19C US Women Ponder Slavery, Voting, & Working Away from Home

Saturday, September 5, 2020

19C Freed Women's Work during Reconstruction

Most former slave women's lives did not change much after the Civil War.

Thomas P. Anshutz (1851-1912) The Chore 1888

From Slave Women to Free Women: The National Archives and Black Women's History in the Civil War Era

Federal Records and African American History (Summer 1997, Vol. 29, No. 2) Prologue Magazine

The National Archives holds rich collections of records on 19C Southern African American women. ...Nineteenth-century African American women who had been enslaved did not leave (many) primary sources such as diaries & letters.

...Over 100,000 African American men served in the United States Army during the Civil War, the majority of whom had been Southern & had once been slaves.

During Reconstruction, all former slave states legalized the right of African Americans to contract & marry. The act of June 6, 1866, required no "other evidence of marriage than proof, satisfactory to the Commissioner of Pensions, that the parties have habitually recognized each other as man & wife, & lived together as such."
Thomas P. Anshutz (1851-1912) Gardening 1879

Since formerly enslaved women could not simply mail in their marriage licenses to obtain their widow's pensions, they provided oral testimony on their marriages & the births of their children. Pension officials also relied on people within the pension claimants' communities who could identify them by recalling personal information...

One example is the file of Lucy Brown. While enslaved to one of the wealthiest slave owners in Mississippi, Lucy Brown married fellow slave Thomas Brown & bore several children. According to Henry Young, who had resided on the same plantation as the Browns, "Thomas & Lucy lived together as husband & wife continually after they were married up to the time that he enlisted." During the war, while Lucy's husband, Thomas, served in the Union army, Lucy lived in a federal camp established for ex-slaves. Reunited in Vicksburg, Lucy & Thomas legally married with an Union army chaplain officiating. According to Lucy Brown, "We were married again by the chaplain of the regiment & he gave me a certificate." After her husband died during the war, Lucy, accompanied by her only surviving child, Clara, found work as a field hand & a domestic servant after the war... The testimonies within the pension file also describe the war experiences of African Americans who left their plantations to become free. Lucy's work after the war as a field hand & domestic are also mentioned...

.Thomas P. Anshutz (1851-1912) Aunt Hannah

...The Freedmen's Bureau (officially know as Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands) was established by a congressional act passed in March 3, 1965...

Many of the labor contracts were standard forms that delineated wages & obligations of employer & employee. .. For example, one woman agreed in her labor contract "to do cooking, washing, ironing, & general housework & anything about the yard or garden that may be required of her." Charity Riley's employers expected her to be responsible for the dairying (including making the butter), feeding the chickens, cooking, washing, spinning, & weaving cloth. She also raised cotton, potatoes, & other vegetables, which her employer allowed her to sell for her own profit. As with Venus Williams, who was hired as a cook but whose employer also required her "to work in the field when necessary," many domestic servants were expected to provide agricultural labor at the discretion of the employer...

After the war, former slave women & men assumed they would have more autonomy over their working lives. For freed women, the fight for more control over their labor took on an additional urgency because they wanted & needed more time for their families. One contract signed by Thomas McArty for himself & his family indicated that his wife would be given "half of each Saturday to wash their clothes." Freedmen's Bureau records such as this contract shows the interconnections between labor & family.

Purchases from the plantation store documented by accounts in the Freedman's Bureau reflected the differences in women's & men's division of labor, functions within the family, & style of dress. On the Oakwood plantation near Vicksburg in January 1868, most men & women kept separate tallies. Men's accounts included pants, caps, shirts, boots, shot, fishing line, powder, hooks, & buckets. Women purchased cloth, such as cotton plaid, but no pants or shirts. Such accounts imply that men assumed responsibility for hunting & fishing equipment while women bought materials for clothes-making. Men & women both acquired whiskey, tobacco, lamp oil, & thread...

The invasion of privacy of these women has given historians the opportunity to explore a world of family, marriage, sexuality, & friendships, often hidden by traditional sources.

Noralee Frankel is the author of Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (1999).

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

A Few 19C American Women

Gorge Henry Durrie (1820-1863) Sarah Murcelus 1841

George Cooke (1793–1849) Lucie Harvie Hull of Athens, Georgia

James Reid Lambdin (1807–1889) Sarah Joseph Hale

Erastus Salisbury Field (1805–1900) Portrait of a Woman said to be Clarissa Gallond Cook in front of a Cityscape

Cephas Giovanni Thompson (1809 – 1888) Portrait of a Woman

Gorge Henry Durrie (1820-1863) Mrs John Forman 1841

James Reid Lambdin (1807–1889) Mrs James Reid Lambdin (Mary Ohara Cochran)..

