Colegiul National Elena Cuza Bucuresti

Lucrare pentru obtinerea atestatului de competente lingvistice la limba

engleza

Candidat:
Burdujan Ioana Atnana
Profesor coordonator:
Bianca Popa
Anul: 2015

Contents:
Contentspage
1
Argument......................................page 2
Chapter I: Womens Rights in
.......page 3-4
Chapter II: Womens Rights in
...page 5-7

the

Middle

Ages

the

Modern

Era

Chapter III: Womens Rights in the 20th Century.

..page 8-11
Chapter IV: Womens Rights Today..page 12-13
Conclusion......page 14
Bibliography.. page 15

Argument: Why ``Womens Rights ``?

Women's rights are the rights and entitlements claimed for women and
girls of many societies worldwide. In some places, these rights are
institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behavior, whereas in
others they may be ignored or suppressed. They differ from broader notions
of human rights through claims of an inherent historical and traditional bias
against the exercise of rights by women and girls in favour of men and boys
Through my topic I am going to try and take you on a journey in time
and space presenting the evolution of Womens Rights in the U.S.A. and the
U.K., from the Middle Ages to this day.
I have mainly chosen this topic because I have always found shocking
pieces of information about womens rights ever since the Middle Ages, but
I never had the chance to put them all together, creating a timeline of their
evolution.
Secondly, even though gender equality is openly discussed all over the
world and laws have been passed to help maintaing equality, this has not
always been the case, as women were not even allowed to vote, the last
country in the world to give womens right to vote, besides ? Vatican, being
Saudi Arabia in 2015.
To sum up, I chose this topic because I believe women had to go
through a lot of hard work to have slightly equal rights with men and people
nowadays do not know through what women had to go for the world to be
the way it is today.

Chapter I: Womens Rights in the Middle Ages

Medieval society was very traditional. Women had little or no role to play
within the country at large. Within towns, society would effectively dictate
what jobs a woman could do and her role in a medieval village was to
support her husband. As well as doing her daily work, whether in a town or
village, a woman had many responsibilities with regards to her family.
The United Kingdom
Medieval England was not a comfortable place for most women. Medieval
women invariably had a hard time in an era when most people led a harsh

life. A few women lived comfortable lives but Medieval society was
completely dominated by men and women had to know 'their place' in such a
society.
Within a village, women would also do many of the tasks men did.
However, they were paid less for the same job. Documents from Medieval
England relating to what the common person did are rare, but some do exist
which examine what villages did. For reaping, a man could get 8 pence a
day. For the same task, women would get 5 pence. For hay making, men
would earn 6 pence a day while women got 4 pence. In a male dominated
society, no woman would openly complain about this disparity.
For many women, a life as a servant for the rich was all they could hope
for. Such work was demanding and poorly rewarded.
The law, set by men, also greatly limited the freedom of women. Women
were:
not allowed to marry without their parents' consent
could own no business without special permission
not allowed to divorce their husbands
could not own property of any kind unless they were widows
could not inherit land from their parents' if they had any
surviving brothers
Girls from richer families tended to marry earlier than girls from poor
families. Poor families needed as many working hands as possible, so a
daughter getting married at an early age would have deprived them of a
worker. This was not true for a rich family. Girls had no choice over who
they married and many girls from rich families were usually married to
someone for political reasons or because it was an advantage to the girl's
family themselves - as opposed to what the girl wanted. Once married, the
young lady came under the control of her husband.

Chapter II: Womens Rights in the Modern Era

The United Kingdom
During the whole of the nineteenth century, women had no political rights
though there had been some movement in other areas to advance the rights
of women.
In 1839, a law was passed which stated that if a marriage broke down
and the parents separated, children under seven years of age should
stay with their mother.
In 1857, women could divorce husbands who were cruel to them or
husbands who had left them.
In 1870, women were allowed to keep money they had earned.
In 1891, women could not be forced to live with husbands unless they
wished to.
These were very important laws which advanced the rights of women.
However, they were good laws on paper. If a woman left her husband for
whatever reason, it would have been very difficult for her to provide for
herself and her children simply because the attitude of Victorian Britain was
that women should stay at home and look after their families. The culture of
the time meant that very few women were skilled in any profession and,
anyway, there were few jobs that paid women well during the nineteenth
century.
This view was supported by Queen Victoria herself - she hardly did anything
during her long rule to advance the cause of women. In 1870, Queen

Victoria wrote on this issue: "let women be what God intended, a helpmate
for man, but with totally different duties and vocations."
As an example of the difficulties women faced, one lady called Elizabeth
Garrett Anderson against all odds qualified as a doctor. However, she got
very few people on her books in London as men would not be treated by a
woman and women tended to remain with their male GP's as that was the
custom. It took a long time before Anderson got a decent reputation among
Londoners - and she faced much hostility along the way.

