How Women Changed Their World for Themselves
Mindy Milburn
Professor Courtney Taylor
June 5, 2018
AMH2010
How Women Changed Their World for Themselves
As time has progressed, the gender role of women has expanded significantly redefining the way mainstream modern America views the American woman. Since the colonial era women have created more opportunities for themselves through small-scale changes in family dynamics; large-scale, effective suffrage movements that established new laws; and effects in the employment and career realm. Women have made progressive steps from no more than possessions to independent, working members of modern American society. Although these changes have taken hundreds of years, (and no doubt were challenging and painful) women have courageously continued to redefine gender roles within an American society that hasn’t always been amenable to a woman’s presence in traditional male roles.
Perhaps it is worth noting before beginning to address specific changes with respect to colonial era and modern gender roles that this topic is extremely complicated and probably cannot be lumped neatly into a “male gender role” and a “female gender role”. Boydston (2008) calls for examining gender role differences not as a binary function in a historical analysis or a shallow representation of a two genders struggling for power but for a shift in our concept of “gender role”. This paper will address gender roles with specificity to the colonial era versus the modern era on a continuum of time with many variables involved and not as a binary male versus female function. In part, because there are racial, sexual, and demographic variables that influence family, legal, and occupational roles. It seemed all encompassing to include a wider viewpoint than the traditional two gender roles.
A small-scale change that occurred in family dynamics that caused a large-scale change in other areas regarding women’s gender roles are a shifting of family dynamics. Fathers were no longer able to control their daughters from moving out of the family home because they were married to a man of their choosing. Women started to work outside of the home with careers of their own and realized that they did not need the financial support of a husband to live independently (Schultz 1992).
These three steps happened in virtually rapid succession over a hundred year span (Grossberg 1985). The marriage of a daughter went from arranged and predictable, with a European-like flavor, to modern day super-focused on the survival of the couple’s relationship along with their financial status. This progressive liberty in choice of marriage partner mirrored the spirit of the times and as well as major ages in American history, such as the Colonial era, Industrial Age, and the Gilded Age.
Frequently, major and minor issues confronted nineteenth century family law; some of these issues plaguing the nineteenth century family were expansion of the legal freedom to marry, whether or not to make matrimony a republican (family) right, determining who was ‘fit’ to wed, reforming illegitimacy and establishing a bastardy law, determining custody rights, and making legal decisions on abortions and contraceptions (Grossberg 1985). Many of these issues would become hugely important later on in public legislation in the 1970s, especially Roe v. Wade’s appearance in the U.S. Supreme Court.
As you can see, issues that arose out of the development of the republican concept of family were complicated and not able to be easily answered by the rudimentary court system and lack of bulk of case law that we have today to rely on. As a result, judges saw fit to create case law as they saw litigants, much as they do today, but with much more dire consequences, as in being the first to try out new methods of social control of persons through legal actions, i.e. matrimonial and even bastardy proceedings and standards. From the colonial era forward to the Industrial Age, the U.S. legal system was just touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of case law. Due to a lack of general knowledge about the workings of disease, the human mind, and other knowledge that we take for granted on a daily basis, there was a gap in the ability to make confident rulings on cases. It makes going through old case law interesting to say the least.
Another major area where the gender role of women has changed concerns public legislation. Brown (2012) states that colonial Virginia even went as far as to regulate the labor and sexuality of English servants. Womens’ rights really started to advance when the women of our nation, such as, Susan B. Anthony and Ida Wells, fought for women’s voting rights. This was a far cry from colonial Virginia’s tight legal distinction between English and African women. Because of pioneers like them, women were able to do more on their own. The attitude of women as mere property changed. The dependency of women has gone from natural and perpetual to voluntary and unnecessary (Norton 2011).
As a result of the women’s suffrage movement, women gained the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920 (History.com 2009). This catalyzed a major social reaction whereby many women’s victories followed including the emergence of competitive athletic for women in the United States (Wettan 1977). Many more laws were passed that touched on all areas on life for women. These laws are noted below.
