History of the Evolution of Women's Rights Essay

The Amendment was passed August 26, 1920. Their fight to vote started sometime in the 1820s. In the 1820s american women were titled to be a perfect housewife which included cooking for the men and children, cleaning, looking after children, and should be submissive towards the other gender. They were not allowed to have paying jobs because men thought women could not handle that things except for taking care of their family. In 1851 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton work together to fight for women’s rights. A lot of people were against what they were trying to accomplish and still are. They worked together in making a newspaper to promote the idea of women’s rights. Around 1869 the National Women’s Suffrage Association was formed

Women’s rights activists influenced the nation to believe that women were men’s equals, changing traditional women social roles. During the 1800’s a husband had legal authority over their wife. In a sense, he owned her, and for that reason women had little respect in their culture. However, as women pursued their cause for equal rights, many men began to see women as their equals. This gained them greater respect within their culture. An example of one of the social changes that occurred because of women’s rights movements was when Lucy Stone kept her maiden name even after she became married. Fifty years before the women’s rights movements began a small event like this would have never been allowed within the community. As women in the 1800’s fought for women’s rights, slowly female social roles began to change.

Many women’s rights activists advocated equal rights in state legislatures, which led to conventions and women’s social organizations. They reasoned that women had the same opportunities to political, religious, social, and economic rights that men had and argued they were no different from men. In Document A, Judith Sargent Murray says, ...our souls are by nature equal to yours; the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us; and that we are not fallen lower than yourselves…” In 1848, New York passed the married Women's Property Act, which allowed married women the right to own property which they had inherited. To get a true sense of women’s attempts for equity they began to join the workforce, and get a higher education to get a new view of themselves.

During this convention, men and women signed a Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded that women be equal with men before the law, employment, and education. This was also the first proclamation demanding to give women the ability to vote. In 1869, two women’s suffrage associations were formed with the goal to gain voting rights for women nationally and statewide. In December of that year, Wyoming territory passed the first women’s suffrage law that allowed women to serve on juries in that territory. The two associations then merged together and formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. Colorado became the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1893. Utah and Idaho follow in 1896, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, Alaska and Illinois in 1913, Montana and Nevada in 1914, New York in 1917, Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma in 1918. In 1903, the National Women's Trade Union League was established to support improved wages and working conditions for women. The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor was formed in 1920 to collect information about women in the workforce and secure good working conditions. The 19th Amendment was established, granting women everywhere the right vote. On June 10th of 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which made it

The battle for suffrage was a long and slow process. Many women tried to initiate the fight for suffrage, like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. “These were the New Suffragists: women who were better educated, more career-oriented, younger, less apt to be married and more cosmopolitan than their previous generation.” (pg 17) Eventually, in 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified; allowing women to vote, but it was not any one person or event that achieved this great feat. It was the confluence of certain necessary factors, the picketing and parades led by Alice Paul, militaristic suffrage parties and the influence of the media that caused the suffrage amendment to be passed and ratified in 1920. But most importantly, they successfully moved both

In the mid to late 1700's, the women of the United States of America had practically no rights. When they were married, the men represented the family, and the woman could not do anything without consulting the men. Women were expected to be housewives, to raise their children, and thinking of a job in a factory was a dream that was never thought impossible. But, as years passed, women such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Blackwell began to question why they were at home all day raising the children, and why they did not have jobs like the men. This happened between the years of 1776 and 1876, when the lives and status of Northern middle-class woman was changed forever. Women began to

When it comes to having custody to children there would be laws automatically giving preference to the mother in child-custody cases. The laws granting alimony to women without reference to need and imposing the burden of child-support on the father regardless of the relative economic situations of the two parents. There was also fear of the amendment would making the protective labor legislation unconstitutional. The amendment would force new changes that could result in women forced them into male roles (Pros and Cons). Opponents of the amendment feared losing spousal support or the decriminalization of rape and other sex crimes.

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 is finally giving married women the right to legally own their own money that they obtain, and it also allows married women to inherit property. Before this Act was passed, married women were not considered as separate individuals by the law. However, single and widowed women were considered as separate legal beings who could own their own property. So why did marriage strip away and limit women's rights when it is only the joining of hands? Married women could not perform any legal action without their husband's consent and approval. In the 1850s, a group of women led by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon campaigned for the law to be passed with no success, and a few years ago the attempt was rekindled that

During the American Revolutionary Era, women played essential roles in the defiance against Great Britain by boycotting British products and joining the non-consumption organization. During the American Revolution, women served as nurses, cooks, maids, seamstresses, some even secretly enlisted in the Continental Army. From 1825 to 1850, women were fighting for equal opportunities as men and women’s right to vote, the Reform Period. Women’s roles were similar during the American Revolutionary Era and the Reform Movement because during both periods, women contributed to the movements, by joining political protest. Their roles differed during the periods because women during the reform movements, created conventions geared towards women, exacting

The gender roles in America have changed tremendously since the end of the American Civil War. Women and men, who once lived in separate spheres are now both contributing to American society. Women have gone from the housewife so playing key roles in the country's development in all areas. Though our society widely accepts women and the idea that our society is gender neutral, the issues that women once faced in the late 1860s are still here.

Women began to form many organizations to support the amendment. Women tried everything in their power to get the law passed.

The property rights of women during most of the nineteenth century were dependent upon their marital status. Once women married, their property rights were governed by English common law, which required that the property women took into a marriage, or acquired subsequently, be legally absorbed by their husbands. Furthermore, married women could not make wills or dispose of any property without their husbands' consent. Marital separation, whether initiated by the husband or wife, usually left the women economically destitute, as the law offered them no rights to marital property. Once married, the only legal avenue through which women could reclaim property was widowhood.

The Women's Rights Movement was a significant crusade for women that began in the late nineteenth century and flourished throughout Europe and the United States for the rest of the twentieth century. Advocates for women's rights initiated this movement as they yearned for equality and equal participation and representation in society. Throughout all of history, the jobs of women ranged from housewives to factory workers, yet oppression by society, particularly men, accompanied them in their everyday lives. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did women begin to voice their frustrations about the inequalities among men and women, and these new proclamations would be the basis for a society with opportunities starting to open for

The quest for equal rights is usually put into two different waves: the first wave being considered women’s suffrage and the second being the equal right movement. One big uprising in feminism happened alongside the abolitionist movement. Many women started to realize that, as they were fighting to get African Americans out of their version of perdition at the hands of their slave owners, that they themselves were slaves to the will of the men in society. Since many women petitioned for antislavery, the Congress in session at the time put forth the gag rule, which placed many of these petitions off to the side for “consideration.”

Women’s suffrage in the United States began in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century until the nineteenth amendment was passed in 1920 to give women the right to vote. Women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony protested the fifteenth amendment that was passed in 1869 because the amendment unfairly did not include women. While Anthony and Stanton protested this proposed amendment other activists such as Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe fought against the women’s suffrage movement by saying that if African-Americans got their right to vote women would gain theirs soon after. The conflict that arose from the two sides butting heads gave way to the formation of two organizations, the National Women’s Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The National Women’s Suffrage Association fought for women’s right to vote at a federal level, they also fought for married women to have the same rights as their husbands in regards to property. The American Woman Suffrage Association took a slightly different approach by attempting to get women the right to vote through much simpler means of the state legislature. The women involved in these movements finally got their day in Washington on January 12, 1915 as a women’s suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but