Womens rights movement

1. The Development of the Women’s
Rights Movement in the US
Julie Mace
Photo Credit: thefatalfeminist.com

2. Women’s Rights vs. Women’s
Emancipation
• Women’s Rights- “civil rights to vote, hold office, have access
to education, and to have economic and political power at
every level of society on an equal basis with men.” 17
• Women’s Emancipation- “is the freedom from oppressive
restrictions imposed by reason of sex; self-determination and
autonomy. Oppressive restrictions are biological restrictions
due to sex, as well as socially imposed ones.” 18

3. • In 1769, the law of coverture was recognized by American colonists in which,
"transferred a women's civic identity to her husband at marriage". 1 This
elaborate system of women oppression in property rights & voting rights strictly
confined a women's ability to be full participants in a society of the free. Women
however, didn't remain idle recipients of the inequalities with coverture; women
fought to get their right to vote & own property.
The Law of Coverture & Voting

4. The “Republican Women”
• Through their determination during the Revolutionary
War and after the war ending in 1783, women's
optimism of gaining rights of property and suffrage in
America ran high as their model of the “Republican
Women" was "competent and confident".2 Women
and men both knew that the “republican mother”
could teach and raise solid democratic sons who could
vote, yet they remained denied this right from these
same men. Judith Sargent Murray in 1798 wrote, "I
expect to see our young women forming a new era in
female history", and she couldn't have been more
prophetic in her statement.2 Photo Credit: Judith Sargent Murray, 1790
#hst202 Via Jessica Marie Johnson.

5. Sarah Pierce’s School for Girls
• According to the Litchfield Historical
Society, “Sarah Pierce encouraged her
students to become involved in
benevolent and charitable societies. The
Litchfield Female Academy students
organized to support local missionary,
bible and tract societies and raised
money for the training of ministers.
Many of the academy alumnae carried
on these activities in later life, becoming
leaders and ardent members of
maternal societies, moral reform
movements, and temperance societies.”
Some of her most well known women
reformers who attended here included
Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher
Stowe.3
Photo Credit: Litchfield Historical Society

6. School for Girls & Sentiments
• Forty years after Judith Sargent Murray
wrote how a new era of women in
history would emerge, the female
students at Sarah Pierce's school for girls
in Litchfield, Connecticut wrote in 1838
"a Ladies Declaration of Independence"
for their 4th of the July celebration. A
decade later, this same inspiration
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott would use in their Declaration of
Sentiments and Resoultions.4
Photo Credits: www.havlicek.weebly.com

7. World Anti-Slavery Convention
Inspires Seneca Falls!
• In 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention
in London, but were denied access to the event because they were a women. Although most
people in this time period agreed that women should not be a part of the public sphere,
Stanton and Motts were, “Outraged by this humiliating experience and decided in London that
they would convene a meeting of women in the United States to discuss their grievances as
soon as possible.” Stanton wrote, “I poured out that day a torrent of my long accumulating
discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the
party, to do or dare anything.” 5
Photo Credits: http://clements.umich.edu

8. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• According to NPS.gov, in 1863, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would create the Women’s Loyal
National League that inspired through their petition drives, the passage of the 13th Amendment
ending slavery. Stanton also found the American Equal Rights Association to gain suffrage for
all citizens of America and helped pass the 15th Amendment that gave African American men
the right to vote. During 1868-1870, Stanton in the newspaper, The Revolution, began
publishing articles about the lives of women, and in 1869-1890, headed the National American
Women Suffrage Association to further advance the voting rights to women. Between 1878-
1919, a new suffrage bill was introduced to the Senate each year, but it wouldn’t be until 1920,
that the 19th Amendment passed gaining women full suffrage rights. 7
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was known as the “great
communicator and propagandist of the nineteenth century
feminism” and “wrote the great manifesto that would set the
agenda for the American women’s movement for 150 years.” 6Photo Credits: www.womenon20s.org

