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365ce08
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it may be time to stop worrying about what we are making extinct and start nurturing what will outlast us.
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Gail Collins-Ranadive |
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bca5b1d
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And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn't yet become either prestigious or profitable--whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.
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Gail Collins |
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b03fdf3
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But there's something about the story of Salem that makes it a Rorschach test for our own vision of history. Some people look back on it as a story about repressed sexual hysteria. Some think it was all about the tensions between the settlers and the Indians. Others see slightly subliminated class warfare. Whatever happened, it was soaked in issues of gender. Women were the beginning and end of the Salem witch-hunt, the first accusers and t..
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Gail Collins |
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67d4c69
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Many of her male friends in the labor movement or politics found the crusade either strange or irritating. One night, Sanger and Bill Haywood, the famous labor leader, addressed a group of women strikers. An observer remembered that Sanger spoke of women's right to limit the size of their families and "received a hearty response" from the audience. Haywood then followed, promising the women that in the glorious economy built by union labor ..
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Gail Collins |
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6720f81
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It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the contradictions of nineteenth-century womanhood than the workaholic editor continually reminding her readers how lucky they were to be presiding over the hearth rather than engaging in "the silly struggle for honor and preferment" in the outside world."
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Gail Collins |
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1808774
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Under slavery, African Americans led desperately constricted and frequently brutal existences. But ordinary life went on as well. For most, the average day was filled with couplings and quarreling, friendship and feuds, moments of silliness, acts of selfishness, and gestures of incredible kindness. They carved out their own worlds as best they could.
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Gail Collins |
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fe6e3a9
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Next to the sale of their children or spouse, rape was perhaps the worst nightmare of slavery. We have no way of knowing how often it happened... We do know that white women were haunted by the fear that their husbands, fathers, or sons were having sex with their slaves. And we know that black mothers nervously watched their daughters to protect them from dangers they could not understand.
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Gail Collins |
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45b7eb9
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But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.
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Gail Collins |
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336d3c3
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Throughout American history, the concept of the woman as a protected homebody went hand in hand with the reality that most women--poor women--were expected to work and were not given any special deference because of their sex. By going off to sling rivets or weld airplane wings, middle-class women lost their status and joined the other part of American womanhood that was expected to fend for itself.
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Gail Collins |
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38afe62
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The department stores also imposed a new, very American kind of democracy, in which everyone was equal as long as they had the money to pay. (Marshall Field instructed his clerks to call all customers "ladies," no matter what their dress or manners.) Even poor women enjoyed the stores' big, carefully decorated windows, with displays that changed regularly."
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Gail Collins |
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d997b63
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Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, "What Every Girl Should Know," for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: "What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office."
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Gail Collins |
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273d2b3
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Truth was one of the few public women of her day who did not pick favorites when it came to the claims of race and sex. "If colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before," she said. Not all black women agreed with her."
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Gail Collins |
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4f30f11
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It's possible that a connection existed between the increasing independence of many women and the surgical assault on them. But it's even more likely that doctors started removing women's sexual organs simply because the arrival of anesthetics had made it safe to do so. Doctors had always regarded female reproductive organs as the source of all women's medical problems.
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Gail Collins |
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5adf175
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But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America's first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spirit. Not since Hannah Dustan scalped her Indian captors in 1697 had the country been so enamored with the idea of a woman warrior.
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Gail Collins |
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9168781
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Americans love the story of the immigrant who comes through Ellis Island with no possessions but struggles to success and happiness. It is the story that most defines us, and we tell it to ourselves over and over. But for the real immigrants, each story was different, and the happiness of the ending changed with every telling.
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Gail Collins |
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66ce521
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The sense of solidarity among the poor was often--although certainly not always--strong. Housewives with very little still fed hungry tramps who came to their back doors. Pauline Kael, a teenager during the Depression who grew up to be a famous film critic, remembered her mother vowing: "I'll feed them till the food runs out."
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Gail Collins |
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e24fd28
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Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice--many female abolition societies refused to allow black members.
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Gail Collins |
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1e0b3bd
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The dissolution of the normal boundaries between women's work and men's allowed some women to operate with an independence the nation would never really see again until the twentieth century.
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Gail Collins |
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b663aa0
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Just being female made women candidates for perpetual medical care, because doctors began treating all the normal passages of their lives--puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause--as illnesses.
