2)       "The impact of greater life expectancy is important to mention, too. Before 1800, wives and husbands could expect that their unions would be broken by death before all the children had left home." page 27 .

3)       "Quaker women in colonial America are of special interest for a number of reasons. Their experience of life was in many ways so unique that broad generalizations about the history of colonial women do not altogether fit them. This is primarily because Quaker theology altered in significant ways the traditional view of women to which most Protestants adhered, and opened to its female adherents opportunities that most women did not have. Admittedly the Friends' influence on colonial women's lives in general was not great; very few Protestant sects followed the Quaker lead or adopted their doctrinal position with respect to women. But the lives of Quakers do show us the way in which the Protestant revolution might have liberated women by allowing them some voice in doctrine, church government, and discipline, and therefore by giving them power and status more nearly equal to that of men."
      "Eve symbolizes those perceptions of women most deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Quakers tried to overturn. Eve was a second thought, created out of Adam's needs. Eve was the first sinner because she was considered by Satan to be weaker of mind and more easily moved by evil argument than Adam, and also to have the power of the temptress over the man. After the Fall, or first in sin, she therefore had to be put in a position in which she could not undermine man's relationship with God; her own relationship with God would be mediated by man.
      This place in the universe came through the judgment of God Himself. His curse for her part in original sin was clearly stated in Genesis 3:16, "Unto the woman he said, will greatly increase thy sorrows and thy conceptions. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be subject to thine husband, and he shall rule over thee." Most Christians fully accepted this reading of the essential inferiority of women, which incorporated an intellectual component because of Eve's inability to resist Satan, a psychological component due to her role as temptress, and a biological component rising out of the curse of painful childbirth.
      If Christians of most eras may be said to have discovered the nature of women in Eve, then Paul's' writings set forth for most seventeenth-century Protestants the weaknesses typical of this nature and also some norms for female behavior and rules for the control of women. Paul's doctrine was of enormous importance in the seventeenth century to the English Puritans, who wanted to purify the English church, and to dissenters like the Quakers, who created new sects. In both cases, godly people wanted to return to what they called the primitive church and tried to recapture the simplicity and fervor of the first Christians. Most of these people therefore accepted without question what they believed Paul was telling them about women. But it was possible to read Paul in several ways, and only a few radicals like the Quakers chose to interpret his writings in a way that would release women from traditional Christian restraints." pages 115-116

4)       "According to Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 40 percent of female abolitionists were Quakers; of feminists born before 1830, 19 percent were Quakers; of suffragists born before 1830, 15 percent were Quakers. Since 2 percent is a generous estimate of Quakers in the total American population in 1800, it is clear that Friends were represented in the leadership of these causes in numbers completely out of proportion to their numbers in the nation. Perhaps we may conclude that although other Protestant sects did not adopt the doctrinal positions that liberated Quake women in the seventeenth century, Quaker women eventually helped lead the way to the political positions through which women might liberate themselves." pages 132-133.

5)       Although the relative importance of various methods of birth control are unknown, abortion and mechanical aids were widely employed to prevent pregnancy by the end of the nineteenth century. Women's commitment to controlling their reproductive processes and their family sizes is demonstrated by the great lengths women went to to avoid or terminate pregnancies. The reactions of male doctors and public officials to women's reproductive decisions underscores their challenge presented to public policy.
      "When large numbers of American families decided to limit their fertility, the birthrate declined, and white men concerned about maintaining Anglo-Saxons as the dominant group in the United States began to be concerned about the fact that the birthrate of the immigrant and black populations of the country remained high. They envisioned a society in which their kind of folk were outnumbered by groups they believed to be genetically inferior. And so they launched a counterattack on abortionists and distributors of birth-control devices, in order to try to stop the dangerous trend." pages 146-147.

6)       "Astute and direct, Gilman located the institutionalization of women's oppression in the home and the family, and in the conditioned mentality that channeled all love and all sense of responsibility and potential for self-esteem into limited personal relationships rather than social activities and humanitarianism." From my own reading of Gilman, specifically, His Religion and Hers, Gilman also identified the church as a source of women's oppression. (quote from page 166)

7)       "As Nancy F. Cott recently pointed out in The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835, male associations formed during this period for a variety of political, civic, and professional goals as well as for religious of charitable purposes, but female associations were almost exclusively religious or charitable. One obvious reason for this distinction was the general exclusion of women from public life. Another reason can be found in the benefits women derived from such associations. Cott concluded that women supported religion faithfully because, "No other avenue of self-expression besides religion at once offered women social approbations, the encouragement of male leaders (ministers), and, most important, the community of their peers." " pages 187-188.

