This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-09-10T18:27:06+00:00 The Influence of Woman, 1840-1860s 2 plain 2020-01-21T14:53:14+00:00

  I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power.  -- Lucy Stone, Oberlin College Class of 1847
   

  Introduction

  As women began to be educated and enter the workforce alongside men, the need to address gender discrimination became increasingly necessary. The matter came to a head in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention and the drafting of the Declaration of Sentiments, but was later overshadowed by the Civil War.

  ---

  The seeds of the suffrage movement were sown well before the Seneca Falls Convention came to order. For instance, co-education, or the practice of educating male and female students in the same classroom, generated an increased interest in women’s rights. At the forefront of this reform was Oberlin College, which first admitted female students to its baccalaureate program in 1837. Prior to this, women who attended college were awarded literary degrees upon completion of their studies. Other colleges followed Oberlin’s lead.
  
  During the 1840s, it became clear that the practice of co-education did not resolve gender discrepancies in education. Despite being educated in the same classrooms, options for men and women tended to vary widely. For instance, at Oberlin College, while women were permitted in classrooms along with men, they were not permitted to participate in extracurricular clubs and societies. This was due in part to the influence of the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, which was founded in 1835 with the mission of rooting out “licentiousness in all its forms” (FMRS Preamble). A prominent member of this society was Marianne Parker Dascomb, who held the title of principal of the female department at Oberlin College from 1833-36, and again from 1852-70. As the head of the female department, she enacted rules and regulations which embodied the precepts of the Female Moral Reform Society and which severely limited the number and nature of extracurricular activities in which female students at the college could participate.
  
  Students such as Lucy Stone (OC 1847) and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (OC 1847) railed against these inequalities and went so far as to form their own student societies to operate on a level with the men’s. They aimed to create a collegiate experience that would prepare women for roles outside the domestic sphere, such as their own roles as political and social activists. 
  
  When the Seneca Falls Convention came to order in 1848, a significant number of well-educated women in America who had experienced gender discrimination in various ways sought agency for themselves. These women carried the torch forward, establishing an organized movement in favor of women’s rights, including suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s proposal for universal suffrage at the Seneca Falls Convention had been extremely controversial, but it gained avid support from Stone and Blackwell, who organized the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1850.
  
  As a direct result of these early women’s rights conventions, the women’s rights activists in the 1850s concentrated their efforts on articulating their positions on issues ranging from female education to suffrage rights. Activists published many explanatory texts during this time, including The Proceedings of the Women’s Rights Convention (1850) and The Women’s Rights Almanac (1858), the latter giving an account of the first decade of the women’s rights movement. 
  
  The movement, however, lost its momentum in the 1860s. During the Civil War, women took on new roles both within and without the home. Women became the heads of their households while their husbands, sons, and fathers were off fighting, and were often called upon to provide medical care for wounded soldiers.  
  
  Furthermore, in 1869, debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, dealing with citizenship and voting rights for African Americans, created a rift among suffrage activists. While more conservative suffragists supported these amendments, more radical suffragists disliked the federal government’s neglect of the issue of women’s suffrage. This disagreement caused the movement to splinter into two organizations: The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stone and Blackwell, which would work for enfranchisement on the state level; and the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which would lobby for a constitutional amendment regarding suffrage. 
  
  It was not until the 1870s that the issue of women’s suffrage was again brought to the public’s attention in any meaningful way.