Rights for Women

Women have not always had the rights that women today have. The 1800s brought about a hard time for women and the need for reform in their rights as upstanding citizens. The article "Notes on The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood" by Catherine Lavender gives four characteristics of "an ideal woman" of the 1800s. The first is piety or purifying society through religion. The second is purity, especially sexual. A woman's greatest treasure was thought to be her virginity. She was able to use sex as a power, controlling the sexual needs and desires of men or as a means to get her way. The third characteristic is submissiveness. A lady had to have a "pliability of temper, and humility of mind." Her clothing also needed to be submissive. Women usually wore corsets to create an hourglass figure of their body. The weight of her overdresses limited her physical mobility, aiding the argument that women were the weaker sex. It was also said that "a really sensible woman feels her dependence," usually on the people around her. The last characteristic of an ideal woman is her domesticity. Women were to stay in the private sphere, or the home where nobody could really see them. The public sphere was the world outside of the home, meant mainly for men who worked. The Cult of Domesticity explains the idea that the lives of middle class women are confined to the home. The proper role of these women was to take care of the house and children and to provide a comfort and companionship to men, while staying out of the public eye. Societal rules for women were very strict, but a fight coming right from the source was about to emerge. 

The Seneca Falls Convention was a gathering of both men and women who wanted reform of the views of women. They, as a group, created the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. It is similar to the Declaration of Independence in the way that it starts and the message it sends. Both documents are declaring freedom for a higher rule they cannot escape. In this case, women are trying to escape rules on how society and the people around them think they need to behave. A very controversial resolution that was part of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments was suffrage for women. The right to vote was heavily debated because it was thought that a woman would vote the same was as their husband. This is not a fair assumption because only some women are married, others are single, and some others are even widowed. Women were also thought to be "intellectually inferior" and people thought they would not be able to make the right decision while voting. Though the right to vote was one of the many resolutions that were heard at the convention, many groups of women's ideas were not addressed. 

Groups of people who did not attend the convention includes, Cherokee women, Slaves, and mill workers. In class, we broke up into groups that represented all of the people who did not actually attend this convention and though of what their resolutions might have been. For the Cherokee women, they wanted to preserve their language, beliefs, and their land. Slaves wanted an end to slavery. And for mill workers, they wanted equal pay for equal work. Because only upper-class white females and males attended the Seneca Falls Convention, none of these problems were ever touched. There were a few similarities between the resolutions we thought of in class and the resolutions that appear in the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. For example, the class thought women should have a right to speak in public, but the Declaration only goes so far as to say they should be encouraged to speak at religious assemblies. Both the class and the Declaration thought women should have a place in the public sphere and should not be confined to their homes. We also had the idea that women should have suffrage. A difference between what the class said and what the Declaration states, though, is the idea that men and women should have the same social standards as each other. 

To me, the most important resolution was the idea that women should have a place in the public sphere. Though this does not give a woman direct rights, it lets her be open to the real world. It gives her a chance to be heard by other people. Nobody should be confined to their home, no matter their sex, race, or religion. Women deserved the right to live like men even if society could not accept that in these times. Our society has accomplished many of the resolutions stated in the Declaration. I feel that we still need to work on equal pay for equal work, but in general, women have the same God-given basic rights that men have.