Black Women Vs. White Women In The Reconstruction Period

Black Women vs White Women in the Reconstruction Period
Women were completely controlled by the men in their lives. First, by their fathers, brothers and male relatives and finally by their husbands. Their sole purpose in life is to find a husband, reproduce and then spend the rest of their lives serving him. If a woman were to decide to remain single, she would be ridiculed and pitied by the community. Some people believe it is a form of slavery. “To me, the sun in the heavens at noonday is not more visible than is the right of women, equally with man, to participate in all that concerns human welfare.” These are words of Frederick Douglas, who was a former slave and a women's rights activist. In the nineteenth century, most Americans assumed that there was a natural order on society which placed women in totally different spheres. Women were considered second class citizens. A second-class citizen is a person who is discriminated against within a state or other political jurisdiction, despite their nominal status as a citizen or legal resident there. Which would sound a lot like slavery, and some people actually believed that the way women were treated was similar to slavery. When women were married all of her inheritance was given to her husband, and she was to “share” it with her husband and family. The women were hard workers and
But the realities of newly freed people in the south—who had little or no money, limited or no education and little access to it, who confronted systemic racism that impacted every area of their lives and for whom the federal government failed to provide any reparational assistance, made that promise appear extraordinarily remote. The black women who emerged from enslavement “knew that what they got wasn’t what they wanted, it wasn’t freedom, really.” (“Claiming Their