"To have drunkards, idiots, horse racing rum-selling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, is too grossly insulting to be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours. We must have it" (Rynder 3). This quote from one of Cady Stanton's speeches shows what great injustice women had to suffer. Stanton is saying that even the scum of the earth had more rights than highly cultured women. In many aspects of life, women's rights were dramatically less than those of men. Women were not allowed to vote; yet they had to pay taxes. Women were subjects of their husbands, and expected to do all of the housework. Many women helped in the fight for women’s suffrage. When looking at the woman’s movement, one must look at what rights were denied, who helped fight for these rights, and what we can learn from the movement. The first thing to look at is the aspect of which rights were denied to women. The most important civil right that women were denied of was the right to vote. When the United States became a country, women were never included in which people had the right to vote. The right to vote in our country was restricted to white men that owned property. Women wanted this right. The women's movement was already in action before the civil war. Women were fighting for suffrage, the right to vote, and prohibition, which would outlaw alcohol. During the war, women's attentions were diverted to war issues, but the movement was strong again after the war. In the United States, individual states decided who was allowed to vote. In the western frontier states men and women had to work equally hard to survive and men recognized this. In light of this fact, women were given the privilege of voting. When the civil war ended, all of the slaves were free. This was also the time when women strove their hardest to pass an ...
