Women's Rights in America What Term Paper

S. Constitution, and Susan B. Anthony was very upset at that.

For one thing, the women's suffrage movement had vigorously supported the abolition of slavery well prior to (and, of course, during the Civil War); and now that blacks were free, and were given the right to vote (although many blacks in America didn't really get to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed their right to cast votes) prior to the women in American having the right to vote.

For another thing, many women were already stretched to the maximum in terms of the patience over their lack of voting rights.

According to an article in www.About.com (Women's History: Susan B. Anthony), "Some of Susan B. Anthony's writings were...quite racist by today's standards." She made the point that "educated white women would be better voters than 'ignorant' black men or immigrant men." In the late 1860s, she even portrayed the vote of freemen as "threatening the safety of white women," according to the article. The man who put up money to fund Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, Revolution, was "a noted racist," the article asserts.

What role did the ideas inherent in the Declaration of Independence have in the women's rights movement? The Declaration of Sentiments (written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton) was presented to the women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It contained several important resolutions: a man should not take a woman's property; a man should not "withhold a woman's rights"; women should not be refused the right to vote. There was some dissention about the "right to vote" clause in the document, but the majority went along with it.

The media pounced on the Declaration of Sentiments (DOS) with scorn, and other male-dominated institutions denounced the document, which contained many phrases directly lifted from the Declaration of Independence (DOI). For example, the DOI states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal..." And the DOS states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal." The next few lines of both the DOI and the DOS are identical. But there were some very dramatic feminine positions taken ("The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her..."), which upset many males, but in the end, by 1920, women were given what they should have been given ever since the Declaration of Independence - the right to cast their ballots along side men.

References

About.com. "Women's History: Susan B. Anthony; Seneca Falls Convention;

Declaration of Sentiments." 2004. Available

http://www.about.com.

History of the American Suffragist Movement (2004). "Timeline: 1861-1867,"

Available:

http://www.suffragist.com/timeline.htm.

Kerber, Linda. "Drawing New Lines." Humanities 16.4 (1995): 15-18.