Mrs. Collins
Block 4
June 2, 2015
Top Ten People, Places, and Events: The Women’s Rights Movement The Women’s Rights Movement is one of the many important events in history. It has given women rights that they never thought they could have. People like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made them possible. These women fought for what they knew should be theirs, and what they knew was possible, they helped give women the right to vote and made men see women as equals. There were many women and men who made these things possible and they continued to fight for equality even when they were rebuffed, put in jail, and declined because the leaders that ran these movements would not take no for an answer. Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 in Massachusetts. When she grew old enough to live on her own she lived in a part of upstate New York that would later be known as “Burn District”. The burn district is where religious revivals and where the formation of new religious movements occurred. In 1853 Anthony began to crusade for the expansion of married women’s property rights. In 1856 she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and in 1890 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association alongside those who were willing to fight for former slaves. Anthony and other supporters were arrested for voting on 1872, she was held for bail $1000 bail. Anthony has a dollar coin minted in her honor. Susan B. Anthony passed away on March 13, 1906.
Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the women suffrage movement. She was born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey. In 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association as the chair of the congressional committee. On March 3 in 1913 she and some of her colleagues coordinated a suffrage display to distract people from President Wilson’s inauguration. The more conservative women of the NAWSA disapproved and became frustrated with the publicity stunts that Paul constructed so she left and started her own movement, alongside Lucy Burns, the congressional union, which later became The National Women’s Party. In 1920 Alice proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States”, and today it has still never been ratified. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the primary women’s rights activists of the 19th century. She was born on November 12, 1815 in upstate New York. After she married abolitionist, Henry Brewster, they traveled to the world anti-slavery convention in London where they were turned away and told that female delegates were unwelcome. In 1848 Stanton and fellow reformers organized the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1895 she published the first volume of a more egalitarian women’s bible. Stanton passed away in 1902; today a statue is dedicated to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott stands in the US capitol. Lucy Stone was born in Massachusetts in 1818. She was a pioneering abolitionist and women’s-rights activist, she is best known for refusing to change her name when she married abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. Stone graduated from Oberlin College in 1847 and became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1871, Stone and Blackwell published the weekly feminist newspaper, The Woman’s Journal. Stone passed away in 1893, the women’s journal survived until 1931.
Ida B. Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862, she is best known for her work as a campaigning journalist and anti-lynching activist. Wells worked for the black newspaper, The Free Speech. In 1892 she left Memphis after an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and threatened to kill her is she ever returned. In 1913 she prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Wilson’s inauguration, but organizers asked her to not come: some of the white women wouldn’t march