...Why is this Important? Abeer Hasan 201105608 German 2901 John J. Webber February 20th, 2013 The true importance of researching and professing information correlated to German women and feminism in the twentieth century may not be apparent to some. However, the study of women’s history, in particular during the time of the twentieth century in Germany, is especially prevalent with regards to the advancements of women’s rights all across the world. Within the realms of present day, women who seek to question the inequalities experienced in their own lives turn to history to understand the roots of their oppression and to become aware of the advancements which have occurred before their life time. The research of women’s rights, especially those of the German woman, help to inspire and motivate individuals to further overcome the disadvantages still presently faced by women in various nations. The suffrage of women in Germany and their feminist movements are especially enlightening to people of our present era, just as they were for women in other nations during the twentieth century. For centuries, a woman’s role in German society was summed up by the three “K” words: Kinder (children), kirche (church), and küche (kitchen). Throughout the twentieth century, however, women had gradually advanced with regards to attaining equal rights. In 1919, they received the right to vote, and were made a prominent attribute to the work force with the start of World War II. East Germany...
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...The Women’s Rights Movement: Women’s Suffrage Jamuel Breeze Old Dominion University Abstract Women’s history is still being reclaimed. Women played critical roles in the twentieth-century American life. Women were workers, artists, parents, and women offered in many forms energies, insights, and strengths in periods of crisis and prosperity. Our forefathers wrote that all men were created equal, but growing up as a females has never been easy. When children are young there are not many differences between boys and girls, but as life continues things change. When young girls grow to become women they face discrimination, from the onset, as opposed to their male counterparts. This discrimination comes from society, and can even come from within their household from parents, siblings, and other family members. Women were viewed as only suitable for domestic works and were not given opportunities for advancement nor knowledge of other skills and trades. This essay will cover the route that women took in order to become equal; The Women’s Rights Movement, but more specifically focus on Women’s Suffrage. The Women’s Rights Movement Women’s rights movements are primarily concerned with making the political, social, and economic status of women equal to that of men while establishing legislative safeguards against discrimination on the basis of sex. The Women’s Right Movement began in 1848 with the first women’s rights convention being held in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth...
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...rights as citizens. I chose to focus on women’s changing roles during the time period from 1865 through 1920 and then through 1920 to this present day. The reason I chose to focus on the women of our history is because this was a very unstable time in history, due to the changing status of minorities in the culture at this time due to the end of the Civil War and the impending revolution for women’s rights with the passage of the 19th amendment. Dating as far back as the early 1800's women’s roles were consistently being challenged and questioned, it was not so much the women’s rights marches of the 60's but it was the beginning of that revolution. During the early part of the 19th century women’s character was separated with four basic attributes: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Even the foreign visitors to America during this period found fault in American male’s attitude towards women, they thought males treated women as inferiors and subjected women to double standards. "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage." This is according to a 1765 law established by Sir William Blackstone an English barrister, and American law followed this principle thereby the wife "belonged" to the husband. These were the times that women lived through and the conditions they lived with during the early part of the nineteenth century. As I move forward making...
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...Women's Suffrage Movement began in 1848 when the first women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The Women's Suffrage Movement was to make women have equal rights with men. Women's suffrage was to allow women to be able to vote, have professional job opportunities, and to be able to allow women to go to a higher educated school such as college. Women also wanted to be able to have the ability to own their own property and income. Some people thought that a Woman's Femininity would be destroyed by allowing more public roles. Women's lives changed drastically during this Century both inside and outside the Home. Their work at home and on farms continued to be essential. Over the next fifty years, Women's suffrage supporters...
