Read American Experiment Online
Authors: James MacGregor Burns
119–20
[Laundry tasks]: Diary of Annie Thompson
(unpublished manuscript in private collection, Chicago), quoted at p. 117; Howard,
passim.
120
[Housecleaning]:
Claudia L. Bushman,
A Good Man’s Poor Wife
(University Press of New England, 1981), pp. 112–13.
[“Hattie’s ‘opera cape’ ”]:
Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in
ibid.,
p. 113.
[Journals read by women]:
Frank Luther Mott,
A History of American Magazines
(Harvard University Press, 1930–68), vol. 3, ch. 4; vol. 4, ch. 21 and supplement; collection. New York Historical Society.
121
[Domestic help]:
U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office,
Statistics of the Population of the United States of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880)
(Government Printing Office, 1883), p. 729; Theresa M. McBride,
The Domestic Revolution
(Holmes & Meier, 1976), pp. 18–19; David M. Katzman,
Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America
(Oxford University Press, 1978);Jordan; Bushman, pp. 109–12; Lillian Pettingill,
Toilers of the Home
(Doubleday, 1903); Harriet Prescott Spofford,
The Servant Girl Question
(1881; reprinted by Arno Press, 1977); Faye E. Dudden,
Serving Women
(Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
[Housewives’complaints]:
Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in Bushman, pp. 109, 110, 109 respectively; see also Katzman, pp. 16–17.
[Domestic science, domestic feminism]:
Catharine E. Beechcr and Harriet Beechcr Stowe,
The American Woman’s Home: or Principles of Domestic Science
(J. B. Ford, 1869; reprinted, 1874,
as
The Housekeeper’s Manual);
Edith Hoshino Altbach,
Women in America
(D. C. Heath, 1974), pp. 8. 33; Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
(Yale University Press, 1973),pp.96–97, 158–67, and
passim;
Mary P. Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Moral Reform in Antebellum America,”
Feminist Studies,
vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 66–85; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English,
For Her Own Good
(Anchor Press, 1978), ch. 5.
121
[Training of daughters]:
Edna Ormsby.
Journal
(Schlesinger Library), February 12, 1895, p. 73;
ibid.,
February 20, 1896, p. 84; Bushman, p. 112; Jordan,
passim;
Thompson,
passim.
121–22
[Sexuality]:
Linda Gordon,
Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right
(Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 23–25; Ronald G. Waters,
Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America
(Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 65–78; see also Stephen Kern,
Anatomy & Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), ch. 9; G.J. Barker-Benfield,
The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America
(Harper & Row, 1976).
122
[“The full force of sexual desire”]:
William Sanger,
The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World
(Harper
&
Bros., 1858), pp. 488–89, in Waters, p. 67.
[Fashion]:
Yarwood, pp. 52, 54.
[Corsets]:
AndrewSinclair,
The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman
(Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 103–5, Stanton quoted at p. 105.
[English visitor on corseted American women]:
Ada S. Ballin,
The Science of Dress in Theory and Practise
(Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), p. 160, in Kern, p. 13.
[Beecher on cares of marriage]:
Catharine Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” from
Letters to the People on Health and Happiness
(Harper & Bros., 1855), in Nancy F. Cott, ed.,
Roots of Bitterness
(E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 263.
[“Like a man a-mowing”]:
Anonymous wife, quoted in Gordon, p. 105.
[“Unaccommodating and capricious”]: ibid.,
p. 125.
[Women’s network]:
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” in Linda K. Kerber and Jane De Hart Mathews, eds.,
Women’s America: Refocusing the Past
(Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 156–79.
123
[Contraception and control of family size]:
Gordon, chs. 5–6; Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck,
A Heritage of Her Own
(Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 222–45.
[Comstock law]:
reprinted in Kerber and Mathews, p. 438; and see Gordon, pp. 24, 167.
[Abortion ]:
James C. Mohr, “Abortion in America,” in Kerber and Mathews, pp. 179–89.
[Stanton on Whitman and women]:
Harriet Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton, eds.,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(Arno Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 210 (diary entry, September 6, 1883).
