Women’s History Midterm Exam—100 points total

Cordery--Fall 2002

Instructions:  In your blue books, answer as completely as you can.    Use your best grammar.

Part I:  Identification:  5 points each.  Fully and completely identify four of the following five terms as they relate to women’s history.  Your answers must include the “who, what, when, where, why, how, and significance.” 

Republican Motherhood                                                             Municipal housekeeping

Homosocial circles                                                                    The New Woman

The Cult of True Womanhood (or the Cult of Domesticity)          African retentions

Part II:  Interesting Questions.  Ten points each.  Fully and completely (that means with specific examples that prove to me that you’ve read the assignments) answer four of the following:

1.  What role did elite women play in the development of the federal government in Washington City?

2.  How were women an integral part of the abolition movement?

3.  What evidence have you seen of women having power in the history we have studied?  What sort of power was it, and how did they get it? 

4.  Compare:  the NWSA and the AWSA. 

                        OR

4.  Provide a brief history of how women gained the vote in the United States.

5.  What did it gain women to be thought of as passionless?  What did they lose to be thought of as passionless?

6.  How did the cosmetics industry change the way women viewed cosmetics from the nineteenth century to the 1920s?

Part III: 

Mandatory short essay number one:  20 points.  Fully and completely, but creatively too, answer the following question:

Hilda Polacheck might have come in contact with women’s clubs at two different points in her life—upon her arrival in the United States and at the time she moved to Milwaukee.  Describe the hypothetical meeting of Hilda with women’s clubs at both times in her life.  What sorts of clubs would she have encountered?  What would she have done for them or they for her?  Note:  your answer should demonstrate your command both of women’s clubs and of I Came a Stranger.

Mandatory short essay number two:  20 points.  Fully and completely, explain the intersection of class, gender, and race in ONE of the following examples:

            Black clubwomen

            Enslaved women

            suffrage