Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, let us take this time to look back at one of the founding mothers of the women’s rights movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

When Elizabeth Cady married abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, she'd already observed enough about the legal relationships between men and women to insist that the word obeybe dropped from the ceremony.

An active abolitionist herself, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was outraged when the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, also in 1840, denied official standing to women delegates, includingLucretia Mott. In 1848, she and Mott called for a women's rights convention to be held in Seneca Falls, New York. That convention, and theDeclaration of Sentiments written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton which was approved there, is credited with initiating the long struggle towards women's rights and woman suffrage.

After 1851, Stanton worked in close partnership with Susan B. Anthony. Stanton often served as the writer and Anthony as the strategist in this effective working relationship.

In the years following the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were among those who were determined to focus on female suffrage when only voting rights of freed males were addressed in Reconstruction. They founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and Stanton served as president…

While Elizabeth Cady Stanton is best known for her long contribution to the woman suffrage struggle, she was also active and effective in winning property rights for married women, equal guardianship of children, and liberalized divorce laws. These reforms made it possible for women to leave marriages that were abusive of the wife, the children, and the economic health of the family.

Read more about her interesting life here: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/stantonelizabeth/a/stanton.htm

Low Self-Esteem and Your Teen

Is your teen suffering from low self-esteem? Feelings of inadequacy can drive young people into performing numerous self-destructive acts such as drug abuse, anorexia, and suicide. Know the warning signs! Learn more about this epidemic courtesy of DoSomething.org:

1. Low self-esteem is actually a thinking disorder in which an individual views himself as inadequate, unworthy, unlovable, and/or incompetent. Once formed, this negative view of self permeates every thought, producing faulty assumptions and ongoing self-defeating behavior.

2. Seven in ten girls believe they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way, including their looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members.

3. A girl’s self-esteem is more strongly related to how she views her own body shape and body weight, than how much she actually weighs.

4. 78% of girls with low self-esteem admit that it is hard to feel good in school when you do not feel good about how you look (compared to 54% of girls with high self-esteem).

5. 75% of girls with low self-esteem reported engaging in negative activities such as disordered eating, cutting, bullying, smoking, or drinking when feeling badly about themselves (compared to 25% of girls with high self-esteem).

6. 61% of teen girls with low self-esteem admit to talking badly about themselves (compared to 15% of girls with high self-esteem).

7. More than one-third (34%) of girls with low self-esteem believe that they are not a good enough daughter (compared to 9% of girls with high self-esteem).

8. One of the main factors in teen promiscuity is self-esteem.  When a teen has little or no self-confidence, he or she will use sex as a means to build confidence.

9. Recent years have seen a significant increase in body dysmorphia in teen boys. Body Dysmorphic Disorder is a psychiatric disorder in which the affected person is excessively concerned about an imagined or minor defect in their physical feature.

10. Teenage boys can be prone to obsessive exercising, binge eating, anorexia nervosa, bulimia, steroid abuse and diet aid abuse.

Read more about the frightening statistics here: http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-teens-and-self-esteem

Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Women during World War II

During World War II, an unprecedented number of women entered the workforce paving the way for future generations to take on new gendered roles. Though these women would earn less than half the wage of their male counterparts, women played an integral part in America’s successful war effort.

Today, Rosie the Riveter remains an iconic image. What you may not know is that apart from factory and home front service roles, women of this age were some of the first to take on official military duties:

One of the lesser-known roles women played in the war effort was provided by the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. These women, each of whom had already obtained their pilot's license prior to service, became the first women to fly American military aircraft. They ferried planes from factories to bases, transporting cargo and participating in simulation strafing and target missions, accumulating more than 60 million miles in flight distances and freeing thousands of male U.S. pilots for active duty in World War II. More than 1,000 WASPs served, and 38 of them lost their lives during the war. Considered civil service employees and without official military status, these fallen WASPs were granted no military honors or benefits, and it wasn't until 1977 that the WASPs received full military status.

Read more about women’s contributions here: http://www.history.com/topics/rosie-the-riveter

Rosemary Anderson is the February Dignity & Respect Champion!

Congratulations Rosemary Anderson, this month’s Dignity & Respect Champion! Rosemary Anderson "believes in kindness" and has dedicated the past five years to writing cards and buying books with some of her own money as a disabled Air Force veteran to send to lonely prisoners around the United States.

Spring Grass Book'em is a books-to-prisoners program that mails books to inmates nationwide. Currently, it is not yet tax-deductible, but all donations received go toward postage, packing tape, books, and more. The program works to help imprisoned people who have been abandoned by their families, don't have access to the library, or anyone incarcerated who wants to learn any subject or skill. The volunteers at Spring Grass Book'em urge that books can change lives and minds, and can therefore change society for the better.

Rosemary feels many people in society disrespect themselves and each other, especially the prisoners.  She believes that treating each other with dignity and respect is healing and it helps everyone expand in new directions.

Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Women’s Suffrage

 

As we think about women’s history this month, let us not take for granted the great strides our fore-mothers made. Today, let us look more closely into the history of women’s suffrage and the fight to gain the right to vote. Though the movement may be most famous for the ground it gained in the 1920s, the women’s suffrage movement actually began almost a century before winning the right to vote:

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had. At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States--temperance clubs, religious movements and moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations--and in many of these, women played a prominent role. Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the "Cult of True Womanhood": that is, the idea that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists--mostly women, but some men--gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women's rights. (They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.) Most of the delegates agreed: 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 certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Learn more by reading the whole article courtesy of History.com here: http://www.history.com/topics/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage

Women’s History Month

 

March is Women’s History Month. Why not take this opportunity to reflect on the women that have made a different in your life? The National Women’s History Project has declared that this month’s theme is women’s education and women empowerment:

Although women now outnumber men in American colleges nationwide, the reversal of the gender gap is a very recent phenomenon. The fight to learn was a valiant struggle waged by many tenacious women—across years and across cultures—in our country. After the American Revolution, the notion of education as a safeguard for democracy created opportunities for girls to gain a basic education—based largely on the premise that, as mothers, they would nurture not only the bodies but also the minds of (male) citizens and leaders. The concept that educating women meant educating mothers endured in America for many years, at all levels of education.

Pioneers of secondary education for young women faced arguments from physicians and other “experts” who claimed either that females were incapable of intellectual development equal to men, or that they would be harmed by striving for it. Women’s supposed intellectual and moral weakness was also used to argue against coeducation, which would surely be an assault on purity and femininity. Emma Willard, in her 1819 Plan for Improving Female Education, noted with derision the focus of women’s “education” on fostering the display of youth and beauty, and asserted that women are “the companions, not the satellites of men”—“primary existences” whose education must prepare them to be full partners in life’s journey.

Learn more about the history of women’s education here: http://www.nwhp.org//whm/index.php