SUFFRAGE
ACTIVITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
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Lucretia
Mott, Quaker preacher, abolitionist, and women's rights
advocate.
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THE SENECA FALLS CONVENTION
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Quaker activist Lucretia Mott called the convention at Seneca
Falls out of their deep anger with male abolitionists and
the patriarchal system they represented. In 1840, when Stanton
and Mott attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London,
the predominantly male convention refused to seat female delegates.
Stanton and Mott, like other activist women in the United
States, began to see similarities between their own circumscribed
status and that of the slaves. Seneca Falls lit a fire among
women determined to change their legal and political position.
Women's conventions were regularly held during the 1850s,
but the Civil War halted these gatherings as women turned
their energies to war work.
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This
mid-19th-century print emphasizes woman’s
power and central place in the home, which was transformed
by the suffrage movement into a compelling rationale for
their political participation.
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WOMEN'S DISAPPOINTMENT AFTER
THE CIVIL WAR
Women, thinking that their patriotism,
war work, and agitation against slavery would be rewarded with
the vote after the Civil War, were bitterly disappointed. They
soon found that Congress and the public felt that this was "the
Negro's Hour," and that citizenship and voting rights for black
men were not to be jeopardized by adding something so outrageous
as votes for women.
Congress passed, and the states
ratified, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments
to the Constitution that abolished slavery, conferred citizenship
on African-Americans, and granted the vote to black men. Women
were conspicuously and constitutionally absent.
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