Tiffany K. Wayne - Böcker

The nineteenth century has been referred to as the Woman's Century, and it was a period of amazing change and progress for American women. There were great leaps forward in women's legal status, their entrance into higher education and the professions, and their roles in public life. In addition, approximately two million African American female slaves gained their freedom. Women's Roles in Nineteenth-Century America examines how economic, political, and social factors in the United States affected women's roles and how women themselves helped shape history. Each thematic chapter addresses ideas about women's proper roles as well as women's experiences of living in the nineteenth century. While the dominant ideas about appropriate gender roles originated from within the white Protestant and primarily middle-class culture, each chapter compares those ideas with the reality of different women's daily lives, integrating information on European American, African American, Native American, and immigrant women, and women of different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds and regions. Students and general readers will come away with a solid understanding of marriage and family life, the boundaries between home and public life, work, the intricacies of social and political reform, and new directions in religious and literary roles and the multicultural histories of the American West.Chapter 1, Marriage and Family Life, looks at women's roles and relationships as daughters, wives, and mothers, as well as the roles of women who remained single, either by choice or circumstance. Slave marriages and interracial marriages are also discussed, as well as reformers' attacks on and attempts to provide alternatives to traditional marriage. Chapter 2 on Work acknowledges women's unpaid work within the household economy as well as their entrance into the paid workforce beginning in the nineteenth century. Chapter 3, Religion, explores women's roles in as churchgoers, reformers, missionaries, and preachers. Chapter 4 on Education examines a century that began with almost no women having access to formal education-and most black women denied any education all-and ended with women making up nearly half of all college graduates and in leading roles as teachers, college administrators, and even college presidents. Women had also made several first entrances into professions requiring advanced educations, such as medicine, the law, and the ministry. Chapter 5, Politics and Reform, explains how women were consistently active in public life throughout the century. Chapter 6, Slavery and Civil War, looks at the experience of enslaved women, their survival and resistance, as well as their first experiences of freedom during and after the Civil War. The chapter also explores the ways in which both black and white women participated in and were affected by the Civil War. Chapter 7 on The West discusses the process of relentless westward movement in the nineteenth century through the perspective of women, whether the thousands of pioneer women who traveled into and settled the west, or the native women who were confronted with and challenged by those settlements. Finally, Chapter 8, Literature and the Arts, shows that while traditional studies of high culture have focused largely on a male canon of writers and artists, women in fact contributed to establishing an American tradition of literature and the arts.

This book explores the theoretical relationship between feminism and transcendentalism through the ideas and activism of prominent 19th century female thinkers and activists. By analyzing the work of such important figures in post-Civil War American intellectual life_such as Ednah Cheney, Caroline Dall, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith_Tiffany Wayne demonstrates how transcendentalism provided a language with particular appeal to women and helped promote an emerging feminist movement with a similar goal of acknowledging women's right to self-development. Bridging the gap between the traditionally disparate fields of women's history and American intellectual history, this book is as much a re-visioning of transcendentalism_arguing for recognition of its more widespread and long-lasting influence in American cultural life_as a project in historicizing feminist theory.

This book explores the theoretical relationship between feminism and transcendentalism through the ideas and activism of prominent 19th century female thinkers and activists. By analyzing the work of such important figures in post-Civil War American intellectual life_such as Ednah Cheney, Caroline Dall, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith_Tiffany Wayne demonstrates how transcendentalism provided a language with particular appeal to women and helped promote an emerging feminist movement with a similar goal of acknowledging women's right to self-development. Bridging the gap between the traditionally disparate fields of women's history and American intellectual history, this book is as much a re-visioning of transcendentalism_arguing for recognition of its more widespread and long-lasting influence in American cultural life_as a project in historicizing feminist theory.

This is the "everything" women's suffrage and Nineteenth Amendment book, coming just as the country celebrates the centenary of the constitutional amendment that finally brought the vote to all American women.Women's Suffrage: The Complete Guide to the Nineteenth Amendment tells the dramatic story of American women's long fight for the vote and passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A veritable library on all things to do with suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment, this reference tells the heroic stories of suffragists and brings to life the ideas and deeds of the organizations that made suffrage possible. Along the way, the book delves into less well-known stories, like the experiences of African American women during the fight for suffrage, the role of labor in the suffrage movement, and the special role of Western states in the fight for voting equality. The material analyzes key moments in the suffrage fight. A comprehensive document section brings to life the arguments for and against suffrage. Included among many primary sources are Jane Addams's provocative "If Men Were Seeking the Franchise" (1913), Carrie Chapman Catt's "Address to Congress on Women's Suffrage" (1917), and many more speeches, laws, and documents of all types.