Matthew Sherlock

The Agency of Women

The American experience is full of contradictions, exceptions, and double standards. If

there is any universal constant in the American story it is that there are no universal

experiences. Two of the largest differences in the experience of American immigrants to the

new world in early America is gender and race. Their roles are defined by the society that they

found themselves. So let us cover what those roles were and how they found their freedom

within those roles.

The Cult of True Womanhood (otherwise known as the Cult of Domesticity) is the

primary way that historians describe the expectations of the society of the Nineteenth Century.

The place for women was not the professional world, it was at home that they belonged. The

British woman’s role was as caretaker and homemaker. It is this preconception of womanhood

and its presumed status of a natural state, that colored their views of the colored women who

lived outside their communities. Native women and African women had different views of what

their roles in community life was. They were farmer, tillers of the land. A role that in British

society was the domain of men alone. They considered these colored women as aberrations in

the natural order of things. “Advice-book authors described men’s ‘natural’ domain as one of

authority derived from his primary economic role. A man’s economic assertive, mirrored in his

authority over wife, child and servant. 1” Like most ideals, the cult of true womanhood was

never the entirety of the woman’s experience, but the weight of expectation from this ideal

1
Katheen M. Brown: The Anglo-Indian gender frontier, Women’s America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 14.
would color how women were perceived and pigeonholed into certain roles. Some women

would fight to break from these roles, others will find power in those same roles, but they all

must deal with it.

Idealism is all well and good in an established society like in England, but the American

frontier was a place where pragmatism was needed to ensure survival. “The particular labor

performed by a given woman depended on the size and resourced of her household…Yet we

can estimate a general market value of housework by combining the values of the individual

activities that made it up:… roughly $250 a year…2” An essential source of income for many

families, not that it was always appreciated. This income gave them independence away from

the men in their lives. However, as society solidified and men’s work increased in value,

women’s labor became less valuable. Women’s labor was trivialized and they were paid less

and were exploited for it. Factory owners during the industrial revolution would hire women

just because they could get away with paying them less, and they did not care about their home

lives. “One agent admitted: ‘So long as they can do my work for what I choose to pay them, I

keep them, getting out of them all I can….How they fare outside my walls I don’t know, nor do I

consider it my business to know. They must look out for themselves.’ Even when employers

paid high enough salaries to provide present security for a family, they seldom provided either

the income or the job security to ensure a household’s well-being against… boom-and-bust

cycles of business.”3 Women were the cheapest hired, and often the first fired. As much as the

patriarchal society they lived in may not have appreciated the labors of women, they had more

2
Jeanne Boydston: The Pastoralization of Housework, Women’s America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 129
3
Jeanne Boydston: The Pastoralization of Housework, Women’s America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 130
independence because of that labor. That independence was limited, but it gave them a start.

Not all women’s labor was considered equal though, because some of those women were not

paid. Some of those women were Africans, some of those were slaves.

Slavery is considered the original sin of American history. It is a blood red stain on the

record. A big reason for slavery’s bad reputation was what it did to colored women. Separating

mother from their children, leaving them powerless in the face of their male masters, and

treating them like cattle. This galvanized the White female population to political action. They

flooded lawmakers’ offices with political petitions giving strength to the abolitionist movement.

The fight for slave liberation was the first time that many women participated in politics. The

experience that they gained in how to mobilize and organize large numbers of people would

serve them well in the years to come as they fought for their own liberation from the forces

that controlled their lives. This emerging political bloc is the foundation for the start of modern

feminism in the Seneca Fall Convention. Seneca Falls was a who’s who of 1848’s politicly active

feminists. Lucretia Mott, Quaker minister, founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery

Society, and principle speaker of the convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wife of a prominent

free-soil politician. Martha Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann, veteran organizers and quakers. 4

The convention brought over reformers from all over the country. They used their experience

to reach out and assert their power. They proclaimed their declaration of sentiments, All men

and women were created equal and binding women to a single sphere was a usurpation of

god’s prerogative “He[man] has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his

4
Gerda Lerner: The Meaning of Seneca Falls, 1848-1998, Women’s America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 223
right to assign to her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.” 5

This proclamation of equality continues to reverberate to this day, though the universality of

the proclamation was challenged by its failures to make allowances for the slave or the poor.

These omissions would be rectified in future conferences.

The lot of women has always been hard in this country. Their freedoms have been

limited, but the brave women of the past found ways to leverage it in ways that opened the

world to them. Little by little gaining more and more ground. If it were not for their efforts, the

world we live in would be very different. Women’s rights are human rights and to exclude

women from those right just hurts us.

5
Gerda Lerner: The Meaning of Seneca Falls, 1848-1998, Women’s America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), 224