A Movement Without a Face: Anonymity and the Push for Women's Rights in 1800s America

Abstract

Despite the plethora of research compiled regarding the beginning of the women's rights movement in America in the mid-1800s, only a small number of historians have looked beyond the convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Although this convention brought the women's movement into the limelight for the first time, strides were being made in the decades prior. This study sheds light on the 20 years prior to the convention and the legal and social advances that had been made in regards to women's rights within marriage and society as a whole. Using newspapers and letters from the time, as well as secondary historical sources, my research details the hard work of lone liberators prior to the movement gaining a face in 1848.