Women's Equality

This past unit, we learned about a lot of social reforms in the mid 19th century.  A really big reform movement was the Women's Rights movement.  The essential question of this unit was "How did the mid-19th century American society react to women's demands for equality? Does 21st century society still react differently to men and women?"

In the 19th century men were viewed as better than women, and women were only supposed to have certain duties in the house.  As this picture shows,  the women was supposed to be in charge of watching over the children, keeping them entertained, their education, and to keep them fancy and give them nice clothes.

These weren't all of their chores however, they had to cook and clean, and wash clothes.

Not only did women have these duties, but they also had to live life without ever sinning or doing any bad deed.  People in the mid-19th century didn't blame men for crimes because it was normal for men to sin and they were supposed to, but a women is supposed to be pure and never sin.  

Women started to realize how unfair this was and they started to demand rights for themselves.  There was a big convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848 and discussed everything they wanted to change about how women were treated.  The came up with a document called The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.  In this document they tried to fix all of the laws and social norms where women weren't treated as equal.  An example of one of the laws comes from the Laws and Practices document when it says "In most states, it is legal for a man to beat his wife." The Sentiments and Resolutions resolves most of the issues however it takes about 72 years before anything changed in the U.S.


Today, in the 21st century, people still see and treat women differently than they do men.  For example we watched this video:

This video shows a really accurate way how society labels men and women differently.  Even if they are doing the same thing, people label them differently.  I believe that the society today has still come a long way from back in the mid-19th century on how we view women, however I believe that we still have a long ways to go before we treat everyone equally.  I don't think we fully understand the Declaration of Independence when it says "All men are created equally..." A lot of people still see it as men and not (wo)men.