Today, August 26th, is Women’s Equality Day which commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote. This day reflects the culmination of a movement which had begun in the 1830s when rising middle-class American women, with an increasing educational background, began to critique the oppressive systems of the early 19th century.
The post 10 facts worth knowing about the U.S. women’s rights movement appeared first on OUPblog.
Anne Zaccardelli, Library and Online Sales Assistant
Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History and Department chair at Davidson College. Her newest 
book, now out in paperback, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement illuminates a major turning point in American women’s history, a convention and its aftermath, which launched the women’s rights movement. Below I share the interview I conducted with McMillen about this tumultuous time in our nation’s history. Be sure to check out McMillen’s previous OUPblog posts here.
OUP: While I was reading the book, I was completely shocked at just how scandalous it was for a woman to merely speak in public. Why was that?
Professor Sally McMillen: The idea of American women speaking in public to mixed audiences was unacceptable until the mid-nineteenth century. They could address other women, and Quaker ministers like Lucretia Mott spoke in meetings. In the late 1830s, when Sarah and Angelina Grimke addressed audiences of men and women, New England ministers were shocked. Women should confine their activities to the domestic arena and not presume to be experts on moral issues—in this case, slavery. In 1837, these ministers issued a formal “Pastoral Letter,” objecting to the sisters’ audacious behavior. Their “Letter” was read in churches across New England, denouncing the two for stepping beyond the female sphere. This caused a number of women to realize that they were as enslaved as the slaves they were trying to free. It also led to Sarah Grimke’s writing one of the earliest treatises on women’s rights, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Nearly a decade later, Lucy Stone, who attended Oberlin Collegiate Institute, discovered that the school did not allow female students to study rhetoric, to debate, or to speak in public. Later, during her career as a public orator for the anti-slavery movement, Stone sometimes found herself drowned out by rowdy protestors and pelted with rotten vegetables and books. Finally, by the 1850s, such reactions subsided, and women’s voices were heard.
OUP: From Hillary Clinton’s pant suits to the cost of Sarah Palin’s clothes, a female politician’s appearance is heavily scrutinized today. Did the suffragettes have this problem as well?
McMillen: Clothing has always been an issue for women that can elicit strong responses. In the mid-nineteenth century, female attire consisted of layers of petticoats, tight corsets, and floor-length dresses. Tight lacing caused health problems by constricting internal organs. In 1850, Elizabeth Miller returned from Europe where she had worn the “Turkish costume” with puffy pants and a short skirt. Welcoming this freedom of movement, soon her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted the outfit, as did Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony. Amelia Bloomer’s newspaper ran sample patterns, and the new fashion statement now had a name (“bloomers”). But the comfortable costume had an abbreviated life, for the public and the press ridiculed women for such unsightly, unfeminine attire. Female reformers soon realized that the
