tv Lectures in History CSPAN July 2, 2016 8:00pm-9:11pm EDT
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pouring the foundations for the building, and will start putting up steel and another month. we are right on schedule to open a museum in early 2017. >> and that was the first of a two-part look at the collections of the museum of the american is revolution. in part two, we will see a part of george washington's tent from the revolutionary war. >> boston college professor teaches a class on the new roles women assumed during the late 19th century. she describes the games women various fields. she also looks at the growth of political organizations run by women. this class is just over an hour.
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>> let's go ahead and start. comeseme of this course from the theme of civil war changed.lly , this is an is over important day. everybody has different ideas of what the nation is posted become. they had some ideas of what it should be. the northerners had ideas of what america should be. and certainly the norm -- the northern men. was whoical question
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was going to have to stay in it. you've gone through that as well. who was going to have a say on what it would be. today i want to talk about women and women's lives. their role in what was the reconstruction and rebuilding of the north, south and west. the story of women is way more crucial than what people realize. here and youtart probably know about this from your high school days with the seneca falls convention. when a number of women came together in seneca falls, new york they talked about women's rights. and the idea of rights for women bookwhen a number of abolitionists went there and
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when they spoke about human rights, those women were not allowed to speak. soy were not allowed to talk on the way home, a number of them get talking and say this is not right. if really people are supposed to be free and equals, they should have rights as well. this is a group of people who issue these sentiments. womenls for rights for and tries to fight back. andall learn about this everybody talks about this being the beginning of women's rights in america and it is. essentially after eight and 48 -- 1848, nothing happens. new york has a lot of other things going on.
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there is a lot of things going looks and itrson is almost as if we are talking about martians voting. it is just not on people's .adars the real change for women and comes out of the american civil war. women's roles changed during the civil war dramatically. go in believing they are really going to be able to maintain the role they had the port the civil war. idea andt with the very quickly women have to take over a whole new set of roles
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during the civil war. all, they begin by supporting the troops both in the north and the south. but duringy becomes the civil war, the war -- roles of women take on a new dimension. in the newen working government jobs. physically hadly to take the paper and put them in bills. those are government girls who did the cutting. them and if you look at the edges you can tell when if women were cutting them, you collect them you want the ones with the straight edges.
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women are beginning to work in the government as clerks. they are taking over for the menfolk. they are working in factories both in the north and the south and they begin to do a number of things that are not part of women's roles. we have women getting involved in nursing which has always been a dirty, male profession. when itat the point becomes a female instead of a male profession. war, you get to women involved in teaching. women are the ones they are to do the teaching. going into spaces where they had previously been asked included. you didn't want your daughters to be involved in the hospital before.
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they are dying and these are spaces that women begin to enter. bonds.e women buying for the first time in american history, women literally own a piece of the american government. they are buying bonds on which they depend. women have invested very heavily in the u.s. government. are part of the u.s. government and they have supported it with their money and with their lives. have put their lives on the line for the u.s. government. we even have a few women fighting the civil war soldiers. there is a great story about that.
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she's able to prove that she fought during the civil war. you have women coming out of this war believing that they should have a say in that government. they gave everything for that government and they feel that they should have us a certainly more of a say that those white southerners that andrew jackson was hardening. -- hardening. so many former confederates had received presidential -- presidential pardons. say,look at that and they how come these guys have a say and we don't russian mark you are going to see a's similar pattern after world war ii.
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the second wave of women activism after a similar set of circumstances. women expect that they are going to have a say in this new reconstructive government and that is not what happens. the focus is on african american male suffrage. women suffer just look at this and they are willing to let that happen but they expect that they are going to be limited as well. julia ward put it this way. when the u.s. rights of 14th amendment, women should be included. they should have rights under that amendment. and of course when congress is
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discussing it, some congressmen do broach that subject. they are left out. -- laughed out. to them, it is just a nonstarter. julia ward says that the civil war came to an end not leaving only the slaves emancipated but with a full dignity of cinemas -- sitting citizenship. was this store to be shot in their face? in 1868, to really dramatic things happened.
