White Women : Shapeshifters Of America Essay

Narratives about captivity have often intrigued readers in Western culture. Mary Rowlandson and Olaudah Equiano’s stories helped pave the way for stereotypes within both European and white culture; teaching Europeans to see Native Americans as cruel and allowing whites to see the evil in the American slave market. In both “A Narrative of the Captivity” and “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” Mary Rowlandson and Olaudah Equiano share their individual stories of being kidnapped and enslaved. Though the two narrators share similarities in their personal accounts of being held captive, either individual’s reaction sheds light on the true purpose of both Rowlandson and Equiano’s writing.

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.

After studying women and gender history in early America for the past semester, my views about American history have changed tremendously. Having very little prior experience with history, I had many assumptions and preconceived notions from high school history classes. Women were never even mentioned in my previous learning about U.S. history, so I assumed they took on unimportant roles and had little, if any, impact on shaping our country’s history. However, after this semester of delving deeply into the women of early America, I could not have been more incorrect. Although they were not typically in the public realm, we cannot fully understand history without studying women. The following readings uncovered the roles of women in the private sphere and were crucial to my new understanding of the importance of women in American history by bringing women to the forefront.

She includes illustrations and photos depicting various political cartoons, petitions, artifacts, and engravings between pages 80 and 81. In her preface she first introduces the limitation of having white, middle-class women reformers. Chapter one, The Roots of Reform, introduces us to how women, empowered by the church first start exploring various charitable forms of outreach, the effect of the Second Great Awakening, and the first leading women; such as Juliana Tappen and Maria Weston Chapman. Chapter two, Charity and the Relations of Class, explores the middle -and upper-class women's need to perform charity. (Again tying in religion) The poor merely existing as a way for the wealthy to earn their way into heaven. We see the invention of the poor house, and how to define who was the "worthy poor." We see the invention of the Asylum as well as early talks of abolitionism. Chapter three, "Drinks, Sex, Crime, and Insanity", introduces the first major movement of the antebellum era, temperance, and the role alcohol played in the antebellum life. We see the emergence of Susan B. Anthony. This is the chapter where we begin to see more radical action from women, and some earlier reformers step away because they are scared of how far the movements are going. These movements are beginning to keep the women out of the kitchen just a little too long. Women begin to have more say, and do more than just simply make speeches and hand out pamphlets. Chapter four, Antislavery, is where we see the biggest divides in the reform movement. Women were divided on issues such as colonization, ending slavery, or should they even be involved at all. Many women wanted to be abolitionists, but did not want to associate with black people. Chapter five: Women's Rights, explores the earliest movements in the women's right cause. We see the effects of the Seneca

In the late nineteenth century, the New Woman time period emerged after World War I. Women began to cast away the domestic stereotypes and they became “independent [women] who [sought] achievement and self-fulfillment beyond the realm of marriage and family” (Miller 1). Straying away from the typical image of women staying and maintaining the home, women started attending universities, receiving professional jobs, and becoming involved in politics (1). The transition of women from the domestic sphere to the public sphere is a notion Zora Neale Hurston uses in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s use of dominant characters in society reveals her theme that experiences and relationships are the roots of finding independence and identity despite the obscurity caused by sexism.

The book offer historical analysis of women’s roles after the America revolution. The story sheds light on an enthralling and unknown side of the struggle for freedom in America

Elizabeth Cady Stanton became conversant with the Women’s rights activists for the first time for the Anti-Slavery convention held in London (Keene, 297). “From a youthful age, Elizabeth was distinctly mindful of the sexual orientation based force lopsided characteristics that were set up in her days” (Dorothy).

White explores the master’s sexual exploitation of their female slaves, and proves this method of oppression to be the defining factor of what sets the female slaves apart from their male counterparts. Citing former slaves White writes, “Christopher Nichols, an escaped slave living in Canada, remembered how his master laid a woman on a bench, threw her clothes over her head, and whipped her. The whipping of a thirteen-year-old Georgia slave girl also had sexual overtones. The girl was put on all fours ‘sometimes her head down, and sometimes up’ and beaten until froth ran from her mouth (33).” The girl’s forced bodily position as well as her total helplessness to stop her master’s torture blatantly reveals the forced sexual trauma many African females endured.

“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).

Harriet Jacobs, a black woman who escapes slavery, illustrates in her biography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) that death is preferable to life as a slave due to the unbearable degradation of being regarded as property, the inevitable destruction of slave children’s innocence, and the emotional and physical pain inflicted by slave masters. Through numerous rhetorical strategies such as allusion, comparison, tone, irony, and paradoxical expression, she recounts her personal tragedies with brutal honesty. Jacobs’s purpose is to combat the deceptive positive portrayals of slavery spread by southern slave holders through revealing the true magnitude of its horrors. Her intended audience is uninvolved northerners, especially women, and she develops a personal and emotionally charged relationship with them.

Overall, the speaker of “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” reminds us that the system of slavery destroys lives. We see this notion play out in the narrative as the speaker talks of a female slave at Plymouth Rock. Here, we bear witness to her lack of respect for life that not only flaws her judgments as a mother, but perpetuates a sense of violence or

The notion of slavery, as unpleasant as it is, must nonetheless be examined to understand the hardships that were caused in the lives of enslaved African-Americans. Without a doubt, conditions that the slaves lived under could be easily described as intolerable and inhumane. As painful as the slave's treatment by the masters was, it proved to be more unbearable for the women who were enslaved. Why did the women suffer a grimmer fate as slaves? The answer lies in the readings, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative which both imply that sexual abuse, jealous mistresses', and loss of children caused the female slaves to endure a more dreadful and hard life in captivity.

For this essay, I have chosen to write about Feminism. The article chosen is by Susan M. Cruea entitled, “Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement”. Her purpose throughout her article is to show the reader how women were mistreated my many men in the 1800s and her frustration is on display for the readers to see. For my argument, I will help support Cruea’s claims about womanhood with secondary sources by Lisa Tetrault entitled, “The Incorporation of American Feminism: Suffragists and the Postbellum Lyceum”, and by Michael S. Kimmel entitled, “Men’s Responses to Feminism at the Turn of the Century”. In this essay, I will display a series of points, from the sources given, to help support the notion that

Over the last thirty decades, women have come secondary to the male population. American women have since sought to challenge and change this standard. We are tired of the oppression and mistreatment! Slowly but surely, women have strived to take a stand against prejudice and embrace the values of American freedom and equality. Even though women’s rights have progressed, we have yet to be treated as equal to the American male, especially in literature.

In nineteenth century America, there were strict gender roles and expectations that men and women were expected to conform to. Men were seen as dominant to women; while men were able to work and drink, women were expected to get married, follow orders from her husband, and live a life of limited freedom and personal choice. We see examples of these roles throughout Lillie Devereux Blake’s novel, Fettered for Life, as we encounter different women in the text that are oppressed through physical abuse and lack of agency. However, Frank Heywood, the woman, manages to outsmart these rules by cross-dressing to be a man. She’s the only female in the novel to break free of the slavery of womanhood, and in the process uses her newfound freedom to act as a voice for the oppressed female population. Not only does Frank aid women and their oppression, but she also proves that women can do the work of a man, but are denied opportunities because of their sex. Blake uses Frank’s character to demonstrate the ways in which gender roles are socially constructed, and prove that it’s possible to break through the implemented social rules.