January 31, 1920

New York, New York

Temperance Movement, women's rights, Prohibition, woman's suffrage

In 1920 Linton Smith, also known as the Bishop of Hereford, wrote a controversial article on the Temperance Movement and Prohibition. Linton claimed that prohibition could possibly divide political parties on a, “Sex basis," meaning that female prohibition proponents could vote as a block against male opponents of prohibition. Strong drink was very popular in the lives of men during the time. In...

October 20, 1850

FAIRFIELD, Connecticut

women's rights, Politics

On October 23, 1850 the first annual National Women’s Rights Convention commenced in Worcester Massachusetts. For two days more then a thousand women and men from eleven different states listened to speakers. The speakers emphasized the right to vote, to own property, to be admitted to higher education and to choose their occupation or profession. Newspaper reporters from all over attended, but the...

October 2, 1837

WORCESTER, Massachusetts

Angelina Grimke, Secularism, Anti-slavery, Religion, Women, women's rights

In 1837, Angelina Grimke authored a series of letters to Catharine Beecher on the topic of the cultural roles of women as they relate to their social, economic, and political rights. One was reprinted in Women's Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 by Kathryn Sklar. In the letter retitled by Sklar as, “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” Grimke argues that humans have rights...

February 26, 1917

Dist Columbia, District of Columbia

Women, women's rights, suffrage, World War I

The Great War in Europe had already lasted much longer than anticipated by the early months of 1917. Despite a long-standing precedent of neutrality in the face of foreign conflict, the United States steeled itself for the possibility of war. On February 26, 1917, the New York Times ran an article entitled "Suffragist Pledge Aid to the Nation" covering the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s...

1839

MIDDLESEX, Massachusetts

Chevalier, Industrial Revolution, women's rights, Lowell

The machine once promised humanity greatness—or so the 19th-century train of thought went. “There is nothing in the physical order of things,” wrote Michel Chevalier, “of which our race has a better right to boast, than the mechanical inventions, by means of which man holds in check the irregular vigour, or brings forth the hidden energies, of nature. By the aid of mechanical contrivances,...

1842

MIDDLESEX, Massachusetts

Industrial Revolution, Cotton Mills, Charles Dickens, Lowell, women's rights

He said he wasn’t going to compare the textile factories at Lowell, Massachusetts, to the ones in his home country of England, but how could he not? After all, Charles Dickens would make it his life’s work to critique the deplorable working conditions that his fellow countrymen had to suffer through on a daily basis. “The contrast would be a strong one,” Dickens wrote in comparing Lowell to...

1862

WASHINGTON, Vermont

Public School, Teachers, Equal Rights, Women, Education, Powerful Women in History, Women's roles, women's rights

During a visit to America, women's welfare activist, Emily Faithfull examined the vast inequality that existed between men and women teachers and concluded that the situation was unfortunately no better for English women. The "feminization of teaching" had just begun to evolve around the time of her visit (1862);the majority of teaching positions in America, from the colonial period to the middle of...

October 8, 1855

MONTGOMERY, Ohio

women's rights, Female Unionists

On Thursday October 8, 1855 the crowd of government and union officials at the The National Convention of Women’s Rights in Cincinnati fell silent as Lucy Stone Blackwell took the stage.  The preceding speaker Mr. Wise, had discussed gender inequality in education. Wise theorized that America was the home of a generation of “disappointed women.” who had been denied equal access to educational...

November 1, 1913

Essex, Massachusetts

Women, Politics, women's rights, Media

     In New England at the turn of the twentieth century women took pen to paper to address the struggles among women in the fight for equality. The Beverly Beacon was the first all women published newspaper. Emerging in the early 1900s, it expressed women's opinions about social, economic, and political aspects of life in the rural New England town of Beverly Massachusetts. The women writers of...

1849 to 1868

NEW YORK, New York

women's rights, Politics, voting, white women's rights, African American Sufferag

In a society where women were becoming the majority, they still stood bounded by political and social restraints. Rather than seeing this as a setback, American women grew more aware of their limitations and demanded the right to vote. The Social Elevation of Woman, refers to a time when patriarchy was most apparent and women’s voting rights remained undervalued. Men of the early nineteenth century,...