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most people who look at the advance of women's suffrage really look at the 1890 merger. come out of the 14th amendment. they come out of the idea that if african-american men should be included, so should women. white women primarily. women should have a say in american society. the association forms and user women like elizabeth cady stanton and susan b anthony. radicald to be more that are going to level the regarding divorce
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laws and different economic inequalities between the sexes. they are seen as radical. thee months later, you get organization of the american women's suffrage association. that is a much more moderate group because it forms primarily by julia ward and lucy stone. they demand it only the vote. once you get that, you can change the laws if you don't like it. this is always the part where i want to talk about julia ward howe. she is the same woman who wrote this. she begins to take on a much during the role
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civil war especially through her writing. she becomes involved in the american women's suffrage association because she really wants the vote. moderatemuch more character than elizabeth cady stanton. it for this reason. her husband is abusive and every time she wants to leave him, he says great. you will never see your kids again. children are the property of their fathers. husbands,ivorce their they can be kept from their kids. she stays married to him to have access to the kids. , i great part of the story read her drier -- diary. he keeps telling her she is stupid and doesn't matter.
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he is the shining light in the couple because he is a very famous reformer. always try to make a point to talk about her and the situation. always remember that julia ward howe is an incredibly important and she waster married to some jerk nobody remembers. what happens after the twonization of these suffrage groups? this is the air right after the civil war when legislators are trying to create a world in are theual rights underpinnings of the government. everyone should have a say in american society and they are really trying to fix band that
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-- expand that with the 14th amendment. that is an important caveat. west, in the organization of those territories. the idea of women's suffrage takes off. territory, they give women the vote. there are very few that it gives women the vote with the addition that women should have a right to the construction of that society. it takes off and in the next year, utah gives women the vote. .bout a thousand women
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they give women the vote in utah in 1870. there is a referendum coming up on whether polygamy should be included. the expectation is that women vote against polygamy. by opening up above, they are going to move society for it. -- forward. ofy end up voting in favor polygamy. women's suffrage debt. it hits real trouble when it hits utah and women vote in a way that they thought it would not. changes the idea of women's suffrage spreading
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state-by-state in the early 1870's. still, you look at that date and ,omen have hope because in 1870 congress is going to be debating a new constitutional amendment to protect african-americans voting in the south and that is the 13th amendment. women lobby hard to be included in the 15th amendment. passes and the states ratify it women are not included. included,are not suffrage continues. they do something very smart and they say they are not going to try and lobby anymore for women's suffrage the ethically. what they are going to do is
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argue that they are citizens under the 14th amendment. women decide that they are going to test their right to vote under the 14th amendment. isoss the country, suffrage tried to vote. registrar anda have their names enrolled and tried to cast a ballot. in 1872, they try and do that and move them the. others do not and there is an important case and want you to remember. so easily divided by the union and confederate's.
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who gets to vote and how it works is a crucial spot in the country. woman tries to register to vote under this idea that she should be able to vote in the 14th amendment. she goes to the registrar and the guy there. refuses to let her register. -- sues him and the cases going to work its way to the court. it of the simple -- supreme court in 1875. about inou have heard the year of 1872 without putting into context is that susan b anthony does register to vote in actually andshe
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she actually cast their ballot. she is been arrested for the crime of voting. conceptan interesting to wrap your head around. they get her under the enforcement act that was put in .lace to protect the crime of voting, the argument behind that is that people should -- who should not deludingght to vote is the people who do have a right to vote. susan b anthony is then a very and this is aure very public case. she is very public about it. butr she is let out on bail after that happens, she goes giving a number of
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speeches about the fact that she is been arrested for the crime of voting. trial, the trial adds fuel to the fire. what happens is that she is the only woman in the courtroom. not allowed to testify on her own behalf because she is a woman. presents heryer simply reads the decision he had already written before the trial. , shewonderful moment watches this happen and gets up. she will not shut up. to ands she is not going what she thinks of him. it becomes such a powerful cause
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that it becomes a sort of a flash point where people look at the question of who should really have a say in one of this is this, she is so mad at what says thisat she government is not a republic. aristocracy at best. this is often miss punctuated. pay attention. she says, and all of gorky of wealth where the risk of her and the poor. -- rich govern the poor. she is actually ok with the idea of rich people governing the people governing
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the uneducated. sex causesigarchy of discord in every home in the nation. that should seem familiar to you guys. many people in the north are turning against the idea of laborers having a sense in society. what you are seeing here is the from the idea of everyone to maybesay in society not everyone should have a say in american society. after the 1870's is where do you draw the boundaries and how do you draw them? women's roles are going to be crucial to this. what happens?
