Status
Available
Publication
Free Press (1989), Edition: 1st, 386 pages
Description
A history of American women from the Indian woman of the 16th century to the dual-role career woman and mother of the 1980s.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member mdobe
In opening the section on Women and Modernity, 1890-1920, Evans sets the scene for the response to industrialization by relating the speech given by the black reformer Frances Harper at the 1893 World's Fair at Chicago. Speaking to the role that women could play in the future of America, she was
Out of the changes wrought by initialization emerged "The New Woman," highly educated in the new all-female schools of the post-Civil War America, she had the choice of family or work. If she choose the life of a teacher or nurse, family would likely be a closed avenue and visa versa. Women did choose career over family and in the Progressive era formed reform communities like Hull House in Chicago (1889). Seeking real experience in the ennui of fin de siecle America, these women reached out to the poor immigrants and sought to "Americanize" them. For some, like Florence Kelley at Hull House, it was the beginning of a long career of female reform activism. Forming the National Consumers' League (NCL), Kelley would agitate for better conditions for working girls who were mercilessly exploited by the new department stores. Reaching out to the working class, they never quite bridged the gap, but they certainly tried. For black women the issues were starkly different. Women activists like the black publisher Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Memphis, TN, sought to expose the brutality of lynching and was run out of town. Black women were more likely to offer support to married working women with children as this was the reality of the black family in early 20th C America.
"A Reunited Woman Suffrage Movement" also animated the female reform movements of the Progressive Era. In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president. Suffragists, as well as other reformers, used the concerns of "politicized domesticity" to break out of the go beyond the domestic sphere and into the world of public reform. It would be the "mother office of the state" that would address the most grievous consequences of industrialization. Building on the legacies of the K of L and earlier republican motherhood, women entered reform. More radical women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman could use domesticity to advocate such radical ideas as collective housekeeping and cooking to free women from the growing "double burden." More ominously, white middle class progressives shared a common racism with their male reformer counterparts.
"The Working Girl" was the subject of great concern among reformers. The dangerous conditions in industrial factories were the subject of reform legislation and agitation, yet the lives of black women who were consigned to agriculture and domestic service were largely ignored by white reformers, who considered that a "race" issue. Bridging the gap of class to support working white women, wealthy reform women joined the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and formed a powerful force to fight for women's equality in the workplace. Supporting the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in strikes against unsafe conditions in the sweatshops of NY, the WTUL league went down to defeat along with the rest of the "Uprising of Thirty Thousand," but the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist Fire only a year later killed 146 women for the lack of the very fire escapes they had demanded in their strike.
With the new public roles of women reformers also came a "The Breakdown of Victorianism." Working class girls pursued entertainment, frolicking provocatively in the dance halls. "Sex o'clock" had struck. And political radicalism was also on the rise in NYC, with Emma Goldman advocating free love, Margaret Sanger promoting birth control and Charlotte Perkins Gilman promoting professionalized housework and communal kitchens. Yet there were many "Paradoxes of Modernity" evident through all this euphoria. Reform and "Americanization" were achieved at the cost of lost immigrant cultures, scientific housework offered new means for intrusion into the private lives of women as did the new social science casework which stigmatized the poor. Freudian psychology also worked to marginalize lesbians, who now appeared to be "abnormal."
"New Life in the Suffrage Movement" came from both radical circles and the settlement movement. A grass roots revival of the suffrage cause featured lecture tours by prominent suffragists and agitation for suffrage legislation in the states. Even President Wilson's inauguration in 1913 was drained of visitors who had gone to see the 5,000 women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Fractures in the NAWSA coalition appeared over the militancy of Alice Paul, who resented the more subdued approach of Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt built a "well-oiled political machine" which focused on local neighborhood organization. Formerly an active member of the Woman's Peace Party, she was politically astute enough to see that support for the war, once war was declared, would be a crucial step to claiming a female right to citizenship. Though the House voted for Woman Suffrage in 1918, the Senate voted it down. Catt's weary women swung into action one last time to push Woman Suffrage over the top. The 19th Amendment became law on August 26, 1920.
