Women in 19th-Century America

The experience of women in the nineteenth century has generated a wealth of interdisciplinary research in recent decades. The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century presents the best of the recent scholarship available in a concise, "one-stop" resource, providing students of women's history and nineteenth-century American culture with an authoritative source of information and interpretation. The authors emphasize areas in which scholars have identified important changes (such as suffrage and reform), topics in which researchers are now making great strides (such as racial, ethnic, religious, and regional diversity), and innovative and relatively recent explorations (for example, work on female sexuality). Accessible overview articles and alphabetical encyclopedia-like entries are combined in a comprehensive, easy-to-use volume. Part 1 contains a historiographical essay followed by a ten-chapter narrative overview. These chapters include discussions of families and households, labor and the workforce, religion and morality, feminism and equal rights, reform and voluntarism, and more. Part 2 is an A-to-Z listing of concise entries on key terms, notable figures, political movements, social and religious organizations, and legislation. Part 3 is an annotated chronology placing events in historical context. Part 4 is a topically organized selection of the best resources for further research, including general historical works, biographies and autobiographies, journals, archives, web sites, novels, and films.

During the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission attempted to replace female charity networks and traditions of voluntarism with a centralized organization that would ensure women's support for the war effort served an elite, liberal vision of nationhood. Coming after years of debate over women's place in the democracy and status as citizens, soldier relief work offered women an occasion to demonstrate their patriotism and their rights to inclusion in the body politic. Exploring the economic and ideological conflicts that surrounded women's unpaid labors on behalf of the Union army, Jeanie Attie reveals the impact of the Civil War on the gender structure of nineteenth-century America. She illuminates how the war became a testing ground for the gendering of political fights and the ideological separation of men's and women's domains of work and influence.

Attie draws on letters by hundreds of women in which they reflect on their political awakenings at the war's outbreak and their increasing skepticism of national policies as the conflict dragged on. Her book integrates the Civil War into the history of American gender relations and the development of feminism, providing a nuanced analysis of the relationship among gender construction, class development, and state formation in nineteenth-century America.

This is an exploration of the involvement of ordinary black and white women in the antislavery movement. Drawing on a variety of sources, Jeffrey uses the words of real women to illuminate the meaning of abolition in their lives.

Tracing the deep roots of women's activism in America, Anne Boylan explores the flourishing of women's volunteer associations in the decades following the Revolution. She examines the entire spectrum of early nineteenth-century women's groups--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; African American and white; middle and working class--to illuminate the ways in which race, religion, and class could bring women together in pursuit of common goals or drive them apart.

Boylan interweaves analyses of more than seventy organizations in New York and Boston with the stories of the women who founded and led them. In so doing, she provides a new understanding of how these groups actually worked and how women's associations, especially those with evangelical Protestant leanings, helped define the gender system of the new republic. She also demonstrates as never before how women in leadership positions combined volunteer work with their family responsibilities, how they raised and invested the money their organizations needed, and how they gained and used political influence in an era when women's citizenship rights were tightly circumscribed.

Shirley Wilson Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900.

Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. She analyzes not only speeches but also editorials, essays, and letters.

Logan first focuses on the prophetic oratory of Maria Stewart, the first American-born black woman to speak publicly. Turning to Frances Harper, she considers speeches that argue for common interests between divergent communities. And she demonstrates that central to the antilynching rhetoric of Ida Wells is the concept of "presence, " or the tactic of enhancing certain selected elements of the presentation.

In her discussion of Fannie Barrier Williams and Anna Cooper, Logan shows that when speaking to which club women and black clergymen, both Williams and,Cooper employ what Kenneth Burke called identification. To analyze the rhetoric of Victoria Matthews, she applies Carolyn Miller's modification of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation.

Logan also examines the discourse of women associated with the black Baptist women's movement and those participating in college-affiliated conferences.

The book includes an appendix with little-known speeches and essays by Anna Julia Cooper, Selena Sloan Butler, Lucy Wilmot Smith, Mary V. Cook, Adella Hunt Logan, Victoria Earle Matthews, Lucy C. Laney, and Georgia Swift King.

Throughout the 19th century, women inventors developed significant technologies, yet, because of complex cultural barriers and the pervasive image of the inventor as male, their technological contributions have until now been ignored and undervalued. This study, the first to focus exclusively on 19th-century women, explores the fascinating relationship between women and technology. According to a government census, there were nearly 5,000 patents awarded to women between 1790 and 1888; further, many women invented significant technologies but never received a patent. The individual and collective experiences of these women reveal both why gendered assumptions about women and technology persist and why they are assumptions, not reality.

Marti takes a detailed look at the women of the Grange from 1866 through the early 20th century. He deflates some of the claims that have been made for the order's liberating influence, but still takes that influence very seriously, exploring the opportunities for sociability and cooperation that fostered sisterhood and encouraged women to pursue their distinctive interests. From the promise of equality made by the founders, to the role the Grange played in promoting equal suffrage, women's roles are fully analyzed in relation to both mutuality with men and sisterhood with each other.

Many extraordinary women traveled west with their Army officer husbands between 1865 and 1890 and discovered a world that was completely controlled by the United States Army. The Army as a public institution colored virtually every aspect of their domestic lives. Army directives, customs, and traditions imposed social obligations on these women, and the world of the frontier Army garrison continually challenged their sense of what it meant to be "true women." Remarkably, they flourished and established a defined role for themselves that went beyond the conventional definition of true womanhood.

This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.