Chapter 5 Flashcards
What happened to many Native women who left their own people to live with white men in informal sexual and domestic unions at U.S. Army forts or trading centers in the West?
They were abandoned when white women arrived and ended up living on the edges of white culture.
What was one remarkable aspect of women’s involvement in the antebellum reform movement?
As many as 10 percent of women in the Northeast were involved in reform groups
In the 1840s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton lobbied to get the New York legislature to pass a bill that
gave wives control over their inherited wealth.
In 1863, New York City was paralyzed by mobs rioting and protesting
the passage of the Conscription Act.
What argument drew many women to the temperance movement in the 1840s and 1850s?
A man who stopped drinking would better support his family.
What do documents detailing life on the Oregon Trail show?
Women’s workdays on the trail were generally several hours longer than men’s.
The work of northern women during the Civil War differed from that of southern women in that they
created a national umbrella organization to provide services to the troops.
In a recurring example of cross-cultural misunderstanding, white emigrants on the Oregon Trail often believed they were under imminent attack by Native Americans when
Native groups were actually approaching the wagon trains to demand money and food.
Congress responded to the petition drive of female abolitionists in the 1830s by
passing the “gag rule,” which tabled all antislavery petitions.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) dramatized
the dangers facing runaway slaves under the new Fugitive Slave Law.
The most controversial resolution of the “Declarations of Sentiments and Resolutions” passed at the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848 was that
women had an equal right to vote.
The year 1848 was significant in U.S. history because the Mexican War, Seneca Falls Convention, and founding of the Free Soil Party all inaugurated
movements that challenged preexisting social boundaries.
Moral reform activists viewed prostitutes as
victims of men’s sexual excesses.
What was the major issue facing reformers and the country in the 1850s?
The spread of slavery
The Shakers, founded by Mother Ann Lee, challenged conventional notions of marriage by
prohibiting all sexual relations, even within marriage.
The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 issued a manifesto that in both style and philosophy echoed the Declaration of Independence when it called for
equality of men and women before the law.
In the spring of 1863, the women of Richmond rioted in the streets protesting
food shortages and triple-digit inflation.
Antebellum female health activists, responding to women’s menstrual, reproductive, and sexual complaints, advocated that
women ignore regular doctors and adopt alternative therapeutic regimes.
During the California gold rush, most middle-class women who traveled with their husbands to the gold-digging sites made money by
offering domestic services to single men
How did the activities of the Grimké sisters produce a split in the abolitionist movement?
Their defense of women’s equal rights created divisions over the proper role of women in the movement.
Many female abolitionists were pushed toward advocating women’s rights by their realization that
free women experienced barriers to personhood like those faced by slaves.
The Oneida community, which challenged many notions of conventional marriage, earned its greatest notoriety by
rejecting monogamy and advocating extramarital sexuality.
Prostitution in California in the mid-nineteenth century had a distinct racial hierarchy with which group at the bottom?
Chinese women
The call for the immediate and uncompensated abolition of slavery and full civil rights for black people came first from
the free black community.
