Women's rights in early America
In the newly formed United States, women's rights were determined largely on whether or not they were married. An unmarried woman could live where she wanted and hold any occupation, that was allowed to her sex. She could also buy and sell real estate, sue and be sued, accumulate personal property, act as a guardian, and write wills. Colonial laws also changed the old English law of primogeniture, or the custom of a parent's estate passing automatically to the eldest son. Estates could now be divided equally among siblings which gave daughters another level of independence. While unmarried women found they had more rights under the new Democracy, once married a woman was once again no more than property. Once married, women were completely dependent on their husbands under the law of coverture. Coverture was based on the idea that the husband was the head of the household and that the family functioned best if he controlled all of the assets. Under coverture, all assets a woman brought into the household, including wages and previously owned property, became the property of her husband, he could use it as he chose without consulting her. The English jurist William Blackstone summarized this relationship in his Commentaries on English Law by stating " By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything" (Salmon). Under these laws women, even unmarried women who were allowed some rights, were classified as second-class citizens. Even the rights afforded them were given, as if to a whining child, by men who saw them as weak, simple-minded, and frivolous.
The first activists meet:
The laws regarding women in post-Revolution America were better than they had been under English law, but, because women had no political representation, they had no way to affect the changes needed for equality. Simply because they couldn't vote, however, does not mean that women weren't involved in the nations politics. In fact, the suffrage movement's history can be traced back to a different political issue that women were fighting for alongside men. This movement was the abolition movement, it was through this movement that the first suffragists met and formed the groundwork for their battle. In 1840, delegates from around the world convened in London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Among the delegates from the United States was a young Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her new husband, Henry. Stanton was one of eleven children, and had seen all of her five brothers die before reaching adulthood. She recalled that her father often expressed the desire that she had been a boy and she promised, "I will try to be all the boy my brother was" (Clift, 2003, p. 9). Stanton spent her life living up to that promise, she rebelled against society's rules for her gender and when married, convinced her husband to omit the wife's obedience vow from the ceremony. For these reasons Stanton was livid when she was told that the female delegates would be seated behind a curtain at the convention, where they could hear what was going on but would not be seen. Her contempt for the treatment of the women at the convention led her to find an ally in Lucretia Mott, a Quaker activist from Philadelphia. The two immediately bonded over their mutual anger towards the male delegates and agreed to organize a women's rights convention when they returned to America (Clift, 2003).