The story of the "The Decline of Female Reform" is covered in Flappers, Freudians, and All That Jazz. The success of suffrage had lead many to believe, falsely in Evans' view, that women could now pursue their own individual goals. Rejecting maternalist protections, indeed all sex-based protective legislation, the National Woman's Party (NWP) under the leadership of Alice Paul pursued the abolition of special women's protections in favor of an Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA appalled Progressive women who had fought so hard for protections of working women. The rise of popularized ideals of "The Companionate Marriage and the Reemergence of Female Sexuality" took place in an atmosphere of depoliticized feminity in which becoming a private secretary or Office Wife became the highest goal of "The Secretary as Single Girl." Without the community of women fostered by Progressive reform movements, women retreated into their own private pursuits.
In the chapter on Surviving the Great Depression, Evans discusses "The Retreat into Privacy: Family, Work and Personal Life" which exacerbated a depoliticizing trend that had set in after the passage of suffrage. The Depression created an atmosphere that further precluded the legitimacy of women's work outside the home. Driven back towards domesticity, the women of the Depression did not experience femininity as empowering but rather relearned the home economy skills of canning food, etc. as a mere means of survival. "The Female Reform Tradition in the New Deal" is a solid overview which serves as a crib to Gordon below. "Social Movements: Activism without Feminism" concludes the section on the New Deal Era with a brief consideration of racial politics. As an activist herself in the Civil Rights Movement, Evans sees the interracial cooperation of the Council for Interracial Cooperation (CIC) as "one of the last opportunities for women to generate organized power outside the corridors of public life by drawing on traditional women's networks." (p. 211) But this moment seems to have been lost. In this anteroom to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, Mary McCloud Bethune is seen urging Jessie Daniel Ames (a Texas suffragist and social reformer) to take up the anti-lynching cause. She formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930. Unlike the communists, who saw the feminist cause as bourgeois, traditional women's networks provided a real option for organizing for real change across the racial divide.
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all to familiar with the Jim Crow violence of the American South. It was an exciting time and a violent time, as many periods of rapid change are. And it was, above all, a time where the issues of class and race intersected in ways that were to be informed by gender. Out of the changes wrought by initialization emerged "The New Woman," highly educated in the new all-female schools of the post-Civil War America, she had the choice of family or work. If she choose the life of a teacher or nurse, family would likely be a closed avenue and visa versa. Women did choose career over family and in the Progressive era formed reform communities like Hull House in Chicago (1889). Seeking real experience in the ennui of fin de siecle America, these women reached out to the poor immigrants and sought to "Americanize" them. For some, like Florence Kelley at Hull House, it was the beginning of a long career of female reform activism. Forming the National Consumers' League (NCL), Kelley would agitate for better conditions for working girls who were mercilessly exploited by the new department stores. Reaching out to the working class, they never quite bridged the gap, but they certainly tried. For black women the issues were starkly different. Women activists like the black publisher Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Memphis, TN, sought to expose the brutality of lynching and was run out of town. Black women were more likely to offer support to married working women with children as this was the reality of the black family in early 20th C America.
"A Reunited Woman Suffrage Movement" also animated the female reform movements of the Progressive Era. In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president. Suffragists, as well as other reformers, used the concerns of "politicized domesticity" to break out of the go beyond the domestic sphere and into the world of public reform. It would be the "mother office of the state" that would address the most grievous consequences of industrialization. Building on the legacies of the K of L and earlier republican motherhood, women entered reform. More radical women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman could use domesticity to advocate such radical ideas as collective housekeeping and cooking to free women from the growing "double burden." More ominously, white middle class progressives shared a common racism with their male reformer counterparts.
