It's funny how we assume certain things.
When I ask students if the crime rate in the United States is rising or falling, they invariably say it is on the increase.
But it's not.
If you watch television news, however, you get the impression that crime is ever-present.
Stephanie Coontz does a really good job using statistics to destroy some cherished assumptions about family life in the United States -- especially the belief that things were so much better "back in the good old days."After reading her article, cite one statistic Coontz uses to contradict an assumption. Find its footnote, and explain where she got her information.
Avoid using the same statistic as a classmate.
This is due Tuesday, March 24.
There was a significant increase in child labor during the last third of the nineteenth century. Some children worked at home in crowded tenement sweatshops that produced cigars or women's clothing. Reformer Helen Campbell found one house where "nearly thirty children of all ages and sizes, babies predominating, rolled in the tobacco which covered the floor and was piled in every direction."
ReplyDeleteShe got her information from: Helen Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 206.
Just for the record I really didn't like this reading. It was so depressing I struggled to read it.
ReplyDeleteMany households resembled the one described by Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation in 1913:
ReplyDeleteIn a tenement on MacDougal Street lives a family of seven-- grandmother, father, mother and four children aged four years, three years, two years and one month respectively. All excepting the father and the two babies make violets. The three year old girl picks apart the petals; her sister, aged four years, separates the stems, dipping an end of each into the paste spread o a piece of board on the kitchen table; and the mother and grandmother slip the petals up the stems.
Rosalyn Baxandall, Lynda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, ed., America's Working Women
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976),p. 162.
The Elusive Traditional Family - page 570.
ReplyDelete"It is worth contrasting this colonial candor to the climate in 1991, when the Department of Health and Human Services was forced to cancel a proposed survey of teenagers' sexual practices after some groups charged that such knowledge might "inadvertently" encourage more sex."
She got her information from :
John Demos,( New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.) Mary Ryan, (New York Cambridge University Press, 1981.)
I think that the passage described in Thomas Bender Community and social Change in America is true I do think that people do move around to this day taking up networks and institutions to get them selves in the work place is very true( IE College)
ReplyDelete"This is not to say, of course, that mobility did not have different effect then then it does now. in the nineteenth century claims historian Thomas bender people move from community to community taking advantage so non familial networks and institutions there integrated them into the new work and social relations..."
Thomas Bender Community and Social Change in America ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1978)
In 1900, 120,000 children worked in Pennsylvania mines and factories, most of them had started work by age eleven.
ReplyDeleteShe got her information from the United States census of 1900.
One third to one half of the children lost at least once parent before the age of twenty one; in the south, more than half of all the children aged thirteen or under had lost at least one parent.
ReplyDeleteShe got her info from Philip Greven(Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press,1970) and Vivian Fox and Martin Quit ( New York: Psychohistory Press,1980)
" Our values may make a difference in the way we respond to the challenges posed by economic and political institutions, but those institutions also reinforce certain values and extinguish others."
ReplyDeletewho honestly understands what that says. i mean really? thats crazy. i didnt like this reading at all. it was depressing and sad.
In the south about 1/3-1/2 of children up to the age of 21 have lost at least one parent. That is really sad. I still have both my parents and most of my friend still have their parents. But if you live in the south 3-5 out of every 10 kids would have lost a parent.
ReplyDeleteShe got her info from Philip Greven(Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press,1970) and Vivian Fox and Martin Quit ( New York: Psychohistory Press,1980)
This is so sad
"In his study of Buffalo, New York, in the 1850's, historian Lawrence Glasco found that Irish and German girls often went into service at the age of eleven or twelve."
ReplyDeleteLawrence Glasco, "The life of Cycles and Houshold Structures of American Ethnic Groups. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979) pp. 281, 285
"And for all the family disruption of divorce, most modern children live with at least one parent. As late as 1940, 10 percent of American children did not live with either parents, compared to only one in twenty-five today."
ReplyDeleteAmerican Demographics, February 1990; Dennis Orthner, "The Family in Transition," in Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family
I know I am late but a had a family problem. I found it to be very sad. I guess more depression than anything. I would not want to read this again.
ReplyDeletesorry meant more depressing not depression
ReplyDelete