Women's Rights in 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (and her daughter Harriot)born on November 12, 1815, an American social ativist, a leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
The Woman's Rights Convention of 1848. The forces, moral and
intellectual, which had been stirring among women, crystallized a few
months after the outbreak of the European revolution in the first
Woman's Rights Convention in the history of America. It met at Seneca
Falls, New York, in 1848, on the call of Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock, three of them Quakers.
Accustomed to take part in church meetings with men, the Quakers
naturally suggested that men as well as women be invited to attend the
convention. Indeed, a man presided over the conference, for that
position seemed too presumptuous even for such stout advocates of
woman's rights.
The deliberations of the Seneca Falls convention resulted in a
Declaration of Rights modeled after the Declaration of Independence. For
example, the preamble began: "When in the course of human events it
becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among
the people of the earth a position different from that which they have
hitherto occupied...." So also it closed: "Such has been the patient
suffering of women under this government and such is now the necessity
which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are
entitled." Then followed the list of grievances, the same number which
had been exhibited to George III in 1776. Especially did they assail the
disabilities imposed upon them by the English common law imported into
America--the law which denied married women their property, their wages,
and their legal existence as separate persons. All these grievances they
recited to "a candid world." The remedies for the evils which they
endured were then set forth in detail. They demanded "equal rights" in
the colleges, trades, and professions; equal suffrage; the right to
share in all political offices, honors, and emoluments; the right to
complete equality in marriage, including equal guardianship of the
children; and for married women the right to own property, to keep
wages, to make contracts, to transact business, and to testify in the
courts of justice. In short, they declared women to be persons as men
are persons and entitled to all the rights and privileges of human
beings. Such was the clarion call which went forth to the world in
1848--to an amused and contemptuous world, it must be admitted--but to a
world fated to heed and obey.
The First Gains in Civil Liberty. The convention of 1848 did not make
political enfranchisement the leading issue. Rather did it emphasize the
civil disabilities of women which were most seriously under discussion
at the time. Indeed, the New York legislature of that very year, as the
result of a twelve years' agitation, passed the Married Woman's Property
Act setting aside the general principles of the English common law as
applied to women and giving them many of the "rights of man." California
and Wisconsin followed in 1850; Massachusetts in 1854; and Kansas in
1859. Other states soon fell into line. Women's earnings and
inheritances were at last their own in some states at least. In a little
while laws were passed granting women rights as equal guardians of their
children and permitting them to divorce their husbands on the grounds of
cruelty and drunkenness.
By degrees other steps were taken. The Woman's Medical College of
Pennsylvania was founded in 1850, and the Philadelphia School of Design
for Women three years later. In 1852 the American Women's Educational
Association was formed to initiate an agitation for enlarged
educational opportunities for women. Other colleges soon emulated the
example of Oberlin: the University of Utah in 1850; Hillsdale College in
Michigan in 1855; Baker University in Kansas in 1858; and the University
of Iowa in 1860. New trades and professions were opened to women and old
prejudices against their activities and demands slowly gave way.
