1. WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE
17.2
How many of you have mothers who work outside the home? Grandmothers who did so? What has changed?

2. Besides eating bon-bons…
Before the Civil War, women married, stayed home, looked after their families
Late 19th c – only middle- and upper- class women could afford to stay home
Poor women had no choice but to work for wagesWomen Lead Reform
Women split over 14th and 15th Amendment.
Susan B Anthony, “sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the black Man and not for women”

3. What jobs were available?
Farm jobs – women did both household jobs and such farm work as necessary:
Raising livestock
Plowing
Planting
harvesting

4. Women in Industry
Once better paying options became available, women looked for work away from the farms
Jobs in cities and town
Labor unions shunned them
By 1900, 1 in 5 women had jobs; 25% of them worked in factories

5. Garment Industry Most women worked in this trade Least skilled jobs
About ½ pay of men
Women assumed to be single, not supporting families

6. What the other half did.. Offices, stores, classrooms
Jobs requiring HS education
By 1890, more women than men w/HS diploma – WHY?
Business schools trained others:
Bookkeepers, typists, stenographers

7. DOMESTIC WORKERS w/o education or industrial skills: domestic work
2 million AA-women freed from slavery but driven by poverty to work
Farm and domestic work
Migrated to cities: cooks, laundresses, scrubwomen, maids
70% of women employed in 1870 were servants
Unmarried immigrants: domestic work
Married women: piecework, took in boarders

8. WOMEN LEAD REFORM What conditions needed correcting?
Dangerous working conditions
Safety of workers (firetraps for workplaces)
Low wages
Long hours
After Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire, middle- and upper-class women joined reform movements
Women’s clubs now discussed temperance, child labor instead of books & art

9. Women and Higher Education
As number of women in colleges grew, so did women’s involvement in reform movements
Vassar 1865
Smith & Wellesly – 1875
Columbia, Harvard, Brown – would not accept women but set up separate colleges for them
By late 19th c, marriage is not the only option
½ of college women never married (late 19th c)

10. Reform Efforts Workplace health and safety
Could not vote or run for office but tried to improve conditions at work and home
Workplace reform
Housing reform
Educational improvement
Food and drug laws
Show slide on patent medicines

11. NACW National Association of Colored Women – 1896
Merged 2 earlier groups
Mission: moral education of the race
Managed:
kindergartens
Reading rooms
nurseries

12. Split over 14th and 15th A Seneca Falls Convention 1848
Women split over suffrage issue
Susan B. Anthony: “sooner cut off my right
hand than ask for the ballot for the black man and not for women.”
1869, Anthony and Cady Stanton found NWSA - National Women Suffrage Association
1890 merge w/others to become NAWSA (Amer)

13. Anti-Woman Suffrage Liquor industry Textile industry
Men – who feared changing role of women in society

15. Three-Part Strategy
Convince state legislatures to give women the right to vote
Test 14th A in courts: state sdenying male citizens the right to vote lose representatives – aren’t women citizens?
National constitutional amendment

16. Strategy on States 1869: Wyoming 1890s: Utah, Colorado, Idaho
After 1896, other states refused to go along

17. Strategy on court cases
Susan B. Anthony and others test this theory 150 times in 10 states and in DC
SC says “yes” to citizenship, but the right to vote does not automatically follow!

18. Constitutional Amendment Strategy?
Cady Stanton got the amendment introduced in CA, but it was killed
Over 41 years, it was introduced and shot down
Only modest success by century’s end