8)       Regarding the women trade unionists in the Troy NY shirt-collar laundry industry: "Male unionists cooperated with the ironers despite the fact that the antagonism between men and women workers were as deep as other hostilities dividing American wage earners. Just as working men were threatened by unskilled "green hands," especially if they were black or Chinese, they were also threatened by women workers. Working men not only believed that women took men's jobs and reduced their earnings, but they also thought that women wage earners were out of their natural sphere." page 213
      "Since most working men were threatened by women workers, why did male unionists rally behind the laundresses' union? A New York State Bureau of Labor Statistics Report of 1886 suggests that the iron molders and laundresses were allied because the laundry women were an important source of income for molders' families. The census manuscript adds some support to this argument. While 14 percent of the laundresses' male relatives were molders in 1865, molders constituted only 8 percents of collar sewers' male relatives, and 5 percent of sewing women's male relatives. Although 14 percent does not represent very many individuals, slightly more laundry women than other working women were related to molders. These family ties may have reduced antagonisms between male and female workers in collar industries and iron foundries. Shared ethnic identity may have augmented these ties. Living in the same neighborhoods and participating in Irish political and nationalist organizations, Troy's Irish working-class community was particularly close-knit. Troy's laundresses and molders probably had more ethnic and family ties than other female and male workers." page 215
      "In order to organize successfully the laundresses also had to develop a commitment to trade unionism through their own experiences in bargaining with employers. In order to form firm alliances with other workers the laundresses had to have common interests as wage earners who were attempting to counter the power of capital. These common interests also explain the laundresses' alliance with the national trade union movement." page 216.
      "But working men's fears of women's competition was so strong that working men could cooperate with women wage earners only under circumstances that mitigated this threat to their livelihood. Three kinds of circumstances seemed necessary for this cooperation: With few exceptions, male and female wage earners cooperated only when male workers believed that women were not directly competing with men; this kind of cooperation occurred when working women were not helpless but proved the unionists' adage that "those who would be free must themselves strike the first blow": most important, working men cooperated with women workers when they derived some direct benefits from working women's labor activity." page 216.

9)       "During the 1850s medical men launched a crusade against planned parenthood. Their impetus was the recognition of an unexpectedly low native birthrate that threatened a decline of their people. In 1851 Jesse Chickering presented an astounding discovery in report on the population of Boston. "American births," he observed, "hardly equal American deaths in 1850." Chickering found that native fertility approached zero population growth in Boston at mid-century. By 1853 other investigators had confirmed Chickering's findings for the entire state of Massachusetts. Two years later C. Humphreys Storer, Professor of Obstrectrics at Harvard University, proposed a concerted campaign against planned parenthood." page 253
      "Physicians had discovered relatively safe methods of controlling fertility; they realized that danger arose not from these methods but from improper techniques." page 254.

      "In 1857, as chairman of a "Committee on Criminal Abortion" for the local Suffolk District Medical Society in Massachusetts, he [the younger Storer] attempted to have contraception as well as abortion condemned." page 255.

10)       About women, education, and work in the years between the 2 world wars: "One-third of all graduate degrees were awarded to women in the 1930s, but women constituted only 4 percent of the full professors at American universities." page 276
      As the Depression deepened: "[a]s jobs grew scarce, complaints against working women grew frequent. The old, persistent notion that women worked for "pin money" while men worked to support their families led many to argue that one more unemployed woman meant one more working man. In 26 states, bills were introduced to prohibit married women from working." page 277
      But regarding legal victories for women workers: "enforcement is not always vigorous enough to transform the models de jure into conditions de facto." page 283

      "As the economic change of a rapidly industrializing society brought social dislocation, Americans clung ever more tenaciously to their most basic assumptions about sexual identity and fought any changes in accepted sex-role divisions..
      Education played a singularly important role in this drama, because the special circumstances of the development of the university placed American higher education at the fulcrum of social change." page 321.

