Women across classes and racial divides: Re-framing Women’s Roles in Traditionally Patriarchal Systems

Excerpt: "Introduction" by Linda K. Kerber and Jane DeHart-Mathews. In their edited volume Women's America: Refocusing the Past, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. pp. 3-23.

 Fifty years ago the historian Mary Beard published an anthology called America through Women's Eyes. In it she argued that an accurate understanding of the past required women’s experience to be analyzed with as much care as historians had normally devoted to the experience of men. Our perspective and our goals in this book are similar to hers.

From ancient Greece to our own day it has been easy for men to write about human experience from their own perspective. Mankind is the noun used as synonymous with humanity; women are the specific exceptions to the general experience. “When we speak of mankind,” complained one historian, “we mean men and women collectively, but when we speak of womenkind, we mean the ladies, God bless them.”[1] This is an easy habit, but it is a lazy one and its effect is to distort our understanding of the past. It does not take into account the possibility that the characteristics of men and the characteristics of women may differ, or that the experiences of men and women may differ because their gender is different, even if they are of the same race, class, and ethnic group.

Two decades ago the historian David Potter offered a useful, commonsensical rule that echoed Mary Beard’s work of a generation before. “When one meets with a social generalization it is frequently worthwhile to ask concretely: Does it apply to women, or only to the masculine component in the population?”[2] Historical phenomena, when viewed through women’s eyes and evaluated for the impact they have had on women, often appear to be very different than when evaluated for their impact on men.

In the last fifteen years historians seeking to test old generalizations have refreshed and often changed our understanding of general trends in American history by what they have learned about women’s history. Things we thought we “knew” about American history turn out to be more complex than we had suspected. For example, most textbooks suggest that the frontier meant opportunity for Americans, “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” But it was men who more readily found on the frontier compensation for their hard work; many women found only drudgery. Other generalizations turn out to be equally suspect. We have often assumed that American slaves were provided with at least adequate diets, but the generalization holds better for male slaves than for pregnant women and nursing mothers who found that the slaves’ diet meant semi-starvation. Differences in experience often worked to women’s disadvantage, but they did not always do so. In a success-oriented society, for ex ample, men have been expected to meet the pressures of competition directly; women, however, have been in some measure shielded from these pressures. Upper-middle-class women, freed from the demands of the marketplace, could pursue their own private interests—in the arts, in philanthropy, in horticulture—at their leisure, for the benefit not only of themselves but also of society.

Whether the differences seem advantageous to one sex or the other, the point remains that to consider one sex while ignoring the other is like looking at an old family photograph in which the male members occupy the foreground as distinct figures, while the female members are an undifferentiated blur in the background. Women’s history enables us to see the women in that photograph more clearly. It enables us to set women in the context of their distinctive past, deriving from their different biological, economic, and political situation. Women’s history enlarges our vision. And with that wider sight, we can hope to readjust generalizations so that our understanding of the whole now takes into account experiences special to each sex.[3]

The final, authoritative history will never be written. We can only approach the reality of the past, constantly refocusing our vision and refining our understanding. “Probably every historian,” observes a recent writer, “has at one time or the other day-dreamed about finding a lost trunk of letters which, when opened, would almost automatically revolutionize our historical understanding. What most of us did not know is that we have had that trunk in our intellectual attics for a long time and never thought to look inside. Women’s historians, having pried open the lid, invite us now to think in new terms, leading to a new perspective and therefore to a new past.”[4]

This anthology will introduce you to that trunk of materials and to the interpretations historians have been making of what they have found there. Like all anthologists, we are enthusiasts. We reprint here essays and documents that we have enjoyed reading and rereading. We think they deserve a wider audience.

Perhaps the most striking conclusion forced upon us by these materials is that public experience and private experience cannot be sharply separated. For example, instead of being at opposite poles, one private and the other public, the home and factory have strongly interacted in the American economic system. In the early stages of industrialization women working in their homes sold carded wool that was spun by factory machinery. As the consumer society developed, women, as part of their role as homemakers, became the chief buyers of manufactured goods. As mothers they have long inculcated in their children those traits of obedience, honesty, and industry that employers expect of their workers. Private activities that women engaged in for their families in their homes had—and continue to have—significant public implications.

Women’s history suggests a more complex understanding of traditional categories of historical interpretation. Conventional periodization has used presidential administrations or wars as major guideposts in organizing our description of the past: the Revolutionary Era, the Age of Jackson, the Civil War, the Eisenhower Years. Conventional interpretations have tended to emphasize the accomplishments of men whether they be presidents, generals, farmers, or ranch hands. But all men had women for contemporaries, and women experienced the same great social phenomena that men did. Certainly women felt the terrible trauma of war. Even in periods when they did not vote, women were citizens who offered allegiance to government and were affected by its policies. If men and women both felt the force of social change, each did so in distinctive ways.

