Status of Women - Essay Example

Abigail Adams is often remembered for admonishing her husband to “remember the ladies” in framing the constitution, but in reply her husband in 1776 makes it clear that he has no intentions of redistributing power. He maintained that women and other disenfranchised groups ought to remain subordinates because of their lack of capacity to reason and for responsible use of liberty. To an extent, Adams’ persistence on patriarchal supremacy is based on fear of crisis, which proposes that he considers women as well as other politically powerless individuals as being possibly “wild” thus; they need to be tamed to maintain social order.

However, Abigail appeals to her husband’s honor as well as the sense of responsibility concluding that men of senses in all ages detest customs that treat women as vessels of sex and beings of providence under men’s protection. Even though, Adams relied on her wife’s extraordinary resourcefulness to run the farm in his absence like keeping his records and even asking her to use her influence in implementing his political ideas, he is unable to acknowledge her real political power. Adams feared that chaos might arise if women were allowed to participate in public life since like his forbearers who subscribed to structures of female behavior; he was convinced that social order in the country would be undermined if women became part of the public life (Abigail and John, n.d). Early excitement after the French revolution enabled the legislators who overthrew the government-crafted statement of universal rights entitled “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen”.

However, crafters of the document wrote it for the political world where women played little role the declaration therefore applied to only half of human species according to Olympe de Gouge a revolutionary woman. In 1779 two years following The Declaration of rights of Man appeared, Olympe wrote rights of woman that included “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” directly confronting revolutionaries. Her disquieting approach and thought about the revolutionary order considered the revolution to be nothing unless it included sweeping changes in women’s rights, which was radical to the revolutionary leaders.

She felt that man alone raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle bloated with science and degenerated into ignorance of commanding as a despot a sex in full possession of its intellectual faculties; moreover, at the time men pretended to enjoy the revolution and claimed their rights to equality in order be mum about the issue (Olympe, n.d). Wollstonecraft in her introduction to her book “Vindication of the Rights of Women” shows her willingness to argue, dispute and suggest alternatives offer great source of wisdom and understanding for more than two hundred years.

This approach was similar to that of Abigail Adams since constantly remaindered her husband to consider women in drafting the constitution and these women’s approach remain to be relevant even today. Wollstonecraft exposition was not limited to rights, which she devoted much attention in their ensuring their legislation, but her approach also reached a wide range of social and political