The United States of America

At the outset of the 19th century, women could not vote or hold office in
any state, they had no access to higher education, and they were excluded
from professional occupations. American law accepted the principle that a
wife had no legal identity apart from her husband. She could not be sued,
nor could she bring a legal suit; she could not make a contract, nor could she
own property. She was not permitted to control her own wages or gain
custody of her children in case of separation or divorce.
Broad social and economic changes, such as the development of a market
economy and a decline in the birthrate, opened employment opportunities
for women. Instead of bearing children at two-year intervals after marriage,
as was the general case throughout the colonial era, during the early 19th
century women bore fewer children and ceased childbearing at younger
ages. During these decades the first womens college was established,
Georgia Female College, and some mens colleges first opened their doors to
women students. More women were postponing marriage or not marrying at
all; unmarried women gained new employment opportunities as mill girls
and elementary school teachers; Mill girls were factory workers employed
mainly in the textile corporations. At the same time a growing number of
women achieved prominence as novelists, editors, teachers, and leaders of
church and philanthropic societies.
Although there were many improvements in the status of women during the
first half of the century, women still lacked political and economic status
when compared with men. As the franchise was extended to larger and larger

numbers of white males, including large groups of recent immigrants, the

gap in political power between women and men widened. Even though
women made up a core of supporters for many reform movements, men
excluded them from positions of decision making and relegated them to
separate female auxiliaries. Additionally, women lost economic status as
production shifted away from the household to the factory and workshop.
During the late 18th century, the need for a cash income led women and
older children to engage in a variety of household industries, such as
weaving and spinning. Increasingly, in the 19th century, these tasks were
performed in factories and mills, where the workforce was largely male.
The fact that changes in the economy tended to confine women to a sphere
separate from men had important implications for reform. Since women
were believed to be uncontaminated by the competitive struggle for wealth
and power, many argued that they had a duty--and the capacity--to exert an
uplifting moral influence on American society. Catharine Beecher (1800
1878) and Sarah J. Hale (17881879) helped lead the effort to expand
womens roles through moral influence. Beecher, the eldest sister of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, was one of the nations most prominent educators before the
Civil War. A woman of many talents and strong leadership, she wrote a
highly regarded book on domestic science and spearheaded the campaign to
convince school boards that women were suited to serve as schoolteachers.
Hale edited the nations most popular womens magazines, the Ladies
Magazine and Godeys Ladies Book. She led the successful campaign to
make Thanksgiving a national holiday (during Lincolns administration), and
she also composed the famous nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Both Beecher and Hale worked tirelessly for womens education (Hale
helped found Vassar College). They gave voice to the grievances of women-abysmally low wages paid to women in the needle trades (12.5 cents a day),
the physical hardships endured by female operatives in the nations shops
and mills (where women worked 14 hours a day), and the minimizing of
womens intellectual aspirations. Even though neither woman supported full
equal rights for women, they were important transitional figures in the
emergence of feminism. Each significantly broadened societys definition of
womens sphere and assigned women vital social responsibilities: to shape
their childrens character, morally to uplift their husbands, and to promote
causes of practical benevolence.

Other women broke down old barriers and forged new opportunities in a
more dramatic fashion. Frances Wright (17951852), a Scottish-born
reformer and lecturer, received the nickname The Great Red Harlot of
Infidelity because of her radical ideas about birth control, liberalized
divorce laws, and legal rights for married women. In 1849 Elizabeth
Blackwell (18211910) became the first American woman to receive a
degree in medicine. A number of women became active as revivalists.
Perhaps the most notable was Phoebe Palmer (18071874), a Methodist
preacher who ignited religious fervor among thousands of Americans and
Canadians.

