The Mcguffey Readers vs. The Cruel Years

The textbooks scored many of the ideals of a Protestant, white, upper middle-class superimposed onto what American society should be. William McGuffey created his lessons with intent to extend his vision of America to schooled children. In William Katz’s The Cruel Years, the numerous accounts of personal struggles through each individual show the actual dissonance that was prevalent throughout Industrial America. The workplace was not a capable environment for a worker’s welfare and productivity, nor was his/her hard work being rewarded. The McGuffey Readers defined roles for each gender to play. Jobs were associated with masculinity, yet “increasing numbers of women were entering the workforce” (Gorn: 127). This upper middle-class imposed a vision of America that did not exist and “exercised a kind of cultural control when they tried to regulate the poorer classes’ thoughts and behaviors” (Gorn: 12). This conflict of ideal versus reality displays

The conflict between the views of the McGuffey Readers and accounts of stories from victims of the Industrial Era is obvious. Despite the wide acceptance of the readers in the classroom, school children did not believe everything that was taught to them, often “reading critically, disregarding or rejecting things that their experience rendered suspect” (Gorn: 3). Ultimately, the textbooks provided “less a depiction of how Americans lived than a revelation of their hopes” (Gorn: 3).

As children progressed through the McGuffey Readers, a culmination of the lessons “associated men with productive labor, especially labor outside the home, and women with nurturing, child-rearing, and household tasks” (Gorn: 13). Ideally, men went into the world to “earn a living in the market economy while women stayed home and attended to the moral and domestic needs of their families. Of course, women of poorer backgrounds labored as servants, in factories, or on farms, but the middle-class ideal depicted women as nurturers of the soul” (Gorn: 48). Wives and mothers not only were expected to do the household work for the men who went out into the world of business and public affairs, they also were expected to “soothe men’s pain.” Not all women accepted this “domestic ideal” set forth within the McGuffey lessons” (Gorn: 102). Sadie Frowne, a young Jewish sweatshop operator, did not match with this ideal. Being a teenage girl with no

Some topics in this essay:
McGuffey Readers, Native American, Frowne Jewish, Industrial Era, Constitution United, Industrial America, Industrialization Ultimately, Katz’s Cruel, William McGuffey, , mcguffey readers, gorn 13, upper middle-class, katz 149, gorn 3, native american, vision america, schooled children, gorn 127, industrial america,