Equality between Men and Women

Men and women should have the equally right to vote, education, and respect. They should have the same rights because being a woman is just a gender. It does not change who we are as a person and it is very unfair. Through time, the way people look at women now has changed through some historical ways. The Salem Witch trials had a very powerful impact on women. Economic and voting oppurtunities for women were very limited. For example, most of the European side of side of the country, women were not educated what so ever.

Women have fought for equal rights for many centuries. Prior to the twentieth century women in America often stayed home to cook, clean and take care of the children. Yes, women were a helping hand around the household, but they wanted to be more than just that. They felt limited in being viewed to do only those things for a great amount of time in history, while men were able to do much more. Women were also viewed as slaves. There were many things that have happened throughout time to change the way people look at women today that had to do with Oberlin College and the Civil War.

You may ask, “What was the Salem Witch Trials?”. The Salem Witch Trials was a powerful movement that affected women’s rights in many ways. (https://www.history.com)The Salem witch trials started in the Spring of 1692. It all started in a small village in Salem, Massachusetts. One day young girls claimed to be overtaken by the devil and accused of witchcraft. Lots of talk began to spread throughout the village and people began to be suspicious. Hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts. The first convicted witch’s name was Bridget Bishop and she was hanged recently after. Eighteen other followed in Bridget’s footsteps and were accused over several months. By September 1692, the trials began to abate and be public, which turned against the trials. None of these girls actually “embodied” the devil, which is what they believed but turned out to be false. In Early 1693, the trials ended and all those who were accused of witchery were released from prison. There was a lot affected women throughout this time period, including being accused of the devil inside them, which led to death!

Gender played a important role in this time period when the trials happened. Women were often getting targeted because of their tasks and duties that had to do with survival in the community. Such as making food, being a wife, being a maid,  taking care of animals and children. It was a suspicion back then that witches had control over the health and life of others.  When someone died women were often blamed because of the jobs they had to take care of people. Sara Bishop, Bridget’s sister, was also involved in witchcraft just because they accused her sister which is stated in this website (http://historyofmassachusetts.org). They were both led to death at Gallows Hill in 1692. They were both housewifes for their community. This is another thing that people were drawn to about witchcraft. This to me was not fair to women because they had so many roles to take in rather than a man would back in the day. There are many strong women in the world who do a lot more the men in the family. Some women make more money than a man would just simply because she is smarter or better at her job. Although some jobs in the world pay fairly, there are certain places still in the world where jobs pay men more just because they are a different gender. This has a connection from way back in the day, even at the witch trials.

Women were also viewed as the weaker gender back then. Because of that they assumed that satan would be in them more then they would be in men. (https://prezi.com)

Women are known to have smaller body types than men. Men’s bodies were viewed to be able to fight off satan, which is basically saying that women wouldn’t be able to. John Alden Jr. was involved in witchcraft, and he was a man! There are men that were accused of witchcraft, but it has been more targeted towards women. This is the classic “boys are stronger than girls” saying that has been going around for years, and still in our everyday life. Women back then were not allowed to show masculine characteristics or they would’ve been persecuted and viewed as a disgrace for their community. To add to that, many women felt like they did not fit into society. Women were expected to be quiet, and do whatever a man said in the household. Whenever a women would rebel from these things, they would be automatically accused of witchery. This simply is not fair because a women should be able to act and say what she feels. Women today have very much more freedom then they did, but it still lacks as a judgement to everyday life.

In 1796 five women, one of them being housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of four from upstate New York, began having a nice lunch when the tables turned towards their rights. Within only a week, they organize a trip to Seneca Falls, New York to discuss women’s rights. There, there are participants that signed a document that was the “Declaration of Sentiments”, which called for appropriate and equal treatment to women all over the world. This was also a convention that women could go to, to discuss their rights and how they should be changed. Stanton drafted a “Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions” that echoed the preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created         equal.”(https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/) This called for rights to vote along with men and educational opportunities for women. After this, Oberlin college was known as the first college a women graduated from in 1830.

Oberlin was  a college few people attended back in the 1800s time period, but is now a well known college. In 1831 Oberlin awards the first academic agrees to three women. This is a big deal because not many women did not have educations at all. Antoinette Brown, Lucy Stone, and Sarah G. Antoinette Brown,were all reformist in women’s rights, abolition, and temperance. Antoinette Brown Was the main person to first graduate at Oberlin and successfully, legally get her doctor’s degree in being an american minister. A few years after, she then got married to Samuel Blackwell. They were then told they cannot live equally within their marriage. “We will be governed very much by circumstances and what seems best as the years go by, but I think, Sam we can be self sovereigns, we can bend everything within and without to our wills, and our wills to our intellects.”, Brown had said.(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FysATUgHNcYteGhRO6qrie3MOAA5mKQZd4W_aZe2BMw/edit) In addition to this, the right of women to women and education and employment outside the home, was just an equally important goal. She did not only believe in political rights, but also academic and economic roles needed to be fair. She argued that Darwin did not pay efficiently to certain genders. The American Association for the Advancement of Science then recognized her accomplishments. They then soon started thinking about letting more women get educations and so forth.