Monday, August 31, 2020

1857 American Farm Yard

Fanny Palmer (American artist, 1812-1876) Published by N Currier American Farm Yard 1857 Women usually kept the poultry.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

19C Girls

Abbott Fuller Graves (American artist, 1859 – 1936) The Fisherman's Lesson

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) Ice Skater or Girl Warming Hands

John George Brown (American artist, 1831-1913) We Can't Be Caught

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) In the Hayloft

John Joseph Enneking (American artist, 1841 – 1916) Pulling Out the Splinter

John George Brown (American artist, 1831-1913) Daisy McComb Holding a Pink Rose

John George Brown (American genre paintere, 1831-1913) Tete a Tete

John George Brown (American artist, 1831-1913) The Industrious Family

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) The Lesson

John George Brown (American genre paintere, 1831-1913) The Peacemaker

John George Brown (American genre paintere, 1831-1913) Golden Locks, Left Behind

John George Brown (American genre paintere, 1831-1913) St Patrick's Day

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) The Storyteller at the Camp

John George Brown (American genre paintere, 1831-1913) Hiding in the Old Oak

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

1862 Man & Woman in Carriage on a Country Morning

Fanny Palmer (American artist, 1812-1876) Published by N Currier Life in the Country Morning 1862

Sunday, August 23, 2020

Hard-earned gains for Women at Harvard -1850 Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Alexander Jackson Davis (American architect, 1803-1892), Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 1850

Women’s exclusion from the University began “as a part of the social order of the time," one that went largely unquestioned by both men and women and that was connected to both “tradition and privilege,” said historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, speaking at the Radcliffe Institute, in a talk titled “It’s Complicated: 375 Years of Women at Harvard."

Horowitz reviews obstacles, milestones in Radcliffe lecture
Harvard Gazette
By Colleen Walsh, Harvard Staff Writer 2012

Harvard’s history with women is indeed complicated, said historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Monday at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

In a talk titled “It’s Complicated: 375 Years of Women at Harvard,” the professor emerita of history and American studies at Smith College examined the University’s shifting gender landscape, contending that while the Harvard of today has much to celebrate in regards to women, it still has room to improve.

The lecture took shape as Harvard President Drew Faust and Radcliffe Dean Lizabeth Cohen discussed how the Radcliffe Institute could, said Cohen, “make an intellectual contribution” to commemorate Harvard’s 375th anniversary.

Just as important to the two historians, said Cohen, “was how the history of women at Harvard might be well represented in the course of the anniversary year.”

Faust offered opening remarks at Monday’s event, saying that the past 100 years can be seen as “a narrative of progress” for women at Harvard. Horowitz’s talk, she said, offered “important and enduring lessons for Harvard” — about how change happens, and about how those committed to learning and opportunity “can make their way into a world that comes increasingly to accept and embrace them.”

Women’s exclusion from the University began “as a part of the social order of the time,” said Horowitz, one that went largely unquestioned by both men and women and that was connected to both “tradition and privilege.”

Established in 1636 to educate an all-male clergy, Harvard by the 18th century had developed into a college to educate the “sons of the arriving mercantile elite.” During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, Boston bluebloods and Harvard, she said, “rose together.”

The first women to knock at Harvard’s doors came from the middle class, typically schoolteachers looking for extra instruction in the sciences. But they were merely “thrown crumbs,” such as access to lectures or labs, said Horowitz.

When a group of powerful women, including Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, widow of the famous Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, founded the Women’s Education Association of Boston, in 1872, and sought to gain the entrance of women into Harvard, it was met with steady resistance.

“We were told not to disturb the present system of education which is the result of the experience and wisdom of the past,” read Horowitz from the group’s records. She noted that at the time both Harvard President Charles William Eliot and the Harvard Corporation were “deeply opposed” to allowing women into Harvard.

Eliot, Faust remarked in her 2004 essay titled “Mingling Promiscuously: A History of Women and Men at Harvard,” “established his position in his inaugural address, declaring that the policing of hundreds of young men and women of marriageable age would be impossible. He had doubts, moreover, about what he called the ‘natural mental capacities’ of the female sex.”

But the association, said Horowitz, would not be deterred. They turned to an innovative solution, developing an institution of their own, one located near Harvard that would offer female students instruction by Harvard professors, “the same courses they taught men in the Yard.”

