Scrigroup - Documente si articole

Username / Parola inexistente      

Home Documente Upload Resurse Alte limbi doc  
AnimaleArta culturaDivertismentFilmJurnalismMuzica
PescuitPicturaVersuri

Atestat pentru Obtinerea Certificatului de Competenta Lingvistica la Limba Englez - Feminism throughout the years in the United States of America

diverse



+ Font mai mare | - Font mai mic



Atestat pentru Obtinerea Certificatului de Competenta Lingvistica la Limba Englez

Feminism throughout the years in the United States of America



Foreword

Technically speaking, I do not believe there has ever been a single united feminism. There have been multiple feminisms representing the efforts of women to live into their full humanity in a world shaped by and for the generally larger and more violent male half of the human species.

To the extent that there is a capital-F Feminism that has dominated the history of feminist thought, it tends to correspond with the goals of the upper-class heterosexual white women who have traditionally been given, and still tend to have, disproportionate power to spread their message--but the movement is so much more than that.

Throughout the centuries women have been nothing more than simple child-bearers, housekeepers and sometimes companions for men, whose sole purpose in life was the satisfaction of having raised morally-valid children. However, this could not last for long, for it was only a matter of time until they would discover the lies and deceits carefully planted into their subconscious since they were born. They realized that their strength did not stand in weak bodies, but in strong souls, for unlike their male halves, they had the power to withstand pressure and ridicule since they had been doing the exact same thing until then. By realizing this they were only a step away from challenging the unjust system which created such profound barriers between the two sexes.

It is true that because of countless generations of oppressed women the mentality continues to prevail, its foundation has been clearly shaken by powerful waves of feminist movements and, although they were not continuous, they have progressed in a natural way, bringing women closer to their goal.

It is my opinion that if these sentiments and ideas are not left to rest and if women continue to fight for their recognition, the wall of misconceptions and subordination can be demolished. It just takes time.

Chapter 1: The beginning

The birth of the United States of America

On April 2, , Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Len landed on what he called 'La Florida'-the first documented European arrival on what would become the U.S. mainland. Of the colonies Spain established in the region, only St. Augustine, founded in 1565, remains. Later Spanish settlements in the present-day southwestern United States drew thousands through Mexico. French fur traders established outposts of New France around the Great Lakes; France eventually claimed much of the North American interior as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. The first successful English settlements were the Virginia Colony in Jamestown in 1607 and the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. The 1628 chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in a wave of migration; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, an estimated 50,000 convicts were shipped to England's, and later Great Britain's, American colonies. Beginning in 1614, the Dutch established settlements along the lower Hudson River, including New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. The small settlement of New Sweden, founded along the Delaware River in 1638, was taken over by the Dutch in 1655.

By 1674, English forces had won the former Dutch colonies in the Anglo-Dutch Wars; the province of New Netherland was renamed New York. Many new immigrants, especially to the South, were indentured servants-some two-thirds of all Virginia immigrants between 1630 and 1680. By the turn of the century, African slaves were becoming the primary source of bonded labor. With the 1729 division of the Carolinas and the 1732 colonization of Georgia, the thirteen British colonies that would become the United States of America were established. All had active local and colonial governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient rights of Englishmen and a sense of self government that stimulated support for republicanism. All had legalized the African slave trade. With high birth rates, low death rates, and steady immigration, the colonies doubled in population every twenty-five years. The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest in both religion and religious liberty. In the French and Indian War, British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. By 1770, those thirteen colonies had an increasingly Anglicized population of three million, approximately half that of Britain. Though subject to British taxation, they were given no representation in the Parliament of Great Britain.

Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and early 1770s led to the American Revolutionary War, fought from 1775 through 1781. On June 14, , the Continental Congress, convening in Philadelphia, established a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Proclaiming that 'all men are created equal' and endowed with 'certain unalienable Rights,' the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, . The Declaration, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, pronounced the colonies sovereign 'states.' In 1777, the Articles of Confederation were adopted, uniting the states under a weak federal government that operated until 1788. Some 70,000-80,000 loyalists to the British Crown fled the rebellious states, many to Nova Scotia and the new British holdings in Canada. Native Americans, with divided allegiances, fought on both sides of the war's western front.

After the defeat of the British army by American forces who were assisted by the French, Great Britain recognized the sovereignty of the thirteen states in 1783. A constitutional convention was organized in 1787 by those who wished to establish a strong national government with power over the states. By June 1788, nine states had ratified the United States Constitution, sufficient to establish the new government; the republic's first Senate, House of Representatives, and president-George Washington-took office in 1789. New York City was the federal capital for a year, before the government relocated to Philadelphia. In 1791, the states ratified the Bill of Rights, ten amendments to the Constitution forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections. Attitudes toward slavery were shifting; a clause in the Constitution protected the African slave trade only until 1808. The Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, leaving the slave states of the South as defenders of the "peculiar institution".

Americans' eagerness to expand westward began a cycle of Indian Wars that stretched to the end of the nineteenth century, as Native Americans were stripped of their land. The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 virtually doubled the nation's size. The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened American nationalism. A series of U.S. military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The country annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845. The concept of Manifest Destiny was popularized during this time. The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest. The U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War resulted in the 1848 cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest. The California Gold Rush of 1848-49 further spurred western migration.

The intimately oppressed

However, it is possible, by reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
      

In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women, there was something more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position as child bearers-but this was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of them in society, even those who did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that. It seems that their physical characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use, exploit, and cherish someone who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-teacher-ward en of his children.
      

Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with children, a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.
      

The first women of the new land

The conditions under which white settlers came to America created various situations for women. Where the first settlements consisted almost entirely of men, women were imported as sex slaves, child bearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: 'Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation.'
      

Many women came in those early years as indentured servants- often teenage girls-and lived lives not much different from slaves, except that the term of service had an end. They were to be obedient to masters and mistresses. The authors of Americans Working Women (Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby) describe the situation:

They were poorly paid and often treated rudely and harshly, deprived of good food and privacy. Of course these terrible conditions provoked resistance. Living in separate families without much contact with others in their position, indentured servants had one primary path of resistance open to them: passive resistance, trying to do as little work as possible and to create difficulties for their masters and mistresses. Of course the masters and mistresses did not interpret it that way, but saw the difficult behavior of their servants as sullenness, laziness, malevolence and stupidity.

For instance, the General Court of Connecticut in 1645 ordered that a certain 'Susan C., for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labor and coarse diet, to be brought forth the next lecture day to be publicly corrected, and so to be corrected weekly, until order be given to the contrary.'

In 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs wrote to her father about her servitude:

"What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to Conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery, with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough, and then tied up and whipp'd to that Degree that you'd not serve an Animal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even begrudged nay many Negroes are better used, almost naked no shoes nor stockings to wear what rest we can get is to rap ourselves up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground. "

Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.
      

Those who lived, sharing the work of building a life in the wilderness with their men, were often given a special respect because they were so badly needed. And when men died, women often took tip the men's work as well. All through the first century and more, women on the American frontier seemed close to equality with their men.

The teachings of the Empire

But all women were burdened with ideas carried over from England with the colonists, influenced by Christian teachings. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled 'The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights':

"In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife arc one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name. A woman as soon as she is married is called covert that is, 'veiled'; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her surname. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. . .. "

Julia Spruill describes the woman's legal situation in the colonial period: ''The husband's control over the wife's person extended to the right of giving her chastisement. . .. But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife. . . .'
    

 As for property: 'Besides absolute possession of his wife's personal property and a life estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her labor. . . . Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to the husband.'
      

For a woman to have a child out of wedlock was a crime, and colonial court records are full of cases of women being arraigned for 'bastardy'-the father of the child untouched by the law and on the loose. A colonial periodical of 1747 reproduced a speech 'of Miss Polly Baker before a Court of Judicature, at Connecticut near Boston in New England; where she was prosecuted the fifth time for having a Bastard Child.' (The speech was Benjamin Franklin's ironic invention.)

