weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. announcer 1: on "lectures in history," townsend university akim reinhardt teaches a story about victorian culture in the u.s. in the last half of the 20th century. he describes the societal customs of the upper and emerging middle class and established gender norms for the time period. they talked about how the conventions created expectations that covered behavior, dress, work, and home life. his class is about an hour. akim reinhardt: all right, this is a picture of queen victoria, queen of england from 1837 until 1901. for a very long time, she was the longest reigning monarch in british history. she was only recently surpassed by queen elizabeth ii, who is 90 years old and has been on the throne since 1952.

so what does all of that have to do with american history after the civil war? well, to be honest not a whole , lot. but her name does refer to a period in both european and american history that witnessed important and far-reaching changes to american and european culture. now the timeframe of victorian , culture as we call it often coincides with her reign, those years of 1837 to 1901, and particularly when someone talks about victorian culture in europe, and if someone just comes up to you and says victorian culture, they are very likely referring to what went on in england, not necessarily america. it coincides with these dates. here in america people sometimes take that long view of victorian culture from the 1830's to about 1900 or so, but you can put that into an early and a late.

and because this course is post civil war, we will stay focus on the victorian culture in america that takes place after the civil war, after 1865, and we will run it up through the first years of the 20th century, to the 1900s, the 1910s and even a little bit into the teens. when we talk about victorian culture in america, particularly after the civil war, we are looking at a society that has undergone a lot of changes because of that war and other things that are going on, some of which we have already talked about, and the changes, disruptions really shape and influence american society. first thing we have got to think about is the war itself and all of the carnage and brutality that comes out of it, the great loss of life, the sacrifices, the debt and so forth -- death and so forth, and the way in

which the north in particular handles it. we talked about this early in the semester. early in the war preserve the , union, maybe free some slaves. by the end of the war, the north has begun to rally around this idea that the war is a moral crusade to end slavery. happens as a result than is that many americans were affected by the word this way. -- the war in this way. when the war was over, they carried with them that strong sense of moral purpose, that after 1865, many americans live d their lives in a way that said, you know what, my life has moral purpose. my life needs to have moral meaning. i am not just living day to day doing this, doing that. right? morality is important, and it shapes how i understand my life, the world around me. so that is one factor. right? americans living with a sense of moral purpose. the second is spread of democracy, which is an ongoing process.

we don't talk about pre-civil war stuff in this class, but it is ongoing, and it continues, and we see that americans are becoming ever more participatory in politics, and that the political environment itself is becoming highly charged and highly competitive. all right? so with a more overtly political culture that americans are living in. third thing we want to talk about, we just talked about it on tuesday, the rise of big business and the spread of modern capitalism. right? we talked about how this was a nation that was poor when it was founded, small businesses, tradespeople and small farmers in the north, and there is a transition to an era of very large businesses, very wealthy people, and a growing industrial economy that led to class divisions. this is going to be really important for this lecture, what

we talked about on tuesday, how there is a small number of the elites. there is a growing middle class, but more and more americans are being trapped in wage work where they get poor wages or barely livable wages or they are ok but not great right? , so the economic problems of the south prior to the war, the pyramid shape of a small elite, a human middle class and a large segment -- yeoman middle-class, and a large segment of poor, free blacks and whites as well as slaves. that kind of economic system -- not based on slavery, but the economic division will appear throughout the whole country in the north and south as well for you have a group of super wealthy elites profiting from the capital system. you have a middle class that is growing but still relatively small, and the growing mass of people struggling to get by. that is the third thing. the fourth thing we want to look when we think of victorian

culture in america is something else we have already looked at the growth of cities and the , rise of immigration. right? cities that seem to be popping out of nowhere in a nation that had been overwhelmingly rural is now increasingly urban, and waves of immigration, not just for an immigration coming from asia and europe but also within the nation, people leaving rural america and heading to the city, and both of these things, while they are very exciting and lead to the production of new wealth and a lot of new opportunities, they are also huge disruptions to society. they also put people back on their heels a little bit, that life is changing all around. that so many people are not from america. so many people are immigrants or the children of immigrants. so many people are living in

cities in what had once been aca very rural nation. so these four factors are going to shape victorian america. the abolition of slavery in the civil war that gives people more purpose, the spread of democracy as a central part of people's lives, the rise of big business and capitalism that leads to class divisions, a small number of wealthy people, a large number of poor, the growth of cities and immigration that disrupts american society. when we look at that new wealth, this new class of wealthy people and all of the wealth that is being created in this new era, we see that it is not distributed equally, that it is divided both geographically and in terms of the population. first of all, these new businesses are mostly in the cities. right? they are not out in the countryside. we talked about how new businesses are in the cities where they can take advantage of of the population to get