"The Working Girl" was the subject of great concern among reformers. The dangerous conditions in industrial factories were the subject of reform legislation and agitation, yet the lives of black women who were consigned to agriculture and domestic service were largely ignored by white reformers, who considered that a "race" issue. Bridging the gap of class to support working white women, wealthy reform women joined the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and formed a powerful force to fight for women's equality in the workplace. Supporting the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in strikes against unsafe conditions in the sweatshops of NY, the WTUL league went down to defeat along with the rest of the "Uprising of Thirty Thousand," but the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist Fire only a year later killed 146 women for the lack of the very fire escapes they had demanded in their strike.
With the new public roles of women reformers also came a "The Breakdown of Victorianism." Working class girls pursued entertainment, frolicking provocatively in the dance halls. "Sex o'clock" had struck. And political radicalism was also on the rise in NYC, with Emma Goldman advocating free love, Margaret Sanger promoting birth control and Charlotte Perkins Gilman promoting professionalized housework and communal kitchens. Yet there were many "Paradoxes of Modernity" evident through all this euphoria. Reform and "Americanization" were achieved at the cost of lost immigrant cultures, scientific housework offered new means for intrusion into the private lives of women as did the new social science casework which stigmatized the poor. Freudian psychology also worked to marginalize lesbians, who now appeared to be "abnormal."
"New Life in the Suffrage Movement" came from both radical circles and the settlement movement. A grass roots revival of the suffrage cause featured lecture tours by prominent suffragists and agitation for suffrage legislation in the states. Even President Wilson's inauguration in 1913 was drained of visitors who had gone to see the 5,000 women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Fractures in the NAWSA coalition appeared over the militancy of Alice Paul, who resented the more subdued approach of Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt built a "well-oiled political machine" which focused on local neighborhood organization. Formerly an active member of the Woman's Peace Party, she was politically astute enough to see that support for the war, once war was declared, would be a crucial step to claiming a female right to citizenship. Though the House voted for Woman Suffrage in 1918, the Senate voted it down. Catt's weary women swung into action one last time to push Woman Suffrage over the top. The 19th Amendment became law on August 26, 1920.
The story of the "The Decline of Female Reform" is covered in Flappers, Freudians, and All That Jazz. The success of suffrage had lead many to believe, falsely in Evans' view, that women could now pursue their own individual goals. Rejecting maternalist protections, indeed all sex-based protective legislation, the National Woman's Party (NWP) under the leadership of Alice Paul pursued the abolition of special women's protections in favor of an Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA appalled Progressive women who had fought so hard for protections of working women. The rise of popularized ideals of "The Companionate Marriage and the Reemergence of Female Sexuality" took place in an atmosphere of depoliticized feminity in which becoming a private secretary or Office Wife became the highest goal of "The Secretary as Single Girl." Without the community of women fostered by Progressive reform movements, women retreated into their own private pursuits.
In the chapter on Surviving the Great Depression, Evans discusses "The Retreat into Privacy: Family, Work and Personal Life" which exacerbated a depoliticizing trend that had set in after the passage of suffrage. The Depression created an atmosphere that further precluded the legitimacy of women's work outside the home. Driven back towards domesticity, the women of the Depression did not experience femininity as empowering but rather relearned the home economy skills of canning food, etc. as a mere means of survival. "The Female Reform Tradition in the New Deal" is a solid overview which serves as a crib to Gordon below. "Social Movements: Activism without Feminism" concludes the section on the New Deal Era with a brief consideration of racial politics. As an activist herself in the Civil Rights Movement, Evans sees the interracial cooperation of the Council for Interracial Cooperation (CIC) as "one of the last opportunities for women to generate organized power outside the corridors of public life by drawing on traditional women's networks." (p. 211) But this moment seems to have been lost. In this anteroom to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, Mary McCloud Bethune is seen urging Jessie Daniel Ames (a Texas suffragist and social reformer) to take up the anti-lynching cause. She formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930. Unlike the communists, who saw the feminist cause as bourgeois, traditional women's networks provided a real option for organizing for real change across the racial divide.
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1989
Physical description
386 p.
ISBN
0029029902 / 9780029029909