Women During the American Romantic Movement

Prior to the American Romantic Period, women were dependent upon male family members or marriage for status, and they had hardly any legal autonomy. Inheritance laws favored sons, women could not enter into contracts, and they were dependent upon the males in their lives. The males controlled all assets, controlled all political affairs, and women rarely had their own voice. If a woman did choose to exercise her voice prior to the Romantic period, there were often strict legal and social implications. Women were second-class citizens, seemingly just above slaves. By the mid-1800’s, women decided the time for change had come. Women such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were setting a different tone, no longer hiding behind their husbands and becoming well-known all on their own. Women began to address voting rights, legal rights, employment rights, divorce rights, and even birth control. Mott and Cady Stanton even organized the first women’s rights convention in New York State in 1848.

Mott and Cady Stanton were exceptional women who prominently fought for suffrage. However, in the background were the everyday women of the Romantic Movement struggling to redefine their role in the United States and in everyday life. Women wanted better education, and they wanted to learn how to think rather than how to behave in order to attract a husband. They wanted to be evaluated by their minds and not their bodies, and they wanted acceptable behavior for women to be based on substance rather superficiality (Powell). Even earlier writings of the Romantic Movement focused on insistence on purity and control over women physically, as evidenced in some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works such as “The Birthmark” (Elbert 23). Women’s suffrage would prove to be an uphill battle, as the United States was very set in its ways. Although the atmosphere of the Romantic Movement did not prove immediately successful for women’s suffrage, the movement did gain momentum and...