The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America - Report Example

WOMENS RIGHTS MOVEMENT (American Women History) History 308 of (affiliation) Location of March 08, Introduction The nineteenth century was a spectacular era in the sense it was a period of rapid change. People were suddenly somehow made aware of all the possibilities all across the world, but especially more so in the Western countries, in particular in Great Britain and the United States of America. It can be said this was a period when modernization started as people know it as the Industrial Revolution spread from Great Britain where it originally started, to the other Western countries in continental Europe and then onwards to America. People realized they have a power to change the world for the better, by improving themselves first and their own native societies. Modernity encouraged people to abandon their traditions and heritage for the new ways of doing things, especially in light of the discoveries, inventions, and innovations that came along. As a result of these new trends and upcoming changes, some people were also alarmed at how these threatened their traditional way of life in danger of being replaced with something that is new and maybe untried and untested. Social stability is under attack because of these new way of life and men were the most threatened of all the sectors of society as their traditional control of society through a patriarchal system of male dominance is being challenged by change. This in turn gave rise to the so-called Cult of True Womanhood intended to put women back under control by emphasizing their traditional role in society as belonging to the home and hearth. Some women who were apparently perceptive enough took action to reverse the effects of this well-intentioned cult but with a hidden agenda which is the continued subjugation of the women to the men in their families, in their homes, in their lives, and in the larger society. It is a quite interesting phenomenon to observe how the womens rights movement originated from this seemingly innocent attempts to restore women to their proper place and role within society. Discussion There is some truth to the old wisdom of being prepared always for unintended changes or consequences, and this applied to the Cult of True Womanhood; it was a movement that arose as a reaction to the challenges and perceived threats brought about by the changes during the Industrial Revolution that shook the political, economic, and social spheres; its stated aims were to preserve the old-world values of what is considered as an ideal woman. It emphasized the virtues of femininity which are piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness; the movement sought to put an ideal woman in her proper place, which is at the home and for family only. But women soon tired of this imposed role on them and want a more active social role. The seeds of the womens rights movement as a champion of womens rights came originally from the well-intentioned abolitionist movement. This was a social and spiritual kind of movement advocating for the abolition of slavery as a cruel and inhuman way to treat fellow human beings. A new kind of sisterhood was formed specifically for the abolition (Yellin & Van Horne 23), similar to the cult in some ways. But it created deep social and political divisions as some people wanted to retain slavery for economic reasons as well as for the security of white people against the enslaved race of black people. This abolitionist activism planted the seeds of the American Civil War and even threatened the Union. However, the abolitionists persisted. Some of the foremost proponents of abolition were actually women who saw the evil of slavery and for which they cannot allow or tolerate it to continue. The women who supported it saw an issue which they could identify themselves with, for in certain ways, the women were also enslaved by the men in their lives. These women wanted to be free just like the black slaves through an analogy or metaphor with slavery, via a form of male oppression (DuBois 32). Demographics – the abolition activism started in the northern states of the Union after the end of the Civil War and spread downwards to the South. New states admitted to the American Union were no longer allowed to practice slavery by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; Elizabeth Stanton as a leading feminist abolitionist patterned their declaration from the said 13th Amendment (Richards 137). This movement was propagated by white people with a conscience and also freed black slaves who knew the cruelties imposed by slavery. Both men and women were allowed to join the movement although women were treated differently. The women who initiated the womens rights movement later came from the abolitionist movement who realized the power of women to bring about positive social and political change as envisioned. Geographic area – the movement actually started in Europe even as early as in fifteenth century when Spain passed a law that outlawed slavery although this was not enforced very well due to the huge profits provided by the triangular trans-Atlantic slave trade. The movement soon gained momentum early in the nineteenth century (at around 1830) with the establishment of the American Anti-slavery Society by William Lloyd Garrison and the two Tappen brothers named Arthur and Lewis. The abolitionist movement started in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Specific time period – Mr. Garrison founded the anti-slavery society in December 1833 to counteract the Fugitive Slave Law that was recently passed which sought to return any escaped slave to his or her rightful owner. The society encouraged people to fight for abolition and it also helped many fugitives escape and move to the free North and become free people themselves. It soon gained momentum as the movement was predicated on Christian principles of treating each person as worthy of human dignity and respect. People gravitated to the movement and it soon gained a lot of adherents and advocates as slavery was seen as un-Christian (Fraser 5). Four conditions were present at the time for the development of the womens rights movement plus the rise of transcendentalism, which is another philosophical movement that had further promoted a womens rights movement as it enabled free-thinking women to apply all its honored principles to their own movement and eventual emancipation from male domination. In transcendentalism, people were encouraged to think that people are inherently good despite the teachings of organized religions and political parties; these two institutions were viewed as the eventual cause of corruption of good people and transcendentalists promoted the noble ideas of self-reliance and personal independence, in particular, achieving desired social changes. Gender consciousness – the development of women thinking that females are being dealt with unfairly developed as a reaction to the Cult of True Womanhood which sought to continue the subjugation of women in society, by putting them in the home and serve their husbands and raise children in order to be viewed as ideal women. In an unforeseen consequence, the cult had awakened in women how they were being systematically subjugated, to become invisible. Gender consciousness came about as a natural development to counteract the efforts of society or the males in society to put women under the control of males; women then had no rights. Recognition of subordination – anywhere in American society, women were always seen as mere appendages or supports for their husbands. The