Women's Social Standing After the Civil War

Women's status has also (and arguably still is) in many ways determined by their marital status and age, so that what is rightful(a) for a fair sex when she is 20 and single may not be true for the same woman at 35 when she is married with lead young children or when she is 75 and widowed.

And yet - these very evidential caveats aside - some generalizations may be made intimately the changes in women's status and the larger historical and cultural reasons behindhand these changes. Women's status has changed along at least three major(ip) axes - policy-making rights, employment and health c be, and cultural perceptions of the female body.

As Benson notes, women's semi semipolitical status remained remarkably consistent from Colonial time through the Revolution and on through the last decades of the nineteenth century. The tenets of English common law that saw women as belong to their husbands (or fathers or sons) were not fundamentally challenged until the agitation for broad political rights in the late 19th century .

Why women a century ago should deliver wanted equal political rights is in some ways an easy question to answer, for it makes right-hand(a) common sense that all groups (and individuals) in a congresswoman democracy should wish to be represented - a organize perhaps most eloquently argued by Abigail Adams, who would live to see fewer enough reforms in her day. But the specific instigating forces towards political reform in the late 19th century are more compl

Woloch, Nancy. Early American Women: A Documentary History, 1600-1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Smith, Page. Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.

Many of the employment gains made by women in recent decades have headed from changes in employment law, as twain federal and state governments have passed both anti-discrimination and equal chance laws poignant the workplace. One of the most important pieces of legislation affecting women is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in wages as well as in course classification, assignment, promotion, and training; in 1986 the U.S.

Supreme Court unanimously govern that informal harassment of an employee violates the civil rights law .

Such reforms were intercommunicate at prevailing conceptions of women as weak and subject to evermore debilitating nervous fits. While the proclivity to swoon and determine wan may have been in some valuate the result of too-tight corsets, it was probably far more often the result of women's discomfort with their hearty roles and alienation from their bodies. Illness was iodin of the few forms of protest often allowed to proper women, and it may also have provided one of the few means through which they could avoid sexual intercourse and so limit family size (Smith, 1970, p. 132). Widespread tendency of women toward the blues could only be cured by addressing and alleviating the affectionate conditions that induced them to begin with, something that women like Blackwell tried to do from one perspective and women like Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony tried to do from a opposite angle. Women armed with accurate knowledge about their bodies along with social and political power did not need to succumb to the vapors .

The 1920s was one of the most important decades for women's rights, seeing both the achievement of women's suffrage and the introduction into Congress (in 1923) of a original Equal Right
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