workers, and have access to new infrastructure, waterworks, electricity, gas, and so forth. so the bulk of the wealth is in the cities. in addition, the wealth is not distributed equally. there is a small number of fortunes,ing immense and a small, a bigger but still not large number of people who are moving to the middle class. and these people are largely nativeborn americans, not immigrants. they are mostly white, and they are mostly protestant christians. they are not jews, they are not catholics, they are not eastern european orthodox. all right? so nativeborn, white, protestant christians -- that is not to say everyone who fits that description is doing well. that is not true. many of the rural immigrants coming from the countryside are

struggling. many of them are white protestant christians as well. native born, white, protestant christians are the majority of the country at this point. but when we look at the small number of people doing well, they are mostly in the cities and that they mostly fit ethnic and religious designations. about victorian america, we often tend to focus on the upper class, top, and middle class. these are people driving the new culture, the new victorian culture. today we are primarily going to look at the middle class. we will then little time on the upper class, but you need to understand they are very important players in all this. we talk about the upper class, we are looking at a new class of wealthy americans for the little -- who are feeling maybe a little bit insecure, because america had been a four country. -- a poor country.

now they are wealthy. how do you be wealthy? what does it mean to be a wealthy american in particular when your country seems so new? so what of the wealthy people are taking their cues and -- from europe. particularly they are looking at france. what do the wealthy french people do? they begin to mimic them to a certain extent. but we will look at the middle because theytoday, are in an interesting position. on the one hand, middle-class people of the time and very much today in a lot of ways are aspiring to be wealthy. right? middle-class people look at wealthy people and think maybe i , can be wealthy one day too. not every middle-class person, but a lot of us. right? and then they look down at the poor people and think, i don't want to be poor. right, this is just human nature. right? you aspire to have more. you are afraid of ending up with less. but we need to remember that

when we think about the economics of the situation, if the middle class are here, lower classes are right beneath them over there. upper classes are way up there. think about in today's money. what is a middle-class wage today? for a single person, you know, 30,000, 40,000, $50,000. maybe family of four, a couple of kids, $60,000, $80,000 to the middle class? well, what are poor working-class people making? maybe half that, three quarters of that, something like that. what do really wealthy people make? the wealthy people make $1 million a year. and if you are the top end of the middle class let's say, and you are making $100,000 a year, you might only be making three times what a working-class person makes, but rich people are making 10 times that you make 50, 100. so economically the middle class

, tends to be much closer to the poor working classes than they do to the wealthy classes. this can create a sense of insecurity. right? there is the reality that it is easier for middle-class or so or -- for a middle-class family to fall into poverty than it is for them to reach the heights of wealth that we all dream about. that can lead to insecurity. at the same time, we have to remember that the middle-class is much smaller than it is today. when we think of an urban and suburban middle-class today we , are talking about the majority of the country. today's americans are middle class whether city or suburb. there are not modern suburbs like we think of yet, so we are talking about strictly urban at this time. and the urban middle class are nowhere near as big, not a majority of the country decidedly a minority. , they are growing in numbers, but they are very small. so what does that mean? that means had the same time you are worried about falling into

poverty and you are aspiring to be wealthy, you are looking at a city around you with lots of poor and working-class people. they are everywhere. there is lots of them. this has some upsides for you. if you are middle-class today you can stretch only so far. ,if you are middle class in the year 1870 or 1880, you can do a lot more with your money. because there are many poor people with need and help. it is not unusual for example for middle-class families during the victorian era to take servants into their homes, bring in a woman to help you cook, clean, run the house, so forth. typically an immigrant although not always, people who really need the money. there are for to having a small middle-class with a lot of people if you are middle-class. there is also the constant reminder there is a lot of poverty out there, and you can start to take on as a small middle-class -- what is the word

i'm looking for? a siege mentality. right? you can worry about the masses of poor and working-class people that surround you, and the rich people that are so far away. and those rich people don't want to be like you, the same way you don't want to fall down to the working class if you are middle-class, well, the wealthy people have no intention of falling to middle-class, which -- veryy fall -- bury far fall for them as far as they are concerned. you have a new middle class that is small, growing, and confronting these circumstances. here is the other thing we want to think about. in this moment, they are smaller than the poor and the working-class, but they have a lot more money than that. and even though the wealthy are wealthier, there is more middle-class people that will be wealthy. so there is more middle-class people and they have more money than all the poor people, so

that allows them to develop an outsized influence. this new growing middle-class , is going to have a profound influence on the country and its culture in a way that we have to think about a little bit, because today we say, oh, the middle-class is influential. of course it is. it is most of the people. it is not all of the people, but a majority of the people. of course it drives american culture. that is kind of a no-brainer. but when the middle-class is a minority, a fraction of the population, and is still driving the culture or initially driving the culture, we have to remember the factors that play into this. all right. let's talk about what this victorian culture is. any questions so far by the way? about any of this stuff? all right. let's talk about the new middle-class culture in american cities, societies after the civil war, and what it looks like. they are creating, the middle-class, the victorians -- we can call them the victorians,