[Burton on love]:
Harriet Burton Laidlaw,
Diary,
Harriet B. Laidlaw Papers, Schlesinger Library.
[Survey of women’s attitudes toward sex]:
Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, “Hygiene and Physiology of Women” (Mosher Papers, Stanford University), vol. 10, in Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,”
American Historical Review,
vol. 79, no. 5 (December 1974), pp. 1467–90, quoted at p. 1487.
[Gilman ‘s illness ]:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 92.
[Women’s depression]:
Ehrenreich and English, pp. 1–4; and ch. 4, esp. p. 95.
124
[Alice James on the “receptive attitude”]:
Alice James to William James, January3–7, 1886(?), in Ruth Bernard Yeazell,
The Death and Letters of Alice James
(University of California Press, 1981), p. 107.
[Beecher on “decay of female health”]:
Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” in Cott, pp. 263–70, quoted at p. 263.
[Woman as “chief ornament”]:
Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions
(Modern Library, 1934), p. 180.
[Gilman on wife’s role]:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Are Women Human Beings?,”
Harper’s Weekly,
May 25, 1912, p. 11, in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed.,
Up from the Pedestal
(Quadrangle, 1975), pp. 325–31; see also Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Women and Economics
(Small, Maynard, 1898).
124
[Doctors and women]:
Ehrenreich and English, pp. 35–88, also ch. 4.
[Henry Ward Beecher]:
Clifford E. Clark, Jr.,
Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America
(University of Illinois Press, 1978);William G. McLoughlin,
The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
125
[Victoria Woodhull]:
Emanie Sachs,
“The Terrible Siren”
(Harper & Bros., 1928); Johanna Johnscon,
Mrs. Satan
(Putnam’s, 1967).
[Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly]:
Mott, vol. 3, pp. 443–53; extensive (though incomplete) collection of the
Weekly
in New-York Historical Society.
125–6
[Woodhull on freeing women from sexual slavery]: Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly,
October 1, 1870, p. 11.
126
[Woodhull’s appearance in Steinway Hall]:
Sachs, pp. 135–36; see also the
Weekly,
January 2, 1875, p. 2.
[Woodhull’s exposé of the Beecher-Tilton relationship]: Weekly,
November 2, 1872, pp. 9–13; see also Robert Shaplen,
Free Love and Heavenly Sinners
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
127
[Beecher as spokesman for the middle class]:
Clark, prologue.
[Department of Agriculture study of farm wife’s work]:
cited in John Mack Faragher, “The Midwestern Farming Family, 1850,”in Kerber and Mathews,
op. cit.,
pp. 114–29, quoted at p. 123.
[Farm women’s routine]:
John Ise,
Sod and Stubble: The Story of a Kansas Homestead
(University of Nebraska Press, 1967), ch. 3.
128
[E.B.’s complaint and rejoinders]:
from
The Household,
1878–79, 1883, in Norton Juster,
So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1865–1895;
(Viking Press, 1979), pp. 145–51, quoted at pp. 145, 146, 149.
[Migration into the Plains states]:
Fred A. Shannon,
The Farmer’s Last Frontier
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 38; see also Page Smith,
Daughters of the Promised Land
(Little, Brown, 1970), esp. ch. 15.
[Creating new counties and communities]:
John D. Hicks,
The Populist Revolt
(University of Minnesota Press, 1931), p. 18.
[Homestead Act]: ibid.,
pp. 9–10.
129
[Sod houses and living conditions]:
Ise,
passim;
Hicks, p. 30.
[Farmers’ financial plight]:
Lawrence Goodwyn,
Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America
(Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 114; Hicks, pp. 89–90; Norman Pollack, ed.,
The Populist Mind
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 34; Ise, p. 17.
130
[Farmers, middlemen, and trusts]:
Shannon, pp. 174, 179, 192–93; Hicks, p. 61.
[Downgrading “number one” wheat]:
Lewis Walker, Jr., “Abuses in the Grain Trade of theNorthwest,” in
Annals of the American Academy of Politicul and Social Science,
vol. 18 (November 1901), pp. 488–90, quoted at p. 490.
