Turn of the Century Women's Roles

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Turn of the Century Women's Roles
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Susan B. Anthony Suffragette

• After meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
  Anthony dedicated herself to winning full rights
  for women.
• Teamed with Stanton, she gained her first success
  with the passage of New York State's Married
  Women's Property Act (1860).
• An ardent abolitionist, she opposed the male-only
  Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
• During 186870 she was publisher of Revolution, a
  women's suffrage paper, and with Stanton she
  founded the National Woman Suffrage Association
  (1869).

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• In the election of 1872 she cast a ballot and was
  arrested and fined, and in 1905 she personally
  visited President Theodore Roosevelt to urge his
  support for women's suffrage.
• The ridicule that had greeted her in her first
  decades was replaced by respect, and she became
  internationally known as the symbol of the
  women's rights movement.
• The following excerpt is part of a speech she
  gave in 1872 advocating women's suffrage.
• "Friends and Fellow-citizens I stand before you
  to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime
  of having voted at the last Presidential
  election, without having a lawful right to vote.
  It shall be my work this evening to prove to you
  that in thus voting, I not only committed no
  crime, but, instead, simply exercised my
  citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all United
  States citizens by the National Constitution,
  beyond the power of any State to deny."

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The Seneca Falls Declaration (1848)

• The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848 outlined
  goals the women's rights movement of the mid-19th
  century.
• As can be seen in the opening passages, the
  document was modeled after the Declaration of
  Independence.
• "When, in the course of human events, it becomes
  necessary for one portion of the family of man to
  assume among the people of the earth a position
  different from that which they have hitherto
  occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and
  of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to
  the opinions of mankind requires that they should
  declare the causes that impel them to such a
  course."

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Attitudes on Enfranchisement

• There were, obviously, proponents on both sides
  of the suffrage issue and both expressed their
  opinions ferociously in the media.
• The presentation supporting the constitutional
  suffrage amendment, then presented as the 16th
  Amendment, were presented during the
  Congressional consideration of the subject and
  presents a compelling argument for its passage.
• "The people "ordained and established" the
  Constitution. Such is the preamble. "We, the
  people." Can it be said that the people acquire
  their privileges from the instrument that they
  themselves establish? Does the creature extend
  rights, privileges and immunities to the
  creator? No the people retain all the rights
  which they have not surrendered and if the
  people have not given to the government the
  power to deprive them of their elective
• franchise, they possess it by virtue of
  citizenship."

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• This New York Times article highlights the
  details on the passage of the 19th amendment and
  then also addresses the half century plight of
  the suffragists.
• "WASHINGTON, June 4 - After a long and
  persistent fight advocates of woman suffrage won
  a victory in the Senate today when that body, by
  a vote of 56 to 25, adopted the Susan Anthony
  amendment to the Constitution. The suffrage
  supporters had two more than the necessary
  two-thirds vote of Senators present. Had all the
  Senators known to be in favor of suffrage been
  present the amendment would have had 66 votes, or
  two more than a two-thirds vote of the entire
  Senate."

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• The Supreme Court decreed, in the first case of
  its kind, Minor v. Happersett (1874) that the
  state of Missouri had been within its
  constitutional rights in denying a woman
  applicant, Virginia Minor, the right to vote.
• "If the law is wrong, it ought to be changed but
  the power for that is not with us.......No
  argument as to woman's need of suffrage can be
  considered. We can only act upon her rights as
  they exist. It is not for us to look at the
  hardship of withholding. Our duty is at an end if
  we find it is within the power of a State to
  withhold."

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Property Rights

• Before married women's property acts were passed,
  upon marriage a woman lost any right to control
  property that was hers prior to the marriage, nor
  did she have rights to acquire any property
  during marriage.
• A married woman could not make contracts, keep or
  control her own wages or any rents, transfer
  property, sell property or bring any lawsuit.
• In 1848, the New York "Married Women's Property
  Act" was passed giving women more comprehensive
  rights to control property. The law was used as a
  model for similar laws in many other states.

