Till this day women are looked down upon. Men feel as if the women can not think as sharply, work as hard, make better judgments and so on. And that's why I chose chapter 3 to blog about. This subject stood out to me the most because I am a proud women and I stand up for the women around me and for myself. It breaks my heart when I witness women being "thrown around" by men, when women allow men to talk down to them, to abuse them, boss them around. Women have a voice just as the men do, so why not use it, and use it proudly.
In the 18 century women were not allowed to state their opinions, they had no rights. It's been said that the women would base their place in socity by her husband's identity. For a women could not think to the fullest, and wasn't capable of making the right decisions. Once being married, their lives consist of making their husbands happy, cleaning around and taking care of the children. Having no rights also meant, they weren't allowed to claim property. It didn't matter if the property belonged to the women before being married, the land now was in control of the male figure. If the married couple got a divorce she would then lose her property and the children she gave birth too. Women weren't being treated right and something needed to change, but how? Women weren't allowed to speak their mind, influnce the media with journalism.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first women who became a leading theorist, writer, and orator. She lived in Seneca Falls, New Yourk and she started the Women's Rights Movement. She was happily married to a lawyer, he was rarely home due to work so Stanton was left home with her seven children. She grew to be bored and tired of not having rights, so she realized something had to be done. Stanton posted a public note in Seneca County Courier stating "A convention to discuess the social, civil, and religious riights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July." 300 attended to her call out for a change, and at the end of the two day meeting, she got 68 women and 32 men to sign their names to a Declaration of Sentiments.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The men of our nation were not happy with this movement. There were magazines, newspapers, anything involving the media influencing their thoughts. While I was reading the chapter, there were quotes from the men's article that I didn't like reading. Men really thought that women couldn't think for themselves and that we were denpendent people. Ladies Magazine reads "Placed in a situation of difficulty, they have neither a head to dictate, nor a hand to help." The Rochester Daily Advertiser called us women " extremely dull" and " hardly worth notice". The New York Herald said female leaders were "weak and silly heads" and being " candidates for admission into lunatic asylums," And lastly another one reads "A women is nobody. A wife is everything."
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was the second women to stand up for Women's Rights Movement. She came together to work with Stanton, putting two great, strong minds together created a great partnership. They created hundreds of women's rights meetings, public lectures and petition drives all over the country during 1850's and doing this they got thousands of people to support them. These two women were doing everything they could to give rights to the women. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendement was made to give former slaves the vote. So now slaves have rights and women still didn't, so this just drove Stanton and Anthony even harder.
Stanton and Anthony realized in order to make this movement sucessful , they'd have to make their own source of communication to get through to their readers. They published a newspaper called The Revolution, and the mass head reading read "Men, Their Rights and Nothing More; Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less." This newspaper was very controverisal, they wrote about aborotion, social issues, prositution, divorce and prison reform. This paper wasn't too sucessful, it lasted for only two years and had $10,000 of unpaid bills.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Finally after twenty years of being unequal, the Women's Rights Movement was united in 1890 to create the National Women Suffrage Association. From the years 1870 and 1910, the women held 500 campaigns nationwide. It wasn't until the Progessive Movement when sucess started to show. This era had many changes occuring so Women's Rights didn't seem so radical. In 1916 Carrie Chapman Catt began an organization for help the movement. The book said her "winning plan" help presuade the House of Representatives into passing the 19th amendent in 1918. Then two years after that, women's suffrage became the law of the land in August 1920. It took 72 years for women to become equal with the men.
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