Main Ideas:
• Women were economically and legally dependent on men because they went paid enough enough, so they had to marry in order to support themselves
◦ Marriage was the most honorable thing that a women could do
• Women started to fight for their rights for education, diverse, and property rights
• They stopped having less children and having more abortions and took back control over their body
Super long Version:
• In the 19th, women remained legally
inferior, economically dependent, and largely defined by family and household roles. Many women still aspired to the ideal of femininity popularized by writers and poets.
◦ This traditional characterization of the sexes, based on socially defined gender roles, was elevated to the status of universal male and female attributes in the 19th, due largely to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the family.
MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
• In the 19th, marriage was viewed as the only
honorable career available to women. Although the middle class glorified the ideal of domesticity, for most women marriage was a matter of economic necessity.
◦ The lack of meaningful work and the lower wages paid to women for their work made it difficult for single women to earn a living. Most women chose to marry.
• The most significant development in the modern family was the decline in the number of offspring born to the average woman.
◦ Although some historians attribute the
decline to more widespread use of male withdrawal before ejaculation, others have emphasized female control of family size through abortion and even infanticide or abandonment.
‣ That a change in attitude occurred was apparent in the development of a movement to increase awareness of birth control methods.
• Europe's first birth control clinic, founded by Dr. Aletta Jacob, opened in Amsterdam in 1882.
• The family was the central institution of middle-class life.
◦ Men provided
the family income while women focused on household and child care.
‣ The use of domestic servants in many middle-class homes, made possible by an abundant supply of cheap labor, reduced the amount of time middle-class women had to spend on household work.
‣ At the same time, by having fewer children, mothers could devote more time to child care and domestic leisure.
• The middle-class family fostered an ideal of togetherness through holiday traditions.
• Women in working-class
families were more accustomed to hard work.
◦ Daughters were expected to work until they married; even after marriage, they often did piecework at home to help support the family.
◦ For the children of the working classes, childhood was over by the age of nine or ten when they became apprentices or were employed in odd jobs.
• Between 1890 and 1914, however, family patterns among the working class began to change.
◦ High-paying jobs in heavy industry and improvements in the
standard of living made it possible for working-class families to depend on the income of husbands and the wages of grown children.
◦ By the early 2000s, some working-class mothers could afford to stay at home, following the pattern of middle-class women.
‣ At the same time, working-class families also aspired to buy new consumer products, such as sewing machines, clocks, bicycles, and cast-iron stoves.
THE MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS
• In the 1830s, a number of women in the
United States and Europe, who worked together in several reform movements, argued for the right of women to divorce and own property.
◦ They didn't get the right to own property until 1870 in Britain, 1900 in Germany, and 1907 in France.
• Divorce and property rights were only a beginning for the women's movement, however.
◦ Some middle- and upper- middle-class women gained access to higher education, while others sought entry into occupations dominated by men.
‣ Teaching was the
1st to become dominated by women
‣ As medical training was largely closed to women, they sought alternatives through the development of nursing.
• Nursing pioneers included the British nurse Florence Nightingale, whose efforts during the Crimean War, along with those of Clara Barton in the American Civil War, transformed nursing into a profession of trained, middle-class ''women in white.''
• By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women's rights had entered the political arena with
the call for equal political rights.
◦ Many feminists believed that the right to vote was the key to all other reforms to improve the position of women. Suffragists had one basic aim: the right of women to full citizenship in the nation-state.
‣ Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903, which enrolled mostly middle and upper-class women.
‣ The members of Pankhurst's organization realized the value of the media
and used unusual publicity stunts to call attention to their demands and were derisively labeled ''suffragettes'' by male politicians.
• Before World War I, the demands for women's rights were being heard throughout Europe and the United States, although only in Norway and some American states did women actually receive the right to vote before 1914.
◦ It would take the dramatic upheaval of World War I before male-dominated governments capitulated on this basic issue.
• In many
countries, women supported peace movements.
◦ Bertha von Suttner became head of the Austrian Peace Society and protested against the growing arms race of the 1890s.
◦ She was but one example of the ''new women'' who were becoming more prominent at the turn of the century. These women rejected traditional feminine roles and sought new freedom outside the house hold and roles other than those of wife and mother.
◦ Lower-class women also took up the cause of peace.
‣ A group of
women workers marched in Vienna in 1911 and demanded an end to armaments, to the means of murder, and we want these millions to be spent on the needs of the people.