. . . Because dates that mark major turning points in traditional historical accounts do not automatically coincide with those dates that mark significant changes in the lives of American women, women’s history challenges us to reexamine conventional periodization. . . . The dividing date between traditional and industrial America is 1820, by which time forces were in motion that would erode the domestic economy of an agrarian society, slowly transforming women’s lives in the process. The long period of industrialization that followed 1820 may conveniently be broken at 1880, by which time large- scale industries in which women were employed were firmly established. By this time, too, women’s rights leaders had come to recognize that suffrage would not be granted by the courts on the basis of a fresh interpretation of the Constitution, and they demanded a specific constitutional amendment. The second major period ends at 1920, when the necessary ingredients for emancipation were present. The historian Gerda Lerner has identified these as “urbanization; industrialization with technology permitting society to remove food preparation and care of the sick from the home; the mechanization of heating and laundry; spread of health and medical care sufficient to lower infant mortality and protect maternal health; birth control; . . . and availability of education on all levels to all children.”[5] These conditions existed in varying measure by 1920, which was also the year of the passage of the Equal Suffrage Amendment, the first year in which women attended large state universities in numbers comparable to men, and the first year in which more women were working in factories and white-collar jobs than in domestic service.

The study of women’s history not only challenges us to reconsider conventional periodization but it also changes traditional history by emphasizing the interrelationship among fields that have often been treated separately. To look at the past through women’s eyes is to see the complex interaction of biology (reproduction), economics, politics, and ideology. These essential categories appear and reappear throughout the book. Taken by themselves they are simple divisions that capture part of women’s historical experience. Taken as parts of an interacting whole, these categories underscore the peculiarity of women’s experience. The key to the interaction is the way in which biology affects the other three categories. An example of this interaction can help explain what this book is about. The mistress of a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina not vote; her dependent political status was dictated by her dependent economic status, which in turn was dictated by law and custom (ideology). She had no property of her own; whatever she had received from inheritance had been vested in her husband when she married. The economic facts of her position could have been that she had brought more wealth to the marriage than had her husband; the political facts were that only her husband could manage her property and participate in the community by voting and holding office—these were facts that changed the economic “facts” of life for her. The reason for one set of facts altering another set of facts was rooted in biology and the ideological explanation that accompanied the undeniable fact that women gave birth. The economic and political implications of this biological fact need not have dictated women’s political role—this we know from the passage of married women’s property acts and the Equal Suffrage Amendment (1920). In the nineteenth century, however, the role of women was defined by the ideological expectation that all women bear and care for children; if some did not, they were deviant. Our plantation mistress could best understand herself—in terms of the prevail ideology—as appropriately deferential to her husband while strict and demanding to her slaves, nurturing and caring to her children. These were the attitudes assigned to her by her “place” in society and that, expressed as the ideology of “true womanhood” (discussed below), celebrated the economic and political dependence of women not because biology actually dictated such dependence but because most people believed that it did. Biology, economics, politics, and ideology combined to describe reality. Historical reality, however, is characterized by change. Our antebellum lady’s granddaughters would find their reality to be different from hers; changes in each of the four categories would make their world different. Because the complex interaction of these four categories over time is so crucial to understanding women’s differing historical experience, each merits fuller discussion.

BIOLOGY

Exploring the past through women, we become aware that history embraces the private sphere of reproduction and domesticity as well as the public sphere of battlefield, court, and legislature. Indeed changing patterns of reproduction are the key to understanding women’s experience; during most of human history, anatomy has been destiny. Without reliable methods of contraception women spent their entire adult lives bearing, rearing, and often burying children, under going pregnancy as often as every two years until finally liberated by menopause. So fundamentally has biology defined the stages of women’s lives that historians increasingly use the concept of the life cycle—a concept that makes it possible to analyze female behavior by separating women into age and marital groupings (daughters, single women, wives, mothers, grandmothers, widows). Although these stages of the cycle remain constant, the number of years women have spent in each stage has shifted. For example, while women have tended to marry around the age of twenty throughout most of American history, the child-bearing stage of life has changed dramatically. Quaker women in the eighteenth century who could expect to bear children regularly until nearly forty contrast sharply to their mid-twentieth-century counterparts who completed their families by the age of thirty. Since women in the 1950s could expect to live much longer than their colonial forebears and to devote less time to the care of small children, they enjoyed a vastly wider range of choices and were freed, if they chose, to move out of the domestic sphere. Changing degrees of biological constraints have made women’s lives—and therefore their history—significantly different from those of men.

Biological differences have also contributed to different assumptions about sexuality. Women have traditionally been regarded as sexual beings. Reference to woman as Eve, the temptress, can be found in much of Western literature. During the nineteenth century, however, assumptions about female sexuality shifted drastically. “Respectable” women came to be seen as passionless creatures whose duty it was to repel the advances of men (who were thought to be more highly sexed by nature) until wifely duty required their submission in the marriage bed. Some historians argue that the Victorian Lady’s effort to deny her husband his conjugal “rights” should be seen as an effort to improve women’s lot at a time when permanent abstinence was often the only reliable form of birth control.[6] (Periodic abstinence in the form of the rhythm method was not effective as a birth control measure in the nineteenth century; only in the 1920s was the ovulation cycle correctly understood and plotted.) Not until the twentieth century and the widespread use of dependable contraceptive devices such as the diaphragm were most Americans able to separate sex from reproduction, to recognize that sexual relations are a valuable and pleasurable part of life for both men and women, and to acknowledge the full dimensions of female sexuality. As historians examine the sermons, marriage manuals, and other writings that told how women were supposed to behave and those records that offer evidence as to how they actually did behave, we are fast discovering that sexuality has its own history. In that history, too, gender has made a difference.

