Women’s Movement Overview
The Women’s Movement
A Spirit of reform permeated American life in the early and middle 1800’s. Women took active roles in the abolition movement and other reform movements. Soon, some of these reformers began to work to gain equality for women as well. Their efforts would lay the groundwork for women’s struggle for equal rights over the next hundred years.
Women Work for Change
In the 1800’s, American women’s freedoms and rights were sharply limited. Instead of taking a powerful role in public life, women were expected to make a difference privately, by influencing their husbands and raising their children to be good Americans. But this idealized influence was too limiting for women. Largely as a result of the Second Great Awakening, women in the early 1800’s began to take on more active roles in public life.
In the early 1800’s, American Women lacked many basic legal and economic rights. Under the British legal traditions that dominated the United States, women could not hold property or hold office or vote, and they were usually forbidden to even speak in public. Formal educational opportunities were virtually unheard of. In the rare instances of divorce, husbands generally gained custody of children.
Women Lead Reform Efforts
The drive to reform American society created by the Second Great Awakening provided new opportunities for women. Many joined reform groups sponsored by their churches. Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard, Elizabeth Blackwell and Ann Preston advanced education during the public school movement. Most community leaders of the temperance movement were women; after all, they and their children were the primary victims of their husbands’ and fathers’ abuse of alcohol.
The abolition movement attracted some of the most thoughtful women of the day, including Angelina and Sarah Grimke. Many abolitionist groups were made up entirely of women. One of the most effective abolitionist lecturers was Sojourner Truth, a former slave from New York who held audiences spellbound with her powerful speech and arguments.
Women Enter the Workplace
In the 1820’s and 1830’s, the Northeast was rapidly industrializing. This provided the first real economic opportunity for women to work outside the home. Thousands of women went to work in the new mills and factories. This gave women a small degree of economic independence (although their wages were typically sent to their husbands or fathers) and a larger degree of social independence as they made friends with other factory workers. By 1830, a few women’s labor unions had formed, and women went on strike for better wages and working conditions.
Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement
Many women argued that their lack of rights made them almost the same as slaves. These women, along with a handful of men from the abolitionist movement, began to work for women’s rights. Women’s rights reformers began to publish their ideas in pamphlets and books. Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, believed what women needed was not personal power but “as nature to grow, we would have every path open to woman as freely as to man.” The Grimke sisters also published their ideas. In Letters on the Equality of Sexes and the Condition of Women, Sarah Grimke’ argued that God made man and woman equal, therefore men and women should be treated equally. Building on her sister’s ideas, Angelina Grimke Weld defended the rights of both slaves and women on moral grounds:
“The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own..Human beings have rights because they are moral beings..If rights are founded on the nature of moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give man higher rights and responsibilities to woman.” Angelina Grimke, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher 1838
This made dozens of other women call for greater rights.
The women who spoke up for full equality were a small minority. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were active reformers, supporting the temperance and abolitionist causes. Mott helped found the Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Stanton was married to a leading abolitionist, Henry Stanton. Henry was also interested in women’s rights. These two women were outraged that women were refused full participation at a meeting for anti-slavery and were inspired to take a dramatic step towards women’s rights.
Women Convene in Seneca Falls
In 1848 Mott and Stanton helped organize the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. Often called the Seneca Falls Convention, the meeting attracted hundreds of men and women, including Frederick Douglass. The delegates at the convention adopted “Declaration of Sentiments” modeled after the language in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Sentiments was ridiculed and it resulted in few improvements for women in the United States. It did, however, mark the beginning of the women’s movement in the United States.
Susan B. Anthony drew inspiration from the convention. She had been involved in the temperance movement and the abolitionist movement, and was now was working for the rights of women. Anthony would help lead the charge to win a single, critical right for women: the right to vote. This quest for suffrage would prove to be a long hard fight. Women in the United States did not get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920.