The Women's Suffrage Movement: The First Wave Of The Feminist Movement

Feminism A legal theory in feminism especially in the period of 1840 to 1870 included abolitionism which gave rise to the women’s movement who in their quest for equal rights of women that included the ownership to property and right to vote, the sort out to abolish slavery as well. Abolitionism garnered male supporters for the women’s movement like Frederick Douglass, Henry Blackwell and William Lloyd Garrison. 1
The First Wave of the Feminist Movement.
The Women’s Suffrage Movement
The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States in the period 1848-1920, formed a significant of the “First Wave” of the Feminist Movement. Woman suffrage is defined as the right of women to vote. The Women’s Suffrage Movement is the organized efforts
Freidan documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"
Women were living ungratifying lives as housewives by not pursuing a career. According to Freidan, the main goals of young women included to marry and to settle down in the suburbs. She writes that the birthrate was soaring, and women had no interested in obtaining jobs. This led to women having a feeling of emptiness and unhappiness inside them, and they could not put their fingers on what was causing these emotions. Women only held jobs if they absolutely had to in order for the family to get by. Almost all women faced this problem, according to Freidan, but few were willing to confront
It was founded by a group of people, including Betty Freidan, and Rev. Pauli Murray, the first African-American woman Episcopal priest. Betty Freidan became the organization's first president. The goal of NOW was to bring about equality for all women. They campaigned to gain passage of the ERA amendment at the state level.
NOW works to eliminate discrimination and harassment in the workplace, schools, and the justice system; to secure abortion, birth control and reproductive rights for all women and end all forms of violence against women; eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia.
As president during its first three years, she wrote NOW's founding statement demanding full equality for women in the mainstream of American life. She also led the organization in its decisions in 1967 to support the Equal Rights Amendment, ERA, for women and legalized abortion.
Initially Freidan and other feminists criticized women's role as primary caretaker of the family because they believed that status and success could be achieved only through work outside the home. By the 1980s, she and others had come to believe that women and men desire both the prestige and fulfillment that come from work outside the home and the love and identity gained through marriage and