ECONOMICS

DOMESTIC ECONOMY

To view work through women’s eyes provides a new appreciation of the economic function of the home. Homes were—and to an appreciable extent still are— restaurants, nurseries, schools, hospitals, and lodging places. The colonial housewife, for example, was expected not merely to prepare and serve meals but to provide much of the food she brought to the table. The curing of meat and the pickling and preserving of vegetables and fruits were her responsibility, as were the garden, dairy, and poultry yard. Clothing the family was another of her tasks. In the northern colonies and on the frontier this meant not only cutting and sewing various garments but also spinning the thread and weaving and dyeing the cloth that went into clothes, household linens, and quilts. Rag rugs, too, were of her making. While more affluent households might include servants to lighten the physical burdens of the mistress of the house, she had to oversee their training and work, often exercising in the process considerable managerial skills of her own. Wives of poorer men lived simply, but they, too, were responsible for feeding and clothing their families and—in the case of illness, childbirth, or death—for serving as nurse, pharmacist, midwife, and undertaker who dressed the body for burial.

As the nation developed, women in cities were gradually relieved of some of these tasks. Even in the twentieth century, however, women in rural areas were expected to do arduous household chores, preserve many dozen quarts of food, and also take their turn in the fields as necessity dictated. Because their homes lacked the plumbing and electricity required for use of an electric washing machine, women in 90 percent of rural households in the United States were still doing laundry by hand as late as 1930. In the tobacco-growing country of the Carolinas and Virginia, young girls not only learned household skills but they, they, along with their brothers, were taught to drop tobacco plants into carefully prepared soil; how to remove worms from the growing plants; how to bind harvested tobacco leaves for curing; and, afterwards, how to tie them into bundles for the trip to market. Although it was usually the man in the family who took the fruits of the harvest to market, whatever the crop, many a prudent farmwife in the eighteenth century gathered up her surplus eggs or other foodstuffs to sell or barter. The domestic economy blended unobtrusively into the market economy

This subtle blending occurred in other ways as well. In hard times women, especially young unmarried daughters, sold their labor, using their pay to sustain the household. Domestic service attracted many women because it involved traditional women’s work and, for live-in servants, room and board as well as wages. Those seeking jobs in towns and cities enjoyed a wider range of options: work in a shop often seemed to offer greater independence and dignity. Census takers and many historians perceived these women to be part of the public market economy because they were working for wages. But the women usually thought of themselves as serving the domestic economy. Most regarded wage work as a temporary necessity undertaken in order to help their families in a time of financial stress.

The change in the status of women’s work from that of belonging to the family to that of belonging to women themselves was a significant step in their emancipation. Because of economic necessity the change is not yet complete, even in advanced industrialized countries such as the United States. Emancipation is not achieved until the work itself is seen as liberating or until women can spend their income as they wish. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the earnings of a married woman were hers to dispose of as she chose. Although in reality many women did indeed regard their “egg money” as their own, English tradition and colonial practice dictated that when a woman married, control of her earnings automatically passed to her husband. Indeed, all that had been hers was at the wedding transferred to him. Except for certain technical exceptions utilized by the wealthy, everything a woman owned at the time of her marriage and anything she might earn or inherit in the future were her husband’s to dispose of as he saw fit, even on the draw of a card or a throw of the dice. The desire of married women to retain or gain control over property that would have been theirs had they been men was an important force in sustaining women’s struggle for political rights in the nineteenth century.

The location of white women’s work in early America was predominantly in the home, as was the case in most preindustrial, rural societies. But even in the colonial period there were many women whose work was performed directly for the market, most notably slave women, who worked on crops destined for sale. Indeed, black women’s work has always been part of the market economy in America. For white northern women, however, the pre-Civil War process of industrialization did much to transform work. The spinning of thread, weaving of cloth, sewing of clothes, preserving of foods—all tasks formerly done in the homes as part of a domestic economy—were now done in mills and factories as part of the market economy. Poorer women followed these traditional tasks into the public sector as the economy modernized. They became part of a paid labor force, as did their children, since low wages made it impossible for many families to subsist on the income of one adult worker. Yet, surprisingly, women’s work patterns changed less than we once assumed. Work in the public sector, as in the private sector, continued to conform in large measure to family pressure and to traditional role expectations about what women could and should do, to the great financial detriment of women wage earners.

