Term paper - Women's History

Introduction

In Ancient Egypt the major reason for women was to wed and to reproduce. 'To marry and beget children may have been the duty of every right-thinking Egyptian, but it was a duty which was very much welcome.' (Tyldesley Pp. 23). There was no legal age of consent. Men would address women suitable for wedding ceremony upon menstruation. This intended that women would wed as young as ten or eleven. Marriage was a personal matter with no intervention from the state. No prescribed ceremonial was presented to wed a man and a woman.

Awoman was considered wed upon going into the husband's household. The married man had the blame to care and protect his wife as her dad did. The married man was not to be the lawful guardian of his wife. This left the woman individually in control of her own assets. Women could jointly own house with their husbands and were publicly acknowledged as being part owner of the property. Upon the husband's death or divorce the woman was to inherit some or all of his assets. Comparatively During the late 1800's and early 1900's, there were a lot of injustices in the United States. The Progressive Movement, which began in the late 1800's attempted to bring about government reforms and correct injustices in America.

One example of the problem in the U.S. was over population of the American cities. More and more people began to move cities from rural areas for jobs. As you can see in Document I, the cities were overcrowded and the infrastructure could not hold up with the influx of people moving to urban areas. The people lived in overcrowded housing developments that were dirty and poor.

There was also abuse in industries. This was exposed by Upton Sinclair. One of his most well known novels was The Jungle, which showed the abuse in the meat packing industry. He uncovered how the people would take extremely spoiled meat and use it as sausage or put it in to a can. They also used all parts of the meat and even rats were found to be in the meat. By writing this book, Sinclair was able to expose the corruption in the industry of meat packing, and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act.

A position change brought about the declining numbers of children between the ages of ten and fifteen who worked. In Document 3, you can see by the chart that the number of children working decreased by 6.8% from 1890 to 1920. Children were often used as cheap labor and were abused greatly. The government was able to reduce the number of working children under sixteen during this period of time because many states passed children labor laws.

Discussion and Analysis

Ancient Egyptian women in wedding ceremony were expected to be fertile. This determined the rudimentary achievement of a marriage. The masculinity of a man depended on the amount of young kids he could father. A woman who could bear many children was looked ...