Suffrage
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer were all instrumental in shifting the status of women in American society. Their writings reveal the personalities, assumptions, and values of the authors. Each of these women took incredible personal risks by challenging the underlying assumptions in the society that women were not valid, valuable members of society. The place of women in American society prior to suffrage was no better than domestic servitude. Anthony forever aligns herself with the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., by using the technique civil disobedience to achieve social justice. Each of these women recognized the connection between slavery of African-Americans and slavery of women. They each fought for abolition as well as suffrage, and therefore understood that women's rights were human rights.
When Anthony, Stanton, and Bloomer fought for equality, they did so in a time when more than fifty percent of the population was denied civil rights. They each saw clearly the problem with not upholding the values of the Constitution, as each of these activists draw from American history to prove their point. Anthony, for example, spoke on behalf of freedom and liberty when she stated, "I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny," ("On Women's Right to Vote," 1872). Bloomer (1895) expressed similar sentiments. As with Anthony, Bloomer stated that it is impossible...
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