The extent to which female employment patterns in industry were shaped by family needs is apparent in a study of a New England textile factory that employed an average of fourteen thousand workers in the years before World War I. Women were very much a part of that work force. As young girls, they went into the mill to supplement family income, often allowing brothers to improve their job prospects by staying in school; as wives, they withdrew when children were born and returned as mothers of small children when the perilous state of family finances required them to do so; as mothers of grown children, they returned to stay.[7] Thus family responsibilities were a crucial factor not in determining at what stage in their life cycle women were gainfully employed but also in explaining why their employment patterns differed from those of male workers. (Indeed, it was not until after World War II that the number of working mothers with small children increased dramatically.)

Family responsibilities did much to determine when women worked; they also affected where women worked. Since employers shared the popular belief that women’s primary obligations were familial and their basic talents domestic, female wage earners were persistently channeled into jobs that corresponded with the kind of work done in the domestic sphere or with characteristics long associated with women. Even in colonial times most women who performed services for pay worked as housekeepers, cooks, nurses, or midwives. In the nineteenth century women seeking new avenues through which to gain economic independence laid claim to the teaching and nursing professions by emphasizing that the attributes required for such work were precisely those considered unique to the female sex. Thus nursing, considered in pre-Civil War years an occupation no respectable woman would enter, was eventually touted as a profession eminently suited to women. Providence, after all, had endowed the fairer sex with that “compassion which penetrate[s] the heart, that instinct which divines and anticipates the wants of the sick, and the patience which pliantly bends to all their caprices.”[8] As the economy grew more complex, middle-class women infiltrated the ranks of librarians and secretaries. These occupations had been primarily male, but, like teaching and nursing, were redefined so as to emphasize the nurturing, service-oriented qualities ascribed to women—with a corresponding decrease in pay. Newer industries provided new job titles but old work categories. Receptionists, social workers, and stewardesses were hired by employers still convinced that the tasks required in these jobs were consistent with the attributes and skills traditionally associated with women. Because gender rather than individual talent or capability has been the primary consideration, the result of this kind of stereotyping has been to segregate women into certain kinds of work, whether in the professions or in industry. Occupations and professions that for one generation constituted a lifeline have become a chain to the next; once a form of work has been defined as female, it has invariably become associated with low pay and minimal prestige. Pay and prestige have been reserved for those remaining overwhelmingly male. It is not surprising that until very recently women in significant numbers have been effectively barred from wielding scalpels, addressing juries, passing laws, or designing buildings.

Working-class women, especially, have been victims of discrimination. Low pay, long hours, and difficult—often dangerous—working conditions have characterized industrial work for both male and female employees during much of our history. Southern mills, where discrimination was based on race as well as sex, afford a classic example of occupational segregation and the inferior position of white and particularly black women. In a typical southern textile mill in the 1930s, management positions were reserved for college-educated white males. Men from working-class backgrounds monopolized supervisory and skilled positions. Semiskilled operative positions were divided among white men and women, with men predominating in better-paying jobs in the card room and dye houses. Women predictably took their place in the spinning and sewing rooms. Black men and women divided the manual labor. Opportunities to work up to a better position were confined to a few white males. For factory and mill women, already bearing the brunt of housework and child care, wage labor frequently meant—and still means—insecure employment in hazardous, low-paying, dead-end jobs.

While unionization enabled many working men to better their lot, it has not provided the same benefit for women. Male members, fearing women would work for lower pay and threaten their jobs, often barred women workers union membership during the early years of organizing. Even in unions that included women, labor leaders sought only limited economic gains for female workers. They, too, thought of the public economy as an essentially male preserve, and they failed to confront the problem of occupational segregation. The basic inequities built into the system have gone unchallenged until very recently, when pressure from the federal government has helped to produce changes.

Thus segregated into jobs associated with low status and low pay, denied equal pay for equal work, burdened doubly as the parent primarily responsible for home and child care, women have experienced work in the public sector differently from men. Viewed through women’s eyes, work in the public sector is different. While it has given women a small measure of economic independence, it has not provided the monetary rewards and the avenues to power and autonomy open to some men. The history of women’s participation in the labor force is, therefore, a history of marginality.

POLITICS

Most Americans, for much of their history, were convinced that God and nature had decreed that the two sexes inhabit different spheres and have different roles. Men’s roles were public and political, women’s domestic. Men’s activities were defined as distinct from women’s activities even when goals were shared, the place of work the same, and the physical effort equally taxing. . . . To be sure, such distinctions might be temporarily suspended in emergency situations. Women worked together with men in the fields to harvest hay before the crop was destroyed by rain; they worked to replace men in factories, on railroads, and at construction sites during World Wars I and II. When the emergency subsided, however, conventional patterns again prevailed. Given the tenacity of these assumptions about separate roles and spheres, it is not surprising that women seeking to enter the public world were inhibited by a formidable set of expectations about where men and women belonged and how they should behave.

