Victorian America Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

Victorian America - Essay ExampleThe country gained 12 innovative states, doubling its geographical area, voted on 10 new amendments to their constitution and increased its population by more than twice its number at the beginning of this period. Americans were becoming more diverse, more urban, and more mobile.2 slavery had legally come to an end and an entirely new population was struggling to redefine itself and find a home. Social norms were questioned and the preconceptions of the elders were no longer automatically assumed honorable. Technology had changed too, bringing with it the mechanized tools of the factory, enabling large groups of workers to earn living wages within a single location rather than struggle to set about crops out on the farm. With the advent of the machine and the production line, more and more Americans were moving to the cities to seek work, bringing the women in from the fields on the farms to the kitchens and family rooms of the bosom class. This emerging middle class gave birth to what has since been referred to as the Cult of the True Woman, coined first by Barbara Welter in the mid-1960s3, a set of ideas and beliefs regarding the proper organize of the quintessential American family. However, through this ideology, women were brought into closer contact with one another, gaining power and voice enough to finally give rise to the feminist fronts that marked the amazing strides toward equal rights that were accomplished in the early part of the twentieth century. Through this process of growth and change, moving from the True Woman to the New Woman, the feminist movement was seen primarily as a masculine movement with very little to suggest the feminisation of American culture, with its emphasis on compassion, consideration, and control that would come in in the twenty-first century.In leaving the farms for the cities with the new modernization of the cities and factories, Welter and others hypothesized that it became n ecessary for women to uphold the traditional ideologies the family had held dear while in a country-bred setting, thereby restricting them to a single idealized image of what embodies the True Woman.