| I. Women, Men, and the Solitude of Self |
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A. |
Changes in Family Life |
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|
1. |
The Victorian ideal of domesticity called for masculine restraint and female
moral influence. But industrialization was transforming domesticity, as Americans
confronted modern conditions of life. More and more, women sought to exert
their influence outside the family, through involvement in reform movements and
civic life. |
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2. |
Americans were also wrestling with modernity:
in an increasingly market-driven society, they championed the freedom of each
individual to choose his or her path. They expressed anxiety and distress over
attendant risks and upheavals. As industrialization transformed society,
Americans reshaped (without necessarily discarding) their traditional
attachments and beliefs. |
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3. |
The average family—especially among the middle class—continued
to get smaller in the post-Civil War decades. A long decline in the birth rate,
which began in the late eighteenth century, continued in this era. In 1800, white
women who survived to menopause had borne an average of seven children; by
1900, the average was 3.6. |
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4. |
Several factors limited childbearing. Americans married
at older ages, and many mothers tried—as they had for decades—to space
pregnancies more widely by nursing young children for several years, which
suppressed fertility. By the late nineteenth century, couples also used a range
of other contraceptive methods, such as condoms and diaphragms, though
they rarely wrote about using them. |
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5. |
In 1873, Anthony Comstock, the crusading secretary of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, secured a federal law that banned obscene materials from
the U.S. mail. The law prohibited circulation of almost any information about
sex and birth control. |
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6. |
As they grew to adulthood, rural young people faced new dilemmas and choices.
Traditionally, daughters had provided essential labor for spinning and weaving
cloth, but industrialization had removed those tasks from the household to the
factory. |
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7. |
Finding themselves without a useful role in the household, many farm daughters
sought paid employment. In an age of declining rural prosperity, many sons also
left the farm and—like immigrants arriving from other countries—often set aside
part of their pay to help the folks at home. |
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B. |
The Rise of High School |
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1. |
For young people who hoped to secure respectable and lucrative jobs, the
watchword was education. A high school education
was particularly valuable for boys from affluent families who hoped to enter to
professional or managerial work. Daughters attended in
even larger numbers than their brothers. |
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2. |
By 1900, seventy-one out of every one hundred Americans between the ages of five
and eighteen attended school. That figure rose even further in the early twentieth
century, as public officials adopted and enforced laws requiring school
attendance. |
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3. |
Most high schools were co-educational. The curriculum
included literature and composition, history and geography, biology and
mathematics, and a mix of ancient and modern languages. Boys and girls engaged
in friendly—and sometimes not-so-friendly—rivalry when girls captured an
outsize share of academic prizes. |
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C. |
College Men and Women |
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1. |
Some high school graduates sought
further degrees, as the higher education system expanded rapidly. Through most
of the nineteenth century, the percentage of Americans who attended college had
hovered around 2 percent. Driven partly by the expansion of public
universities, that percentage began to rise steadily in the 1880s, reaching 8
percent by 1920. |
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2. |
The curriculum at private colleges
also changed. Under dynamic president Charles Eliot, between 1869 and 1909,
Harvard College pioneered the use of liberal arts. |
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3. |
In the South, one of the most famous
educational projects was Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded in
1881. Washington, born in slavery, not only taught but also exemplified the
goal of self-help. |
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4. |
Washington became the most prominent black leader of his
generation. His autobiography, Up from
Slavery, became an immediate bestseller in 1901. Washington’s style of
leadership, based on avoiding confrontation with whites and cultivating
patronage and private influence, was well suited to the difficult era after
Reconstruction. |
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5. |
In the Northeast and South, women most
often attended single-sex institutions or teacher-training colleges where the
student body was overwhelmingly female. |
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6. |
For female students from affluent families, private colleges offered an education equivalent to men’s. Vassar College started the trend when it opened in 1861; Smith, Wellesley, and others soon followed. |
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7. |
Co-education was more prevalent in the Midwest and West,
where state universities opened their doors to female students after the Civil
War. Women were also admitted to most of the southern African American colleges
founded during Reconstruction. |
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D. |
Masculinity and the Rise of Sports. |
