GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN
AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL HISTORY
Ann Marie Satur
NORMS
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Cell phones on silent
Respect others
Engage in discussion
Have fun!
SLO’S
Students will be able to
1. Describe what rights, if any, women had in the colonial,
postcolonial, and modern-day US.
2. Discuss the history and development of the suffragist movement
3. Identify and describe such prominent pioneer feminists as Ann
Hutchinson, Sarah Grimke, Sojourner Truth, and other leading
figures of the suffrage movement.
BELLWORK
• What do you think the world would be like today if women had no
rights?
GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN
COLONIAL AMERICA
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Blackstone Commentaries
Colonial girls grew up mothers and wives
Colonial women did not accept second-class position
Anne Hutchinson
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Banished from Boston for teaching God’s ways to colonial males
Children were viewed as economic help
Illiterate colonial women
Community-based schools typically excluded girls
• Read the scriptures
• Land Ownership
ANNE HUTCHINSON
• Learned theology from her father
• In the New World, served God publicly but quietly
• Divine grace required human cooperation vs. covenant of grace totally
depended on God
• Depended on God
• Governor of Massachusetts attended her meetings
• Spoke freely about ministers
• Turned almost all of Boston against their ministers
• Earliest feminist in the new world
GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
DURING AND AFTER THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
• Restricted women’s rights and opportunities
• Women dared to challenge the system, men who supported them
• 1745, Susanna Wright – first woman to provide notary services in the colony
• Legal counsel, prepared wills, deeds, other legal contracts
• 1764 James Otis – questions whether women were born as free as men
• 1175- Thomas Paine published Pennsylvania Magazine
• Proposed women’s rights
ABIGAIL ADAMS
• No formal schooling
• Took advantage of her father’s library and tutorial skills of family neighbors
and friends
• Abby and her sister, most educated women of their time
• John Adams (Husband)
• Intellectual equal
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Discussed politics
1776 – Continental Congress: “all men are created equal”
1777 – women were denied their right to vote
1789 – Constitution was ratified. New terms added “people, persons, and
electors”
GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
DURING THE ABOLITION
MOVEMENT
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1790 – New Jersey extended voting rights to women
1807 – male politician (men, I tell you!)
1821 – Emma Hart Willard ->Troy Female Seminary established in NY
First endowed school for girls in the nation (yay!)
Sarah Margaret Fuller -> writings and ideas challenged men’s claim to superiority
-> possessed one of the most powerful and creative minds in her generation
->wrote Women in the Nineteenth Century
Sarah Grimke began a speaking career on slave abolition and women’s rights
-> First female Anti-Slave Society Convention held in NY
1839 – Mississippi -> Women’s Property
CONTINUED
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1844 – Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA)
->demanded a ten-hour work week
-> first permanent labor association for women in US history
1848 – Declaration of Sentiments
1855 – Missouri vs. Celia
Quakers extended educational rights to women
Abby Kelley Foster – spoke at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Conventions
Civil War breakout lead to a setback in activities
SOJOURNER THE TRUTH
GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal
Rights Association (heavily influenced by Margaret Fuller)
• Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe -> American Woman
Suffrage Association (AWSA)
• 1868- 14th amendment was ratified, extending constitutional rights and
protection to all citizens
• 1869- first woman’s suffrage law passed in Wyoming
• 1870- 15th amendment final ratification stating, “The right of citizens of the
United States to Vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or
by any other State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
(uh, where’s the women?)
• ->Wyoming had its first sexually integrated Grand Jury
CONTINUED
• 1872 – Susan B. Anthony arrested for attempting to vote in the Presidential Election
• ->Sojourner Truth demanded a ballot during the same Election
• 1873 – US Supreme court ruled a state had the right to exclude a married woman
from practicing law.
• 1875- Minor v. Happersett Supreme Court ruled a state could prohibit a woman from
voting
• 1895- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (NAWSA) published Woman’s Bible. Not such a great
idea. Resigned as President. Never invited to sit on stage at conventions
• 1896 – Nat’l Association of Colored Women was founded by Harriet Tubam, Fanny
Jackson Coppin, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell, Margaret
Margaret Murray Washington, Ida B. Wells Barnett, & Charlotte Forteen Grimke
• Let’s take a look at page 155
GENDER AND WOMEN’S RIGHT IN
THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY
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Most progressive era in Women’s Rights
Educational enhances
1903 – organization of middle class and working class women
-> Mary Drier, Rheta Child Dorr, and Leonora O’Reilly (Women’s Trade Union League of New
York – International Ladies Garment Workers Union)
“Women were created from the rib of man to be
beside him, not from his head to top him, nor from
his feet to be trampled by him, but from under his
arm to be protected by him, near to his heart to be
loved by him.”