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• Origins of Feminism- Much of the abolitionist grassroots strength came from Northern Women

  • The public sphere was open to women in ways government and political party’s were not
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe participated in s movement against the Indian Removal act as her sister Catherine Beecher was a major organizer
• Dorothea Dix was a Massachusetts teacher who was a leading advocate for more humane treatment of the insane who were usually jailed

  • Thanks to the efforts of Dorothea Dix 28 states constructed mental institutions
• The Female Reform Society was formed by middle class NYC women to redeem prostitutes from sexual sin and to reveal double standards they published lists of men who frequented prostitutes

  • The efforts of the reform society were echoed
• The Grimke Sisters were abolitionists and suffragists Angelina and Sarah Grimke had experienced first hand accounts of the horrors of slavery as the daughters of a prominent slave owner

  • They began to deliver scathing condemnations of slavery in the 1830’s
  • The Grimke sisters used the controversy against their public speeches as a springboard to argue against the idea that women taking part in public speeches was unfeminine
  • Sarah Grimke released the Letters on the Equality on the Sexes in 1838 which served as a powerful call for women’s rights
• • Frances Wright a Scottish Owenite spoke at New York’s hall of science about abolitionism in the late 1820’s and early 1830’s
  • Maria Stewart a black Bostonian spoke to male and female audiences in 1832
  • Both women received heavy criticism
• • The Grimke sisters were the first to use the first to apply the idea of universal equality ideas from slavery in women‘s rights
  • Catharine Beecher reprimanded the sisters for going against heavens assigned male and female roles
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were denied access the the World Anti-Slavery convention of 1840 because of their gender even though they made the journey to London

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott went on to be major organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848
  • The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of women’s suffrage
  • The Declaration of Sentiments was written at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848
• At the Seneca Falls Convention the Declaration of Sentiments was written which weaved the sentiments of the women who attended the convention with the Declaration written by Thomas Jefferson

  • Most attendees were working class women who denied the home as the woman’s sphere
• • Since women’s house hold chores were greatly diminished with the presence of domestic servants and manufactured goods, women chafed at the inability to get an education and enter professions that allowed them to express their intellect
• Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Jacksonian Era congressmen who became the editor of the New York Tribune in 1844

  • Before being editor of the Tribune Fuller edited The Dial which expressed the views of the New England transcendentalist group she was a part of
  • Fuller wanted to apply transcendental ideas to women’s rights- the ideas that freedom was a personal quest for development with her published 1845 article Women in the 19th Century
  • Margaret Fuller chose to marry a European man because she knew an American one would only stifle her
• • During the 1850’s a new way of dressing was devised by Amelia Bloomer- it was ridiculed by the press
  • The confinement of long tight dresses with corsets that were considered proper female attire stifled the working woman
• • the concept of the “slavery of sex” empowered women to develop an all encompassing critique of male authority over women
  • when feminist and activists, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell married, they felt the need to repudiate New York’s marriage laws that overpowered the husband
• • The similarity between marriage and slavery gained traction, southern defenders of slavery linked that slavery and marriage were natural inequalities
• • influence by abolitionism, women’s right advocates, turned of self ownership into a tool since the law of domestic relationships had it so that the man had pre-accessed to his wife bodily
  • The demand for women to dictate their own sexual activity and procreation challenged the idea that women’s rights stopped at the doorstep
  • Women refrained from discussing private liberties in the public sphere, but Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony expressed their dissatisfaction with traditional marriages
• • even in the form circles, the role of women was debated ex. Samuel Gridley Howe pioneer the humane treatment of the blind and educational reform, as well as an abolitionist did not support his wife’s participation in suffrage
• • when abolitionism split into two wings in 1840 the immediate cause for this dispute was women’s role in anti-slavery
• The liberty party Became a party, determined to make evolutionism of political movement they nominated James G Birney in 1840 and again in 1844