Women's Role & Status

Women's posture was as well as during this stopover (and arguably still is) in many ways placed by their marital status and age, so that what is true for a fair sex when she is 20 and single may non be true for the same woman at 35 when she is marital with trio young children or when she is 75 and widowed.

And yet - these precise significant caveats aside - rough generalizations may be make about the changes in women's status and the larger historical and heathen reasons behind these changes. Women's status changed along at least three major axes - policy-making rights, employment and health care, and cultural perceptions of the female person body. This paper focuses on the first of those arenas of change.

As Benson notes, women's political status remained remarkably consistent from Colonial times through the novelty and on through the last decades of the 19th century. The tenets of English cat valium law that saw women as belonging to their husbands (or fathers or sons) were not fundamentally challenged until the agitation for broad political rights in the previous(a) 19th century (Benson, 1966, p. 224).

Why women a century past should have wanted equal political rights is in some ways an easy question to answer, for it makes good common intelligence that all groups (and individuals) in a representative democracy should

Women cannot get behind or beyond their nature, and their nature is to substitute sentiment for reason - a sweet and not unlovely characteristic in womanly ways and places; yet reason, on the whole, is considered a desirable necessity in politics (Woloch, 1997, p. 402).

wish to be represented - a engineer perhaps most eloquently argued by Abigail Adams, who would live to put through few enough reforms in her day.

But the specific instigating forces towards political reform in the late 19th century and untimely 20th century are more complex.

A woman who occupies the same realm of thought with man ? must ever so be surprised and aggravated with his assumptions of headship and superiority, a superiority she ne'er concedes, an authority she utterly repudiates. Words can not signalise the indignation, the humiliation a proud woman feels for her sex in disenfranchisement (Cott, 1986, p. 127).

With the gaining of the franchise - in 1920 - everything would change for American women, and yet in some ways everything also remained the same, for the same forces that had propelled women into fighting for the select remained very much in evidence. The desire of many women for a more just society that had brought them into the fight against slavery as much as for their own suffrage continued. And the urge for scotch equality (which is always an aspect of political power) that engaged women in the temperance movement (to prevent the family's income's being converted into gin) also continued. Finally, the desire
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