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| From the Editor |
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In this issue, HISTORY NOW looks at
the efforts by women across two centuries to gain the
right to vote and to enjoy equal opportunities within
American society. The women’s rights movement, like
the struggle by African Americans to gain their freedom
and their civil rights, is one of most important reform
efforts in our nation’s history. Bringing this story
to the classroom allows us to raise vital questions with
our students: how has the promise of the Declaration of
Independence, that all men are created equal, been expanded
and made more inclusive over the course of our national
history? Under what circumstances do reform movements
begin—and end—and how do we evaluate their
successes and failures? In addition to these broad questions,
the study of the women’s rights movement brings
to life individual women and groups of women who have
shaped our history and who deserve recognition. Bringing
their stories into the classroom provides female students
with the opportunity to look into the mirror of the past
and see their own faces—just as their male classmates
have long been able to do.
HISTORY NOW has called upon some of the most noted scholars
in the field of women’s history to discuss many
of the key ideas, events, and issues of the women's movement,
especially the long struggle for suffrage. In her essay
on the legal status of women from 1776-1830, Marylynn
Salmon sets the scene for the reform efforts of the following
century. She shows us how U.S. law viewed women as dependents
within the family both before and after the Revolution
and denied them a formal political voice. In her essay
on feminist pioneers, Anne Firor Scott traces the emergence
of ideas that challenged women’s inferior status.
Beginning with the Enlightenment, American and European
thinkers begin to argue that women’s apparent intellectual
inferiority was the result of poor educational opportunities
and restrictive social customs rather than innate characteristics.
Scott shows us that the chorus of voices challenging the
status quo grew steadily over the course of the early
nineteenth century and lead to the history-making demand
for suffrage in 1848. Judith Wellman takes us to that
memorable moment at Seneca Falls, when the first women’s
rights convention met in 1848. Here, women like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Angelina Grimke, and Lucretia Mott, along
with Frederick Douglass, firmly linked the credo of equality
in the Declaration of Independence to the rights of women
and made the first public demand for the right to vote
for women. Next, Ellen DuBois follows the political crisis
that suffrage organizations faced in the years after the
Civil War. DuBois places the split in the movement in
the context of Reconstruction legislation and reminds
us of the tensions and complications that arise when the
demand for reforms based on race and gender collide. Barbara
Winslow provides us with a much needed comparative perspective
in an essay that examines the women’s movement in
the United States and in England. The parallels are striking,
but so too are the differences. This comparison reminds
us that the differences in the political structures of
the two countries play a critical role in shaping the
strategies suffragists pursued. Finally, Sara Evans takes
us through twentieth century developments and controversies,
tracing the ebb and flow of the women’s movement
from the triumph of the Nineteenth Amendment to the activism
of the 1970s. Taken together, these essays provide us
with an essential overview, but they also provide us with
discussion topics for our classroom that should stimulate
thoughtful consideration of changing gender roles, the
American reform tradition, and the way in which our society
grapples with majority and minority rights.
As always, Mary-Jo Kline provides a rich array of primary
and secondary sources for those who want to pursue this
subject in depth. And HISTORY NOW’s expert teachers
provide lesson plans for elementary, middle, and high
school classes. After reading the essays, take our “Voting
Rights Quiz” and test your knowledge.
Our women’s suffrage issue is the third in this
year’s focus on equality, carrying us from the abolition
movement, to Lincoln and Emancipation, to the struggle
for women’s political participation. Our next issue
will be devoted to the civil rights movement of the twentieth
century, the final example that illustrates this theme.
Carol Berkin
Editor, History Now
Carol Berkin is Professor of History at Baruch
College and The Graduate Center, City University of New
York. She is the author of several books including Jonathan
Sewall: Odyssey of an American Conservative, First Generations:
Women in Colonial America, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing
the American Constitution, and Revolutionary
Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence.
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Editor - Carol Berkin, Associate Editor - Lesley S. Herrmann,
Managing Editor - Karina Gaige, Editorial Assistant - Whitney
Moses, Researcher - Brian Riggs, Designer - Sabina Daley, Archivist
- Mary-Jo Kline, Contributors - Ellen DuBois, Sara Evans, John
Hallagan, Marcia Kunf, Roberta McCutcheon, Marylynn Salmon,
Anne Scott, Amy Trenkle, Judith Wellman, Barbara Winslow.
"Wake Up America" Demonstration photograph courtesy
of the New-York Historical Society, ID#71461.
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