Women in the 19C United States of America: 1886 Teach Your Daughters

Friday, August 6, 2021

1886 Teach Your Daughters

THE CHRISTIAN RECORDER, February 18, 1886, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Teach Your Daughters
Give your daughters a thorough education.

■Teach them to cook and prepare the food for the household.
■Teach them to wash, to iron and darn stockings and sew dresses.
■Teach them to make bread, and that a good kitchen lessens the doctor’s account.
■Teach them that he only lays up money whose expenses are less than his income, and that all grow poor who have to spend more than they receive.
■Teach them that a calico dress paid for fits better than a silken one until paid for.
■Teach them that a full, healthy face displays a greater luster than fifty cosmetic beauties.
■Teach them to purchase, and see that the accounts correspond with the purchase.
■Teach them good common sense, self-help and industry.
■Teach them that an honest mechanic in his working dress is a better object of esteem than a dozen haughty, finely dressed idlers.
■Teach them gardening and the pleasures of nature.
■Teach them, if you can afford it, music, painting, etc., but to consider them as secondary objects only.
■Teach them that the happiness of matrimony depends neither on external appearance nor wealth, but on the man’s character.

Thanks to Accessible Archives.

About this blog

In colonial America, men were considered superior to woman in all ways. In a strict patriarchal hierarchy, men controlled not only wealth & political power but also how their children were raised, religious questions, & all matters of right & wrong.

In the early part of the 19Cy, however, many Americans experienced a revolution in gender. The doctrine of “separate spheres” maintained that woman’s sphere was the world of privacy, family, & morality while man’s sphere was the public world -– economic striving, political maneuvering, & social competition. But women were interested in equality.

In 1848, New York passed the Married Woman’s Property Act. Now a woman wasn’t automatically liable for her husband’s debts; she could enter contracts on her own; she could collect rents or receive an inheritance in her own right; she could file a lawsuit on her own behalf. She became for economic purposes, an individual. By 1900, every state has passed legislation modeled after this, granting married women some control over their property and earnings.

In 1870 after the Civi War, the 15th Amendment was ratified, saying, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” African-Americans could vote, but women could not.

But it was not until 1920, that the 19th Amendment was ratified granting women the right to vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”