Women’s antislavery efforts served as a springboard for women to take action against gender inequality and advocate for their own rights.

Some northern women reformers saw new and vital roles for people of their gender in the realm of education.

• Catherine Beecher pushed for women’s roles as educators.

  • Published her book titled, “The Duty of American Women to Their Country” in 1845, in which she argued that the United States had lost its moral compass due to democratic excess. 

  • She argued that women were responsible for restoring the moral center by instilling in children a sense of right and wrong.

In 1848, about 300 male and female feminists, many of them veterans of the abolition campaign, gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York for a conference on women’s rights.

• Organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

• First of what became annual meetings that have continued to the present day.

• Agreed to a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, based on the Declaration of Independence, which declared:

  • “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  • “The history of mankind,” the document continued, “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

Sojourner Truth was a former enslaved woman who devoted much of her life to championing the causes of abolition and women’s rights.

• Born into slavery with the name Isabella Baumfree and gained her freedom in 1826.

• Became the first Black woman to win a lawsuit against a White person when she sued to gain the freedom of her son.

• She was supported by leaders such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

• Challenged the notions about Black people’s priority within the women’s rights movement.

• Delivered a speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio; it was titled “Ain’t I a Woman.”

  • Published in an 1863 edition of the Anti-Slavery Standard by Frances Dana Gage, an abolitionist and feminist.

Republican Motherhood: Meant that women, more than men, were responsible for raising good children, instilling in them all the virtue necessary to ensure the survival of the republic.