Women’s rights and how they were treated is very different
nowadays than it was back in the 1800s. A big example that may seem strange to
us is that they weren't allowed to vote. Women, back then, were seen as weak
and inferior and wouldn't survive in the outside world. Thus, they were
confined to their homes. This is the idea of the public and private sphere. The
public sphere is the world outside the home and was a rough place and, since
women were seen as delicate, people thought that it was for only men and that women
just couldn't survive. The private sphere was the home and, back in the 1800s,
was seen as the place that women worked, raising her children and doing other
household chores. They had to stay in their homes and out of the public eye
which is considered the ‘cult of domesticity’. Back then, the ‘ideal’ women had
to have 4 specific characteristics. First, they had to have piety. This means
they needed to be religious, and if they were not religious they were not seen
as women even if they were mothers. The second feature was purity, which meant
they needed to protect their ‘greatest treasure’ which was their virginity. If they
couldn't, they were seen as being lower being. The third feature was submissiveness,
and it means that women had to submissive to their husbands and they needed to
fulfill their duty to god. The fourth, and last, feature is domesticity which
means that women had to do their role which was managing the home and raising
the children. They were supposed to keep their husbands from falling for the
evil in the outside world. One of the first gatherings that tried to stop this
was the Seneca Falls convention. Women and men gathered in Seneca Falls, New
York to talk about reforms that could give women more rights and make them
equal to men. Their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolution is extremely
similar to the Declaration of independence because it was molded off of it. The
beginning of the Sentiments was, “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 hitherto
occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should declare
the causes that impel them to such a course.” This sentence is almost the same
as the begging of the DI. In the convention, what is really shocking is the
fact that African American slave women were not allowed to speak. The irony is
that they are trying to get more rights yet they won’t allow black women to
speak. I was in this group when we did our class activity and our main goal was
to abolish slavery. This was one of the important goals that the class listed
as being important. (I am not sure if number 10 means end slavery, I am going
to assume it doesn't) However, if you look at the resolutions you can see that
slavery was not one of their priorities and the reason it isn't is because black
women were no allowed to discuss their problem. I think slavery is the most
important and we definitely accomplished it, however, I believe that resolve
number 3 is the most important, which is, that women are men’s equal and that
they should be treated as such. I believe that for the most part we have
accomplished that. Although, there are still those people out there that are against
women’s rights, as time goes by there are less and less of those people and I believe
that those people will be gone for good.
