Kramer: How did marriage and women’s roles change from Colonial period to the Republican Period?
How did marriage and women’s roles change from the Colonial period to the Republican Period, into the 19th c. Industrial Period. How did women use the Cult of Domesticity and the Cult of True Woman to carve a niche for themselves? Are these ideas repressive or freeing? In what ways? What ways did women take social power?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Bastion
Didn’t the people who’re are asking you all these questions give you a book with the answers in it?
In the Colonial period, women’s work was vital to the survival of the colonies. Their role in cloth production was particularly important, as cloth was in very short supply in the early colonies, spinning and weaving were vital female skills. They raised poultry, milked cows, made their own butter and cheese, brewed the ale that people drank instead of water, grew vegetables, preserved food for winter, tended the sick, and in the southern colonies in the early decades they often laboured in the fields beside the men.
During the later colonial period their economic importance declined somewhat, as more ready-made good became available, and their role as producers was no longer seen as vital. But many women still performed important roles as supporters of husbands in their business for instance, like Deborah Read Franklin, who ran all Benjamin Franklin’s business concerns while he spent years in Europe. She was typical of many 18-th century colonial women.
With the coming of the Revolutionary War, women’s cooperation was vital in boycotting British goods, as the family shoppers without their cooperation “tis impossible to succeed” said South Carolina patriot Christopher Gadsen in 1769. They were also needed to produce the goods that could no longer be bought, and once more their skills in spinning and weaving became vital. Southern ladies wore dresses made of homespun cloth to their fancy balls, and they joined their husbands and fathers in making political toasts and singing patriotic songs. The northern women organised spinning bees and were honoured for their production of homemade material, which they proudly presented to local officials.
While the men were away fighting, women took over farms and businesses, and in some parts of the country, endured life under an army of occupation. Abigal Adams for instance held down the fort at the family farm in Massachusetts while her husband was away, sheltered soldiers and refugees, and when dysentery struck in the neighbourhood her house became a hospital. “And such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.” she wrote.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, American women changed from colonial goodwives to people with more modern concerns. They went to school, and they knew a great deal more about what was going on in the world outside their own neighbourhoods. They were still religious, but they wanted to be happy in this earthly life as well as the next. They thought about marriage in terms of romance and companionship rather than a simple economic partnership. They hoped to see their children rise higher in the world than their parents did. They wanted their homes to be attractive, and comfort was becoming a priority.
The period before the Civil War was, for women, both a time of liberation and new restrictions. Teaching became a respectable career, giving middle-class girls an option in life beyond marriage or dependent spinsterhood. Working-class girls entered the factories. A few female pioneers fought their way into the professions and became doctors or ministers or journalists: others entered the public world as reformers or lecturers. But at the same time Americans of both sexes were setting the most rigid rules for proper womanly behaivour in the country’s history. Writers loved to list eh qulaities of the True Woiman, and they were always the opposite of the virtues of the true man. “Man is strong – woman is beautiful. Man is daring and confident – woman is diffident and unassuming. Man is great in action – woman in suffering.” explained Ladies Museum magazine.
The colonial housewife had contributed to the family with her chickens and butter money, but the True Woman relied totally on her husband for emotional and financial support. her only resources were spiritual.
The law of the True Woman was attractive to many Americans in the pre-Civil War era, because it emphasised safgety and control. The new industrial economy was creating unheard-of opportunities for making money, but it was unstable, with booms and panics and get-rich-quick schemes and bankruptcies. In the bust of 1881, land values fell asmuch as 75 percent overnight, and when the panic of 1837hit New York, more than a third of the city’s workers lost their jobs. Nervous businessmen embraced the idea of the family as a little nest detached from the outside world. The whole country was like the nation’s transport system, which had improved so fast that it was possible for people to travel to places they would not have dreamed of a few decades earlir – but at a price. The railroads kept having wrecks and the steamships blew up – there were at least 150 major explosions between 1825 and 1850. it was a giddy, frightening time, and many women liked the idea of being protected by strict boundaries.
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