Women's Rights In American History

One of the most controversial topics in American History has been the subject of gender equality and the ever changing concept of women’s rights. Overtime, it’s actually quite incredible to see how far the American populous has come, comparatively with other countries, in such a short period of time. Women’s status in America today, for all intents and purposes, is equal to any man’s. However, that has not always been so. The United States has existed for exactly 240 years, and over the course of that time, the development of women’s rights can be divided into 5 eras: The Colonial Era, The New Nation Era, The Pre Civil War Era, The Industrial Era, The World War Era, and the Post World War Era. By thoroughly investigating the development of
Two big activists for “expanding women’s roles through moral influence” were Catharine Beecher and Sarah J. Hale (Digital History). Both acting through the sword of the day, the written word, Beecher and Hale educated students, led legal campaigns, and wrote letters to school boards in order to change education policies. These women’s rights activists, along with others such as Caroline Maria Sedgewick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Augusta Evans Wilson, were known as sentimentalists, or as Mary Kelly calls them, literary domestics. Mary Kelly, author of Literary Domestics: Private Women, Public Stage, asserts that these literary domestics were “nurtured as private domestic beings, conditioned to live as private individuals, and directed to accept woman’s private domestic role” instead of being “consciously trained or educated to become published, income-earning writers” (Kelley), which was still a major blockade preventing women from gaining political, social, and economic freedom. In other words, the society around them still only really cultivated housewives and did not allow much freedom for the female
Women, while granted primitive suffrage in a few areas, was not guaranteed suffrage in major areas except in a few short areas. “In twenty-five states women possess suffrage in school matters; in four…limited suffrage in local affairs; in one…municipal suffrage; in four states, they have full suffrage, local state and national” (Anthony). This, while seemingly a small step, was actually quite a large step towards universal female suffrage. Through consistent barrages of letters of inequalities to congress and local government from activists, “Women are becoming more and more interested in political questions and public affairs” (Anthony), which raises an important point. One can surmise from the previous statement by Susan B. Anthony in “The Status of Women, Past, Present, and Future,” that many women didn’t care about the agenda of these activists. Most women were content not having to deal with complicated real world problems outside of their own household. So in order for the gender to rise as a whole, these “literary domestics” also have to combat the people they’re trying to win for. Lucky for them, Susan B. Anthony, among others, have given all their energy and the best years of their lives to making this happen, for all the woman of the nation, “Until woman has obtained ‘that right protective of all