Women's Roles in Nineteenth-century America
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. |
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Inhalt
Marriage and Family Life | 1 |
Work | 25 |
Religion | 49 |
Education and the Professions | 71 |
Politics and Reform | 99 |
Slavery and the Civil War | 127 |
The West | 149 |
Literature and the Arts | 171 |
191 | |
203 | |