History of Women in America Midterm

Primary Sources

Sources that came directly from the time period of study; important because they give us a look directly into the culture and thoughts of people at the time.

Secondary Sources

Sources that are written many years later about the time period of study; important because of the analysis and different perspectives that the historian/scholar gives, but also contain biases.

Coverture

A woman has no legal identity; it is covered first by her father and then by her husband; makes it difficult to trace women through history, as their identities are covered by their husbands.

Seven Themes of Women’s History

Mobility; violence, including physical, representational, and economical; resistance; labor; criminalization; art; sex

Salem Witch Trials

Occurred in Salem Village in Massachusetts in 1691-1692, where many people were accused of performing witchcraft and being witches, the majority of whom were women.

Possession

A phenomenon occurring during the Salem Witch Trials, in which people, mostly younger girls and women, would claim that they were possessed by a witch. Symptoms included convulsions, odd behavior, etc. Could have been a result of trauma from King Phillip’s War, or a cultural performance.

Misogynoir

The unique combination of racism and misogyny experienced by Black women.

Fugitive Slave Act

A part of the compromise of 1850 made in order to postpone the Civil War; All legal citizens were now required to return runaway slaves to their owners, even if they were in a “free” state, and provided a monetary incentive for the return of the runaway slave

Harriet Jacobs

Author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”; A successful runaway slave who was able to teach herself to read and write, escape from her enslavement in the South after 7 years hiding in a small attic, and eventually make her own money and publish a book in the North.

Midwifery

One of the few early career paths for women; women who aided other women through their pregnancies, childbirth, and postpartum, as well as performed all the tasks of modern day doctors by diagnosing and taking care of the sick and ailing in their communities.

Martha Ballard

A midwife pre- and during the revolutionary era who kept a diary entry for a whole lot of years of her life; this book was often considered unimportant by historians until another woman wrote a whole book about how they were wrong.

King Phillip’s War

The most bloody war in American history proportionally; a chain of very violent conflicts between Native Americans and the settlers of the 1600s, one that could be the cause of major trauma, possibly causing the Salem Witch Trials

Puritans

A group of separatists who arrived in Plymouth in order to find religious freedom and create the “castle on the hill” after facing extreme discrimination in England; very patriarchal structure ordered after the way that humans are meant to interact with God.

Republican Motherhood

The idea that women should be allowed to be educated in order to educate the next generation of lawyers and politicians.

Abigail Adams

The second first lady of the United States; wrote letters to her husband telling him to “Remember the Ladies” and threatening to form a rebellion against the new, male run United States government in order to have women included in the Constitution.

1662 Virginia Law

Makes slavery inheritable through the condition of the mother.

1808

Written in the constitution as the year that the import of enslaved people is banned; makes the 1662 law more important and put pressure on Black women to have more children to continue to recreate slavery

Seneca Falls Convention

The first women’s rights convention where they read, discussed, and signed the Declaration of Sentiments; attended by about 300 people in 1848

Declaration of Sentiments

A document written in order to detail the tyranny that the patriarchic United States government imposes onto women, mimicking the Declaration of Independence

Petitions

Post revolutionary war, wealthy white women were able to make petitions to the US government in order to regain property, money, and other types of compensation, often after their loyalist husbands fled; many played into the stereotypes of helpless women at the time in order to get their way, as argued in the book, In Dependence.

Lesbian/Proto-lesbian

Women who love other women; in the modern era usually romantic relationships and including genital contact, but this isn’t necessarily true for people of other eras.

Sexual Invert

An outdated understanding of homosexual people; people who have the mind of one gender but the physical sex of another, explaining why some women felt attraction to other women, and men to other men.

Anachronistic

Separating ourselves and our modern understandings from the time period of study; not imposing modern terms and understandings to a time period where these thought processes weren’t the same and these terms did not exist.

Epistemic Privilege

The concept that certain social positions, particularly those of marginalized and oppressed groups, offer a superior, more comprehensive understanding of social reality.

Indiana Women’s Prison

Opened in 1873, the first all women’s prison in the US, also run by women

Rhoda Coffin and Sarah Smith

The founders of the IWP; Quaker women who were able to create the prison because of their privilege as wealthy white women and by leaning into maternal stereotypes; highly abusive to those who were incarcerated in their prison.

Cherokee Women

We didn’t spend much time on this and the only thing she mentioned for the test was that they had a matrilineal social structure where women were the centers of power and inheritance.