People's History: Women 1619-1851 (Chapter 6)
Music: Ave Maria
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Summary For many years our nation's women fought the damaged self-esteem that disrespect invites. They overcame the odds - they nursed, they taught, they came to advocate for other people's rights. Chapter The women came as little more than slaves, indentured servant girls among the waves of immigrants. Both black and white were used for sex and toil, and oftentimes abused. Equality invaded the frontier, where woman, same as man, would persevere, but elsewhere she was reckoned to be pure, submissive, reading little to ensure her lower class, and homely - all advice from those who felt tradition would suffice, like Jefferson and Franklin. Lacking votes and property, the best in petticoats, but most confined to "horse's druggery," or spinning cotton (spinsters): dust, debris, and smoky oil for sixteen hours a day. Against the greatest odds they found a way to counter the injustice of their time, to educate themselves in ways sublime: they battled poverty, they taught, they nursed, they fought for children's rights. And they reversed (in part) the sexist thought. And they'd persist: like Dorothea Dix, an early feminist, who challenged heads of hospitals - they clashed about asylum inmates chained and lashed. And Frances Wright, who fought for birth control. Sojourner Truth, who bared a tortured soul with thirteen children sold as slaves, endured "a mother's grief, and none but Jesus heard." |