Identifications: You will write short answers (a brief identification of the term, person, or event, followed by a statement of its significance in American women's history) for five of the following (10 points each):

Essays: You will answer two of the following questions in a brief (about 2-3 pp. each) essay (25 points each). Be sure to answer the entire question, and to support your argument with evidence (examples, quotes from lectures or the readings) whereever possible.

1) Drawing on readings and lectures, compare and contrast the rights of women in the Massachusetts Bay and the Chesapeake colonies before the Revolutionary War. Be sure to address marriage and divorce, as well as property rights. How did Puritanism shape the experiences of women in the Massachusetts Bay, and what do the Salem Witch Trials illustrate about their experiences? How did slavery affect the experiences of both white and Black women in the Chesapeake?

2) Drawing on lectures and readings, discuss the 19th-century construction of Separate Spheres. What theories about the nature of women's bodies were used to support the physical and practical separation of men's spheres and women's spheres? How did economic changes, such as those governing men's and women's work, support the development of Separate Spheres? How did Separate Spheres contribute to the formation of the idea of True Womanhood?

3) Drawing on lectures and readings, especially Linda Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, discuss the experiences of slave women. How did the experiences of slave women differ from those of slave men? What were their patterns of labor and family life? What strategies for resistance and survival did slave women use?

4) Drawing on lectures and readings, discuss the strategies that women reformers chose to oppose slavery. How did the idea of women's "Moral Authority" develop? How did women use it to argue for their place to speak outside what was traditionally defined as their "Sphere"? What were the special challenges faced by Black women reformers, like Maria Stewart and Linda Brent, because of the dependence on this concept of True Womanhood and women's moral authority?