A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition. Howard Boone's Zinn
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of “refreshing the tree of liberty”? Explain your response.
16. Explain the difference between Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s attitudes toward popular participation in the decision-making process. If one were to look only at Federalist Paper #10, does Madison agree with Hamilton or Jefferson on this issue?
17. Did the U.S. Constitution define a democratic government? Is a democratic government possible in an economically polarized society?
18. Why did city mechanics in New York support wealthy conservatives in promoting the ratification of the U.S. Constitution? Is it surprising that they did?
19. Many historians argue that the U.S. Constitution creates a neutral, level playing field on which contestants prove their worth (that any inequality in wealth is not due to unfair rules but to unequal abilities). For what reasons does Zinn disagree with this interpretation?
20. Why did Congress pass the Whiskey Tax? How did small farmers who manufactured whiskey respond? What is the difference between the means by which Shays’ Rebellion was defeated and the Whiskey Rebellion was defeated? What is the significance of the answer to the previous question?
21. Draw a map that includes the following: Boston; Springfield; Massachusetts; New York City; New York; Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania; Saratoga; Yorktown; Philadelphia; Hudson River; Proclamation Line of 1763.
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. It seems that their physical characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use, exploit, and cherish someone who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-teacher-warden of his children.
Because of that intimacy and long-term connection with children, there was a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.
Earlier societies—in America and elsewhere—in which property was held in common and families were extensive and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did the white societies that later overran them, bringing “civilization” and private property.
In the Zuñi tribes of the Southwest, for instance, extended families—large clans—were based on the woman, whose husband came to live with her family. It was assumed that women owned the houses, and the fields belonged to the clans, and the women had equal rights to what was produced. A woman was more secure because she was with her own family, and she could divorce the man when she wanted to, keeping their property.
It would be an exaggeration to say that women were treated equally with men; but they were treated with respect, and the communal nature of the society gave them a more important place. The puberty ceremony of the Sioux was such as to give pride to a young Sioux maiden:
Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud shadows moving over the prairie will follow you…. Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and modest, my daughter. And proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women are lost, the spring will come but the buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes down until their women are weak and dishonored.…
The conditions under which white settlers came to America created various situations for women. Where the first settlements consisted almost entirely of men, women were imported as sex slaves, childbearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: “Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt… sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation.”
Many women came in those early years as indentured servants—often teenaged girls—and lived lives not much different from slaves, except that the term of service had an end. They were to be obedient to masters and mistresses. Sexual abuse by their masters was common. According to the authors of America’s Working Women (Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby): “They were poorly paid and often treated rudely and harshly, deprived of good food and privacy.”
In 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs wrote to her father about her servitude: “What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probibility of you in England to Conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night…with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough.…”
Of course these terrible conditions provoked resistance. For instance, the General Court of Connecticut in 1645 ordered that a certain “Susan C, for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labor and coarse diet.…”
Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one-third of the cargo. Slave traders reported:
I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed.… [p]acked spoon-fashion they often gave birth to children in the scalding perspiration from the human cargo.… On board the ship was a young negro woman chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased and taken on board.
A woman named Linda Brent who escaped from slavery told of another burden:
But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.… My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.…
Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.
All women were burdened with ideas carried over from England. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled “The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights”: “In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner.… Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master.…”
Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: “The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement—But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife.…”
As for property: “Besides absolute possession of his wife’s personal property and a life estate in her lands, 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.”
For a woman to have a child out of wedlock was a crime, and colonial court records are full of cases of women being arraigned for “bastardy”—the father of the child untouched by the law and on the loose. A colonial periodical of 1747 reproduced a speech “of Miss Polly Baker before a Court of Judicature, at Connecticut