Civil Liberties in Gender Roles and Identities - Case Study Example

Battle Scars: Civil Liberties in Gender Roles and Identities I. Introduction In recent decades, scholars have progressively examined the private domain of the family to improve understanding of the influence of public institutions in power. Through shifting the concern away from the public institutions toward individual household relations, scholars have developed a more extensive view of the means in which household and kin relations support the diffusion of culture and resources from one generation to the next. Hence, this paper will attempt to analyze the changes in gender roles at the aftermath of the American civil war since the pivotal historical event reconciled women’s and men’s sexual and reproductive behavior within and outside the family constitution. The study of the American civil war in terms of gender and sexuality has proven to be worthwhile in the clarification of the intersection between the private and the public worlds; analyzing the private family in the lens of public perspective can unveil the true position of women and the dynamics of their daily existence (Clinton 1992). Even though the important designations of male and female social and marital roles did not alter between 1860 and 1880, the association between individuals and the larger community did. Men were further granted rights of marital contract which then echoed the changing focus of social and political strength afar from the family. Women also, however in a much lesser extent, gained improved basis for legal separation. Unlike men, nevertheless, women carried on to be recognized as members of a family unit and not as individuals (ibid). The alteration of women’s position in the domestic and public domain after the Civil War came to be the foundation of the contemporary standing of white women and African-American women in America. Hence, it is important to examine the changes and revisions in the civil liberties of the women during and after the war in terms of their family life. II. Rewriting the Relationships of Womanhood The Civil War and the Republican Reconstruction had broken down the old patriarchal system, yet by 1870, North Carolina Conservatives which is a federation of Democrats and a number of former Whigs, had overthrown the Republican and assumed full control of the state legislature. This latest new-fangled Conservative legislature revamped several statutes, including those pertaining to divorce, during the 1871-72 convention. Primarily, the Redeemer legislature motivated women to stay in marriages through giving them the power to file a suit for child support without taking legal action for divorce or conditional separation. Also, it revised the basis for divorce in a manner that privileged the husbands. Adultery and impotence remained to be the exclusive justifications for separation. However, the law included gender discrimination into its classification of adultery (Faust 1996). While either gender could be divorced for deliberately committing adultery and abandoning one’s marital partner, only a woman could be divorced merely for the committing of adultery. On the other hand, a husband’s adultery had to be coupled with desertion of his wife to be acknowledged as basis for divorce (ibid). In due course, then, postbellum divorce rulings in North Carolina granted men, except women, greater liberty to divorce than had antebellum divorce edicts. The abolition of slavery and the mounting national importance on individualism have been liable to these changes. In antebellum North Carolina or the slavery stronghold South commonly, the institutions of slavery and the family were much interconnected that laws controlling one affected those prevailing over the other. If slavery, which became the moral fiber of the southern subsistence, were to remain secure, so must the family, which was the stamina of the southern political and social structure (Clinton 1992). After the abolition of slavery, racial regulation became the obligation of public institutions rather than families. The attempts to establish physical detachment of the races, which could by no means accounted while slavery subsisted, further contributed to shifting notions about the relationship of marital bonds and divorce to the larger society. Taken as a whole, the divorce appeals filed between 1860 and 1880 are far from being representative of women’s standpoints than those filed between 1840 and 1860. At some stage in the antebellum period, white women petitioners whined natural family structures gone wrong. They pursued for divorces and separations when their civil rights to protection and sustenance within the tradition of marriage was disrupted by cruel, decadent husbands. Those small numbers of African Americans who were liberated appeared hesitant to consult their marital dilemmas before courts ruled over by white slaveholders (Venegas 2004). On the contrary, between 1860 and 1880, growing populations of white and black men run off marriages that had been injured by war, social disorder, and economic misery. By the 1870s, public authorities who sought to reestablish old structures of power in a new context assisted men to get rid of wives who did not act or behave in the prescribed conduct. In North Carolina, or recently the New South, the implementation of racial and gender standards of behavior progressively turned out to be the accountability of public institutions rather than private families (ibid). Therefore, it can be assumed that the state put emphasis more on enforcing social norms or proper individual conduct rather than safeguarding the institution of the family. To reinforce the authority of husbands in society, courts bestowed upon them divorces from wives who had transgressed the sanctity of fidelity. The powerlessness of wives to obtain divorces if not their husbands had successfully terminated the marriage through abandonment implied that even though the family was not anymore sacrosanct, women’s identity remained entrenched in marriage. The courts granted African-American men authority over African-American women providing that they did not defy their racial inferiority (Clinton 1992). The rewritten bonds of womanhood and race intermingled as ever, embedded old hierarchical orientations of power onto the forms of a new social order. III. Reconstructing Liberated Women The sexual intimidation of race politics throughout the Reconstruction is apparent. White women’s corporeal being became sacred properties which ex-Confederates put in order and fought, refighting the battle and reinforcing provincial and race arrogance. Black women’s physical existence was similarly significant. For a protracted period of time, humiliation and silence enveloped their sexual disobedience. Almost all the scholarly writings published regarding the subject matter in the South deals entirely with white victims, even the literatures committed to interracial rape. This mirrors racism persistent within both the academic domain and the larger society (Clinton, 1992). But condemnation is finally surfacing, as there is no ruling of boundaries for historians. Articulations become loud and clear, obliging people to heed their call, to observe their own shortcomings, and to integrate decisive issues of gender and sexuality into the re-understanding of liberated women. Paradoxically, African American women’s approaches and struggles in the nineteenth century have fashioned bitter dispute in the twentieth century as people attempt to reunite the matriarchal nature of black households with bigotry and sexist statements about the role of families within contemporary culture. Moreover, the abolition of slavery changed insights of proper sexual behavior and provided black women if not greater opportunities to stand firm against oppression, then the hope that their perspectives could broaden while sexual maltreatment weakened. Reconstruction in various ways granted black women their civil rights, yet little means to realize those legal civil liberties (Faust, 1996). It conferred women a voice, yet starved of African-Americans a medium within which to articulate and be heard without punishments. IV. Conclusion The centrality of gender as part of the Civil War experience has received considerable attention from the intellectual community. Gender in these studies did not merely assume another feature for investigation, but as a tapestry of the war, establishing a more inclusive appreciation of the social, political and ideological underpinnings of the conflicts. In lieu with this, several literatures committed to the formulation of theoretical issues about the characteristic of gender relation in nineteenth century America have burgeoned in the contemporary period. Historians have particularly argued that wars, throughout the history of mankind, have frequently carried over issues of gender into emphasis, often summoning both men and women to execute unique, but particular gender roles (Petrino 2001). Yet, the American civil war, as several literatures have demonstrated, also roused questions and fashioned exceptional tensions for American men and women. As the pivotal historical event of the mid-nineteenth century, the sectional calamity formed even amidst an exclusive orientation of gender identities and roles in both northern and southern communities (ibid). Ultimately then, the issues raised by studies on gender and sexuality in the American Civil War, oblige people to think again regarding the male and female experiences in nineteenth century America. Traditional notions of manhood and the effect of war on male identities must be re-evaluated so as to enhance appreciation of the severe and distressing impacts of bloodshed on women’s social status in relation to the family and home. Works Cited Clinton, Catherine. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Petrino, Elizabeth. "Disarming the Nation: Womens Writing and the American Civil War." A Journal of American Women Writers 18.1 (2001): 112. Venegas, Yolanda. "The Erotics of Racialization: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of California." Frontiers-- A Journal of Womens Studies (2004): 63. Read More