Women’s Rights

1848

• Seneca Falls

• Declaration of Sentiments

Divisions in the movement for civil rights and other issues (1830s-1850s)

• Upper/Middle Class:

• Property Rights

• Marriage Rights

• Access to higher education

• Anti-Prostitution

• Voting Rights

• Abolition

• Access to Employment

• Dress Reform

• Also

• Working Class:• Temperance• Anti-Gambling• Better working

conditions• Better living

conditions• Help for the poor• Representation in

gov’t• Control of earnings

Methods to achieve this:

• Upper/Middle class women:– Lobbying– Abolitionist movement– Publish journals– Protesting colleges

All used these methods:

-Picketing

-Civil disobedience

Civil War

• Hold on the movement: Why?

Civil War Photography--Thesis topic?

Hope during Reconstruction

• 13th, 14th, 15th amendment

• Do these amendment give women rights? Suffrage? Why or why not?

• 13th:

• 14th:

• 15th:

Failure

• “They always unified the words ‘without regard to sex, race or color.’ Who hears of sex now from these champions on freedom.”

• Splits movement:– Champion for black equality?

– Suffrage for women?

• What happens to movements for equality that split?

Fredrick Douglass

• Why I Became a Women’s Rights Man

• 1. Why should women have rights?

• 2. Why is he grateful toward women?

• 3. How does this writing compare to the “What is the 4th of July to a Negro?” speech

Response Post Reconstruction• 2 groups

– 1. National Woman Suffrage Association-Constitutional amendment

– 2. American Woman Suffrage Association--State amendments

• Why do these groups look to

different governments to

achieve the same goal?

Other methods to gain equality

• Run for office• Mass voting• Courts

– Through 14th amendment

• Political Cartoons• Expand domestic sphere to include social evils

– Can leave the home– Fight for the morality of society

Justifications for Equality

• How do women justify the need for equality and suffrage?

• The following political cartoons were published during the fight for suffrage.

• For each cartoon, write down the justifications shown.

Myra Bradwell(state level)

• 1869--Illinois Supreme Court denied application to practice law– “femme covert”

• Appeals again with 14th amendment– Right to choose livelihood

• "It certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that this [the right to choose one's profession] has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex. The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother."

1870sState laws

• Marriage laws that legally disabled women were slowly uplifted

• Women could practice law and medicine in several states

• Slow movement

Virginia MinorNational level

• Minor vs Happersett (1875)– Happersett refuses Minor’s attempt

to register to vote in Missouri– Case goes to Supreme Court– Suffrage is not a right but a privilege

to be granted by individual states– Women are indeed citizens

E or H?

• Is hierarchy or equality being promoted post Reconstruction?

Combine Efforts for Success

• Suffrage becomes top priority• Combining efforts (by 1890)

– National Association Woman Suffrage

• Young women drawn to the movement– Carrie Chapman Catt

• 3 Part strategy– 1. Convince states and the 2. national government to

support suffrage amendments– 3. Court Cases

“Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.”-- Susan B. Anthony, 1896

(1888)(1895)

The Bicycle Local Level

Challenges to Suffrage• How might the fact that women’s rights

movement originally emcompassed so many ideas, inspire anti-suffrage?

• National Association Opposed to suffrage

• Liquor Industry

• Child labor

Justifications• Women (particularly suffragists) were potential

hysterics– Can’t take them seriously

• “A women's emotional instability would make her a dangerous voter. She would let her feelings rather than her intellectual concerns be her primary reason for voting. ”

• “"Women did not have the intellectual capacity of men because their brains were smaller and more delicate.

State by state success for suffrage

• 1869-Utah• 1870-Wyoming• Based on the map on pg 47

– Which part of the United States (geographically) first allowed women the rights to vote?

– Which states were last to give women the right to vote?

– Is this surprising? Why or why not?

– Read the section above the map:• How did states impact each other in granting women suffrage?

