Elizabeth cady stanton secondary sources

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Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas

Overview

Studying history teaches us, in many ways, how to think: about the past, about the world around us, and about how that world might look in the future.

Writing history, on the other hand, teaches us how to communicate: how to organize our thoughts, distill our research findings into a clear thesis statement, and tailor our message to the needs of our chosen audience.

In Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, we'll explore how historians go about the business of writing history. To illustrate this process, we'll examine case studies involving the women's movement and the centuries­long fight to expand the rights of American women.

Because all good historical writing begins with good research, we'll look at how to assess primary and secondary sources—which ones are appropriate for an academic research paper, and which ones aren't— and how best to search for them in Shapiro Library and primary resource depositories.

We'll also look at how historians turn their research into a coherent written work. The process begins with a research question; based upon research, a historian will then come up with an answer to that question, which forms the basis of his or her thesis statement. Finally, the historian considers the audience that he or she will be writing for—is it other historians, or local businesspeople, or maybe high school students?—and tailors the thesis statement into a message that's appropriate for that audience.

At the end of Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, you'll have an opportunity to begin putting these concepts to use. You will be required to submit a writing plan that details the topic of your own historical event analysis; the primary and secondary sources you plan to use; the audience for your analysis; and how you plan to tailor your message to that audience.

While the writing plan represents an important element of your final course grade, in the long run it's even more important than that. In the "real world" outside the classroom, good writing is a valuable but all too rare commodity. Whether you pursue a career in business or science or medicine or the arts, you're going to need to organize your thoughts and communicate your ideas clearly, concisely, and forcefully. Writing history is a good way to learn how to do just that.

Course Outcomes

After completing this theme, you should be able to:

Select appropriate and relevant primary and secondary sources in investigating foundational historic events Communicate effectively to specific audiences in examining fundamental aspects of human history

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A monument to three pioneers of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott—in the U.S. Capitol. (Click icon for citation)

Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas | Learning Block 3-1: The Long Road to Women's Rights

The Constitution, as originally written and ratified, had nothing to say about women's rights—indeed, it had nothing to say about women at all.

The Constitution's original language was strictly gender­neutral, referring repeatedly to "persons" or "citizens," rather than to "men" or "women." Gender distinctions did not enter the Constitution until 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which addressed the voting rights of all "male...citizens."

In this theme, we will look at two crucial events in the long campaign to expand the rights of American women. The woman suffrage movement, which fought to extend the right to vote to all American women, ended successfully in 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed women all the same legal rights as men, ended in defeat in 1982, when the amendment fell three states shy of the 38 needed for ratification.

We will use these two case studies to examine the historical concept of causality and to learn more about evaluating and searching for primary and secondary sources. Evaluating sources is important, because it helps you make sure that whatever research you use in your academic research paper is appropriate.

Learning Objectives

In this learning block, you will:

Be introduced to the core concept of this theme: The Long Road to Women's Rights Explore the historical concept of causality

The Long Road to Women's Rights

The Constitution the Founders crafted was a product of British common law and 18th­century thinking, neither of which was particularly friendly to women. At the time of the Constitution's ratification, for instance, a woman's rights depended almost entirely on her marital status: in most states, unmarried women, including widows, could own property, enter into contracts, and live where they pleased. But the rights of married women were totally subordinated to the rights of their husbands. (Salmon, 2016)

Moreover, by establishing a system of federalism, the Constitution left most questions of day­to­day rights—the right to vote, to marry, to inherit property—to the states, whose policies were highly restrictive toward women. At the time of ratification, New Jersey was the only state that allowed women to vote—and it rescinded that right in 1807.

The long campaign to expand the rights of American women has gone on for almost two centuries, and it has seen both victories and defeats. In Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, we will focus on two major goals of the women's rights movement. The Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, was ratified, after decades of effort, in 1920. But the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have ensured women "equality of rights under the law," was defeated after a contentious national debate that came to a close in 1982.

The women's rights movement began in earnest in July 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, a two­ day gathering in upstate New York that drew 300 participants "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman." Its principal organizers, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had met eight years earlier at the World's Anti­Slavery Convention in London—at which the women delegates, including Mott, were barred from speaking and were required to sit in a segregated area. (Wellman, 2004)

The following chart summarizes some of the major historical factors that led to the birth of the women's movement at the Seneca Falls Convention:

Members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, before a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. (Click icon for citation)

The Seneca Falls Convention was the product of a wide range of historical factors:

The rise of the abolition movement, many of whose leaders strongly encouraged the participation of women; The religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which inspired many women to become active in social causes; The influence of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, some of whose more progressive branches advocated an expanded role for women in religious affairs; and The political movement in support of Married Women's Property Acts, state laws that accorded married women some limited economic rights. (Wellman, 2004; Library of Congress, 2013)

The Seneca Falls Convention produced the famous "Declaration of Sentiments," based on the Declaration of Independence, which included the simple but radical assertion: "We hold these truths to be self­evident: that all men and women are created equal." The Declaration was followed by a series of 13 Resolutions calling for legal and social equality for women, including the assertion that "it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." (This link will take you to the full text of the Declaration of Sentiments.)

In its early years, the women's movement focused on economic and social issues, including the lack of educational opportunities for girls and women. The advent of the Civil War brought an almost exclusive focus on the abolition of slavery, but while the end of the war meant an end to slavery, it also created profound disappointment for many women's­rights advocates. The failure of Congress to include women in the guarantees of legal and voting rights, which were extended to freed slaves in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, caused a schism in the women's movement.

