Exercises
1. What effect does private property seem to have on the position of women in society?
2. How did European women manage to pay for their voyage to the American colonies?
3. How did masters exercise their control over female servants and slaves? How did husbands exercise control over their wives?
4. Was it better for a woman to be married or single in colonial America?
5. What was a fundamental obstacle preventing women from rebelling against their subordinate status?
6. Why was Anne Hutchinson banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
7. Why was Mary Dyer hanged?
8. What role did American women play during the American Revolution?
9. What was Abigail Adams’s argument in favor of giving women the vote? To whom did she make this argument?
10. What might one of Thomas Jefferson’s reasons have been for excluding women from politics?
11. In the periods before, during, and after the American Revolution, what factors caused some women to demand greater rights for themselves (or their sex)?
12. Why would women editors of a women’s magazine write a story discrediting the wearing of bloomers?
13. How did the proponents of the Cult of Domesticity (or the Cult of Womanhood) argue that the women’s sphere was separate but equal? One aspect of the “Cult” denned the role of women as being as responsible for the moral fabric of her family. How might a middle-class woman have used the ideology of being responsible for the moral fabric of her family to justify her involvement, outside the home, in the reform movements—abolition, peace, communitarianism, education, temperance?
14. What is the origin of the word “spinster”?
15. What evidence does Zinn provide to indicate that single women were perhaps lured to the factory by attractive wages and conditions only to see those wages and conditions deteriorate?
16. Did the emergence of an idle, educated, middle-class female population in the midst of politically charged reform movements lead to the first organized feminist movement? Explain your answer.
17. Why did middle-class women activists gravitate to the reform movements (antislavery, temperance, dress styles, prison conditions, peace, education, communitarianism)? How were the reform movements excellent training grounds from which to promote and pursue a women’s rights movement?
18. Why was the World Anti-Slavery Society Convention of 1840 the birthplace of the women’s rights movement?
19. Take a standard American history text and compare its treatment of the following points with Zinn’s teatment of them in this chapter. (If the traditional text does not address one of the points below, speculate as to why the text excluded it.)
a. means by which women came to colonial America
b. the unique experiences of indentured women (as distinct from indentured men)
c. the different legal status of single and married women in colonial America
d. the significance of Anne Hutchinson’s story
e. the role of women in the American Revolution
f. Abigail Adams
g. women’s magazines
h. “cult of true womanhood” (“cult of domesticity”)
i. the reasons women became mill workers
j. the experiences of women mill workers in the 1830s and 1840s
k. Frances Wright
l. Emma Willard
m. Elizabeth Blackwell
n. Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
o. Sojourner Truth
p. Sarah and Angelina Grimké
q. Seneca Falls
What points does your chosen traditional text make about women (1619–1848) that Zinn leaves out?
As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs
If women, of all the subordinate groups in a society dominated by rich white males, were closest to home (indeed, in the home), the most interior, then the Indians were the most foreign, the most exterior. Women, because they were so near and so needed, were dealt with more by patronization than by force. The Indian, not needed—indeed, an obstacle—could be dealt with by sheer force, except that sometimes the language of paternalism preceded the burning of villages.
And so, “Indian removal,” as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. The cost in human life cannot be accurately measured, in suffering not even roughly measured. Most of the history books given to children pass quickly over it.
In the Revolutionary War, almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British. They knew that if the British, who had set a limit on the colonists’ expansion westward, lost the war, there would be no holding back the Americans. Indeed, by the time Jefferson became president in 1800, there were 700,000 white settlers west of the mountains. Jefferson now committed the federal government to promote future removal of the Creek and the Cherokee from Georgia. Aggressive activity against the Indians mounted in the Indiana Territory under Gov. William Henry Harrison.
When Jefferson doubled the size of the nation by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803—thus extending the western frontier from the Appalachians across the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains—he proposed to Congress that Indians should be encouraged to settle down on smaller tracts and do farming. “Two measures are deemed expedient. First to encourage them to abandon hunting.… Secondly, to Multiply trading houses among them…leading them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, and civilization.…”
Jefferson’s talk of “agriculture… manufactures… civilization” is crucial. Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy. Land was indispensable for all this, and after the Revolution, huge tracts of land were bought up by rich speculators, including George Washington and Patrick Henry. John Donelson, a North Carolina surveyor, ended up with twenty thousand acres of land near what is now Chattanooga. His son-in-law made twenty-two trips out of Nashville in 1795 for land deals. This was Andrew Jackson.
Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as often depicted in American textbooks) just a war against England for survival, but a war for the expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory.
Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion. “The land,” he said, “belongs to all, for the use of each.…” Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States government, in 1811 Tecumseh organized an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: “Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.”
The Creek Indians occupied