Suffragist and Equality

Suffragist and Equality

B. O’Neil

10/24/2012

English 306

Suffragist and Equality

Looking back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people see that women did not have as many rights as they do today. Subjugated to the will of men, a woman’s job included motherhood and service to the home. The campaign for women’s suffrage began in the decades before the Civil War and lasted for almost 100 years. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had extended the elective franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had. At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were blooming across the United States--temperance clubs, religious movements, moral-reform societies, and anti-slavery organizations--and in many of these, women played a prominent role. American women were beginning to rebel against the idea that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States. The change in social conditions and ideas of equality caused many U.S women writers from a variety of racial, ethnic and class backgrounds to speak out and seek publication of their short stories, declarations, poems and essays in support of woman suffrage.

While Judith Sargent Murray was before the suffrage movement, she was one of the first women who fought for the equality amongst the sexes. Murray was an essayist, playwright and poet whose career flourished during the 1790s. Murray believed that if women were given the equal opportunity to develop their intellectual capabilities, they would be able to exercise good judgment, therefore escaping their allegedly female vulnerability to passion and sentimental emotionalism. She anticipated that advancement in education would allow young women to form “a new era in female history.” In one of Murray’s most influential essay, “On the...