The Great Lawsuit by Margaret Fuller Essay

With the advancement of suffrage to equal pay, over the last century, women’s rights have progressed immensely. Through historic marches and demonstrations across the United States, women protested for their equal place in politics and social progress. Despite the fear-mongering components used in achieving these rights, women’s rights are still thoroughly debated within society today. Over the last century, incredible and unreachable goals have been fulfilled for women, such as the right to vote and a sense of equal state in the “Free World,” and can only improve in the years to come.

Over the course of many years, women have struggled to expand their roles and rights in society, hoping to one day achieve complete equality with their male counterparts. Two women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Judy (Syfers) Brady, both recognized the patriarchal society in which women had to endure. They despised the way it heaped inequality and servitude upon women, and decided to assert their opinion on the issue in order to change the perceptions and imposed limitations on women. In Stanton’s speech, “Declaration of Sentiments”, and in Brady’s article, “I Want a Wife”, both women attempt to convince their audiences that females deserve complete equality with men by stating the submissive situations and obligations women find themselves immersed in. This is done to get their female audiences to reevaluate how they have been treated and give them a second chance at attaining equality. Both women employ various rhetorical techniques in their arguments to strengthen, as well as compel other women to oppose the ‘domesticated’ image of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Judy (Syfers) Brady expressed their views in pursuance of forging a path to a revamped lifestyle for women.

Campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment in the early twentieth century, women found it particularly difficult to have their efforts opposed by other women. One of the hovering questions that went along with the proposal of the amendment was whether those supporting equality for women, advocating the equality of opportunity, would also support the enablement of women to be freely different from men without consequence. There were passionate feelings on both sides of the arguments and this debate brought into focus many questions about equality. Despite the magnificent accomplishments of all the movements and efforts of women, complete gender equality had yet to be achieved.

The struggle for equal rights has been an ongoing issue in the United States. For most of the twentieth century Americans worked toward equality. Through demonstrations, protests, riots, and parades citizens have made demands and voiced their concerns for equal rights. For the first time minority groups were banding together to achieve the American dream of liberty and justice for all. Whether it was equality for women, politics, minorities, or the economy the battle was usually well worth the outcome. I have chosen articles that discuss some of the struggles, voyages, and triumphs that have occurred. The people discussed in the following articles represent only a portion of those who suffered.

What would today’s world be like without the contributions from women in the past and more to come in the future? What would a women’s life be like without having the same opportunities as men? Sarah Margaret Fuller, a journalist, social reformer, and writer represented the individual women with rights during the middle 1800s. Contributing to transcendentalism, Fuller transformed the idea of a women’s rights and who they should be in society, presenting radical views changing forever the American woman.

Margaret Fuller was challenging the women of her era even when she was young. Margaret Fuller was given a higher form of education than most females of her time by her father. After Margaret’s father died, she began holding a secret meeting to help educate women about a thing, that at the time were considered socially unacceptable for women to talk and learn about. Men eventually began coming to these meeting as well. The fact that men came to a meeting run by women helps prove that women have the mental capacity to talk and teach about thing previously thought to be socially unacceptable for women to even learn about. Fuller was also a writer, something else that was also viewed as socially unacceptable for women to do. Fuller has many writings

Margaret Fuller was a highly educated and well respected philosophical influence of the nineteenth century who contributed significantly to influence the women’s rights movement. She didn’t join organized movements or women’s rights organizations because she felt that she could have more of an impact by speaking and acting independently, in which she excelled.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women, had almost no rights in society. They were not permitted to own or inherit property, their education was severely limited, there was a period in which they were not permitted to divorce their husband, and when they were given this right, they were not permitted to retain guardianship over their children. Since women were not allowed to have their own property it was essential that they married men who were able to provide for them the status that they had enjoyed in their father’s home. Preferably the status they gained in marriage was greater than what they had before. The hope was that the husband would help support the woman’s mother when her father passed away. For women who did not find husbands there were limited options left to them. In

