Chapter 3
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The ideology of “true womanhood” was a set of beliefs about different components of a woman’s life. Some of these components were her home life and personal relationships. It was believed that a woman was responsible for taking care of the home, her husband and her children. This was not regarded as work but rather a birthright. Her life was based on service others. Women who worked outside of their homes were called working class and those who worked inside their homes were considered middle class. There was a conflict between them because middle class women believed they were more ladylike and womanly than the working women.
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The Lowell mill girls represented a time of new opportunities and a shift in the discrimination of society against working women. These young women experienced personal independence and held their own unique views and opinions. Even for a short time, they challenged wide held beliefs about womanhood and inspired new ideas at a time when their gender was restricted in many areas. The decline of the Lowell system implied that the gap between the “ladies” and the “factory girls” was widening again and that society was not yet ready to accept this form of employment for women.
“The History of Prostitution”
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Sanger viewed women as being vulnerable to the effects of bad treatment by family
members and personal issues such as poverty. He believed that women did not exactly have it in them to choose a life of prostitution, but rather they had to be influenced by some situation they were in. On the other hand, women who were candidly sexual and who admitted to choosing this kind of life for no reason other than their personal desires, were viewed as immoral and corrupt. It is easy to see that Sanger, as much as he tried not to make his studies personal, held discriminatory beliefs against prostitution. I believe that what he tried to do is very significant, regardless of the fact that his opinions were somewhat biased.
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Three causes of prostitution that stood out in Sanger’s study were inclination, destitution and seduction & abandonment. Most of the prostitutes he interviewed were driven by their extreme poverty and inability to care for their children or fund their addictions. Others had husbands or boyfriends that left them and they viewed prostitution as a way of payback. Some women had been sexually violated at some point, others were alcoholics and some were persuaded by friends or bad company.
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Sanger’s study of these women leads us to believe that during that time there was largely a discrimination against women’s choices and behaviors. Sanger did not write about how minimal work opportunities were available to women at the time and how a woman didn’t have many other alternatives to choose from. Sanger did not see that prostitution was a product of his society, not only of the personal choices of these women. Prostitution exists today, as does discrimination, but there are now many opportunities available to women that weren’t available then. So, if Sanger were alive today, he would see a new world for women but he would find that a lot of the views of prostitution he held back then are still largely accepted and held in our society today.
2 comments:
PR#1
I agree with your entry women were driven into staying at home and were held responsible to taking care of the home and the husband.
middle class women said something about being more womenly meant doing house work and also that it made the poor stand out because the lacked women domesticity.
It did open new opportunities, good and bad. the good one was like you mentioned, gave women more opportunities and they became independent. they were earning their own money. but the bad was it gave men the opportunity to mistreat them. how? well they were being paid so little and the women were being asked to work harder at times.
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why do you think that his comments were bias. i thought that he really did not look at these women with disrespect.
i agree with the causes, because it is somewhat similar to what i wrote. the chart was very helpful.
that's right he did not really talk about the low opportunities women had when it came to job opportunities. he only discussed the causes of it. maybe he did when he talks about some women working as prostitutes because they were poor, but still he should of focused on that issue as well.
PR# 2
I agree with you both here too, it saddens me to think these women were not appreciated for the mammoth task they had in running a household. I don’t think the working class women necessarily lacked domesticity though, I‘m sure they were required to fulfill all roles, working a job and keeping their households in order, although they were probably not as literate as the middle class women. I agree though that with only poorer women working outside the home even further separation of the classes would happen.
Yes I agree with you, the independence these women experienced came with a big price, hard work for little money. They were also pushed out of their positions by immigrants who were willing to work even harder for even less money. Unbelievable!! Uncannily similar to what is going on in America today though, funny how some things don’t change.
I didn’t think Sanger disrespected prostitutes either, I think what Irene was saying, however I was a little confused from the text but I think she was saying that Sanger couldn’t understand how women could be ‘candidly sexual’ it just wasn’t their nature, it must be some outside influence!! I think the author mentioned this was a middle class, 19th Century appropriate attitude.
I see the cause of prostitution as a result of low employment opportunities also. With one there is the other. I think the ‘draw’ of prostitution also comes from supposed ‘easy money’ so even if there were some opportunities, many would make the choice of prostitution.
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