Movements to stop the slave trade and Women's rights movements
Enlightenment thinking behind freedom of slaves
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Freedom without equality
• Abolition brought legal freedom but not political freedom to slaves.
• Property requirements, poll taxes, and literacy tests were some of the ways that prevented former slaves from voting.
• White creole elites owned most of the property in the Americas and kept blacks in check by forcing them to accept low paying jobs.
• Some African Americans owned small plots of land but they could not challenge the elites.
• Abolition brought legal freedom but not political freedom to slaves.
• Property requirements, poll taxes, and literacy tests were some of the ways that prevented former slaves from voting.
• White creole elites owned most of the property in the Americas and kept blacks in check by forcing them to accept low paying jobs.
• Some African Americans owned small plots of land but they could not challenge the elites.
Women's rights
• Women's participation alongside men to abolish slavery inspired feminist social reforms to seek equality with men. • The pointed out that women suffered many of the same legal disabilities as slaves. • They drew on enlightenment thought in making a case for women's rights. • In spite of support they had little success before the twentieth century • Rousseau advised that girls education should prepare them to become devote wives and mothers. • Social reformers found enlightenment thought extremely useful in arguing for women's rights. • Astell asked if all men were born free, why all women were born slaves. • Most prominent women's right advocate was Mary Wollstonecraft. • She had little schooling but read books and gained an informal self education. • She published an influential essay entitled A Vindication of the rights of Women • Wollstonecraft argued that women possessed all the rights that Locke had granted to men. • She insisted on the right of women education. • Women played crucial roles in the revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. • Some women supported the efforts of men by sewing uniforms, rolling bandages and managing shops. • 6000 Parisian women marched to Versailles to protest the high price of bread. • Revolutionary women had little prospect of holding official positions or playing a formal role in public affairs. • Under the National Assembly and the convention, the French Revolution brought more rights for women. • The republican government provided free public education to boys and girls. • They granted wives a share of family property and legalizing divorce and legalized divorce • The revolution did not bring women the right to vote or play major roles in public affairs. • United States and the independent states of Latin America revolution brought legal equality and political rights only for adult white men, who retained patriarchal authority over their wives and families. |
Women's rights movements
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a prominent figure in women rights reform • She went to London to attend a antislavery conference but ground that the organization barred women from participation. • Infuriated she returned to the US and began to build a movement for women's rights, • She organized a conference of feminists who met in Seneca Falls New York • The conference passed twelve resolutions demanding that lawmakers grant women rights equivalent to those enjoyed by men. • The resolution called for women's right to vote, attend public schools, enter professional occupations, and participate in public affairs. • More women received formal education than before the American and French revolutions. • Rarely did they enter professions and they did not vote. • Social reforms laid a foundation that would change in the twentieth century. |
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