Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fifteenth Amendment

This chapter introduces Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the principal feminist thinker and women’s rights leader of the nineteenth century. It summarizes Stanton’s background, her work for suffrage with Susan B. Anthony, and modern backlash against her opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. The chapter discusses Stanton’s complex philosophy of multiple feminisms, including liberal, cultural, and radical thought. It then focuses on Stanton’s work for family equality, integrating her feminist thought into a legal history of the family.

Slavery, Women's Rights, and the Beginnings of Feminist Biblical Interpretation in the Nineteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-169
Author(s):  
Claudia Setzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Abolitionist Movement

Progressive movements create social changes that reach far beyond their original contexts. Such movements challenge authoritative texts and interpretations in the culture, generate alternative understandings of authoritative works that may be applied to other struggles, create a social arena for the dissemination of ideas, create patterns of thought that may be re-constituted in other forms, and may leave intact some related social problems. The abolitionist movement demanded a confrontation with slavery in the Bible and the development of non-literal exegesis. It also provided a conduit for the new methods of European biblical scholarship, particularly through the preaching and writings of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Three nineteenth-century women, Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in spite of differences in their biographies and religious commitments, shared similar methods of interpreting the Bible to argue for women’s rights. This article argues that habits of interpretation and knowledge of emerging historical-critical scholarship that these women learned in the abolition movement carried over into their fight for women’s rights. Like many nineteenth-century Christians, they subscribed to a belief in progressive revelation, occasional Orientalism, and a sometime negative evaluation of Judaism. Yet they show a remarkable anticipation of contemporary feminist biblical scholarship in their understandings of the effect of culture on interpretation, their view of gender as socially constructed, and their descriptions of God and Jesus as both male and female.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Reproductive Control ◽  
The Family ◽  
Marital Property ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Way

This book analyzes the feminist and legal thought of women’s rights founder Elizabeth Cady Stanton on gender equality in the family. It discusses Stanton’s theories on marriage, divorce, marital property, domestic violence, reproductive control, and parenting. Revealing Stanton's comprehensive demand for systemic legal reform, it challenges conventional depictions of the narrowness of early feminism, the development of family law, and women's assumed acquiescence in domestic subordination. Stanton demanded change to the institutions of government, church, family, and work, which constituted “a fourfold bondage” of women. The family was one of these keys to full reform because Stanton understood the way in which the private domestic sphere was integrated with the public sphere of work and governance, and its related freedoms and opportunities. The book traces the way in which virtually all of Stanton’s proposals became law—from no-fault divorce to the elimination of dower to maternal custody—and the ways in which Stanton’s work informs legal activism for women’s rights today.

scholarly journals Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and ‘Huquq un-Niswan’: An Advocate of Women's Rights in Islam in the Late Nineteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Minault
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Third Place ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sometime in the late 1890s, Sayyid Mumtaz Ali visited Aligarh and happened to show Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan the manuscript of his treatise in defense of women's rights in Islamic law, Huquq un-Niswan. As he began to read it, Sir Sayyid looked shocked. He then opened it to a second place and his face turned red. As he read it at a third place, his hands started to tremble. Finally, he tore up the manuscript and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Fortunately, at that moment a servant arrived to announce lunch, and as Sir Sayyid left his office, Mumtaz Ali snatched his mutilated manuscript from the trash. He waited until after Sir Sayyid's death in 1898, however, to publish Huquq un-Niswan.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document