Throughout the course of American history, women have been forced to manipulate their own societal roles in order to cling to autonomy, due to the dominance of white Anglo-Saxon males in the economic, political, and social sectors. The capitalistic achievements of Hetty Green, a late 19th century entrepreneur named “The World’s Richest Woman,” or more appropriately, “The Witch of Wall Street,” exemplified such a notion (Wallach). Green’s legacy as a stringent and savvy investor, boasting a net worth of 200 million dollars at her death that belittled the 80 million dollar estate of J.P. Morgan (Columbia), has been expunged from historical records, instead leaving behind an monotonous transcript of male exceptionalism and supposed “industrial statesmen[ship]” during the Gilded Age (“Robber Barons”).Women’s perceived identities throughout time have been vastly malleable, with opponents of gender equality resorting to the belittlement of females intellect in order to regain power; women have been forced to utilize these generalizations in order to advance themselves, displayed specifically through the philosophy of “republican motherhood”,” the job opportunities available during the Revolutionary War, and the rise of feminine conservatism, ultimately revealing the hidden path to power, which, cladden with thorns and underbrush, has dictated the outcome of Hetty Green’s legacy and continues to warp the identities of females into the twenty first century.
Genesis states that God
As the United States was continuing recovering from the Civil War and embracing the expansion of the West, industrialization, immigration and the growth of cities, women’s roles in America were changing by the transformation of this new society. During the period of 1865-1912, women found themselves challenging to break the political structure, power holders, cultural practices and beliefs in their “male” dominated world.
Everyone can agree that sexism had its talons deep in the flesh of the American mindset during the 1800's and although this is an obvious fact, few people understand just how hostile an environment it was for a woman. Among those few, were the women living in this malicious medium. From corsets to kitchens, housekeeping to health, life was not easy for even the most well-to-do woman. Although not all women decried their situation, a strong-minded minority dropped their oven mits, put their fists in the air, and called out for a change. Equal opportunity, equal right to vote, equal pay, and all around equality is what they demanded. But feminism was not only found at suffrage rallys or Grange meetings, it made its way in to every medium,
Anne-Marie Slaughter constructed the article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” including personal and statistical measures to prove that, though women have come far, they are not to the standard of men. She begins the article informing us of her job as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department in Washington D.C. Admittingly, with such a high-profile job and finding herself struggling to balance her 14-year-old son, she made the decision to quit her job after two years. Accordingly, Slaughter pondered her years working in a high power workplace, realizing
“Look at us! We’re just like everyone else. We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion; this idea that you have to settle down and resign from life.” (April Wheeler, Revolutionary Road). It has become a society norm that women are meant to serve housewives; to cook, clean, garden, and nurture children, even though they are much more capable of other things. The role of women is greatly overseen, as they are not perceived to be of their full potential, rather than as societies idealistic expectation. This is because men and those who are wealthy are unable to look past gender and accept women as of equal significance.
Women’s history in the United States has always been represented as a struggle for rights. Wealth and status were tied to either their fathers or husbands. In the early 1900s, women were afforded the traditional roles of society. The majority of women worked in the home. If they were of the 18% young or poor women, they also worked in factories as laborers, manufacturing items for the booming industrial revolution (U.S. Department of Labor, 1980). During this time period the workplace was not in compliance with current safety standards. There was no minimum wage yet, work conditions were horrible and they worked long hours, “In 1900, the average workweek in manufacturing was 53 hours,” (Fisk, 2003). Women took “pink
The economic “market revolution” and the religious “Second Great Awakening” shaped American society after 1815. Both of these developments affected women significantly, and contributed to their changing status both inside and outside the home. Throughout time, women’s roles and opportunities in the family, workplace, and society have greatly evolved.
The ideals by the Republicans which came into the limelight after the Revolutionary War would set into motion a revolution not just in the United States but in many countries across the world. Linda Kerber’s ‘Women of the Republic’ is a demonstration of the paradigm shift in relation to the US social and political structures after the American Revolution. Kerber observes that not only did the war provide more opportunities to women but also set a platform for women to chart the way forward politically. This important role is what came later to be known as the Republican Motherhood. The concept of Republican Motherhood demonstrates the important role that woken played politically in addition to attending to their traditional roles of domestic responsibility.
