Equal Opportunities
Women started to realize that they should have equal opportunities as men, and they started speaking about it. In 1803 Miss A. M. Burton read a poem at a female academy, some of it includes how women had the determination to strive for the same knowledge, and hope that men will hear the women. There were many women after the poem was read that succeeded, and early national Americans recognized that women’s acquisition of education represented a critical step in their path to equality (McMahon 2012)3 .
By 1840 educational opportunities were starting to appear to women, such as the Troy Female Seminary which was founded by Emma Willard in 1821, as well as many others. These women were given opportunities as teachers, authors, missionaries, and reformers. McMahon also makes it clear that women in the early ages achieved measures of their equality in education as well as equality in their daily lives. She also uses a quote and expands on it which I think is very important to understand, this is from Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848 “He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.” Women’s rights activists understood that the franchise was only one path to equality; thus, they sought not only the right to vote but further access to education, reforms to divorce and property rights legislation, and expanded economic opportunities, including “an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.” Women’s rights activists called for something greater than mere equality— they sought a comprehensive vision of gender equality largely unconstrained by narrow representations of difference. Perhaps it was, in part, the limits of mere equality that inspired these activists to develop a more expansive women’s rights agenda.”
Emmma Hart Willard addressed the public but in particular the members of the Legislature of New York. In her address she speaks for all women, asking the legislature for women to receive education with respectable reform and that it is necessary, but it can only happen with the legislature’s approval. Willard states “ The improvement of Female education will be considered by our citizens a subject of importance, the liberality which they part with their property to educate their daughters, is sufficient evidence; and why should they not.”4
3McMahon, Lucia. 2012. Mere Equals : The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
4 Willard, Emma Hart. An Address to the Public; (Particularly) to the Members of the Legislature of New-York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. Albany: Printed by I. W. Clark, 1819. Nineteenth Century Collections Online