In their search for the ideological origins of the women's rights movement, historians have already defined rather clearly two distinct ideas. The first Linda Kerber has labeled “the ideology of the Republican mother,” a cluster of attitudes popular in the years after the American Revolution that emphasized the importance of mothers being educated in order to educate their children. These ideas were argued persuasively by both male and female writers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, most eloquently by Judith Sargeant Murray, the New England essayist who stressed the need for female education in the 1790s. By the 1820s, a second ideology was taking form, one that I would like to label “the ideology of the teaching daughters,” in which writers argued the benefits of employing women as teachers.

Between 1880 and 1930 millions of women poured into the American labor force. The rate of female labor force participation in this period increased from about fifteen to nearly twenty five percent, such that by 1930 almost one out of every four American workers was a woman. Taking jobs as typists, clerks, teachers and telephone operators, as well as traditionally female jobs in manufacturing and domestic service, women rapidly expanded the range of occupations then open to them. Not surprisingly, these changes raised troublesome questions about women's roles in society, and invited more than a little controversy. “For the past fifty years,” wrote one observer in 1929, “there have been many 'scare’ headlines and perturbed fathers, mothers, preachers, teachers and reformers, ready to tell of dire consequences to follow the entrance of women into new occupations”. The movement of women out of the home and into the workforce was accompanied by a variety of changes in American social life. Not least among these was the development of a new range of educational experiences to prepare women for their rapidly changing world.

As the regular monthly meeting of Memphis, Tennessee's Board of Education drew to a close on the evening of February 10, 1873, Judge J. O. Pierce, a new member, rose to his feet. Speaking in behalf of the city's corps of female teachers, the representative from the tenth ward introduced the following resolution:

Surveying the urban scene in 1799, a group of upper-class women reflected on the condition of poor widows in New York City: “widow is a word of sorrow,” they wrote, “but a widow left poor, destitute, friendless, surrounded with a number of small children shivering with cold, pale with want, … her situation is neither to be described nor conceived.” Determined to do something about this situation, these women, led by Isabella Graham and her daughter Joanna Bethune, established the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, an organization intended to assist “the silent retiring sufferer.” It was the first private charity organization directed and managed entirely by women. However, by the 1850s perceptions of the urban poor as pitiful and needy had given way to a much harsher vision. Looking at a new generation of poor women in the same city, the directors of an industrial school saw their clients as neither suffering nor retiring, but as vile, wicked, and degraded. “A bad man is a curse to the community,” they observed, “but how much more vile a wicked woman.” Upon this premise the agents of a new charity established in the mid-nineteenth century a network of urban industrial schools which trained poor young girls in the rigors of factory work.

Central to the rise of the modern state in western societies was the change from private to public schooling; an attendant feature of this shift was the development of bureaucratic modes of school organization. Recent North American studies of these related phenomena, however, present two different interpretations of their evolution. Michael Katz's and David Tyack's studies of nineteenth century American schooling have portrayed the state as the protagonist in the promotion of bureaucratic structures in education, and their arguments have been echoed in Canadian analysis. The state, according to this interpretation, set the pace of educational reform, redefined the nature of parental, communal and religious involvement in the socialization of the young, and provided the framework for the organization of schools along hierarchical and bureaucratic lines.

There has been increasing interest in the past several years in the history of temperance and prohibition in both Canada and the United States. Researchers of women's history, religious history and social history have viewed the temperance movement as a key element in understanding developments in each of these areas. One of the organizations central to the temperance movement, and one which has been given credit as a catalyst in organizing the “anti-drink” campaign, was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Until quite recently most of the studies related to the WCTU have been parts of much larger works on prohibition itself. Although this women's organization has been credited in these studies with an important role in the campaign, the essence of the WCTU, its philosophy, organization and methodology are lost in the ongoing rush to tell the story of the rise and fall of prohibition. Sinclair's Prohibition: An Era of Excess, Symbolic Crusade; Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement by Joseph Gusfield and James Timberlake's Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 are examples of such work. Norman H. Clark's Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition shows the interest women took in the number of saloons and the problems associated with alcohol. In Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1890–1913, James Blocker identifies prohibitionist leaders, both men and women, as “decent citizens.” What each of these works tells us is what women did for temperance.