10-22-CH7-WomenAndModernity Flashcards
What is the “hook” story?
- Frances harper speaks to the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.
- “Today we stand on the threshold of woman’s era. In her hand are possibilities whose use or abuse must tell upon the political life of the nation, and send their influence for good or evil across the track of unborn ages.”
What is the Title and dates of chapter 7?
Women and Modernity
1890-1920
What is the thesis?
The middle-class “new woman” and the working-class “working girl” enjoyed a measure of individuality and autonomy that frightened many of their contemporaries. Their interaction sparked a new “domestic politics” and a flowering of female voluntary associations. It brought into the middle classes some aspect of the maternal commonwealth. But the individuality of the new woman and the working firl also marked a shift away from communal domesticity, undermining a Victorian culture with a new drive toward autonomy, pleasure, and consumption.
- Intro What general theme does the “hook” story in the intro illustrate?
Women are beginning to feel and articulate their power. And Frances Harper is calling upon women to take up and express that power.
What’s the basic time period of this chapter? Is it defined by a specific event, what are the specific dates covered?
1890-1920
- It covers the birth of the Modern Woman
- The Passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote
- WW1 happened
List the Section Headings
The New Woman A Reunited Woman Suffrage Movement The Working Girl The Breakdown of Victorianism Paradoxes of Modernity New Life in the Suffrage Movement
Does just thinking about the significance of these titles give you any indication of how you’re going to answer the main question and how Sara Evans is going to support her thesis?
I think these sections will nicely lead us to the evolution of this new independence on the part of women and the growing and rousing voice of suffrage as it concludes with the 19th Amendment
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)
- Women gain the vote with the passage of the 19th amendment while the right undermined their collectivity
- Women created institutions that demanded that the government take some responsibility for community life… such as safe drinking water
- Middle class prejudices towards blacks, immigrants, and the working class
- The female professional, and the enticements of pleasure and leisure undermines the solidarity of 19th century middle-class women’s culture rooted in domesticity
- Educated women become more modern with a greater detachment from tradition and community.
- Appropriated the language of “science” to assert thier individual rights
- Growing hatred against all things foreign… red scare post war
What are the 4 things that Evans is doing with 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
Does the section reading answer the question outlined in the intro? How does the evidence presented support the thesis?
Answer
Section Heading: The New Woman
- The emergence of the college-educated, frequently unmarried, and self-supporting new woman.
- Challenged conventional wisdom about women’s intellectual capacities
- Developed deep and loving bonds with both teachers and sister students.
- 1870: More than 11K women enrolled in higher education (21% of all students)
- 1880: 40K women students enrolled in higher education (32% of all students)
- Graduation gave 2 choices: Traditional domesticity of marriage or a career of paid work.
Modern America
- urban, industrial, bureaucratic
* came of age between 1890-1920
Collective Power of Women
- reached its apex in a massive push for political reform and woman suffrage.
- Am. women shaped that new order with a profusion of new voluntary associations, instutuitions and social movements
Frances Harper
- Black woman who addressed the Congress of Representative Women in 1893
- “Today we stand on the threshhold of woman’s era. In her hand are possibilities whose use or abuse must tell upon the political life of the nation, and sent their influence for good or evil across the track of unborn ages.”
The Ascendency of Science
- A vision of efficiency and order in the physical, chemical and biological universe
- Order could be harnessed and put to use
- With the Germ Theory, infectious diseases are suddenly understandable and preventable
- Science meshed with the rational, secular wordview of the middle class
- Virtually anything could be classified and counted
The Gibson Girl
Played tennis and golf and rode a bicycle
The New Woman - Choosing Career
While assuring their critics that educated women certainly would be superior mothers, they went on th argue that those who chose careers over marriage would unleash maternal skills and capacities on a needy world–schooling the young, tending to the poor, nd improving the health of women and children.
National Consumers’ League
- consolidated the collective power of female voluntary associations
- Furnished women a base of expertise from which to shape public policy for a generation
Settlement House Movement
- Begun in 1889 with the establishment of Hull House by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr
- Established in a poor immigrant neighborhood of Chicago
- Spread to most major cities
- 1890: Nearly 100 houses established, most by women
- Provided a new family, a cross between the traditional home and the college dormitory
Jane Addams
- Founder of Hull House
- Wanted to do something significant with her life and education
- Conceived the idea of renting “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.”
- “City housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities” (1906 NAWSA Convention)
Florence Kelley
- leader of Hull House in 1892
Joined with Illinois Women’s Alliance to work for protective labor legislation for working women and children.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs
- Founded in 1890
- Brought together 200 clubs representing 20K women
- 1900: 150K members
- 1920: 1M members
- Embedded ideas of female benevolence and civic action
- As one member put it, “What college life is to the young woman, club life is to the woman of riper years, who amidst the responsibilities and cares of home life still wishes to keep abreast of the time, still longs for the companionship of those who, like herself, do not wish to cease to be studentsbecause they have left school.”
