The Women's Right Movement

5 Things to Know about the Women’s Rights Movement

1. Abigail Adams forecast the quest for women’s equality in her “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband, John Adams, stating, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” [Note: If you wind up writing about this letter on the Regents, call attention to the fact that you TRANSCRIBED the letter in class.]

2. In 1848, approximately 300 women and men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for the Seneca Falls Convention, a major meeting convened to discuss women’s rights, including the right to vote.  Among the attendees were Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and former slave Frederick Douglass.  Cady Stanton, with input from Mott and Jane Hunt, wrote and delivered the “Declaration of Sentiments.”  Although one of Cady Stanton’s and others’ demands was women’s right to vote, not all attendees agreed on this point.  In the end, 100 of the 300 “ratified” (approved) the Declaration (68 women & 32 men).  Cady Stanton and Douglass signed; Mott had reservations about the document’s inclusion of the demand for women’s suffrage, but in the end was the first to sign the Declaration.  [Review text of the “Declaration” and recall that it imitates the “Declaration of Independence.”]

3. Those fighting for women’s right to vote (also known as “suffrage” or “franchise”) were called suffragettes.  All women—not just Caucasians—gained that right when the 19th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

4. In 1923, Alice Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  Here is the text:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

In 1972, the ERA finally got the required 2/3 majority vote in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and a deadline for the required 3/4 of the 50 states’ approval by individual state legislatures was set for 1979.  35 states approved the amendment—just three states short of the necessary 38—but five of those states wound up rescinding by the time the deadline arrived.  President Jimmy Carter signed a three-year extension, moving the deadline to 1982, but no additional states approved the amendment, so the ERA fell to the wayside.

In 1972, Australian-American pop singer Helen Reddy releases “I Am Woman,” a hit song that becomes the anthem for the women’s movement.