Major Problems In American Women's History Analysis

Both Mary Beth Norton’s Major Problems in American Women’s History and Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century are compilations of primary sources about American history. Norton’s book provides a listing of primary sources. Sterling on the other hand placed some short paragraphs between the source texts in order to make the whole more readable and give some context. The assigned chapters show a selection of testimonies and interviews given by southern black women before and after the Civil War. They show that the suffering of colored women in the south did not abate during the reconstruction, but shifted to different forms.
The hardships of slaves are well known but are often generalized, with the role of women sometimes being lost in the depiction of American social and political history. With the rise of gender studies, a well deserved interest for women as historical actors increased. These selected primary sources give insight on the personal level in the way black women perceived their situation and reacted to challenges. The sources show two very clear distinctions along two different axes. The first one is a spatial difference between the north and the south, and the second one a temporal difference, before and after the Civil War.
Ever since the foundation of the United States of America, the
The general literacy rate of blacks between 1865 and 1900 had increased with 400 percent. Black institutions such as schools and colleges were established and by the late nineteenth century black women such as Ann J. Edwards could even go to University. Sterling also noted the rising income of blacks after the Civil War. She said “details in the women’s testimony indicated that blacks’ homes were larger and more comfortable than they had been in the first postemancipation [sic.]