Dorothea Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1822. She was the oldest of her own three siblings. Her father Joseph was an itinerant Methodist preacher who was frequently away from home, and her mother suffered from debilitating bouts of depression. He then taught her to read and write at a very young age which made her above average of most men and women. At the age of 12, she was taken in with her grandmother to pursue her education.  Dix would eventually establish a series of schools in Boston and Worcester, designing her own curriculum and administering classrooms as a teenager and young woman.(https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/dorothea-lynde-dix) Dorothea was a teacher, reformer, and author. She worked to find solutions of mental people at institutions, and her results ended up helping people from all over the world.  She changed how mental institutions ran throughout military hospitals and established a reputation as a leader for female nurses. She retired and traveled to Europe  and continued to write and offer guidance to what was now a  huge spreading movement to reform the treatment of the mentally ill. Old hospitals were redesigned and rededicated according to her ideals, and new hospitals were founded in accordance with the principles she espoused. After a long life as an author, advocate and leader, Dorothea died in 1887 at the age of 85 in a New Jersey hospital that had been established in her honor.

Susan Brownell Anthony was both February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts and died March 13, 1906 in Rochester New York. She helped battle suffrage for a very long time. voting booths, religious institutions, workplaces, and homes, and at the intersection of many issues, including race, class, and temperance. The civil war has influenced women actually in a lot of ways. After the Civil War, Anthony demanded that women have their own voice and opinion on certain things in their own independent lives. She also believed the biggest suffrage time was with women. She had a product called The History Of Women Suffrage,which she authored with her best friend. She was raised as a quick learner. She was able to read and write at the age of only 3. After being denied the right to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852, Anthony organized and became the president of the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society.(https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/anthony-susan-b/ ) During the early times in the Civil War, Anthony organized the Women’s National Loyal League, which fought for emancipation. Towards the end of the war, the group decided to campaign and eventually won to change the fourteenth amendment. In 1869, Anthony organized another woman suffrage convention in Washington, DC, and just 5 months later, she and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Women looked up to her as such a powerful voice. By voting, she was arrested and convicted. She was also fined, but refused to pay it. The case eventually dropped. She then traveled to show support for the women’s suffrage.

More than 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Clarissa Harlowe Barton was one of these women. She could not have just gone out to the military like they do today. As men went into war, everything became more feminist. Thousands of women joined to help out with the war and become nurses and volunteers.  This was the first time in American History that women played a significant role in a huge event like this by effort. Fellow nurses in the war did not like all the infections going on and wanted to do something about it. They then contacted the federal government, and they actually listened to them and tried to begint to make things safer. The Sanitary Commission was the result of this. This helped many troops to be safe and more preventable from diseases. The commission almost paid fifteen million dollars in supplies. The majority was collected by women. Slave women were, of course, not free to contribute to the Union cause. Moreover, they had never had the luxury of “true womanhood” to begin with: As one historian pointed out, “being a women never saved a single female slave from hard labor, beatings, rape, family separation, and death.” (https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/women-in-the-civil-war) During the Civil war, many women faced new jobs and opportunities.

Frances Clayton was another women that was disguised in the Civil War. She served many months. Both the Union and Confederate armies forbid any women to come into the military, so the fact that she did was really putting her life at risk. If the government found out she could be killed or prosecuted. his conventional picture of gender roles during the Civil War does not tell the entire story. Men were not the only ones to fight that war. Women bore arms and charged into battle, too. Like the men, there were women who lived in camp, suffered in prisons, and died for their respective causes. (https://www.archives.gov)

However, this was a very risky thing to do. Some of the soldiers knew that Frances was a girl but did not end up saying anything because they respected her for going into war with them.

Women’s movement, diverse social movement, largely based in the United States, seeking equal rights and opportunities for women in their economic activities, their personal lives, and politics. It is recognized as the “first wave” of the larger feminist movement. After the war, the households of this time period was changed dramatically. Some women were on their own because their loved one passed away or the man become the owner of the house again. As soon as the war was over, because so many women helped out within the war, they gave them a lot more job opportunities. Margaret Mead was one of the first women after the war to get a fair and honest job without any discrimination.( https://www.britannica.com) Margaret Mead, born December 16th, 1802, but then died November 15th 1863,  American anthropologist whose great fame owed as much to the force of her personality and her outspokenness as it did to the quality of her scientific work.

In conclusion, there are many women’s rights movements throughout time. Women have gone through a lot in the past. They have been treated unfairly for a long time until some amazing people and events happened. The civil war and the Oberlin College event has influenced the world today and Women’s rights to be treated equally. These historical events shaped the different ways that women could be looked at. The Salem Witch Trials was just one example of many. Women should not be looked at differently just because they are women! In everyday life this has grown a lot throughout time and time again, but this event had a big impact.

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