In Anglo-American tradition the right to participate in political activities—jury duty, officeholding, voting—was conditioned on the holding of property. Since married women could not direct the use of their property, it seemed to follow that they could be neither jurors, nor voters, nor officeholders. That politics was considered a male domain, that women were simply not political beings, is an understanding as old as Western civilization. Aristotle, whose classic work provided the basic terms by which Westerners have understood politics, said that men alone realized themselves as citizens. It is no accident that the civic virtue he extolled derives from the same root as the word virile. Women, Aristotle maintained, realized themselves only within the confines of the household. Their relationship to the world of politics, like their social status, was derivative—through fathers, husbands, and sons.

Colonists brought this understanding with them to the New World. Even the Revolution, in the course of which the relationship of men to the state was radically redefined, did little to reorient the relationship of women to the state. It was left for women of the post-Revolutionary generations to reassess the promise of republicanism and to devise political strategies by which they would demand full inclusion in the republic.

The political history of American women has been out of phase with that of American men. In the early nineteenth century propertyless white men were successful in demanding the vote; following the Civil War black men were enfranchised. After 1880 one of the major political challenges facing men was to mobilize successful coalitions in support of particular candidates and programs. The political tasks that women faced after 1880, however, remained those that men had already accomplished; women still needed to move from petitioners to voters to electable candidates. Only recently have women in increasing numbers begun to run for office and to mobilize political coalitions in support of candidates and programs. Thus the political experience of men and women in America has diverged widely.

The political activities of American women have generally fallen into two categories. The first might be called the Politics of Inclusion It involves all efforts to become part of the political system: suffrage, jury service, officeholding, and the shaping of policies and statutes. A major goal of the Politics of Inclusion has been and still is to secure equal treatment under the law, to change the many statutes that treat men and women differently. Not until 1975, for example, did the Supreme Court require that women be assigned to juries on the same terms as men.

The second category might be called the Politics of Reform. It proposes to achieve a more just and orderly society. Among these goals have been the abolition of slavery, protective legislation for women workers, and racial justice. Also involved have been radical attempts to restructure society along various socialist lines.

Women gave their loyalty sometimes to the Politics of Inclusion, sometimes to the Politics of Reform, sometimes to both. For example, Carrie Chapman Catt, who was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1914 to 1920, placed inclusionary politics first on her own agenda; only after suffrage was achieved did she work primarily in the peace movement. On the other hand, Emma Goldman distrusted the system so much that she felt the vote was inconsequential for the reformed society of which she dreamed. An example of someone who combined the Politics of Reform with the Politics of Inclusion was the temperance advocate Frances Willard, who supported suffrage as a vehicle by which the social reform she was primarily committed to might be achieved.

A distinctive feature of women’s reformist politics has been the way in which women have made their domestic experience into a public issue and, through this transformation, enhanced both their domestic and public roles. Sometimes women justified moving into the political arena by arguing that public involvement would permit them to fulfill their domestic responsibilities more competently. Jane Addams made this appeal when she argued that women should have the vote so that they could elect city officials who would see to it that rotting garbage was removed from their homes, decaying meat taken out of markets, and polluted water purified; otherwise the best efforts of mothers to assure their children clean homes and wholesome food were to no avail. Other women supported the Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act of 1921 on the grounds that women had a special interest in maternal health and infant care. In these and similar cases women worked in the public sphere to protect and improve the domestic one. But once they moved into the public life of politics, no matter how much they justified their presence there in traditionalist terms—arguing that they were acting only as partisans of domestic virtue, health, and safety—the fact of the matter was that they had done something quite untraditional.

Women who crusaded for legislation to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages were a case in point. The women themselves may have said in traditionalist phrases that their only concern was with home and children—homes destroyed and children abused by alcoholic fathers—but what they did on behalf of liquor-free homes involved public speeches, parades, demonstrations, and even lobbying of public officials. These actions were certainly not traditionalist—at least not for women in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, traditionalist words, when added to the innovation of widespread and effective political action, were part of a process. Changes within this process were not always anticipated but came as women in the nineteenth century created for themselves a public life not necessarily at odds with domestic life but as an extension of it. By looking at reformist crusades as an opportunity for women to establish a public role, we begin to understand that, whether or not their goals were feminist, the process itseff was a liberating one.

IDEOLOGY

Finally, to examine the past with a new sensitivity to women’s experience is to discover how profoundly women’s lives have been shaped by ideologies that have developed out of their distinctive biological, economic, and political histories. Implicit in the concept of ideology is the emphasis on the fact that ideas are cradled in social experience and, when used to explain that experience, form interworking networks of meaning that have a compelling attractiveness to those who believe them. The word ideology can be used in a negative way—to convey the idea that ideologies distort reality—or in a neutral way We use it in a neutral way, in part because we do not believe that ideas based upon social experience and explaining that experience necessarily distort reality. (Historical “reality” is itself often a matter of social consciousness, i.e., defined by the groups explaining it.) Thus by ideology we mean the terms and assumptions by which Americans think about women, the notions they have about what is appropriate demeanor for women, and the ideas they have about the kind of roles it is normal for women to assume and the kind of goals they should have for their lives.[9]

