TERMS TO COME TO TERMS WITH FOR THE MIDTERM
TERMS
Models of studying women’s history
Democratic ideal
Paradigm of “separate spheres”
Feminism
Slave trade
republican motherhood
Frontiers of inclusion/exclusion
Mortality rate
Sex ratio tobacco brides
Ursline Nuns
Mothers and Daughters of the Revolution
Great Awakening
going back to the blanket
Textile Mill of Lowell
Fur trade
Temperance Movement
Berdache
NWSA/AWSA
Iroquois Confederacy
Married Women’s Property Act
Pueblos
Women’s National Loyal League
Seneca Falls Convention
Patrilineal/patrilocal
Matrilineal/matrifocal
Pueblo Revolt
Metis
Quakers
Consumer culture
Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society
“gag rule”
Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago
Witchcraft in 17th century
Female Moral Reform Society
Lowell Female Reform Assoc.
Puritans
Pidgin English
Fertility rate
1662 slave law
Female indentured servitude
Executor
Dower right
Feme covert/feme sole
STUDY QUESTIONS FOR THE MIDTERM
1. Describe what life was like for Native Americans before Europeans arrived in America.
2. How were relations between the sexes characterized in traditional Native American
societies?
3. Explain the idea of matrifocal using the Pueblos as an example.
4. Why were the Iroquois unique among the Native peoples of the Eastern Woodland
region?
5. What factor made Native American women appear sexually immoral to Europeans?
6. What was the Protestant Reformation and how did it affect European women’s lives in
the sixteenth century?
7. How did the Spanish conquest impact the Pueblos of New Mexico?
8. What roles were played by many of the individual Native women who were involved in
intimate relationships with the Spanish in the sixteenth century?
9. Why did many Spanish women see immigration to New Spain as a great opportunity
during the middle of the sixteenth century?
10. How did French involvement in the fur trade affect Native American family and gender
relationships?
11. Before European contact describe the life of West African women.
12. How did Europeans view and treat African women differently than they did Native
American women?
13. European observers misunderstood Native American culture. Describe how they viewed
most Native Women.
14. In Pueblo ideology, which factors contributed to relatively egalitarian relationships
between the sexes?
15. What type of political power did Native American women hold in most tribes?
16. Why did some Native Americans become berdaches?
17. Why is Malinche a controversial figure in Mexican history?
18. Why was Marina de San Miguel investigated by the Spanish Inquisition?
19. Why do historians think that the English settlers on the island of Roanoke included
women in their colony?
20. What did the English at Jamestown feel about Native women’s labor in the fields?
21. Describe one way that Europeans treated African female slaves differently than they did
Native female slaves.
22. According to legend, what crop was introduced to North America by enslaved African
women who brought the seeds over hidden in their hair?
23. What was a contributing factor in the Virginia Company’s importation of 150 “tobacco
brides” to Jamestown in 1620 and 1621?
24. Why did women in the Chesapeake colonies tend to die at an earlier age than men
throughout the seventeenth century?
25. Explan the idea of feme sole and feme covert.
26. How did Bacon’s Rebellion impact Virginia?
27. In what way did the law shape sex roles and sexual conduct in Puritan New England?
28. Describe the story of Anne Hutchinson.
29. Why did Quaker women in Pennsylvania enjoy relatively equal status with Quaker men?
30. Explain how the Enlightenment impacted women before the American Revolution.
31. Describe three ways that women contributed to the Revolutionary effort.
32. What was one effect of the Revolutionary War on the slave population?
33. Why did the Revolutionary War cause particular problems for Quaker women?
34. As northern states gradually abolished slavery, what happened to most of the newly freed
women?
35. What were many impoverished war widows forced to do to survive by 1800?
36. Who was Abigail Adams and what did she warn of?
37. What is a reason that women were denied the vote in most states after the American
Revolution?
38. Explain the idea of Republican Motherhood.
39. After the Revolution, what changes took place concerning divorce in the United States?
40. Explain the “cult of domesticity.
41. What did Catherine Beecher’s book A Treatise on Domestic Economy teach?
42. What was one way middle-class women were affected by changing social and economic
conditions in the years before the Civil War?
43. What was a unique feature of the Lowell system?
44. Who oversaw the labor of household slaves and the feeding, clothing, and doctoring of
the entire labor force on southern plantations?
45. Explain the significance of the year 1848.
46. What happened to many Native women who left their own people to live with white men
in informal sexual and domestic unions at U.S. army forts or trading centers in the West?
47. Prostitution in California in the mid-nineteenth century had a distinct racial hierarchy
with which group at the bottom? Why?
48. What argument drew many women to the temperance movement in the 1840s and 1850s?
49. Explain the similarity between “The Declaration of Sentiments” and “The Declaration of
Independence.
50. How did the woman suffrage movement respond to the congressional debates over the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?
51. What was the argument about woman suffrage advanced by the New Departure theory of
the suffrage movement?
52. Explain the Supreme Court’s decision in Minor v. Happersett
53. Why did more African American wives work than white married women did post-Civil
War?
54. Why did office work become the fastest-growing sector of the female labor force by
1900?
55. Why did “homosocial” relationships come under attack in the late nineteenth century?