worked equally hard against them.” The standard during the Antebellum period was a woman that didn’t do any kind of laborious task other than housework which was thought as being an enriching and awarding process. However, wage-earning women visibly were unable to live up to these new standards because they were forced out of their own gender sphere of domesticity just to find work. During the Antebellum period, it was believed to be a men’s sphere to work and men masculinity was based on the fact of being the main “breadwinner” for the family. By a woman going into this sphere they went against the formation of the two gender spheres.
Women were to take care of their homes and farms. In the Modern Era, there has been a lot of changes. Women are not just servants, home keepers or housewives. They are free to discover who they are and
There were very high standards for women during the Elizabethan Era. Elizabethans thought that a woman’s outer appearance was merely a reflection of her inner condition (Papp and Kirkland). Women were valued for their beauty and qualities such as being submissive, passive, modest, humble, temperate, and kind (Zuber). A good woman was also obedient, modest, and had virtue and chastity (Papp and Kirkland). John Knox, a Scottish protestant leader said, “Women in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man” (Alchin).
The Homestead Act is a special Act that promoted migration to the western part of US. Public lands were made easily accessible to settlers with a small filing fee in exchange for 160 acres of land to be used for farming. Homesteaders received ownership of the land after continuously residing on the land for five years. Homesteaders also had an alternative of acquiring the land from the government by paying a specified amount per acre, after six months of residency. The Homestead Act resulted in the distribution of million acres of public land (Library of Congress n.p).
“Women could not be doctors, priests, judges, or lawyers” (Hopkins 8). For several years there was these bias towards men and because of that women were not entitled to vote, did not receive an education unless you were of royalty, and they were forced to surrender any land inherited to them to their husbands or brother. Women were also only allowed to move to a new community by marrying a man from a different