George Blog#8
1.Some of the most significant developments in women’s wage labor in the late 19th century were industrialization and the admission of women into labor unions. Industrialization paved the way for large openings in factory jobs and a steady decline in agricultural and domestic work. Women were much more inclined to take jobs in a factory than do what they’ve been doing for years. Women were also now in the labor unions for their industrial jobs. Women were later encouraged to form their own organizations for all working class women so they could speak on behalf of the female wage laborers.
2.The images on page 345 show a before and after view of 3 Native American girls. In the first picture the girls sat on the floor covered in blankets and had their hair braided. In the second picture they are shown sitting on chairs in traditional American working class garb. One thing that does not change in these pictures is their sad faces. These pictures work perfectly at explaining the feelings of Native American women during the era of western consolidation. You can see in their faces the reluctance to change their ways and take on a new way of life, moreover someone else’s way of life.
1. Bessie Van Vorst meets a variety of women at the factory. The first woman she describes meeting is the head forewoman. She is older than the rest of the workers there and has evidently been drained by her daily tasks at the factory, however offers much wisdom and truth to Van Vorst about working at a factory. The next woman she meets is a pretty, young girl who has been working at the factory for five months and only works to make money to spend on herself.
2.Van Vorst believed that the women at factories thought they didn’t have large enough numbers to make a threatening enough stand to the factory owners against their working conditions. This is why they passively accepted their fate and danced along to the tune played by the factory owners. They believed they were expendable and if they tried to stand up for themselves they would only lose their jobs.
3 comments:
LiA: R1
Hi George,
I appreciate the comments you leave, it's nice to get good feedback from classmates, particularly as I noticed i write a lot :/. It was intersting to me, that we both made the same observation regarding the picture of the native American Indian girls, noting that their facial expression remained the same in both pictures. I think this picture is significant as the facial expression of these children is so striking, and contrary to the traditional "before and after" pictures. Moreover, it may be possible that the women may have appeared passive as they were in reality not perturbed by the tasks assigned to them, due to their acceptance of the status quo.
R # 2 Anahit
Hi Lia, I want to add my comment to yours, too. Because all I like from this blog were the images of Indian girls. As you noticed we can tell a sad story by only looking at before and after pictures of Indian girls. Whites forced them to attend schools and replace their culture with white people culture: seat like white woman seats, wear like white woman wears and act like whites. The purpose of printing those pictures was to show to the society how white people care about Indians and what a lovely job they were doing. They decided with that method to get rid of all Native Americans.
LIA SAYS:
*NB. The women I talked about in the last sentence, are the women wage laborers in Von Vorst's account.
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