upper and middle class, are creating and promoting a new set of values and mores. one of these fancy french words. it is like more with an s at the over -- anaccent accent going over the e, an accent aigu as opposed to grave, if you are taking a french class. anyone know what mores are? >> unspoken practices. akim reinhardt: sometimes they can be spoken, but they are the ideals, the values that a community shares. the mores are the codes of conduct you live by, what you aspire to be, the taboos you avoid, kind of like values for the whole communities. so a new set of values and mores are being promoted by these victorians. and underpinning it is this strong sense of morality talked about. they come out of the civil war

with a very strong sense of moral purpose, and that will guide them as they set this new values and mores. what are the promoting? what are the ideas that guides -- that really guide them? restraint. right? don'tbe sure we -- showy, give into your urges, don't be gluttonous. downony is like let me sit and eat everything. no. restraint shows being amoral, -- you are being a moral, thoughtful person. modesty. don't brag. don't make yourself the center of attention, right? that is not polite, that is selfish. be modest. the third thing we want to highlight, hard work. all right? work hard. sometimes this is referred to as the protestant work ethic.

that term is problematic although these people are largely protestant. it is not like protestants have a monopoly on working hard, but in this context, when you see these are the values the victorians are promoting, restrain yourself, don't give into your urges and gluttony and desires all the time be modest, , don't brag or make yourself the center of attention. and work hard, do not be lazy. ok? laziness,d at excess, and the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake as signs of immorality. remember they are being guided , by a sense of moral purpose. if they see you being lazy, not working hard, they don't think well he is just being lazy or , she is being lazy, maybe she needs a little inspiration. maybe he is just not inspired. maybe he just needs a little encouragement. no, no they think are being , immoral. they think you are a cynic.

they think you are not doing god's work. laziness is a moral problem, an immoral act. excess, eating too much, bragging, all of these are immoral, not just character flaws but transgressions against what god wants you to be and how god wants you to behave. and so they set this new set of codes, behavioral codes, morals, values for themselves, but they also expect other people to follow them. as the gilded age is unfolding, war,period after the civil the victorians began to demand that their fellow citizens, who were poorer than them follow , their cultural lead. do as i do, do as i instruct you. and in fact, they often blamed people's poverty on their immorality. on the suppose it -- opposed

immorality. they would give into ideas like the poor are poor because they are behaving badly, because they are immoral. maybe the drink too much. maybe they are undisciplined. maybe they are lazy. they have moral flaws, and that is what is contributing to their poverty. they are less inclined to recognize the structural factors that we have talked about in this class, right, that these new businesses are sprouting up and running out small businesses. small businesses are being squeezed, and the tradesmen and craftsmen who used to run their own businesses don't have the opportunities anymore. they are being pushed into industrial labor, wage labor. they have nowhere else to go, the bosses are not paying as well. these are the structural factors at work. but from the victorian point of view, it is less about the structural factors and more about, you are lazy because you are immoral. that is your fault. you can fix it by becoming a

more moral person, and you can work your way out of poverty. so victorians were consummate that their way to live was the only right way to live. about about victorians, it is not just they had a strong moral code. moralistic meaning you have a strong sense that your relative is the only right form, and people need to follow your lead on that. one of the most profound ways that victorians expressed their new morality was through gender roles. all right, gender roles. victorians created specific roles in society for both men and women to follow. but one of the problems is they were pretty much unaware of the difference between gender and sex.

so maybe you have talked about this in other classes. what is the difference between gender and sex? anyone know? yes. >> sex is biological whereas gender is choice. john langellier: sex -- akim reinhardt: sex is about the biological. gender is about society and culture. are you born male or female or trans? that is biological. you first come out, ok. your sexual acts for biological. all right. gender is how society interprets the male and the female and the ideas and assumptions it makes about masculinity and femininity. this don't necessarily have anything to do with biology. let's assume for a second that you have a friend who is going to be having a baby. i know most of you are a little young for that, but use your imagination. your friend is going to be

having a baby, and you decided as a gift, a shower, he will -- you are going to bring a onesie, the little things babies wear, you put them in. they throw up on it. if the kid is going to be a boy, what color onesie? just say it. and if the kid is going to be a girl, what color? if they are doing old-style, did not want to find out, what color are you going to get? yellow, green, things that are supposedly gender-neutral. what does that have to do with biology? absolutely nothing. right, i mean zero. there is nothing inherently pink about women or blue about men. these are ideas society has used to interpret masculinity and femininity. i almost wore my pink shirt today, but then i realized it did not fit right. constructedoles are culturally interpreted and ideas