Chapter III: Womens Rights in the 20th

A table of employment gives an example of where women worked in 1900 :
Type
of
Number of women employed
employment
Domestic Servants 1,740,800
Teachers
124,000
Nurses
68,000
Doctors
212
Architects
2
The twentieth century will, without doubt, be viewed by historians as the
Woman's Hour. A girl born in 1899 had little chance of evading the role that
was considered her destiny - to marry young, stay home and raise a family.
Her forbearers in the late nineteenth century had struggled hard to improve
her chances of an education. Campaigners like Millicent Fawcett and
Elizabeth Garret Anderson had carried out a personal and largely peaceful
struggle to open professions like medicine to women. Yet still, only the
privileged few, whose fathers or husbands were enlightened enough to
permit it, got a foot on the ladder of opportunity. In the early part of the
century the suffragists argued powerfully, but peacefully for the vote. They
were unsuccessful in their immediate objective, although they still exist in

the form of one of the country's main research and lobbying groups working
on behalf of women, the Fawcett Society.

The United Kingdom

In the later years of the nineteenth century, women wanted one very basic
right - the right to vote. This was strictly known as the right of suffrage and
the group that fought most for this right became known as the Suffragettes.
The original movement for women's political rights was a non-violent one
led by Millicent Fawcett. Her movement was called the National Union of
Women's Suffrage Societies. Fawcett believed in the power of change
through persuasion. She argued that those women who had money and
employed men as gardeners, cooks etc., were in the absurd position of not
being able to vote yet those men employed in their employment did! Another
of Fawcett's arguments was that those women that worked paid the same
level of tax as men who were employed, but the men could vote and the
women could not.
However, Fawcett's arguments were not listened to and some men were less
than polite when giving reasons as to why women should not vote :
"Political power in many large cities would chiefly be in the hands of
young, ill-educated, giddy, and often ill-conducted (badly behaved) girls."
Frederick Rylands (1896)
Such a reaction led to some women taking a more hard-line attitude and in
1903, the Women's Social and Political Union was created by Emmeline
Pankhurst. They became known, as mentioned above, as the Suffragettes.
She believed that if men would not listen to reasonable ideas, then women
should use force to push for what they wanted - the right to vote. Their
polices included the burning of churches, attacks on politicians, disrupting
the day-to-day work of Parliament and, if arrested, going on hunger strike.
Their campaign took them into the twentieth century - a century that gave
women over 30 years of age the right to vote in 1918 and allowed them to
stand for Parliament as MP's in the same year. In 1928, women were given
the same political rights as men.

The United States of America

Lydia Taft was an early forerunner in Colonial America who was allowed to
vote in three New England town meetings, at Uxbridge, Massachusetts, in
1756. Following the American Revolution, women were allowed to vote
in New Jersey, but no other state, from 1790 until 1807, provided they met
property requirements then in place. In 1807 all women were taken off the
voters' roll as universally male suffrage was instated. The women's suffrage
movement was closely tied to abolitionism, with many suffrage activists
gaining their first experience as anti-slavery activists.
In June 1848, Gerrit Smith made women's suffrage a plank in the Liberty
Party platform. In July, at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York,
activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began a
seventy-year struggle by women to secure the right to vote. Attendees signed
a document known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, of which
Stanton was the primary author. Equal rights became the rallying cry of the
early movement for women's rights, and equal rights meant claiming access
to all the prevailing definitions of freedom. In 1850 Lucy Stone organized a
larger assembly with a wider focus, the National Women's Rights
Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. Susan B. Anthony, a resident
of Rochester, New York, joined the cause in 1852 after reading Stone's
1850 speech. Stanton, Stone and Anthony were the three leading figures of
this movement in the U.S. during the 19th century: the "triumvirate" of the
drive to gain voting rights for women. Women's suffrage activists pointed
out that black people had been granted the franchise and had not been
included in the language of the United States Constitution's Fourteenth and
Fifteenth amendments (which gave people equal protection under the law
and the right to vote regardless of their race, respectively). This, they
contended, had been unjust. Early victories were won in the territories
of Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870).
John Allen Campbell, the first Governor of the Wyoming Territory, approved
the first law in United States history explicitly granting women the right to