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1875, the supreme court handed down the decision. when you read that, read my version. it was a kind of boring decision until the very end of it to go through everything they can think of that women have done in american history as they say that the question in hand is that they suggest in this. yes, of course they are citizens but then there is a kicker at the end of it. they say of course women are citizens with citizenship does not convey the right to vote. this is a really big deal. it unhingeecision his citizenship in voting. 1875 and in 1876, you're
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going to have blacks voting across south. it is who should have a say in american society. who should have a right to participate in the construction of the new nation. meanwhile, if this is the womenophical arguments are not sitting home eating bonbons and watching this play out. we talk about the rise of , women's roles have
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changed dramatically. men are dying in huge numbers as well is coming back to their homes from the war crippled. either in body or in mind. talk to you before about the millennia lewis. it opens up a lot of doors. i mentioned to you before she shows up in 1893. edmonia lewis was educated at oberlin college at the time. she is african-american and
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n and she becomes a symbol of human rights. this extraordinarily talented to come in this skin. because she is so visible and she becomes a symbol of what women can do. she gets a lot of her training because their prejudices are not as big as they are in america. she becomes very famous and rome she is an3, agriculturalist and a farmer. let's say she made a dollar a day.
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in 1873, she had to commissions and those commissions were worth $60,000 each. in 1877 she was a sculptor. she was very pleased on what she had done she is obviously very well-known and opening up the door to women. she puts a neoclassical look on american women of color. perhaps even more famous is the statue of 1867 called forever free. you can see her main characters has chains on. they are broken but not off.
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today, the mans in this sculpture is unclothed but the woman is closed. this is of african american notn being objects that are bound it. dressed and taking part in society in a way that he clothes.lose -- she can carry herself forward into modern american society. even though he is bigger and more powerful, there is a lot going on in that particular statue. you're looking at this and you've never heard of her. she is only one of the women in the late 19th century who
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dramatically changed american culture after the war. -- she is aculpture southern novelist and she is the first female american author to earn more than $100,000. the reason i bring her up is because i have talked a lot about the north so far today. southern women are in an especially pinched spot. they are from a region of the country that has just lost the civil war and is devastated. the men, especially the white men returning home, are often really unable to assume positions in society again. you have a bunch of women who dependent, and
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they know they are living through a dramatic time in america, and they are talented and educated. young out of the civil war, have a huge number of female writers, north and south, but primarily south. what they write are things that now don't make it across our radar screens often. she is famous as a romance novelist. especially, women, worked out a lot of attention between the north and south through romance novels and the explorations you could do with romance novels of boundaries, .ender, economics, race a whole lot of these things, and they are really interesting. you can see some of the ideas when we read virginia. there are a lot of things, and
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it is about the west mostly, but he is trying to tie into the popularity of post-civil war romance novels. this lady may be more familiar. this is louisa may all caps -- louisa may alcoot. women," wasittle the bestseller in that year. way forly pioneered the northern female writers. she actually didn't like writing these books. they became enormously popular, and one of the reasons is ofause her "little women" 1868 spark a whole bunch of new roles for women. if you think about it, there are four girls in "little women," a nd only one of them is a traditional, stay-at-home,
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pre-civil war girl, and that is bad. best finally dies -- that is beth. dies of somely undisclosed illness. , shes kind of a homebody doesn't like to leave the house. the other sisters are all modern women. meg works for a living. and wants to go out and write the great american novel. amy is a sculptor. them are actually fairly successful in the professions. crucially, all three of them end up settling down, getting married, and having children. that is going to be important for the way women reintegrate into this new post construction society. you have southern writers, northern writers. t, -- alcott, we
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found out that she wrote real potboiler stories. she wrote a short story called "mask" about women who had to hide themselves. but people aren't just reading about women, they are watching them. this is anna dickenson. she is so well known as a speaker, she is the first american woman to address congress. very well-known, very highly paid, eloquent speaker, and she speaks across the country at lectures, where she introduces topics and tells people about subjects they don't otherwise know about. so now, women are not only taking part in the arts, they are actually physically in public, informing people. roleare taking up public