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Gail Collins |
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142234e
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Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)
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Gail Collins |
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63df252
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The maximum weekly rate paid for women in domestic service in New England around the time of the Revolution was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers.
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Gail Collins |
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f8725f9
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Mothers are the only gods in whom all the world believes Joseph Campbell claimed. And this makes psychological sense: all children come forth through women, but boys must learn to separate from the mother by making her other, while girls identify with her, as they will become mothers themselves.
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Gail Collins-Ranadive |
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49e6d5f
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One law prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court, and carefully defined "negro" as anyone who had one nonwhite grandparent."
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Gail Collins |
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d8f5507
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The history of American women is all about leaving home--crossing
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Gail Collins |
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21a7c78
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That's pretty much our story: Melanie and Scarlett, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the soccer moms and the vampire slayers. All of them are more complicated than they let on.
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Gail Collins |
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a56f122
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It was a raw country, and the first generations of colonial women did things that their granddaughters would have found unthinkable.
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Gail Collins |
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f490682
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They wore fashions that broadcast the fact that they were much sturdier and more mature than the little flapper. (If they were going to carry the world on their shoulders, those shoulders had better be padded ones.) They could take care of themselves at a time when men couldn't be counted on. The ultimate heroine of the decade, Scarlett O'Hara, could do anything except pick the right man--she was, as one critic pointed out, a flapper in rev..
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Gail Collins |
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d079834
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Sir William's critics claimed his much-younger spouse had tormented him with her sexual demands, forcing him to raise money to buy her luxuries to make up for his inadequacies in bed.
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Gail Collins |
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232286d
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The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.
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Gail Collins |
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f6726d5
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It's hard to imagine how women made the leap into professions for which they had no role models, no invitation, and very little encouragement.
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Gail Collins |
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eaab369
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The male view of why women had to be kept out of the public world was basically that they just weren't up to it.
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Gail Collins |
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0a4d13c
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Looking back, it's easy to see the clothes as a metaphor for everything else that happened to women in postwar America.
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Gail Collins |
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4a0f759
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The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.
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Gail Collins |
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6638115
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As in Europe, the typical American witch-suspect was a woman, frequently middle-aged with few or no children and a reputation as a difficult personality.
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Gail Collins |
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024d956
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The first successful sanitary napkins went on sale in 1921, in what must have been one of the most important unheralded moments in the history of American women.
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Gail Collins |
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57099cb
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There were actually all sorts of New Women, but they shared an independent competence that some found rather terrifying.
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Gail Collins |
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efcc50f
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No matter what the ladies' contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal.
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Gail Collins |
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a6078f3
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not before it sets off soft pink shades in stucco and stones, turns the mountains from sun burnt orange to shadowed blue.
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Gail Collins-Ranadive |
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f091953
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Charley Parkhurst ran a stagecoach through dangerous territory for years and no one knew Charley was actually a woman until she died in 1879. "He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the California drivers...and it was an honor to be striven for to occupy the spare end of the driver's seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins," wrote the San Francisco Morning Call before Charley's sex was discovered."
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Gail Collins |
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1010542
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Mary Johnson may have been the first African American woman. She arrived sometime before 1620 as the maid of a Virginia planter. Like white women, the black residents of the early southern colonies found opportunities in the general chaos around them. Johnson and her husband were indentured servants, and once they earned their freedom, they acquired a 250-acre farm and five indentured servants of their own. By the mid-seventeenth century, a..
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Gail Collins |
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00e3191
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1924, the first two women were elected governors, and both were uninspiring stand-ins for their husbands. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the widow of the governor of Wyoming, had not even wanted her husband to run for office, and when he died suddenly, the Democrats nominated her to fill out his term without her permission. "Ma" Ferguson of Texas ran for office when her husband was impeached. Her signature achievement as governor was to pardon an aver..
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Gail Collins |
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8dc19fd
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fifth of American families lived on farms in the 1930s,
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Gail Collins |
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9ebc967
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Eleanor was a member of one of America's great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it's surprising she survived her upbringing at all--one cousin called it "the grimmest childhood I had ever known." Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she re..
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Gail Collins |
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454f1be
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And Emerson once claimed that we Americans needed the boundless West in order to become ourselves, to stop being pseudo-Europeans.
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Gail Collins-Ranadive |