Women In The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era was a time of social activism and political reform for the United States. This era started to bloom in the 1890s, and women took this opportunity to push for their rights. Women that took the leap to secure the nineteenth amendment include Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances E. Willard, Margaret Sanger, and Carrie Chapman Catt. These brave women made themselves heard, when men turned their ears away from them. Although it took these women and many more until 1920 to pass the nineteenth amendment, their stands paid off in the end. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a strong-willed woman who saw the Reconstruction as the time to demand her own emancipation, and she did so by proclaiming that the Progressive Era as woman’s transition
This word entered the political vocabulary for the first time in the years before World War I. It expressed not only traditional demands such as the right to vote and greater economic opportunities for women but a quest for free sexual expression and reproductive choice as essential to women’s emancipation. Not only did these women push that a man and woman be equal, but also that woman should not be subjected to staying home and raising children. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger both put this into perspective. Their writings strongly impacted the first generation of twentieth- century feminists. The author of Women and Economics, Gilman, expresses in her book that women work longer and harder than most men, and not solely in maternal duties. She also argued, women experienced not fulfillment but oppression, and the house wife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. She goes on to explain that women want to be more independent, and because of this there is proof that change has come. Many young girls out in the United States that want to be independent and wish to have a career that does not involve them giving birth to children until the day they die. Cue in Sanger the author of “Free Motherhood,” who risked and did go to jail because she sold birth control to women who were poor and could not afford to have another child. She claimed that the most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood. Women of the working class were bringing children into the world at a rapid pace because they had no knowledge of contraceptives, and because of this it was the woman who suffers first from hunger, the woman whose clothing is least adequate, the woman who must work all hours, even though she is not compelled. Sanger goes on to express that a free race cannot be born of slave mothers. No woman can call herself free who does not own and