, about masculinity and femininity. sex is biological. and the victorians don't really see the difference between these ideas, these gender ideas, and the biology of sex. when they create gendered ideas, they end up assuming that is just the biology of it, so their ideas about masculine and feminine they also believe that is the way things are. here is how they defined men and women, and so not only defined them through gender, but really believed this was inherently, innately held. they just popped out this way. men they saw as highly competitive. men like to compete. they are robust that way, kind of macho. physically robust. man. ok. and maybe on the bad side according to them, men could be

vulgar and give into decadent urges. what do i mean? sex. they like the sex. men come out and grow up and are naturally horny, and there can be a problem with victorians. as we will see in a second. let's turn to women. women were seen as physically frail, the opposite of men. men were fit and robust, women were physically frail creatures. be gentle with them. they were seen as intellectually inferior, not as bright as men. on the positive side as far as they were concerned, women were seen as inherently gentle and nurturing, that they have what it takes to raise a family, make people feel better, heal people, mother and teach and do all of these wonderful, important things. so men are competitive and

strong and kind of, oh, got to watch out for that guy. the women they are weak and maybe soft, but they are really nice and take care of us. this is the interpretation of the gender roles. with this interpretation of gender roles, they put forth a bunch of ideas about how men and women should behave, what is the proper way to be a man, the proper way to be a woman. and it starts, in some ways, with sex. victorian ideas about sex were very restrictive. they only countenanced heterosexual sexuality. the others were no, they did not even consider them for the most part, not acceptable. only heterosexuality. and beyond that, sexual activity was something that is not really

good unless you are doing it for one purpose only, and that is to make babies. sex with the purpose of making children, that is wonderful. you are doing god's work. go forth and be fruitful. but sex for pleasure, that is not really -- men might have urges, but that is a bad thing. women were thought to not enjoy it anyway, if you can believe that. sex was seen as something only for procreation, never to be done for marriage, and even within the confines, kind of really relegated to that realm of making babies. if you are not ready to start your family, you should not be having much sex. if it is not the right time of the month for procreation, maybe you should not be having sex. if you are past childbearing age or decided you have enough kids, you should not be having sex. who is this guy?

does anyone recognize him? he is younger than most of the pictures you see. teddy roosevelt. this is a young teddy roosevelt. in 1880, theodore roosevelt got married to a woman named alice on his 22nd birthday. the day before, he is writing in his diary on the eve of his wedding. he writes, "thank god i am absolutely pure. i can tell alice everything i have done." what is he saying? what does he mean? "thank god i am absolutely pure. i can tell alice," his soon-to-be wife, "everything i have done" or not done, if you want to think of it like that.

he is a virgin. that is what he is saying. he is saying, thank god i am a virgin, i have nothing to hide from my future wife. i did not transgress the moral codes. he would have said, i have not done anything wrong. i have not given into my decadent urges. i'm still pure, i am still a virgin, i have saved myself for my wife. so in this quote from the young teddy, we see these ideals, so what was it like in everyday life for society of people who had very restrictive ideas about sexuality? if a young couple were dating -- they would not use that phrase, courting, seeing each other. a man and woman, single man and woman that we might say dating, were expected to be chaperoned at all times. if you are seeing a young woman or a young man, you would not be left alone. that would be very, very inappropriate. that would lead to rumor and someone fell down on the job. chaperoned all the time.

if a man wanted to write letters to a woman, there was no email, text. no telephones for most of this period as well. if a man wanted to write women letters, it is the only way to communicate privately with her. if you can't communicate privately with her in person, you are chaperoned all the time, if you wanted to write her letters, you are expected to ask her permission first. to simply write letters and send them to her was a little too forward. now you are crossing some lines, buddy, behave yourself. if a man kissed a woman, this was akin to asking her hand in marriage. if you kissed a woman, you might as well say i am ready to commit for the rest of our lives. these are the standards of sexual conduct that the society is advancing. then when the couple is

together, married, then a dynamic emerges or was thought to emerge in any case. who knows what goes on behind private doors, closed doors. the thinking was this. men are given to decadent urges. they are horny. women are not seen to have a sex drive. and not really enjoying it when they have it. how is this dynamic supposed to play out? men will naturally want to do it at times that are not just for procreation. doing it is going to be very conservative as you may think. there is no fancy stuff in the bedroom. they still want to do it. even if it is straightlaced stuff. it is the wife's job to say no. we are not having sex tonight, we are not ready to start our family, or we are past that age, or maybe it is that time of the month. whatever the case may be. if we are not going for reproduction, then it's the wife's job to keep the man from

acting up. a little different from a modern marriage. within the victorian family, the man was the breadwinner. it was his job to go out, make the money and supply for his family. to have his family taken care of. he was seen as someone going out and being competitive, working hard, elbowing, competing and metaphorically elbowing and wrestling other men to get his share and bring it home to take care of his family. men are seen as competitive. men are seen as somewhat macho. there is an irony here. what do most of these victorian men do for a living? i should say work. are these manual laborers? are these blue-collar guys going down to the factory and being physical all day?

