Women

In the nineteenth century, across the United States, women’s opportunities were limited. The vestiges of an element of English common law called coverture ensured women did not have a legal identity. Their fathers covered them until they married, at which point they fell under the legal identity of their husbands. In practice, this meant that women did not legally own property and did not even control their own children. They could not own businesses and could not bring suit to court. Rather, they had to rely on a husband, father, or other male relative. The concept of “Republican Motherhood,” however, ensured that some education was necessary. This ideal, which emerged after the American Revolution, held that mothers were central to raising virtuous boys who would one day shape the Republic.

In the North, the Second Great Awakening and the rise of the middle class expanded women’s opportunities further. Heavily centered around the family, the middle class celebrated not an authoritative father but a loving mother. Separate spheres ideology held that men and women occupied different elements of society. Men were responsible for the public sphere, including politics and work outside of the home. Women took care of the domestic sphere, pushing temperance, self-control, hard work, honesty, and frugality. They had considerable power within this space, including nurturing children. Embracing these domestic ideals also pushed northern women into the public domain through such crusades as temperance and moral reform.

In the agrarian South, patriarchy reigned supreme, where a male patriarchal “master” headed a family of dependents – women, children, and enslaved people, when financially possible. Here, men were virtually the law within the household. This hierarchy – and the dependent role women maintained – played a crucial role in uniting the South in its defense of slavery, for all white men were essentially “masters.” Operating with very little personal freedom, elite white women in the South also played a central role in managing the plantation household, overseeing large staffs of enslaved men and women within the domestic sphere. This expectation included embracing the violence that was necessary to maintaining the institution of slavery. Completely dependent on a male patriarch, women working outside of the home were limited to the occupations of the domestic realm, including working as a seamstress or milliner, teaching, domestic service, and sex work. Significantly lower paid than their male counterparts, these limitations ensured that poor white women often carried the burden of poverty in the South.

The institution of slavery ensured that Black women faced still more limited circumstances. As chattel, they were defined by their productive capacity – their ability to produce in the field, the enslaver’s household, or reproductively. Subject to violence, rape, and the inability to control even their own children, enslaved women found ways to carve out elements of independency. Although enslavers sometimes forced enslaved men and women to engage in marital unions with spouses of the enslaver’s choosing, Black women often selected their own husbands, resisting the fact that these unions were only rarely enshrined in law and were subordinate to an enslaver’s desires. As far as was possible, these marriages followed the gendered division of labor typical throughout the U.S., where women were responsible for cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. Within these private households and the slave quarters more generally, enslaved women also engaged in the religions and cultural practices of their ancestry, including Caribbean and African influences.

The Civil War expanded women’s roles in society. Still within the realm of the domestic sphere, women in both regions formed Ladies Military Aid Societies, with an eye towards supporting soldiers. These groups sent domestic necessities, including clothing, socks, and bandages, and they eventually embraced nursing. In the South, societies even began making cartridges and preparing sandbags. Such work and the broader need for women to maintain the household without a male counterpart ensured that women took on new responsibilities, many of which pushed them deeper into the public sphere than was possible before the war. In the South, poor women even became active in demanding that the Confederacy support their families, even rioting publicly in places like Richmond. As many Black women escaped to the U.S. Army during the war, marriage often became their first goal, even forcing the federal government to implement new policies that protected and supported their families. They seized this opportunity to rebuild the families that had long-been severed by the institution of slavery.

After the war, many of these expansions in women’s roles declined, but they did not disappear entirely. Northern women became active in providing support for veterans and their families, even helping navigating the pension system, while southern white women became active in burying the dead, memorialization, and the emergence of the Lost Cause mythology. This idea downplayed the role of slavery in the war and celebrated the Confederacy for its protection of families, within which, women were vital. Black women continued to lobby the U.S. government, including utilizing the Freedman’s Bureau to relocate members of their families and to solidify those unions. With intimate knowledge of the skills and length of individual tasks, they also played pivotal roles in negotiating the financial value of their labor and of negotiating the terms of free labor more generally. Nevertheless, the sexual victimization of Black women continued, becoming a prominent feature of the postwar South.

(Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1780-1860; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Ruth Poe White, “Orphans, White Unity, and the Charleston Orphan House, 1860-1870; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South; Nina Silber, Gender & the Sectional Conflict; Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War)