Women’s Rights Over the Last Century Throughout history, cultures have typically assigned different roles to men and women. Women through the lens of history have been seen as inferior to the male authority. Women for many centuries have fought for legal equality, a voice, the right to own property, to work outside of the home, and common social equality. Women went from being the property of their husbands, and/or their fathers to being able to own their own property and manage their own financial businesses. Woman today in the twenty century are able to drive, own property, work outside the home, vote for president, work in male dominated jobs, have laws that protect their rights, and most importantly have a voice. This was not always the reality for women in nineteenth century. The living legacy of what women fought for in the past century has surpassed their expectations. Women’s rights movement has changed tremendously in the last century and has flourished into something bigger. In this century we have had a female candidate to run for president. The objective of this paper is to lay out the foundation of how women’s rights has changed over the last century. It all began on July 13, 1848, at a tea gathering in upstate New York, when a young housewife, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was invited to tea with four women friends. When the course of their conversation took a sudden turn, they started to discuss the situation of women. They were utterly confused why under America’s new democracy have the limitations been placed on her and her fellow female friends. Hadn’t the American Revolution had been fought just 70 years earlier to win the patriots freedom from tyranny? But women at that time still had not gained their freedom even thought they’d equally taken tremendous risks through those active dangerous years. All of Stanton’s friends agreed that the new republic could surely benefit if women played a more active role in society. This was definitely not the first group of women to have such conversation, but it was the first to plan and carry out a specific, large-scale program (Eisenburg & Ruthsdotter, 1998). Within two days of their afternoon tea together, the small group of women chose a day for their convention, found a suitable location, and placed a small announcement in the Seneca County Courier. The purpose of the foundation was to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman. The organized gathering would take place at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848. In the history of western civilization, no similar public meeting had ever been called. This was one of the first steps to taking in the thousands of steps women would take closer to civil freedom. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many patriotic women, shared their ideas of improving the new republic. They saw that it was their mission to help the republic keep its promise of a better, more egalitarian lives for its citizens. Stanton used the Declaration of Independence as the frame work for writing the “Declaration of Sentiments” that was drafted. She strategically connected the nascent campaign for women’s rights to directly of that a powerful American symbol of liberty. She deliberately enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly. She used the forefathers revolutionary Declaration of Independence as guidance to list her number of grievances. It went into specifics: Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law, women were not
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The media of the time was in frenzy. Women demanding to vote was a scandalous and an outlandish matter. The Declaration of Sentiments was often published and ridiculed in the public eye. The movement was already being attacked. Although, many were opposed to giving women their right’s. The Women’s Rights movement continue to move forward as planned. The movement optimistically expanded, in hope to make conventions in all parts of the country. So, they continued with their conventions until the start of the Civil War. Elizabeth Cade Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth, were the women among the group that traveled the country lecturing the women on what they could
The media of the time was in frenzy. Women demanding to vote was a scandalous and an outlandish matter. The Declaration of Sentiments was often published and ridiculed in the public eye. The movement was already being attacked. Although, many were opposed to giving women their right’s. The Women’s Rights movement continue to move forward as planned. The movement optimistically expanded, in hope to make conventions in all parts of the country. So, they continued with their conventions until the start of the Civil War. Elizabeth Cade Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth, were the women among the group that traveled the country lecturing the women on what they could