While leaders of the movement agreed on the goal of woman suffrage—securing for women the right to vote—they disagreed strongly over the best way to achieve that goal. In 1869, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which focused on changing federal law; the NWSA opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it excluded women. That same year, Lucy Stone, a prominent lobbyist for women's rights, helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and focused its efforts at the state level. (U.S. House of Representatives, 2016)

While these two groups would eventually unite, more than 50 years would pass before woman suffrage would be enshrined in the Constitution by the Nineteenth Amendment. And, with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the larger goal envisioned by those who attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848—full legal equality for all American women—has yet to be realized.

References

Library of Congress, American Women. (2013, February 13). Married Women's Property Laws. Retrieved from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/property_law.html

Salmon, M. (2016). The Legal Status of Women, 1776­1830. Retrieved from http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history­ by­era/womens­history/essays/legal­status­women­1776%E2%80%931830, May 16, 2016.

U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives; Office of the Historian, Women in Congress, 1917 ­ 2006. (2016). The Women's Rights Movement, 1848 ­ 1920. Retrieved from http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions­and­Publications/WIC/Historical­Essays/No­Lady/Womens­Rights/, April 27, 2016.

Wellman, J. (2004). The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women's Rights Convention. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Historical Causality

One purpose of history is to explain the past—and the concept of causality is fundamental to that effort. (Munro, 2016)

Searching for the causes of a historical event means, essentially, looking for an explanation of why the event occurred. But that search is rarely as simple as many people think.

Indeed, one of the most important things to remember about historical causality is that historical events usually have many causes. The process of sorting out all those causes and figuring out which ones were more important than others is rarely easy.

Back in grammar school, you may have been asked questions like "What caused the Revolutionary War?" or "Why did the South secede from the Union?" Depending on how lenient your teacher was back then, you might have gotten away with simple answers such as "Taxation without representation" or "To protect slavery." But by now, you should realize that those simplistic answers didn't tell the whole story. (Waring, 2010)

Historical events almost always have multiple causes. Consider a quick example: in Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, we are looking at the centuries­long effort to expand the rights of American women. One important part of that effort was the campaign for woman suffrage, which we will look at in more detail in Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas, Learning Block 3­4.

American women won the right to vote when, after more than 70 years of campaigning for suffrage, they saw the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920—but why was this Amendment finally approved? To put it another way, what factors caused the women's suffrage movement to succeed, after so many decades of frustration and failure?

There are a lot of factors that led to the success of the women's suffrage movement: strong leadership of women such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Paul; changing attitudes toward the role of women in society and in the workplace; the role of women in supporting the war effort during World War I and the war's impact on the public's conception of "democracy"; the extension of voting rights to freed African Americans, through the Fifteenth Amendment; political decisions by leaders such as President Woodrow Wilson; and the political momentum from successful local campaigns to win woman suffrage in more than a dozen states before 1920.

All of these causes contributed to the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Which was most important? As with so much else in the study of history, there's no definitive answer to that question; different historians may emphasize different causes, depending on which historical lens each applies and how each interprets the historical evidence. (Brien, 2013) As you evaluate different secondary sources, you will see how these differences in emphasis can lead to different conclusions about the relative importance of historical events.

References

Brien, J. (2013). "The Role of Causation in History" History in the Making Vol. 2, No. 1 72 ­ 81. Retrieved from https://historyitm.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/brien.pdf

Munro, N. (2016). Pathways: Causation in History. Retrieved from http://www.philosophypathways.com/essays/munro2.html, April 27, 2016.

Waring, S. (2010). "Escaping Myopia: Teaching Students about Historical Causality." The History Teacher Volume 43, Number 2 (February, 2010), 283 ­ 288. Retrieved from http://www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/pdfs/Waring.pdf

Types of Causes

In looking for the causes of a historical event, a primary consideration is chronology—that is, the order in which key events took place. (Waring, 2010) For one event to have caused another event, it must have taken place before the second event. But chronology does not tell us the whole story: just because one event happened before another does not necessarily mean that it caused the second event.

In a famous example often cited by logicians, the fact that a rooster crowed before sunrise does not mean that the rooster caused the sun to rise. This is an example of what logicians and historians call the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. (Carroll, 2015)

Historians also distinguish between proximate causes and ultimate causes. A proximate cause is an event that immediately precedes, or is directly responsible for causing, some other event. The proximate cause of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was the vote by the Tennessee House of Representatives to approve the amendment on August 18, 1920.

An ultimate cause (also known as a distal cause) is an event that, when viewed at a higher level, may be considered to be the real reason an event occurred. One of the ultimate causes of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was the shift in American public attitudes toward the role of women in society.

At the most simplistic level, a proximate cause tells us how an event happened; an ultimate cause is more likely to tell us why it happened. It's important to remember that most historical events have multiple proximate and ultimate causes. (Palazzo, 2007)

In considering the relative importance of different causes, historians often divide them into necessary causes and contributory causes. (Waring, 2010) A necessary cause is an event or trend that is essential to causing some other event; without the necessary cause, the second event could not take place. Approval by 36 state legislatures was a necessary cause for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

By contrast, contributory causes are not essential to causing some other event, but they may make that event more likely to occur. President Woodrow Wilson's eventual decision to come out in favor of woman suffrage was a contributory cause for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, but it was not an essential factor in the Amendment's success.

Once again, most historical events have multiple necessary and contributory causes.

References

Carroll, R. (2015, November 18). The Skeptic's Dictionary: post hoc fallacy. Retrieved from http://skepdic.com/posthoc.html

Palazzo, A. (2007, March 30). Transcription and Translation: Proximal vs. Ultimate Causation. Retrieved from http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2007/03/30/proximal­vs­ultimate­causation/

Waring, S. (2010). "Escaping Myopia: Teaching Students about Historical Causality." The History Teacher Volume 43, Number 2 (February, 2010), 283 ­ 288. Retrieved from http://www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/pdfs/Waring.pdf

Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas | Learning Block 3-2: Secondary Sources