The role of women in American history has evolved a great deal over the past few centuries. In less than a hundred years, the role of women has moved from housewife to highly paid corporate executive to political leader. As events in history have shaped the present world, one can find hidden in such moments, pivotal points that catapult destiny into an unforeseen direction. This paper will examine one such pivotal moment, fashioned from the fictitious character known as ‘Rosie the Riveter’ who represented the powerful working class women during World War II and how her personification has helped shape the future lives of women.
“Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically. Why goddamnit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them-all human motives?” (Ellison 418).
In the early 1800’s, when the new nation was beginning to form, the young nation’s founding fathers began to shape a new country to free the oppressed Europeans who found a taste of freedom. However that freedom only went so far, for our founding fathers and authors of the U.S Constitution, managed to create a gender biased society and only managed to exclude an entire gender from the new hope they created. By this time, the development in the young country and the expansion of the American economy had begun. This meant that there were jobs available for people who wanted to earn a living to feed their families. Unfortunately, due to the law and what it represented, only Caucasian men could work outside of their homes to bring back some income to feed their families. Unfortunately for the next 200 years, several of the nation’s mothers, sisters and wives were engaged in a battle against society and social norms, as they begun to turn against the status quo, by demanding equal rights, such as the right to vote. Their eyes opened to the oppression around them and they sought change. However they faced obstacles such as social rejection. They were considered too frail and less intelligent to handle jobs and involvement in the government, which were considered ‘a man’s work’. Several influential women such as Alice Paul thought differently and made it their goal to encourage society to rethink about the role of a woman.
''For nearly 30 years, she had taunted conservative Americans with her outspoken attacks on government, big business and war,'' Miss Wexler writes. '' On her freewheeling coast-to-coast lecture tours she defended everything from free speech to free love, from the rights of striking workers to the rights of homosexuals. Her name became a household word, synonymous with everything subversive and demonic, but also symbolic of the 'new woman' and of the radical labor movement that blossomed in the years before World War I. To the public she was America's arch revolutionary, both frightening and fascinating. She flaunted her lovers, talked back to the police, smoked in public and marched off to prison carrying James Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist' under her
She thrived in an industry which was predominantly male-operated, challenging the limits of what a women could pursue. With her knowledge of the family business, Frances was considered “as good a judge of credits as any banker in the country.” (74) Frances Harling proved herself to be just as capable as any male banker, much admired for her capabilities by both old and new generations of the time. Among the women of Black Hawk, Mrs. Gardener also challenges gender norms by running a business. She runs a hotel, with primarily male visitors, with the help of her husband. Although it was common at this time for men to be in charge of their family’s business, Mrs. Gardener took this position in her family’s dynamic. It was in fact “Mrs. Gardener who ran the business and looked after everything. [...] [Her husband] was a popular fellow, but no manager.” (89) Although men were usually the breadwinners of their families during this time period, Mrs. Gardener showed that women could be breadwinners as well. Her skills and ambition provided her with a successful business opportunity that she took pride in. Additionally, her husband appeared grateful for her skills as Mr. Gardener realized “that without [Mrs. Gardener] he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man’s hotel.” (93) Mrs.
Sojourner Truth’s words in her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” served as an anthem for women everywhere during her time. Truth struggled with not only racial injustice but also gender inequality that made her less than a person, and second to men in society. In her speech, she warned men of “the upside down” world against the power of women where “together, [women] ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!” Today, America proudly stands thinking that Truth’s uneasiness of gender inequality was put to rest. Oppression for women, however, continues to exist American literature has successfully captured and exposed shifts in attitude towards women and their roles throughout American history.
“All the Chilling Parallels Between 'The Handmaid's Tale' and Life for Women in Trump's America” explores the idea that women’s roles in society are being limited in a way that provides a current analytical perspective of women’s oppression by the men involved in the government in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Women’s economic independence being controlled by the government, which consists of predominantly males, is strikingly similar to the way men regulate women’s economic autonomy in The Handmaid’s Tale. In today’s society, discrimination against women involved in the workforce is obvious considering “the median income of women working full-time, year-round in the U.S. was just 79 percent of what men earned” and the wage gap is
It doesn’t look like the ‘bull-pen’ mentality is about to change any time soon but that does not mean women should take the abuse lightly. Remember Muriel Siebert, widely known as the ‘first lady of Wall Street’? Siebert was the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and was the first woman to head one of the exchange’s member firms, and she barrelled through this male-dominated domain with grit and grace.