The 1893-94 depression
- left thouseand jobless, homeless and utterly desparate from the heart of the poorest neighborhoods radicalized settlement house workers, as did association with working-class women.
National Consumers’ League (NCL)
- sponsored a “white label” campaign in which manufacturers who met their standards could use NCL labels on their clothes.
- Lobbied for maximum hour and minimum wage laws
- Never able fully to overcome the differences in experience and perception that divided young working women from their wealthy patrons
Department Stores
- Offered shoppers the equivalent of a whole street full of small shops
- A bright and attractive environment that invited impulse buying and promised shopping as an invigorating pleasure
Mary Church Terrell
- Oberlin College graduate
- Prominent activist
- “Self-preservation demands that [Black women] go among the lowly, illiterate and even the vicious, to whom they are bound by ties of race and sex … to reclaim them.”
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
- Galvanized the black community with her crusade against lynching in 1892
- Daughter of Mississippi slaves and a former teacher
- Edited her own newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee
- 1892: Following a brutal lynching of 3 black businessmen, she undertook an investigation and expose of the economic motives behind white violence
- Resist, she urge the black community.; demonstrate economic power with a boycott of white businesses
- defend the honor of black womanhood and manhood by exposing the fraudulent cry of “rape” with which the white community justifies its terrorism.
- started a national and international crusade against lynching and
- Played a key founding role in a series of black women’s clubs
National Association of Colored Women (NACW)
- Founded in 1896
- United more than three dozen such clubs in 12 states and Washington, D.C.
- Mary Church Terrell of NACW
- Emphasizing self-help and community responsibility
- The business of providing classes of all sorts, recreation, welfare institutions–kindergartens, orphanages, homes for the elderly and for working girls–and public health campaigns
- Trained new leadership within the black community
- Pushed male leaders, including the powerful Booker T. Washington, to fight for the rights and dignity of black women
Atlanta Neighborhood Union
- founded in 1908
- Founded by wives of faculty members at Spelman and Morehouse colleges
- The settlement house movement entered the black community
Section Heading: A Reunited Woman Suffrage Movement
Answer
Individual autonomy
- Pursuit of pleasure and consumption fueled by larger and more distant institutions that increasing dominated the politic and culture of America
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
- Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone, initiate a process by which the two organizations agreed to merge
- Founded with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as its president
- Susan B. Anthony succeeded Stanton in 1892 and remained a key leader until her death in 1906
- Was internally divided over strategy: Anthony preferred to work for a federal amendment to the Constitution, many others continued to advocate state level pressure for referenda and legislation
Female reform tradition arguments for suffrage
- Women’s just claim to equal rights
- The state needed women precisely because of their difference.
- By 1890s, they developed a new and sophisticated notion of the role of the state, particulary in response to the massive urban problems of hunger, housing, sanitation and education.
Anna Garlin Spencer
- Spoke at the NAWSA convention in 1898 on th “Fitness of Women to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Moral Development.”
- “So long as the State concerned itself with only the most external and mechanical of social interests” the presumption that men should rule was “inevitable, natural and beneficent.The instant, however, the State took upon itself any form of educative, charitable, or personally helpful work, it entered the area of distinctive feminine training and powers, and therefore became in need of the service of woman.”
- Her view that the absence of women would harm the “mother-office of the State” anticipated Jane Addams’ assertion
Suffragists
- Asserted that women’s nature suited them to the new social responsibilities of the state
- Claimed that female morality would clean up corruption
- Women needed the vote to protect their own special interests whether as mothers concerned for the education of thier children, as working women subjected to exploitation without protection, or as the abused wives of drunkards
- Returned to the basic tenets of republican motherhood to argue that the vote would enhance women’s capacity to carry out their traditional roles.
- Suffrage advocates increasingly espoused the class and race prejudices of the white middle class.
Progressive movement
- The feminization of government as a means of reform by proposing curbs on (male) competition and curruption and new, nurturing roles for the state.
Grover Cleaveland
female voting threatened to disrupt “a natural equilibrium so nicely adjusted to the attributes and limitations of both [women and men] that it cannot be disturbed without social confusion and peril
* Suffragists replied, restored social order rather than threatening it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- writings began to appear in the 1892
- key theorist of “domestic politics”
- Daugher of old New England family, great-granddaughter of theologian Lyman Beecher and great niece of Cahtarine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
- had an independent life in which she supported herself with lectures and writings
- A socialist, Gilman argued that economic independence was the most fundamental necessity for women
- She advocated the professionalization of housework with collectivized cleaning, cooking, and child care
- Porposed that the key to future change lay in transforming the socialization of young children so that girls and boys would no longer be limited in thier perception of their own capacities and life choices.
- the idea of property as the foundation of civic virtue even as its more equitable distribution transforms the membership in public community.