9. Lucretia Mott
• Lucretia Mott was “an experienced and
highly acclaimed public speaker, a Quaker
minister and longtime abolitionist.” 8
Mott’s founded the Philadelphia Female
Anti-Slavery Association in 1833 that
helped bring passage of the 13th
Amendment. According to NPS.gov,
“Throughout her life Mott remained
active in both the abolition and women’s
rights movements. She continued to
speak out against slavery, and in 1866 she
became the first president of the
American Equal Rights Association, an
organization formed to achieve equality
for African Americans and women.”9
Photo Credits: Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

10. Seneca Falls
• The first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, “a region
where they held their convention…had for more than two decades been the
center of reform and utopian movements. The region was known as the “burned-
over” district, because so many schemes for reforms had swept over it in rapid
succession” including evangelical revivalism, temperance, abolition, church
reform, Mormonism, and chiliastic movements.” 10
Photo Credits: www.opschools.org.

11. Map of Women’s Suffrage
in the US, 1848
Photo Credits: emaze.com

12. Seneca Falls, 1848
1st Women’s Rights Convention
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann
McClintock organized the 1st Women’s Rights Conference on July 19-20, 1848.
Most of the 300 participants “were reformers with considerable organizational
experience” including religious dissidents groups, lawyers from the Liberty Party
or Free Soil group, and Frederick Douglas, famed former slave. 11
Photo Credits: www.historynet.com

13. Seneca Falls: Day 1
• The first day of the Seneca Fall’s Women’s Convention was “reserved to women,
who occupied themselves with debating, paragraph by paragraph, the Declaration
of Sentiments prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” 12
Photo Credits: www.griid.org

14. Seneca Falls: Day 2
• On the second day of the convention, men were invited to participate and speak.
At the end of the day, “sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names
to the Declaration of Sentiments which embodied the program of the nascent
movement and provided the model for future woman’s rights conventions.”13
Photo Credits: http://myoncell.mobi/

15. Declaration of Sentiments
• Stanton & Mott’s along with the others of the convention, selected their model for
their Declaration of Sentiments after the Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,
“following its preamble almost verbatim, except for the insertion of gender-neutral
language.” 14
• The main argument was “to base their main appeal (property rights , wages, &
voting) on the democratic rights embodied in the nation’s founding document…
that all men and women are created equal. The second fundamental argument for
the equality of woman was religious” that had long established that a man had
“absolute tyranny” over a women. 15
• Seneca Falls and its Declaration of Sentiments was a “public voice for women and
the recognition that women could not win their rights unless they organized.” 16

16. Married Women’s Property Acts
Photo Credits: http://www.slideshare.net/

17. First National Women’s Rights
Convention, 1850
• Two years after Seneca Falls and the passing of the first women’s property
acts in NY, Worcester, Massachusetts attracted 1,000 in hopes of gaining
additional rights and securing women’s right to vote.
• In 1869, two women’s group form in hopes of gaining women’s suffrage
across America.

18. Susan B. Anthony
• This woman suffragist got her roots by demanding
“equal pay for equal work”. She was a teacher and
realized that male teachers were making $700 a year
while she only made $250 a year. 23
• She later becomes active in temperance movement,
but she is not allowed to speak at temperance rallies
because she was a woman. “This experience, and her
acquaintance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led her to
join the women's rights movement in 1852. Soon
after, she dedicated her life to woman suffrage.”
Photo Credits: gloster.com

19. National Women
Suffrage Association
• In 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National
Women Suffrage Association with the primary goal of achieving voting
rights for women by means of Congressional amendments to the
Constitution. 20
Photo Credits: ocp.hul.harvard.edu

20. American Women
Suffrage Association
• That same year, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others form the
American Woman Suffrage Association with their primary goal of gaining
voting rights for women through amendments to state constitutions. 20
Photo Credits: Bryn Mawr College