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after the civil war in a way they really didn't do before the civil war. the are also using visibility to influence american life. i told you she would come back to haunt us today. increasingly focused on her position as a mother. her position as a mother to say that women are different than men, that women really can do society better than men have done. is notally sets her off only did she watch this ,ncredible carnage of the war feeding fires around washington, one of her friends feed one of the first people killed in the war. ,fter the franco-prussian war and incredibly bloody war, she decided that enough was enough,
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in women had to take over world society. reminiscenceser after the franco-prussian war, "i was visited by the senate feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. it seemed -- what she does is she issues in appeal to womanhood throughout -- throughout she the world, but women with whom she has contact in other countries. she says, we need to stop war. she makes this declaration that says --
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plural, come together to stop war. if you google mother's day, it will say it was started in 1908 by anna jarvis. that is wrong. she started it because she her mother going to mothers days. the idea of mothers days comes out of the post-civil war period, with the idea that women, as mothers, could clean up world politics. women taking on a because taking a role they are different, start really to take off in the 1870's. in the 1860's right up through 1870, you get the idea that women should have rights because
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all humans should have rights. during the 1870's, you get this idea that women should have rights because they are different. women have a perspective that is going to be able to do things like stop war and stop the dangerous aspects of industrialization. 1874, we get the creation of the women's temperance -- women's christian temperance wctu. the they became politically involved and organized under any -- under annie wittenmyer. stopare trying to excessive drinking, promote temperance. theoretically, saloons are being regulated, but they are really not. u begins to do things like poor liquor in the sewers.
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sewer inually not a 1874. they are actively trying to clean up the city's by cleaning up the alcohol. i'm going to talk a second about the constitutional convention of idaho in 1869. literally, when the guys are trying to organize because the two should, within days, they are still basically trying to figure it out -- the first people to the door are the wctu. they are there before anybody else shows up. is one of the first things that goes on the agenda because the wctu is so powerful and popular. women are not only taking roles in society in atomized waves. because women have entered the teaching profession and because women have entered nursing, and because, as i talked about, we
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have the rise of middle managers now have extra money in leisure time, you know have concepts coming that women need education. what i want to talk about now is the rise of women's colleges. women's colleges are going to be crucial. while women have had seminaries and education before this period , people really point to the organization of smith college in 1875 as a real landmark for the education of women. the radcliffe annex, organized in 1879. differente a little from smith because it borrows professors from harvard. ist these colleges are doing they are setting up women -- they recognize that women have brains and their educating women. there is a funny twist, because they have to overcome the idea that women are weak and are
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going to be injured by the application of their brain, or they are going to turn into sort of stupid shouldered, bespectacled people who can't do a hard days work. at the same time, women's colleges are quite aggressive about teaching women much of the same curriculum that men have. women have to take physical education classes, they have to they have to have courses in setting tables, and serving tea, and knowing different places where dishes go, so that women will not be educated out of their sphere. there is a funny hybrid. one of the things that comes out of the rise of the college movement that i think is wholeating is there is a
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series of novels and novelists to come from the end of the 1970's on -- and of the 19th century on about women's colleges. some of you may have read "daddy longlegs," which is actually set in the 20th century. there is a famous fred astaire movie, but it missed the point of it being a women's college. late louise in the book, when they start their own college. there is a wonderful scene those books where it essentially becomes a coed college. the women and the men sit on a staircase. while women are learning these things -- and these tend to be middle-class women whose families have the money and time , what ishem to school
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really crucial about these things is that they are going to intelligent, of connected women. begin to form social networks at these colleges, the same way i say to you your networks from school will matter in your lives. women coming to these colleges are going to have friends. they are going to have friends they took classes with, friends they stayed up late talking about social issues with, and these networks are going to have a huge effect on the rest of american society both in terms of what they do but also the way they think about what they do. one of the people who is crucial in this is this woman here, jane adams. it is worth mentioning that, by 1870, so many are getting involved in education. people, the majority of
