Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement by Sally G. McMillen

Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women

(Sigerman 12) Margaret Livingston Cady was a formidable woman. Men were to be the breadwinners and political leaders, and women the loving, nurturing wives and mothers who willingly deferred to their husbands' authority. (Sigerman 12) Popular books and magazines and religious and intellectual leaders increasingly assigned separate roles to men and women: the active world of business and politics for men, and the more peaceful and private sphere of the home and family for women. ( Sigerman 12) As the economy changed and grew, people's perceptions of the social and economic roles that men and women should play also changed. Some women, especially young, single women, worked in the factories that made these goods, while other women continued to work at home,sewing for their families as well as for manufacturers who paid them by the piece. In 1898 she published The Woman's Bible, a scholarly but irreverent feminist commentary, for which the National American Woman Suffrage Association censured her.she continued her independent course on behalf of women's emancipation until her death in 1902. Because of Cady Stanton's advocacy of liberalized divorce laws, reproductive self-determination, and greater sexual freedom for women, hers became an increasingly marginalized voice among women reformers in the 1880s. She had always advocated divorce law liberalization, and in 1860 she precipitated a heated debate among women's rights advocates by urging women to leave unhappy marriages. Cady Stanton's interests extended far beyond the vote. In 1847, the Stantons moved to rural Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth bore the last three of their seven children and grew resentful of her domestic confinement. There Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott, the leading American female abolitionist, and began to study the Anglo-American traditions of women's rights.

Despite her father's opposition, they married in 1840 and for their honeymoon went to London to attend the World's Antislavery Convention.

Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement by Sally G. McMillen