The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. The flapper portrayed in cartoons, ads, and nationally circulated journalism, however, was almost always white, with features that denoted Northern European origins. She was also frequently shown with luxury goods or in exclusive settings. But young women of many ethnic groups also took up flapper styles and embraced the spirit of youthful rebellion. A popular song attested to generational conflict among Mexican Americans in San Antonio. In "Las Pelonas"--"The Bobbed Heads," or "Flappers"--the singer lamented the influence of Anglo youth culture on his Mexican-American community. [English version follows original in Spanish.]

The Five Points was a notorious mid-nineteenth century New York City slum. Located just east of the fashionable stores, columned banks, and well-dressed crowds of Broadway, its squalor served to remind New Yorkers of the destitution that so closely underlay the city's surging wealth. The neighborhood included the infamous "Old Brewery," which had once been a real brewery but by mid-century had degenerated into a miserable tenement dwelling for the very poor. In the early 1850s the New York Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the "Old Brewery," demolished it, and built a mission on the site. The women of the Home Missionary Society made children their first concern, as, increasingly, did many other reformers of this period. While in this selection these Protestant missionary women showcase the children's gratitude, many Irish-Catholic immigrant families resented the missionaries' assumption of superiority and regarded their proselytizing as antagonistic to their own desire to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.

During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by female workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that female employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. It did not, however, prevent companies from hiring only men for higher paying jobs. Despite the fact that Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment, African-American women as a class remained "at the bottom of the economic totem pole" because of "their dual victimization by race and sex-based discrimination," in the words of Dr. Pauli Murray, whose testimony to Congress appears below. Dr. Murray, an African-American professor of American studies specializing in law and social change expressed concern that despite previous antidiscrimination legislation, "we are holding on very definitely to the patriarchal aspect of white America." Murray advocated the position that all antidiscrimination legislation should explicitly prohibit sex discrimination

The threat of lynching was a powerful mechanism for keeping black Southerners in line. Although this interview (conducted by historian Charles Hardy for a radio program) took place in 1985, "William Brown" (a pseudonym) could still vividly recall the smell of burning flesh that lingered after a 1902 lynching that he witnessed in Jacksonville, Florida, when he was five years old.

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912--in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.

In 1753, fifteen year old Mary Jemison was captured by Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years War between the French, English, and Indian peoples of North America. She was adopted and incorporated into the Senecas, a familiar practice among Iroquois and other Indian peoples seeking to replace a lost sibling or spouse. Mary married and raised a family in the decades before and after the American Revolution; many captives, once adopted and integrated into an Indian community, refused the opportunity to return home, finding life in Indian society more rewarding. In 1823 Mary Jemison related her life story to James Seaver, a doctor who lived near her home in western New York. Seaver's story of "the white woman of the Genessee," as she became known, sold over 100,000 copies in 1824.

Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile mill workforce remained entirely white for a number of reasons: landlords wanted African Americans to work in cotton fields; white leaders promoted industrialization as the salvation of poor whites; and the dominant racial ideology forbade the mixing of white women and black men in the workplace. Although planters and manufacturers had the most to gain from a segregated work force, white workers--as this 1898 protest from the women of Atlanta's Fulton Mills indicated--accepted the idea that factory work was the privilege of "loyal white citizens." There were few opportunities for white women to earn cash wages in this period, and family farms yielded little cash. The only jobs open to black women--domestic service--paid even less.

The National Police Gazette portrays, in a characteristically lurid fashion, an industrial accident in a North Grosvenor, Connecticut, cotton mill. Many late-nineteenth century businessmen ignored hazardous working conditions, since they had little financial incentive to make the workplace safer. In 1881 alone, 30,000 railway workers were killed or injured on the job, and industrial hazards existed in other industries, including textiles. A national weekly magazine, the National Police Gazette enthusiastically violated the mores of genteel culture, focusing on legal and illegal sports, violent crimes and accidents, and sex. Women were often depicted as perpetrators or victims of violence, providing titillation to the weekly magazine's male readership.

This lesson introduces students to the complexity of history by focusing on the diverse activities of Black women in the nineteenth century. Historians have traditionally ignored free black women during this period, and furthermore oversimplified the lives of slave women. Using a variety of sources and documents, students will learn that many Black women, whether born slaves, free, or freed in later life, resisted the system that oppressed them, earned degrees, and became politically active before, during, and after the Civil War.
Students will learn how to read and interpret various primary and secondary sources and how to use them to draw conclusions about the issues that the authors faced during the nineteenth century.
Students will read historical narratives imaginatively and in their proper context.
Students will view evidence of historical perspectives and draw upon visual and literary sources while studying the lives of nineteenth-century black feminists, the issues they faced, and their methods for solving them.

