The women's rights movement (WRM) seeks women's equality with men in all aspects of society, with full access to the same rights and opportunities that men enjoy. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792 first introduced the concept of rights for women. Previously focused on abstract notions of women's equality, women slowly progressed to battle for constitutional and legal rights, like property rights and suffrage. Early 19th-century intellectual leaders of the American WRM were Lydia Maria Child (1802-80), who wrote the Ladies Family Library, 1832-1835, a history of women; Margaret Fuller (1810-50) and her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century of 1845; and Elizabeth Ellet (1818-77) who wrote The Women of the American Revolution of 1848.

Ninety women came to the Virginia colony in 1619, followed by 18 women and 11 girls who landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. The first women colonists were often indentured servants kidnapped from cities or sold from prisons in Europe. Later, African women, forced to endure the Middle Passage, came to America as slaves. In contrast, the Quakers, who brought the principle of women's equality to America, were singular in their support of women's rights, allowing women to preach and enter into the government of the church. Quaker women frequently suffered religious persecution; Mary Dyer refused to recant her religion to the Massachusetts authorities and was hanged in Boston in 1660. Undeniably, women in the colonial period had many duties but not many rights.

In the early 1800s, U.S. women organized politically on their own behalf. Interested in social problems and their reform, women advocated temperance and gave aid to prisoners, prostitutes, unwed mothers, and widows. Female factory workers went on strike alone for the first time in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1828, but these first attempts to unionize failed. Similarly, Maria W. Stewart, a black woman who spoke out from 1831 to 1833 on the necessity for girls' education and the abolition of slavery, finally gave up in frustration. Lacking organizational experience and not permitted to speak in public, women gained experience in political organizing through their activism in the antislavery movement. Through this abolitionist work they gained awareness of their inequality and began to change their organizational focus from anti-slavery to women's rights. Lucretia Mott, an ordained Quaker minister, helped establish the Philadelphia Anti- Slavery Society in 1833 and organized the first Anti- Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837. An important catalyst for the WRM occurred when Lucretia Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840.

Lamenting that as women they were not allowed to be delegates, they vowed to organize a convention on women's rights. In 1848, the Married Women's Property Bill became law in New York State, and on July 19-20 of that year, a convention held in the Methodist Church in Seneca Falls signified the beginning of the WRM in the United States. Resolutions passed unanimously were appeals for women's rights to equality in divorce, child custody, inheritance, property rights, and the right to an education, but some opposed the call for women's right to vote. State conventions and grassroots organizing on women's rights continued until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

References:

1) Bacon, Margaret Hope. 1997. Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America. Toronto, ON: Collier- Macmillan Canada.

2) Crow, Barbara A., ed. 2000. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press.

3) Flexner, Eleanor and Ellen Fitzpatrick. 1996. Century of Struggle: The WRM in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

4) Ryan, Barbara. 1992. Feminism and the Women's Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement, Ideology and Activism. New York: Routledge.

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