Going to a public school until the 8th grade, I would like to think that having been taught using only the common curriculum textbooks I have pretty well absorbed the traditional, mainstream narrative of the history of the United States. Our thick textbooks had multitudes of information stored on the Revolution, slavery, the Civil War, postbellum rebuilding, and of course, a copious amount of white men in power. What the textbooks neglected to mention was women’s history. Apart from the smallest shred of sidebar information, the textbooks were devoid of any meaningful substance about women’s suffrage or early feminism. Of course, these books still had the U.S.S.R. labeled as a country on the map, and many modern textbooks began to mention the
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Exposing the lesser known facts and feats of 19th century women’s history is an integral theme in Untidy Origins. For example, the six central women (Eleanor Vincent, Lydia Williams, Lydia Osborn, Susan Ormsby, Amy Ormsby, and Anna Bishop) portrayed in the book are left out of almost all other retellings of women’s history in favor of more famous figures, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. These six ordinary women organized a meeting in Albany to discuss women’s rights and place in society before the famous Seneca Falls Convention, which is often marked as the first convention to discuss women’s rights in America. The six women were also remarkable for the fact that they wrote a petition in the vein of the Declaration of Independence, stating that women possessed “inalienable rights” when it came to equal rights and citizenship. In their petition they also chose to not identify themselves as wives, mothers or Christians, simply identifying themselves as women, cementing their expectation and desire for equal treatment on the basis of gender. With such an interesting and seemingly revolutionary mindset, Ginzberg makes an interesting argument as for why these women aren’t included in mainstream …show more content…
On the issue of equal suffrage, the right for women to vote was solidly and unsurprisingly defeated in a vote at the 1846 Constitutional Convention. However, women’s property rights were more openly accepted, albeit slowly, and made their way slowly into New York society. This local change, small as it is, was important for the simple fact that it proved that women had the opportunity to help make change to better their own social
Exposing the lesser known facts and feats of 19th century women’s history is an integral theme in Untidy Origins. For example, the six central women (Eleanor Vincent, Lydia Williams, Lydia Osborn, Susan Ormsby, Amy Ormsby, and Anna Bishop) portrayed in the book are left out of almost all other retellings of women’s history in favor of more famous figures, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. These six ordinary women organized a meeting in Albany to discuss women’s rights and place in society before the famous Seneca Falls Convention, which is often marked as the first convention to discuss women’s rights in America. The six women were also remarkable for the fact that they wrote a petition in the vein of the Declaration of Independence, stating that women possessed “inalienable rights” when it came to equal rights and citizenship. In their petition they also chose to not identify themselves as wives, mothers or Christians, simply identifying themselves as women, cementing their expectation and desire for equal treatment on the basis of gender. With such an interesting and seemingly revolutionary mindset, Ginzberg makes an interesting argument as for why these women aren’t included in mainstream …show more content…
On the issue of equal suffrage, the right for women to vote was solidly and unsurprisingly defeated in a vote at the 1846 Constitutional Convention. However, women’s property rights were more openly accepted, albeit slowly, and made their way slowly into New York society. This local change, small as it is, was important for the simple fact that it proved that women had the opportunity to help make change to better their own social