For example, since the early nineteenth century one of the most pervasive ideologies has been what one historian has called the “Cult of True Womanhood,” which extolled the virtues of piety, sexual purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. In the sermons they heard and the books they read, women were instructed to internalize these virtues and to dedicate themselves to the private sphere, nurturing and serving their families and transforming their homes into a “Haven in a Heartless World.”[10] “Woman’s sphere,” declared a newspaper in 1850, "is about the domestic altar and within the tranquil precincts of the social circle. When she transgresses that sphere and mingles in the miserable brawlings and insane agitations of the day, she descends from her lofty elevation and be comes an object of disgust and contempt.”[11]

Educational theory and practice reflected and perpetuated many of these same assumptions about women’s nature, capacities, and proper place. The belief that women’s brains and nervous systems simply were not capable of the sustained intellectual effort expected of men and, more important, that women’s place was in the home led to the founding of special female academies that emphasized religion and the domestic arts rather than the classical training provided for young men. Too much study of Greek, Latin, philosophy, and logic, it was feared, might make young females unfit for their primary role as wives and mothers. Given women’s inferior mental capacity and their delicate emotional system, intense intellectual debate was also considered inappropriate. School texts often disseminated ideas about correct attitudes and proper demeanor.

Dress, too, reflected ideology insofar as it mirrored what people believe themselves to be and what they wanted others to believe them to be. In the nineteenth century, when women of affluence were expected to be both home centered and leisured, their clothing announced that expectation. They wore boned, tightly laced corsets, which inhibited breathing, and hoops or multiple layers of long, heavy petticoats, which made vigorous walking difficult. Fashion seemed to conspire to keep the lady hobbled to her home—to the dismay of radicals who believed that an uncorseted, loose, shorter dress supplemented by bloomers rather than petticoats would improve women’s physical and emotional health by making it easier for them to exercise and to move about more freely in the public world.

An ideology that sought to impose on all women a pattern of life only marginally appropriate for middle-class women could also serve to insulate women from a clear understanding of political and economic relationships. Social divisions made it difficult for women to perceive the subordination they shared. The shopkeeper’s wife whose divorce from an alcoholic husband deprived her of custody of her children might underpay the immigrant seamstress who made her clothes. Women’s perception of themselves as an oppressed group was further masked by the fact that, unlike other minority groups, they lived on intimate terms with their oppressors, deriving their status from fathers and husbands and, in the case of the more fortunate, benefiting from social and economic advantages that distinguished them from other women. (The respect and privileges accorded a married woman often depended—and in some respects still do—on the position of her husband in the community, not on her own accomplishments.) So completely did many women internalize conventional wisdom about women’s proper place that they rejected any attempt to change it.

Women did, however, devise methods of coping with the more constraining aspects of their culture. They struggled to gain some measure of reproductive control not only through abstinence from sexual intercourse but also through widespread use of dangerous abortive devices. They subverted legal constraints on their economic independence by recourse to trusteeships and premarital contracts to protect their own property. They sought and found solace and emotional sustenance in the churches, which welcomed them as communicants, offered them the companionship of fellow believers, and lauded their piety. Indeed, women were considered by nature to be more pious than men, a belief that women could exploit to enlarge their sphere of public activity. Religion, for example, confirmed a sense of mission that found expression in the church-related but increasingly secular female reform societies so prevalent in the nineteenth century—organizations such as the Female Missionary Society for the Poor of the City of New York. Out of common needs, experiences, and associations women created what might be called a female culture, characterized by strong affectionate ties among women of the same class and family networks. . . Moreover, as women began moving beyond the home, they brought with them these strong emotional ties to other women, thus creating female networks. These networks provided crucial encouragement and support for individuals whose public activities made them out of step with conventional society, whether in battle on behalf of birth control or against “demon rum” or child labor.

While ideology is reflected in newspapers, books, sermons, and even dress, the real test of its power is how we live our lives, what options we believe are open to us, and what choices we make. For poorer women who could not financially afford to devote themselves exclusively to the domestic sphere and the rearing of their children, the Cult of True Womanhood bore little resemblance to the reality of their everyday lives. For many middle-class women who could afford financially and emotionally to live their lives in accordance with these ideological dictates, prescription and practice were one. For some women, however, the emotional cost was too high because the constraints seemed too great. Inherent in the nineteenth-century Cult of True Womanhood and in its twentieth- century counterpart, the Feminine Mystique, is the premise that women’s lives are determined by their biology and by the gratification that they might find in self-abnegating service to others rather than in the more abstract exercise of the mind or the pursuit of a career in a traditionally male profession. While these beliefs have served in varying measure to limit all women, they have proved particularly burdensome to those individuals endowed with special talents or creativity that they sought to develop fully.

Women who wished to be artists or intellectuals have encountered difficulties not usually experienced by men of equal talent. They discovered that they lived in a society which assumed that women’s family obligations must take precedence over all other activities. As late as 1935 Margaret Mead, whose own career in anthropology was one of great productivity and distinction, observed wryly that a woman might identify herself as “a woman and therefore less an achieving individual, or an achieving individual and therefore less a woman.” If she chose the first option, the one presumably consistent with her biological destiny, she was more likely to be “a loved object, the kind of girl whom men will woo and boast of, toast and marry.” If she opted for the second, however, she lost “as a woman, her chance for the kind of love she wants.”[12] The ideological message delivered was quite clear, Although it is impossible to measure precisely how such messages affected behavior, there are various indications suggesting that they did indeed affect women’s perceptions of the options open to them.