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graduating high school in america are women. only about 2% of americans go to college in that year, but women are already 21% of that group. jane addams is from illinois. her father had worked with abraham lincoln. she was almost famous, -- they were blue. you're supposed to send into those eyes. i will show you a picture of her later, in a minute. pre-much anyone who saw jane adams commented on her eyes. did a tour of europe when she was a young woman, after going to a seminary, a small women's college. she was horrified by what she saw in europe. she toured the tenement district in london, and she felt that the
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people she saw there were hardly even people. she actually likened them to animals. she said, this is the modern world, because it was the modern world for her. is no way, in a modern world, that people should look like this. exactly what one could do about it was not clear. she eventually does what one would expect. network, to her social to a woman named alan did star, gates starr, and they talk about how women could have an effect on the terrible conditions brought about by industrialization in america. five points is the region of new york, the area of new york that is famous in "gangs of new
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york." it is famous as being sort of the most dangerous part of new york. is, what can sheltered, middle-class, usually white women due to ameliorate these sort of conditions when they can't vote, they are not involved in the economy. can they do to stop america from going down the road that we talked about, where they are very rich, poor, and everything seems to be falling apart. the answer is that women see the world differently. they see the world organically. the way women can heal the split, if you will, is to return the idea of an organic society to america. it is one thing to talk about it, but the way they can do it is literally by living in these areas.
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in 1889, starr and addams buy what is called whole house. -- hull house. it is in a poor area of chicago. they open it and they live there. they begin to open services for the immigrants, the immigrants around them. they begin to provide babysitting, they begin to talk to people about why their lives are the way they are, they try and clean the debris out of the cities, the trash out of the streets, in the garbage especially, because they notice that the garbage is carrying flies, and the areas with the worst garbage have the worst sickness among babies. they try and provide social services. crucially, because of those social networks i talked about,
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lots of educated, middle-class women come through paul house and later on, the henry street settlement. and they startgh to listen to the immigrants and the poor people around them about why they are poor, about what their lives are like. on theart to focus overall traditions that are still in america. they have presentations of neil workers, for example. they try and encourage the daughters of the immigrant women to value their mother's experiences. these women go out and they collect statistics. they go into factories. they find out what people are paid, how many hours they work,
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what the work is like. this is the beginning of social work. it was not an accident that the university of chicago, in the early 20th century, was a place one would go to study social work, because this is where the idea had come from. crucially, for historians, these documents are invaluable. and, they are invaluable in the early 20th century when the supreme court starts to take into consideration conditions of life. for example, in the brandeis brief, when he writes the brandeis brief, which puts together a lot of information about conditions in the country, he actually got material from his sister-in-law who was a settlement house worker. these were called settlement houses. a settlement house workers like those at whole house -- at hull began to try to re-create
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an organic society, and they try , likeit in a modern way gathering statistics and ideas. lillian wald brought to the table nursing skills. other skills,ings but billion wald -- but lillian wald says we need to improve public health. she is really the one behind improving public health across the country in general. i told you i would show you another picture of jane addams. again, trying to improve the lives of children. this is a new york picture even though jane addams is from chicago. women and children, primarily. you cannot improve the lives of women and children without
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improving society as a whole. they don't stop here. kelley, is florence actually the daughter of a very famous industrialist congressman from pennsylvania, a guy named pig iron kelley. iron becaused pig he was not necessarily the brightest crayon in the box, but he was good at listening to other people said. if you want to know what people thought, you can just read pig iron, because he habits and ofize his -- because he kind makes a synopsis. the daughter has issues of her own that she is trying to address in american society. she has been at hull house, she has seen the terrible conditions especially of garment workers,
