Persuasive Essay On Equal Rights Amendment

Equal rights for Men and women is quite the controversial topic. For years society has been very unequal. Women were supposed to stay at home with the kids, and were looked down upon if they dared to fight for their standing in society. Now, women can vote and hold executive positions, but after all these years men and women still aren't considered equal. The

Women were not allowed to vote nor were they paid as much as men for completing the same job. In a 1889 payroll from Lyman Mills in Holyoke, MA we see that a man and a woman performing the same work for the same duration of time, could have a three dollar difference in their weekly wages. Three dollars may not seem like much but it is equivalent to $74.36 in today’s money! Suffragist Susan B. Anthony once said that the preamble of the Constitution says “’We the people of the United States…’ It was the people; not we the white male citizens; nor we, the male citizens; but we the whole people, who formed the union.” Women gained their right to vote in 1920 when the nineteenth amendment was passed.

Equal rights have long been sought out by the people of America and they continue to be chased after today. Several of our freedoms were originally seen by the Constitutional to be inalienable, so ingrained in what the founding fathers saw as American values that the Bill of Rights has set them in stone. Unfortunately for some, universal suffrage was not one of those rights. While voting was largely limited at the founding of America, citizens, namely white males, slowly gained the right to vote without discrimination towards age or social status. However, women remained barred from the ballot, regardless of race. Though the suffrage movement started as a woman’s social movement, it evolved into a driving force that would hold the power to put in place a nineteenth constitutional amendment.

Women’s rights and equalities have always been an issue. Women first began their fight for equality in 1776, when the Congress was working on the Declaration of Independence. During the late 1840s, women set up the first women’s rights convention, which was the starting point of the women’s rights movement. In 1861, men were getting called off to war, leaving their wives and kids at home to wait patiently and care for the house and children. Women did not take too well to that idea, and they began to take action. Women have always fought for their right to stand alongside men. The three major events for the fight to gain rights and equality for women were the “Remembering the Ladies” declaration, the Civil War, and the Women’s Rights Movement.

Over the history of time women were not allowed to have prominent roles and rights in society. Through history and time women have fought for the right to vote, to work for equal pay, the women’s suffrage, gaining property rights, and much more. The first women’s right movement in the United States of America, which started in the 1830s, arose from the campaign too end slavery. Many things such as evangelical Christianity, the abolitionist critique to slavery, and debates about the place of women in the abolitionist movement played valuable roles in the development of the antebellum women’s right movement. These efforts and large steps that women took to destroy and tear down the walls that limited them from having a voice still resonates today.

Two of the most hot-button issues faced in the 2016 election included abortion rights and gun control. Since President Trump’s election these issues have remained at the forefront of political discussion. With several months still remaining, 2017 had already claimed the reputation for the deadliest year for mass shootings in America’s history (Wilson, 2017). We began 2017 with six killed in the Ft. Lauderdale airport and progressed, to 58 killed in Las Vegas at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, to the most recent incident that left 26 dead in a Texas church. In addition to these three most notable events, there have been many other shootings that have brought the causality total to 112 with 531 wounded from mass shootings alone (Wilson, 2017). These senseless deaths left the American public emotionally drained and searching for a solution to a problem that the government is hesitant to proactively address, but rather leaves to the individual state’s discretion.

Women in America never felt equally to the men. They never felt as if they had the same potential or freedoms the men had. Women, like men, felt they were entitled these rights. This lead to many campaigns, protests, etc. Women fought for these rights for years with little to show for it. But, on August 26th, 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment was passed giving women the right to vote. In the 1920’s women wanted equality, which fueled the suffrage movement that allowed key women to lead the charge and fight for reforms.

In the United States history, women lacked the ability to do many things that men could do. An example of this would be that married woman couldn’t own property, had no legal claim on any money they may earn, and had no right to vote. Women didn’t have the choice of what they wanted to do. Their job was to stay at home and clean the house and take care of the kids. They had no effect on the political system and couldn’t even stage their vote. On August 18, 1920, it changed a lot of things for woman. On this day, the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote.

The fight for women’s rights began in the decades before the Civil War. In the 1820s and 1830s, all white men were given the right to vote no matter how wealthy they were or how much land they had in their possession. Customs and laws placed men as superior in the household and

All throughout history, there is not a time in which women have not been treated with disrespect, harmed, ridiculed, or seen as less than men. Despite countless denial about their rights, to quote Senator Mitch McConnell, ‘She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.’ Although this statement was meant in response to Elizabeth Warren reading Coretta Scott King’s letter and not intended as an empowering statement, that’s exactly what it’s become. It perfectly captures how women have been throughout history and continue to be as long as there is injustice against them. In terms of equal rights for women, looking at many times in history such as the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848

Women were not granted equal rights when the nation was formed it took them well over 50 years to earn it as it started in 1848 and ended in 1920. Along with many other rights women did not have the ability to vote because people believed women should not have more to worry about other than being a house wife. The process was anything but simple they had a large number of advocates and activists working to show they deserved equal rights just as much as men did. In 1920 the nineteenth amendment was ratified and deemed so important because it ended women's suffrage by finally giving them the right which was a victory considering all the effort they put forth over the course of 72 long years.

Over time women's rights have grown, however this has not happened without the difficulty of time and tradition. The original role of women was not equal to man, instead their role was to act as the housekeeper, the mother of children. Due to this stereotype, women were unable to gain many rights, and much of the protests against how unfair this was were unheard. To begin, what is known of women's rights during the 1800s is, women in society were subservient to men. Women were only allowed to have access to a minor education, which was not enough to build a life off of much less a job.

Women had attempted to call attention to the issue of woman’s suffrage for hundreds of years. Until August 18th, 1920 women had no right to vote for the politicians that governed them. Many women wondered why they had not been given suffrage, but African American men were given the right to vote nearly 50 years earlier. The fifteenth amendment states that citizens “shall not be denied the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. Why couldn’t gender have been included in the amendment? Many claimed that was not fair to the women who had helped Americans in the most crucial of times. During previous wars women were left to take care of the household while men were at war. They also worked

In colonial America, most positions of power outside the family were available only to property-owning men, and this carried on in American culture for generations to come. After the creation of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African American men the right to vote, feminist leaders such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony set out to expand woman suffrage. “Anthony attempted to vote in 1872, but was arrested, found guilty, and fined.” The fact that Anthony was punished for trying to vote shows that America betrayed its core values at this point in history. If “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, woman should have had the right to vote long before the 1900s. “During World War I, the support for woman suffrage increased due to the progressive movement and inspired many suffragists to focus exclusively on the federal government's failure to approve a woman suffrage amendment.” The right for women to vote was finally approved by congress in 1919, and the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution on August 26, 1920. The fact that women were denied the right to vote goes again all of what America stands for; therefor this amendment was long

Today in our generation, much has changed over the years dealing with women’s rights. Women have more rights today than they did back in the early years. Conflict over social values affected the wider political environment and the readiness of institutions to facilitate the movement for equality (Chafe, W, 1978). Some people still believe today that women shouldn’t have a voice. “Empowering women isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do” (Barack Obama). In this paper it examines the equality in voting, sexual harassment, and women equality in not only the workplace, but in their everyday lives.