History of Women's Rights

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 som

d women's social roles. In significant part, according to Douglas, the women of the American bourgeoisie and liberal clergymen, linked as they were by Protestant piety, participated in what she refers to as "the sentimentalization of theological and secular culture" (Douglas 12). Advocacy of female emancipation that also valorized domestic and personal virtue--sentimentalization, that is--was to prove decisive for the course of feminism as a force in American society because it was marginalized vis-à-vis the controlling dynamic of industrialization, the benefits of which were mixed for the culture but nevertheless highly visible as symbols of social improvement. In Douglas's formulation, feminization of culture was not an imposition of feminist values but instead a spread of so-called feminine (i.e., not overtly masculine, i.e., passive) virtues: In the process of sentimentalization which they aided, many women and ministers espoused at least in theory to so-called passive virtues, admirable in themselves, and sorely needed in American life. They could not see to what alien uses their espousal might be put. . . . The pressures for self-rationalization of the crudest kind were overpowering in a country propelled so rapidly toward