women rights in civics
Answers
During America’s early history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male citizens.
For example, married women couldn’t own property and had no legal claim to any money they might earn, and no female had the right to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and motherhood, not politics.
The campaign for women’s suffrage was a small but growing movement in the decades before the Civil War. Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated across the U.S.—temperance leagues, the abolitionist movement, religious groups—and in a number of these, women played a prominent role.
Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the ideal woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.