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1. |
Gender
expectations also changed for middle-class men. Traditionally, the mark of a
successful American man was his economic independence: he was his own boss. But
by the late nineteenth century, more and more men worked in salaried positions
or for wages. Increasing numbers also did “brainwork” in an office, rather than
using their muscles outdoors. Anxieties arose that the American male was
becoming, as one magazine editor warned, “weak, effeminate, decaying.” One answer was athletics. |
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2. |
Before the Civil War, there were no distinctively American
games except for Native American lacrosse. The most popular team sport was
cricket. Over the next six decades, however, sports became a fundamental part
of American manhood—and a big business. |
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3. |
One of the first promoters of physical fitness was the
Young Men’s Christian Association. Adapted from Britain and introduced to
Boston in 1851, the YMCA combined vigorous activities for young men with
an evangelizing appeal. |
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4. |
In cities and towns across America, the YMCA built gymnasiums and athletic
facilities for men, and later women through the YWCA. |
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5. |
In the post-Civil War years, no other sport in America was as successful as
baseball. Earlier in the century, Americans had played various stick and ball
games; the version called baseball was first played in New York around 1842. |
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6. |
Rules continued to develop in the 1840s and 1850s, and baseball’s popularity spread
in military camps during the Civil War. |
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7. |
Big-time professional baseball arose after the war, with
the launching of the National League in 1876. |
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8. |
American men not
only rooted for professional baseball teams, but they also got out on the
diamond to play. Until the 1870s, most amateur players were clerks and
white-collar workers who had leisure and the income to pay for uniforms. |
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9. |
Shut out of white leagues, black players and fans turned
instead to segregated professional teams. These had emerged as early as
Reconstruction, showcasing both athletic talent and race pride. |
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10. |
The most
controversial sport was college football, which began at elite Ivy League
schools during the 1880s. |
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11. |
Like baseball and the YMCA, football soon attracted
business sponsorship. |
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12. |
The first professional teams emerged around the turn
of the century in western Pennsylvania’s steel towns. Executives of Carnegie
Steel organized teams in Homestead and Braddock, and the first league appeared
during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. |
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E. |
The Great Outdoors |
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|
1. |
As the rise of sports suggests,
Americans began to look back on Victorian life as stuffy and claustrophobic,
and they revolted by heading outdoors. |
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2. |
A craze for bicycling swept the
country; in 1890, at the height of the mania, U.S. manufacturers sold an
astonishing 10 million bikes. |
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3. |
Those with
leisure time used the rail networks to get outdoors and closer to nature. For
people of modest means, this most often meant Sunday afternoon by the lake. |
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4. |
As Americans went searching for such renewal, national and state governments
set aside more public lands for preservation and recreation. The United States
substantially expanded its park system, and during Theodore Roosevelt’s
presidency, extended the reach of national forests, now overseen by a U.S.
Forest Service. |
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5. |
By 1916, President Woodrow Wilson provided consistent administrative oversight
of the national parks, signing an act creating the National Park Service. A
year later, the system numbered thirteen parks—including Maine’s Acadia, the
first that lay east of the Mississippi River. |
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6. |
Further preservation was carried out after 1906 through the Lacey Act, which
allowed the U.S. president, without congressional approval, to set aside “objects
of historic and scientific interest” as national monuments. |
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7. |
Environmentalists worked not only to preserve land but also to protect
wildlife. |
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8. |
Many states also passed game laws to protect wildlife and regulate hunting and
fishing, redefining these as recreational, rather than subsistence activities. |
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9. |
In all parts of the country, new game laws triggered controversy over the uses
of wildlife. In the South, conservationists got many game laws passed in the
early twentieth century, but not until the late 1910s and 1920s did judges and
juries begin taking them seriously. |
| II. Women in the Public Sphere |
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A. |
Negotiating Public Space |
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1. |
Gradually, women of all classes and
backgrounds began to claim their right to public space. At the same time,
middle-class women sought in a different way to expand their place beyond the
household, by building reform movements and taking political action. |
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2. |
No one promoted commercial domesticity more successfully than P. T. Barnum, who
