SUBMISSION: Students will submit their completed assignments via Canvas. Note, plagiarism detection software will be enabled. Be sure that your submission is original, adheres to academic formatting standards, and includes a comprehensive bibliography. * INSTRUCTIONS: Choose ONE of the following essay prompts to respond to: I choose this one: * Evaluate the postwar Civil War era with a gendered focus. What opportunities were presented during Reconstruction? What shortcoming existed? Overall, how would you characterize the post war South and women's status within the region? Be sure to place your topic of choice (i.e. antebellum reform, the reconstruction era, or activism during WWI) into context. That is, what conditions: socially, politically, economically, encouraged or motived the evolution? Similarly, don't forget to evaluate the legacy. How does the era change the landscape for American women? Your essay must incorporate a minimum of 2 primary sources from Through Women's Eyes. You can choose from material embedded within the chapter or essays contained at the chapter's end. Source material must be cited appropriately-in-text citations as well as a bibliography are needed. Given the length of the paper, avoid using block quotations. These are direct quotes longer than four lines in length. Generally, block quoting is reserved for papers which are much lengthier (10-15 pages). Rely on your own interpretation of the material. You do not need to preform additional research outside of the text, PP slides, and material on Canvas including documentary films. Midterm papers are to be 3-4 pages in length not counting the title page (750-1,000 words), Times New Roman 12 pt. font, and double spaced. Following paragraphs is from trough women's eyes book. Chapter 6 IDA B. WELLS, MARY KENNEY, AND M. CAREY THOMAS were all daughters of the Civil War era. Wells was born in 1862 to Mississippi slaves; Kenney in 1864 to Irish immigrants in Hannibal, Missouri; and Thomas in 1857 to a wealthy Baltimore Quaker family. Despite these great differences in background, the unfolding of each woman's life illustrates the forces that affected American women's history in the years after the Civil War and, in turn, women's capacity to be forces in the making of American history. Wells (later Wells-Barnett) was shaped by the violent struggles between former slaves seeking to realize their emancipation and white southerners seeking to retain their racial dominance. As a journalist, Wells exposed new, brutal methods of white supremacy, and her work sparked an organized women's movement among African Americans. Kenney (later O'Sullivan) was a lifelong wage earner who recognized that workers needed to act collectively rather than individually to improve their lives. A pathbreaking female labor organizer, she helped form the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 (see pp. 422–24). Thomas, a self-proclaimed tomboy as a child, never married and became a pioneer of higher education for women. She was one of the first women to graduate from Cornell University and to receive a doctorate (in Switzerland), and she was the founding dean of Bryn Mawr College. In the post-Civil War (or postbellum) years, such individuals laid the basis for an era of extraordinary achievement by American women. “Reconstruction” is the term used to describe the period of American history immediately after the Civil War, the revision of the U.S. Constitution to deal with the consequences of emancipation, the rebuilding of the South after the devastations of war, and the reconstitution of national unity after the trauma of sectional division. The formal period of Reconstruction lasted twelve years. It ended in 1877 when U.S. troops withdrew from the former Confederacy, leaving the South to work out its own troubled racial destiny without federal oversight and the North to concentrate on industrial development and economic growth. The word "reconstruction" can also be used to cover a longer period, during which the U.S. economy was reconstituted entirely around industrial capitalism. The free-labor ethic on which the Republican Party was founded evolved into a commitment to unbridled industrialization. The resulting wealth, optimism, and productivity were not shared equally. On the contrary, the gap between rich and poor grew enormously during the postbellum years, producing great tension and violence between owners and workers. With chattel slavery eliminated, industrial society could no longer ignore its internal class divisions, and by the end of the century, conflict between labor and capital overtook the inequalities of race as the most overt challenge to national unity. Women were reconstructing their lives in these years as well. In the defeated South, women emancipated from slavery grappled with the challenges and dangers of their tentative freedom, while their former mistresses sought to maintain the privileges of white supremacy under new conditions. In the North, a determined group of women sought equal political rights, and the woman suffrage movement came into its own. Industrial capitalism generated both a rapidly expanding female labor force and new leisure and wealth for middle- and upper-class women. Between 1865 and 1900, women's wage labor, the terms of appropriate womanhood within which women lived, and their scope for public action all expanded. By the end of the nineteenth century, the basis had been laid for an epoch of female assertion and accomplishment unparalleled in American history.American history's first presidential assassination (Abraham Lincoln), followed quickly by its first presidential impeachment (Andrew Johnson), left the executive branch in shambles and the legislative branch in charge of national Reconstruction. Republicans controlled Congress, and former abolitionists, known as Radicals, controlled the Republican Party. To protect the North's victory and their party's control over Congress, the Radicals were determined to enfranchise the only population on whom the Republicans could depend in the defeated Confederacy - former slaves. In 1866, Radicals proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to establish the citizenship of ex-slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment began with a simple, inclusive sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Leaders of the women's rights movement hoped to further revise the Constitution and reconstruct democracy without distinction of either race or gender. Despite their best efforts, however, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, followed by that