Rebecca Feilton Women's Rights Analysis

During Rebecca Felton’s declarations that it was an obligation of manhood to act in women’s best interests and invest equality in their wives and daughters, she also proclaimed that it was the responsibility of the male race to protect women. In perhaps her most well-known and often quoted 1897 speech on Tybee Island, her argument regarded the protection of women’s innocence from the rape of blacks a duty of white men. This speech made headlines in newspapers across Georgia because of its sensational racial language and the statement if “lynching is required to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts-then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” In this speech, Rebecca Felton identified the recently …show more content…
Felton encouraged the idea that all men had to answer to a higher authority in their Savior. In her “McRae Address”, she called for “young husbands, as you look at your wife’s eyes, remember she is considered by divine authority to be your own other self” and that a marriage is “a symposium of domestic love with equal duties and equal responsibility, where a man’s responsibility and a woman’s duty are counted equally” She also added during the “Improvement of Farm Homes” address that “the first duty of a Georgia Farmer is to promote the prompt attendance to the domestic improvement of his home.” Rebecca Felton believed that it was through equality within a marriage and the happiness of a wife and mother that the South’s domestic troubles would begin to emerge from the darkness left by the Civil War and the suffering many families still lived with. According to Felton, women had been trapped at the mercy of men in many aspects of life for far too many years, and requiring changes inside of the household was just the beginning of the