Changes in Women's Status

Charting the changes that women underwent over a period of time is a difficult one for a number of reasons. To begin with, while some changes can be quantified or at least assessed (women's salaries as compared to men's, for example, or the equitableness of divorce laws), others cannot. How an individual woman (or a group of women) feels about her place in society and the reasons behind that is something that is very difficult to tease out, and it is impossible to know with absolute certainty whether certain women feel the way they do for cultural, historical, personal or psychological reasons. Also, the changes in women's status during this time encompass such a wide range of issues that it is difficult to summarize them with any degree of brevity.

Finally, the change in women's status varies dramatically by region, by class and by race - so much so that to talk about (for example) an Inuit woman following a tradition life pathway and a black female attorney in Atlanta as sharing similar positions in history is essentially meaningless. Women's status has also (and arguably still is) in many ways determined by their marital status and age, so that what is true for a woman when she is 20 and single may not be true for the same woman at 35 when she is married with three young children or when she is 75 and widowed.

And yet - these very significant caveats aside - some generalizations may be made about the changes in women's status and the larger historical and cultural reason

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ndidacy was seen as either marvelous or astonishing (and sometimes both). But as Elizabeth Dole begins making the first steps in her run for the presidency in 2000, her candidacy is seen as perfectly normal, with political pundits commenting not on her sex but on her views on taxes and other policy issues. While critics of women's participation in the political realm often argued that it was too dirty a realm for women, supporters - often women themselves - argued that the female sex was so morally superior to men that rather than being corrupted by entering the public sphere (of either work or politics) women would in fact make it more pure. In an 1891 description of the typical female office worker, journalist Clara Lanza quotes the head of a publishing house as saying he much prefers women clerks to men. Men are troublesome. They complain about trifles that a woman wouldn't notice � if they have a slight headache they stay at home� The women come whether they have headaches or not. They never want a day off to attend a baseball match . And yet, even as the virtues of women in the workforce are praised, Lanza also emphasizes the fact that most clerks marry and leave their jobs. In fact, their work has made them better wives. The

Category: History - C