of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, established black suffrage without reference to woman suffrage. Thwarted in Congress, these women turned to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that women's political right to the franchise was included within the new constitutional definitions of national citizenship and political rights. Their efforts failed. The only actual enfranchisement of women in the Reconstruction era occurred in the territories of Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), where a handful of legislators accorded women the vote in territorial and local elections. Even so, the movement for women's enfranchisement changed and expanded, drawing new adherents from the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. The old alliance with abolitionists was shattered, and most white women's efforts for women's equality were no longer linked to those for racial equality. The advocates of woman suffrage undertook a campaign that would require an additional half century and another constitutional amendment - the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920 — to complete (see pp. 450–52). Constitutionalizing Women's Rights In 1865 and 1866, as Congress was considering how to word the Fourteenth Amendment, women's rights activists called for woman suffrage to be joined with black suffrage in a single constitutional act. Many northern women had fought for the end of slavery, so, in the memorable words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Would it not be advisable, when the constitutional door is open, for [women] to avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side?”1 To pursue this goal, Cady Stanton, Anthony, and others formed the American Equal Rights Association, dedicated to both black and woman suffrage. “We resolved to make common cause with the colored class the only other disfranchised class,” observed Lucy Stone, "and strike for equal rights for all."2 But Radicals in Congress contended that pursuing woman suffrage and black suffrage simultaneously would doom the latter, which was their priority. Accordingly, they wrote the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, meant to encourage states to grant voting rights to former slaves, to apply only to “male inhabitants. . . twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States." This was the first reference to gender in the U.S. Constitution. Woman suffragists petitioned Congress to get the wording changed, but abolitionist Wendell Phillips told them, "This hour belongs to the Negro," leaving Cady Stanton to wonder impatiently if "the African race is composed entirely of males."Two years after the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, congressional Radicals wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to advance black suffrage more forcefully, explicitly forbidding states from disfranchisements on the grounds of “race, color or previous condition of servitude." Again gender was not included, leading Cady Stanton to charge that “all mankind will vote not because of intelligence, patriotism, property or white skin but because it is male, not female.”4 The American Equal Rights Association collapsed, and in its wake, woman suffragists divided over whether to endorse the Fifteenth Amendment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony broke with their former Radical Republican allies and formed the rival National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). To reconcile woman suffrage advocacy with the Radical Republican agenda, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Ward Blackwell, took a different route. In 1869, they organized the American Woman Suffrage Association. They focused on campaigns for suffrage at the state level and in 1870 inaugurated the Woman's Journal, a weekly newspaper published for the next fifty years. Of the two societies, NWSA pursued the more aggressive, independent path. The organization's newspaper, defiantly named the Revolution, lasted only two years. It proclaimed on its masthead: "Women their rights and nothing less; men their rights and nothing more." NWSA gained political autonomy for the suffrage movement but at the cost of an important part of the women's rights legacy: attention to the interrelation of the hierarchies of race and gender. As the larger society left behind the concerns of the ex-slaves and of Radical Reconstruction, much of the woman suffrage movement did, too, envisioning women's emancipation largely in terms of white women. A New Departure for Woman Suffrage Once the new constitutional amendments had been ratified, NWSA proposed an inventive, bold interpretation of them. The argument was both simple and profound: first, women were "persons" whose rights as national citizens were established by the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment; second, the right to vote was central to and inherent in national citizenship. Third, and most important, women's right to vote was thus already established and did not require any additional constitutional change. This argument, which was called the New Departure, brought to prominence one of the most unusual advocates in the history of woman suffrage, Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Born into poverty, Woodhull made her way into the highest ranks of New York society, in large part by cultivating powerful men. Aided by a congressman friend and without the knowledge of other suffragists, in 1871 she presented the case for the New Departure before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Within a year, however, Woodhull, who had boldly criticized sexual hypocrisy within middle-class marriages, had become involved in the most notorious sexual scandal of the age. She went public with her knowledge that Henry Ward Beecher, powerful Brooklyn minister and brother of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (see pp. 160–61, 250–51), had had an adulterous affair with one of his parishioners. Under a new federal anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act (named for Anthony Comstock, the "social purity" crusader who drafted the legislation), Woodhull was jailed for using the federal mail system to distribute her newspaper, which included accounts of the scandal. Cady Stanton, one of the few suffragists who steadfastly defended Woodhull, insisted, "We have already women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity. If this present woman be crucified, let men drive the spikes.”5 Woodhull avoided jail but dropped out of public life; she eventually moved to England, where