Womens Rights In The 1800's

“Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” Famous words said by Hillary Clinton in her speech that was aimed at promoting women’s rights on September 5, 1995. Many activists, such as Clinton, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, fought all of their life trying to gain women’s rights, because they knew that everyone deserves equality. Some of the rights that they fought for include the right to live free from violence, slavery, discrimination, and the right to vote, own property and earn a fair and equal wage. Women are entitled to all of these rights, yet across the world, some women and girls are denied these rights, simply because of their gender. Women in the 1800’s were expected to be submissive to
their husband. Many compared the conditions of women in this time to a form of slavery. Your main goal as a women in the 1800’s was to get married, have children and take care of the home.
If you were single and did not plan on marrying, then you were looked at as an outcast. When women married, they became feme covert. This term refers to women who did not have legal existence in the eyes of the law once they were married. She can’t own property in her own name or control her earnings. They were bound by certain rules, even if their husband died, they were still required to be controlled by their sons and if none, their siblings or closest relative would take care of them. They were thought to be more pure, weak, emotional and dependent on man, while men are characterized to be powerful, logical, ambitious and independent. Barbara Welter described this ideology as “The Cult of True Womanhood”. Women were expected to obtain these four main principles: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. They
were expected to be more religious than their husband, pure in heart, submissive and stay at home in their private sphere. In her private sphere, her role was to civilize her husband and family. When her husband was to return from work, she provide him with a refuge from the cruel and outside world and do things for him such as cleaning, starting a warm fire and making sure supper is prepared, because the main goal is for him to be comfortable and unbothered in the home, before he goes off into the cruel world the next morning. Many women, however, did not want to tend to their husbands and consult them first before they did anything. Consequently, this led to women's suffrage movements. Many women during this time period did not want to marry, have children or tend to a home.
They wanted to be able to earn money on their own, in their own name and support themselves without the approval of their husband. This is why they started the women’s suffrage movement. The main goal of this movement was to be considered equal to men, such as their ability to vote and earn wages without a man’s consent. Lucretia Mott, one of the famous women’s rights activists, was denied a seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention and preached outside the hall of the convention. While she was in London, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and they bonded over their shared opinions of the lack of rights for women. They both organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. It was a convention to discuss the social, civil, religious conditions and rights of women. Lucretia Mott presented the Declaration of Sentiments, which contained signatures of men and women who were declaring their separation from men. About 300 people attended this convention and it was successful in the way that it pushed men to think about the fact that women needs these rights. The convention didn’t really push for immediate results as to gaining their rights faster, but it did prove to men that this is a really serious issue and that women really need their rights. But not everyone thought that they needed these rights, even women among them. There were some women, such as Catherine Beecher,
who were against women gaining suffrage They felt that it isn’t a woman's place to be with the man and that they belong at home with the children. Many men still thought that women were inferior to men and that they have never voted before, so why start now? Men stated that women were seen as emotionally unstable and could not possibly handle the real world and have the duties as they do. Without any doubt, there was a majority of the women that wanted change in the world and seeked to obtain it by holding meetings and conventions to put make their goals a reality. Women anticipated change and wanted to see equality immediately in the world. But one hundred years later, history repeats itself.