Week Six

The feminist movement emerged as a result of the Atlantic revolutions, during and after which many people, based on enlightenment ideas, began to question and challenge traditional ways of thinking.  Shortly after the French Revolution, playwright and journalist Olympe de Gouges wrote Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen in which she attempted to apply to women the rights of man laid out in the French Declaration of 1789 (813, 817).  While numerous women in France at the time agreed with Gouges and attempted to participate in events promoting equality, they were unsuccessful in their efforts because most men disagreed, believing instead that women were meant to focus on marriage and motherhood rather than politics (805, 818).

Other women followed Gouges example in arguing for equality of the sexes and the rights of women.  One such woman was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who led the feminist movement in America during the nineteenth century (818).  In 1848, Stanton took a leading role at the first organized women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York.  During the conference she wrote a statement in which she reworded the Declaration of Independence to read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal” (806).  Almost fifty years later Stanton addressed the U.S. congressional committee, urging them to amend the constitution to allow women the right to vote.  Stanton’s main argument in the address is that women are individual people who must live their own lives.  She states that women have not only the right, but also the obligation to rule over themselves and make their own choices and that as individuals who are living just the same as men, women should not be sheltered from life.  Stanton believed that men do not, cannot and will never understand what it is to be a woman so men should dictate the lives and decisions of women.

“Seeing then that the responsibilities of life rests equally on man and women, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity.  The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is a mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer…Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burden….” (819).