Success(the result of…)

• New Strategy + Historical context = Suffrage

New Strategy• Carrie Chapman Catt

– 5 part strategy• Tie local, state and national workers

• Gain wide base of support– College educated women

• Lobbying

• Lady-like behavior

• Organization

• Tactics learned from English– National Women’s Party– Hunger strikes

Historical Context

• “ With a suddenness and force that have left observers gasping, women have injected themselves into the national campaign this year in a manner never before dreamed of in American politics.” New York Herald, Aug. 11, 1912

Historical Context

• WWI

• Progressive Era--Democratic Party

• Colleges

Success(the result of…)

• New Strategy + Historical context = Suffrage

Role of Gov’t in Suffrage

• State

• National

• Which government would you give the most credit to for securing suffrage?

Suffrage

• 1919-19th amendment• How long is the battle for suffrage?• Now what?

– ERA-1923

– End of suffrage associations

– Other rights• Birth control

• Dress reform

• Freedom

Roaring 20s

• Focus Q’s

• What changes for women in the 1920s?

• What accounts for these changes?

• What remains the same?

• Does suffrage bring much change in women’s lives?

Suffrage

• Empty right?

• What changes for women in the 1920s?

• What accounts for these changes?

• What stays the same?

Great Depression -1930s

• Resentment

• Breadlines

• “You could get two pounds of hamburger for quarter so we’d buy two pounds and split it-then one week she’d pay the extra penny and the next week I’d pay.”

WWII and Women

• Major part of the workforce

• “It was the first chance we got to show that we could do a lot of things that only men had done before.”

• Dual roles=pressure

• National Government:

• What are the expectations of women after the war?

• What were the opportunities open to women after the war?

Post WWII

• Family life changes: stereotypes are glorified

• “The key figure in all suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and the community-the keeper of the suburban dream.”

• Some women continue to work

Women’s Movement of 1960s and 1970s

• Feminism– Theory of political, social and economic

equality of men and women

• Known as 2nd wave: 1st wave was when?

• De facto battle…laws are generally in their favor

• Known as Women’s Liberation Movement

Pgs 78-79

• Highlight the NOW goals and challenges they face (2 different colors with key)

• Create a Venn Diagram with a partner that shows the similarities and differences between the two waves.

Women’s Liberation MovementCauses

• WWII– Why?

• Television– Why?

• Employment Discrimination– Why?

• Civil Rights Movement– Why?

• “The unspoken assumption that women are different. They do not have executive ability, orderly minds, stability, leadership skills, and they are too emotional. It has been observed before, that society for a long time discriminated against another minority, the blacks, on the same basis--that they were different and inferior. The happy little homemaker and the contented “old darky” on the plantation were both produced by prejudice. As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice…the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black.”-Shirley Chisholm-May 21st 1969

Tied to CRM

Goals

• Reproductive Rights

• Redefine how they are viewed

• Equality– Jobs– Pay– Treatment– Equal Rights Amendment

Leaders

• Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique

• “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction…each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent questions--’Is this all?’”

Gloria Steinem

• Use the mass media

• Worked at a Playboy club

• “Sex and race, because they are easily visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into the superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this systems still depends on.

Groups

• NOW (National Organization for Women)

• “true equality for all women”

• “full and equal partnership of the sexes”

Methods

• NOW:– Raise awareness through journalism and the media– Consciousness-raising sessions– Push for a constitutional amendment– Lobbying– Protests

• Other groups:– Protest Miss America pageants– Less about legislation—move about getting media

attention

Challenges

• Phyllis Schlafly– “a total assault on the family, on marriage, and

on children.”– Represented the conservative viewpoint

• Prevailing stereotypes

Reproductive Rights

• Roe vs Wade

• 1973-Texas

• Roe believes she has the right to an abortion, “right to privacy”

• Court upholds decision until after the third trimester when interest in the human life is “compelling” and states may legislate

Success?

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964– Title VII– EEOC

• Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1972

• Commission on the Status of Women-1961

• Equal Credit Opportunity Act-1974

• Roe vs Wade

Slow change

• Percentage of women in workplace is up from 30% in 1950 to 60% in 2000.

• Many fields are open up to women.

• Problems:– Still paid less than average man– Majority of the poor in the US are single

women