11)       "The idea that woman's "place" was in the home except in the war emergency maintained a strong following in the United States during the war, but among men more than women. Real obstacles such as child care and domestic responsibilities, rather than their own attitudes, kept most nonemployed American women from seeking employment." page 349.
      "The American woman, according to propaganda, took a war job in order to bring her man home sooner, but the OWI's [Office of War Information] own survey material suggested that women in fact responded predominantly to the high wages offered in war industry." page 356
      "An examination of propaganda and public opinion shows that both the United States and Germany urged women to move into new areas of activity without changing basic attitudes about women." page 356.

12)       A Truly Subversive Affair: Women Against Lynching in the Twentieth- Century South
      "The lynch mob in pursuit of the black rapist thus represented the trade-off in the code of chivalry, for the right of the southern lady to protection presupposed her obligation to obey. The role of the lady demanded chastity, frailty, vulnerability. "A lady," noted one social psychologist, "is always in a state of becoming: one acts like a lady, one attempts to be a lady, but one never is a lady. Internalized by the individual, this ideal regulated behavior and restricted interaction with the world. If a woman passed the tests of ladyhood, she could tap into the reservoir of protectiveness and shelter known as southern chivalry. Women unable or unwilling to comply with such normative demands forfeited the claim to personal security. Together, the practice of ladyhood and the etiquette of chivalry functioned as highly effective strategies of control over women's behavior as well as powerful safeguards of caste restrictions.
      Ironically, the symbolism of southern womanhood may have created an objective basis for the fear of black attacks on white women. "When men sow the wind," warned the abolitionist Fredrick Douglass in 1892, "they will reap the whirlwind." " page 372

13)       About the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, ASWPL:

      "Nevertheless, ASWPL members sought to undermine the rationalizations for lynching by dissociating the image of the lady from its connotations of female vulnerability and retaliatory violence. With even fewer reservations, they attacked the paternalism of chivalry." page 372
      "Ames opened the discussion with the question, "Have slavery and reconstruction in the South produced a Double Standard of Ethical and Moral Conduct based upon race? If so, does this Double Standard contribute to the phenomenon of lynching in the South?" The conversation that followed touched on the ways in which legal, political, and economic discrimination against blacks created a climate of opinion conductive to violence. But the group's most impassioned exchanges focused on the status of women. White male attitudes, they concluded, originated in a slave system in which black women "did not belong to themselves but were in effect the property of white men." To rationalize sexual exploitation, the myth arose that "Negro women invited and preferred promiscuous relationships with white men . . . . Negro women were looked upon as degraded creatures, quite without instincts of personal decency and self-respect. As a corollary to this conception of Negro women in terms of animal wantonness, white public opinion conceived all white women in terms of angelic purity." This double standard had resulted in a society that "considers an assault by a white man as a moral lapse upon his part, better ignored and forgotten, while an assault by a Negro against a white woman is a hideous crime punishable with death by law or lynching." " pages 378-379

      "At the annual meeting of 1934, the ASWPL adopted a resolution that Ames regarded as a landmark in the development of ASWPL thought:

We declare as our deliberate conclusion that the crime of lynching is a logical result in every community that pursues the policy of humiliation and degradation of a part of its citizenship because of accident of birth; that exploits and intimidates the weaker element. . . for economic gain; that refuses equal educational opportunity to one portion of its children; that segregates arbitrarily a whole race in unsanitary, ugly sections; . . . and finally that denies a voice in the control of government to any fit and proper citizen because of race.

14)       "The young female participants in the social movements of the 1960s. . . had neither a stake in defending or furthering particular positions in the public realm, nor clarity about what their future roles should be." Contradictory messages of what it meant to be female to these college-educated daughters of the middle class created the conditions necessary for revolt. On the one hand, the media, parents, and schools informed them that women's only true happiness lay in the roles of wife and mother. On the other hand, from their observations of reality they concluded that housewifery was distinctly unsatisfactory for millions of suburban women. Furthermore, despite conditioning to the contrary, most American women expected to work outside the home during a substantial part of their lives. When the spark of "revolt appeared in the black and student uprisings, large numbers of women responded and found their own confusions strangely transformed.

