11-5-CH9-GreatDepression

Question 0

What’s the basic time period of this chapter? Is it defined by a specific event, what are the specific dates covered?

Answer 0

1930’s
The Great Depression
The New Deal

Question 1

What is the Title and dates of chapter 9?

Answer 1

Surviving the Great Depression

Question 3

What is the “hook” story?

Answer 3

The birth of the Hollywood Femme Fatales
Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo
Strong, Grown up women

Question 4

1. Intro What general theme does the “hook” story in the intro illustrate?

Answer 4

Women needed to be grown up and partners in survival

Question 5

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?

Answer 5

Feminism lost ground. Women’s specific voices are lost and unacknowledged. And as usual, the fight to keep women down continues…

Question 6

List the Section Headings

Answer 6

The Retreat into Privacy: Family, Work, and Personal Life
The Female Reform Tradition and the New Deal
Social Movements: Activism without Feminism

Question 7

Section Heading:

The Retreat into Privacy: Family, Work, and Personal Life

Answer 7

• How does this section relate to the previous section?
• What is Happening?
• What changed for women from before?
• What is the difference?
• Why is it different? What are the causes? What are the effects?

Question 8

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)

Answer 8

Within the Democratic Party, women became a grassroots force for the first time. The openness and experimentalism of the New Deal and the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House allowed a key group of women reformers powerful ways to reshape the state along the lines of politicized domesticity. The expanded state, however, also redefined the meaning of “public,” separating it from roots in citizen activism in local communities and infusing it with the values of efficiency, rational planning, and control by experts.

A female community and sense of mission based on middle-class domesticity could no longer flourish, and the mass movement for which it had provided a base no longer existed. In the absence of a movement specifically devoted to women’s rights and a feminisht critique of gender roles, radical women and labor organizers found it difficult to manage multiple roles and assert the importance of women’s needs; thus, the striking achievements of women within the New Deal were rapidly erased from memory. And so, although some women were powerful in the thirties, women as a group were not empowered.

Question 10

Family structure breakdown

Answer 10

The psychic shock for many families whose status and social position depended on the occupation and income of the husband was exacerbated because the traditional sex roles of male breadwinner and dependent spouse no longer worked.

Question 11

Black women: employment in the 1930s

Answer 11

• Worked in far greater numbers than white women
• Unable to work in clerical and factories
• Crowded into domestic work
• In 1930, 55% of all household workers were nonwhite
• In 1940, 64% of all household workers were nonwhite

Question 12

Living situations in the 1930s

Answer 12

• Families doubled and tripled up
• Women revived their foremothers’ skills in home production to stretch family resources: patched and remade clothes, split worn sheets and sewed outside edges, etc.
• Home production and constant recycling allowed families to reduce their dependence on the cash economy while maintaining some semblance of respectability

Question 13

Birth control in the 1930s

Answer 13

• loss of women’s sexual liberation
• Contraception became commonplace in the middle classes
• Birth control legal in 1936
• Primary purpose was to prevent the birth of children families could not afford.

Question 14

Married women workers

Answer 14

• Section 213 of the Economy Act: Reduction of married women in the workforce, beginning with government workers
• Widespread belief that married women who worked outside the home were taking jobs away from men: not true.
• The executive committee of the AFL passed a resolution that “married women whose husbands have permanent positions… should be discriminated against in the hiring of employees.
• The consequence of firing women was not that men gained acess to jobs but simply that more households faced destruction

Question 15

Unemployed women remained relatively invisible.

Question 16

Homeless single women in NYC

Answer 16

• sat in train stations, rode the subways, visited employment agencies
• desperation and starvation remained quiet and private
• not many women in the breadline, no flophouses for women

Question 17

Rural women

Answer 17

• thousands of farm families lost thier land to mortgage foreclosures
• famers could not sell their produce for what it cost them.
• made clothes for children from flour sacks
• extremely hight fertility
• raised patches of vegetables
• poverty, constant work in house and field

Question 18

Tenant farm women

Answer 18

• followed patterns of preindustrial family econonmy: cooking from scratch on wood stoves, drawing water from wells, working long hours in the fields, letting the man “tote the pocketbook,” bearing children almost constantly, and watching anxiously over their daughters’ sexual purity

Question 19

Women worked out of necessity

Answer 19

• Married women did not withdraw from the labor force once a male income provided enough for subsistence; rather they continued to raise their families’ standards of living with a minimum level of household consumer goods such as refrigerators, automobiles, and washing machines, and with increased education for their children

Question 20

What is the thesis?

Answer 20

Women participated actively, powerfully, in labor and social movements and in the redefinition of American politics and public life that was the New Deal, bringing to fruiton ideas they had nurtured for generations. Yet they did so following the demise of a widespread women’s movement capable of articulating female interests and mission. As a result, their victories in many ways went unclaimed. Domestic concerns finally succeeded in reshaping the state, but they were disconnected from women’s broader claims for independence and citizenship.

Question 23

There was so much radical potential in women’s reform of the late 1800s/early 1900s why did so little come out of it? Why did the right to vote not really change anything?

Answer 23

Broader Changes in American Society

* individualism
* consumerism
* lack of organizing vision
* marketing of women's bodies

Essential difference&raquo_space; why we got the vote… if there is a difference between men and women, then there are differences for class and race… no feminist underpinnings that said the sexes are equal

Question 24

What was the major paradox that emerged with the changing definition of women’s cultural image, especially as seen through Hollywood actresses?

Answer 24

stronger more masculine women emerged that garnered critism from men to smack them down

Question 25

Were women more of less empowered during this era? Explain specifically how women’s power shifted and what was the downfall (or upside) of this?

Answer 25

Women were less empowered… married women who worked should be fired if they were married. Women “should” be supported by their husbands. While in fact, women were not taking jobs from men as women were relegated to women-only jobs.

At the same time, women were placed into government.

Womens issues became more nationalized. (look at pg 217 in Sara Evans, “A female community…”

Question 26

Women were very active in reform groups in the 30s. Why were women’s rights not fought for during this time?

Answer 26

(page 214 women in teamsters union) Women mobilized in defense of their families but not for themselves as women. Activism without feminism. No larger sense of women’s rights.

We are starving, why would we be concerned with women’s rights.

Question 27

Lynching assoc

Answer 27

• White men accuse black men of rape to keep blacks and women in their place
• White women work together with black women for the first time to put a stop of this practice.
• They didn’t allow black women to join
• Failed to work on a national level to outlaw lynching

Question 28

Social Security Act 1935-1937

Answer 28

• NOT Covered: Agriculture work, domestics, part-time workers
  + Earned less than $200/yr from a single employer
  + Non-continuous work
• Covered without seeing the benefits
  + Married wage-earning women (once you marry, you will be paid back through your husband) - your work doesn’t count

85% of black women are not covered (domestic)
Lobbying interests kept agricultural workers out of the SSA

Men are the providers and women are dependent

Question 36

Section Heading:

The Female Reform Tradition and the New Deal

Answer 36

• How does this section relate to the previous section?
• What is Happening?
• What changed for women from before?
• What is the difference?
• Why is it different? What are the causes? What are the effects?

Question 37

Disappearance of female culture undergirding the women’s rights movement

Answer 37

The absence of a movement which articulated women’s specific concerns and interests, even as women attained new positions of power, deprived many activists outside the New Deal of the supportive networks of other women as well as a feminist perspective with which to interpret the sexism pervading their lives.

Question 38

Section Heading:

Social Movements: Activism without Feminism

Answer 38

• How does this section relate to the previous section?
• What is Happening?
• What changed for women from before?
• What is the difference?
• Why is it different? What are the causes? What are the effects?