no, these are the new white-collar workers. this is that managerial class. the one we talked about on tuesday that managed the big business. the business model has so many investors and owners, but the owners cannot run it so they hire a new class of managers. that is these guys. they aren't going to work and doing super macho stuff. they are going to work and sitting behind a desk for the most part. pushing papers around and doing this, that and the other thing. they are seeing themselves as being part of some highly competitive world. it can be competitive when it is banking and there is money on the line. there can be pressure in any of these jobs. they are not physically demanding. they are men who are casting themselves as highly competitive and then they come home. what is the home? the home is something the woman has prepared and manages for them. the woman's domain is seen as domestic.

the man goes and makes the money and comes to the home that the wife, the mother manages. her job is to create a nurturing and well tended, come, peaceful environment where the husband can come home after that hard day and recharge his batteries so to speak. to put that nasty, competitive world out there behind him and rebuild his moral character and his spirituality and replenish his soul before he heads out the next day to do it all over again. the wife's job is to maintain the home and raise the family. and, very often this was with the help of servants as we mentioned. the father was the patriarch. the father was seen as the boss, the commander, the leader of the family. this is not a gender equality situation as you have probably started to sense. this is a patriarchal or

male-dominated culture. the man sets the rules for the home. the man gives the orders, and the wife is expected to obey him. she is subordinate to him. she is not his equal. so the wife then, she has tools. -- two rules. on the one hand, she is underneath him, following his orders, but she also acts as his lieutenant. she takes his orders and then uses them to run the household. so when he is gone and she is tending to the kids and carrying out his will. she is doing it the right way as if the kids shouldn't be eating this at this time -- that is her task. she uses what the victorians see as her inherent domestic qualities to raise the children. the children themselves, not the childhood you were raised with. did your parents ever call you

buddy or refer to you as their best friend? hey, champ, how's it going? not the victorian way of doing things. that is not victorian childrearing. children were supposed to be obedient. they were to do as told. they were to tend to their chores as need be. follow their studies. when they were playing in the house, were you the wild kid? were you throwing things around? yelling and screaming? no, no, no. calm down. from an early age, they were learning about restraint. don't yell. babies scream, but once you are not a baby anymore, you are 5, 6, 7 years old, you start learning to behave yourself. the parent doesn't treat the child like an equal in any respect. he is just a child, she is just a child and does not treat them

like a friend. the parent treats the child like a child. the inferior that they are who needs to grow up by modeling our behavior. from an early age, the girls should be modeling the mother's behavior. the boys should be modeling the father's behavior. going about their business and learning to be adults. speak when spoken to, be a good child. in everyday life, the victorians demanded that people be sober. that word has a couple of meanings. there's the literal meaning, don't get drunk, don't drink too much. but also when we say be sober, we mean be serious. be a sober person.

work hard, be humble, and display good manners is what the victorians saw as good manners. these are good things. a lot of this. we don't want to come down too hard on the victorians. their way of understanding and culture may be different than ours. some of it we see as very problematic. they are very sexist. there are other ideas that can be very classist and judgmental about the poor in ways that are very unfair. not all of it is problematic. not all of it is bad. there are some good qualities they are trying to advance as well. for victorians to be a sober person, a humble person, a well mannered person, it meant that there was a certain way you carried yourself. let's think about victorian fashion.

what does it mean to be a supermodel strutting down the walkway, runway, catwalk in 1870's and 1880's america? nothing like that. women are expected to display themselves very modestly. to show basically as little bit of skin as possible. women wore long dresses, black shoes that laced above the ankles. gloves were popular, hats were popular. a lot of these dresses are collared. coming right up to the neck. in public, many victorian women only showed their faces, maybe their hands if they were not wearing gloves. it is a very modest appearance.

you can also see some elements of class distinction. we do have some money. the hats show elements of style and flair. they are kind of big, they got some frills and buttons on the dress. show off a little bit, but just a little bit. this is about modesty, good manners, good behavior. here is a picture from 1899 from a catalog. this is late victorian era. you can see a covering of almost everything. there are elements of design and fashion. there are elements of flourish and stylishness. the main theme is keeping things covered up. early in the victorian era, early in the gilded age, there is an emphasis on what you see here. there is kind of a remnant left over of tight waists.

