1866 – 1904 Industry and Empire Supplemental Materials

Art Activities

Modern Womanhood in Art

When American artist Mary Cassatt traveled to Paris she was invited to exhibit with artists of the Impressionist movement. This movement was organized in 1874 by a group of artists who rejected classical and established styles and embraced new techniques. Impressionist artists depicted scenes of modern, everyday life and often painted outdoors. In her paintings, Cassatt focused specifically on the private and social lives of middle- and upper-class women.

In this activity, students will analyze the paintings of Mary Cassatt and discuss her subject matter and the Impressionist technique. They will then discuss how ideas of identity, gender, and womanhood have changed since the 19th century and use those conversations to inspire their own Impressionist portrait of what womanhood means to them in the 21st century.

To read and download the lesson plan for this art activity, click here.

Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis was a Black and Chippewa sculptor who combated racism and sexism in the art world to create a successful career. Her first works were small portrait medallions of famous American abolitionists. She later went on to create busts and large-scale marble sculptures. Unlike many artists of the time, Lewis completed the entire process of making her sculptures by herself, rather than creating a small model and hiring workers to complete the final product. Many of her sculptures are known for their activist themes and depictions of her Indigenous heritage.

Students will read the life story of Edmonia Lewis and consider the importance of her identity and artistic process when discussing her body of work. They will then draw inspiration from her pieces to create their own portrait medallions that commemorate women from the Industry and Empire unit of Women & the American Story.

To read and download the lesson plan for this art activity, click here.

For supplemental slides to walk you through the art activity, click here.

Vanderbilt Costume Ball

The technological innovations of industrialization led to business opportunities in industries like steel and railroads, increasing the number of millionaires in the United States. Women like Alva Vanderbilt benefitted from this nouveau riche lifestyle. In 1883, she hosted a costume ball. The cost of the party was extravagant and the costumes worn by guests symbolized both the excesses and the inventions of the Gilded Age.

In this activity, students will create a costume for a working class woman of the Gilded Age inspired by the designs worn at the Vanderbilt costume ball. They will consider the styles and industrial innovations of this time period and create a costume from assorted craft, repurposed, and upcycled materials.

To read and download the lesson plan for this art activity, click here.

Source Notes

Labor and Industry

Convict Labor

  • LeFlouria, Talitha L. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Organized Labor and Strikes

  • Hunter, Tera W. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Vanderbilt Costume Ball

  • Broyles, Susannah. “Vanderbilt Ball—How a Costume Ball Changed New York Society.” Museum of the City of New York. Published August 7, 2013. https://blog.mcny.org/2013/08/06/vanderbilt-ball-how-a-costume-ball-changed-new-york-elite-society/
  • Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Industrial Work for Women

  • Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 2003).
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Aunt Jemima

  • Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998).
  • Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Black Domestic Workers

  • Hunter, Tera W. “Historical Note.” The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhpfb
  • Hunter, Tera W. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
  • Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Irish Domestic Workers

  • Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughter’s in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
  • Murphy, Maureen. “Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890. New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora. Charles Fanning, ed. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Modern Womanhood in Art

  • Barter, Judith A. Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Harry N. Abram, Inc. Publishers, 1998).

Shop Girls

  • Kessler-Harris. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 2003).
  • Porter Benson, Susan. Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890–1940 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
  • Remus, Emily. A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Life Story: Lucy Parsons

  • Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Life Story: Emily Warren Roebling

  • Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
  • Juravich, Nick. “Emily Warren Roebling: Building the Brooklyn Bridge and Beyond.” Women at the Center. May 30, 2018. https://womenatthecenter.nyhistory.org/emily-warren-roebling-beyond-the-bridge/

Life Story: Edith Wharton

  • Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2007).
  • Robinson, Roxana. Introduction to The New York Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: NYRB Classics, 2007).

Life Story: Leonora Barry

  • Levine, Susan. “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor.” The Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (Sep. 1983): 323–339.
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Fighting for Equality

Fighting Jim Crow

  • Rydell, Robert W. “A Cultural Frankenstein? The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.” Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993).

Temperance Movement

  • Dubois, Ellen Carol, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
  • Tyrrell, Ian. Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment

  • McDaneld, Jen. “White Suffragist Dis/Entitlement: The Revolution and the Rhetoric of Racism.” Legacy, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2013), pp. 243–264.
  • Tretault, Lisa. The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Black Women’s Clubs

  • Barnett Cash, Floris Loretta. Action: The Clubwomen and Volunteerism from Jim Crow to the New Deal, 1896–1936. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).
  • Dubois, Ellen, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
  • Giddings, Paula J. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. (New York: William Morrow, 2007).
  • Gray White, Deborah. Too Heavy A Load: African American Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

Minor v. Happersett, 1874

  • Kerber, Linda K., Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. Ninth Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  • Tretault, Lisa. The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

School Segregation

  • Ngai, Mae. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

Comstock Act

  • Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
  • Werbel, Amy. Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

Life Story: Abigail Scott Duniway

  • Ward, Jean M. “Abigail Scott Duniway (1834–1915).” Oregon Encyclopedia. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/abigail_scott_duniway/#.YRFQu9OA6Lo. Updated November 13, 2020.

