Sex and Separate Spheres 10.10.23

• HIS 379 The Family in America
• Year 4

Sex and Separate Spheres in the 

Antebellum North

The History of Family in America (HIST 379)
Dr. Caitlin Wiesner
Main Hall Room 213
October 10, 2023

Sharing Session: 

Family Oral History Project Selections and Questions

Briefly share with the class:

• the individuals you have selected to interview
• your research goal
• the questions you have created.

After you share, the rest of the class will have the opportunity to provide feedback.

Discuss:

Married Women's Property Acts (1848, 1860)

• What protections do these acts extend to married women in antebellum America?
• How do they demonstrate economic and legal changes in the institution of the family?

The Emergence of Separate Spheres

Men’s Sphere: Public, Wage Labor, Politics, Competition, Aggression, Vice, Virility

Women’s Sphere: Home, Domesticity, Religion, Nurturing, Docility, Morality, Passionlessness

“... home is her appropriate sphere of action; and that whenever she neglects these duties, or goes out of this sphere of action to mingle in any of the great public movements of the day, she is deserting the station which God and nature have assigned her… Our husbands and sons...with rejoice to return to its sanctuary of rest, there to refresh their wearied spirits, and renew their strength for the toils and conflicts of life.”
Mrs. A.J. Graves, Woman in America (1844)

“Yet even now, in the present state of affairs, she can exert an immense influence for good, publicly. She can, without outstepping the limits of delicacy, identify herself with most, if not all, of the great efforts of the day … She can labor actively in the Temperance reform… for who is a greater suffered than she from the deadly curse it wars against… the wife of an inebriate...has seen her husband go forth this very morning, to spend in some haunt of dissipation, the earnings of many days labor, long hoarded for her children’s wants"

- Mary Vaughn to Amelia Bloomer (November 1850)

Discuss: "TO MARRIED WOMEN- MADAME RESTELL" (1839)

• Why direct abortion and birth control services to married women?
• What does this tell us about the place of family and “separate spheres” in growing cities?
  

“Many women suppose that the child is not alive till quickening has occurred, others that it is practically dead till it has breathed. As well one of these suppositions as the other; they are both of them erroneous.” (1866)

"An act for the suppression of trade in, and Circulation of Obscene literature and articles of Immoral Use," including "“any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” (1873)

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

We will begin discussion of readings each class with an FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise. All students will free write the following:

     A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
    An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
    A question that the reading raised for you

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise

All students will free write the following:

1.  A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
2. An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
3. A question that the reading raised for you

Laura Briggs, Taking Children (2022), Introduction-Chapter 2

1.    According to Briggs, why has the American state perpetuated “child taking” in various forms over the course of three centuries?
2.    What effect has “child taking” had on the meaning of “the family” in America?
3.    How does the “child taking” of the American state compare to its efforts to control the institution of marriage (as described by Nancy Cott in Public Vows)?