HIST 205-03, Women in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica, Fall 2005

Abstract

Historian Susan Armitage writes, “Whether one is male or female is, for the most part, a biological fact. But the roles, values, and behaviors people assign to that fact are enormously varied across time.” Gender refers to concepts of manhood and womanhood that shape divisions of labor, family structure, social identity, civil law, sexual mores, and political rights. Thus, systems of power and opportunity are encoded in gender. Because gender differs across cultures and across time, and because it informs the structures of society as well as its values, the study of gender is vital to the field of history. The United States in the nineteenth century saw dramatic change that reverberated through the lives of women. Industrialization, the rise of domestic sentimentalism, westward migration and invasion, slavery, civil war, reconstruction, and urbanization transformed women’s roles during this period. Letters, diaries, and oral histories, as well as scholarly works will provide a window on women’s lived experience. Popular magazines, political cartoons, and American painting will reveal a discourse on gender that called forth American concerns about liberty and order, hierarchy and equality, individualism and community.