Pros Of The Reconstruction Era

The Republican nominee, Ulysses S. Grant, was elected president by a very slim margin in 1868 which led to Congress ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment only a year later. The third and final amendment of the era prohibited the state and federal governments from refusing any citizen the right to vote based on their race or prior condition of servitude. Although the law stated that any citizen had the right to vote, it failed to include women. Female rights advocates saw the Reconstruction Era as a time to claim their own emancipation, as the African-Americans were doing at the time. Women took advantage of the time and started to demand liberty for divorce laws, the recognition that they had control over their own bodies, and birth control.

There was very little success and movement towards women having the right to vote except for places like Wyoming that needed to attract immigrant women to extremely lowly female populated lands. In 1869, Wyoming extended the right to vote to women and became the second state in the 18th century to allow women to vote behind New Jersey when it entered the Union in 1890 (588). Some women opposed the 15th Amendment and argued that native-born American women should have the right to vote over African-Americans and immigrants, while other feminists supported the era’s amendments because they believed they were steps in a positive direction towards ubiquitous suffrage. The consequence of the two side’s ideas were two separate women’s suffrage organizations: The American Woman Suffrage Association, with Lucy Stone as president, and National Woman Suffrage Association, run by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Both organizations tried to use the Constitution’s words to claim equal rights but courts rejected their efforts every time due to the fact that the people in chair were men. The majority of men believed that women did not have a place outside of the house and were made to be domesticated, bear children, and please their opposite gender. In 1890, the organizations decided that they were fighting

They wanted everyone to understand that being in control of their own bodies did not mean that they were no longer forcibly taken by their husbands but rather, they had the choice to pursue someone when they decided they wanted to. Jane Addams, one of the era’s most defining reformers, believed that women needed to reach for their dreams and be open in communities because the ideas and aspirations of women could better the corruption of the government. Addams did not only want white American women to be fighting for their rights but immigrant and African American women as well so in 1889 she founded the Hull House. Over 400 of these houses sprouted across the country by 1910, providing housing for thousands of impoverished immigrants. She built schools to educate the children and created jobs so the parents could make a living (721). Addams recruited many immigrants and lower class citizens into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, making the organization population range from settlement-house workers to the highly educated people. By 1917, the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s population had grown to be over 2 million people fighting for woman suffrage and soon enough their relentless work began to pay off