patriarchal society of America saw to it this continues by teaching in schools how female kids should always be obedient and eventually serve their biological purpose which is to serve their husbands and raise the kids by producing a good number of progeny, cook the food, wash the familys clothes, and do other domestic chores. In other words, this cult movement tried to perpetuate the dominant role of the male (husbands and fathers within the context of family relationships) by claiming “true women” stay at home. Alternate vision – the awakening of the women encouraged them to think independently and how to achieve gender independence by fighting for the rights of women. The women soon realized they have to fight for these rights and one vision which they articulated was the right to have an abortion despite the best efforts of the church and the medical profession to prohibit it. Abortion was one of the first issues which the womens rights movement took up because it was something that is uniquely female only as female is the gender which can carry a pregnancy. It soon became a rallying issue for women activists to legalize abortion as a womans right to own her body and make decisions about pregnancy and abortion independently of the men. Development of an agenda – the womens rights movement had to fight off their portrayal of the women who availed of abortionists services as dangerous women who acted unnaturally. Women are supposed to nurture life and the very act of abortion negates that assumption to bring life into this world. Women who had aborted were portrayed in the media (mostly newspapers) as evil without any discussion of how they became pregnant in the first place. The women who promoted womens rights soon caught on to the idea that pregnancy is not just an act of a single person; the male is equally complicit in the resulting pregnancy and the movement created a new agenda which tackled a good number of domestic issues which were not discussed openly before to include the disparate power relationships between the two genders and to develop the uniquely coherent and harmonious female vision in symbolic discourses (Smith-Rosenberg 243). Transcendentalism – this movement coincided with the growth in the womens rights movement and it was beneficial as it influenced development of feminist discourse. One of the foremost female transcendentalists was Margaret Fuller who wrote extensively on this topic, together with eminent writers such as Ralph W. Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau. The issue of abortion became a focal point of the womens rights movement as an issue to raise the general consciousness of all women as there was a determined effort to depict abortion as a criminal offense by some men of the medical profession (Storer 64). The public discourses on abortion were primarily written by men and the women were not allowed to respond. This is a crude attempt to perpetuate control of men by criminalizing abortion. The main argument was that abortion is murder when viewed from the point of when life had started, but as Fuller said, a new woman was already given a mind of her own on such matters as abortion (Fuller 1). The Catholic clergy and the American Medical Association (AMA) led the charge in the attempt to criminalize abortion not only as immoral and violative of the rights of the unborn but also as potentially dangerous to the pregnant woman, which was partly true at the time if crude instruments and little medical knowledge were taken into account when doing abortions. But it is of special note this fight against abortion was part of the larger social changes during the century, when bourgeois men were fully determined to control their bourgeois wives who had tasted the first freedoms they wanted when these wealthy women were allowed to venture out of the home. The ability to procure abortion easily became a potent symbol of both social change and female autonomy against a backdrop of economic, demographic, and technological factors which turned a supposedly simple sexual and physiological issue into a complex political issue too. This new female freedom threatened the traditional male dominance in the home and in society; males reacted with renewed vigor to reassert their control over women but this in turn drew adverse reactions from women, in particular, the early feminists. They pointed out how the public debate had been so one-sided so far, neglecting to mention issues like marital rapes and a lot of peripheral but major issues such as real sexual concerns about unwanted pregnancies. Conclusion The bourgeois men of America can be blamed for the rise of the womens movement and the consequent feminist movement because of their ill-advised moves to control their women by such obvious devices like the Cult of True Womanhood to perpetuate male social dominance. It backfired on them, so to speak, as women made the correct comparisons between slavery and of their own female oppression as abortion was criminalized that was considered as a backward step for democracy in America. Before the AMA and the Roman Catholic Church advocated for the criminalization of abortion, the women enjoyed considered personal sexual freedoms but there were a few brave women who rebelled against these social and political constraints in the form of new legislation against abortion. There was clearly a clear and wide gender gap in terms of the power relations between the two sexes; males exercised inordinate power over women. The womens suffrage movement got combined with the womens rights movement as it evolved into a full-blown feminist movement that challenged male dominance at home and the patriarchal order of society. Abolitionism gave American feminists a good reason to show how their gender oppression was a nice parallel of black slavery and it gave them a good idea in how to transform this insight into a useful political tool to advance their feminist agenda. Although the path from abolitionism to feminism was not very straightforward, it was good enough to articulate their own concerns about how the prohibitions imposed by the male conservatives in society afforded the best examples of female slavery at a time when the world was supposedly rapidly modernizing towards a new, progressive, and free era in human history. Women had wondered why they also were enslaved by male society and so they fought to see it overturned by fighting for their rights, in particular, the right to have safer abortions. References DuBois, E. C. (1999). Feminism and suffrage: The emergence of an independent womens movement in America, 1848-1869. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Fraser, D. B. (1972). A study in abolitionism, feminism, and evangelical religion. New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press. Fuller, M. (1843, July). The great lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women. The Dial. Retrieved on March 06, 2014 from http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/fuller/debate.html Richards, D. A. (1998). Women, gays, and the Constitution: The grounds for feminism and gay rights in culture and law. Champaign, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985). Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America. New York, NY, USA: Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. Storer. H. R. (1868). Criminal abortion: Its nature, its evidence, and its law. Philadelphia, PA, USA: Little, Brown, & Company. (a re-print). Yellin, J. F. & Van Horne, J. C. (1994). The abolitionist sisterhood: Womens political culture in antebellum America. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Read More