"May it please the honourable bench to indulge me in a few words: I am a poor, unhappy woman, who have no money to fee lawyers to plead for me.. .. This is the fifth time, gentlemen, that I have been dragg'd before your court on the same account; twice I have paid heavy fines, and twice have been brought to publick punishment, for want of money to pay those fines. This may have been agreeable to the laws, and I don't dispute it; but since laws arc sometimes unreasonable in themselves, and therefore repealed; and others bear too hard on the subject in particular circumstances I take the liberty to say, that I think this law, by which I am punished, both unreasonable in itself, and particularly severe with regard to me . Abstracted from the law, I cannot conceive what the nature of my offense is. I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risqu of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done it better, if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid.. . . nor has anyone the least cause of complaint against me, unless, perhaps, the ministers of justice, because I have had children without being married, by which they missed a wedding fee. But can this be a fault of mine? .. .
      

What must poor young women do, whom customs and nature forbid to solicit the men, and who cannot force themselves upon husbands, when the laws take no care to provide them any, and yet severely punish them if they do their duty without them; the duty of the first and great command of nature and nature's Cod, increase and multiply; a duty from the steady performance of which nothing has been able to deter me, but for its sake I have hazarded the loss of the publick esteem, and have frequently endured pub-lick disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory. "

No wonder that Puritan New England carried over this subjection of women. At a trial of a woman for daring to complain about the work a carpenter had done for her, one of the powerful church fathers of Boston, the Reverend John Cotton, said: '. . . that the husband should obey his wife, and not the wife the husband, that is a false principle. For God hath put another law upon women: wives, be subject to your husbands in all things.'
      

A best-selling 'pocket book,' published in London, was widely read in the American colonies in the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter:

You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar'd for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of those Dudes which seem'd to be most properly assign'd to it. Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection: Ours wanteth your Gendeness to soften, and to entertain us.

Trial and error

Against this powerful education, it is remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled. Women rebels have always faced special disabilities: they live under the daily eye of their master; and they are isolated one from the other in households, thus missing the daily camaraderie which has given heart to rebels of other oppressed groups.
      

Anne Hutchinson was a religious woman, mother of thirteen children, and knowledgeable about healing with herbs. She defied the church fathers in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by insisting that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for themselves. A good speaker, she held meetings to which more and more women came (and even a few men), and soon groups of sixty or more were gathering at her home in Boston to listen to her criticisms of local ministers. John Winthrop, the governor, described her as 'a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment, inferior to many women.'
      

Anne Hutchinson was put on trial twice: by the church for heresy, and by the government for challenging their authority. At her civil trial she was pregnant and ill, but they did not allow her to sit down until she was close to collapse. At her religious trial she was interrogated for weeks, and again she was sick, but challenged her questioners with expert knowledge of the Bible and remarkable eloquence. When finally she repented in writing, they were not satisfied. They said: 'Her repentance is not in her countenance.'
      

She was banished from the colony, and when she left for Rhode Island in 1638, thirty-five families followed her. Then she went to the shores of Long Island, where Indians who had been defrauded of their land thought she was one of their enemies; they killed her and her family. Twenty years later, the one person back in Massachusetts Bay who had spoken up for her during her trial, Mary Dyer, was hanged by the government of the colony, along with two other Quakers, for 'rebellion, sedition, and presumptuous obtruding themselves.'
      

It remained rare for women to participate openly in public affairs, although on the southern and western frontiers conditions made this occasionally possible. Julia Spruill found in Georgia's early records the story of Mary Musgrove Mathews, daughter of an Indian mother and an English father, who could speak the Creek language and became an adviser on Indian affairs to Governor James Oglethorpe of Georgia. Spruill finds that as the communities became more settled, women were thrust back farther from public life and seemed to behave more timorously than before. One petition: 'It is not the province of our sex to reason deeply upon the policy of the order.'

Women and the Revolution

During the Revolution, however, Spruill reports, the necessities of war brought women out into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote articles for independence. They were active in the campaign against the British tea tax, which made tea prices intolerably high. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups, boycotting British goods, urging women to make their own clothes and buy only American-made things. In 1777 there was a women's counterpart to the Boston Tea Party-a 'coffee party,' described by Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband John:

"One eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant (who is a bachelor) had a hogshead of coffee in his store, which he refused to sell the committee under six shillings per pound. A number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trunks, marched down to the warehouse, and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver. Upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter, he delivered the keys when they tipped up the cart and discharged him; then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trunks and drove off. A large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction. "

It has been pointed out by women historians recently that the contributions of working-class women in the American Revolution have been mostly ignored, unlike the genteel wives of the leaders (Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams). Margaret Corbin, called 'Dirty Kate,' Deborah Sampson Garnet, and 'Molly Pitcher' were rough, lower-class women, prettified into ladies by historians. While poor women, in the last years of the fighting, went to army encampments, helped, and fought, they were represented later as prostitutes, whereas Martha Washington was given a special place in history books for visiting her husband at Valley Forge.

Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase 'all men are created equal' by his statement that American women would be 'too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.' And after the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York's constitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word 'male.'
      

A new society, old mentality

 Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were changing-the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of the factory system, expansion of political rights for white men, educational growth to match the new economic needs-that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In preindustrial America, the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some measure of equality; women worked at important jobs-publishing newspapers, managing tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in skilled work. In certain professions, like midwifery, they had a monopoly. Nancy Cott tells of a grandmother, Martha Moore Ballard, on a farm in Maine in 1795, who 'baked and brewed, pickled and preserved, spun and sewed, made soap and dipped candles' and who, in twenty-five years as a midwife, delivered more than a thousand babies. Since education took place inside the family, women had a special role there.
      
 As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and aggressiveness became more and more defined as a male trait. Women, perhaps precisely because more of them were moving into the dangerous world outside, were told to be passive. Clothing styles developed- for the rich and middle class of course, but, as always, there was the intimidation of style even for the poor-in which the weight of women's clothes, corsets and petticoats, emphasized female separation from the world of activity.
      



It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the family, to keep women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled. Barbara Welter (Dimity Convictions) has shown how powerful was the 'cult of true womanhood' in the years after 1820. The woman was expected to be pious. A man writing in The Ladies' Repository: 'Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity that bests suits her dependence.' Mrs. John Sandford, in her book Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character, said: 'Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy.'
      

Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: 'If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution.' A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were 'high spirited not prudent.'   The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the first proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:

The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and the same girl, as she 'conies out' of the cocoon of her family's protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection, so filled to the brim with tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first person she sees. She awakes from the midsummer night's dream of adolescence, and it is the responsibility of her family and society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some clown with the head of an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex and/or class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived and adolescence is formally over.

The cult of domesticity

In The Young Lady's Book of 1830: ',.. in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.' And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: 'True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.' Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: 'If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly.' Giving women 'Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness,' one book ended with: 'Do not expect too much.'
      

The woman's job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, he nurse, cook, cleaner, seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldn't read too much, and certain books should be avoided. When Harriet Martineau, a reformer of the 1830s, wrote Society in America, one reviewer suggested it he kept away from women: 'Such reading will unsettle them for their true station and pursuits, and they will throw the world back again into confusion.'
      

The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of 'separate but equal'-giving her work equally as important as the man's, hut separate and different. Inside that 'equality' there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: 'The die is about to be cast which will probably determine the future happiness or misery of my life. I have always anticipated the event with a degree of solemnity almost equal to that which will terminate my present existence.'
      

Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains. One woman, writing in 1813: 'The idea of soon giving birth to my third child and the consequent duties I shall he called to discharge distresses me so I feel as if I should sink.' This despondency was lightened by the thought that something important was given the woman to do: to impart to her children the moral values of self- restraint and advancement through individual excellence rather than common action.
      

The new ideology worked; it helped to produce the stability needed by a growing economy. But its very existence showed that other currents were at work, not easily contained. And giving the woman her sphere created the possibility that she might use that space, that time, to prepare for another kind of life.
      

Chapter 2: Taking action

2.1. The need to have a role in society

The 'cult of true womanhood' could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman's subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.
      

Putting all women into the same category-giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate- created a classification (by sex) which blurred the lines of class, as Nancy Cott points out. However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young girls-literally, 'spinsters'-to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90 percent of their operatives-most of these women between fifteen and thirty.
      

Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Eleanor Flexner (A Century of Struggle) gives figures that suggest why: women's daily average earnings in 1836 were less than 371/2 cents, and thousands earned 25 cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, 'a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the 'moneyed aristocracy' which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it.'
      

A journal kept by an unsympathetic resident of Chicopee, Massachusetts, recorded an event of May 2, 1843: "Great turnout among the girls .. . after breakfast this morning a procession preceded by a painted window curtain for a banner went round the square, the number sixteen. They soon came past again .. . then numbered forty-four. They marched around a while and then dispersed. After dinner they sallied forth to the number of forty-two and marched around to Cabot. They marched around the streets doing themselves no credit. "

There were strikes in various cities in the 1840s, more militant than those early New England 'turnouts,' but mostly unsuccessful. A succession of strikes in the Allegheny mills near Pittsburgh demanded a shorter workday. Several rimes in those strikes, women armed with sticks and stones broke through the wooden gates of a textile mill and stopped the looms.

2.2. An unfair system

Catharine Beecher, a woman reformer of the time, wrote about the factory system:

Let me now present the facts I learned by observation or inquiry on the spot. I was there in mid- winter, and every morning I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor. The time allowed for dressing and breakfast was so short, as many told me that both were performed hurriedly, and then the work at the mill was begun by lamplight, and prosecuted without remission till twelve, arid chiefly in a standing position. Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o'clock. it must be remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lamps, together with 40 to 80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air and where the air is loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.

And the life of upper-class women? Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman, in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans, wrote: "Let me be permitted to describe the day of a Philadelphia lady of the first class . This lady shall be the wife of a senator and a lawyer in the highest repute and practice . She rises, and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her parlor, neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman; she eats her fried ham and her salt fish, and drinks her coffee in silence, while her husband reads one newspaper, and puts another under his elbow; and then perhaps, she washes the cups and saucers. Her carriage is ordered at eleven; till that hour she is employed in the pastry room, her snow-white apron protecting her mouse-colored silk. Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to her chamber, as she calls it; shakes and folds up her still snow-white apron, smoothes her rich dress, and . .. sets on her elegant bonnet .. . then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives the word: 'Drive to the Dorcas Society.'

Yet not all women were bound by the restraints created by their place in society. Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies' publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, speakers.
      

2.3. Education for women

When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819 on the subject of education for women, she was contradicting the statement made just the year before by Thomas Jefferson (in a letter) in which he suggested women should not read novels 'as a mass of trash' with few exceptions. 'For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged.' Female education should concentrate, he said, on 'ornaments too, and the amusements of life. . . . These, for a female, are dancing, drawing, and music.'
      

Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women 'has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.' The problem, she said, was that 'the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made into a standard for the formation of the female character.' Reason and religion teach us, she said, that 'we too are primary existences not the satellites of men.'
      

In 1821, Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first recognized institution for the education of girls. She wrote later of how she upset people by teaching her students about the human body:

Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked at the sight of a pupil drawing a heart, arteries and veins on a blackboard to explain the circulation of the blood, that they left the room in shame and dismay. To preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the human body.

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical cSchool. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.
      

Elizabeth Blackwell got her medical degree in 1849, having overcome many rebuffs before being admitted to Geneva College. She then set up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children 'to give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex.' In her first Annual Report, she wrote:   "My first medical consultation was a curious experience. In a severe case of pneumonia in an elderly lady I called in consultation a kind-hearted physician of high standing. .. . This gentleman, after seeing the patient, went with me into the parlor. There he began to walk about the room in some agitation, exclaiming, 'A most extraordinary case! Such a one never happened to me before; I really do not know what to do!' I listened in surprise and much perplexity, as it was a clear case of pneumonia and of no unusual degree of danger, until at last I discovered that his perplexity related to me, not to the patient, and to the propriety of consulting with a lady physician!"

2.4. Issues needed to be resolved

Women began to be involved in other movements of reform- antislavery, temperance, dress styles, prison conditions and this turned eventually gave them the courage to speak of their own situation. Angelina Grimke, a southern white woman who became a fierce speaker and organizer against slavery, saw that movement leading further: "Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves of both sexes from the dust, and turn them into men and then it will he an easy matter to take millions of females from their knees and set them on their feet, or in other words transform them from babies into women."

Angelina was the first woman (in 1838) to address a committee of the Massachusetts state legislature on antislavery petitions. She later said: 'I was so near fainting under the tremendous pressure of feeling. . . .' Her talk attracted a huge crowd, and a representative from Salem proposed that 'a Committee be appointed to examine the foundations of the State House of Massachusetts to see whether it will bear another lecture from Miss Grimke!'
      

Speaking out on other issues prepared the way for speaking on the situation of women: Dorothea Dix, in 1843, addressed the legislature of Massachusetts on what she saw in the prisons and almshouses in the Boston area: "I tell what I have seen, painful and shocking as the details often are. I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!"

Women put in enormous work in antislavery societies all over the country, gathering thousands of petitions to Congress. Eleanor Flexner writes in A Century of Struggle:

Today, countless file boxes in the National Archives in Washington bear witness to that anonymous and heart-breaking labor. The petitions arc yellowed and frail, glued together, page on page, covered with ink blots, signed with scratchy pens, with an occasional erasure by one who fearfully thought better of so bold an act . They bear the names of women's anti-slavery societies from New England to Ohio.,. .

In the course of this work, events were set in motion that carried the movement of women for their own equality racing alongside the movement against slavery. In 1840, a World Anti-Slavery Society Convention met in London. After a fierce argument, it was voted to exclude women, but it was agreed they could attend meetings in a curtained enclosure. The women sat in silent protest in the gallery, and William Lloyd Garrison, one abolitionist who had fought for the rights of women, sat with them.
      

2.5. History being written, grievances being told

It was at that time that Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott and others, and began to lay the plans that led to the first Women's Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived as a mother, a housewife, full of resentment at her condition, declaring: 'A woman is a nobody. A wife is everything.' She wrote later:

I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated household, and the impossibility of woman's best development if, in contact, the chief part of her life, with servants and children, .. . The general discontent I felt with woman's portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic condition into which everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women, impressed me with the strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of society in general and of women in particular. My experiences at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul. I could not see what to do or where to begin-my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.

An announcement was put in the Seneca County Courier calling for a meeting to discuss the 'rights of woman' the 19th and 20th of July. Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence:

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied
      

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; dial among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.. ..
      

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.. . .

Then came the list of grievances: no right to vote, no right to her wages or to property, no rights in divorce cases, no equal opportunity in employment, no entrance to colleges, ending with: 'He had endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.'
      

And then a series of resolutions, including: 'That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.'
      

A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex:

That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. .. . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a'nt I a woman?

Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a'nt I a woman?
I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a'nt I a woman?
 I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'nt I a woman?

Thus were women beginning to resist, in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, the attempt to keep them in their 'woman's sphere.' They were taking part in all sorts of movements, for prisoners, for the insane, for black slaves, and also for all women.
      

