The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.
The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
I'm so intrigued by women throughout history where the significance of what they were representing at that time is obscured by the fact a man saved them or they were prostitutes.
During the 19th-century struggle for women's rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.
The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.
The history of American women is all about leaving home - crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own.
That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.
Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.
As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show.