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Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.
This is the story of James, John, and Hamilton Armstrong, three sons of a yeoman farmer living on the Pennsylvania frontier at the outset of the American Revolution. James and John joined the Continental Army in 1776, rose from the ranks to become officers, and served until the army was disbanded in 1783. Hamilton remained home to work the farm, protect the family, and serve in militia and “ranger” units to defend the frontier from repeated attacks from hostile Indian tribes. Their combined wartime experiences encompassed almost the totality of the American Revolution, from Canada in the north to South Carolina in the south and along the western frontier. James and John fought in most of the major battles of the revolution, including Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Guilford Courthouse, Eutaw Springs, and Yorktown, where they distinguished themselves in the eyes of generals like the Marquis de Lafayette, Mad Anthony Wayne, Light- Horse Harry Lee, Nathanael Greene, and George Washington.
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