Problem
Based on the following set of documents:
1. Louisa May Alcott, "A Union Nurse"
2. Mary Livermore, "Northern Women on Farms"
3. Louticia Jackson, "A Wartime Mistress"
4. Eva Jones, "Confronting Defeat"
5. "Moments of Emancipation"
6. Sarah and Lucy Chase, "Teaching the Freedmen"
7. Susie King Taylor, "A Former Slave Remembers the War"
8. Amanda Stewart Knight, "Crossing the Plains"
9. Jannicke Saehle, "A Norwegian Immigrant in Wisconsin"
10. Mary Ballou, "A Woman's View of the Gold Rush"
Choose two of the following questions to answer:
A. The documents from Mary Livermore, Eva Jones, and the emancipated slave narratives offer us very different perspectives on the Civil War and its aftermath than we are accustomed to. In each instance, the war is really just the backdrop to daily life; even though it does have significant influence on people's experiences, it's not the first thing on their minds. What are they concerned about? What do these documents reveal about the connection (or lack thereof) between events at the national level and women's ordinary lives? What surprises you or intrigues you about the experiences of these women during the Civil War era?
B. Even as the country marched on toward (and eventually into) war, most Americans' lives were not directly touched by the issues of slavery and states' rights. Instead, their energies were consumed by the mad-dash for western land. The 19th century saw hundreds of thousands of Americans moving west. Sometimes women were willing migrants, sometimes not, but in any case, the move transformed their lives in many ways. Working with the documents from Saehle, Ballou, and Knight, what can you discern about the challenges women faced in westward migration, both in the process itself and once they reached their destinations? Draw on at least three of these documents to consider what they suggest to us about the way women handled this transition, bid farewell to the lives they left behind, and constructed news lives out west? What roles did gender play in the American West? What did migration mean for some of these different groups of women?