used the country’s expanding rail network to develop his famous traveling
circus. Barnum condemned earlier circus managers who had opened their tents to “the
rowdy element.” |
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3. |
Finding Americans eager for excursions, railroad companies made their cars
comfortable for respectable women and children. |
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4. |
The purveyors of modern consumer culture designed one popular site specifically
for women: the department store. In earlier generations, men had largely
controlled the family pocketbook; women’s task was to labor at home to produce
their families’ food and clothing. |
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5. |
By the late nineteenth century, especially in towns and cities, women became
the main family shoppers. Department stores attracted middle-class ladies by
offering tearooms, children’s play areas, and other
features to make women feel welcome. |
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B. |
From Female Moral Authority to Feminism |
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1. |
Changing expectations about the use of public space reflected a broader
expansion of women’s public activities, from patriotic work to many types of
reform. Starting in the 1880s, women’s clubs sprang up in cities and towns across
the United States. So many clubs had formed by 1890 that their leaders created
a nationwide General Federation of Women’s Clubs. |
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2. |
Such groups frequently made maternalist arguments: they justified their work based on what they saw as women’s special
talents. |
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3. |
One of the first places women sought to reform was the saloon. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded
in 1874, spread rapidly after 1879, when the charismatic Frances Willard became
its leader. |
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4. |
It became the leading organization advocating prohibition of liquor. The WCTU,
more than any other group of the late nineteenth century, launched women into
public reform. |
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5. |
The movement for women’s suffrage benefited from the influx of temperance
support. |
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6. |
Though it divided into two rival organizations during Reconstruction, the
movement reunited in 1890 in the National American Woman Suffrage Organization. |
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7. |
Soon afterward, suffragists won two victories in the West: Colorado in 1893 and
Idaho in 1896. |
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8. |
Like temperance work, patriotic activism became women’s special province in the
post-Civil War decades. The Daughters of the American Revolution, founded in
1890, devoted themselves to celebrating the memory of Revolutionary War heroes. |
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9. |
African American women did not sit idle in the face of discrimination and
exclusion by white women from philanthropic organizations. |
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10. |
By 1896, African American women created the National Association of Colored
Women, a network of local women’s clubs that focused their attention on community
support. |
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11. |
Black club women arranged for the care of orphans, founded homes for the
elderly, worked for temperance, and undertook public health campaigns. |
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12. |
The largest black women’s group arose within the National Baptist Church (NBC),
which by 1906 represented 2.4 million African American churchgoers. |
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13. |
Founded in 1900, the Women’s Convention of the NBC promoted and funded night
schools, health clinics, kindergartens, day care centers, and outreach programs
for men and women in prison. |
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14. |
Despite divisions of race and
ethnicity, many women recognized that they shared problems across lines of
economic class. |
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15. |
Some created new organizations to call attention
to the plight of poorly paid female workers and to agitate for better working
conditions. The most famous example was the National Trade Union League,
founded in New York in 1903. |
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16. |
Financed by wealthy supporters, the league
trained working-class leaders like Rose Schneiderman, who became a union
organizer among garment workers. Although often frustrated by the patronizing
ways of their well-to-do sponsors, such trade-union women identified their
cause with the broader struggle for women’s rights. |
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17. |
By the early twentieth
century, the most radical women took a public stance against women’s “separate
sphere.” |
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18. |
A famous site of sexual rebellion was New York’s Greenwich Village, where
radical intellectuals, including many gays and lesbians, created a vibrant
community by the 1910s. |
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19. |
Along with many other political activities, women in Greenwich Village founded
the Heterodoxy Club (1912), which was open to any woman who pledged not to be “orthodox
in her opinions.” |
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20. |
The club brought together intellectuals, journalists, and labor organizers who
supported voting rights, but had a more sweeping view of what was needed for
women’s liberation. Such women began to call themselves feminists and to
articulate broad goals for women’s personal development. |
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21. |
As women entered the public sphere, feminists argued, they should not just
fulfill Victorian expectations of self-sacrifice for others; they should work
on their own behalf. |