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and she wanted to take that on. how do women take on industrialization? by the late 19th century, women can take on industrialization as consumers. florence kelley and this woman begin to advance the idea the women can ameliorate extraordinarily bad conditions of industrialization. sweatshops, terrible pay, terrible conditions, by refusing to buy products that are made in sweatshops. they organize eventually, in 1891, the national consumers league. they would say, we will not buy underng or goats made unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. consumers, that
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mother feeding our children -- as consumers, safe food and drink for our children. that every human being has a right to these things, but we are wives and to have and we have good things for ourselves, but we also must protect the other mothers who are out there producing these things. women taking on -- i reallyociety , buttalked about the east there is also the west. the west will play an important role in how women's roles play out in the 19th century. this is not a woman on a horse. this is the stereotypical image of a cowboy coming out of the civil war with the movement of the cattle on the planes from
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1866 onward. what i didn't talk about was that, by the 1870's, the image of a cowboy has a certain role for women. this has gotten picked up in certain westerns ever since. women are either good, stay at home wives or they are sort of criminals or prostitutes in this western image coming out of the civil war. this has to do with the image of the american cowboy. those images of women as either very good or very bad become crucial to the way in which women's images develop after the war. if that is the image of women, with the cowboy, the reality of women in the west is very different. women work very hard in the west. they work in all the ways that they do in the east. homesteaders, farmers, they work in industries that are
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growing in the west. basically, the employment patterns in the west for women replicate those in the east. they do laundry. they do all the things that they do back east. there are, of course -- i have to include this picture because it is fun. course,e, of prostitutes in the west. i like this image because of the liquor in the striped stockings. the only reality of the west. yes, there are prostitutes, yes, there are wives, but for the most part, there are women doing everything they did back east.
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that old saying that they had to do everything that man did and still take care of the kids at the same time. the experiences of western women have an image of being fallen-home wives, or women as they call it. the reality is that they are doing everything. idea,really do push the and women writers and writers about the west, push the ideas very heavily in the late 19th century. good, american women. the cowboy takes off with such great power as a symbol of america after the civil good -- civil war. good, american women are housewives. because this picture she was born in 1867, she lived and she iss period,
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probably our most influential western writer. printoks have been in since the 1930's. in my generation, everybody read them. she writes out of south dakota. what is fascinating about them is that she wrote them in part in these books very specific image of a western woman, who follows a man, stays home and takes care of the kids, and is rewarded for that behavior. what is fascinating to me about that is that it isn't the life she lived. in fact, at one point, the family lived above a saloon. in fact, she worked for other people. in fact, she made her own money.
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that idea of women being in the , taking their kids and being rewarded for that really takes off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. the reason i make such a big deal out of this is that what i am suggesting is that, by the 1880's, she has the idea that women are different and they should have a say in american society not because everyone should have equal rights and of discussion, but rather because they are wives and mothers. yesterday, i was reading the convention notes of the idaho constitutional convention of 1889. here in this convention, when they are talking about women's mr. king says, "i'm in favor of --
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they had just said that chinese and indians could not vote. here he says, "i firmly believe that a majority of women in this territory or any state in the union are just as well-qualified to the right of suffrage as the average man. tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of women 10,000 times better qualified than one half of the men who vote in these united states. what i am setting up here is the at the very moment when americans are trying to figure out who should have a say in american society -- they are cutting out african-americans with the idea that african americans are corrupting the .ote they are cutting out laborers because of the idea that
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organized labor also wants a handout from the government. they are deep and always so sure about the robber barons. they aren't so sure that the industrious -- the industrialists are switching the congress and legislatures to unfairly benefit them. there is a lot of people like said, that maybe shouldn't have a say. should be taken into consideration, maybe class, maybe education. but women are good wives and mothers. they are going to vote the right way so long as they are wives and mothers. in 1890, the year after that -- i'm just giving you the line here.