[The small farmer’s high costs of transportation]:
Hicks, pp. 61–65.
[Migration back to the East]: ibid.,
p. 84; Shannon, p. 146.
130–1
[Susan Orcutt’s appeal]:
quoted in Pollack, p. 36 (June 29, 1894).
131
[Condition of Southern farmers, post-Civil War]:
Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch,
One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation
(Cambridge University Press, 1977). p. 151.
[The cotton mania]:
Charles H. Otken,
The Ills of the South
(Putnam’s, 1894), ch. 7, quoted in Hicks, p. 49.
[Conditions in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi]:
C. Vann Woodward,
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913
(Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 177.
[Political leaders on farmers’ conditions]:
quoted in
ibid.,
pp. 187–88.
132
[
“Working on halves”]:
Ransom and Sutch, pp. 89–90.
[“Slavery under a new name”]:
Robert Preston Brooks, “The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912,” in
Georgia Studies: Selected Writings of Robert Preston Brooks
(University of Georgia Press, 1952), p. 101.
[Ned Cobb on his labor as a boy]:
quoted in Theodore Rosengarten,
All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 15.
132–3
[Washington on living conditions of sharecroppers]:
Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery:
An Autobiography
(Corner House, 1971; originally published 1900, 1901), pp. 112–16.
134
[Ownership of land by black farmers]:
Woodward, p. 205; Arnold H. Taylor,
Travail and Triumph: Black Life and Culture in the South Since the Civil War
(Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 72.
[Pride of ex-slaves in owning land]:
George P. Rawick, ed.,
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography
(Greenwood Press, 1972), vol. 6, p. 192, quoted in Taylor, p. 69.
[Conditions of white sharecroppers]:
Shannon, p. 99.
134–5
[Farm family’s income]: ibid.,
quoted at p. 115.
[Woodward on the crop lien system]:
Woodward, p. 180.
[Otken on credit system]:
quoted in Ransom and Sutch, p. 164.
135–6
[Merchant-debtor relationship]:
Goodwyn, p. 31; see also Thomas D. Clark, “The Furnishing and Supply System in Southern Agriculture Since 1865,”
Journal of Southern History,
vol. 12, no. 1 (February 1946), pp. 24–44.
136
[“No cotton, no credit”]:
Goodwyn, p. 31.
[Matt Brown]:
Clark, “Furnishing and Supply System,” pp. 41–42.
137
[Transformation of Lynn]:
John T. Cumbler,
Working-Class Community in Industrial America
(Greenwood Press, 1979), quoted at p. 17.
[Inside view of a tenement]:
Jacob A. Riis,
How the Other Half Lives
(Scribner’s, 1890), p. 43.
[Death rate of children]: ibid.,
p. 36.
138
[Death of a baby]: ibid.,
pp. 43–44.
[Divisions between ethnic groups]: ibid.,
pp. 24–25.
[Sweatshops]:
John Dewitt Warner, “The ‘Sweating System’ in New York City,”
Harper’s Weekly,
vol. 39, no. 1990 (February 9, 1895), p. 135, as cited in Milton Meltzer,
Bread
—
and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor, 1865–1915
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 41.
139
[Testimony of Fannie Harris]:
quoted in Robert W. Smuts,
Women and Work in America
(Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 43–44; on child labor, see also Jacob A. Riis,
The Children of the Poor
(Scribner’s, 1902).
[Richardson]:
Dorothy Richardson,
The Long Day: The True Story of a New York Working Girl
a
s Told by Herself
(Century, 1905), as cited in Smuts, pp. 70–72, Richardson quoted on owner at p. 72.
[“A few hard chairs”]:
Rose Cohen, quoted in Katzman, p. 12.
[Domestics’ grievances]:
Helen Campbell,
Prisoners of Poverty
(Little, Brown, 1900), pp. 222–31, excerpted in Cott, pp. 322–26, quoted at pp. 323, 324.