In the nineteenth century, most Americans assumed that there was a natural order in society which placed men and women in totally different spheres. The ideal woman was submissive; her job was to be a docile, obedient, loving wife who was totally passive to the men around her. Before the American Revolution, according to Zinn, "all women were burdened with ideas carried over from England." Within a family, the husband had absolute control over his wife's personal property, wages and life estate. The law was unequal towards men and women. For a woman, having a child out of wedlock was a crime. However, to the man, he was not touched by the law at all. Not to mention women's political rights. As Zinn, stated, "it remained rare for women to participate openly in public affairs."
Petition to Congress, December 1871:
Rise of the Public Woman:
The public sphere was open to women in ways government and party politics were not. Women would hand out entreaties, attended meeting, marched in cavalcades, and delivered public allocutions. They formed organizations, some of which were only social. But others ran charity schools and refuges for women in need. The Female Seminary Movement began in 1815. Their goal was to improve the quality of women’s edification. (Foner 432) All these activities enabled women to carve out a place in the public sphere. But what encouraged the women’s movement the utmost was the push for abolitionism. Hero’s such as the Grimke sisters began to convey popular lectures that offered a scornful condemnation of bondage. Maria Stewart, black Bostonian, in 1832 became the first American woman to oration to mixed male and female audiences. Stewart said “This is the land of freedom, and we claim our rights”. She was quite controversial and received intense denunciation. (Foner 432).
Petition for Woman Suffrage Signed by Frederick Douglass, Jr
Women’s Rights:
Woman's Rights Convention was embedded in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the conference that refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from America because of their sex. Eight years later the women formed The Seneca Falls Convention held in New York, July 19–20, 1848. There they drew up the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which they prototypical from the Declaration of Independence. Instead of condemning King George, the manuscript doomed the brutalities and inequality that men bestowed upon women. (Foner 433) . Some of the sentiments were as follows: “ He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise; He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men - both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns”.( http://www.archive.org/stream/declarationofsen00amer#page/n1/mode/2up)
The women would not be totally fulfilled until as Stanton said “only the vote would make woman free as man is free”. In a democratic society sovereignty was intolerable without access to the ballot. Seneca Falls marked the inauguration of the seventy-year struggle for women’s suffrage. The right to vote was one of many things women strived to link equality with men. Prior to 1848 when a woman married she could not make a contract, she could not keep or control her own wages. She could not control property that was hers before the marriage. She could not acquire property while married. She could not transfer or sell property. She could not bring any lawsuit.(Foner 434) With the coming of the Civil War, a woman still had little control over her life. The ideal woman was an obedient wife, a loving mother, and totally subservient to the men in her life.
Finally In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment which prohibited state and federal agencies from gender-based restrictions on voting came into full effect.
Women have come a long way since the early days of the movement. There are now a higher percentage of women in college then men, many of the top corporations have women as CEOs, many top universities are run by women, and last but not least plenty powerful politicians are female.
General Records of the U.S. Government
National Archives and Records Administration
Foner, 2009. Give me Liberty (pages 432-433)
Zinn, 2009. People's History Of The United States (pages 87-88)
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/resolution.html
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/douglass-petition.html
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/petition-to-congress.html
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