Cult Of True Womanhood Essay

In 2020 it will be 100 years since women obtained the right to vote in the United States. Since the women’s suffrage began, women have been fighting for the right to be equal to men. After years and years of being treated as if they were property and not a person, a group of women decided that they weren’t going to take it anymore, they wanted to have a voice in everything a man had a voice in. The women were fighting against what they called a “Cult of True Womanhood” which is defined by History.com as “the idea that the only ‘true’ woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family” (The Fight for Women’s Suffrage, 2009). Let’s go back to where the fight all started in 1848 when reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott invited a group of activist men and women to Seneca Falls, New York to talk about women’s rights. Mostly all of the delegates agreed that “American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, ‘that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with

Another a big issue going around right now, is the one of women being paid less than men for the same job. I have read arguments that this is not true that women just simply pick lower paying jobs like being a teacher. This is a myth, full time women make around .78 cents to the dollar that men make. “President Obama supports passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a comprehensive and commonsense bill that updates and strengthens the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who perform substantially equal work.”(Did You Know That Women Are Still Paid Less Than Men?, n.d.). How are women supposed to be taken seriously and treated with the same respect as a man when they are treated as though their hard work is worth