The Women’s Movement
Chapter 8 Section 4
Women Work for a Change
Women’s rights limited
Private influence
Lack of basic legal and economic rights
 Could not hold property, hold office, or vote, forbidden
to speak in public
 No formal education
 Divorce: husband gained custody of children
Certain cultures women held a great deal of power
(matrilineal)
Reform Efforts
Reform of American society driven by 2nd Great
Awakening
Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard, Elizabeth
Blackwell, Ann Preston public school movement
Dorothea Dix treatment of prisoners, treatment
of mentally ill
Angelina and Sarah Grimké Abolitionists
Sojourner Truth former slave from NY
 Powerful speeches and arguments
Sojourner Truth
Women enter the Workplace
Industrialization allow women to get out
of home
Economic independence
Social independence
1830, women’s labor unions form
Political and Economic Status of
Women in early 1800s
 Women could not vote
 Women could not hold public office
 Women could not serve on juries
 Few women received any level of higher education
 Women could not work in most trades or professions
 When they did work, women were paid less than men doing the same
jobs, and their fathers or husbands often took what money they did
earn
 Married women lost legal control of any money or property they
owned before marriage to their husbands
 Married women could not testify against their husbands in court, sue
for divorce, or gain custody of their children
Women Fight for Rights
 Virtually no progress for women’s rights
 Middle class women hire poor women to do housework
 Think about the society in which children are raised
 Women began to see their own social restrictions comparable to
slavery
 Lack of power held by slave = lack of power held by
women
 Women’s Movement
 A movement working for greater rights and opportunities for
women
 Grimkés argue that God made men and women equal
 Moral grounds to defend slaves and women
Disagreement
 Full equality small minority of women
 Debate over whether women should be allowed to join
men’s business meetings (abolition)
 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed
women should be allowed to join
 Mott and Stanton active reformers
 Temperance and abolition
 Mott American Antislavery Society and Philadelphia
Female Anti-Slavery Society
 Stanton married to Henry Stanton (leading abolitionist)
both interest in women’s rights
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls Convention
 Mott and Stanton organize 1st Women’s Rights
Convention in NY
 “Declaration of Sentiments”
 Marked beginning of women’s movement
Amelia Bloomer
 Leading voice for women’s rights
 The Lily
Susan B. Anthony
 Right to vote (suffrage)
Women Gain Rights
Married Women’s Property Act
 Guaranteeing many property rights to women
Wage earners
Reformers
Property rights
Right to vote