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SS360: American Women
Republican Motherhood(post-Revolutionary War)
Duty was to raise civic-minded sons Women should be educated and educate
their children Many women began to participate civically…
like Abigail Adams.“I desire you would remember the ladies and
be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” – Abigail Adams
http://www.thelizlibrary.org/suffrage/abigail.htm
Cult of True Womanhood(Cult of Domesticity)
Prevalent from the Civil War to 1920 or so
Main purpose in life was motherhood
Characteristics include:
Piety Purity Submissiveness Domesticity
Therefore all True Women were urged, in the strongest possible terms, to maintain their virtue, although men, being by nature more sensual than they, would try to assault it. Thomas Branagan admitted in The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated that his sex would sin and sin again, but woman, stronger and purer, must not give in and let man "take liberties incompatible with her delicacy." "If you do," Branagan addressed his gentle reader, "You will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution.“
If such good advice was ignored the consequences were terrible and inexorable... A popular and often reprinted story by Fanny Forester told the sad tale of "Lucy Dutton." Lucy "with the seal of innocence upon her heart, and a rose-leaf upon her cheek," came out of her vine-covered cottage and ran into a city slicker. "And Lucy was beautiful and trusting, and thoughtless... Needs the story be told- Nay....Lucy was a child - consider how young, how very untaught - oh! Her innocence was no match for the sophistry of a gay, city youth! Spring came and shame was stamped upon the cottage at the foot of the hill." The baby died; Lucy went mad at the funeral and finally died herself... The frequency with which derangement follows loss of virtue suggests the exquisite sensibility of woman, and the possibility that, in the womenÌs magazines at least, her intellect was geared towards her hymen, not her brain.... If, however, a woman managed to withstand manÌs assaults on her virtue, she demonstrated her superiority and power over him... Men could be counted on to be grateful when women thus saved them from themselves...
The New Woman
Slightly overlaps and represents tension between old traditions and new ideals and progressivism.
Reform movements and philanthropy Usually middle-class; college-educated
Ida Tarbell, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-117944
Front page of expose of
the Standard Oil
Company, written by
Ida Tarbell, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-
51280
1920’s Women – A shift
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg3QBwtOGSI
American Women
This is an AD for Birth Control from 1963. What does this ad tell us? How was this a shift in thinking from say the early 1900s and before?
American Women
Why was birth control so important in changing the lives of women? This is something
that feminists such as Crystal Eastman and Margaret Sanger worked fervently on.
American Women
What was/is the relationship between sexuality and the advertisement of consumer goods?
American Women
What impact would the media, including magazines and television/ movies have on changing notions of sexuality? Think about those previous images. What
are they selling? How does this stand in stark contrast to the
ideals of “true womanhood?”
Questions? Comments?
American Women
ReferencesPatterson, M. (1995). Survival of the best
fitted: Selling the American new woman as Gibson Girl, 1895-1910. ATQ, 9(2), 73. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Images: All retrieved from the Library of Congress database at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
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