DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From “Powerless” Young Woman to Women’s Rights Pioneer and Activist

Imagine This: It’s the early nineteenth century and women have few legal rights. Married women can’t own property, they have no right of inheritance, and their wages belong to their husbands. You know the laws are unfair, but as a young woman yourself, what can you do?

You’re born in Johnstown, New York, one of six children in 1815. Your father is a judge and the town’s most prominent citizen.

You dislike restrictions of any kind and you especially dislike your restrictive clothing: the long skirts, the red stockings, the heavy red flannel dresses with starched ruffles at the throat that scratch your skin, and the black aprons.

Growing up, you spend a lot of time in your father’s law office where you see how few legal rights women have. Women don’t even have the right to the guardianship of their own children. A father can apprentice his children without their mother’s consent and he can even appoint another guardian to raise them in the event of his death.

When your brother Eleazar is killed in an accident right after his graduation from Union College, your father is devastated, and you are determined to be all that your brother had been. To do this, you believe that you have to have a good education and also great courage.

You ask the Presbyterian minister next door to teach you Greek--something usually taught only to boys--and you learn to ride a horse and jump fences as well as any man.

Since colleges do not accept women, you enroll in the Troy Female Seminary. It is the best education available to a young woman, but you know that there is still a great difference between a young men’s college and even the most advanced female seminary.

After graduating from the Troy Female Seminary in 1833, you spend time with your cousin Gerrit Smith in Peterboro, New York. While there, you are introduced to a young escaped slave girl named Harriet who is on her way to Canada. After hearing her story, you become a confirmed abolitionist yourself.

At Peterboro, you learn about racial injustice and you’re in constant contact with reformers of all kinds: abolitionists, temperance workers, philanthropists, and religious reformers. You feel drawn to the idea of an active life with purpose and you spend the rest of your life fighting for women’s rights.

You believe that the right to vote is the key to women’s equality, and you and your friend, Lucretia Mott, decide to hold a conference of your own where you can debate the burning issue of equal rights for women. It takes you eight years to organize the conference, but on July 19, 1848, the first Women’s Rights Convention is held at Seneca Falls, New York, and three hundred people attend.

You give the first speech yourself which shocks many people because they think it’s “unladylike” for a woman to address a crowd. Your controversial, radical ideas about the equality of women and their right to vote sparks a struggle that will last for seventy-two years--the struggle for women’s suffrage in America.

The two-day Seneca Falls Convention marks the birth of the Women’s Rights Movement, and the United States will never be the same again! You devote the rest of your life to the movement and on October 25, 1902, at age eighty-six, you write a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt urging the complete emancipation of thirty-six million women just as Lincoln had emancipated the slaves. It is the last letter you ever write because you die the next day.

It will take another seventy-two years for women to gain the right to vote, but finally on August 26, 1920, the United States passes the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting all women the right to vote. You have finally succeeded in doing what you set out to do!

 “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal."                                       

                             Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lgJrqhZvHQ

Giving Back: Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted her entire life to fighting for women’s rights and equality for all women.

Did You Know that when Elizabeth married Henry Stanton, she insisted that the word “obey” be dropped from her marriage vows because she believed that she and Henry would be equal partners?

Something to Think about: Why do you think the issues of women’s rights and equality for all women were so important to her?

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!