In the midst of these movements, there exploded, with the force of government and the authority of money, a quest for more land, an urge for national expansion.

Chapter 3: Universal suffrage

3.1. Confusion

The proceedings in Seneca Falls, followed a few days later by a meeting in Rochester, brought forth a torrent of sarcasm and ridicule from the press and pulpit. Noted Frederick Douglass in the North Star: 'A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman.'

But Elizabeth Cady Stanton, although somewhat discomforted by the widespread misrepresentation, understood the value of attention in the press. 'Just what I wanted,' Stanton exclaimed when she saw that James Gordon Bennett, motivated by derision, printed the entire Declaration of Sentiments in the New York Herald. 'Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.'

Stanton, thirty-two years old at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, grew gray in the cause. In 1851 she met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, and shortly the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women. When national victory came in 1920, seventy-two years after the first organized demand in 1848, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration-Charlotte Woodward, a young worker in a glove manufactory -had lived long enough to cast her ballot.

Helen Keller had said in 1911: 'We vote? What does that mean?' And Emma Goldman around the same time: 'Our modern fetish is universal suffrage.' After 1920, women were voting, as men did, and their subordinate condition had hardly changed.
      

Right after women got the vote, the measure of their social progress can be seen in an advice column written by Dorothy Dix that appeared in newspapers all over the country. The woman should not merely be a domestic drudge, she said:

a man's wife is the show window where he exhibits the measure of his achievement . The biggest deals are put across over luncheon tables; we meet at dinner the people who can push our fortunes . The woman who cultivates a circle of worthwhile people, who belongs to clubs, who makes herself interesting and agreeable is a help to her husband.

Robert and Helen Lynd, studying Muncie, Indiana (Middletown), in the late twenties, noted the importance of good looks and dress in the assessment of women. Also, they found that when men spoke frankly among themselves they were 'likely to speak of women as creatures purer and morally better than men but as relatively impractical, emotional, unstable, given to prejudice, easily hurt, and largely incapable of facing facts or doing hard thinking.'
      

A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: 'The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.' He went on to say that there were forty thousand beauty shops in the country, and that $2 billion was spent each year on cosmetics for women-but this was insufficient: 'American women are not yet spending even one- fifth of the amount necessary to improve their appearance.' He then gave an itemized list of the 'annual beauty needs of every woman': twelve hot-oil treatments, fifty-two facials, twenty-six eyebrow plucks, etc.
      

It seems that women have best been able to make their first escape from the prison of wifeliness, motherhood, femininity, housework, beautification, isolation, when their services have been desperately needed-whether in industry, or in war, or in social movements. Each time practicality pulled the woman out of her prison-in a kind of work-parole program-the attempt was made to push her back once the need was over, and this led to women's struggle for change.

World War II had brought more women than ever before out of the home into work. By 1960, 36 percent of all women sixteen and older- 23 million women-worked for paid wages. But although 43 percent of women with school-age children worked, there were nursery schools for only 2 percent- the rest had to work things out themselves. Women were 50 percent of the voters-but (even by 1967) they held 4 percent of the state legislative seats, and 2 percent of the judgeships. The median income of the working woman was about one-third that of the man. And attitudes toward women did not seem to have changed much since the twenties. 'There is no overt anti-feminism in our society in 1964,' wrote feminist and sociologist Alice Rossi, 'not because sex equality has been achieved, but because there is practically no feminist spark left among American women.'

In the civil rights movement of the sixties, the signs of a collective stirring began to appear. Women took the place they customarily took in social movements, in the front lines-as privates, not generals. In the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta, a Spelman College student named Ruby Doris Smith, who had been jailed during the sit-ins, expressed their anger at the way women were relegated to the routine office work, and she was joined in her protest by two white women in SNCC, Sandra Hayden and Mary King. The men in SNCC listened to them respectfully, read the position paper they had put together asserting their rights, but did not do very much. Ella Baker, a veteran fighter from Harlem, now organizing in the South, knew the pattern: 'I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman in a group of ministers who are accustomed to having women largely as supporters, there was no place for me to have come into a leadership role.'



3.2. The sense of failure

During the 1960s women took the place they customarily took in social movements, in the front lines-as privates, not generals. In the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta, a Spelman College student named Ruby Doris Smith, who had been jailed during the sit-ins, expressed their anger at the way women were relegated to the routine office work, and she was joined in her protest by two white women in SNCC, Sandra Hayden and Mary King. The men in SNCC listened to them respectfully, read the position paper they had put together asserting their rights, but did not do very much. Ella Baker, a veteran fighter from Harlem, now organizing in the South, knew the pattern: 'I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman in a group of ministers who are accustomed to having women largely as supporters, there was no place for me to have come into a leadership role.'
      

Nevertheless, women played a crucial role in those early dangerous years of organizing in the South, and were looked on with admiration. Many of these were older women like Ella Baker, and Amelia Boynton in Selma, Alabama, and 'Mama Dolly' in Albany, Georgia. Younger women- Gloria Richardson in Maryland, Annelle Ponder in Mississippi-were not only active, but leaders. Women of all ages demonstrated, went to jail. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted polio). She roused people to excitement at mass meetings: 'I'm sick an' tired o' bein' sick an' tired!'
      

Around the same time, white, middle-class, professional women were beginning to speak up. A pioneering, early book, strong and influential, was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Just what was the problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say 'I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.' Or she would say, 'I feel as if I don't exist.' Sometimes. 'A tired feeling I get so angry with the children it scares me. I feel like crying without any reason.'

Friedan wrote out of her experience as a middle-class housewife, but what she spoke about touched something inside all women: "The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, -A sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- 'Is this all?'
      

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, 'the problem.' And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone. "

The 'mystique' that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, as wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: 'The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.'
      

In the summer of 1964, in McComb, Mississippi, at a Freedom House (a civil rights headquarters where people worked and lived together) the women went on strike against the men who wanted them to cook and make beds while the men went around in cars organizing. The stirring that Friedan spoke of was true of women everywhere, it seemed.
      

By 1969, women were 40 percent of the entire labor force of the United States, but a substantial number of these were secretaries, cleaning women, elementary school teachers, saleswomen, waitresses, and nurses. One out of every three working women had a husband earning less than $5,000 a year.
      

What of the women who didn't have jobs? They worked very hard, at home, but this wasn't looked on as work, because in a capitalist society (or perhaps in any modern society where things and people are bought and sold for money), if work is not paid for, not given a money value, it is considered valueless. Women began to think more about this fact in the 1960s, and Margaret Benston wrote about it ('The Political Economy of Women's Liberation'), Women doing housework were people outside the modern economic system, therefore they were like serfs or peasants, she said.

3.3. Time for a new change
      

The women who worked in the typical 'woman's job'-secretary, receptionist, typist, salesperson, cleaning woman, nurse-were treated to the full range of humiliations that men in subordinate positions faced at work, plus another set of humiliations stemming from being a woman: gibes at their mental processes, sexual jokes and aggression, invisibility except as sexual objects, cold demands for more efficiency. A commercial 'Guide to Clerical Times Standards' printed a question-and-answer column:

Q. I'm a businessman, and my secretary seems to move entirely too slowly. How many times a minute should she be able to open and close a file drawer?
A. Exactly 25 times. Times for other 'open and close operations' are .04 minutes for opening or closing a folder, and .026 minutes for opening a standard center desk drawer. If you're worried about her 'chair activity,' clock her against these standards: 'Got up from chair,' .033 minutes; 'turn in swivel chair,' .009 minutes.

A woman factory worker in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the early seventies, in a medium-sized corporation whose president's dividends from the corporation in 1970 amounted to $325,000, wrote in an organizing newspaper that 9 percent of the workers in her department were women, but all the supervisors were men.

