Women’s Fight Equality

Women’s Fight Equality

During the pre-civil war period of 1820-1860, vast changes in society were occurring. Conflicts between the North and South were increasing in number and intensity, and many advocators of abolition and women’s rights began to gain recognition and supporters.

This was a period of great change in the United States, particularly for women.

In fact, this is when women began to actively give their support to a wide-range of reforms. Many supported the abolition movement and the temperance movement. With the majority of women advocating for the highly visible abolition and temperance movements, disunity fell upon the women’s right movement. Though the women’s rights movement was not generally considered to be greatly successful, women gained the knowledge, experience, and contacts needed for meetings yet to come by being involved with these movements.

The women’s rights movement as a whole is a complex historical event and many happenings are interrelated and uncharacteristically interlinked socially, economically, and politically. Socially, much progress was made in the areas of educational equality, contraception awareness, and the anti-slavery and temperance movements. Women were also somewhat successful economically by gaining more equality in the workplace. Politically, however, they were not so fortunate. Women did not get the right to hold property or divorce until well after the civil war, nor did they gain the right to vote until 1920.

Ideas like these were considered by most to be too radical to take on at the time. As a result, overall the women’s movement for equality was not greatly successful from 1820-1860.

One of their more successful endeavors was obtaining equal education for women. In 1833, the first co-educational college was founded in Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin was not only for men and women, but black and whites alike. Oberlin gave women the first sense of accomplishment especially when other schools followed in its foot steps. Prudence Crandall opened a school that same year for African American females and in 1852 the Antioch College welcomed women as students. First Grinnell, and then the state university in Iowa was opened to females.(Millstein 148) Even though women were allowed to attend college and earn an education, they were s...

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...jority of their accomplishments were social, and their failures political, with a balanced economical middle ground. As the women won their small victories, they learned what boundaries they could push farther and what ones would come with time. Some of their successes gave way to others. Without contraception awareness and educational equality, women would not have had the time nor the education to eventually organize and unify as one force persistently fighting for equality. The period of 1820-1860, therefore maid the foundation for the women’s rights movement and the abundant successes that were realized in later decades.

Bibliography:

Franck, Irene. Women’s World: A Timeline Of Women In History. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1995.

Hanmer, Trudy. The Women’s Rights Movement: Opposing Viewpoints. California: Greenhaven Press Inc., 1996.

Lunardini, Christine. What Every American Should Know About Women’s History. Massachusetts: Bob Adams Inc., 1994.

Millstein, Beth. We, the American Woman. New York: Science Research Associates Inc., 1977.

Rappaport, Doreen. American Women: Their Lives In Their Words. New York: Library of Congress Publishers Inc., 1990.