in order to accomplish this, they would wear a corset. it was not something you could put on yourself. simply wearing one was assigned that you had someone helping you, probably a domestic helper. the way it went was, you put the corset on, you took a deep breath, suck it in. your helpers behind you put their knee in your back and pulled the laces tight. you are stuck there. think about your waist. men are wearing pants. what do you got here at your waist? i'm a 32. i am reasonably slender. a lot of you are 34 or 36 inches. women are shaped more curvaceously, they might have something similar in the hips and the narrow waist. not as narrow as you think.

the ideal waist size in the victorian era is 18 inches. think about that. 18 inches. yeah, ok. there is an element of sexuality to it, but it is hidden away in many respects. here is a more modest version of women's victorian dress. these are not upper-class, not upper-middle-class, these are modest women, the lower ends of middle-class. they don't have the buttons or the frills, but they are still dressed very plainly and modestly. what about for men? men's fashion, for these white collar and middle class workers, favored suits. as with women, colors were generally not loud. there is a lot of neutral tones.

black, white, and gray. occasionally some color flourish. mostly, it was a lot of neutral coloring. shirts with collars. i have a collar, it is firmly attached to my shirt. in this time, in the 19th century, collars were attached separately. you would put on a shirt and tie it on after. a sign of wealth was that you had good, starched collars. poor people who would wear collars would buy paper collars. you could wear them two or three times before they start falling apart. think of it like a disposable razor. the more well-to-do people have collars that were more lasting. paper collars for the people who were more aspiring. neck ties were becoming more popular. this collar does not fully cover the tie around the neck. hats were also common for men.

this is a derby. it is a good shot of a derby hat. the kind of headware that victorian men were apt to wear . photo. a family i know what you're thinking, what a happy bunch of people. one thing to keep in mind is that we are being filmed here today. ok, fancy, 21st century. you have the phone out. back then, photography is a much more difficult technology to rangle and manage. it is relatively new. it goes back to the mid-19th century with glass plates. it is getting a little better. it is still complicated. you have to set up the thing on the tripod. the photographer goes under the dark blanket and holds up the powder thing, when that happens you just have to sit there. if you move, it will blur. the other thing is that this is expensive.

it is rare, and it is a big deal. people did not typically smile in these types of family portraits or any other type of portrait. that may be why they are not looking the most festive. it is a big deal, so you are going to put on your sunday best. your best clothing or some of the best clothing. beyond that, we can see the victorian ideals being presented. how this family wants to present itself. the children are calm and well behaved. the family unit sits together. you can see the rank here with the father, the wife to his right. the older children standing behind him and the younger children on the side and between them. we are getting the impression that the victorian lifestyle is aspiring to this. calm, sober. people who are modest and putting their best foot forward.

i will leave the family photo up for just a little bit as we move on. the victorian sense of morality in some respects was derived from the civil war. the horrors of the war, how that led to a sense of people developing a strong sense of moral purpose. during the war, northerners embraced the idea that ending slavery was the great moral cause. after the war and particularly after reconstruction, they are going to take that sense of moral purpose and transfer it to other areas. what is it next that americans of this class are going to look to as a way of expressing their moral outlook? there was a variety of causes that the victorians supported. they saw as not just the right thing to do, but the moral thing to do. the righteous thing to do.

popular causes for victorian reformers included eliminating corruption from government. we have talked about this a little bit. we will talk more about it next week. this is a very bad time for corruption in american politics. we see it at the urban level. we read a little bit about the urban machines. we will talk about the more where there are people buying votes and stuffing ballot boxes. it permeates up to the state level as well. even in congress, senators are being bought and paid for by big businesses, railroad companies. there is a tremendous amount of corruption. victorians see this as a real problem, understandably, and worked to eliminate it. charity for the poor, they can be very judgmental of the poor. that doesn't mean they are a bunch of heartless bastards.

they want to help the poor. it is not so simple. it is going to be within their moral framework. we said, victorians have a tendency, not every victorian all the time, but generally, they had a tendency to blame the poor for being poor. you are poor because you are immoral. you have some moral failings. maybe you are lazy, or what have you. maybe you are not following the bible well enough or reading the bible well enough. you don't go to church enough, maybe you would not be so poor then. these kinds of ideas. for the victorians who wanted to help the poor, what it meant was that we will set up these charities and give you some money and provide some services. it is not as simple as lining up and getting it. the first thing that had to happen was that you had to prove

