Discussion Questions
1. The book says that for American women "the center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Do you agree?
2. Were the early colonial women very brave or easily led? If you had lived in 17th century England, would you have opted to stay home or brave the journey? Where would you have wanted to end up—in New England or Virginia?
3. America's Women seems to attribute the witch craze in Salem to "teenage girls in crisis who stumbled on a very bad but very effective way of trying to take control of their unhappy environment." Do you agree? The story can be told from any number of perspectives: economic, religious, social, psychological. Is any one, or combination, satisfactory?
4. When families moved from farms to the city after the Revolutionary War, women's role changed and their status fell. The whole concept of the True Woman who radiated goodness was an effort to raise their stature again. Was it a satisfactory strategy? Can you come up with alternatives?
5. There are two role models for women who wanted to have public lives in the early 19th centur—Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Blackwell. How did they differ? If you had been alive then, which would you have been like?
6. Women were the best clients for the growing medical profession in the period before the Civil War. Why do you think that was? How did it work out for them?
7. Some white Southern women had different views of slavery than their husbands. Why was that?
8. The book says the "emotional burden on middle-class black women in the 19th century was stupendous." Has this burden been duplicated in the 21st century?
9. The rise of department stores at the turn of the century meant a huge change for women—both as consumers and as workers. Why was that?
10. If you had been an immigrant around the turn of the century, what country would you have wanted to come from? Why?
11. Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to serve in Congress, and she wound up voting against not one, but both world wars. Do you approve or disapprove?
12. In the Twenties, women won freedom in areas like dress, dating and drinking but many lost interest in politics and "feminism" fell totally out of fashion. All in all, would you regard the decade as a step forward or back?
13. When women got the vote, the first president they helped elect was one of the worst—Warren Harding. How, if at all, does this reflect on suffrage?
14. Do you agree that Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important woman in American history? If not, who would you nominate?
15. Speaking about the American civilians during World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith said "Never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation." Do you agree?
16. In the 1950s, less than 10 percent of the population felt a person could live a happy life without being married. The status of single women seems to have gone up and down several times in our history. Why is that? Where do you think it is now?
17. Things changed so fast for women in the late 1960s. Why do you think that was? Will we ever go back to the way things were in the 1950s, when the full-time housewife was the universal American ideal?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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