"A few years ago I was suspended for three days from work because my children were still young and I had to take time off when they were sick. . . . They want people who keep quiet, squeal on one another, and are very good little robots. The fact that many have to take nerve pills before starting their day, and a week doesn't go by that there aren't two or three people who break down and cry, doesn't mean a thing to them".

She added: 'But times are changing, and from now on, more people will speak out and demand from their so-called bosses that they be treated the way the bosses themselves would like to he treated.'
      

Times indeed were changing. Around 1967, women in the various movements-civil rights, Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar groups-began meeting as women, and in early 1968, at a women's antiwar meeting in Washington, hundreds of women carrying torches paraded to the Arlington National Cemetery and staged 'The Burial of Traditional Womanhood.' At this point, and later too, there was some disagreement among women, and even more among men, on whether women should battle on specifically women's issues, or just take part in general movements against racism, war, capitalism. But the idea of a feminist focus grew.
      

In the fall of 1968, a group called Radical Women attracted national attention when they protested the selection of Miss America, which they called 'an image that oppresses women.' They all threw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and other things they called 'women's garbage' into a Freedom Trash Can. A sheep was crowned Miss America. More important, people were beginning to speak of 'Women's Liberation.'
Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A leaflet put out by WITCH in New York said:

WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no 'joining' WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.

WITCH in Washington, D.C., protested at the United Fruit Company for the corporation's activities in the Third World and its treatment of its women office workers. In Chicago it protested the firing of a radical feminist teacher named Marlene Dixon.

3.4. The voice of those unheard   

Poor women, black women, expressed the universal problem of women in their own way. In 1964 Robert Coles (Children of Crisis) interviewed a black woman from the South recently moved to Boston, who spoke of the desperation of her life, the difficulty of finding happiness: 'To me, having a baby inside me is the only lime I'm really alive.' Without talking specifically about their problems as women, many women, among the poor, did as they had always done, quietly organized neighborhood people to right injustices, to get needed services. In the mid-1960s, ten thousand black people in a community in Atlanta called Vine City joined together to help one another: they set up a thrift shop, a nursery, a medical clinic, monthly family suppers, a newspaper, a family counseling service. One of the organizers, Helen Howard, told Gerda Lerner (Black Women in White America) about it:

"I organized this neighborhood organization, two men and six ladies started it. That was a hard pull. A lot of people joined in later. For about five months we had meetings pretty near every night. We learned how to work with other people. A lot of people were afraid to really do anything. You were afraid to go to the city hall or ask for anything. You didn't even ask the landlord for anything, you were afraid of him. Then we had meetings and then we weren't afraid so much anymore. . . . The way we got this playground: we blocked off the street, wouldn't let anything come through. We wouldn't let the trolley bus come through. The whole neighborhood was in it. Took record players and danced; it went on for a week. We didn't get arrested, they was too many of us. So then the city put up this playground for the kids. "

A woman named Patricia Robinson wrote a pamphlet called Poor Black Woman, in which she connected the problems of women with the need for basic social change:

"Rebellion by poor black women, the bottom of a class hierarchy heretofore not discussed, places the question of what kind of society will the poor black woman demand and struggle for. Already she demands the right to have birth control, like middle class black and white women. She is aware that it takes two to oppress and that she and other poor people no longer are submitting to oppression, in this case genocide. She allies herself with the have-nots in the wider world and their revolutionary struggles. She had been forced by historical conditions to withdraw the children from male dominance and to educate and support them herself. In this very process, male authority and exploitation are seriously weakened. Further, she realizes that the children will be used as all poor children have been used through history-as poorly paid mercenaries fighting to keep or put an elite group in power. Through these steps she has begun to question aggressive male domination and the class society which enforces it, capitalism."

In 1970, Dorothy Bolden, a laundry worker in Atlanta and mother of six, told why in 1968 she began organizing women doing housework, into the National Domestic Workers Union. She said: 'I think women should have a voice in making decisions in their community for betterment. Because this woman in the slum is scuffling hard, and she's got a very good intelligent mind to do things, and she's been overlooked for so many years. I think she should have a voice.'
      

Women's magazines and newspapers began appearing, locally and nationally, and books on women's history and the movement came out in such numbers that some bookstores had special sections for them. The very jokes on television, some sympathetic, some caustic, showed how national was the effect of the movement. Certain television commercials, which women felt humiliated them, were eliminated after protest.
      

In 1967, after lobbying by women's groups, President Johnson signed an executive order banning sex discrimination in federally connected employment, and in the years that followed, women's groups demanded that this he enforced. Over a thousand suits were initiated by NOW (National Organization for Women, formed in 1966) against U.S. corporations charging sex discrimination.

3.5. More delicate issues


The right to abortion became a major issue. Before 1970, about a million abortions were done every year, of which only about ten thousand were legal. Perhaps a third of the women having illegal abortions- mostly poor people-had to be hospitalized for complications. How many thousands died as a result of these illegal abortions no one really knows. But the illegalization of abortion clearly worked against the poor, for the rich could manage either to have their baby or to have their abortion under safe conditions.
      

Court actions to do away with the laws against abortions were begun in over twenty states between 1968 and 1970, and public opinion grew stronger for the right of women to decide for themselves without government interference. In the book Sisterhood Is Powerful, an important collection of women's writing around 1970, an article by Lucinda Cisler, 'Unfinished Business: Birth Control,' said that 'abortion is a woman's right no one can veto her decision and compel her to bear a child against her will .'In the spring of 1969 a Harris poll showed that 64 percent of those polled thought the decision on abortion was a private matter.
      

Finally, in early 1973, the Supreme Court decided (Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton) that the state could prohibit abortions only in the last three months of pregnancy, that it could regulate abortion for health purposes during the second three months of pregnancy, and during the first three months, a woman and her doctor had the right to decide.

There was a push for child care centers, and although women did not succeed in getting much help from government, thousands of cooperative child care centers were set up.


Women also began to speak openly, for the first time, about the problem of rape. Each year, fifty thousand rapes were reported and many more were unreported. Women began taking self-defense courses. There were protests against the way police treated women, interrogated them, insulted them, when women filed rape charges. A book by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, was widely read-it is a powerful, indignant history and analysis of rape, suggesting self-defense, individual or collective: "Fighting back. On a multiplicity of levels, that is the activity we must engage in, together, if we- women-are to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape. Rape can be eradicated, not merely controlled or avoided on an individual basis, but the approach must be long- range and cooperative, and must have the understanding and good will of many men as well as women ."

Many women were active in trying to get a Constitutional amendment, ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), passed by enough states. But it seemed clear that even if it became law, it would not be enough, that what women had accomplished had come through organization, action, protest. Even where the law was helpful it was helpful only if backed by action. Shirley Chisholm, a black Congresswoman, said: "The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. Women in this country must become revolutionaries. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes. We must replace the old, negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive action."

Perhaps the most profound effect of the women's movement of the sixties-beyond the actual victories on abortion, in job equality-was called 'consciousness raising,' often done in 'women's groups,' which met in homes all across the country. This meant the rethinking of roles, the rejection of inferiority, the confidence in self, a bond of sisterhood, a new solidarity of mother and daughter. The Atlanta poet Esta Seaton wrote 'Her Life':

This is the picture that keeps forming in my mind:
my young mother, barely seventeen,
cooking their Kosher dinner on the coal stove,
that first winter in Vermont,
and my father, mute in his feelings
except when he shouted,
eating to show his love.

Fifty years later her blue eyes would grow cold
with the shock of that grey house
and the babies one after another
and the doctor who said
'If you don't want any more children
move out of the house.'

For the first time, the sheer biological uniqueness of women was openly discussed. Some theorists (Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectics of Sex, for instance) thought this was more fundamental to their oppression than any particular economic system. It was liberating to talk frankly about what had for so long been secret, hidden, cause for shame and embarrassment: menstruation, masturbation, menopause, abortion, lesbianism.

