Women's struggle for equal rights

¶ … Politics of Being a Woman: From Suffrage to Congress

The women's rights movement gained a lot of traction in the nineteenth century through its association and involvement in abolitionist movements and a general push for greater societal and economic equality, not to mention political access. Allowing women to join such movements was frequently resisted, and the attempt to prevent a female delegation from taking part in the World Antislavery Convention in 1840 prodded the formation of a women's rights group and the explicit struggle for the equality of women. Though this began as a primarily British movement, it was in 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two American women who had been at the World Antislavery Convention, held the first Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. This was the true beginning of the modern women's rights movement, which gained momentum throughout the nineteenth century.

The National Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869, with a focus on achieving a constitutional amendment granting women in the United States the right to vote. The American Woman Suffrage Association was formed alter in that same year, and its efforts were directed at achieving individual state amendments or laws allowing women to vote -- a tactic that would prove more successful for several decades. In 1913, however, here still had not been a significant amount of progress made, and a more radical group was formed. The Congressional Union for Women's Suffrage was more vocal in their fight, but also slighted women of color as a means of retaining popularity in the South. The struggle continues with such organizations as the National Organization for Women, which was founded in the 1960s in an effort to establish true equality and freedom from discrimination for women.

One of the reasons for the formation of the National Organization for Women was the fact that, despite legislation like the Equal Pay Act of 1963, there were still many disparities in the way women were treated both in the halls of government and the offices and boardrooms of the corporate world. This Act was passed by Congress in order to ensure the equality of wages based on gender, but many women activists were angered by the fact that the legislation was not really enforced, and companies often got away with disparities in pay and even in hiring practices. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was even more sweeping in its condemnation of discriminatory practices based on gender in many matters of business, including employment, wages, banking decisions, etc. yet despite such hard-won legislation, the issue of gender equality in this country is still far from over.