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the national women's suffrage association and the american women's suffrage association to become the national american women's suffrage association, and they focus on getting the vote. this alienates a number of people who had been a part of the national women's suffrage association. she is an elderly woman at this point, and she sailed through europe very shortly thereafter. suffrage, the idea of and women having a say in by 1890,society, relies not on the idea that everyone shall equal rights, but belongthat some people in american society because of who they are. i talked about the rise of 1899 in the idea
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that certain african-americans did not participate in american society. i talked about the government using the troops in both homestead and palm against strikers. women aren't part of that. women want to suffrage and think they should have the suffrage because they are good wives and mothers. they are not going to ask the government for any special favors. they are on the right team, if you will. this is a powerful argument. the first woman elected to 1917 -- from montana in she is not the first to sit in congress. she is the first woman elected to congress. she was a member of this organization. this worked, the idea that people should get the boat because of being wives and mothers. i want to argue that, when women get the vote, they do it very deliberately.
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after 1890, after the mississippi constitution i talked about, which restricted the boat based on education or , in thees in the south south, but also in the north, there are a number of new constitutions that take the boat away from african-american man, poor man, immigrants, at the very moment that women are getting the vote. women get the vote in part because they argue they will purify american society. they are not like the people trying to use the government for the wrong and. they will use the government for good american families. i love this image because women not only wear white when they are arguing for something, but they also -- arguing for suffrage, but they also push the baby.
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look at this image, dressed in white and pushing their babies. not because they deserve to have equal rights because everybody does, but because women must participate in an american society, and they must participate in a particular american society. it is no longer in american society based on the idea that every human need, by definition, should have a say. it is now the idea of an american society in which certain people should have a say in american society because they are defending the idea of a nuclear family, of a government that is not beholden to any special interests, that will advance the idea that we talked about from lincoln through horatio alger on into the late 19th century. a middle-class idea, an idea that the government should not respond to everybody.
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toshould not be responding those organized labor is that many newspapers and thinkers accuse of trying to pervert american society. it should respond to a group of people who claim not to want special interests, claim not to want any help from the government. paradoxically, because they don't want anything from the government, they are the very ones who should control it. of course, when they become the ones to control it, they will control it for their own interest. this moment is the rise of an articulated look at how women should participate in society that we crystallize in the late 19th century, the idea about an american middle class. any questions? let's pick it up on thursday with dorothy richardson.
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>> join us every saturday evening as we hear lectures on topics ranging from the american revolution to 9/11. lectures and history are also available as podcasts. visit our website or download them from itunes. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> the hard-fought 2016 primary season is over. historic conventions to follow this summer. >> colorado. >> florida. >> watch c-span as the delegates consider the nomination of the first woman ever to head a major political party, and the first non-politician in several decades. watch live on c-span, listen on the c-span radio app.
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you have a front row seat to every minute. c-span, allions on beginning on monday, july 18. >> this weekend on "road to the white house rewind," we look back at the 1968 republican and democratic conventions. here is a preview. democrats.fellow we have recognized and indeed, we must recognize the end of an era and the beginning of a new day. belongs to the people, to all the people everywhere, in this land of the people, to every man, woman, and
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child that is a citizen of this republic. and, within that new day lies nothing less than the promise seeing a generation ago by that , to every manolfe his chance, to every man regardless of his birth, his shining golden opportunity, to every man the right to live and work and be himself. and, to become whatever thing his manhood can combine to make him. this is the promise of america. yes, the new day is here. across america, throughout the entire world, the forces of
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emancipation are at work. freedom's rising voice. let me live my wife, let me live in peace, let me be free say the people. >> watch more from the 1968 republican and democratic convention sunday at 10:00 a.m. eastern on our weekly series, "road to the white house rewind." american history tv, only on c-span3. historian james robertson talks about robert e. lee's ties to virginia in the various military campaigns throughout the civil war. he also compares his life after the war to other generals and veterans. discusses his role
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