In the time period before the Civil War moral reformers and the state of the working financial industry combined to lead many Americans to imagine separate spheres of activity for men and women. Most women of European descent lived lives similar to their European counterparts. They were legally and socially subservient to men they were stuck in a society with a daunting patriarchal structure. The exception, however, was working-class women who were more equal to men of their classes, but only because they were equally poor. Most advocates of the maternal commonwealth were white and from the upper-middle-class areas. Life was much different for women of the lower class who had no education. Many single, middle-class women took jobs in the newly formed cities. Jobs such as being a typewriter opened up and became irreplaceable to the modern corporation. Telephone services required operators to run and manage the switchboard, and the new department store required sales positions. Many of these women who worked these jobs found themselves feeling more and more independent even though the wages they were paid were low in comparison to male counterparts. For others, life was not as simple, wives of immigrants often took in boarders, extra tenants, into their already crowded tenement homes. By providing services such as laundry and cooking at a fee they were able to gain the needed financial help to pay rent. Wealthy women in the south had their lives change from managing a home on a slave plantation to managing hired work. Sharecropping was a task both men and women took part in. Women in these conditions found themselves having to work two sets of job firstly working the fields throughout the day and secondly maintaining and working the house by night. In general, it can be seen that the higher the social class the greater the restrictions on women. American women did participate in the American Revolution but they were still expected to marry and have kids rather than pursue a career. Women were also unable to own property, something that was a condition for voting, they were essentially shut out of the political process. Men began to move away and work outside of the home at an increasing rate, which left women to maintain the house and raise children. This led to the ideology of republican motherhood; since they were raising children, especially male children who would become the future voters and legislators of America women held a very important role and were able to improve their status. Women couldn't themselves participate in the political process but they needed to be educated some because they were going to raise and teach those who would later participate in the political process. This idea of republican motherhood allowed women access to education in order to effectively raise their children.
The rise of an economy characterized by more wage-paying jobs, as opposed to subsistence farming, contributed to this development. The market revolution had profound effects on American women because as production shifted from homes to factories it shifted away from women doing the producing which led to the cult of domesticity. This decreed that the woman's place was in the home rather than providing for the home the job of women was to enable their husbands to provide for the home. This was to be done by providing food and a clean living space but also by providing emotions such as love, friendship, and mutual obligation. The idea of true equality between men and women was so radical that it was embraced by very few people. Even though the market economy was linked to economic growth women's opportunities for work were very limited. The only work available to them was typically low paying, but still, poor women did find work in factories or as domestic servants or seamstresses. Some middle-class women did find work teaching but the Cult of Domesticity felt that middle-class women should stay at home, most American women had no opportunities to work for profit outside the home. This led many women to find work outside of the traditional spheres in reform movements. For example, Frances Willard led the Women's Christian Temperance Union and brought the women's rights movement together with an ideology that asserted women's special role in politics. The idea was to create a maternal commonwealth, upper and middle-class women of the late 19th century were not content with the cult of domesticity of the earlier years. Many had become college educated and yearned to put their knowledge and skills to work for the public good. According to their view, alcohol led to increased domestic violence, neglect, and decreased the income families could spend on necessities. Women gave many temperance lectures to go alongside these views. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union would become one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country by the end of the 19th century. Although national prohibition was not enacted until 1919, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was successful at pressuring state and local governments to pass dry laws. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union worked within the system, but there were radical temperance advocates who did not. For example, Carry Nation took a direct approach and was known to take an axe and chop the bar into pieces. As the temperance movement grew both men and women supporters realized that women could be a greater ally if they had the ability to vote. The most urgent reasons women wanted the ability to vote were alcohol related; they wanted regulations on bars, the right to own property, hold financial security, and the ability to divorce violent husbands. To do these things they needed to change the laws that limited their freedoms and in order to change those laws they needed the vote.
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The struggle for women's suffrage manifested itself at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 where Elizabeth Stanton and many others wrote and published the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled from the Declaration of Independence. The movement for women’s suffrage was a middle class and upper-class effort most delegates at the Seneca Falls convention were from the middle class. Post Civil War, many suffrage seekers were disappointed when the Fifteenth Amendment specifically granted the vote to black men, ignoring the vote of women. Women were provided limited political roles in the Whig and Republican parties, usually as of morality and civilization, the Democrat party largely kept them out of any political work. The republican party began to shift away from the concerns of the suffragists' and move in favor of African-Americans. This shift essentially split the movement. Some women sided with the republican and felt the moment belonged to the African-Americans, and did not want to jeopardize the Amendment in Congress by combining it to the controversial movement of woman suffrage. Others, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, strongly opposed and continued to push for woman suffrage. In 1869 Illinois reformers founded the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association but failed to add women's vote to the 1870 state constitution. Activists began a push for changes in individual laws, which led to many specific women's rights. Reformers including Alta Hulett, Myra Colby Bradwell, and her husband Judge James secured passage of laws between 1860 and 1890 that included women's right to control their own earnings, to equal guardianship of children after divorce, to control and maintain property, to share in a deceased husband's estate and to enter into any occupation or profession.
