Women's Rights Evolved from Specific Historical Moments

The "political" like "gender" has many stipulative definitions. For the purpose of my argument I suggest attaching efficacy and agency as qualifications for participating in the political arena. Women have been participating, sometimes subtly, in the political realm even before they were acknowledged to have rights, an example of this was during the American Revolution. This happened because specific historical moments can put a cultures notion of the political and gender into question, which allows people to react in different ways and then attach new meanings to the political and gender. Other moments in history where women politically participated occurred during imperialism, and the antebellum period. Thus historical factors allowed rights discourse to evolve, and it changed women's rights in the United States. As a result women began to progressively exert political agency. This political agency was derived from duties that women held in the private sphere, and at particular moments throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, women used their duties in the private sphere to transcend into the public political sphere, and associate themselves with rights.

With respect to the American Revolution, some scholars believe that women were participating in food riots to merely perform their roles as providers of food for their families, and yet other scholars argue that they were using the moment to demonstrate a subtle degree of political efficacy. The best explanation combines both schools of thought, which is exactly what Barbara Clark Smith does when she focuses her argument that feminine political consciousness is derived by a relationship to the community and the market economy. Smith claims that women participated and "brought themselves into the resistance and war out of sources of legitimacy that were their own."¹ This shows that political agency is derived from duties that women held as their own in the private sphere, which is evident since women had the duty to provide food for their family. However, as prices rose dramatically during the American Revolution, women then used the issue of consumption to transcend into the public political sphere and participate in food riots. At this time women were able to combine performing their roles with being politically conscious.

It is difficult to see female participation in food riots as only performing a duty; women clearly felt they had a sense of political legitimacy in riots, as well as legitimacy in other methods of political participation during the American Revolution. Women were not only participating in riots, they were also boycotting consumer goods and joining groups such as the Daughters of Liberty. It is hard to not see these acts of political consciousness, because the war was inherently political and the war affected the majority of the rebelling population. Women's duties were directly affected in the marketplace as they struggled to provide goods for their families, their reaction whether rioting or boycotting was therefore politically derived and shows political consciousness and political agency. The revolutionary years provided the opportune moment for women to be politically conscious and exert political agency through issues that derived from their space, the private sphere. For the most part their participation was unopposed even though they were not acknowledged to have any rights at this time, but as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth century women were acknowledged certain rights. As a result of this, women were able to evolve rights discourse by using other historical moments to demonstrate an even greater degree of political consciousness and political agency, which would eventually evolve in the 1850's as women's rights conventions demanded equal rights.

Prior to the 1850's, rights discourse evolved greatly as the United States carried out imperialistic policies in the early nineteenth century. As a result women were able to participate in the political realm. While we already know that female domestic writings coincided with expansionism as seen in Amy Kaplan's article, it is still important to recognize other ways that women were gaining a political voice during this era, and where they were deriving that political voice from. Robert E. May analyzes women who were active in supporting William Walker and his invasion of Nicaragua and New Mexico. May also analyzes the activities of Anna Ella Carol, and other privileged women who wrote direct political arguments and lobbied in support of filibustering activities. Based on this evidence, and other examples he is able to claim that even though women "played a relatively minor role numerically in filibustering, they nonetheless asserted themselves as planners, propagandists, participants and popularizers-achieving a degree of agency by involvement in the movement."² This agency can also be derived from the private sphere, since we know from Kaplan's article that the nation was considered the home, where men and women were united against the alien. It is because of this cultural logic that the women May studied were able to affix themselves to political causes during this time, since they transcended from the private sphere, and the notion of the home.

Female participation in the expansionist movement shows an evolution in ideas about women's rights from those that were acceptable in the eighteenth century. Women were able to do more in the political realm during this era, because the cultural logic of this time period directly included women in the fight against the alien. This clearly differed from the Revolutionary era, where women were legitimately able to transcend into the political realm because of consumer issues that affected their private sphere. As women immersed themselves in this new domestic verse foreign cultural logic they were able to reap benefits in the form of expanded political participation. Women were now able to openly affiliate themselves with a political party, and their presence was widely welcomed in political parades and political rallies. Additionally some women were able to filibuster and influence their husbands as well as politicians. These were all popular and acceptable ways for women to exert political consciousness and political agency, and it occurred because of the historical moment.

In addition to imperialism, another historical time period that further evolved ideas about women's rights occurred during the antebellum era. The United State's political landscape was changing in the 1850's as sectional conflicts polarized the nation; at this moment many women transcended into the political sphere to not only join the anti-slavery movement, but demand suffrage and other political rights. An explanation for these actions can be rooted in the argument that Nancy Isenberg makes when she claims that religion and politics are intertwined. Under this argument, Isenberg claims that antebellum church and state work together and have "similar ways to legitimate masculine authority in public forums."³ Isenberg's evidence and the way she draws upon the works of Jurgen Habermas helps show how religious discourse was similar to political cultural logic. And since women were allowed to participate in the public sphere of religion, they started to demand rights and join the anti-slavery movement so they could participate in the political sphere to a greater extent. Thus although the cultural logic of the time excluded women from participation in the public sphere, historical circumstances caused private and public spheres of to overlap. The common ground would then allow women to participate in politics and even consider themselves "limited right bearers."

The power of discourse between religion and politics was clearly influential as women advocated passionately for rights in antebellum America. As women began to view natural rights and sacred rights as interchangeable, women were inspired to repeatedly called for equal rights as men which was seen widely throughout the women's rights conventions during the 1850's. They wanted a state that recognized the issues that had been raised during the past half century about women's place in the public and political sphere. These antebellum feminists essentially wanted the government to recognize how ideas about women's rights in the political sphere had evolved from historical moments such as the revolution, to imperialism and now when the nation was about to face a sectional crisis. Their articulate demands for co-equal representation clearly derived from the parallel logic that religion and politics shared during this time. Without this thread, women would not have been able to as articulately transfer the language of rights to permeate from sphere to sphere during this specific historical moment.

It is obvious that women made great advances in evolving ideas of rights discourse from the Revolutionary era through the antebellum era. Women made many demands of the government during the 1850's women's rights movement, which had a broad range of demands. Unfortunately these demands which included to a varying degree, co-equal representation and autonomous control of property and education, were put on hold as the sectional crisis intensified and ultimately resulted in disunion and the eruption of the Civil War.18 Yet even though these issues and demands were postponed for a few years, they would eventually gain momentum and further evolve throughout reconstruction. It is crucial to recognize the evolution of ideas about women's rights throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and now specific historical moments provided women with the chance to claim space in the political realm. Thus by understanding how women used duties in the private sphere to transcend into the public forum during different eras, one can better understand the evolution of women's rights and the discourse that created it.

¹ Barbara Clark Smith, "Food Rioters and the American Revolution," The William and Mary Quarterly; 29.
² Robert E. May, "Reconsidering Antebellum U.S. Women's History: Gender Filibustering, and America's Quest for Empire," American Quarterly; 1159.
³ Nancy Isenberg, "Pillars in the Same Temple and Priests of the Same Worship: Woman's Rights and the Politics of Church and State in Antebellum America," Journal of American History; 99.