Women\'s Rights in America What

Women's Rights In America

What non-egalitarian ideologies were present in American society at the time of the launching of the women's rights movement? Put forth an argument.

It was written in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, but it didn't say anything about women; but because the young nation had a lot of other things to squabble about, women were asked to take a back seat, raise the children, cook the meals, clean the house and wash the clothes, and be quiet. Men had all the rights, plain and simple, and women did much of the work.

Meanwhile, while the U.S. women's rights movement - and the women's suffrage movement - brought important constitutional issues to the forefront of American culture, the women's movement had to compete with other great issues. After all, the nation was on the brink of destroying itself, as southerners and northerners killed each other in massive numbers (618,000 died); that issue dwarfed the idea that women should have the right to vote.

And as to the right to vote for women - pushed hard in the 19th Century up to, through, and after the Civil War - because it had to compete with the far greater issues of slavery and state's rights, it was indeed pushed to the background of social concerns.

And beyond the right to vote, there was within the genre of a woman's place in the American society there was the "complex agenda of rights, among them the right to control property, of guardianship over children, and of access to education and to work in trades and professions" (Kerber, 1995).

America may be the "land of the free..." But it actually cost money to vote if you were African-American, and if you were a woman; indeed, even 17 years after the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law that discouraged white women from voting; the law provided that "any woman who did not choose to register to vote did not have to pay the poll tax," Kerber writes. In other words, if you registered to vote, you'd have to pay the "poll tax."

What was the schism that caused the powerful abolitionist Fredrick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and other women within the women's suffrage movement, to part ways?

During the Civil War, "suffrage efforts nearly come to a complete halt as women put their enfranchisement aside and pitch in for the war effort," according to a History of the American Suffragist Movement (www.suffragist.com/timeline.htm).That issue brought Fredrick Douglass together with several leaders of the women's suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony.

After the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony was very upset with the Fredrick Douglass and other abolitionists - and with the politicians who helped craft the language of the 15th Amendment - because of the language contained in the 15th Amendment. In providing voting rights for "freedmen" (blacks who had been slaves), the 15th Amendment used the word "male" in the U.S. Constitution, and Susan B. Anthony was very upset at that.

For one thing, the women's suffrage movement had vigorously supported the abolition of slavery well prior to (and, of course, during the Civil War); and now that blacks were free, and were given the right to vote (although many blacks in America didn't really get to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed their right to cast votes) prior to the women in American having the right to vote.

For another thing, many women were already stretched to the maximum in terms of the patience over their lack of voting rights.

According to an article in www.About.com (Women's History: Susan B. Anthony), "Some of Susan B. Anthony's writings were...quite racist by today's standards." She made the point that "educated white women would be better voters than 'ignorant' black men or immigrant men." In the late 1860s, she even portrayed the vote of freemen as "threatening the safety of white women," according to the article. The man who put up money to fund Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, Revolution, was "a noted racist," the article asserts.

What role did the ideas inherent in the Declaration of Independence have in the women's rights movement? The Declaration of Sentiments (written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton) was presented to the women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It contained several important resolutions: a man should not take a woman's property; a man should not "withhold a woman's rights"; women should not be refused the right to vote. There was some dissention about the "right to vote" clause in the document, but the majority went along with it.