When
Lucy Stone, founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, was born in
1818, her mother is quoted as saying, “Oh
dear! I am sorry it is a girl. A woman’s life is so hard!” Her
mother, as a farmer’s wife, baked and cooked over a wood stove for her family
and washed, scrubbed and drew water from an outside well and
heated it on the stove. She also made cheese and soap, plucked chickens,
dipped candles, wove and dyed cloth, made the clothes, milked the cows, and
cared for her children. Lucy became
a teacher when she was 16, earning her board and one dollar a week. It took her
nine years to save the $75 needed to enter Oberlin College in Ohio, the only
college in the country that offered a degree for females.
Poor
women working in the cotton and woolen mills in 1846, worked 12 to 16 hours
daily. Many lived six to a room and
two to a bed in company boarding houses and were paid $2 a week.
Women
were not permitted to give evidence in court, nor, did they have the right to
speak in public before an audience.
When
a woman married, her husband legally owned all she had (including her earnings,
her clothes and jewelry, and her children). If he died, she was entitled to only
a third of her husband’s estate.
“Out
of indignation at the condition of women, the suffrage movement was born. For 70
years it played a leading part in a great struggle to raise womankind to an
equality with men.” (Women’s Rights by Olivia Coolidge.)