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Working Restrictions

• A major facet of the Progressive movements
  agenda was to ameliorate the worst aspects of
  industrialization including environmental
  degradation, abuse of workers, exploitation of
  consumers, and corruption of the political
  process.
• Starting in the state legislatures, reformers
  passed a variety of statutes, including factory
  safety laws, workmen's compensation, minimum
  wages and maximum hours.
• However, conservatives were able to block some of
  these programs in the courts, where they appealed
  to a judiciary imbued with the notions that
  private property was sacrosanct and that
  legislatures should not be able to tell people
  how to use their property.

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• In 1905, the case of Lochner v New York ruled
  that limiting the hours of bakery workers,
  regardless of sex, to a ten-hour day was
  unconstitutional, because such a measure bore no
  relation to the worker's health or safety.
• When the state of Oregon established a ten-hour
  workday for women in laundries and factories,
  business owners attacked it on the grounds that,
  like the New York law, it bore no relation to the
  women's health or safety.
• Justice Brewer upheld the law, claiming that it
  did relate to women's health and safety, in an
  unprecedented brief that established that women
  were, legally, different from men.
• "That woman's physical structure and the
  performance of maternal functions place her at a
  disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is
  obvious. This is especially true when the burdens
  of motherhood are upon her....and as healthy
  mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the
  physical well-being of woman becomes an object of
  public interest and care in order to preserve the
  strength and vigor of the race."

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The 19th Amendment

• Although briefly postponed due to the outbreak of
  WWI, the continued agitation by women determined
  to obtain voting rights resulted in the
  ratification of the 19th Amendment, which finally
  allowed women to represent themselves at the
  polls.
• The pictures include photographs of a
  pro-suffrage parade, suffrage protesters
  targeting Woodrow Wilson because of his
  reluctance to support the 19th Amendment, and
  Kentucky Governor, Edwin Morrow, signing the 19th
  Amendment on its way to ratification.

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Politicians

• American women have had the right to vote since
  1920, but their political roles have been
  minimal.
• A notable exception was Jeanette Rankin, a member
  of the Republican Party who campaigned for
  universal suffrage, prohibition, child welfare
  reform, an end to child labor and staying out of
  the First World War, and became the first woman
  to be elected to the House of Representatives.
• One of her first actions was to introduce a bill
  that would have allowed women citizenship
  independent of their husbands, whereas women lost
  most of their liberties in deference to their
  husbands after marriage.

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• Hattie Caraway of Arkansas was first appointed to
  the Senate in 1932 to fill the vacancy caused by
  the death of her husband, Thaddeus H. Caraway.
• In 1933, she became the first woman elected to
  the United States Senate.
• She was the first woman to chair a Senate
  Committee and the first woman to take up the
  gavel on the Senate floor as the presiding
  officer.

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Female Professionals

• Doctors were not the only female professionals
  who encountered resistance. The legal profession
  was also resistant to admitting women.
• Myra Bradwell applied for membership in the
  Illinois state bar in accordance with a state
  statute that permitted any adult of good
  character and with sufficient training to be
  admitted.
• Because she was a woman, however, the Illinois
  State Bar denied her admission, noting that the
  "strife" of the bar would surely destroy
  femininity.
• Bradwell appealed the decision to the United
  States Supreme Court, arguing that her right to
  practice law was protected by the Fourteenth
  Amendment. In another blow for Women's Rights,
  the Supreme Court disagreed with Bradwell.
• In an 8-1 ruling, it upheld the decision of the
  Illinois court, ruling that the "Privileges or
  Immunities Clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment
  did not include the right to practice a
  profession. Justice Bradley's opinion concurring
  in the Court's judgment is notable for positing
  that it was the "paramount destiny" of a woman to
  "fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and
  mother. This is the law of the Creator."

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Female Medical Education

• Beginning in the 19th century the required
  educational preparation for the practice of
  medicine increased.
• This tended to prevent many young women from
  entering professional medical careers, although
  they had dominated many areas of medicine,
  primarily midwifery, prior to this point.
• Home nursing was considered a proper female
  occupation, whereas nursing in hospitals was done
  almost exclusively by men.
• Specific discrimination against women also began
  to appear. For example, the American Medical
  Association, founded in 1846, barred women from
  membership. They were also barred from attending
  "men's" medical colleges.