to these charity operators that you were what they called the worthy poor. what do you think the worthy poor means? i am a victorian, and i want to help poor people. i am not helping all of the poor people, i am selectively helping the poor people that i think are the worthy poor people. what do you think that means? >> moral? professor reinhardt: moral. people who recognized the error of their ways. people who are open to the idea that maybe they have been sinning. people that are going to be receptive to your brand of moral tutelage, moral teaching. it wasn't a matter of giving money or services. very often charity required that there be an interviewing process, what is your lifestyle, how are you living? when it comes time to be helped, you may have to attend our bible classes or go through moral training of some sort that we

provide for you. it is a charitable notion of helping people, but one that is framed by their understanding of what poverty is, what causes it and what cures it. that moral training was very much a reflection of their morality. american protestant christianity. if they were working with an immigrant community that was perhaps catholic, orthodox, or jewish, they were looking for converts. they were trying to moderate their behavior and morality as they understood it. another cause that was very popular with the victorians was prohibition. another word for prohibition is temperance. to temper is to tamp something down. the temperance movement will be known as the prohibition movement.

this is the effort to restrict and even ban the sale and consumption of alcohol. this movement was particularly popular with victorian women who saw alcohol as a threat to stable family life. if a woman's domain is the domestic sphere, that's how victorians defined women, working in the home. they raise the children, tend to the husbands, what kind of activity is going to be acceptable for women to be engaged in when it comes to entering the public sphere? women aren't supposed to be in the public sphere. they aren't supposed to be in politics and these kind of things. this opens up an avenue for victorian women to be in the public sphere. helping other poor women through charities or in this case, helping to fight what is seen as the scourge of alcohol.

alcohol is seen as ruining families. the idea that men, these immigrant men, these other men who aren't living up to our moral code, they work in their blue-collar jobs, they don't make enough money, and then they go and waste it on drink. they get drunk. they don't behave like a good victorian husband should. so, because of that, this becomes an avenue where victorian women can enter the public sphere and get involved indirectly in politics and more directly through charity. the women's christian temperance union, whose logo you see here , was one of these organizations dedicated to this.

trying to temper alcohol sales and consumption. they are founded in 1874. you can call them by their initials, wctu. they are successful in a number of ways. by the end of the century, they had over half a million members. here is a picture of a wtcu rally in alabama in 1909. we are talking about victorian culture as something that spreads throughout the country, it is a function of the middle class wherever it appears. north, south, wherever you find it. in big cities, smaller cities. even in towns. here you see people rallying to crusade publicly against alcohol. you see the sign, god wills it.

this is a moral crusade for them. god does not want you to be drunk, behave better. here is a woman christian temperance union pledge. this is something that goes along with the values that we are talking about. the notion that your word is your bond. if you take an oath, you stand by it. lying is seen as a very bad thing. to publicly pledge something and take an oath, means you are going to do this. there's a lot of gravitas associated with this. here is one strategy they tried. getting people to take a pledge. i hereby solemnly promise, god helping me to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors, including wine, beer, and cider. you are thinking what is the problem with apple juice? we are not talking about apple juice. we are talking about one of the more popular alcohol beverages.

when you let that apple juice get a little hey, hey. in order to discourage the use i will not do this anymore and do what i can to help my fellow brothers and sisters in christ to refrain from drink. let's talk about resistance to the victorian ideals. we will start from within. just like with any other culture or subculture, not everyone is on board 100% all of the time. there are always dissenting voices. there is a tension between those who advance the culture and promote the culture and those who have disagreements and want to ship or change it or overturn it.

not everything went with everything. not everyone thought it was peachy keen. children were not always well behaved, obedient and quiet. not all victorian adults were capable of meeting all the expectations. this is a very repressive system in some ways. it is very rigid and unyielding. right is right and wrong is wrong. not everyone is always living up to this. not everyone wanted to live up to all of this all of the time. not everyone was a virgin when they got married. that doesn't mean you publicly talked about it. you absolutely did not. if a man had sexual adventures before marriage, it was not looked upon kindly. it would not be talked about in

public and the men themselves might even talk about it privately. it was wrong, don't do it. there was this notion that men were this way. boys will be boys. they were given a little more latitude. women are subjected to a much firmer, stronger standard about sexual behavior than men are. if a woman is known to have had sexual relations before marriage, it is a major scandal. this would ruin her reputation, sabotage her chances at finding a good marriage and in many ways could ruin her life. that creates an inconsistency. everyone is being told no sex before marriage or no sex outside of procreation. everyone is being told that. but what men do, it is not good, whatever.