Some new laws that were passed after the 19th Amendment was ratified included the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 (Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party); the Commission on the Status of Women (Eleanor Roosevelt) established by John F. Kennedy in 1961 provided for fair hiring practices, paid maternity leave, and affordable child care; the Equal Pay Act (1963); Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not to mention when the Supreme Court legalized the use of contraceptives by married couples in 1965 when it heard Griswold v. Connecticut’s case.
Civil rights protections (1967) were extended to women; Congress passed the Title IX of the Education Amendments (1972); the Supreme Court established Abortion Right in 1973; women-only branches of the U.S. Military were eliminated in 1973; employment discrimination against pregnant women was banned in 1978; and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into Law in 2009 which expanded workers’ right to sue for pay discrimination (AnnennbergClassroom.Org n.d.)
Lastly, as new laws were created and passed, and times were changing, more jobs opened up in traditional male-dominated professions as it became acceptable for women to work in those career fields (Prewitt 1973). Brown (2012) even describes that racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia affected gender roles and what was considered masculinity in working culture as slavery was legally hereditary through the mother. So not only did a cultural shift take place in male-dominated roles, but women of African descent took on the burden of house and fieldwork and additional stigma from lower-class English women (Brown 2012). As time passed, women’s ‘gender’ roles actually began grouping by racial categories.
In modern America, gender roles are not nearly as polarized as they once were in colonial times where the schools and churches played significant supporting roles in the daily community life of individuals. Daily community lives are also not as male-biased with church and state the domineering facets of life.
As a modern American society, we have so many more spheres of social and occupational influence in our daily lives. We tend to not restrict ourselves as heavily as the colonials did, and our society has moved away from the principles upon which colonials built their societies and their lives, namely God and the right to practice their religion. We openly acknowledge taboo issues daily that regard women. In colonial times, this could have included a plethora of dressing, manner of speaking, acting, or behavioral issues that are common in today’s American society.
It is obvious that a woman’s role has defiantly changed the face of America since colonial times. Specific areas of major change include family dynamics, establishment of new laws, and occupational change. Women have demonstrated their sense of independence, fearlessness, and resilience in creating a future where women’s roles are more respected and balanced. This has not come without a huge price, in terms of challenge, pain, suffering, adversity, and even death, and will continue to present the same wages unfortunately. Since colonial times, women continue to stand on the shoulders of giants to foresee a future of equality and liberty from stereotypical gender roles.
As we charge forward, more variables will be added to the gender role and time continuum, like sexuality, demographics, political affiliation, and social affiliation. This will confound our ability to distinctively draw a line in the sand between the classic “male” and “female” gender role system which characterized the colonials’ existence. Anthropological and historical analyses is never as simple as the black-and-white type thinking we’d like to make it out to be.
Citations Page:
Annenberg Classroom. “Women's Rights Timeline.” Annenberg Classroom, Annenbergclassroom.org, n.d., www.annenbergclassroom.org/files/documents/timelines/womensrightstimeline.pdf.
Boydston, Jeanne. “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis.” Gender & History, vol. 20, no. 3, 17 Oct. 2008, pp. 558–583., doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2008.00537.x.
Brown, M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Project MUSE
Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in the Nineteenth-Century America. University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1987.
Prewitt, Lena B. “The Employment Rights of the Female.” Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 40, no. 5, 15 Dec. 1973. EBSCO.
Schultz, Martin. “Occupational Pursuits of Free American Women: An Analysis of Newspaper Ads, 1800?1849.” Sociological Forum, vol. 7, no. 4, 1992, pp. 587–607., doi:10.1007/bf01112317.
Staff. “Women's Suffrage.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2009, www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage.
Wettan, Richard. “Charlotte Epstein: Women's Emancipation and the Emergence of Competitive Athletics for Women in the United States.” Proceedings, Second International Seminar on Physical Education and Sport in Jewish History and Culture, 1977, Edited by Uriel Simri.