Womans Suffrage Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Womans Suffrage - Essay ExampleIn America both groups originated in the ideals of American country and Protestant individualism. But these ideals when applied to women were everywhere met with contradictory economic and social institutions which subjected women to traditional male dominance or questioned their capacity for independence and initiative. With the flood of post-civil war suffragist rhetoric came an equally full and passionate phone call from the anti-suffragists, or antis as the suffragists called them. Threatened by the suffragists new conception of modern government(Oates 1991) Religion deeply helped to legitimize womans quest for equality. Of the five women who planned the Seneca Falls convention in the summertime of 1848, four were Quakers. Historian Margaret Bacon has asked why the tiny Religious Society of Friends contributed such a disproportionate digit of leaders to the feminist cause. It turns out that Quakerism was a veritable seedbed for the new feminism. As early as the ordinal and eighteenth centuries, Quaker women had served as traveling ministers, on occasion leaving behind husbands and children, so powerfully did they feel called to the Lords work. Well before the Revolution the American Friends had also established a tradition of separate womens business meetings of the monthly meeting. In addition, Quaker women who felt moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in meetings were expected to do so.