it will not ruin his life. he might be chided, he might be spoken to. his reputation might separate -- suffer somewhat. if a woman does it, wow, major fall out. what that means is men are likelier to pursue if they want to, sexual relationships. women have to be very careful about not having the wrong kind of sexual relationship. that means that if you are a victorian guy who wants to have sex with a woman, either the for marriage, outside of your marriage, whatever the case may be, what are the odds that you will find a victorian woman to do that with you? that could be hard. people have affairs, kids do what they will do. i'm not saying that it didn't happen, it happened. it is hard. instead, what happens is we see a thriving prostitution industry

in victorian america. particularly in the cities. the cities have more nominated a -- anonymity. upper middle-class men are all going to bordellos, brothels, restitution houses and purchasing sexual activity from poor women. from working-class women. they live in a different world in many ways. they are struggling to get by, many of them. the prostitution industry is quite robust. despite the fact that it was illegal in most places. for victorian women, these double standards and repressive cultures led to the emergence of some critics. this woman, charlotte perkins

gilman. she is born in 1860, right before the civil war starts. she dies in 1935. there were not relegated to the domestic sphere. work is a short story called yellow wallpaper. woman who isa

married to a doctor, a physician and her husband diagnoses her with the following disorder: temporary nervous to suppression slight hysterical tendency. do you think these things turn up in textbooks today? common foe medical diagnoses. diagnoses thaton were given to women at the time. they were typically used as a way to marginalize women who were seen as acting out. they were not sufficiently subservient to men who were transgressing against these gender roles for women.

fromre suffering hysterical disorder. there is something wrong with you. you are sick. in the story, the characters diagnosed with the disorders. to husband prescribes her her bedroom upstairs where she is to rest and she is not allowed to leave the room without his permission. if he is using it as a way to reassert his control over her. subservientr the victorian woman. there staring at the yellow wallpaper in this room she is not allowed to leave and slowly goes crazy. life, gilman fared better than that. on somebase this story

of her own experiences. she wasn't creating fantasy here. she was writing the story that spoke to the realities of victorian culture and victorian gender roles. there is some resistance to the culture itself, where people are not playing along or actively resisting. most came from working-class people outside this realm, the blue-collar workers and the dockworkers, the minute women who did not have the money to live in the society and who resented the moralistic victorian assumptions about them being inferior or immoral or the designs on getting them to change. nick --ts from death different ethnic groups, people

with different religious backgrounds, jews, catholics, eastern orthodoxy's often clung to their own ways of doing things and did not see their way of doing things and believing as wrong or inferior or moral. often, they pushed back against the victorian efforts to assert this moral code on them. they resisted things like temperance, decided it was ok for them to drink alcohol. they often resisted cemetery and is him, the notion that you have to thet adherence sabbath. you should not be going to the store. you should be in church. groups, they said we go to church, but we don't have the strict thing you do. against theseck victorian ideas of restraint and

don't show off and don't brag. they thought it was different. there's nothing wrong with going out and having a good meal when you can afford it or going out and enjoying life and having a swat of the -- a good time. this new class of workers who greatly outnumbered the victorians during this time are not always so receptive to the message. week, weome back next will see there is going to be a tension playing out in which the elites of the society and the people of the working-class and the lower classes are struggling to see what will be the face of america going forward as america enters the 20th century and the victorians strive to maintain up high ground which they do

until the 1920's and things get more complicated. thanks for coming. i will see you next week. >> you are watching american history tv. twitter. on you can get information on our schedule and keep up with the latest history news. >> on march 30, 1981, ronald reagan survived an assassination attempt outside the washington hilton hotel. sunday, the national law enforcement museum hosts secret service and fbi agents involved in protecting the president that day. this is a preview. >> you were very modest about it when i asked about being shot and almost run over by the president's limousine. you went to the hospital. did you get a chance to talk to

present reagan about that? -- aus a lube about that little bit more about that. if you have questions,, to the mic. >> the last time i was in the hospital about 10 days, i didn't have any thing like that. he was injured more seriously and was there longer. my wife carol and two of my children came up to get me. my daughter brought her nursing kit to make sure everything was in order. she was four years old. my son was acting like a doctor. they came to get me. i had the message to come down and see the president. it sounded like in order to me. down, my wifent and two of our children.

>> you weren't wearing one of those horrible hospital guess? -- gowns? we had a great conversation. the present was still looked up to many of the machines i had been hooked up to. they made noises that attracted children. they were attracting my two children. my wife was more nervous than i was. she was worried my kids might finish the job hinckley had started. we were nervous. know meident did not from anyone. we rotate. we had a wonderful conversation. he said we would have lunch together and we did. we were just about out the door.

doorre just about out the ready to head for home, which we were very anxious to get to. was mccarthy, reagan. what the hell that this guy have against the irish? >> from the national law enforcement, a discussion on the attempt on ronald reagan. the entire program air sunday at 4:30 p.m. eastern on american history tv, only on c-span3. >> we are standing in front of the turtle bay exploration park and museum in redding, california. come inside as we look at an exhibit that shares the agricultural history of the region. i think it is really important for us to remember that agriculture is one of the backbones of california.