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U.S. History 1877-Present 5: Prohibition 6651 Views
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Description:
Hm...working and contributing to society, or eating bonbons at home? Tough choice for us at here at Shmoop. Maybe we should work at a bonbon factory?
Transcript
- 00:04
Besides alcohol the women's Christian Temperance Union also [Womens temperance union together]
- 00:07
tackled other social problems like prostitution, sanitation and labor rights
- 00:12
how by twisting the idea of the women's sphere... they said prostitutes were women
- 00:21
who had fallen because of their fathers or husbands drinking and people you can
- 00:25
imagine how much sexual abuse happened in those unregulated days as well well
Full Transcript
- 00:29
this drove the women to the ultimate sin just to get money to support themselves [Cash falls from above]
- 00:33
well it had nothing to do with the WCTU trying to protect prostitutes from
- 00:38
male violence wink wink the WCTU also argued what poor
- 00:42
sanitation prevented mothers from raising healthy children they said
- 00:47
unfair labor practices kept women working in factories when they should be [Woman working in a factory]
- 00:50
home caring for their husbands and their kids they were smart to connect their
- 00:54
social causes not to women's rebellion or women's liberation but to the women
- 00:59
sphere how could men argue with what they invented of course the idea that
- 01:05
America was great because the whole family could be supported by one man's [Man holds out bag of cash]
- 01:08
income only worked in middle and upper classes for the poor which was the
- 01:13
largest class at that time one guy working in a shoe factory wasn't going [Man carrying selection of shoes]
- 01:17
to support much of anything....Lower class families generally had lots of
- 01:21
kids and everyone had to work to make ends meet mothers and daughters work
- 01:25
12-hour days 6 days a week and not all of them long to be able to stay home and
- 01:29
eat bonbons many of them wanted to contribute to society in a public way to [Group of women in uniform]
- 01:34
earn their own money and to get out in the world because hey bonbons are also
- 01:38
great on the run.... middle and upper-class women didn't all want to stay at home [Woman with 4 babies at home]
- 01:44
and be baby machines either many spearheaded the way for social reform in
- 01:48
the cities... Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889 the rich white lady
- 01:54
who ran it and other settlement houses worked with immigrant women to improve
- 01:58
their lives then they recruited the immigrant women [Immigrant women sitting on a bench]
- 02:00
to help fight for equality pretty slick way to build up an army
- 02:04
right wealthy women also supported the poor mostly Jewish immigrant women who
- 02:09
worked in the Shirtwaist factories of New York City when those workers went
- 02:13
on strike facing down the men who used every
- 02:15
dirty trick in the book to knock them down these rich white lady stood with [Guys holding im with stupid signs and woman appears in the middle]
- 02:19
the workers of course plenty of middle-class and wealthy American women
- 02:23
didn't see any common ground with poor immigrant Jewish or black women this
- 02:28
drove a wedge into the women's movement as the non-white non wealthy women of
- 02:33
America felt ignored and invisible in a white dominated world but this didn't
- 02:39
stop women of every class from doing their bit to smash the golden cage that [Crowd of women and a golden cage appears]
- 02:42
was the women's sphere it was a time of great struggle for women but let's face
- 02:47
it the golden cage might have had it worse [Rifle crushes golden cage]
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