Question

Why was the issue of extending political rights to women a controversial one within the liberal movement in 1848? What do these revolutions reveal about political conflicts due to gender differences?

Answer 1

The U.S. women’s rights movement first emerged in the 1830s, when the ideological impact of the Revolution and the Second Great Awakening combined with a rising middle class and increasing education to enable small numbers of women, encouraged by a few sympathetic men, to formulate a critique of women’s oppression in early 19th-century America. Most were white, and their access to an expanding print culture and middle class status enabled them to hire domestic servants; they had the time and resources to assess and begin to reject the roles prescribed by cultural domesticity and legal coverture, or the traditional authority of husbands. A critical mass of these rebellious women first emerged among those who had already enlisted in the radical struggle to end slavery. When abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke faced efforts to silence them because they were women, they saw parallels between their own situation and that of the slaves. The Grimkes began to argue that all women and men were created by God as “equal moral beings” and entitled to the same rights. The ideology of the women’s movement soon broadened to encompass secular arguments, claiming women’s part in a political order ostensibly based on individual rights and consent of the governed. At Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and at subsequent women’s rights conventions, the participants articulated a wide range of grievances that extended beyond politics into social and family life. Almost all the leading activists in the early women’s movement, including Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were trained in “the school of antislavery,” where they learned to withstand public or familial disapproval and acquired practical skills like petitioning and public speaking. The women’s rights activists’ efforts were complicated by questions about which goals to pursue first and by overlap with other reform efforts, including temperance and moral reform as well as abolition and black rights.

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Answer 2

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• Parallel to the revolts of poor, unemployed and starving peasants and workers in many European countries in the year 1848, a revolution led by the educated middle classes was underway.

• Events of February 1848 in France had brought about the abdication of the monarch and a republic based on universal male suffrage had been proclaimed.

• In other parts of Europe where independent nation states did not exist–such as Germany, Italy, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire–men and woman of the liberal middle classes combined their demands for constitutionalism with national unification.

• The issue of extending political rights to woman was a controversial one within the liberal movement, in which large number of woman had participated actively over the years.

• Woman had formed their own political associations, founded newspapers and taken part in political meetings and demonstrations.

• Despite this, they were denied suffrage rights during the elections of the Assembly.

• When the Frankfurt Parliament was held in Church of St. Paul's, woman were admitted only as observers to stand in visitor's gallery.