The development of women rights

Women Activists Dilemma to support or Oppose the 15th Amendment as evidenced by the split in the Women’s suffrage Movement
Introduction
After the Civil war, three amendments were passed which massively transformed the women’s rights movement. These were the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. The thirteenth amendment approved in the year 1865 declared slavery illegal (Parker, 1849). Thus, all the women who were previously enslaved became free and acquired protection by human rights. The fourteenth amendment declared that everyone born in the U.S was a legal U.S citizen and should not be deprived off their rights including all slaves. Moreover, the law added that all male American citizens had the right to vote (Anderson, 590).
Finally, there was the controversial Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870. The amendment granted black American men the right to vote by stating that the rights of U.S citizens to participate in elections must not be denied on the basis of their race or color. The Fifth Amendment had no mention of women or their rights (Pankhurst, 478). Hence, women were greatly offended by the Amendment because it intentionally omitted the mention of gender. Women activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony together with their women followers were extremely offended by this omission (Anderson, 591). According to them, the amendment was extremely wrong to omit the rights of women. They argued that the rights of women should have been defended together with those of black American men. Other activists e.g. Lucy Stone and Mary Livermore were also offended by the fifteenth amendment yet still supported it (Pankhurst, 493). They feared that if the rights of women were included in the amendment, the amendment would not pass meaning no new suffrage rights would be won. In fact, after the omission of women’s rights in the Fifth Amendment, five decades went by before women gained the right to vote in any federal elections. In fact, none of the women of the Seneca Falls generation lived long enough to enjoy their right to vote (Pankhurst, 295).
Stanton argued that the omission of the rights of women in the Fifth Amendment was an unreasonable compromise that limited women. Other scholars reasoned that the rise of Jim Crow would not have been possible if the Fifth Amendment women had acknowledged women and given them a voice in politics. However, this implied that white women were more progressive and open minded than men (Parker, 1852). This might have not been the case, but it resulted into the split of women right’s movement into two disputing delegations. These are the National Women’s Suffrage Association and the American Women’s Suffrage Association. This dispute greatly stunted the growth of the movement for many years (Anderson, 590).
The women suffrage movements were conducted both in the U.S and in Australia. This was in the late 19th C and in the early 20th C. However, women suffrage in the U.S began way earlier than in Australia and even took longer to succeed. In the U.S, woman suffrage began after the first U.S conference held to fight for women’s rights, the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention. The convention was held by various feminists in the Seneca Falls in 1848. The convention was organized by activists Lucretia Mott and Stanton and attended by various other feminists. Its primary goal was its claim of the declaration of sentiments (Pankhurst, 498).
The declaration claimed that women that women had been oppressed and deprived off their rights for many years. Similarly, the declaration implied that by being derived off their right to vote in the Fifth Amendment made women seem more inferior. In fact, the oppression of their rights gave them very few choices in life. However, the Conference failed to address the issues of racism and other oppressions encountered by black women (Warwick and Huma, 299). The fact that the conference did not address the issue of black women made some of the white suffragists associate voting rights with the supremacy of whites. In fact, after the Fifth Amendment, white suffragists separately began advocating for the voting rights of their white women. They argued that the white women had the right to vote while the Asian, black and Native American women did not (Tabb, 595).
Later on, black women also publicly began the fight for their right to vote. In her speech during the American Equal Rights Association, Sojourner Truth argued that by giving black men the right to vote and denying black women the same rights implied that black men were dominate to their fellow black women. In fact, it literally made the black men masters over their black women which ultimately made the situation of black women equally worse as before (Pankhurst, 503).
Some members of the white women suffrage movement leaders liaised with white supremacists. Those who were members of the American Suffrage Association plainly endorsed the fifteenth amendment. These were mostly black men and women with no racial or gender distinctions (Parker, 1862). Conversely, numerous white suffragists were against the abolishment of lynching. It is because; the protection of white women’s rights was used to justify ruthless acts. The suffrage continued for many years with black men also being denied the right to vote until their fellow black women were given the right to vote (Tabb, 765). Eventually, woman suffrage movements ventured into Australia with the activists from the U.S matching with those from Australia. The suffrage became bigger and stronger since there were more people petitioning for the same. Moreover, as time passed by, women knew their rights and merged to strongly fight for their rights to vote. Nonetheless, many years passed until finally the 19th Amendment was passed in the year 1920 allowing women their right to vote. The woman suffrage was successful even though, it took five decades for it to succeed (Warwick and Huma, 296).
Conclusion
In conclusion, The Fifth Amendment was amo111ng three other Amendments passed after the Civil war. The amendment granted black American men the right to vote by stating that the rights of U.S citizens to participate in elections must not be denied on the basis of their race or color. The Fifth Amendment had no mention of women or their rights. Hence, women were greatly offended by the Amendment because it intentionally omitted the mention of gender. Therefore, women remained limited and denied of their rights to vote. Many women activists alongside their women followers were extremely offended by this omission. They argued that the rights of women should have been defended together with those of black American men. On the other hand, other activists also offended by the fifteenth amendment still supported it lest the amendment would not pass meaning any new suffrage rights would be won. Eventually the disagreements resulted into the split of women right’s movement into two disputing suffrage associations. This continued the fight for women’s right to vote for many years until finally women were allowed to vote in 1920




Works Cited
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Pankhurst, Sylvia. The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement. Minealo, NY: Courier Dover Publications, 2015.608. Print. Accessed from https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=zxUvCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:n1WuqiJ9bMIC&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTr7zzneTbAhWJyRQKHXsjDbsQ6AEIJzAA on 19th June 2018.
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Tabb, Charles J. "The Bankruptcy Clause, the Fifth Amendment, and the Limited Rights of Secured Creditors in Bankruptcy." U. Ill. L. Rev. (2015): 765. Print. Accessed from http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi- bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/unilllr2015§ion=28 on 19th June 2018.


Warwick, Kevin, and Huma Shah. "Taking the fifth amendment in Turing’s imitation game." Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 29.2 (2017): 287-297. Accessed from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0952813X.2015.1132273 on 19th June 2018.