The Women's Rights Movement

The year is 1840 in London, at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott for the first time. They became good friends over the fact that the men denied them participating in the process even when Mott was nominated to serve as an official delegate of their society. This doesn’t surprise me one bit, women counter parts have always acted like they should come first and that women should only be allowed to do certain things in life. Ms. Stanton married Henry Stanton, who was a journalist and antislavery orator. They met through the involvement in the temperance movement. After eight years Stanton was living near Seneca Falls. Mott and others stopped by for a social visit which would bring on a spontaneous event of history. Stanton wanted womens rights to be presented before the public, so the women decided to call for a convention.

Abolitionist Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia Quaker along with Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley embraced women’s rights and connected their abolitionist views with the acknowledging of sisterhood in oppression with female slaves. Eventually, many began to push for women’s equality along with the emancipation of slaves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attended the London World’s Anti-Slavery Convention and with Lucretia Mott was forced to sit in a screened-off woman’s section. She there collaborated with Mott in relation to the issue of women’s rights.

Stanton’s most memorable convention was the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 where one hundred men and women gathered for the historic convention. There she introduced her manifesto, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which proclaimed that men and women are equal and women need more protection under the law. The document also called for expansion of employment and educational opportunities along with the right to vote for women. Stanton’s manifesto was inspired by the United States Declaration of Independence, The press was not fond with the Seneca Falls Convention and complained that all the women that attended were sour maids and childless women. Although the media did not approve of her remarkable meeting, it brought attention to the women’s rights movement on the political standpoint. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Mott was raised in a Quaker community just like Anthony was. She helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and was the president of the society. Mott boycotted all products of slave labor. When she went to attend the World Anti-Slavery convention in London, she was denied a seat because of her gender. When she was denied a seat, she stood outside of the hall where the convention was being held and preached her doctrine of female equality. When she spent a lot of time in London, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who also believed in fighting for women’s rights. The two became good friends almost instantly. Mott was officially known as a feminist when she argued for equal pay and voting rights. In the summer of 1848, both Stanton and Mott organized a meeting at Seneca Falls, New York where the American Women’s Right Movement was launched. Shortly after, Mott was elected president in 1852. In 1864, she contributed in the establishment of Swarthmore College. As she got older, she served as the head of the American Equal Rights Association. Mott worked hard for everything she did just as Stanton and Anthony had

“The anti-slavery movement provided opportunities for women to participate in public action and for Stanton to develop her reformist sensibilities. Women who raised money and awareness for female education typically did so behind closed doors to avoid violating codes of proper, womanly behavior. But abolitionism challenged these codes by encouraging women to speak publicly” (Belinda Stillion Southard 2006, sec.3). Women believed it was their moral duty and natural rights to speak publicly about, mistreatment, oppression, and inequality against women. In Learning about the Woman`s Movement with Sentiments Document, according to Brenda Betts (2005), “ The Women's Rights Convention of 1848 came about because several women traveled from the United States to London, England in 1840 to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention.

Back in the mid 1800’s the first women’s convention was initiated by Elizabeth Stanton, along with others who founded the Women’s Suffrage Movement. After attending an World Anti-Slavery Society meeting, where the women were required to sit is a separate area away from the men, the women decided that they were little better than slaves and decided to do something about it. (Pearson, 2017)

When the women’s right movement began in the antebellum years in the northern United States, it seems to be sparked by the abolitionist struggles against slavery. A Women’s Right Convention at Seneca Falls, New York in the late 1840s was one of the biggest emergence of women’s rights. Leading this convention were many prominent women including Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were all trained in the school of

During this convention is when two women named Elizabeth Cady Stanton along with Lucretia Mott began to discuss and lead to the idea of creating a women’s rights convention in order to take a stand against this unfair treatment (Harris

Dolly Parton once quoted, “If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.” This quote helps understand the impact the Women’s Suffrage Movement makes on the present day. In 1848 the battle for women’s privileges started with the first Women 's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment, which provided full voting rights for women nationally, was ratified in the United States Constitution when Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it (Burkhalter). Freya Johnson Ross and Ceri Goddard stated a quite valid argument in a secondary source Unequal Nation saying, “Since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, major social changes have transformed the lives of women and men in many ways but the United States has not noticed how far away our nation is from the gender equal future” (5). When women were finally granted the right to vote, barriers were broken which would allow an increasing chance to make progressive steps to a more equal nation, but our nation has yet to realize our full potential.

