During the early 19th century, sexism seems to
have reached an all-time high. Now that industrialization has changed how people
make, sell, and buy products, women no longer need to knit clothes or cook all
that much in the home. Since previously that was seen as their most important,
if not only, job, now that it was no longer required women became more of a
luxury than anything useful. It was during this time that the “Cult of Domesticity”
arose, an idea of what women should always act like that still shows traces in
modern day society. This idea held that there should be four ideals that women
should represent above all else: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.
Women were supposed to worship God when men couldn’t (meaning that any woman of
any other religion was obviously not a woman), they were supposed to be pure
whereas men could potentially give in to their desires, they were supposed to
submit to the male in all aspects, and they were supposed to make the home, the
“private sphere” a place where men could recuperate from all their work in the
rough and cutthroat “public sphere,” a place women were never supposed to see.
This idea was prominent through the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, but eventually a few women decided to
attempt to prove their equality to men. At the time women could not own
property, vote, they were rarely allowed to go out to public areas, they had
little claim over their children, and they hardly even had a right to their own
bodies. In attempt to gain some of their own rights, some 300 people, 40 of
them men, gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to hold the Seneca Falls
convention. The end result of the convention was The Declaration of Rights and
Sentiments, a document written by the women demanding certain rights that be
allowed to them. The document was almost entirely based off of the Declaration
of Independence, starting in the same way and using the exact template
throughout the rest of it. Among other things, the women demanded the right to
vote, to own property even if they are married, to teach and speak in public
assemblies, and to generally thought of as man’s equal. This document met
extreme amounts of controversy, especially the right to vote. Women were not
given suffrage until 1920, 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention. Only one
member of the convention was alive at the time.
The convention, however, was not exactly completely
equal. The only men and women there were white and generally of the middle or
upper class. Poor women, black women, Native American women, and women of other
nationalities were not given any sort of representation. While in class all
these groups were heard from, only white middle and upper class women were
allowed to be present at the convention. However, even with every group
accounted for, our class came up largely with the same ideas. Our resolutions
included demanding to be seen as US citizens and given all the rights there of,
to be allowed to vote, and to be given basic freedoms given to man already.
However, there were ideals like that of ending slavery that were not seen in
the real convention.
I believe the most important ideal was the ability for
women to be seen as equal to men and to be given all the same rights. Without this
ability, many of the ideas such as the right to vote and to own property could
be denied to women simply based off of sex. Once you destroy the barrier
between the sexes in just the law, you can start to allow for more leeway in
the ideals of how women should act and eventually even in how women are thought
of. While society has accomplished the objectives given by the Seneca Falls
Convention in the law, the world is still not completely non-misogynist. There
are still many instances of women being paid less than men and being expected
to follow the Cult of Domesticity, and a vast majority of the top jobs in the
world are held by men, but we have certainly taken a large step in the right
direction, and one can only hope that more will follow.