she married a wealthy man, remade her reputation, and lived until 1927.Independent of Woodhull, suffragists around the country pursued their voting rights on the basis of the New Departure theory that they needed only to take hold of the right to vote, which was already theirs. During the elections of 1871 and 1872, groups of women went to their local polling places, put forth their constitutional understanding to stunned election officials, and stepped forward to submit their votes. In Washington, D.C., the African American journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary was able to register but not to vote. Susan B. Anthony convinced polling officials in her hometown of Rochester, New York, to let her vote. "Well I have been & gone & done it!!” she wrote exuberantly. “Positively voted the Republican ticket."6 Two weeks later, she was arrested for the crime of illegal voting, based on a federal law meant to disfranchise former Confederates. Her trial was a spectacle from start to finish. The judge ordered the jury to find Anthony guilty, which it did, and the judge's final insult was to refuse to jail Anthony so as to keep her from appealing her verdict. The U.S. Supreme Court finally considered the suffragists' argument in 1875, in the case of Virginia Minor, of St. Louis, Missouri, who sued the official who had not allowed her to vote. In Minor v. Happersett, one of the most important rulings in the history of women's rights (see the Appendix, p. A-6), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, while Minor was indeed a citizen, voting was not a right but a privilege bestowed by the federal government as it saw fit. Not only did this decision strike the New Departure theory dead, but it also indicated that the Court was bent on narrowing the meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in general. Subsequently, the Court permitted more and more ways to deprive black men of their franchise and constitutional civil rights. After the Minor decision, NWSA began to advocate a separate constitutional amendment, modeled on the Fifteenth, to bar states from disfranchising “on the grounds of sex.” This was the wording that would eventually go into the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), but for the time being, the proposed amendment made little headway. In 1876, NWSA leaders, uninvited, forced their way into the national celebration in Philadelphia of the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the corner stones of a republic," they declared. "Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement."7Meanwhile, life in the defeated South was being reconstructed as well. No element of freedom came easily or automatically for the former slaves, and southern whites changed their lives and expectations reluctantly. Black women fought for control over their labor, their children, and their bodies. Elite white women sought new capacities and strengths to accommodate the loss of the labor and wealth that slaveowning had given them. White women from the middle and lower ranks remained poised between loyalties of race and the resentments of class. By 1870, all the southern states had met the terms Congress mandated for readmission to the Union. After the removal of federal troops in 1877, white southerners, in a process known as Redemption, moved to reclaim political control and to reassert white supremacy. As they did so, new laws institutionalized segregation and a race-based system of convict labor. The region's economy, still largely agricultural, slowly began to industrialize. The complex result of these post-Reconstruction social, political, and economic changes was known as the New South. Black Women in the New South After the defeat of the Confederacy, many freedwomen and freedmen stayed on with their masters for months because they did not know they had been freed or had nowhere to go. Others took to the road to find long-lost spouses and family members. Those who could not travel posted advertisements, such as this one in the Anglo-African Magazine: “Martha Ward Wishes information concerning her sister, Rosetta McQuillan, who was sold from Norfolk, Va. About thirty years ago to a Frenchman in Mobile, Ala.”8The hard-won family reunions of the freed slaves did not always end happily. Some spouses had formed new unions. Laura Spicer, sold away from a Virginia plantation, was contacted by her husband three years after the war ended. He had since become attached to another woman and was deeply conflicted. “I do not know which I love best, you or Anna," he wrote to Spicer. “[T]ry and marry some good, smart man . . . and do it because you love me, and not because I think more of the wife I have got than I do of you."9 Nor were parents always recognized by the children they had been forced to leave behind. "At firs' I was scared of her, 'cause I didn't know who she was," one child remembered of her mother. “She put me in her lap an' she most' nigh cried when she seen de back o' my head . . . where de lice had been an' I had scratched em."10 In 1865, the U.S. Army, charged with occupying and governing the defeated Confederacy, organized a special division to deal with the former slaves. The Freedmen's Bureau provided temporary aid, oversaw their labor, and adjudicated disputes with former masters. It was the first government agency established by the United States to address the needs of an oppressed racial minority. One of its tasks was to ensure that freedpeople had rights to their own children. On returning to the Union, southern states had passed laws, known as black codes, to limit the freedoms of newly emancipated slaves. Apprenticeship laws provided for the indenture of black children into servitude regardless of the wishes of their parents. Black mothers and grandmothers fought especially hard against the black codes. “We were delighted when we heard that the Constitution set us free," Lucy Lee of Baltimore explained, “but God help us, our condition is bettered but little; free ourselves, [but] deprived of our children. . . . Give us our children and don't let them be raised in the ignorance we have [been]."11 The deepest desire of the freedpeople was to have their own family farms. However, Congress

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SUBMISSION: Students will submit their completed assignments via Canvas. Note, plagiarism detection software will be enabled. Be sure that your submission is original, adheres to academic formatting standards, and includes a comprehensive bibliography. * INSTRUCTIONS: Choose ONE of the following essay prompts to respo