In her novel Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller discusses the essence of marriage as a union and how the past ties in with dreams of the future. When describing the sacrament of marriage and unity, Fuller expresses that the “highest grade of marriage union… may be expressed as pilgrimage toward a common shrine.” In other words, Fuller’s idea of marriage is built upon the theory that marriage is a two-person ordeal, and both parties involved must strive for and worship the same ideals, both in each other and in the outside world. Furthermore, Fuller, while noting that she wrote the novel at the midpoint of her life, takes another look in the new light of day that age and wisdom have granted her at the symbols and objects which she used to consider important. While doing so, she notices that “some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken.” Fuller emphasizes the reality that symbols can change in meaning over time and need to be re-evaluated from time to time instead of being continually adored. Rather than clinging to symbols in the hopes that the dreams they represent can be realized, sometimes those dreams should be acknowledged as impossible to achieve rather than being used as unsteady pieces of flotsam to cling onto an unrealistic shipwreck of a dream. Furthering her argument that things which used to hold hope for the future while in the dawn of life should be acknowledged but not used

Margaret Fuller is one of the most inspirational figures in American literature. She was a role model for countless of women by being a feminist author and publishing one of the first feminist pieces of literature, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller dared to write about radical concepts that dumbfounded the people living in the nineteenth century, and advocated for women’s rights long before feminism actually became a concept (Vanderhaar 235). She brought different ideas to the nineteenth century world and left many people wondering where exactly did these ideas come from. While most people credit her different thoughts to her conversations in the Transcendentalist circles and her time as a woman in the nineteenth century, Margaret Fuller’s unusual and hard childhood experiences, such as receiving a boy’s education, neglection, pressure from male peers, and growing up around many cultural stresses, had a much greater impact on her feminist point of view.

In the 19th century England love and marriage were concepts that weren’t very closely related. The novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, centers on the importance of marriage as one of life’s most important treasures and life’s greatest source of happiness. As the book title so rightfully depicts, pride and prejudice was demonstrated by the various social classes against each other as per the moral and social expectations of that society. Austen presents the reader with two main factor about relationships that are each based around different struggles including social class, love and marriage especially as it impacts the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy.

I wish to begin by talking about Judy Brady, an author trying to convey to her audience that all men in the seventies wanted a wife. Not just a wife, but a “Wife”; a person with a title behind the four letter word. A title so misleading and mistaken it may change relationships. In “I Want a Wife” a wife is almost given a label of that of a slave or servant. However, nowadays a wife is someone a man can love and work with and cherish. My father did not marry my mother for her abilities but for her huge heart and devotion to their relationship. Their love continues to grow as they both give back and work with one another. If my father is hanging clothes

Fuller uses a quote that is degrading to women and empower men in American society to prove how these phrases have given women a demeaning status in society. She uses one phrase in two different forms to send a strong message about the power gender has on the thoughts on of American’s. “Frailty, thy name is woman. The earth waits for her queen” (Fuller 3) In using this quote

The common outlook on family hierarchies is that the man presides on a pedestal. Most seem to forget about the matriarch though. Within “Why I Want a Wife,” Judy Syfers used irony, intentional repetition, informal language phrases, and the establishment of ethos and logos to emphasize how essential a wife is to a tranquil life’s construction, but how little she is appreciated.

Although many groups have face inequality women have, and are still facing gender inequalities in laws. Before 1920 women could not vote and had little to no rights in America, women were looked at as nothing more than wives and mothers. In 1920 the nineteenth amendment gave women the right to vote, though this was far from the end of struggles for women’s rights. Women could not serve on juries in many locations before 1975, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Taylor v. Louisiana (419 U.S. 522) that excluding women from juries was unconstitutional. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, married women could not own property, sign contracts, or make wills, although by the end of the century they could do all these things thanks in part to efforts of the women’s rights movement of that era. Yet, employment