What was it like to be a woman in 1800 in America?

Question: What was it like to be a woman in 1800 in America!?

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Well, it would depend very much on your social class, and indeed on what part of the 1800s you lived in, because conditions for women changed enormously in the course of the century!.

In the early 1800s, employment opportunities for women were very limited!. Poor women mostly worked either in domestic service or in textile mills, some did sewing (piecework) or did laundry work, a few women kept boarding houses!.

For educated women, teaching was the main respectable way to earn a living!. the public school system began to employ women teachers because there weren't enough male teachers to fill the posts!. they were paid a lot less than men, but many were glad to be able to earn their living in a respectable way!.

girls from prosperous families seem to have had a good deal of freedom in the early 19th century!. A Spanish visitor to America in 1847 wrote:
"The unmarried woman!.!.!.!.is as free as a butterfly until marriage!. She travels alone, wanders about the streets of the city, carries on several chaste, and public love affairs under the indifferent eyes of her parents, receives visits from persons who have not been presented to her family, and returns home from a dance at two o'clock in the morning accompanied by the young man with whom she has waltzed or polkaed exclusively all night!."

After marriage, however, women's lives became much more restricted!. "In America, the independence of women is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony" wrote Alexis De Toqueville!. "If an unmarried woman is less constrained there than elsewhere, a wife is subject to strict obligations!. The former makes her father's house an abode of freedom and pleasure, the latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister!."

The nineteenth century was when the notion of 'sepereate spheres' took hold, the idea that men's worlds and women's should be seperate, with men going out into the world of work and politics, and women staying at home to keep house and raise the children!. In the colonial period, marriage had been very much an economic partnership, with women producing many of the products needed to sustain life, but in the early 19th century, the wife's role was seen as mainly a supportive one, she was a housekeeper and mother above all!. Men not only went out to work, they also went out to places of entertainment on their own, while their wives stayed at home!.

Of course, this was the ideal, and ignored the fact that many women, even married, women, had to work for a living!. and even if they did not work outside the home, the labour they did inside it could be very hard, if they were not well off enough to afford servants!. Housecleaning, which had had low priority in the colonial period, when women had been primarily producers, became very important in the 19th century, and cleaning a house at that time was very hard work, with no labour-saving devices, and fires and oil lamps created a lot of dirt!. there was hardly any indoor plumbing, so water for washing of clothes or people would have to be fetched by hand from a well or pump!. And of course all the washing would be done by hand!.

The percentage of women who never married rose in the 19th century!. many women no longer saw spinsterhood as the worst possible fate!. In the 1840s, the Young Ladies Association of Oberlin College donducted debates on the topic "Is married life more conducive to a woman's happiness than single!?" Magazines urged women not to marry for money or social position, and they depicted maiden ladies positively though perhaps somewhat depressingly, as unselfish beings who dedicated their lives to others!. "Better single than miserably married" was one of the aphorisms of the era!.

Some women became involved in social reform, the Abolitionist movement depended on the activities of women, who got up petitions and organised anti-slavery fairs and lectured, and risked abuse and often physical violence doing so!. The campaign for women's rights grew out of the abolitionist movement, with Elizabeth Cady Stantion and Susan B!. Antony spearheading the movement from 1848 onwards!. The women's Temperence Movement grew rapidly during the second half of the 19th century, far more women were involved in the temperence crusade than in women's suffrage!.

In 1850, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the USA to qualify as a doctor, and during the second half of the 19th century, employment opportunities for women expanded greatly!. Nursing became respectable due to the reforms of florence Nightingale!. During the Civil War, many women took over clerical jobs vacated by men who had gone into the army, and after the war they continued to be employed in clerical work!. By 1900, a third of all government jobs were done by women!. the invention of the typewriter led to many more women being employed in offices, half of all stenographers and typists were women by 1880, and by 1900 it was three quarters!. the new department stores employed large numbers of female salesclerks, 142,000 had been hired by the end of the century!. Women made inroads into library work, they were praised at the 1876 American Library Association meeting for being "the best of listeners"!. Women were generally expected to give up work when they married, only very poor women usually continued to work after marriage!.

Women began to go to college in around 1870, and by 1880 there were 40,000 women in college, about a third of the total number of college students!. By 1890, going to college had become so acceptable that the Ladies Home Journal ran a contest to sell subscriptions to the magazine, the prize was a scholarship to Vassar!.

After the Civil War, it became much more common for families to go out together and enjoy themselves, rather than men socialising on their own while wives stayed at home!. Families went to theatres and restaurants, and circuses became the most popular form of paid entertainment in the 1860s and 1870s!. Summer vacations became popular!.

Games like croquet, lawn tennis and archery became popular, because they could be played by both sexes out of doors!. Croquet sets were even sold with candle sockets on the wickets for night playing!.

Houses became more comfortable as indoor plumbing began to be introduced, making the housewife's lot easier!. Real bathtubs, a rarity before the Civil War, became more common!. Outdoor privies were still the norm though!.

Women's clubs became very popular during the later part of the 19th century!. In cities, small towns, even remote rural areas, middle-class housewives organized themselves into groups to study current affairs, world history, or english literature!. by the turn of the century there were 5,000 local organizations in the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and that was only a tiny fraction of the groups that were scattered around the United States!. It was a sort of informal, do-it-yourself college system!. The idea of doing something unrelated to their families was an enormous breakthrough for many women!. Harriet Robinson, who joined the New England women's club in 1869, noted in her diary that the first meeting she attended was the first evening she had spent away from her husband in twenty years!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

The "Frugal Housewife"
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