Originally, the rights of American women were minor. Women could not vote, serve on juries, or attend colleges among other restrictions. Women like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought long and hard for civil, religious, and social rights of American women. Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence. This declaration demanded equality of men and women. Women’s suffrage, or the right to vote, was another struggle for the women to overcome. These women did win some small victories such as convincing New York to pass a law protecting women’s property rights, and some states even began to allow married women to keep their wages. Education also improved for women. American schools were focused on educating boys, who would grow up to be voters, so Emma Willard started The Troy Female Seminary. Eventually, Mary Lyon built Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which was the first college for women, although it was not called a college at the time. Even though education improved for women, it would not be until 1920 that a constitutional amendment would be made to allow women to vote. The Women’s Rights Movement was a very major and important improvement for American

On August 18, 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex, was ratified. This amendment represented nearly eighty years of struggle for American suffragists. Throughout this arduous journey the suffrage movement evolved alongside the women who embodied it, each generation splintering into moderate and radical factions. Since its founding in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had been the leading women’s suffrage organization. However in 1916, growing disillusioned with NAWSA’s moderate style and political theory, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns broke away and formed their own coalition: the National Woman’s Party. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate that these two organizations, while different in political tactics, were equally effective in securing suffrage for women due to the combination of their independent activities.

The women of the temperance movement worked to rally around the abuse of alcohol because, in the words of Mary C. Vaugh, "there is no reform in which woman can act better or more appropriately than temperance. Its effect fall so crushingly upon her she has so often seen its slow, insidious, but not the less surely fatal advances, gaining upon its victim. Oh! The misery, the utter, hopeless misery of the drunkard's wife!" (Danzer et al.). As women's activism increased their goals shifted towards that of helping women through education and schools; up until the 1820s there were little opportunity to educate women beyond elementary school but the changing times and changing attitude of women paved way for a transformation of this status quo. In 1821, the Troy Female Seminary opens it's doors and became one of the nation's first female schools for higher learning and as decades past more schools followed suit such as the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and the first coeducational college, Oberlin College in

The woman suffrage movement, which succeeded in 1920 with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, coincided with major national reform movements seeking to improve public education, create public health programs, regulate business and industrial practices, and establish standards agencies to ensure pure food and public water supplies. In 1870, the first attempt that Virginia women, as a campaign, fought for the right to vote in New Jersey when native Anna Whitehead Bodeker invited several men and women sympathetic to the cause to a meeting that launched the first Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association in Richmond. Though it is not the same concept as fight for the right to vote, women have been fighting an invisible fight for along time in the terms of rape culture on college campuses. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women are sexually assaulted while in college. The fight women take to get help on college campuses is a hard battle when many times put through victim blaming and rejection by the police. Those who chose to stand up for their rights against the injustice, often placed upon them by societal and cultural expectations, make progress towards

The women 's suffrage movement, the time when women fought for their rights, began in the year 1848 and continued on all the way through the 1860s. Although women in the new republic had important roles in the family, the house, and other obligations, they were excluded from most rights. These rights included political and legal rights. Due to their gender, they have been held back because they did not have as much opportunities as the men did. The new republic made alterations in the roles of women by disparaging them in society. During this era, men received a higher status than women. Because women were forced to follow laws without being allowed to state their opinions, they tried to resist laws, fight for their freedom and strive to gain equality with men. This leads to feminism, the belief in political, social, and economic equality between men and women. It is the feminist efforts that have successfully tried to give rights that men had, to women who have been denied those rights. Upon the deprivation of those rights, the Seneca Falls convention and the Declaration of Sentiments helped women gain the privileges and opportunities to accomplish the task of equality that they have been striving for.

Due to the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832, which specified that women could not vote in parliamentary elections, the women’s suffrage movement grew. The non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies formed in 1897, an amalgamation of 20 suffrage societies, with Millicent Fawcett as president . They attempted to attain the vote