HOT TOPIC: Women's Suffrage
Volume 2, Issue 22 - February 19, 2006"In 1840 Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was much to their despair that even there they were not allowed to be seated simply because of their gender. If not at a gathering of individuals committed to freedom and equality for all people, where?
The answer was Seneca Falls, New York, a small town on the border of the United States and Canada. There in 1848 some two-hundred and fifty people attended, including forty men (among them Frederick Douglass). In fact Mott’s husband James wound up presiding over the two day event because no one else felt comfortable enough as a public speaker. The result was the Declaration of Sentiments, deliberately based on the wording and ideals of the Declaration of Independence, consisting of a series of resolutions regarding the right to vote and the reform of marriage and property laws. This document became the fuel that propelled the United States to ratify the nineteenth amendment some seventy years later.
Western society has come much farther in the past eighty years. Consider http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/profiles.html, NASA’s Profiles of Frontierswomen, as a contemporary collection of examples as to how women have made a difference in society over the past century. Still, as you peruse this week’s offerings, you will realize (as I have) that there is still much work to be done for women around the world.
I hope you will find this week’s D12 to be substantive and moving in its presentation of the struggle for women’s rights both past and present."
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