This research provides a chronological account of major trends, developments, and events visible in the history of women's rights and social status more generally, from the 19th century to the time that the US Constitution was amended to grant women the right to vote in 1920. The research will set forth the context in which issue fronts emerged around the transformation of women's social and political position in the United States and then discuss features of the domestic and international historical and cultural landscape that affected the form and content of women's experience over the period under consideration, with a view toward identifying areas of principal significance and influence on women's history subsequent to their obtaining suffrage.
Concern for women's rights had reached the consciousness, though not the conscience, of policy makers from the earliest days of the republic. Abigail Adams's 1776 injunction in a letter to husband John, Massachusetts delegate to he First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, has been widely quoted:
--and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember [quoting Defoe here] all men would be tyrants if they could (Adams, cited by McCullough 104).
Women in England were thinking along the same lines, though it would be some years before rhetoric would be translated into action. Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Women was roughly contemporaneous with the French Revolution, which had taken its cue partly from the American Revolution. Social reform in the matter of where the ladies stood was in the air, though it was to be decades before mainstream Anglo-American discourse regarded it with serious intent.
Marginalization of woman-centered discourse in A...