Scott Claudon
Zinn Chapt. 6 Essay
Chapter 6 of APHOTUS is all about women in 1750s through 1900s. This chapter explains how women fought, not only for their own rights, but for many other causes as well. Zinn unveils how they have been shrouded in a society that teaches them to accept their life as property. This is what Zinn tries to convey in chapt. 6.
Women throughout the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, have fought for many rights and privileges. Zinn tells of women taking a heavy part in anti-slavery movements, an example being Frances Wright of 1824, Lucy Stone of 1847, Angelina Grimke of 1838, or perhaps the silent protest at the World Anti-Slavery Society Convention in 1840. Unequal wages were fought for as well, in hundreds if not thousands of strikes. The first of which, that was known, was in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, and continued in Dover, Hampshire, 1824, Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, and Chicopee, Massachusetts in 1843. They fought against the Church too. Anne Hutchinson was one of the most known women whom expressed the need to interpret the Bible for the readers self. Overall, a lot of women fought valiantly for their rights, but some submitted to the societal view…
It was common teaching to have the males as property owners, and the women to be property. A very popular book was "widely read in the American colonies in the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter." This book conveyed the idea that women should accept their position as child givers, housekeepers, and overall property. For many women, getting married was life's purpose, and that was all they looked forward too. As Julia Spruill puts it "the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her labor... Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to the husband." It can be plainly seen that husbands dominated over wives in this era.