2021 Gumbo final - Book - Page 82
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women’s rights
A
s the country mourns the loss of long-time U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we at
Gumbo have taken the time to reflect on the history of women’s rights in the United States as a whole as
well as in Louisiana and here at LSU.
130 years ago this year, Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1890. In 1900, all states
had laws allowing women to own property in their own name. In 1916, Montana elected Jeannette Rankin as the
first woman to serve in the House of Representatives. In 1918, Margaret Sanger fought her way to the United
States Supreme Court to allow doctors to advise their married patients about birth control methods for health
purposes. Her clinic, along with others, became Planned Parenthood in 1942.
The 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified 100 years ago this year. But that is
not where the fight for women’s rights began, nor is it where it ended.
Before the United States was a country as we know it today, under the Constitution, women were fighting for
their rights. Abigail Adams in March of 1776 wrote a letter to her husband John Adams and his colleagues at the
Constitutional Convention to remember women as they formed the foundation of this country.
“Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors,” she wrote.
“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we
are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or
representation.”
In July of 1848, nearly 75 years later, the first woman’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York.
Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the Convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments,
which reworded the Declaration of Independence to speak solely on women’s issues. This declaration was signed
by 68 women and 32 men.
Of course, these figures were not saints. Stanton made no secret that when she advocated for women’s suffrage,
she was advocating for middle class, white, protestant women such as herself. She said many times that she did
not support the passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave adult black men the right to vote, because she
believed she was more deserving of the vote than were black men. But the Convention and the activism that burst
forth from it led to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which finally granted women the right to vote.
Just a year later, in January of 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in
the United States and went on to become a doctor. Blackwell’s acceptance letter from Geneva College was intended
as a practical joke. Professors forced her to sit separately in classes, excluded her from labs, and local townspeople
shunned her. That didn’t stop her; Blackwell went on to graduate from Geneva with the highest grades in her class.
Sojourner Truth, a former slave, an advocate for abolition, women’s rights, and temperance, stood in front of a
crowd in May of 1851 in Akron, Ohio and asked them:
“And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and
no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it-and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and
when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
More locally, in 1905, Olivia Davis became the first woman to graduate from LSU. In 1909, Mercedes Garig
became the first female faculty member. Six years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, Harriet S. Daggett
became the first female faculty member of the LSU Law School. Daggett was a graduate of Yale Law School. She
taught at the Law School for at least 25 years, and in that time wrote countless papers.
In 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Claudette Colvin did
it first. Colvin was 15 and riding the bus home from school with friends. She was told she had to get up and stand
in the back, because the back rows were already full, so that a young white woman could sit.