Abstract
The family of the industrial era was the battlefield where matters of gender were resolved and cultural contacts were mediated at a time of great demographic change. Urbanization and westward expansion proceeded simultaneously, the South and Northeast lost population to western and north central states, and immigration accelerated after 1900, with women participating in these upheavals sometimes as prime movers and at other times as reluctant venturers. This demographic and economic turmoil prompted the state and other external agencies to intervene increasingly in family life in an attempt to bring all sectors of the population into conformity with reformers’ and lawmakers’ views about appropriate gender and age relations. They regarded the white middle-class urban model of wage-earning father, home-making mother, and dependent children as the ideal family, yet the discrepancies between ethnic and racial groups over women’s individual interests and those of the family continued to characterize population trends in this era.
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Bibliography
Contemporary accounts of American education can be found in US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1917);
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Studies of African-American women writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries refute the notion that literary production was exclusively white or male. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987) indicates that these authors subverted the paradigms of (white) womanhood as a means of reflecting upon (black) women’s experiences.
Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992) explores the themes upon which Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, and other African-American women authors reflected.
Other female contributions to American cultural life are discussed in Kathy Preiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986);
Elaine Hedges, “The Nineteenth Century Diarist and Her Quilts,” Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), 293–308;
Jean Gordon, “Early American Women Artists and the Social Context in Which They Worked,” American Quarterly, 30 (1978), 54–69;
Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (1994).
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© 1999 S. J. Kleinberg
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Kleinberg, S.J. (1999). Family, Migration, and Social Values in the Industrial Era. In: Women in the United States, 1830–1945. American History in Depth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27698-1_7
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