21. 1869: Racial Equality Splits
Women’s Suffrage Associations!
• After the passing of the 13th Amendment which freed slaves, the 14th
Amendment which dealt with citizenship and equal protection of the laws,
and the 15th Amendment which granted African American MEN the right to
vote, the association between the National Woman’s Suffrage Association
and the American Woman Suffrage Association began to crumble in 1869. 20

22. 1870: First Women
Nominated for President
• The Equal Rights Party
nominates Victoria
Chaflin Woodhull for
presidency despite
herself being allowed
the right to vote. 20
Photo Credits: sllideshare.net

23. 1874: Minor v. Happersett
• After Susan B. Anthony’s arrest in 1872, other suffragists began testing
the 14th Amendment. Virginia Minor, who was president of the Woman
Suffrage Association in Missouri, took to the polls. When refused to
being allowed, Virginia and her husband sued “for denying her one of
the privileges and immunities of citizenship”.
• Even though they lost, the appealed to the Supreme Court. The
Supreme Court justices “held that if the authors of the Constitution had
intended that women should vote, they would have said so explicitly.”21

24. 1890: Women’s Suffrage
Associations Join Together Again!
• In 1890, the National Woman
Suffrage Association and the
American Woman Suffrage
Association merge to form the
National American Woman
Suffrage Association and
campaigned state by state for
voting rights for women.20
Photo Credits: Bryn Mawr College

25. Wyoming: First State to Grant
Women’s Suffrage!
• In 1869, the territory of Wyoming needed enough voting citizens to
become a state, thus opened up election voting to women over the age of
21. In 1890, Wyoming became a state and continued to permit women to
vote in elections. 20
• Kansas followed in 1887 allowing women to vote in municipal elections,
along with other western states (see map). 20

26. 1896: National Association of
Colored Women Organize!
• More than hundred African American clubs across the nation merge to
form the National Association of Colored Women led by Josephine St.
Pierre Ruffin whose goal was to “promote equality for women, raise funds
for projects that benefit women and children and oppose segregation and
racial violence.” 20
Photo Credits: nacwc.org

27. Western States Begin Granting Women
the Right to Vote before 1920!
Photo Credits: University of South Florida

28. 1878: 19th Amendment Written!
• Susan B. Anthony will write the woman suffrage amendment in 1878, and
was passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. The
amendment was then sent to the States to ratify. 22
Photo Credits: http://www.weloveladiesfirst.com/

29. 1920: 19th Amendment
Women Gain Suffrage!
• On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granted
woman the right to vote and was ratified by all states. It was signed into
law by Secretary of State Brainbridge Colby. 22
Photo Credits: usconstitutionday.us

30. Presentation Citations
• All photo credits are given on the photo.
• 1. Kerber, Linda., Women‘s America Refocusing the Past (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147. 2. Women‘s America
Refocusing the Past, 147. 3. Women‘s America Refocusing the
Past, 148. 4.
http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/history/academy.php 5.
Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 259. 6. Women‘s America
Refocusing the Past, 258-259.
7.https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/elizabeth-cady-
stanton.htm 8. Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 259. 9.
https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/lucretia-
mott.htm 10. Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 259. 11.
Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 260. 12. Women‘s America
Refocusing the Past, 260. 13. Women‘s America Refocusing the
Past, 260. 14. Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 260. 15.
Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 260-261. 16. Women‘s
America Refocusing the Past, 261. 17. Women‘s America
Refocusing the Past, 261. 18. Women‘s America Refocusing the
Past, 262. 20. Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics
www.AnnenbergClassroom.org 21. Women‘s America Refocusing
the Past, 315. 22. Women‘s Rights Movement in US History:
History and Timeline of Events (1848-1920),
www.infoplease.com/spot/womenstimeline1.html.
• 23. 16. Women‘s America Refocusing the Past, 264. 24.
http://susanbanthonyhouse.org/her-story/biography.php
Photo Credits: Arago-Smithsonian