10-15-CH6-GildedAfeMaternalCommonwealth Flashcards
What’s the basic time period of this chapter? Is it defined by a specific event, what are the specific dates covered?
1865-1890
“Maternal Commonwealth” in the Gilded Age
Post Civil War Time period.
What is the thesis?
In the battles over the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights to black men, suffrage became a central issue within the movement for women’s rights as well. Female citizenship, in turn, began to take on new meanings in a world infused with racial and class conflict as well as tensions between women and men.
What is the “hook” story?
“Law me, talk about crying and singing and crying some more, we sure done it.” That was how Mary Armstrong remembered her reunion with her mother in Texas several years after the Civil War. She had searched for her since 1863 when she received her own freedom in Missouri at the are of seventeen.
- Intro What general theme does the “hook” story in the intro illustrate?
That life was changing rapidly. People were more mobile. And voting rights were changing for African-Americans, but not women.
What is the conclusion? This is located in the last couple of paragraphs and are set off of the main text with a small flag emblem. (Read this after reading the intro and before reading the sections to focus the reading)
- Between 1865 and 1890 public life
- “Woman’s sphere” was evolving in new and internally contradictory ways
- Republican motherhood had bifurcated into two women’s movements: Republicanism fueled the demand for woman suffrage and full citizenship led by two different suffrage associations.Motherhood, as defined in Victorian domesticity, fostered a vision of maternal commonwealth, an ideology about the public importance of domestic values surfacing in temperance, women’s clubs the YWCA and the Knights of Labor.
On the other hand, expectations of domesticity had begun to change, and the cumulative impact of changing marital patterns along with women’s increased public presence generated a backlash itself in the name of domesticity
List the Section Headings
Aftermath of War: Reconstruction, Abolition, and Women’s Rights
From the WCTU to Populism: Origins of Maternal Commonwealth
Immigrant and Working-Class Women in the Industrial City
Maternal Professions and Sororal Associations
What are the 4 things that Evans does in her writing?
- Is she setting you up with background?
- Explains the why of her thesis
- Explains the effects of something that happens. She articulated the effects.
- Answers the “what” … what the major changes were
maternal commonwealth
- appealed to middle-class, Protestant women
- Agenda forwarded by the WCTU
- Women believed in their mission as moral guardians and as nurturers
- They were critical of public life in a rapidly changing, patriarchal world that endangered the lives and morals of poor, single women outside the protective embrace of middle-class families
- They created new institutions to safeguard other women’s morality and domesticity
Does the section reading answer the question outlined in the intro? How does the evidence presented support the thesis?
Aftermath of War: Reconstruction, Abolition, and Women’s Rights
- The creation of 2 women’s suffrage organizations sustains the suffrage movement for over 2 decades. A mention of women’s suffrage does make it into the Republican platform briefly in 1872
- ## The Black vote prevents the white Democrats from reclaiming control of southern states and thwarting the legislative goals of Republicans in Congress.In the battles over the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights to black men, suffrage became a central issue within the movement for women’s rights as well.
The Crop lien System
- Land owners provided seed, tools and land on credit against the income of the future crop
- That income rarely erased the debt creating another kind of slavery
- Black sharecroppers were in perpetual debt
African American value of Mutuality
- Turning to the community for support
- Individualistic competition had few rewards,
- Women played a strong and visible roles in their families and in associations
Freedom for African Americans
Among other things it meant making one’s own decisions, not taking orders from whites, sustaining an independent family life, and learning to read and write.
Ku Klux Klan
- Stifled any independence or success achieved by African Americans
The subservience of african-american women
Northern black leaders urged that black women should be model housewives
- Black men experienced a loss of manhood through enslavements and unemployment and female subservience within a patriarchal family furnished one symbol of its reassertion
- In S. Carolina black leaders were urging men “to get the women into their proper place–never to tell them anything of their concerns”
American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) founded in 1869
- Founded by Lucy Stone and Blackwell
- Pledged support for the 15th amendment
- Women’s suffrage best achieved at the State level
- Believed that the Republicans would support women’s suffrage once blacks were enfranchised.
