Charting the changes that women underwent over a period of time is a difficult one for a number of reasons. To begin with, while some changes can be quantified or at least assessed (womenÆs salaries as compared to menÆs, for example, or the equitableness of divorce laws), others cannot. How an individual woman (or a group of women) feels about her place in society and the reasons behind that is something that is very difficult to tease out, and it is impossible to know with absolute certainty whether certain women feel the way they do for cultural, historical, personal or psychological reasons. Also, the changes in womenÆs status during this time encompass such a wide range of issues that it is difficult to summarize them with any degree of brevity.
Finally, the change in womenÆs status varies dramatically by region, by class and by race û so much so that to talk about (for example) an Inuit woman following a tradition life pathway and a black female attorney in Atlanta as sharing similar positions in history is essentially meaningless. WomenÆs status has also (and arguably still is) in many ways determined by their marital status and age, so that what is true for a woman when she is 20 and single may not be true for the same woman at 35 when she is married with three young children or when she is 75 and widowed.
And yet û these very significant caveats aside û some generalizations may be made about the changes in womenÆs status and the larger historical and cultural reasons behind these changes. WomenÆs status has changed along at least three major axes û political rights, employment and health care, and cultural perceptions of the female body.
As Benson notes, womenÆs political status remained remarkably consistent from Colonial times through the Revolution and on through the last decades of the 19th century. The tenets of English common law that saw women as belonging to their husbands (or fathers or sons) were...