The Status of Women - Essay Example

Denied higher level schooling, and schooling in general in some cases, prevented from obtaining any legal rights or owning property as a separate entity from their father or husband and with a majority of her household work unconsidered in terms of the physical work she could accomplish, women had little opportunity to do anything other than be a wife and a mother. Against this backdrop, women who found themselves in non-traditional situations - the widow, the businesswoman, the intellectual - continuously struggled to find a better balance between men and women that allowed women some of the freedoms afforded to men, while women who fell within the societal norms also found themselves being forced into a more dominant role.

Roles began shifting slowly as women grew into and then out of the ideology of the True Woman into that of a New Woman in personal and public spheres. As they moved from the rural setting to the industrialized city setting, women in America saw tremendous changes in the way they were expected to live their lives - from lives of working alongside the men in the fields they moved to working exclusively within the home, finally setting the stage by the end of the nineteenth century for the advances of the women's movements that would dominate the early part of the twentieth century.

Colonial America saw la. "During the early history of the United States, a man virtually owned his wife and children as he did his material possessions. If a poor man chose to send his children to the poorhouse, the mother was legally defenseless to object" (Comptons, 1995). "Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the property rights of American married women followed the dictates of common law, under which everything a woman owned became her husband's property upon her marriage" ("Married Women's Property Acts", n.d.).

However, there were some women who lived in colonial America who "worked in professions and jobs available mostly to men. There were women doctors, lawyers, preachers, teachers, writers and singers" (Comptons 1995). This was because "prior to the 1800s, there were almost no medical schools, and virtually any enterprising person could practice medicine. Indeed, obstetrics was the domain of women" (Comptons 1995). Even this changed, though, by the beginning of the nineteenth century when women were again relegated to the acceptable positions of writing and teaching only as the educational requirements for these professions were increased and women, fulfilling their obligatory role of wife and mother at an early age, were unable to complete the necessary training.

These restrictions on what a woman could do or own were partly due to the fact that most women were not considered intelligent enough to consider all the consequences involved in managing business or political situations. Most could not prove otherwise as they did not have the access to formal schooling that would have provided them with these skills. "In colonial times, formal learning had a low priority. Girls' education typically took place at home, where