1. Aim #29:What was life like for women in the first half of the 19th century in America?
Do now!
Read the primary sources (pink handout) regarding the women’s rights movement and answer the accompanying questions.
2. Please copy down this aim 

2. (I) Background to Women’s Rights Movement
Following the Revolutionary War, women encouraged to become models of “Republican Motherhood” (Women were the guardians of “morality and benevolence”)
b. Market economy: impacted the social roles of middle class men and women
c. “Cult of Domesticity” (women’s role is in the home)
Catherine Beecher wrote Treatise on Domestic Economy
for the Use of Young Ladies (guidebook for wives and mothers on how to accomplish their household responsibilities)

3. (II) The Rise of Women’s Rights
Involvement in the public sphere
Temperance movement
Circulated petitions, attended meetings, lectures. parades
3. Abolitionist movement inspired women’s rights (saw their plight as similar to a slave’s)
b. Women were prohibited from:
Voting
holding office
higher education
owning property
5. Signing a will or contract
6. Bringing a suit in court without her husband’s permission
7. Getting custody of their children in a divorce
c. Domestic violence virtually unchallenged

4. (III) Key figures in the women’s rights movement
Angelina and Sarah Grimke
First to apply abolitionist doctrine to universal freedom and equality to status of women
b. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott
1. (1840) Delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (they were denied full participation because they were women)
2. Organized Seneca Falls Convention (1848) (marks the beginning of a 70 year struggle for women’s suffrage)
Raised issues of women’s suffrage
3. Modeled the Declaration of Sentiments after the Declaration of Independence
*** 100 delegates (34 were men, including Frederick Douglass)

5. Seneca Falls Declaration

6. What It Would Be Like If Ladies Had Their Own Way!

7. Please consider these questions after watching the documentary “Great Women’s Rights Movement Footage 1970s”
What are the ways the relationship between the abolitionist and women’s rights movement of the 1840s is similar to the civil rights and women’s rights movement of the 1960s/1970s?
2. What complaints do you hear in common from the antebellum period (1820s-1840s) of women and the women in the documentary?