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Women’s Rights and Roles to 1848

Women’s Rights and Roles to 1848 . Write-Group-Share on Key Questions:. In American society today, men and boys are expected to: In American society today, women and girls are expected to: What restrictions do these expectations put on each gender?

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Women’s Rights and Roles to 1848

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  1. Women’s Rights and Roles to 1848

  2. Write-Group-Share on Key Questions: • In American society today, men and boys are expected to: • In American society today, women and girls are expected to: • What restrictions do these expectations put on each gender? • How strict or flexible is this gender system? • How much do our FAMIILES buy into this gender system? Our schools? Our selves? • Compare to gender system/expectations in another society you are familiar with (different country, culture, generation, region, other)

  3. Revolutionary Times: Legal Restrictions • Lives revolved around household • Coverture: Legal identity of women is subordinated first in fathers, then in husbands • Prohibited from: voting, holding public office • Married women could not own property, make a contract, sue or be sued, keep her earnings, or write a will

  4. Revolutionary Times: Social restrictions • Prejudice – women were considered weak and irrational • Husbands had almost unlimited power over them • Physical punishment was allowed by law • Divorce was severely restricted

  5. Abigail Adams, March 1776 • In the new Code of Laws... I desire you to remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands

  6. Abigail Adams, March 1776 “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

  7. John Adams replied… • “As to your new Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.... We know better than to repeal our masculine system.” • “Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.”

  8. Influence of Revolution • “At liberty's spring such draughts I've imbib'd, • That I hate all the doctrines by wedlock prescrib’d.” – anonymous poem, 1794

  9. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) • British • Said women should enjoy same natural rights as men. “The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.”

  10. Republican motherhood • Women must be educated so that they could instill civic virtue in their sons • Steppingstone to education that led to further progress

  11. Influence of Abolitionism • “It was asserted that we were "a ragged set, crying for liberty." I reply to it, the whites have so long and so loudly proclaimed the theme of equal rights and privileges, that our souls have caught the flame also, ragged as we are.” Maria Stewart, black Northern abolitionist

  12. Angela & Sarah Grimke • Southern slaveowners’ daughters who spoke to northern congregations against slavery (1830s) • Were told women shouldn’t speak in public • Sarah then wrote “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes”

  13. Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Lucretia Mott

  14. Seneca Falls “To have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer quietly submitted to.” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  15. In table groups • Read the Declaration of Sentiments and Declaration of Independence. • Reading questions: • List the SIMILARITIES between the two documents. • Based on what you’re reading, what rights can you infer that early 19th c. women lacked? • How does Declaration of Sentiments use the wording and tone of the Declaration of Independence to inspire others and justify its points? Be specific.

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