vote. The law was approved on December 10, 1869. This day was later
commemorated as Wyoming Day.
Utah women were disenfranchised by provisions of the federal Edmunds
Tucker Act enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1887.
"Kaiser Wilson" banner held by a woman who picketed the White House
The push to grant Utah women's suffrage was at least partially fueled by the
belief that, given the right to vote, Utah women would dispose of polygamy.
It was only after Utah women exercised their suffrage rights in favour of
polygamy that the U.S. Congress disenfranchised Utah women.
By the end of the 19th century, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming had enfranchised
women after effort by the suffrage associations at the state
level; Colorado notably enfranchised women by an 1893 referendum.
During the beginning of the 20th century, as women's suffrage faced several
important federal votes, a portion of the suffrage movement known as
the National Woman's Party led by suffragist Alice Paul became the first
"cause" to picket outside the White House. Paul and Lucy Burns led a series
of protests against the Wilson Administration in Washington. Wilson ignored
the protests for six months, but on June 20, 1917, as a Russian delegation
drove up to the White House, suffragists unfurled a banner which stated:
"We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy.
Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the
chief opponent of their national enfranchisement".
Another banner on August 14, 1917, referred to "Kaiser Wilson" and
compared the plight of the German people with that of American women.
With this manner of protest, the women were subject to arrests and many
were jailed. On October 17, Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months and
on October 30 began a hunger strike, but after a few days prison authorities
began to force feed her. After years of opposition, Wilson changed his
position in 1918 to advocate women's suffrage as a war measure.
The key vote came on June 4, 1919,[ when the Senate approved the
amendment by 56 to 25 after four hours of debate, during which Democratic
Senators opposed delaying and obstructing the amendment. The Ayes
included 36 (82%) Republicans and 20 (54%) Democrats. The Nays
comprised 8 (18%) Republicans and 17 (46%) Democrats.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited state or federal sex-based
restrictions on voting, was ratified by sufficient states in 1920.

Chapter IV: Womens Rights Today

The United States of America
The role of women in the United States has changed dramatically over the
past few decades. For one, more and more women have taken on new
responsibilities outside the home by joining the paid workforce. While
women made up only about one-third of the workforce in 1969, women
today make up almost half of all workers in the United States. Women are
also stepping up to lead the country; a record number of women ran for
public office in 2012, and a record-high percentage of women are serving in
Congress. In addition to making progress on issues of economics and
leadership, women have made progress on health issues, which impact
womens personal well-being, as well as their economic security. Over the
past few years, women have been able to end gender discrimination by big
insurance companies and gain free contraception coverage because of the
Affordable Care Act.
Despite womens advancements, however, substantial inequalities remain.
Although an increasing number of women are either the sole breadwinner
for their family or share the role with their partners, women in the United
States are paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. The pay gap is
even larger for women of color. On average, African American women make
64 cents for every dollar that white men make. While 2012 was a watershed
year for women in terms of getting elected to public office, women still
comprise only 18.1 percent of Congress, despite making up more than half

of the U.S. population. They also face challenges on health issues, as 2012
saw continued conservative efforts to erode womens ability to make their
own decisions about their health and well-being.
A deeper examination shows that disparities for women also exist among
states. Women in Vermont, for example, make on average close to 85 cents
for every dollar a man makes, while women in Wyoming make only 64 cents
more than 25 percent less than women in Vermont. On leadership, 15
states have no female elected leaders in the House of Representatives or the
Senate. Lastly, while less than 10 percent of women in Vermont, Wisconsin,
Hawaii, and Massachusetts are uninsured, nearly 25 percent of women in
Texas do not have health insurance.

CONCLUSIONS
There have been huge changes for women in terms of employment in the
past decades, with women moving into paid employment outside the home
in ways that their grandmothers and even their mothers could only dream of.
In the US, for the first time, in 2011, women made up slightly more than half
the workforce. There are (some) high-profile women chief executives. There
is a small but increasing number of female presidents. Women are moving
into jobs that used to be done by men.
However, despite great strides made by the international womens rights
movement over many years, women and girls around the world are still
married as children or trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery. They are
refused access to education and political participation, and some are trapped
in conflicts where rape is perpetrated as a weapon of war. Around the world,
deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth are needlessly high, and women
are prevented from making deeply personal choices in their private lives.
I think society still does not look upon women as being totally equal with
men as eventhough women nowadays women work they are often still worse
paid than men, in part-time jobs or in the huge informal employment sector
with little protection and few rights, and we still have to go down a long
road in order to be legally equal with men.

BIBLIOGRAFIE
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval_women.htm
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3539
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/womensrights.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage#United_States
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/report/2013/09/25/74836/t
he-state-of-women-in-america/