Post Revolutionary America Sparknotes

The Advancement of “Equal Rights” in Post-Revolutionary America In 1998, Rosemarie Zagarri wrote a persuasive review of the advancement of women’s rights in post-revolutionary America called, The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America. Zagarri shows the struggle of early American women and their rise to equal rights with men by pointing out the dramatic relevance that gender or sex has on this topic. “Put simply, men’s rights involved liberties that allowed choices, while women’s rights consisted of benefits that imposed duties… rights became a gendered variable” (Zagarri 203). Rosemarie Zagarri shows that the post- revolutionary rights of men and women were based on separate principles such as equality of the sexes/ genders,
Zagarri pulls from Wollstonecraft and Paine’s written head to head dispute of women’s rights in the 1790’s. Thomas Paine wrote a book called The Rights of Man, issued in 1791 and 1792. While the book framed the formal and systematic natural rights of all human beings, Paine excludes women from the “natural” rights to own property, to vote, and to participate in the government (Zagarri 207). Mary Wollstonecraft took a stand for women and called it a “Revolution in Female Manners.” Wollstonecraft sought to open as many doors for women as she could by educating the society on equal rights for all. Wollstonecraft had a very popular work called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which quickly won the audiences in Philadelphia and Boston between 1792-1795. While Wollstonecraft never “advocated a wholesale alteration in sex roles” she did push her audience, “… to apply the same principles and standards to women as to men, she in effect challenged the exclusion of women from a wide range of educational, professional, and political opportunities” (Zagarri
Women have a tendency to be treated as subordinates to men, and Zagarri highlights this many times in her document. While women, for a short time, were said to have the same rights as men, they were not given the opportunity to access those rights. Scholars argue that, “the creation of the modern liberal state has necessarily presumed the subordination of women to men. In theory as well as practice, democratic nations… have depended for their existence, they say, on a “structural sexism” that excludes women from full participation in the polity” (Zagarri 204). As the topic of women’s rights became more popular, people began to realize that while men were saying women had equal rights, they were using ill logic to prove it. The “rights” they were claiming to give to the women were drawn from the Scots and were more duty-bound than the men’s rights. In the post- Revolutionary era, people who wrote about women’s rights, Zagarri says, “… were willing to admit women’s equality with men, but they also wanted to preserve the notion of inherent differences between the sexes” (Zagarri 216). She continues with, “They wanted to reconcile a new notion- women’s rights- with a very old idea, women’s subordination to men” (Zagarri 216). Zagarri describes