      By the late 1960s, most American women's lives were dramatically unlike the happy-housewife image of the 1950s. And like the proverbial child who pointed out that the king had no clothes, America's youth first heralded the discrepancy between myth and reality. While professional women in NOW challenged the widespread inequities facing women in law and civil rights, young participants in the social movement of the 1960s- civil rights, the new left, the antiwar movement- tore away the shrouds of ambiguity and mystification surrounding women's roles with intrepid zeal and directness. When they asserted that the personal was political, they set out to trace all aspects of women's lives- work, sexuality, family roles, self-image- back to their social and political roots. Women's liberation meant not only civil equality but also a rethinking of the most fundamental assumptions from the perspective of women's actual experience. Kathie Sarachild compared their examination of personal experience with the seventeenth-century struggle against scholastics and dogmatists who clung to ancient texts on anatomy despite the very different facts revealed by dissection: "So they'd deny what they saw in front of their eyes, because Galen didn't say it was there."
      Thus, the women's liberation movement initiated by women in the civil rights movement and the new left who dared to test the old assumptions and myths about female nature against their own experience, and discovered that something was drastically wrong. They dared because within these movements they had learned to respect themselves and to know their own strength." pages 391-392

15)       "The youthful insurgency known as the new left represented a moral revolt of middle-class youth of the 1960s against the evils of poverty, racism, and war. Beginning with the civil rights movements in the South and antinuclear protests on northern campuses, it grew in size, locations (campuses, urban slums, rural cooperatives), and tactics (sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration, block organizing, draft-card burning, mass marches). New left ideology reflected the combined visions of rural southern blacks and a generation of middle-class youth who had absorbed the idealism implicit in the cold-war rhetoric of the 1950s only to discover evils of poverty and discrimination in the midst of the good society. As cold-war liberals, students had accepted the view defining the world as divided between the free and democratic nations of the West and the monolithic evils of communism. The rhetoric of the cold war throughout the fifties was that of a moral crusade. Students took their inherited values literally. They believed in freedom, equality, love, and hope. But their world failed to match up. Within the university they eventually came to perceive themselves as cogs in an expanding system geared to train them to join other cogs in corporate and government bureaucracies, where efficiency, forced cooperation, and mass organization won out over critical thinking and intellectual community. When black students in the South initiated a wave of sit-ins in the spring of 1960, the generation entering the sixties had the opportunity to act on their ideals and beliefs.

      From the beginning, the student movement emphasized the importance of building new kinds of human relationships and the political import of personal choice." page 393

16)       The Second Wave of Feminism in the 1960s
      "Thus, community organizing in North and South offered young women new role models: the image of a woman who recognizes and names her own oppression and then learns to stand up for herself, breaking through patterns of passivity and learning new self-respect in the process. Inevitably these models carried with them important lessons, which were bound to be absorbed in some measure by the young women who spent weeks and months going from door to door exhorting people to stand up for themselves." page 399

      "Men believed that women would simply adopt the culturally accepted norms of male behavior." page 404

      "In this context, women finally broke away in the fall of 1967. They had learned too much respect for themselves and too much organizing skill to acquiesce quietly in their eclipse." page 405

      "In sharp contrast to new left ideological debates from which they had been excluded, women found, for the first time, that they could legitimately talk about themselves, their relationships, their hopes and angers. The vitality of these exchanges and the growing sense of collective power- the knowledge that there was a movement to back them up- allowed many women to claim for the first time the leadership capacities they had developed." page 407

      "The young women had not begun with a legalistic definition of women's rights. They were radicals, used to taking on issues and getting to their roots whatever the cost. And they began with a high level of shared cultural alienation." page 407

      "Indeed, it represented an intensified microcosm of the dilemma of most American women, trapped in an obsolete housewife role while new realities generated an unarticulated sense of greater potential." page 409

      "Thus, armed with new questions and with mutually supportive structures, women generated an outpouring of scholarly studies in the sociology of family and sex roles, female psychology, women's history, and literature by and about women. Whole programs on women's studies encouraged interdisciplinary cross-fertilization and provided points of intersection with the woman's movement." page 410

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