18th Century Colonial Women

The majority of women in the eighteenth century spent their days performing many strenuous tasks in and around their homes. Pregnant women were at really high risk for bearing children, colonial women would give birth to about five and eight offsprings. Many of the pregnancies would often end in miscarriages and about one in eight could expect to lose their lives in childbirth. In addition, colonial women were always consumed by household chores and always had work to tend to, an example of this is an 18th century woman, Mary Cooper. In her diary she wrote about how living on a farm she has “seene little else but hard labor and much sorrow. . . . I am dirty and tired almost to death." Colonial women were in charge of keeping the household
The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, stated that “all men are created equal.” In reply to that statement, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, asking him to “Remember the Ladies.” Abigail Adams, like many other others at this time, wanted women to have more rights under the new American government. Her husband, John Adams, responded pretty arrogantly, and just like many men during this time he believed women influenced society without political power. According to this popular viewpoint, women were supposed to morally influence their husbands and sons. Women weren’t allowed to vote, and the rules from the colonial times stayed the same, that when women married they lost their legal identity. Women couldn’t own property, control their own money, or sign legal documents. But instead, their brothers, husbands and fathers were expected to manage these responsibilities and men were supposed to represent their wives, mothers, and daughters in politics. Even though she could not vote, Abigail Adams advocated for women’s rights through her writing. Other women did the same, despite the fact that the American Revolution had ended, Americans continued to debate the role of women in society. Each of the thirteen colonies established their own constitutions soon after independence from England was declared. Therefore, state law rather than federal law governed
After the civil war, another women’s rights movements was born. Susan B. Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, the primary goal of the organization was to achieve voting rights for women through an amendment. That same year, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and Julia Ward Howe started the American Woman Suffrage Association, which eventually merged with the other association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Throughout the Northeast and the Midwest, women’s rights conventions were held as well. These state, local, regional and national meeting were open to everyone and everyone was welcomes to voice their opinions. The early leadership were all feminist abolitionists, Susan B. Anthony saw the conventions as an ideal platform for educating the public about women’s rights issues and for recruiting people for the cause. The Syracuse convention was a crucial landmark in her development as an activist, where 2,000 people had gathered, both men and women. As the years passed, the conventions became the life of the NWSA (National Woman Suffrage Association), an exclusive female-led woman suffrage movement. Even after Anthony’s death, these networks worked and after the decades of fighting, it finally succeeded in gaining women’s suffrage with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in. The