Life Story: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

  • Streitmatter, Rodger. “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: Driving Force in the Women’s Club Movement.” Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History. (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1994).

Life Story: Victoria Woodhull

  • MacLean, Maggie. “Victoria Woodhull.” The Ohio State University Department of History. https://ehistory.osu.edu/biographies/victoria-woodhull.

Life Story: Edmonia Lewis

  • George, Alice. “Sculptor Edmonia Lewis Shattered Gender and Race Expectations in 19th-Century America.” Smithsonian Magazine Online. August 22, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sculptor-edmonia-lewis-shattered-gender-race-expectations-19th-century-america-180972934/.
  • Rothberg, Emma. “Edmonia Lewis.” National Women’s History Museum. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/edmonia-lewis.

Life Story: Katharine Coman

  • Coman, Katharine. “The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands.” Publications of the American Economic Association 4, no. 3 (Aug. 1903): 1–61.
  • Schwarz, Judith. “Yellow Clover”: Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 59–67.
  • Vaughn, Gerald F. “Katharine Coman: America’s First Woman Institutional Economist and a Champion of Education for Citizenship.” Journal of Economic Issues 38, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 989–1002.

Life Story: Florence Merriam Bailey

  • Creese, Mary R.S. “Florence Merriam Bailey.” Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998).
  • Kofalk, Harriet. “Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey.” Women in the Biological Sciences. Louise Grinstein et al., eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
  • Oehser, Paul S. “In Memoriam: Florence Merriam Bailey.” The Auk 6 Vo. 1 (1951): 19–26.

Expansion and Empire

Exodusters

  • Gates, Henry Louis. Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008. (New York: Knopf, 2013).
  • Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1998).

Life in the Arizona Territory

  • Brown, Stanley C., ed. A Frontier Teacher in Tonto Basin: The 1880 Diary of Angeline Mitchell. (Payson, AZ: Rim Country Press, 2016).

Page Act, 1875

  • Kerber, Linda K., Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. Ninth Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  • Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Indigenous Resistance to Relocation

  • Dubois, Ellen Carol, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

Girls Education at Carlisle Indian School

  • Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, and Susan D. Rose, eds. Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

Puerto Rican Citizenship

  • Erman, Sam. Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Filipina Resistance Against Imperialism

  • Dubois, Ellen Carol, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

Life Story: Emilia Casanova de Villaverde

  • Ruiz, Vicki and Virginia Sanchez. Latina in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Life Story: Queen Lili’uokalani

  • Lili’uokalani. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. 1898.
  • Lili’uokalani Trust. “History.” Accessed July 28, 2021. https://onipaa.org/pages/her-history.
  • Morris, Aldyth. Lili’uokalani. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).

Life Story: Lozen

  • Aleshire, Peter. Warrior Woman: The Story of Lozen, Apache Warrior and Shaman. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001).
  • Perdue, Theda. Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Life Story: Mary Ellen Pleasant

  • Hudson, Lynn. The Making of “Mammy Pleasant”: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

Life Story: María Ruiz Burton

  • Crawford, Kathleen. “Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton: The General’s Lady.” Journal of San Diego History. Vol. 30, No. 3, Summer 1984. https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1984/july/burton/. Accessed June 24, 2021.
  • Montes, Amelia Maria de la Luz, and Anne Elizabeth Goldman. Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
  • Sanchez, Rosaura, and Beatrice Pita. “Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Power of her Pen.” Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sanchez Korrol, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Life Story: Polly Bemis

  • Wegars, Priscilla. Polly Bemis: The Life and Times of a Chinese American Pioneer. (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2020).

Life Story: Changunak Antisarlook

  • Ray, Dorothy Jean. “Sinrock Mary: From Eskimo Wife to Reindeer Queen.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75 no. 3 (July 1984).
  • “Sinrock Mary, the Reindeer Queen.” National Parks Service. Accessed July 30, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/people/sinrock-mary-the-reindeer-queen.htm.

Suggested Reading

Books and Articles

  • Barnett Cash, Floris Loretta. Action: The Clubwomen and Volunteerism from Jim Crow to the New Deal, 1896-1946 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).
  • Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton University Press, 1998).
  • Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughter’s in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
  • Dubois, Ellen, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
  • Erman, Sam. Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, and Susan D. Rose, eds. Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
  • Giddings, Paula J. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 2007).
  • Gray White, Deborah. Too Heavy A Load: African American Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
  • Hudson, Lynn. The Making of “Mammy Pleasant”: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
  • Hunter, Tera W. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
  • Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
  • Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
  • Kerber, Linda K., Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberg, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. Ninth Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  • Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 2003).
  • LeFlouria, Talitha L. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
  • Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
  • Ngai, Mae. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
  • Remus, Emily. A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
  • Tretault, Lisa. The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
  • Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
  • Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008).
  • Werbel, Amy. Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).