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C. |
Domesticity and Missions |
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|
1. |
While few American women shared fully in the ideas of
the Heterodoxy Club, hundreds of thousands engaged in more widely
acceptable forms of public activism, through their churches and religious
groups. |
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2. |
Some sponsored Christian missions in the American West, which eastern women
regarded as uncivilized and in need of uplift. The Women’s National Indian
Association, for example, funded missionary work on reservations, arguing that
women had a special duty to promote “civilized home life” among Indians. |
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3. |
In San Francisco, elite and middle-class white women built a rescue home for
Chinese women who had been sold into sexual slavery. The project was racially
condescending, and it also generated fierce opposition from white residents who
hated Chinese immigration. |
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4. |
Nowhere was the rhetoric of domesticity more powerful than in the movement for
overseas missions, which grew from a modest start in the pre-Civil War period
to a peak in the early twentieth century. |
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5. |
By 1915, American religious organizations sponsored over 9,000 overseas
missionaries; these workers in the field were supported at home by millions of
missionary society members, including over 3 million women. |
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6. |
Missionaries who worked to foster Christianity and domesticity often showed
considerable condescension toward their “poor heathen sisters.” |
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7. |
In many places, missionaries won converts, particularly by offering medical
care and promoting scientific progress and women’s education. Some missionaries
came to love and respect the people among whom they served. But others became
deeply frustrated. |
| III. Science and Faith |
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A. |
Darwinism and Its Critics |
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1. |
As the activities of missionaries showed, the United States continued to be a
deeply religious nation. However, the late nineteenth century brought
increasing public attention to another kind of belief: faith in science. |
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2. |
Researchers in many fields became converts to the doctrine of positivism: the belief that one could
rely only on hard facts and observable phenomena. In their enthusiasm, some
positivists rejected all reform efforts as romantic and sentimental: they
believed only a struggle for “survival of the fittest” could bring true
progress. |
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3. |
Evolution—the idea that species are not fixed, but ever-changing—was not a
simple idea that scientists all agreed upon in the late nineteenth century. The
term was widely associated with British naturalist Charles Darwin and his immensely
influential book, On the Origin of Species (1859), which proposed the
theory of natural selection. |
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4. |
In nature, Darwin argued, all creatures struggle to survive. Individual members
of a species are born with random genetic mutations that better fit them for
their particular environment. |
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5. |
Social
Darwinism, as Spencer’s
idea became known, found its American champion in William Graham Sumner, a
sociology professor at Yale. Competition, said Sumner, is a law of nature that “can
no more be done away with than gravitation.” |
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6. |
The most dubious
applications of evolutionary ideas were codified into new reproductive laws. Some
Americans embraced eugenics, an emerging “science” of human breeding.
Eugenicists argued that mentally deficient people should be prevented from
reproducing. |
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7. |
They proposed sterilizing those deemed “unfit,” especially residents of state
asylums for the insane or mentally disabled. |
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8. |
In the early twentieth century, almost half of U.S. states enacted eugenics
laws. By the time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, about 20,000 people had been
sterilized, with California and Virginia taking the lead. |
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B. |
Realism in the Arts |
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1. |
Inspired by the quest for facts, American authors rebelled against romanticism
and Victorian sentimentality and took up literary realism. |
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2. |
In the 1880s, William Dean Howells, one of the country’s most eminent editors and novelists, began to call for writers
“to picture the daily life in the most exact terms possible.” |
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3. |
By the 1890s, a younger generation of writers took up the call. Theodore
Dreiser dismissed “professional optimists” who limited their vision to “only
our better selves, and arrive at a happy ending.” |
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4. |
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893),
privately printed because no publisher would touch it, described the seduction,
abandonment, and death of a slum girl. |
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5. |
In Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a collection of stories based on his
family’s struggle to farm in Iowa and South Dakota, Hamlin Garland turned the
same unsparing eye on the hardships of rural life. |
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6. |
Some authors believed realism did not go far enough to overturn Victorian
morality. Jack London spent his teenage years as a factory worker, sailor, and
tramp. In stories such as “The Law of Life” (1901) and “To Build a Fire” (1908),