The “Harvard Annex” opened its doors in 1879. By 1890 more than 200 women were being taught by 70 men. Yet Agassiz continued to push for more. In 1894, Radcliffe College was granted an official charter by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Agassiz was its first president.

Faust, Harvard’s Lincoln Professor of History, described the new college in her 2004 paper. Radcliffe, she wrote, represented a “compromise between what women wanted and what Harvard would give them, as an alternative to the two prevailing models of coeducation and separate women’s institutions. Radcliffe College would educate women by contracting with individual Harvard faculty to provide instruction, would offer its own diplomas, to be countersigned by Harvard’s president, and would be subjected in academic matters to the supervision of ‘visitors’ from Harvard.”

Yet though women were making significant inroads, they were still set apart from Harvard, a separation that may have come with unseen costs, said Horowitz.

“What does it mean to a woman student that there are no female models?” she wondered.

“For better or worse,” said Horowitz, “professors are models, as well as inspirers.”

A more complex picture emerged Harvard’s graduate Schools. The Harvard Graduate School of Education was the first to admit women in 1920. Harvard Medical School accepted its first female enrollees in 1945 — though a woman first applied almost 100 years earlier, in 1847. Women began petitioning Harvard Law School for admittance in 1871. The School opened its doors in 1950, but that was 20 years behind most law schools in the country, said Horowitz.

The author and former Radcliffe fellow even offered her own experience with Harvard’s “complicated” approach to women. When she was denied acceptance to Harvard’s graduate program in history in 1962, she protested her rejection to Dean Kirby-Miller, the recently displaced dean of the Radcliffe Graduate School. Kirby-Miller agreed that she had been discriminated against, then promptly refused to take her case, telling Horowitz “she had lost two better ones in the last week.”

Horowitz ultimately received both her master’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard in American civilization in 1965 and 1969

In 1963, Harvard degrees were awarded to Radcliffe students for the first time. In 1967, Lamont Library allowed women access. In 1975, the two Colleges merged their admissions. In 1977, “a critical date,” Harvard’s ratio of four men to one woman ended with “sex-blind admissions.” In 1999, Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study was born.

“Moving an institution towards equity turns out to be hard work,” said Horowitz. Harvard has made great progress, she said.

Of the 16 members of the Harvard Council of Deans, seven are women, and women also hold many other top administrative posts at the University, she said. While the faculty still strives for greater diversity, what’s important to remember, said Horowitz, is that the University has a “clear tenure track system” in place, which offers women a road in.

Still, other changes are needed if women are to be convinced to stay at Harvard, and other academic institutions, long enough to pursue tenure — specifically, changes in regards to starting a family and caregiving.

“To achieve equity requires that educational institutions provide women with a wide range of services and a flexible career clock, enabling the balance of working and caregiving. To be gender blind about this, is to be blind about the reality of many women’s lives.”

Friday, August 21, 2020

1852 Woman in a Carriage

Chevaux & Voitures. Phaeton a Caisse Fixe. Published by W. Schaus, New York. 1852

The Norman Rockwell Museum tells us that before the end of the 19th century, proper women were typically relegated to the position of passengers in their conveyances–driving was done by servants, hired drivers, or one’s male escort. Horses were big and needed considerable physical strength to control.

If a woman desired to drive her own horse-drawn carriage she was often accompanied by her servant sitting behind his mistress ready to assist her in a moment’s notice. As you can see in Mary Cassatt’s 1879 painting of a woman driving her carriage showing her servant seated at the back.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) Woman and Child Driving, 1881
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Not until the end of the 19th century was it acceptable for women to drive their own carriages, which were typically designed to be lighter in weight and of a lower profile so that if unaccompanied a woman might alight without assistance and still have the strength to control the animal and vehicle.

Even with the advent of the automobile, there were similar discussions of a woman’s suitability with regards to handling a powerful auto. Montgomery Rollins in a 1909 article magazine wrote, “It’s no child’s play to run a motor car. No license should be granted to one under eighteen, and . . . never to a woman, unless, possibly, for a car driven by electric power.” Not suited to distance driving or high speeds, the electric car was considered safer for a woman because it was quieter, cleaner, and easier to operate. Not surprising, women did not necessarily seek only simplicity and ease—like men, some desire and desired power, speed, and control.

After the passage of the women’s voting rights amendment in 1920, American woman were on the cusp of a new age and even illustration showed their verve as they embraced the new era. The cover illustration for the January 1921 issue of American Automobile Digest shows an exuberant young woman driving her auto through the January 1st calendar page in celebration of her new freedom.