The Appeal to Reason, the most popular radical publication in American history, was founded in 1895 by J. A. Wayland. The socialist newspaper reached a paid circulation of more than three-quarters of a million people by 1913, and during political campaigns and crises it often sold more than four million individual copies. Wayland, the paper's publisher until his suicide in 1912, had become a socialist through reading. He built his paper on the conviction that plain talk would convert others to the socialist cause. From its Kansas headquarters, the Appeal published an eclectic mix of news (particularly of strikes and political campaigns), essays, poetry, fiction, humor, and cartoons. During and after World War I the paper declined in circulation, and it ceased publication in November 1922. This poem by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman appeared in the September 28, 1912, issue.

Margaret Sanger gained notoriety as an advocate for contraception, which she defined as essential for women's freedom. By the late 1920s, however, Sanger's radicalism had become muted. In "The Civilizing Force of Birth Control," she addressed middle-class constituencies with the argument that contraception would strengthen marriage. Like many liberal intellectuals of the time, Sanger was a eugenicist--she believed in managing human reproduction to improve "the race" through better breeding. Many eugenicists were concerned about declining fertility among college-educated and middle-class women, even as they also worried about what they saw as the excessive fertility of poorer women. However, unlike many eugenicists who urged elite women to have more children, Sanger argued that birth control for all women would serve the cause of eugenics. This essay appeared in Sex in Civilization (1929), a voluminous collection of commentary that suggested the emergence of a new species of expert--the sexologist.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right to vote for women joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. In 1894 (a year of extraordinary class conflict that included the national Pullman and coal strikes), Carrie Chapman Catt addressed an Iowa suffrage gathering and maintained that women's suffrage was necessary to counter "the ignorant foreign vote" in American cities and protect the life and property of native-born Americans.

During World War II, the defense industry expanded and American men mobilized for military service. Many women found jobs previously unavailable to them in aircraft plants, shipyards, manufacturing companies, and the chemical, rubber, and metals factories producing war materials. These jobs paid higher salaries than those traditionally categorized as "women's work," such as teaching, domestic service, clerical work, nursing, and library science. Married women were discouraged from working outside the home during the Depression to lower competition with men for limited jobs. After the U.S. entered the war, though, the Federal government encouraged housewives to join the work force as a patriotic duty. The number of employed women grew from 14 million in 1940 to 19 million in 1945, rising from 26 to 36 percent of the work force. Most industry analysts and government planners expected this situation to be temporary. At the end of the war, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans. The bulletin excerpted below revealed that most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce--especially older married women--increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed "women's work."

This course enhances cross-cultural understanding through the discussion of practical, ethical, and epistemological issues in conducting social science and applied research in foreign countries or unfamiliar communities. It includes a research practicum to help students develop interviewing, participant-observation, and other qualitative research skills, as well as critical discussion of case studies. The course is open to all interested students, but intended particularly for those planning to undertake exploratory research or applied work abroad. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

In World War II soldiers, sailors, nurses, and airmen often found themselves thrown together with fellow Americans whose experiences and backgrounds were drastically different from their own. Racial segregation was an official policy of the War Department, but gender discrimination was a subtler, if no less troublesome, social constraint. Doris Brander, who enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor in the navy's Women's Auxiliary Voluntary Expeditionary Service (WAVES), felt that she and her fellow WAVES were rebels, going against the tide of convention and pushing the limits on women's opportunity. In this 1992 interview with Rosetta Kamlowsky, Brander described how she and other women fought the sexism they experienced in the military and strove for gender equality.

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym "Dame Shirley," was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819-1906). The letter was written to Clapp's sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp's subject in the "Shirley letters," as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte's stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

Although we sometimes think of farm and factory as antithetical, many people moved easily between the two. Icy Norman grew up in North Carolina, the daughter of a miner. As a young woman she worked long hours in a textile mill, but she also helped with the farm chores, especially seasonal chores like the corn shucking described here. In this excerpt from a 1979 interview conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, she recalled family and friends rolling up the rug for dances and parties when the day's work was done.

Students will analyze how a portrait reflects the events and trends of its time and then create a portrait of a public female figure today.

Statistics on women's work in the early 20th century were invariably misleading: most women worked but only a minority were formally in the wage labor force. Nowhere was the discrepancy between the domestic ideal and the reality of women's work lives wider than in rural America. In 1913 the U. S. Department of Agriculture decided to investigate and document the lives of farm woman they discovered a vast reservoir of discontent. The report, reproduced here, was culled from letters responding to a questionnaire sent to the wives of farmers and commented on all aspects of rural life, especially the enormous burden of labor that these officially non-working women were expected to carry out.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, two representatives of labor unions voiced opposition to the ERA, arguing that it would threaten protective legislation based on gender difference.