One of the most influential books to appear in the early seventies was a book assembled by eleven women in the Boston Women's Health Book Collective called Our Bodies, Ourselves. It contained an enormous amount of practical information, on women's anatomy, on sexuality and sexual relationships, on lesbianism, on nutrition and health, on rape, self-defense, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. More important even than the information, the charts, the photos, the candid exploration of the previously unmentioned, was the mood of exuberance throughout the book, the enjoyment of the body, the happiness with the new- found understanding, the new sisterhood with young women, middle-aged women, older women. They quoted the English suffragette Christabel Pankhurst:

Remember the dignity
of your womanhood.
Do not appeal,
do not beg,
do not grovel.
Take courage
join hands,
stand beside us.
Fight with us.

The fight began, many women were saying, with the body, which seemed to be the beginning of the exploitation of women-as sex plaything (weak and incompetent), as pregnant woman (helpless), as middle-aged woman (no longer considered beautiful), as older woman (to be ignored, set aside). A biological prison had been created by men and society. As Adrienne Rich said (Of Woman Born): 'Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies.' She wrote:

"I have a very clear, keen memory of myself the day after I was married: I was sweeping a floor. Probably the floor did not really need to be swept; probably I simply did not know what else to do with myself. But as I swept that floor I thought: 'Now I am a woman. This is an age-old action, this is what women have always done.' I felt I was bending to some ancient form, too ancient to question. This is what women have always done. As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed-even by strangers on the street, it seemed-was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings met with absolute denial. This is what women have always done."

Rich said women could use the body 'as a resource, rather than a destiny.' Patriarchal systems, she said, whether under capitalism or 'socialism,' limited women's bodies to their own needs. She discussed the training of passivity in women. Generations of schoolgirls were raised on Little Women, where Jo is told by her mother: 'I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.'

Male doctors used instruments to bring out children, replacing the sensitive hands of midwives, in the era of 'anesthetized, technologized childbirth.' Rich disagreed with her fellow feminist Firestone, who wanted to change the biological inevitability of childbirth, because it is painful and a source of subordination; she wanted, under different social conditions, to make childbirth a source of physical and emotional joy.

One could not talk of Freud's ignorance of women, Rich said, as his one 'blind spot,' which implied that in other matters his vision was clear; such ignorance distorts all. There is a dilemma of the body: "I know no woman-virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate-whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves-for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings." Her reply to this: "the 'repossession of our bodies a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body' as a basis for bringing forth not just children but new visions, new meanings, a new world. "

3.6. The prisons were being destroyed, the time for change had come

For most women who were not intellectuals, the question was even more immediate: how to eliminate hunger, suffering, subordination, humiliation, in the here and now. A woman named Johnnie Tillmon wrote in 1972: "I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. I have raised six children. I grew up in Arkansas worked there for fifteen years in a laundry moved to California. In 1963 I got too sick to work anymore. Friends helped me to go on welfare.Welfare's like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.   And that is why welfare is a women's issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women's Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it's a matter of survival. "

Welfare, she said, was like 'a super sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. The man runs everything . . . controls your money. . . .' She and other welfare mothers organized a National Welfare Rights Organization. They urged that women be paid for their work-housekeeping, child bearing. "No woman can he liberated, until all women get off their knees.'

In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody's. The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead, the family was used-men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when tidings weren't going right. Why could this not be turned around? Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another? Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds-male, female, parents, children-they could undertake the changing of society itself.

But in the sixties and seventies there was not just a women's movement, a prisoner's movement, an Indian movement. There was general revolt against oppressive, artificial, previously unquestioned ways of living. It touched every aspect of personal life: childbirth, childhood, love, sex, marriage, dress, music, art, sports, language, food, housing, religion, literature, death, schools.
      

The new temper, the new behavior, shocked many Americans. It created tensions. Sometimes it was seen as a 'generation gap'-the younger generation moving far away from the older one in its way of life. But it seemed after a while to be not so much a matter of age-some young people remained 'straight' while some middle-aged people were changing their ways and old people were beginning to behave in ways that astounded others.
      

Sexual behavior went through startling changes. Premarital sex was no longer a matter for silence. Men and women lived together outside of marriage, and struggled for words to describe the other person when introduced: 'I want you to meet my . . . friend.' Married couples candidly spoke of their affairs, and books appeared discussing 'open marriage.' Masturbation could be talked about openly, even approvingly. Homosexuality was no longer concealed. 'Gay' men and 'gay' women- lesbians-organized to combat discrimination against them, to give themselves a sense of community, to overcome shame and isolation.
      

All this was reflected in the literature and in the mass media. Court decisions overruled the local banning of books that were erotic or even pornographic. A new literature appeared (The Joy of Sex and others) to teach men and women how sexual fulfillment could be attained. The movies now did not hesitate to show nudity, although the motion picture industry, wanting to preserve principle as well as profit, set up a classification system (R for Restricted, X for prohibited to children). The language of sex became more common both in literature and in ordinary conversation.
      

All this was connected with new living arrangements. Especially among young people, communal living arrangements flourished. A few were truly communes-that is, based on the sharing of money and decisions, creating a community of intimacy, affection, trust. Most were practical arrangements for sharing the rent, with varying degrees of friendship and intimate association among the participants. It was no longer unusual for men and women to be 'roommates'-in groups of two or three or larger, and without sexual relations-as practical, unselfconscious arrangements.
      

The most important thing about dress in the cultural change of the sixties was the greater informality. For women it was a continuation of the historic feminist movement's insistence on discarding of 'feminine,' hampering clothes. Many women stopped wearing bras. The restrictive 'girdle'-almost a uniform of the forties and fifties-became rare. Young men and women dressed more nearly alike, in jeans, in discarded army uniforms. Men stopped wearing neckties, women of all ages wore pants more often-unspoken homage to Amelia Bloomer.
      

There was a new popular music of protest. Pete Seeger had been singing protest songs since the forties, but now he came into his own, his audiences much larger. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, singing not only protest songs, but songs reflecting the new abandon, the new culture, became popular idols. A middle-aged woman on the West Coast, Malvina Reynolds, wrote and sang songs that fit her socialist thinking and her libertarian spirit, as well as her critique of the modern commercial culture. Everybody now, she sang, lived in 'little boxes' and they "all came out just the same.'
      
The Catholic upsurge against the war was part of a general revolt inside the Catholic Church, which had for so long been a bulwark of conservatism, tied to racism, jingoism, war. Priests and nuns resigned from the church, opened their lives to sex, got married and had children-sometimes without bothering to leave the church officially. True, there was still enormous popularity for the old-time religious revivalists, and Billy Graham commanded the obedience of millions, but now there were small swift currents against the mainstream.
      

There was a new suspicion of big business, of profiteering as the motive for ruining the environment. There was a reexamination of the 'death industry,' of moneymaking funerals and profitable tombstones, as in Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death.
      

With the loss of faith in big powers-business, government, religion-there arose a stronger belief in self, whether individual or collective. The experts in all fields were now looked at skeptically: the belief grew that people could figure out for themselves what to eat, how to live their lives, how to be healthy. There was suspicion of the medical industry and campaigns against chemical preservatives, valueless foods, advertising. By now the scientific evidence of the evils of smoking- cancer, heart disease-was so powerful that the government barred advertising of cigarettes on television and in newspapers.
      



Traditional education began to be reexamined. The schools had taught whole generations the values of patriotism, of obeying authority, and had perpetuated ignorance, even contempt for people of other nations, races, Native Americans, women. Not just the content of education was challenged, but the style-the formality, the bureaucracy, the insistence on subordination to authority. This made only a small dent in the formidable national system of orthodox education, but it was reflected in a new generation of teachers all over the country, and a new literature to sustain them: Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age; George Denison, The Lives of Children; Ivan Illich, De-schooling Society.
       Never in American history had more movements for change been concentrated in so short a span of years.

