Revision Flashcards
TRADITIONAL STORY of the history of woman suffrage
Until Summer of 1848, when 100 people met at Seneca Falls, New York, to declare themselves in favor of women’s equal civil & political right, no American women had uttered the demand for the vote. At least not publicly.
How can that traditional story be dismantled?
Looking at efforts to organize charitable societies, speaking out against intemperance and slavery, organizing against their employers. Demanding expanded property rights, education, and employment opportunities.
Hull House
settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, United States that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of the city, Hull House (named after the original house’s first owner Charles Jerald Hull) opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912 the Hull House complex was completed with the addition of a summer camp, the Bowen Country Club.[2][3][4] With its innovative social, educational, and artistic programs, Hull House became the standard bearer for the movement that had grown nationally, by 1920, to almost 500 settlement houses.[5]
Roots of the demand for suffrage
found in not only in movements such as abolition but also in debate about republican ideals and about the essential meaning of the Declaration of Independence
1846 New York constitutional convention
One delegate, Mr. Harris, an Albany Whig who would propose a married women’s property clause, “offered a somewhat important memorial, very numerously and respectably signed by some of the zens of Albany” that “related to the disfranchisement of clergymen holding office, and of women
The 1821 reforms
NJ & NY conventions took place as part of a process of revisiting ass. and reenvisioning structures of the late 18th cen. polity that had been the revolution’s legacy
Married Women’s Property Acts
The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was based in New York City, the movement was created by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The Married Women’s Property Acts are laws enacted by the individual states of the United States beginning in 1839, usually under that name and sometimes, especially when extending the provisions of a Married Women’s Property Act, under names describing a specific provision, such as the Married Women’s Earnings Act. The Married Women’s Property Acts helped to rectify some of the difficulties that women faced under coverture, the English common law system that subsumed married women’s ability to own property, wages, enter into contracts, and otherwise act autonomously, to their husband’s authority.[1] After New York passed their Married Women’s Property Law in 1848, this law became the template for other states to grant married women the right to own property.
Under the common law legal doctrine known as coverture, a married woman in British North American colonies and later in the United States had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. Her rights and obligations were subsumed under his. She could not own property, enter into contracts, bring a law suit, or earn a salary in her own name.[3] An unmarried woman, a femme sole, on the other hand, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name.
Over several decades, beginning in 1839, statutes that enabled women to control real and personal property, enter into contracts and lawsuits, inherit independently of their husbands, work for a salary, and write wills were enacted. The first such law was in Mississippi, which in 1839 granted married women the right to own (but not control) property in her own name.[4] It was enacted after a successful case by Chickasaw a woman, Betsy Love Allen, prevented a creditor of her husband from seizing her separately owned property.[5][6] Maine and Maryland did likewise in 1840. In 1842, New Hampshire allowed married women to own and manage property in their own name during the incapacity of their husband, and Kentucky did the same in 1843. In 1844 Maine extended married women property rights by granting them separate economy and then trade licenses. Massachusetts also granted married women separate economy in 1844.[7]
Usually, concerns for family integrity and protecting a household from economic crisis, rather than a liberal conception of the role of women in society, motivated these changes.[1] Change came in piecemeal fashion. As late as 1867 a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cole v. Van Riper noted that “It is simply impossible that a married woman should be able to control and enjoy her property as if she were sole, without practically leaving her at liberty to annul the marriage.”[8] According to one analysis, the legislation came in three phases—allowing married women to own property, then to keep their own income, then to engage in business—and advanced more quickly in the West, exactly like female suffrage did.[8]
