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SS360: American Women

Republican Motherhood(post-Revolutionary War)

Duty was to raise civic-minded sons Women should be educated and educate

their children Many women began to participate civically…

like Abigail Adams.“I desire you would remember the ladies and

be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” – Abigail Adams

http://www.thelizlibrary.org/suffrage/abigail.htm

Cult of True Womanhood(Cult of Domesticity)

Prevalent from the Civil War to 1920 or so

Main purpose in life was motherhood

Characteristics include:

Piety Purity Submissiveness Domesticity

Therefore all True Women were urged, in the strongest possible terms, to maintain their virtue, although men, being by nature more sensual than they, would try to assault it. Thomas Branagan admitted in The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated that his sex would sin and sin again, but woman, stronger and purer, must not give in and let man "take liberties incompatible with her delicacy." "If you do," Branagan addressed his gentle reader, "You will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution.“

If such good advice was ignored the consequences were terrible and inexorable... A popular and often reprinted story by Fanny Forester told the sad tale of "Lucy Dutton." Lucy "with the seal of innocence upon her heart, and a rose-leaf upon her cheek," came out of her vine-covered cottage and ran into a city slicker. "And Lucy was beautiful and trusting, and thoughtless... Needs the story be told- Nay....Lucy was a child - consider how young, how very untaught - oh! Her innocence was no match for the sophistry of a gay, city youth! Spring came and shame was stamped upon the cottage at the foot of the hill." The baby died; Lucy went mad at the funeral and finally died herself... The frequency with which derangement follows loss of virtue suggests the exquisite sensibility of woman, and the possibility that, in the womenÌs magazines at least, her intellect was geared towards her hymen, not  her brain.... If, however, a woman managed to withstand manÌs assaults on her virtue, she  demonstrated her superiority and power over him... Men could be counted on to be grateful when women thus saved them from themselves...

The New Woman

Slightly overlaps and represents tension between old traditions and new ideals and progressivism.

Reform movements and philanthropy Usually middle-class; college-educated

Ida Tarbell, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-117944

Front page of expose of

the Standard Oil

Company, written by

Ida Tarbell, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-

51280

1920’s Women – A shift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg3QBwtOGSI

American Women

This is an AD for Birth Control from 1963. What does this ad tell us? How was this a shift in thinking from say the early 1900s and before?

American Women

Why was birth control so important in changing the lives of women? This is something

that feminists such as Crystal Eastman and Margaret Sanger worked fervently on.

American Women

What was/is the relationship between sexuality and the advertisement of consumer goods?

American Women

What impact would the media, including magazines and television/ movies have on changing notions of sexuality? Think about those previous images. What

are they selling? How does this stand in stark contrast to the

ideals of “true womanhood?”

Questions? Comments?

American Women

ReferencesPatterson, M. (1995). Survival of the best

fitted: Selling the American new woman as Gibson Girl, 1895-1910. ATQ, 9(2), 73. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Images: All retrieved from the Library of Congress database at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/