Laborers for Liberty: American Women 1865-1890 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States) - Hardcover

Sigerman, Harriet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195080467 ISBN 13: 9780195080469

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

In the years following the Civil War, women in the United States took up many new roles and their impact on the nation became ever more visible. As new territories were settled and the country began to heal its wounds, great industrial expansion brought changes in women's occupations, education, and activities. The sharecroppers who labored in the fields of the South, migrants who put down roots in the Great Plains, immigrants who sought opportunities in the ever-swelling cities, the first generation of young women to attend universities--all were part of the changing American landscape.
Although women were expected to serve their families, communities, and the country by being good wives and mothers, their activities actually extended far beyond the home. After the Civil War, women organized to work toward civic, social, and religious improvement. They devoted themselves to a wide range of issues and causes--ending alcoholism, preventing violence against women, helping young farm women adjust to city life,increasing women's educational opportunities, and--above all--obtaining the vote for women. These were crucial stepping-stones in women's quest for social and political power.
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Addams are but a few of the women whose struggles for women's rights are chronicled in Laborers for Liberty. But the stories of women whose names are not familiar are also recorded. Each waged her own battle for liberty in the home, on the farm, and in the factory, as American women began to take greater control over their lives and to lay the groundwork for 20th-century feminism.

About this title

About the Author

Harriet Sigerman is a historian and freelance writer who has contributed to European Immigrant Women in the United States: A Biographical Dictionary and The Young Reader's Companion to American History. She has been a research assistant to Henry Steele Commager at Amherst College and for the Stanton-Anthony Papers at the University of Massachusetts.

From School Library Journal

Grade 6 Up-Sigerman covers a wide range of women's experiences in the United States from the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the 20th century. She opens with an extensive examination of the lives of both black and white women in the Reconstruction South. Descriptions of sharecropping, mass legalization of former slaves' marriages, and the will to prosper in spite of the devastation of their families' wealth all give a deeper perspective to the history found in typical textbooks. Life on the frontier comes vividly alive through the excerpts from women's diaries, which are marked here by their frankness and overarching interpretation. Of particular note is the change in Native American tribes as they moved from hunter-gatherer societies to marginalized, sedentary residents of reservations; the formerly equal women saw their roles trivialized, paralleling the treatment of their white counterparts. Women's roles during industrialization and their political activity to gain suffrage are all chronicled. Supplemented by a generous array of photographs, this book is a readable but substantial counterpoint to other history books at this level.
Ruth K. MacDonald, Quinnipiac College, Hamden, CT
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0195080467
• ISBN 13: 9780195080469
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144