Women were always looking for more, and they were confident in themselves and hunted to demonstrate that they could achieve more and be equal. People like Anne Hutchinson were excommunicated for questioning how males governed the church. During the nineteenth century, women sought increased rights, beginning with single protests and progressing to more coordinated protests.
Throughout the United States during the nineteenth century, enormous developments occurred that impacted the lives of all women of various social statuses. Many white women began working in mills around the beginning of the 1820s. These women were employed outside their homes with men of all socioeconomic classes.
However, middle-class women were still expected to be homemakers and tend to the home, be obedient, and attend to their husband’s demands at home. Because women were increasingly occupied away from the household, doing jobs that men did, they were able to begin acting politically. These women were known as “mill girls.”
They worked long hours in hazardous settings. Women began organizing rallies in the 1830s to demand better working conditions and higher wages. Since those ladies, middle-class women felt a sense of belonging to a well-organized unit, which would eventually enable them to act together to seek equal rights. Because these women were concerned about the well-being of the impoverished, they felt that their work provided them with a voice and social influence.
Females who worked in the abolitionist movement laid the way and played a significant part at the beginning of organized women’s rights movements. Initially, the women functioned with African women who had escaped slavery and sought to better themselves by learning to read and write.
White women such as Lydia Maria Child and Sarah Grimke pushed for abolition, which taught them that they had very little voice, and the sexism they discovered confirmed this. The World Antislavery Convention in London refused to allow women to sit as delegates in 1840. This prompted the United States to initiate a women’s rights campaign, and it drew 300 people who supported the Declaration of Sentiments.
The Constitution said that men and women were created equally and that women would be socially and legally equal to men, including the ability to vote. Before these occurrences, women could not perform the same things as men since it was socially unacceptable.
Even daily life was difficult; it required simply physical power, such as cutting wood for the winter by hand. Citizens began to treat each other with respect, rather than how women were usually treated and looked down upon. Women were becoming more educated, and they wanted to show themselves by working as hard as males.