CHALLENGES TO PREVAIL VIEWS

We also know that women who challenged the piety, submissiveness, and sexual purity associated with “true womanhood” were punished. Women in Puritan Massachusetts could, as Anne Hutchinson learned, be privately pious but not publicly prophetic. While Hutchinson’s remarkable personality attracted to her cause men as well as women who believed in her religious vision, she suffered banishment. In nineteenth-century America women whose sexuality was celebrated, like those in the Oneida community, or whose marital patterns were unusual, like those among the Mormons, were able to withstand social disapproval of their deviance only by living in relatively isolated communities. Even those women who assumed for themselves moral responsibilities which were the logical extension of women’s piety found that, if they pursued those responsibilities with greater independence and public activism than society deemed appropriate, they, too, could be condemned as unwomanly. Accordingly, southern ladies who openly agitated against lynching in the early twentieth century discovered that one could be opposed to legal violence in theory but not in practice. The much-vaunted protection that the South bestowed upon the fairer sex existed only so long as the ladies obeyed the “rules.” To deviate from the norm was to be labeled unfeminine. “Tomboys” might be acceptable; “mannish” women were not. The accusation of “mannishness” was tinged with intimations of being “unnatural”—sexually deviant—or, if one were not too threatening, merely eccentric.

Despite pressures to conform, there have always been individuals who dissented from prevailing beliefs about women’s proper role. For some, frustration, doubts, and questions developed slowly, sometimes requiring years before culminating in outright revolt. Ironic as it may seem, those very doubts and questions could be nourished by precisely those institutions that encouraged women to conform to accepted standards of behavior. Religion and education were two-edged swords. Schools conveyed the expectations of society. But inasmuch as people were encouraged to think, the result might be a questioning of those very expectations.

Similarly, organized religion, while reinforcing traditional values contributed to the very process by which they were slowly eroded. For example, Protestant evangelicalism, in its emphasis on the Christian home and the place of women within it, stressed—as did nineteenth-century society generally—piety, domesticity, and a self-denying submissiveness. However, the evangelical woman, whether she was Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or even Episcopalian, was encouraged to be "useful." Although the initial intent was to discourage frivolity, a woman who was encouraged to be self-disciplined, sober, and reflective—“the mistress of herself and her actions”—could also become a woman who thought for herself.[13] As she participated in church-related activities and the many reform societies that were an extension of the religious impulse, she could discover an institutional framework within which to meet other women in networks of associates as well as develop leadership skills and become competent in dealing with the public. Efforts to improve the plight of others could lead some women to the conclusion that their own condition needed improving. Thus women active in the antislavery crusade of the 1840s and women active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s learned in those movements not only how to be effective organizers and dissenters but how easily those dedicated to achieving the rights of one group could perpetuate the assumptions and practices that denied the very same rights to another. For some women the result, in the mid-twentieth century as in the mid-nineteenth, was to transform reformers into feminists; advocacy of racial justice developed into commitment to sexual equality.

By whatever process women came to question prevailing assumptions about women's place, they expressed their frustrations in many different ways. Those who were unwilling or unable to confront the real source of their distress sometimes found release from conflicting feelings in psychosomatic illnesses or that most common affliction of nineteenth-century women, hysteria. Those who were able to recognize the conflict between society's expectations and their own needs sometimes expressed their dissent privately, thereby escaping the censure society directs toward those who challenge the status quo. Others expressed their dissent more openly, turning to groups sharing their views. Incorporating equality for women into the party's public statements, socialists enlisted thousands of female members in the first decades of this century. Other women gravitated toward explicitly feminist groups that, although initially quite small, were active in the North before the Civil War and grew dramatically in the decades before World War I. But while organized movements for women's rights have flourished intermittently, it was not until the development of the contemporary women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s that women in significant numbers embraced an ideology that radically challenges traditional values and assumptions, an ideology that incorporates not only family and service but ambition and achievement. 

FEMINIST AND TRADITION

Contemporary feminists reject traditional views about women's role and place because they see these views as supporting attitudes and practices that deny women equality. Women, they believe, should be able to define themselves as individuals, choosing work that at least provides economic independence and at best brings personal and professional fulfillment. Women should also be able to express freely their sexuality and sexual preferences; to decide whether and when to marry; to choose whether and when to have children. As today's feminists have injected these concerns into the public consciousness, they have criticized values that define women primarily as reproductive beings who, simply because they bear children, must automatically lead domestic, mothering lives. It is not surprising that feminists also reject the notion that the most significant goal of women’s lives is to make themselves attractive to the men who will provide for them. (Nineteenth-century critics were also scornful of the dependent women who exchanged sexual favors for economic support, whether within marriage or outside of it.)

