Women's Studies: History of Women's Rights

With its controversial decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court declared that women had the right to have an abortion, which it later interpreted to prohibit laws that unduly burdened a woman’s ability to choose an abortion until the third trimester of pregnancy.

The Supreme Court ruled that a fetus is not a “person” under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy before the fetus acquires viability. The justices based the decision on the penumbras of the Bill of Rights and on the substantive liberty interests protected by the Due Process Clause.

For about a decade prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade, abortion laws had been changing in the United States. Whereas prior to that time the only legal abortions were to save the life of the mother, states were beginning to consider other reasons. During the 1960s, twelve states had loosened regulations on abortions, with four others putting virtually no restrictions on early term abortions in 1970.

The Declaration of Sentiments was written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was presented to the participants at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848. Modeling her work on the Declaration of Independence, the author sought to address the wrongs perpetrated against womankind and called for redress of those wrongs. The Seneca Falls meeting was the first convention specifically devoted to the issue of women’s rights.

In all her writings and speeches, Susan B. Anthony displayed her single-minded devotion to the cause of women’s rights, and particularly the right to vote. Over the years she honed her arguments until the success of the cause of suffrage and women’s rights became inevitable. This major shift in public opinion was the result in large part of Anthony’s carefully crafted arguments.

Addams’s essay on women’s suffrage, “Why Women Should Vote,” published as an editorial in the Ladies’ Home Journal in January 1910, inscribes itself in the intense debate on the topic that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in America.

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In this final program, Dr. Amanda Foreman looks at the role of women in revolutions that transformed the modern world. She discovers, through women like campaigner and writer Olympe De Gouges, that the French Revolution's promise of equality would be limited to men In the end, revolutionary change for women would come from within the private sphere - in America, with activists like Margaret Sanger, who developed the pill which would finally give women control over when to have children.

Over 2000 articles from reference materials about Gender Equality.

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