It was really interesting to read about all of the differences and similarities between the USA and Latin America in regards to how they treated women, racial minorities, and slaves. The thing that surprised me most was the stereotype in Latin America that women who worked in any job had “loose sexual morals” and were therefore little better than actual prostitutes. While women in the US at the time were also discouraged form working, as far as I know people achieved that by making jobs unavailable to them and teaching them that their place and duty was in the home. I’d never heard that harmful stereotype about their sexuality before, so I’m not sure if the stereotype wasn’t present in the US or if I’ve just never been taught about it. It does seem like it would be a sadly effective way of keeping women in homes and not at work. In a time when a women was only valued for how well she married, and she couldn’t marry well if she was branded as a “prostitute”, women would almost never want to risk getting a job. I wondered where the stereotype came from. Maybe it was a way of enforcing gender roles; it implies that real jobs are for men, so by taking a real job a woman is acting like a man. Men could have sex with whoever they wanted, so a woman acting like a man must also have sex with whoever she wanted. The stereotype manages to shame women into staying in the domestic sphere while reinforcing other beliefs about masculinity. I wonder when that stereotype began disappearing from society enough for women to start working alongside men as they do now.

The differing stories of emancipation and discrimination between various countries in the Americas were also intriguing. In the US, we learn more about how white people brought about emancipation during the Civil War. While we are taught about slaves and former slaves joining the fight for their freedom, it’s not focused on very much. I wasn’t aware that slaves had been such a major part of the fight for abolition anywhere except Haiti, where I knew there had been a successful slave rebellion. It was depressing to see how across the Americas, slavery was almost always immediately replaced by systems that were almost as bad. Systems of sharecropping, which tied a farmer to their employer and limited their choices and freedoms almost as much as slavery did, became common in the US and many Latin American countries, as did de facto or de jure discrimination. The Americas took a huge step forward in the 19th century by abolishing slavery, but it seems that most countries then started backtracking as much as possible to make sure things didn’t change very much. In the US, the process of abolition went fairly quickly once started; slaves in Confederate states were freed as soon as the war ended, and an amendment banning slavery in the rest of the country followed within a year. In Latin America, countries put strange limits on slavery that would only free some or would only free them at some point in the future, but ultimately the process of abolition had similar results across the Americas.