Discuss one continuity or difference you see in women’s lives in the Revolutionary Era versus the Colonial Era. Specify which women/group of women you are dis

Early 19th Century Ideals of Womanhood & Women’s

Activities HIST 474 Spring ‘24

I. Women & Religion during the Early Republic

A. Historical Background: Colonial Developments 1. 1st Great Awakening B. Second Great Awakening C. Sunday School Movement 1. From home to church to community supporting the spread of the ‘gospel’

a. Sunday Schools “Sabbath Schools” “Female Union for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools”

b. Religious tracts 2. New roles and skills as leaders & organizers as an outgrowth of faith and

evolving ideals of womanhood

II. Republican Motherhood and Representative Government

A. Women’s Education and Raising Citizens B. Passing of the Revolutionary Generation C. Fertility Transition and Family Limitation

Middle class women “applied egalitarian ideas and a virtuous, prudent sensibility to their bodies and to their traditional images of self.”

(Less womb and more head and heart–drawing from revolutionary rhetoric of reason”

Hartford Female Seminary Catharine Beecher’s School, founded 1823

III. The Market & Early Industrial Revolution

A. The location of work “Work Left Home” B. Differentiation of Work

1. “Productive” Labor 2. “Reproductive” Labor

C. Market Development

1. Agriculture 2. Transportation (Eerie Canal, right) 3. Urbanization

IV “The Cult of True Womanhood” and the Ideal of “Separate Spheres”

HOW INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT ARE THE DUTIES DEVOLVED ON FEMALES AS WIVES…THE COUNSELOR AND FRIEND OF THE HUSBAND; WHO MAKES IT HER DAILY STUDY TO LIGHTEN HIS CARES, TO SOOTHE HIS SORROWS, AND TO AUGMENT HIS JOYS; WHO, LIKE A GUARDIAN ANGEL, WATCHES OVER HIS INTERESTS, WARNS HIM AGAINST DANGERS…CONSTANTLY ENDEAVORS TO RENDER HIM MORE VIRTUOUS, MORE USEFUL,MORE HONOURABLE, AND MORE HAPPY.

III. Female Moral Reform

A. Reponse to social and cultural change B. Extension of Ideology and Experience C. Reform Societies

A. Men

B. Women

Masthead of NY Reform Association publication showing a multi-story home (likely a ‘refuge’ or shelter and housing for ‘fallen’ women; not the combination of charity and judgment based on the ideals of piety and virtue.)

Bibliography

Klepp, Susan E. “Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid- Atlantic Region, 1760-1820.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (1998): 910–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567216.

Miller, Page Putnam. “Women in the Vanguard of the Sunday School Movement.” Journal of Presbyterian History (1962-1985) 58, no. 4 (1980): 311–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23328107.

Ryan, Mary P. “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America.” Feminist Studies 5, no. 1 (1979): 66–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177551.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711179.