Many women who would work for the abolition of slavery worked for women’s rights. They launched a struggle to improve women’s lives and win equal rights. Like many of the women reformers, Lucretia Mott was a Quaker. Quaker women enjoyed a certain amount of equality in their own communities. Mott gave lectures in Philadelphia calling for temperance, peace, workers’ rights, and abolition. Mott also helped fugitive slaves and organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At the world anti-slavery convention in London, Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There the two female abolitionists joined forces to work for women’s rights.

In July 1848, Stanton, Mott, and a few other women organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. About 200 women and 40 men attended. The convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The women’s declaration called for an end to all laws that discriminated against women. It demanded that women be allowed to enter the all-male world of trades, professions, and businesses. The most controversial issue at the convention concerned suffrage, or the right to vote. Stanton insisted that the declaration include a demand for woman suffrage, but delegates thought the idea of women voting was too radical. After a heated debate, the convention voted to include the demand for woman suffrage in the United States.

The Seneca Falls Convention paved the way for the growth of the women’s rights movement. During the 1800s, women held several national conventions. Many reformers, both male and female, joined the movement. Susan B. Anthony, the daughter of a Quaker abolitionist in rural New York, worked for women’s rights and temperance. She called for equal pay for women, college training for girls, and coeducation—the teaching of boys and girls together. Anthony organized the country’s first women’s temperance association, the Daughters of Temperance.

Anthony met Stanton at a temperance meeting in 1851. They became lifelong friends and partners in the struggle for women’s rights. For the rest of the century, Anthony and Stanton led the women’s movement. They worked with other women to win the right to vote. Beginning with Wyoming in 1890, several states granted women the right to vote. It was not until 1920, however, that woman suffrage became a reality everywhere in the United States.

Pioneers in women’s education began to call for more opportunity. Early pioneers such as Catherine Beecher and Emma Hart Willard believed that women should be educated for their traditional roles in life. They also thought that women could be capable teachers. The Milwaukee College for Women set up courses based on Beecher’s ideas “to train women to be healthful, intelligent, and successful wives, mothers, and housekeepers.” After her marriage, Willard educated herself in subjects considered suitable only for boys, such as science and mathematics. In 1821, she established the Troy Female Seminary in upstate New York. Willard’s Troy Female Seminary taught mathematics, history, geography, and physics, as well as the usual homemaking subjects. Mary Lyon established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts in 1837. She modeled its curriculum on that of nearby Amherst College. Some young women began to make their own opportunities. They broke the barriers to female education and helped other women do the same.

During the 1800s, women made some gains in the area of marriage and property laws. New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, and the new state of California recognized the right of women to own property after their marriage. Some states passed laws permitting women to share the guardianship of their children jointly with their husbands. Indiana was the first of several states that allowed women to seek divorce if their husbands were chronic abusers of alcohol.

In the 1800s, women had few career choices. They could become elementary teachers, although school boards often paid lower salaries to women than to men. Breaking into fields such as medicine and the ministry was more difficult. Some strong-minded women, however, succeeded in entering these all-male professions. Hoping to study medicine, Elizabeth Blackwell was turned down by more than 20 schools. Finally accepted by Geneva College in New York, Blackwell graduated at the head of her class. She went on to win acceptance and fame as a doctor.

Despite the accomplishments of notable women, gains in education, and changes in state laws, women in the 1800s remained limited by social customs and expectations. The early feminists, like the abolitionists, temperance workers, and other activists of the age of reform, had just begun the long struggle to achieve their goals.