The Knights of Labor provided women workers the opportunity to join a labor organization, and their emphasis on cooperation and negotiation appealed to many. The Knights of Labor provided members with social activities as well as representation in the workplace, and social activities; organizing workers and their families in social groups that hosted rallies, festivals, and picnics. Lucy Parsons, an African-American woman, became a major figure in Chicago's labor movement and radical politics in the Gilded Age. Her husband, a white man named Albert Parsons, and her worked together to became two of the city's most prominent radical social critics and organizers. Lucy Parsons helped organize the Chicago Working Women's Union. Few women in Illinois went away to work early in the Gilded Age, but more found jobs later in the period, typically younger unmarried women. They found work as stenographers or clerks but they found little to no upward mobility. Rural women often continued to find lives of hard work on the farm, though many struggled to take on the roles and forms of the new domestic ideology. In the 1880s new women's clubs were formed consisting of the wives of the prosperous middle class. Many devoted themselves to the causes of social reform and charity. Many female reformers found that despite being unable to vote their status as wives and mothers provided them with the ability to fight to provide better conditions for women and children. In Illinois, the Chicago Woman's Club became a leader of this movement, they devoted time and attention to preventing young offenders from becoming lifelong criminals. Clubwomen began to demand, and ultimately receive, seats on the boards which allowed them to govern important state and private institutions for children and families.
Not welcome in white clubs, African American women often founded their own organizations. Their clubs largely resembled the same goals as all-white organizations, their devotion to education, suffrage, temperance, moral reform, and self-help. Ida B. Wells brought another perspective to Illinois born a child of slaves Wells found education and began teaching school as a teenager. Through her work as an educator in Memphis, Wells challenged the common southern practice of segregated facilities. She did this by suing a railroad, and became a journalist devoted to exposing blacks' unfair lot in society. Wells became a traveling lecturer and married Ferdinand Barnett, a newspaper publisher, and lawyer. Wells confronted the northern reform establishment as well as southern racism. Wells confronted Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for their support of southern reformers who accepted the practice of lynching. In 1894 she published a book titled, 'The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition', in the book she detailed blacks' exclusion from the fair by white organizers.
While the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other middle-class women's movements for social reform often struggled to understand and reach immigrants and workers, others learned about their customs and assisted them in their new lives. A settlement house was a home where immigrants could go when they had no other place to live. Settlement houses provide food, shelter, lessons in English, and tips on how to adapt to American culture. The first settlement house was founded in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Addams and was called Hull House this was modeled after the example of English reformers who took up residence in London's slums, which soon featured public baths, a kindergarten and nursery, a playground and gymnasium, an employment bureau, and educational programs for neighborhood residents. Jane Addams wanted Hull House to serve as a prototype and model so that future settlement houses could improve and serve immigrants better. By the year 1900, there were nearly 100 more settlement houses in cities throughout the nation. Most advocates of the maternal commonwealth were white and from the upper middle-class areas. Rather than openly attempt to change the lives and attitudes of poor immigrants, as many reformers of social uplift had done, Addams wanted to provide them with an opportunity to help and organize themselves. Addams emphasized that the house had an impact upon the poor, but it also had an impact upon its organizers as well as leading Addams to urge more women to be more active in civic life. Hull House had many notable residents which came to include Florence Kelley, Sophonisba Breckinridge Dr. Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, and Ellen Gates Starr. These are all women who supported residents of the neighborhood to develop the formation of important reform societies. These societies include the Immigrants' Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, and the nation's first juvenile court. The Hull House reformers marked the emergence of what came to be known as the 'new woman' in this era. The “new woman” was college-educated, self-supporting, and often unmarried, these women sprouted from the newly formed eastern women's colleges; these colleges provided women with a sound education. College-educated women now dealt with a new dilemma on how to balance family life with a career. Many social critics made this dilemma more difficult to handle by arguing that women with a career simply did not want to be mothers, or even go as far as saying an education damaged motherhood abilities.
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