Chapter XIX
Women
In the old British tradition, women could not vote. The American Revolution did not change the status of women in any way. The English colonies had many laws and traditions that discriminated against women. In 1848, these laws and traditions survived unchanged.
The laws said that if a woman divorced, the husband would get the children. If a married woman worked in a factory, she had to give her wages to her husband. When a single woman got married, she had to give all of her property to her husband. A woman could not testify against her husband in court. The only professional work available for women was teaching. By tradition, women could not be doctors, lawyers, or priests, or do any other kind of professional work. Most women accepted this status.
After William Lloyd Garrison formed his organization against slavery, many women in the North joined. They became very active in the campaign against slavery. Some of the men who were against Black slavery said that women should not be leaders in the organization. They should only be followers.
Two women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, were angered by this. They decided that women should organize for their rights. In 1848, they organized a Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Three hundred women and forty men came. They drew up a list of eighteen laws and traditions that they wanted to change because they were unfair to women. One of the items on the list was that women should be allowed to vote. At first, more than half of the people at the convention did not support this. But Frederick Douglass, a Black man who was there, gave such a strong speech in support of the idea, that some of the people changed their minds, and a majority accepted the idea.
The women formed an organization to get rights for women. But to get the right to vote, they had to convince the men to give it to them. This was a slow process. In 1897, Colorado gave women the right to vote. By 1914, twelve states, all west of the Mississippi River, allowed women to vote. In 1916, Montana became the first state to send a woman to Congress.
In 1869, Susan B Anthony became a leader in the organization that wanted women to have the right to vote. She realized that the only way to guarantee the right to vote for all women was by getting an amendment to the Constitution. Finally, in 1920, the 19th amendment to the constitution was passed. It gave women the right to vote. It took seventy-two years for women to get the right to vote. By the time the 19th Amendment passed, all of the early leaders of the women's movement had died.
After women got the right to vote, there was a split in the women's movement. One group of women wanted laws that gave special protection to women. They wanted laws that forbade factories to assign heavy or dangerous work to women. This woman's organization succeeded in getting such laws in a few states.
The other group of women was against such laws. They formed their own organization. This group worked for equality of the sexes. At that time, in some factories, women were paid less than men doing identical work. This organization campaigned for equal pay for equal work. To prove that it really wanted equality, this women's organization was against establishing a younger retirement age for women than for men.
A number of years earlier, on March 8, 1911, a terrible fire occurred at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This factory was in a tall building. In the upper floors, 148 people burned to death, almost all of them young women. A year later, the Socialist Party in New York had a very large demonstration on March 8 to ask for safer and better working conditions for women. At the next conference of the Second International, the delegates from the American Socialist Party asked that the conference designate March 8 as International Women's Day. They said this should be a day when women protest and struggle for their rights. Some Russian Bolsheviks were at this conference. After 1917, when they were in power, March 8 was established as International Women's Day in the Soviet Union.
Today, only a small number of people observe International Women's Day in America. It is a day when women who are angry about something, show that they are angry. No one in America would think of giving flowers to a woman on March 8. Flowers are given on Valentine's Day and on Mother's Day in June.
During the 1960's, many young women were active in the movement for civil rights for Black people and in the organizations against the war in Vietnam. Around 1970, they began to realize that even in these movements, their participation was undervalued. Often, they performed low-level tasks while men made important decisions.
These women decided that they needed an organization to change this. The first thing they did was consciousness raising. They began holding meetings in small groups so that every woman who came would be given a chance to talk. They talked about the customs and traditions that prevented women from being truly equal to men. They talked about the ways in which little girls are socialized to accept this. They talked about how jobs traditionally done by men were higher paid than jobs done by women. To end this inequality, they felt that women had to have the right to work at those jobs. They said that women should have the right to work as police, fire fighters, and coal miners. They were most successful in getting women into the police. Today, about a third of the police in America are women. Now there are women fire fighters and women coal miners. They also said that wages in jobs usually done by women should be increased so that men would enter those professions. For example, they wanted men to become nurses.
They realized that it was necessary to better understand the position of women in the social order. To help do this, they demanded that the universities establish women's studies programs where they could examine the history of women and the contribution of women to culture. Today, most American universities have a women's studies program. They also looked at how religion does not give equality to women. To have equality, they said that women should be allowed to be priests in the churches and rabbis in the synagogues. Today some synagogues have women rabbis. The Episcopal religion now admits women to the priesthood. Many Catholic women want their churches to have women priests.
This movement is called the women's liberation movement. Not all women support this movement. This movement's greatest strength is in the universities. They want to end the customs, traditions, and attitudes that lead to discrimination against women.