Module 7, Women's Suffrage Movement
American women had the highest female literacy rate in the world. In the 1820s and for decades to come married women could not own property, make contracts, bring suits, or sit on juries. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others organized the first women's rights convention in history in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Women have had to overcome the oldest form of exploitations and subordination. In the fight for women's suffrage, most of the earliest activists found their way to the cause through the abolition movement of the 1830s. In 1840, when Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the world Anti- Slavery Convention in London, they were forced into the gallery along with all the women who attended. Their indignation led them eight years later, to organize the first U.S. women's rights convention at Seneca, Falls, NY. In the early years of the women's rights movement, the agenda included much more than just the right to vote. Th...