A Call for Women's Rights

1. A Call for Women's Rights

2. Seeking Equal Rights • Women had few rights in the mid-1800’s • Could not own property, vote, go to school, etc. • As they fought to end slavery, women realized they needed rights themselves.

3. Women Reformers • Susan B. Anthony • Worked to change opinions on women’s rights, abolition, and temperance • Created the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) • Elizabeth Cady Stanton • Was suffragist, lecturer, and writer • Advocate for equal education for women • Wrote the well-known Women’s Bible that said the Church has been the greatest block in the way of women’s rights

4. Women Reformers • Sojourner Truth • Former slave and powerful speaker • Was for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights • Famous speech – “Ain’t I a woman?” • Lucy Stone • Founded American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA) • Founded the Women’s Journal – weekly report of women’s progress politically, vocationally, economically, legally, and culturally • Elizabeth Blackwell • First American female physician • Her graduation helped lead the founding of female medical colleges

5. Seneca Falls Convention • Women’s rights movement – an organized campaign for equal rights • Seneca Falls Convention (1848) – 200 women and 40 men • Created Declaration of Sentiments – “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal.” • Voted for resolutions that demanded equality for women at work, school, and church

6. New Opportunities in Education • Mount Holyoke was founded and eventually became the first women’s college in the United States. • Women started to teach grade schools • Women started to write for magazines • Example: Sarah Josepha Hale edited Godey’s Lady Book

7. Quotes from Famous Reformers • Susan B. Anthony:“There will never be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers…The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more despicable because they do not realize it. O to compel them to see and feel and to give them the courage and the conscience to speak and act for their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of all the world for doing it!” • Lucy Stone: “We want rights. The flour-merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we try to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the difference.” What chains is Anthony talking about? What is Stone’s point?

8. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman’s freedom… The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she brought about the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned, and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of imprisonment, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants.” What story is Stanton referring to?

9. Sojourner Truth: “Nobody eber help me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! Ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could hear me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man-when I could get it-and bear de lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and see ‘em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” • Elizabeth Blackwell – “The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immerse attraction for me.” Besides equality, what else it Truth talking about? What is the moral struggle Blackwell is referring to?