The Young Oxford history of women in the United States
2 total works
v. 6
In the years following the Civil War, women in the United States took up many new roles and their impact on the nation became ever more visible. As new territories were settled and the country began to heal its wounds, great industrial expansion brought changes in women's occupations, education, and activities. The sharecroppers who labored in the fields of the South, migrants who put down roots in the Great Plains, immigrants who sought opportunities in the ever-swelling cities, the first generation of young women to attend universities--all were part of the changing American landscape.
Although women were expected to serve their families, communities, and the country by being good wives and mothers, their activities actually extended far beyond the home. After the Civil War, women organized to work toward civic, social, and religious improvement. They devoted themselves to a wide range of issues and causes--ending alcoholism, preventing violence against women, helping young farm women adjust to city life, increasing women's educational opportunities, and--above all--obtaining the vote for women. These were crucial stepping-stones in women's quest for social and political power.
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Addams are but a few of the women whose struggles for women's rights are chronicled in Laborers for Liberty. But the stories of women whose names are not familiar are also recorded. Each waged her own battle for liberty in the home, on the farm, and in the factory, as American women began to take greater control over their lives and to lay the groundwork for 20th-century feminism.
Although women were expected to serve their families, communities, and the country by being good wives and mothers, their activities actually extended far beyond the home. After the Civil War, women organized to work toward civic, social, and religious improvement. They devoted themselves to a wide range of issues and causes--ending alcoholism, preventing violence against women, helping young farm women adjust to city life, increasing women's educational opportunities, and--above all--obtaining the vote for women. These were crucial stepping-stones in women's quest for social and political power.
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Addams are but a few of the women whose struggles for women's rights are chronicled in Laborers for Liberty. But the stories of women whose names are not familiar are also recorded. Each waged her own battle for liberty in the home, on the farm, and in the factory, as American women began to take greater control over their lives and to lay the groundwork for 20th-century feminism.
v. 5
The year 1848 was a year of revolution. In Europe, the German philosopher of communism Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto, the British philosopher of liberalism John Stuart Mill published The Principles of Political Economy, and a small number of communitarian socialist women in France demanded their own political rights in the midst of an uprising that overthrew the French monarchy. In the United States, several determined women in upstate New York called a convention, attended by almost three hundred women and men, which drew up a declaration modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Just as that Declaration cited the injustice of the British crown, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls detailed the wrongs of gender inequality in this country. The convention and the Declaration marked the formal beginning of the women's rights movement in the United States.
The tumultuous middle years of the 19th century were times of increasing political activism by women's groups, and both antislavery agitators and supporters of slavery. These years also saw the geographical expansion of white settlement across the continent. Formerly Spanish and Mexican territory was annexed, gold was discovered in California, cities and industries grew in the Northeast, and "king cotton" and the grip of racial slavery extended from the deep South to the near Southwest. It was a time of momentous change and upheaval as sectional interest became so bitterly incompatible that it led to the catastrophe of Civil War.
How women participated in these events forms the story of this book. The voices of women--pioneers and displaced Native Americans, slaves and slaveholders, industrial wage earners and the wives and daughters of capitalist entrepreneurs, political radicals and demure conservatives, women who served the Union and those who aided the Confederacy--resonate through these pages. Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton--their stories and others tell of the setbacks and the triumphs as women continued to fight An Unfinished Battle for equal rights for all.
The tumultuous middle years of the 19th century were times of increasing political activism by women's groups, and both antislavery agitators and supporters of slavery. These years also saw the geographical expansion of white settlement across the continent. Formerly Spanish and Mexican territory was annexed, gold was discovered in California, cities and industries grew in the Northeast, and "king cotton" and the grip of racial slavery extended from the deep South to the near Southwest. It was a time of momentous change and upheaval as sectional interest became so bitterly incompatible that it led to the catastrophe of Civil War.
How women participated in these events forms the story of this book. The voices of women--pioneers and displaced Native Americans, slaves and slaveholders, industrial wage earners and the wives and daughters of capitalist entrepreneurs, political radicals and demure conservatives, women who served the Union and those who aided the Confederacy--resonate through these pages. Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton--their stories and others tell of the setbacks and the triumphs as women continued to fight An Unfinished Battle for equal rights for all.