- Only managed a brief mention of woman suffrage in the 1872 platform. Did not resurface again until 1916
- Produced a weekly newspaper Woman’s Journal
National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) founded 1869
- founded by Stanton and Anthony
- Refused to support the 15th Amendment unless it enfranchised women
- Feared that this would be the last opportunity to have the issue on the political agenda
- Took money from racest Democrats like George Train who advocated white women suffrage as a weapon against black political power (i.e. white women could outvote blacks)
- Chose to work at the national lovel for an all-inclusive suffrage amendment, believing that state-by-state progress would be lengthy, arduous, and difficult to achieve.
- Reached out to new groups of women who had not previouslyb een touched by political struggle: teachers and journalists: women who had become active during the war through the Sanitary Commission, and others in the middle class who found the restrictions of domesticity increasingly confining.f
NWSA
- Made no concession to Victorian ideals
- Used publicity-grabbing, activist tactics.
- 1872: Backed the presidential campaign of Victoria Woodhull, a flamboyant advocate of free love who maintained that women were already enfranchised under the 14th and 15th Amendments
- Members of NWSA tried to vote in several communities and when refused, cast their ballots in a special box in protest
Industrialization of Time
- Women’s lives became detached from the earth’s seasons.
- Factory whistles sang out at hte same time regardless of weather or changes in teh sunrise or sunset
- Train schedules imposed new “time zones” so that arrivals a nd departures could be predictable and synchronized
- Family time diverged increasingly from industrial time as industries rationalized and routinized their procedures.
- Time changed its meaning.
Woman’s Journal
- Weekly newspaper by the AWSA
- Masthead: “Devoted to the Interests of Woman, to her Education, Industrial, Legal and Political Equality and especially her right to Suffrage.”
How does the evidence presented support the thesis?
Answer
Does the next section apply the same tactics that you used on the first section to this section.
From the WCTU to Populism: Origins of Maternal Commonwealth
Answer
Birth of the Temperance Movement 1873-1874
- Began in small midwestern towns
- Issue had its roots in the antebellum era
- Attacked a particular male behavior, the consumption of alcohol.
- Eruption of the temperance issue occurred in the midst of an economic depression.
1st intercontinental railroad is completed in 1869
- Shortened coast to coast travels form several months to several days
- Made the east coast markets accessible to farmers in the west
Frances Willard
- President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 1879-1899
- Leading educator and former dean of Evanston College for Ladies
- Passionate advocate of Victorian womanhood “Womanliness first–afterwards what you will”
- Advocate of the “Home Protection Ballot” a limited suffrage demand through which “the mothers and daughters of America could participate in decisions about whether “the door of the rum shop is opened or shut beside their homes.”
- Willard used women’s commitments to clubs and missionary societies and their social posture as moral guardians of the home to bring thousands into public, political activity for the first time.
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
- Organized in 1874 in response to the midwestern women’s crusade.
- Men are not allowed to join
- Frances Willard, president from 1879 to 1899
Cooperative Commonwealth
- 1880s
- White and black farmers in the west and the south founded cooperatives to free themselves from the crop-lien system and the threat of peonage
- Small farmers became visible to one another and thier collective power emboldened them to envision a social order in which cooperation and human values would claim priority
- Mary Elizabeth Lease, an Irish woman from Kansas and mother of four who was admitted to the Kansas bar in 1886 said “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more Hell.”
“Do Everything” Policy of the WCTU
- Autonomous choices for local chapters
- Passed in 1882 at the UCTU national convention
- Encouraged local chapters to work on any and all issues they deemed important
- Allowed conservative chapters to avoid issues, while unleashing the energy and creativity of militant activists
Mary Elizabeth Lease
- Populist version of maternal commonwealth or politicized domesticity
“Thank God we women are blameless for this political muddle you men have dragged us into… Ours is a grand and holy mission… to place the mothers of this nation on an equality with the fathers.”