Gender Inequality in Our Changing World by Lori Kenschaft & Roger Clark & Desirée Ciambrone

Author:Lori Kenschaft & Roger Clark & Desirée Ciambrone [Lori Kenschaft]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317907473
Publisher: Routledge

Gender, Power, and Politics in the United States

Women’s Entrance to Politics, 1820–1930

Although some women participated in the political debates of the revolutionary era, they were nearly always the wives or daughters of politically active men and worked in relationship with their male relatives. It was not until the 1820s that significant numbers of American women began to organize as women to pursue self-defined goals. Foreign visitors in the 1830s were amazed by the way Americans seemed to create groups for every purpose. Nowhere else were people as likely to form voluntary associations: to see something that could be improved and start a group to improve it. Since social life was generally gender segregated, most of these groups were single sex.

Education was a great help, as it enabled people to take notes, learn from written documents, and better organize their thoughts. Groups were also much more common in towns and cities, where neighbors could gather without traveling long distances. Most voluntary associations were therefore in the north, where industrialization encouraged urbanization and near-universal literacy arrived generations earlier than it did elsewhere. Because nearly all white northern women could read and write by 1850, they had the basic skills required to start a politically effective group.

Women learned other skills from experience. Joining a mothers’ club or sewing circle was reasonably non-controversial. It took women away from home for a few hours, but it could feel like an extension of women’s devotion to domestic life. In these clubs, women talked about their lives, developed relationships with other women, and learned how to organize a meeting and lead a discussion. Sometimes they addressed shared problems or started a new group for a special purpose. As time went by, women started and joined an enormous number of societies devoted to charitable purposes (e.g., providing food, coal, nursing aid, or burial expenses), educational purposes (starting schools, Sunday schools, and adult programs), and social reforms (anti-slavery, temperance, women’s rights, etc.).

All types of women’s organizations, even the most innocuous, thus helped women develop social capital. Women’s expanding relationships with other women gave them more independence from their families and more ability to imagine and execute projects in their communities – in other words, more political power.

Many nineteenth-century women used arguments based on gender to claim larger roles in their communities. Some elaborated the idea of God-given gender differences into a “cult of domesticity” that they used to expand their influence and power within a women’s world. Were women children’s primary educators? Then they needed to be well educated themselves. Were women naturally responsible for children? Then they should have a say in schools, religious education, and whether their sons would be sent off to war. Other women took an even more expansive view of women’s responsibilities. Were women the moral guardians of society? Then they should be able to curb drunkenness, wife beating, prostitution, gambling, and other vices. Were women supposed to serve others, especially the weak? Then they could not ignore enslaved Africans or Native Americans who were being dispossessed of their land.

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