London dramatized what he saw as the harsh reality of an uncaring universe. |
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7. |
London and Crane helped create literary naturalism. They suggested that
human beings were not so much rational agents and shapers of their own
destinies, but blind victims of forces beyond their control—including their own
subconscious impulses and desires. |
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8. |
America’s most famous fiction writer, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens),
came to take an equally bleak view. Mourning the loss of his wife and two
daughters, Twain was also worn down by failed
investments and bankruptcy. |
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9. |
By the time Twain died in 1910, realist and naturalist
writers had laid the groundwork for literary modernism. Modernists rejected traditional canons of literary
taste. They tended to be religious skeptics or atheists. They questioned the
whole idea of progress and order, and they focused their attention on the
sub-conscious and the “primitive” mind. |
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10. |
In the visual arts, technological changes helped introduce a new aesthetic: by
1900, some photographers argued that the rise of photography made painting
obsolete. |
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11. |
Painters invented their own form of realism. In 1913, New York Realists
participated in one of the most controversial events in American art history,
the Armory Show. |
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12. |
Housed in an enormous National Guard building in New York, the Show introduced
America to modern art. Some painters whose work appeared at the Armory Show
were experimenting with such styles as cubism, characterized by abstract,
geometric forms. |
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13. |
A striking feature of both realism and modernism, as they developed, was that
many of their leading writers and artists were men. They denounced
nineteenth-century culture as hopelessly feminized and ridiculed popular
sentimental novels, especially those written for women. In making their work
strong and modern, these men also wanted to make it masculine. |
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C. |
Religion: Diversity and Innovation |
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|
1. |
By the turn of the century, new scientific, literary, and artistic ideas posed
a significant challenge to religious faith. Some Americans argued that science
would sweep away religion altogether. |
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|
2. |
Nonetheless, American religious practice remained vibrant. Protestants
developed creative new responses to the era of industrialization, while
millions of newcomers built their own institutions for worship and religious
education. |
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3. |
By 1920, almost 2 million children attended Catholic elementary schools instead
of public schools, and Catholic dioceses across the country operated over 1,500
high schools. |
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4. |
Like Protestants, some Catholics and Jews succumbed to secular pressures and
fell away from religious practice. |
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5. |
Those immigrant Catholics who
remained faithful to the church were anxious to preserve what they had known in
Europe, and they generally supported the church’s traditional wing. But they
also wanted church life to express their ethnic identities. |
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6. |
In the late nineteenth century, many native-born, prosperous American Jews
embraced Reform Judaism, abandoning many religious practices, from keeping a
kosher kitchen to conducting services in Hebrew. |
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7. |
But this was not the way of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe.
Generally much poorer and also eager to preserve their own traditions, they
founded Orthodox synagogues, often in vacant stores, and practiced Judaism as they
had at home. |
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8. |
Like Catholics and Jews, Protestants found their religious beliefs challenged
by modern ideas and ways of life. Some Protestant thinkers found ways to
reconcile Christianity with Darwin’s theory of evolution and other scientific
principles. |
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|
9. |
While some Protestants enlisted in foreign missions, others responded by
evangelizing among the unchurched and indifferent. They provided reading rooms,
day nurseries, vocational classes, and other services; they funded YMCAs and
YWCAs. |
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|
10. |
This movement to renew religious faith through dedication to public welfare and
social justice became known as the Social Gospel. |
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11. |
Its goals were epitomized by Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps (1896),
which told the story of a congregation whose members resolved to live by Christ’s
precepts for one year. |
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|
12. |
An example of the Social Gospel at work, the Salvation Army, which arrived from
Great Britain in 1879, spread a message of repentance among the urban poor,
offering assistance programs that ranged from soup kitchens to shelters for
former prostitutes. |
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|
13. |
Disturbed by what they saw as
rising secularism and abandonment of belief, some conservative ministers and
their allies held an annual series of Bible Conferences at Niagara Falls. The
resulting "Niagara Creed" reaffirmed the literal truth of the Bible
and the certainty of damnation for those not born again in Christ. These
Protestants called themselves fundamentalists,
based on their belief in the essential truth of the Bible and its central place
in Christian faith. |