Women's Rights Of Women Before 1860

Women have always worked at home, minding the children and cooking for their husband while finding time to make clothes for their family. In the nineteenth century, women got the chance to do things they did at home for money. Women got to spread their wings a little and teach or sew clothes or write for money. They did have trouble getting the right to do so. With the women suffrage movement and the United States needing to do things instead of slaves, women got their independence.

While some women wanted to stay home with their family, they would send their young daughters off to textile mills to make money for their family. The young ladies would make money, helping the family and/or saving money for when they got married. The textiles were the ladies would worked were cramped with other ladies and machines that they had to operate twelve hours a day, every day except for Sundays for little money. In February 1834, the ladies had enough of the low wages and protested “to exact the higher rates

In five years, over four thousand groups of women had become a part of the groups. The number of woman’s rights conventions were almost two dozen before 1860. In those groups, there was a lady named Paula Wright Davis who was very vocal about men letting “women open a store, learn any of the lighter mechanical trades, study for a Profession” like a man can. She wanted men to see women as equal. Davis and other women, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did get rights “in protecting married women’s rights to their own money and property in New York” the same year a two dozen conventions were held (Roark). At one of the conventions, Elizabeth Stanton gave a speech called the Declaration of Sentiments that became what women would look to as their go to material. In the speech Stanton said “all men and women are created equal”, it became what the women’s rights movement based their movement on