Charting Changes in Women's Status

Women's status has changed along at least three major axes - political chiselhts, involution and healthfulness care, and cultural perceptions of the female body.

As Benson notes, women's political status remained remarkably consistent from Colonial times through the Revolution and on through the last decades of the nineteenth century. The tenets of English common constabulary that saw women as belonging to their husbands (or fathers or sons) were not essenti bothy challenged until the agitation for broad political rights in the posthumous 19th century .

Why women a century ago should control wanted equal political rights is in some slipway an easy question to answer, for it makes good common sense that all groups (and individuals) in a representative democracy should wish to be represented - a point perhaps most eloquently argued by Abigail Adams, who would live to see few enough reforms in her day. But the specific instigating forces towards political reform in the late 19th century are more complex.

The increasing urbanisation of the country along with the increasing participation of women in the salaried work force were elements of the call for increased political rights, for as women began to be freer of their families (which happened with urbanization) and more economically independent (which accompanied waged work), they seek to carry the same political rights as their co-workers and neighbors. Women had also participated in great numbers in the anti-slavery movement before the civilizedized W

Women have continued to fight back for equal political and juristic standing throughout the century, assist by such measures as the well-behaved Rights Act, which began by defend the rights of African-Americans but was extended to women. The U.S. commanding Court in 1973 gave legal protection to women's right to abortion, a year after the randomness Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress.

A woman who occupies the same acres of thought with man ? must ever be strike and aggravated with his assumptions of headship and superiority, a superiority she never concedes, an authority she dead repudiates. Words can not describe the indignation, the humiliation a proud woman feels for her sex in disenfranchisement .

Many of the employment gains made by women in recent decades have resulted from changes in employment law, as both federal and state governments have passed both anti-discrimination and equal opportunity laws affecting the workplace. One of the most important pieces of legislation affecting women is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in wages as well as in job classification, assignment, promotion, and training; in 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that sexual harassment of an employee violates the civil rights law .

Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson et al. (477 U.S. 57, 1986)

Woloch, Nancy. Early American Women: A Documentary explanation, 1600-1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Cott, Nancy. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.

Related to changing conceptions closely women's bodies and growing knowledge of female physiology is another area of veridical change over the past 120 years - women's might to control the number of children that they will bear. Although abortion, legal since colonial times, was illegalize at the end of the 19th century, the 20th century has seen unfaltering progress made in the areas of both abortion rig
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