Patriot's History: Women 1800-1850 (Chapters 5,7)
Music: Ave Maria
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Summary The Eighteen-Hundreds, women making slow but steady gains in education, suffrage, abolitionist campaigns. Chapter No property, no voting rights, no college; just the wife's delights of rearing children, keeping house, attending church, and tending spouse. The middle nineteenth century brought jobs (a textile factory or grammar school) and progress in the quest for college: Oberlin was first to offer a degree to women (blacks would also be admitted). Woman activists would prosper, and as feminists - Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone - the seeds of suffrage would be sown on U.S. soil, with deference to men no more. As "temperance" became their watchword and began to grip America, a man named Mr. Lincoln would become a voice against the "Demon Rum." In church the wives could coexist with men, and abolitionist campaigns were often woman-led, as former slaves aspired to spread the word: Sojourner Truth, for one; Ms. Tubman, also, on the run herself when slaves went underground to ride her "railroad," freedom-bound. |