The majority of women were expected to be domestic caretakers, child bearers, and obedient servants to their husbands or fathers. Few, if any laws, existed that would protect the rights of women or promote their causes. Having been forced into this sphere of domesticity women craved an opportunity to do more. As industrialization and mechanization took hold in the new country women moved from rural areas to urban areas. Drawn by the promise of wages in factories like the Lowell Mills of the Northeast, women began to see that there was more for them to contribute to society.
Though, frequently that same society was not quite yet ready to embrace a strong minded and economically independent woman. The American Revolution solidified the Enlightenment ideals of Republicanism and free will, yet those things were still widely misunderstood.
Even though some women sought out their own individual paths through economic independence, society called for someone to teach the upcoming generations of Americans what it would take to preserve these ideals.
This would become known as Republican Motherhood and that duty fell to women because men viewed themselves too busy, as they were engaged in the world of politics and economics. Society called for someone to teach the upcoming generations of Americans what it would take to preserve these ideals.
Women evolved into becoming the moral guardians of the country. The white men dominated the spheres of economics and politics by restricting access to minorities and women, while women were forced into the sphere of domesticity. The differing needs of the family became evident as people moved away from rural areas and the practice of subsistence farming and began to embrace the industrialized urban areas. The life of the yeoman farmer relied on a familial workforce, so larger families were necessary.
Women—along with African Americans, American Indians, and other minorities—were decidedly overlooked in the expansion of democracy across early nineteenth-century America. Suffrage expansion at this time was limited to white males, leaving all women and non-white men behind. Women of this era were generally pushed to the sidelines as dependents of men, without the power to bring suit, make contracts, own property, or vote.
By the s and 40s, however, the climate began to change when a number of bold, outspoken women championed diverse social reforms of slavery, alcohol, war, prisons, prostitution, and capital punishment. Many women in the nineteenth century were involved in reform movements, particularly abolitionism. In , Maria Stewart who was African American began to write essays and make speeches against slavery, promoting educational and economic self-sufficiency for African Americans. Although her career was short, she had set the stage for the African-American women speakers who followed her, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.
Lucretia Mott, an educated woman from Boston, was one of the most powerful advocates of reform and acted as a bridge between the feminist and the abolitionist movements. Unfortunately, direct participation in the public arena was fraught with difficulties and danger.
When the women emerged, arms linked in solidarity, they were stoned and insulted. While women gained some legal rights in the nineteenth century, African-American women, in particular, remained largely disenfranchised. Describe the protections the law afforded some women and the vulnerability of African Americans before the law.
She could not conduct business or buy and sell property. Her husband controlled any property she brought to the marriage, although he could not sell it without her agreement.
Women also lacked the right to bring suit, file for divorce, pursue legal recourse, or vote. Many women in the early eighteenth century, however, began to agitate for legal equality between husbands and wives and for the same educational opportunities as men.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ca. African-American women were even more disenfranchised under the law, facing the intersecting oppressions of gender and race. Missouri v. Celia, a murder trial that took place in Missouri in , clearly illustrates these dual factors. It involved a slave woman named Celia and her master, Robert Newsome. Soon after becoming intimate with another slave while still being sought after by her master, Celia became pregnant.
Old Glory Burnt Flags. Pledge of Allegiance. Oath of Enlistment. The Lord's Prayer. We The People. In God We Trust. All Betsy Ross Flags. Betsy Ross - Betsy Ross - 45 DTJ. Historic American Flags. American Flag Wall Art. Challenge Coin Wood Flags. Air Force. Coast Guard. Military Branch Flag. Custom Military Wood Flags. Subdued Wood Flags. Patriotic Apparel. All - Graphic Tees. Men's Collection. The following excerpt introduces the concept of "Republic Motherhood" and explores its lasting legacy on the American Republic.
In the years of the early Republic a consensus developed around the idea that a mother, committed to the service of her family and to the state, might serve a political purpose. Those who opposed women in politics had to meet the proposal that women could-and should-play a political role through the raising of a patriotic child. The Republican Mother was to encourage in her sons civic interest and participation. She was to educate her children and guide them in the paths of morality and virtue.
But she was not to tell her male relatives for whom to vote. She was a citizen but not really a constituent. Western political theory, even during the Enlightenment, had only occasionally contemplated the role of women in the civic culture. It had habitually considered women only in domestic relationships, only as wives and mothers.
A political community that accepted women as political actors would have to eliminate the Rousseauistic assumption that the world of women is separate from the empire of men. The ideology of Republican Motherhood seemed to accomplish what the Enlightenment had not by identifying the intersection of the woman's private domain and the polis.
The notion that a mother can perform a political function represents the recognition that a citizen's political socialization takes place at an early age, that the family is a basic part of the system of political communication, and that patterns of family authority influence the general political culture. Yet most premodern political societies-and even some fairly modern democracies-maintained unarticulated, but nevertheless very firm, social restrictions that isolated the female domestic world from politics.
The willingness of the American woman to overcome this ancient separation brought her into the all-male political community.
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