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Equality Of Women In The Declaration Of Independence

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Embedded within the nation’s Declaration of Independence, one of the most important documents made in America, there is a claim that says “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Many can attest, however, that this freedom only applied to white property owning men. Throughout America’s rich history, this claim has been proven to be untrue due to events taken place with women, African Americans, and propertyless white men's attempts for equality. The beginning of the fight for women’s rights begins well before the nineteenth century and abruptly evolved into a full movement that lasts long after the Civil War. Society was just coming out of an era that believed in Republican Motherhood, …show more content…

Within multiple years, women went from homebound housewives to opening up and demanding their rights. At the beginning of the progress that was fought by African Americans, there was obviously the long history of slavery. The act of slavery was the biggest contradiction between the ideas of equality written in the Declaration of Independence (Corbett, 2014, p. 192). Americans were seeking equality and freedom after their battles with Britain; however, they were withholding freedom and equality from a large group of people themselves. Though many people today see the issue of slavery as a moral argument, majority of the population in the eighteenth and nineteenth century viewed slavery as a political issue. In fact, slavery was possibly the most influential issue in American politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A fundamental event that aided in the progression of African American freedom was the election of Abraham Lincoln because of its cause of the Civil …show more content…

The Abolition Movement used morality as argument for the immediate elimination of slavery. During a fast day in 1863, William H. Willcox preached in the Bethesda Church, "And I firmly believe that this great contest which slavery has thrust upon us...is to be made by the God of our fathers the occasion, not only of destroying this system of iniquity, but also of leading our nation through such discipline of heroic struggle...," ("Hope for the Country", Sequence 6). The ideas Abolitionists stressed about slavery being a sinful practice became increasingly prominent in Northern churches, and it was the help of the church that turned a war that was meant for the preservation of the Union, to a war of freedom (Gunby,

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