Our American sisters: Women in American life and thought

Politics & Social Sciences

Shade, William G.

Friedman, Jean E.

Social Sciences

D.C. Heath

Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought (College) [May 01, 1987] Friedman, Jean E.; Shade, William G. and Capozzoli, Mary Jane ...

Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought

Capozzoli, Mary Jane

D.C. Heath & Co.

The southern women's reform movement emerged late in the nineteenth century, several decades behind the formation of the northern feminist movement. The Enclosed Garden explains this delay by examining the subtle and complex roots of women's identity to disclose the structures that defined -- and limited -- female autonomy in the South.Jean Friedman demonstrates how the evangelical communities, a church-directed, kin-dominated society, linked plantation, farm, and town in the predominantly rural South. Family networks and the rural church were the princple influences on social relationships defining sexual, domestic, marital, and work roles. Friedman argues that the church and family, more than the institution of slavery, inhibited the formation of an antebellum feminist movement. The Civil War had little effect on the role of southern women because the family system regrouped and returned to the traditional social structure. Only with the onset of modernization in the late nineteenth century did conditions allow for the beginnings of feminist reform, and it began as an urban movement that did not challenge the family system.Friedman arrives at a new understanding of the evolution of Victorian southern women's identity by comparing the experiences of black women and white women as revealed in church records, personal letters, and slave narratives. Through a unique use of dream analysis, Friedman also shows that the dreams women described in their diaries reveal their struggle to resolve internal conflicts about their families and the church community. This original study provides a new perspective on nineteenth-century southern social structure, its consequences for women's identity and role, and the ways in which the rural evangelical kinship system resisted change.

The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900

History

Americas

The University of North Carolina Press

The southern women's reform movement emerged late in the nineteenth century, several decades behind the formation of the northern feminist movement. The Enclosed Garden explains this delay by examining the subtle and complex roots of women's identity to disclose the structures that defined -- and limited -- female autonomy in the South. Jean Friedman demonstrates how the evangelical communities, a church-directed, kin-dominated society, linked plantation, farm, and town in the predominantly rural South. Family networks and the rural church were the princple influences on social relationships defining sexual, domestic, marital, and work roles. Friedman argues that the church and family, more than the institution of slavery, inhibited the formation of an antebellum feminist movement. The Civil War had little effect on the role of southern women because the family system regrouped and returned to the traditional social structure. Only with the onset of modernization in the late nineteenth century did conditions allow for the beginnings of feminist reform, and it began as an urban movement that did not challenge the family system. Friedman arrives at a new understanding of the evolution of Victorian southern women's identity by comparing the experiences of black women and white women as revealed in church records, personal letters, and slave narratives. Through a unique use of dream analysis, Friedman also shows that the dreams women described in their diaries reveal their struggle to resolve internal conflicts about their families and the church community. This original study provides a new perspective on nineteenth-century southern social structure, its consequences for women's identity and role, and the ways in which the rural evangelical kinship system resisted change.

The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

In Ways of Wisdom, Jean Friedman traces how Jacob Mordecai and his family, German American Orthodox Jews, adopted the Anglo-Irish enlightened pedagogical system developed by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria. In 1808 Mordecai founded the Warrenton Female Academy on the enlightened principles described in the Edgeworths’ guide, Practical Education, and he enlisted family members to teach and manage the school. Rachel Mordecai, inspired by her father’s progressive methods, initiated an Edgeworthian experiment in home education on her young stepsister, Eliza. Rachel’s diary, reproduced in full in Ways of Wisdom, chronicles the moral instruction of Eliza. While retaining the traditional didacticism of wisdom literature, the diary also describes Eliza’s resistance to enlightened discipline and method.
Friedman’s case study bears particular importance for scholars as it qualifies and enriches our understanding of the American Enlightenment as an amalgam of religious and ethnic assumptions rather than a universal acceptance of Liberalism or Republicanism. Ways of Wisdom also offers an illuminating reinterpretation of “Republican Motherhood” as a culturally diverse and politically complicated domestic paradigm.

Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University of Georgia Press

Revolt of the Conservative Democrats: An Essay on American Political Culture and Political Development, 1837-1844 (Studies in American History and Culture)

UMI Research Press

The revolt of the conservative Democrats: An essay on American political culture and political development, 1837-1844 (Studies in American history and culture)

This study introduces a new perspective on Lincoln and the Civil War through an examination of his declaration of our national values and the subsequent interpretation of those values by families during the war.• Takes a new approach to the study of the Civil War as it connects Lincoln to families' assessment of their own and national virtues• Provides a unique viewpoint on Lincoln's virtues derived from his important Independence Hall speech• Shows how virtue helped to coalesce families into one unified nation• Is enlivened by short biographical pieces in every chapter

Abraham Lincoln and the Virtues of War: How Civil War Families Challenged and Transformed Our National Values

Praeger

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Books by Friedman, Jean E.