Women's Rights Movement

Social reform is a movement that seeks to change the social and political views of discounted groups. Social reform movements involve the discounted groups and activists in an effort to change political policy while bringing public awareness to the issue through protests, media, amended legislature, etc. The social reform movements from 1820-1860 were characterized by unyielding perfectionism, impatience with compromise, and distrust with established social institutions. These qualities explain the degree of success or failure of these movements in achieving their objectives. While many people say the women's rights movement was a failure during the nineteenth century and had no noticeable progress until the twentieth century, it is an example …show more content…
Beginning in the nineteenth century, women began to be involved in various social reform movements, to make the world a better place. Women have continued to be involved in many movements for social change. Involvement in some issues, like racial equality, sometimes also led to women working for their own rights more actively. Issues especially important in women's history are abortion rights, peace and pacifism, domestic equalization, temperance and prohibition, and much more. One of the huge issues that jumpstarted the convention was women’s inability to express their opinion about slavery. Their inequality in religious bodies led to distrust of the Church and women started to refuse to conform to traditional gender rules, like legal rights in marriage and the ability to wear pants. A woman named Abby Kelley said, “ Have good cause to be grateful to the slave, striving to strike his iron off, we found most surely, that we were manacled ourselves.”The Declaration of Sentiments was created by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wife to a well-known anti-slavery orator and niece of a leading reform philanthropist, which was an outline of injustices that set the agenda for women’s rights movement and where twelve resolutions were adopted calling for equal treatment of women and allowing them the right to vote. She and Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia …show more content…
It began in Worcester, MA, and was held yearly until 1860, with the exception of 1857. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the convention meetings came to a stop. It combined both male and female leadership, and invited a broad base of support including temperance advocates and abolitionists. Speeches were stated on the subjects of equal wages, expanded education and career opportunities, women's property rights, marriage reform and temperance. Main among the affairs examined at the convention was the passage of laws that would give suffrage to women. There was a distrust against the government due to the previous “Gag rule” of 1836 that prevented discussion of petitions against slavery. It was finally repealed in 1844 due to John Quincy Adam’s efforts, but there was nothing stopping the government from doing the same to women’s suffrage. After the first convention, Lucy Stone, a women’s rights activist and graduate of Oberlin College, Henry C. Wright, a controversial abolitionist and feminist, William Lloyd Garrison, and Samuel Brooke, author of Slaves and the Slave Holders, spoke of the need for such conventions and was overseen by Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis at Melodeon Hall. The outcome was another convention on October fifteenth or sixteenth, 1850, in Worcester, MA, where about 1,000 people attended. Several newspapers reporting the event, giving it the much needed exposure that marked