Because feminists value independence and equality, they see as absolutely basic the right of all women to control their own bodies through access to birth control measures and, when necessary, safe, legal abortions. Believing that financial independence is also essential to full freedom and autonomy, contemporary feminists are very concerned with economic status. They have explored ways in which women working solely within the home might receive economic recognition for their labor. They have criticized those factors that account for the inferior position of women who work outside the home. Because such women now constitute a majority of all American women, and because they average in earnings only 64 percent of those received by men, it would be fair to say that a majority of American women as a class are directly discriminated against in the economic system. Therefore feminists attack discriminatory practices on the part of employers who do not pay men and women equal wages for equal work. They point out the occupational segregation evidenced in the fact that 8O percent of all working women are concentrated in 20 of 411 occupations, the vast majority working as nurses, teachers, saleswomen, and secretaries. The socialization that channels many men into high-paying professions and trades and many women into low-paying, “pink-collar” work is especially deplored. This socialization is epitomized by parents who give young daughters nurses’ kits and young sons doctors’ bags, guidance counselors who urge mathematically talented girls to become bookkeepers and boys to become engineers.

To escape this double bind, feminists use books, toys, and parental example to demonstrate to young girls that they need not limit their aspirations. They also recognize, however, that the young woman who aspires to a high-level business or professional career will in reality have two full-time jobs if she chooses to have a family in a society in which women are still seen as primarily responsible for home and child care.

The effort of contemporary feminists to redistribute the burdens of the domestic economy makes them part of a tradition. A few feminists in the nineteenth century and a few more early in the twentieth, wrestling with precisely this problem, advocated public schemes, such as kitchenless apartment buildings, while urging a new set of private decisions within the family as to who would do various chores.[14] Contemporary feminists call for institutional measures such as low-cost, quality child care facilities, maternity leaves, and flexible work schedules. They also propose changes in attitudes and life styles, believing that couples working in the public sector can reassess responsibilities so that men and women share equally the burdens and pleasures associated with earning a living, maintaining a household, and rearing a family

Private action, however, is no substitute for the broad institutional changes that many feminists believe will come when women, historically powerless, have the political power necessary to change a society in which sexual inequality has for centuries been a pervasive and persistent reality. In order to become part of the political power structure women, they believe, must no longer be confined—or confine themselves—to housekeeping chores within the political parties. Instead they must seek and hold elective and appointive office at every level commensurate with their numbers. Having women in positions of political power is a dubious gain, however, unless those women are willing to support the kind of changes feminists believe are necessary if all women are to achieve greater reproductive, economic, and political control of their lives. They are convinced that women and men alike must examine existing values and assumptions about what is appropriate for men and especially women to be and do, ultimately putting together and acting upon a set of new values that liberate rather than constrain and oppress. The end result, many feminists believe, must be the restructuring of both persons and institutions—in short, a feminist transformation.

Challenges to long-standing beliefs and behavior, whether issued now or in the past, have been criticized by traditionalists. They perceive feminists’ demands for equality not as an effort to remove discrimination based solely on gender and to expand options for men and women alike but rather as a rejection of cherished norms and values. Men who possess power and privileges they do not wish to share understandably see in feminism a threat. Moreover, many women who believe they have lived useful and admirable lives by traditional rules see feminist attacks on traditional sex roles as an attack on a way of life they have perfected—and hence an attack on them personally. Thus feminist insistence that women should be able to seek fulfillment in the public world of work and power as well as in the private world of home and family is viewed by traditionalists as an egocentric demand that places personal gratification above familial duty. By the same token, the demand that women themselves be the ultimate judge of whether and when to bear children is seen by some not as a legitimate desire to control one’s own body but as an escape from maternal obligations that threatens the future of the family and ultimately, therefore, society itself.

To suggest that some women find feminism a route to personal fulfillment while other women find that route in traditionalism is not to suggest that the ideological history of women is bipolar. It embraces many variants. Traditionalist women may be as suspicious of male-controlled institutions as feminists; feminist women may be as “feminine” as traditionalists. Traditional women may be as publicly active on behalf of their goals as feminists; feminists may be as concerned with family as traditionalists. Both groups identify with a sisterhood and see “women’s issues” as special ones, although they do not consistently agree as to what they are. Partisans of the two groups may unite or divide along class, occupational, or political lines. But no matter what the issue and the proposed solution, wherever women are on the ideological spectrum they are part of women's history.

“Woman has always been acting and thinking . . . at the center of life,” wrote Mary Beard a half century ago; but the significance of women’s activities has, until recent years, often been discounted and rarely been understood. The scholarship of the past decades has spotlighted much that had lain in the shadows of history, unnoticed and unappreciated. As we have examined that scholarship, we find ourselves less impressed by sex role constraints—which were very real—than by the vigor and subtlety with which women have defined the terms of their existence. These creative experiences show how the private lives of historical persons can help us understand the rich complexities of change. To study women’s history, then, is to take part in a bold enterprise that can eventually lead us to a new history, one that, by taking into account both sexes, should tell us more about each other and, therefore, our collective selves.