Imagine the role of a woman in the early 1800s, waking up and right from the “get-go” feeding and clothing children while trying to keep them in line all day. The latter half of the day spent cleaning the house and cooking a meal in preparation for the husband to return. During the early years of the 19th century women were expected to be proper and hold themselves with respect. They were not encouraged to pursue an education, their only role was to “play house” and be a mother, Margaret Sanger wrote evidence of this prejudice, “Woman’s role has been that of an incubator and little more.” However between the late 1800s and the end of World War II the status of women in the United States dramatically changed in a beneficial way for all parties.
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They believed that women were, “…little more than a servant to her husband and children.” as Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it in the book Voices of Freedom edited by Eric Foner. There was the belief that women couldn’t make the correct decision on votes and that they were not capable of handling. Some people were even under the assumption that most women did not actually care about getting the right to vote. Not only was the topic of women’s suffrage a debate but so was the right for women to hold industrial jobs. Before World War I women worked at home and as the men disappeared and the demand for workers increased jobs opened up for women. However as men started to come back from the war they took their old jobs back. The problem was that there were a bunch of women holding jobs and now as the war came to an end, a giant population of unemployed men were wandering about. The solution according to Norman Cousins was to, “Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.” Public opinion seemed to be that the women were just place holders until the men could come back and continue working again. Women faced great opposition to suffrage and the right to get jobs but they fought back and only served to gain a greater more equal status in American
They believed that women were, “…little more than a servant to her husband and children.” as Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it in the book Voices of Freedom edited by Eric Foner. There was the belief that women couldn’t make the correct decision on votes and that they were not capable of handling. Some people were even under the assumption that most women did not actually care about getting the right to vote. Not only was the topic of women’s suffrage a debate but so was the right for women to hold industrial jobs. Before World War I women worked at home and as the men disappeared and the demand for workers increased jobs opened up for women. However as men started to come back from the war they took their old jobs back. The problem was that there were a bunch of women holding jobs and now as the war came to an end, a giant population of unemployed men were wandering about. The solution according to Norman Cousins was to, “Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.” Public opinion seemed to be that the women were just place holders until the men could come back and continue working again. Women faced great opposition to suffrage and the right to get jobs but they fought back and only served to gain a greater more equal status in American