Kate Chopin and the Suffrage Movement For the CSET

expense to the state.”

When the Senate took up the bill, one member asserted that “disaster and ruin would overtake the nation.” Suffrage would lead inevitably to “government by females” because “men could never resist the blandishments of women.” Instead, he recommended that women “attach themselves to some man who will represent them in public affairs.”

The staggering changes for women that have come about over many generations, in religion, in government, in employment, in education – these changes did not just happen spontaneously. Women themselves made these changes happen, very deliberately. Women have not been the passive recipients of miraculous changes in laws and human nature. Seven generations of women have come together to affect these changes in the most democratic ways: through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and nonviolent resistance. They have worked very deliberately to create a better world, and they have succeeded hugely. The Women’s Rights Movement marks July 13, 1848 as its beginning.

On that sweltering summer day in upstate New York, a young housewife and mother, Elizabeth

Cady Stanton, was invited to tea with four women friends. When the course of their conversation turned to the situation of women, Stanton poured out her discontent with the limitations placed on her own situation under America’s new democracy. The American Revolution had been fought just 70 years earlier to win the patriots freedom from tyranny. But women had not gained freedom even though they’d taken equally tremendous risks through those dangerous years. Surely the new republic would benefit from having its women play more active roles throughout society. Stanton’s friends agreed with her, passionately. This was definitely not the first small group of women to have such a conversation, but it was the first to plan and carry out a specific, large-scale program.

Within two days of their afternoon tea together, this small group had picked a date for their convention, found a suitable location, and placed a small announcement in the Seneca County Courier. They called “A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” The gathering would take place at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848.

These were patriotic women, sharing the ideal of improving the new republic. They saw their mission as helping the republic keep its promise of better, more egalitarian lives for its citizens.