Womens Rights Movement in the US :: Womens Liberation Movement

In early societies, women bore children, cared for the home, and helped maintain the familys economical production. work force hunted, made war, and, in settled societies, assumed primary function for field crop production. Male dominance, however, was important from the time of the earliest create verbally historical records, probably as a result of mens stripping of their role in development of hunting and warfare as circumstance activities. The belief that women were naturally weaker and inferior to men was also certified by god- centered religions. In the bible, god placed Eve under Adams authority, and St. capital of Minnesota urged women to be obedient of their husbands. In Hinduism the reward of a proper womanhood is rebirth as a man. Therefore, in most traditional societies, women chiefly were at a disadvantage. Their education was limited to learning domestic skills, and they had no access to positions of power.Some exceptions to womens dep terminusence on men did ex ist. In old-fashioned Babylonia and Egypt women had property rights, and in medieval Europe the could join craft guilds.Men of the lower classes also lacked rights, but they could console themselves by feeling transcendent to women.The Enlightenment, with its egalitarian political importance, and the Industrial Revolution, which caused economic and social changes, provided a well-to-do climate for the rise of feminism, along with other reform movements in the new 18th and the 19th centuries.Of deeper significance for women was the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of handicrafts, which women had always carried on at home, without pay, into machine-powered mass production meant that lower-class women could become wage earners in factories. This was the beginning of their independence, although factory conditions were hazardous and their pay, lower than mens, was legally controlled by their husbands. At the same time middle and upper-class women were expected to stay at ho me as idle, decorative symbols of their husbands economic success. Such conditions encouraged the womens liberationist movement.Rapidly industrializing Great Britain and the U.S., feminism was more successful. The leaders were primarily educated, leisured, reformist women of the middle class. In 1848 more than 100 persons held the first womens rights convention, at Seneca Falls, modern York. Led by the abolitionist Lucretia Mott and the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they demanded equal rights, including the vote and an end to the double standard. In the U.S. progress was slower. The number of working women increased nearly after the two world wars, but they generally had low paid, female- prevail occupations, such as school teachers and clerical work.