As you read, take notes on the following questions. Be sure to provide specific examples from this text in your responses. Responses should be at least 1-2 paragraphs.
- What effect does private property seem to have on the position of women in society?
- How did women manage to pay for their voyages to the American colonies?
- How, in early America, did masters exercise their control over female servants and slaves? How did husbands exercise control over their wives?
- Was it better for a woman to be married or single in colonial America?
- What role did American women play during the American Revolution?
- Why was Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony?
- Why was Mary Dryer hanged?
- What did Abigail Adams argue for regarding equal rights between men and women? Whom did she appeal to?
- In the first half of the 19th century, what did the “cult of true womanhood” (Sometimes called the “cult of domesticity) teach was women’s proper role in society? How might a middle-class woman have used this ideology to justify her involvement, outside the home, in reform movements such as abolition and education?
- How did the anti-slavery movement lead to the women’s rights movement?
- What was the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848? How did the Declaration of Principles (also known as the Declaration of Sentiments) draw upon the Declaration of Independence?
- Why does the author call this chapter “the intimately oppressed”?
- Make a timeline of people and the events surveyed in this chapter, and briefly describe the people and events.
- Anne Hutchinson
- Abigail Adams
- Emma Willard
- Advice to a Daughter
- The role of women during the Revolutionary War
- Frances Wright
- Lucy Stone
- Bloomers
- Elizabeth Blackwell
- Sarah and Angelica Grimke
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- Seneca Falls