Overview: Feminism today

Although there is no longer an organized feminist movement in the United States that influences the lives and actions of millions of women and engages their political support, there are many organizations, ranging from the National Organization for Women to women's caucuses in labor unions and professional groups, which fight for women's rights, and there are many more organizations, many of them including men as well as women, whose priorities include women's issues. But the mass women's movement of the late sixties, seventies, and early eighties no longer exists. Few, among the many women who regard themselves as feminists, have anything to do with feminist organizations other than reading about them in the newspapers. Young women who are drawn to political activism do not, for the most part, join women's groups. They are much more likely to join anti-corporate, anti-globalization, or social justice groups. These young women are likely to regard themselves as feminists, and in the groups that they join a feminist perspective is likely to affect the way in which issues are defined and addressed. But this is not the same thing as a mass movement of women for gender equality. A similar dynamic has taken place in other circles as well. There are now very large numbers of women who identify with feminism, or, if they are reluctant to adopt that label, nevertheless expect to be treated as the equals of men. And there are large numbers of men who support this view.

The extent of feminist or pro-feminist consciousness, by which I mean an awareness of the inequality of women and a determination to resist it, that now exists in the United States, is an accomplishment of the women's movement. But it is also something of an anomaly, since it is no longer linked to the movement that produced it. When the first wave of the women's movement in the United States went into decline, after woman suffrage was won in 1921, feminism went into decline with it. By the 1950s, feminism had almost entirely disappeared, not only as an organized movement, but also as an ideology and a political and social sensibility. Even in the early sixties, in the New Left, to describe one as a feminist was to invite raised eyebrows and probably more extreme reactions. Now, for a second time in U.S. history, the memory of a movement that engages the energy of very large numbers of women is receding into the past. But this time feminist consciousness has, if anything, become more widespread. This raises the question: what accounts for this difference? How and what does feminism change when it becomes a cultural current rather than a movement for social change?

In part this different history may have to do with the disparities between the first and second waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism began in the 1840's as a demand for women's equality generally. The women's movement emerged out of the abolitionist movement, and at first, feminism was part of an egalitarian worldview, closely connected to antislavery and antiracism. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and to an even greater degree over the first two decades of the twentieth, mainstream feminism narrowed to the demand for women's suffrage. Leading feminists, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class, native-born white women even made racist and anti-immigrant arguments for woman suffrage. Though the women's movement also included working-class women, many of them socialists, for whom feminism remained a part of a broader commitment to social equality, by the second decade of the twentieth century, radicalism was a minor current within the women's movement. Emma Goldman, who combined determination to resist the oppression of women with anti-capitalist politics, was not typical of feminists of the first two decades of the century. For most feminists, and for the public, feminism had come to mean the vote for women and little more. Once suffrage was won, feminism lost its raison d'être, and so had little future either as a movement or as consciousness.

The second wave of the women's movement turned out differently. It did not narrow ideologically, nor did it run into any dead end, as its predecessor had. If anything, over time, the radical currents within the movement gained influence: women who had entered the movement thinking that women's equality would not require major social changes tended to become convinced that gender inequality was linked to other dimensions of inequality, especially class and race. The women's movement declined in the eighties and nineties mostly because the constituency on which it had been largely based, young, mostly white, middle-class women, gradually put political activity behind them. These women were beneficiaries of what John Kenneth Galbraith called the 'culture of contentment of the eighties and nineties.'

They benefited, along with the rest of the class, from the prosperity of the time; they also benefited from affirmative action. Even as they left political activity, few feminists thought that the aims of the women's movement had been accomplished. Many thought that they could continue to work towards these aims in the arenas, mostly professional, that they were entering. Feminist consciousness was sustained in part, no doubt, because it was widely understood that its aims had not been achieved, and because many women who left the movement remained committed to its goals.

This in itself would not have led to the widespread acceptance of feminism that has taken place over the last twenty years. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, some commentators have argued that the inequality of women in the Arab world is a sign of the deep cultural gap involved: to reject feminism is to reject modernity and the West. For instance, Laura Bush, speaking on the weekly presidential radio address, on November 17, 2001, supported the Bush administration's attack on Afghanistan on grounds of the denial of women's rights by the Taliban. In the sixties, probably even in the seventies, such an argument would have been unthinkable. Many feminists, especially radical feminists, thought that their challenge to male supremacy was also a challenge to the existing social order. Many, who regarded themselves as guardians of that social order, agreed. How has feminism become an accepted part of modern, Western society rather than an enemy of it?

The emergence of the second wave of feminism in the United States was connected to a transformation of the economy that was drawing women into the labor force on a permanent basis. Before the Second World War few women worked outside the home after marrying and having children; most of the few who did were blacks or immigrants. The middle class set the cultural standard: marriage meant domesticity for women. Working-class people, including immigrant groups, strove to attain this idea. Even the depression of the 1930s did not put much of a dent in it; many women supported their families after their husbands lost their jobs, but often by taking work into the home. During the Second World War many women worked outside the home, but that was understood as a temporary, wartime necessity, and most women who worked in industry lost their jobs when the war ended.

The postwar United States was suddenly prosperous. The struggles of the thirties (and the fear that those struggles might continue once the war was over) helped to prompt the creation of a large welfare state bureaucracy and a wide array of social services. This brought new jobs, mostly white-collar jobs. Prosperity also led to a massive economic expansion and to the creation of many white-collar jobs in the private sector as well. Many of these jobs required some higher education. By the late fifties many women--mostly white middle-class women with some college education--were taking such jobs, partly because there were not enough men to take them, partly because many families and women needed more income, and partly because some women were tired of domesticity and wanted jobs. In the sixties, these trends accelerated. By the seventies it became clear that it was not only middle-class but also working-class women who were in the labor force for good. Meanwhile, during the fifties and sixties, higher education had expanded dramatically, and women, mostly white middle-class women, had begun attending colleges and universities in large numbers. College and university degrees gave expanding numbers of young women the credentials they needed in order to get the jobs that were becoming available. Colleges and universities also provided the arenas that young women needed to form bonds with each other, to develop a new female consciousness and a feminist movement. The movements of the sixties, despite their problems of sexism, provided a supportive environment for the development of a radical women's consciousness and a movement that demanded women's equality and linked it to demands for class and racial equality. Women civil fights activists, prompted by the parallel between the oppression of blacks and that of women, were the first to develop a feminist perspective. The antiwar movement on northern campuses provided a supportive environment for the growth of a large and radical feminist movement.

The women's movement thus emerged in the contradiction between an economy that not only invited but required the participation of women, and a culture that continued to define femininity in terms of passivity and subservience to men. This contradiction still exists. Feminism quickly became a mass movement because young women needed a new set of values, and each other's support, in making the transition between the domestic world that most of their mothers had inhabited and the world of work that they were entering. The demand for women's labor, and the strength of the radical movements of the time, also gave young women the leverage to challenge the culture and structures of gender inequality, and to confront the men who expected women to abide by these rules. Other than the antiwar movement, the women's movement was, by the early seventies, the largest of the radical movements of the time. It was certainly the most lasting of the movements of the sixties, expanding and becoming stronger through the seventies . The size and strength of the women's movement had to do with the fact that it was challenging a dying institution, the patriarchal nuclear family, revolving around women's domesticity.

