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Chapter VII - Petticoat Rebels
Petticoat Rebels 1835 - 1850
While Politicians contended with one another over expansion and slavery, reform-minded, middle-class women energetically campaigned for women's rights. The official status of women prohibited them from voting, signing contracts, making wills or bringing legal action against someone without the husband's permission. In the rare instance of divorce, the law denied women control of their own property and their own children. Legally, a woman's status was equivalent to that of a minor, a slave or a free black person.
In the years between 1800 and 1850, religious revivals which strongly encouraged moral reform of the family and society in general influenced women to question their debased status. As they participated in antislavery and temperance movements as well as in prison and asylum reforms, women became increasingly frustrated by their appalling lack of political and economic power. Every effort to remedy their ills was ridiculed by men who scolded that women should be seen, not heard. In 1837 arrogant antislavery church leaders openly reprimanded Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two antislavery lecturers from South Carolina. These men derived their authority from the unquestioned assumption that women should "obey, not lecture, men." At first surprised by the hostile reaction to their speech, Angelina Grimke would later write, "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own." Other women began to comprehend the completely secondary nature of their existence and all its restrictions. Thus, in 1840 when the American antislavery movement split over the question of whether or not women had the right to participate, the organized movement for women's rights began.
In 1848 two other supporters of women's rights who refused to be no more than "household drudges" decided to call a convention to deliberate the social, civil and religious status of women. On July 19, 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, women at the convention issued the Declaration of Sentiments. This document contended that "all men and women are created equal" and that any laws forcing women into a "position inferior to that of men are of no force or authority." In response to this radical document, male newspaper editors insultingly described its authors as "love-starved spinsters" and "petticoat rebels."
Between 1850 and the impending Civil War, these women continued to hold conventions and to agitate for women's rights. Susan B. Anthony, an "ardent Quaker" involved in temperance and antislavery movements as well as the growing women's movement, summed up the frustrations of women when she indignantly wrote, "What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient for anything but domestic concerns." As one historian later wrote about the women's movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton "forged the thunderbolts and Miss Anthony hurled them." However, at this moment in the American drama the storm clouds gathering over the issues of slavery and territorial expansion obscured any lightning bolts thrown by reform-minded women.
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