Sunday, July 7, 2013

What were the effects of the Women's Rights Movement of the middle to the late 1800s?

The women's rights movement of the mid-1800s helped build the political foundations and social networks upon which the later push for temperance and women's suffrage depended. The organizational prowess of leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott led not only to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1849, with its "Declaration of Sentiments," which would comprise the platform of the movement, but also served as an example and encouragement to other civically minded women around the country to become politically active.  


As a result, women began to agitate for and gain the right to vote and own property (under certain circumstances) in certain western states and territories such as Wyoming (in 1869) and Utah (in 1870). Partly also as a result of the Second Great Awakening, and with the help of their churches, women around the country began to meet outside their homes to discuss the havoc that alcohol  wrecked on their lives, causing husbands to become abusive, to gamble away their money, and even to prostitute their wives and daughters in some extreme cases. The push to ban or curb the sale of alcohol and the campaign for universal women's suffrage, became inextricably linked.


Although the 18th and 19th amendments (Prohibition and Women's Suffrage, respectively) did not pass congress until 1920, the politicization of women in the mid-1800s gave women a voice in politics that they had lacked before. Although women such as Susan B. Anthony and Stanton could not vote, they came to have national profiles, and went on lecture circuits speaking to both men and women around the country, influencing the way those men voted. 

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