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• Instead, women enrolled in their own such as the
  Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, which was
  established in 1850.
• By the 1910s, however, women were attending many
  leading medical schools, and in 1915 the American
  Medical Association began to admit women members.
  
• Elizabeth Blackwell was instrumental in breaking
  back into the field for women.
• She relentlessly pursued an education and
  eventually became the first female doctor in the
  modern American era.

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Women's Education

• The idea of a proper women's education was a
  controversial topic.
• People disagreed on which topics were acceptable,
  at which age women should begin and end their
  education, and who should instruct them.
• At the end of the 18th Century, Mary
  Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the
  Rights of Woman through which she sought to
  "persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength,
  both of mind and body, and to convince them that
  the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart,
  delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste,
  are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness."
  

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Agnes Nestor Working Her Fingers to the Bone
(1898)

• Beginning in the late 19th century, the rapid
  increase in the number of women in the work force
  reflected a significant shift in the role and
  status of women in American culture.
• As women become more economically empowered,
  their methods and scope of organization also
  became increasingly more apparent and often tied
  to labor disputes.
• Such disputes often provided the impetus for
  organized movements to achieve suffrage with the
  general understanding that political influence
  would provide women with greater protection in
  the work place

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• Agnes Nestor, a factory worker, played a
  substantial role in the emerging women's labor
  movement.
• Nestors mother was a textile mill worker and her
  father was a machinist and a one-time member of
  the Knights of Labor who became a city alderman
  in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
• The family migrated to Chicago during the
  depression of the 1890s, and the teenage Agnes
  went to work in a glove factory.
• The sixty-hour work weeks exhausted her. I have
  been so tired all day I could hardly work, she
  regularly noted in her diary.

• Soon she became president of her glove workers
  local and later a leader of the International
  Glove Workers Union.
• She also took a leading role in the Womens
  Trade Union League, serving as president of the
  Chicago branch from 1913 to 1948.

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19th Century Reform

• The late 19th century was a period of intense
  social reform movements. The bellow excerpt is
  from a speech by Susan B. Anthony who observes
  that, though women are least likely to succumb to
  intemperance, they are the worst hurt victims of
  it. She also states that many women are forced
  into prostitution out of poverty because they are
  now allowed any other jobs.
• "Women, like men, must not only have fair play
  in the world of work and self-support, but, like
  men, must be eligible to all the honors and
  emoluments of society and government."
• This second excerpt is from a writing by author
  and activist Grace Dodge, who exhorts young
  ladies to improve themselves and make efficient
  use of their time.
• "We are all workers--busy bodies and I think
  there is not one of us who could not say, "It
  seems as if a woman's work was never done."'

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Domestic Expectations

• Domesticity used to be a matter of fact gender
  was deterministic of ones occupation.
• In the Victorian period most women were
  responsible for clothing, feeding, educating, and
  sanitizing their families.
• The women who were not responsible for such
  things were usually well off and could afford to
  hire servants and buy expensive appliances to
  reduce the labor involved in such tasks.
• Women have often been put into the domestic
  sphere without voicing their opinion on the
  matter.

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• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a prolific writer of
  the era, wrote the Yellow Wallpaper, a story
  which explains how men perpetrated an ideological
  prison that subjected and silenced women.
• This ideology, called the Cult of True Womanhood,
  legitimized the victimization of women.
• The Cult of Domesticity and the Cult of Purity
  were the central tenets of the Cult of True
  Womanhood.
• Laboring under the seeming benevolence of the
  Cult of Domesticity, women were imprisoned in the
  home or private sphere, a servant tending to the
  needs of the family.

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• Technology has a tremendous role in the way
  domesticity has changed.
• There have been great advances in sciences that,
  through their application, have greatly reduced
  the amount of time and the extent of labor
  required for many domestic tasks.
• By 1937 the first automatic washer was invented
  and this assuredly diminished the workload.
• Sewing had been a typical home activity for many
  centuries but it was not until Isaac Singer
  invented the first practical sewing machine in
  1853 that sewing could become an industry.