Despite the media's portrayal of the family, in the fifties, as utterly stable, in fact divorce rates were already rising. With or without the women's movement, women would have moved into the labor force in huge numbers over the following decades, further destabilizing the form of family life anchored by women's domesticity. But neither the destabilization of the traditional nuclear family nor the massive entry of women into the labor force guaranteed any overall improvement in women's status. Rising divorce rates meant, among other things, a loss of security for women. The ability to work, to hold a job, does not guarantee equality or even, necessarily, hold out the promise of it. The women's movement took the opportunity presented by women's entry into the labor force to demand better terms for women in the workplace, the public arena, and the family.

For women, working for wages outside the home has become the norm. This, in combination with feminist pressure for greater gender equality on all levels of society, has transformed the lives of U.S. women as well as the very structure of U.S. society. The feminist goal of gender equality has not been achieved; not only do women still earn less than men, but in the ranks of the poor, single women and their children have come to predominate. The prejudices that discourage women from entering traditionally male fields remain and violence against women persists. Though the nuclear family of the forties and fifties was based on male supremacy, the increasing instability of family life has hardly been a blessing for women. But women's equality has become a publicly accepted principle. Glaring deviations from this principle are open to challenge and very large numbers of women are ready to make such challenges when necessary. This in itself is an enormous and transforming advance.

So, over the last two decades feminist consciousness has spread even as the organized women's movement has contracted. This is partly because of the increasing numbers of women in the labor force, and in other areas of public life, who, in talking to each other and giving each other support, spread and redefined feminism, even if they do not call themselves feminists or use the word. It was possible for the first wave of feminism to disappear because the women's movement that it was associated with had come to an end without the majority of American women having gained access to arenas outside the home. The fact that women are now in the labor force and the public arena to stay makes it hard to imagine that feminism and what it stands for could disappear again. This is a measure of progress. Probably feminism will continue to be a major political current in the United States, though perhaps not based in any movement, and in that sense a cultural as well as a political phenomenon.

One danger posed by the attenuating connection between feminist consciousness and the movement from which it emerged is that feminist consciousness is losing its radical edge. This has happened to some degree: in the professions, feminism has tended to absorb the obsession with individual success that prevails in that arena. A large, actively engaged movement does not necessarily prevent such developments; first wave feminism, in its suffragist phase, absorbed the perspective of the upper-middle class of that time. But a movement can make it possible for movement activists to look critically at their own class, and develop an independent perspective. This is what happened in the sixties and early seventies, making radical feminism, and radicalisms of other varieties, possible.

It does not seem likely that another mass women's movement will emerge any time soon. But feminism is being given new vitality by its association with the range of activist groups that make up the antiglobalization and anticorporate movements. Young women in these movements are very likely to describe themselves as feminists; feminism is accepted as one of the ideological currents that shape these movements, along with anarchism, environmentalism, and the struggle against white supremacy. Inside these groups, women tend to take for granted the equality that women of the movements of the sixties and seventies fought for. If the labor movement makes headway in its effort to organize the unorganized, feminism will inevitably become part of the culture that develops within it, because so many of the unorganized are women. Such movement-based versions of feminism could introduce radicalism into wider feminist discussions.

Over the last two decades other movements have followed the same trajectory as the women's movement. The environmental movement is a clear case: once consisting of large numbers of people engaged in political activity, it now consists on the one hand of a series of staff-driven organizations, and on the other, of a large sector of people who consider themselves environmentalist, or who have an environmental consciousness, but who take action on environmental issues largely in individual ways, such as in their shopping habits and in recycling. A similar argument could be made about the African-American movement, whose organizations have shriveled while militant forms of racial and ethnic consciousness have expanded, at least culturally, among young people. To some degree this expansion of various forms of consciousness going way beyond the borders of the movements in which they first emerged shows the lasting influence of those movements. But it also has to do with what appears to be the decline of political and protest movements, and the difficulty of finding compelling forms of political engagement. The tendency of the political to collapse into the cultural, even as it connotes a measure of triumph, weakens the left.

Glossary of terms

A

Abolish - To do away with wholly; to annul; to make void; -- said of laws, customs, institutions, governments, etc.; as, to abolish slavery, to abolish folly

Agitator - a person who stirs up others in order to upset the status quo and further a political, social, or other cause

Allegiance - loyalty or the obligation of loyalty, as to a nation, sovereign, or cause

B

(to) Banish - to expel from or relegate to a country or place by authoritative decree; condemn to exile

Brook - a small, natural stream of fresh water

C

Chastisement - to restrain; chasten

Coarse - lacking delicacy, taste, or refinement; unpolished

Conquistador - one of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the 16th century

D

Disfranchise - to deprive (a person) of a right of citizenship, as of the right to vote

Dividend - a share of anything divided

E

Eloquence - the practice or art of using language with fluency and aptness

Encampment - temporary living quarters specially built by the army for soldiers

Exploit - to utilize, esp. for profit; turn to practical account

F

Francophone - a person who speaks French, esp. a native speaker

Fierce - violent in force, intensity

G

Genocide - the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group

H

Haughty - disdainfully proud; snobbish; scornfully arrogant; supercilious

I

Indentured - a contract by which a person, as an apprentice, is bound to service

L

Loyalist - person who remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution; Tory

M

Mainland - the principal land of a country, region, etc., as distinguished from adjacent islands or a peninsula; (in Hawaii) the 48 contiguous states of the U.S.

Mercenary - working or acting merely for money or other reward; venal

Monopoly - exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices

P

Patronization - to act as a patron toward (an artist, institution, etc.); support

Plague - to trouble, annoy, or torment in any manner

R

(to) Ratify - to confirm by expressing consent, approval, or formal sanction

Rebel - a person who refuses allegiance to, resists, or rises in arms against the government or ruler of his or her country

Republicanism - republican principles or adherence to them

S

Seamstress - a woman whose occupation is sewing

Settler - a person who settles in a new country or area

Sovereign - having supreme rank, power, or authority

Stingy - reluctant to give or spend; not generous; niggardly; penurious

T

(to) Trust - to push forcibly; shove; put or drive with force

Trait - a distinguishing characteristic or quality, esp. of one's personal nature

Twofold - having two elements or parts

U

Unalienable - not to be separated, given away, or taken away; inalienable

V

Virtue - conformity of one's life and conduct to moral and ethical principles; uprightness; rectitude.

Voluble - characterized by a ready and continuous flow of words; fluent; glib; talkative

W

Wedlock - the state of marriage; matrimony

Bibliography

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Harper Perennial, 2003

Lerner, Gerda. The Female Experience: An American Documentary. Oxford University Press, 1997

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Prometheus's Great Books in Philosophy Series). Dover Publications, 1996

Chafe, William H. Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (Galaxy Book). Oxford University Press, USA, 1978

Allen, Robert Loring and Allen, Pamela P. Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States. Howard University Press, 1974

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and Mayering, Sheryl L. Women and Economics Dover Publications, 1998

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mistique. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2001

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Taylor & Francis, Inc., 2006

DuBois , Ellen Carol , Dumenil, Lynn , Dumenil, Lynn Dumenil , Lynn. Through Women's Eyes: An American History with Documents Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005

Firestone, Shulamith. "Notes from the First Year". New York: The New York Radical Women, 1968

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, & Anthony, Susan B., & Gage, Matilda Joslyn. History of Women's Suffrage II. Ayer Company Publishers Inc. , 1985

Epstein, Barbara. "Feminist consciousness after the women's movement". Monthly Review, Sept.2002

Rownmiller, Susan In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. Dial Books, 1999

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. Belknap Press 1996





Politica de confidentialitate | Termeni si conditii de utilizare



DISTRIBUIE DOCUMENTUL

Comentarii


Vizualizari: 3157
Importanta: rank

Comenteaza documentul:

Te rugam sa te autentifici sau sa iti faci cont pentru a putea comenta

Creaza cont nou

Termeni si conditii de utilizare | Contact
© SCRIGROUP 2024 . All rights reserved