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...Progressive Era One of the biggest questions during the twentieth century was whether or not women really made an adequate difference during that time, specifically during the progressive era. Prohibition was one of the key aspects that began to change the thoughts amongst women and how powerful they could be. How far did women go to let prohibition go into full effect and how did they play a prominent role during this age? How did this change their gender-ideal throughout the twentieth century? The vitality of women’s rights and their roles leading into the nineteenth century had been nearly obsolete. However, on Christmas Eve of 1873, the stereotype would soon modify. Eliza Stewart was ready to strike after an incident with her husband occurred involving the use of alcohol. Nearly 200 women, known as the Women’s Crusade, joined Stewart on the way to protest against the use of alcohol outside places such as drug stores, saloons and bars, yelling and protesting to stop selling alcohol (Burns). As these women would later move across the United States, their power as one would begin to grow even more. These women would be neglected by the bars and men and some would throw things at them like stones or rocks, or they would even be kicked or hit at. This did not stop them from moving forward to get they wanted. They were able to close down up to 1300 liquor sellers, even though no law changes were made (Burns). The near fail of the Women’s Crusade did not stop there for the power of women...
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...Progressive Era One of the biggest questions during the twentieth century was whether or not women really made an adequate difference during that time, specifically during the progressive era. Prohibition was one of the key aspects that began to change the thoughts amongst women and how powerful they could be. How far did women go to let prohibition go into full effect and how did they play a prominent role during this age? How did this change their gender-ideal throughout the twentieth century? The vitality of women’s rights and their roles leading into the nineteenth century had been nearly obsolete. However, on Christmas Eve of 1873, the stereotype would soon modify. Eliza Stewart was ready to strike after an incident with her husband occurred involving the use of alcohol. Nearly 200 women, known as the Women’s Crusade, joined Stewart on the way to protest against the use of alcohol outside places such as drug stores, saloons and bars, yelling and protesting to stop selling alcohol (Burns). As these women would later move across the United States, their power as one would begin to grow even more. These women would be neglected by the bars and men and some would throw things at them like stones or rocks, or they would even be kicked or hit at. This did not stop them from moving forward to get they wanted. They were able to close down up to 1300 liquor sellers, even though no law changes were made (Burns). The near fail of the Women’s Crusade did not stop there for the power of women...
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...made by Spanish women in the early twentieth century? Indisputably, General F. Franco’s dictatorship in a “Nationalist Spain” truncated both social and political progress made by women throughout the period of the early 1900s. In order to discuss the crucial motives for the totalitarian regime’s reversal of such developments, a brief historical background of European stances on the roles of women must firstly be examined. As established by H. Graham, attempts at preserving socio-cultural conservatism to uphold political ideologies during this era were geared primarily towards the reiteration of traditional gender roles in society. The influence of existent policies in a Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at this time were, undoubtedly, of great influence on Franco’s regime. Earlier legislation enforcing this conservative perspective in Spain confirms such views, in that under these laws women could only conduct certain economic affairs, make purchases and sign contracts under supervision of a dominant husband - “el permiso marital” being required. This concept of subordination to men permeated Spanish society, restricting women to lives of exclusive domesticity. As ‘queen of the home’, the majority of middle and lower class women were uneducated illiterates, generally ignorant and uninvolved in political affairs and indoctrinated by traditions of Catholicism supremacy. However, several feminist organisations formed in the early twentieth century under the Primo de Rivera rule, along...
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...fact, by the beginning of the twentieth century, one out of five women had a job and twenty-five percent of those women worked in manufacturing. Women were usually paid half to less than half the amount of...
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...Restrictions and Expansions? The amendments of the early 20th century were a crucial breeding ground for the development of how government and citizens saw their roles. Religious groups and women preached toward anti-alcoholic sentiments and brought about the 18th amendment. Many states prior to this had already banned alcohol sales and it was considered a state matter that government shouldn’t interfere with. This amendment, although morally right, was more of a volatile infringement on American standards that had been around since the Mayflower. Government officials ended up accepting bribes, alcohol that was sold illegally often killed buyers from poisonous elements used in home distillery, and the mafia began to establish stronger footholds...
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...Joshua Wu Equal in the Twentieth Century The late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century became the rising point of equality and social reform and protest. After many Nationalist movements of reform and revolts, this resulted in several unified countries. It then led to the next big social issue, equality. The female equality movement, especially the suffrage movement, gained traction throughout the world gaining massive support from many. Many female activists and authors were very vocal about the injustice they faced and how the societies they lived in needed to change. Some of these activists/authors were: Virginia Woolf, Alexandra Kollontai, Constance Markievicz, and Sylvia Pankhurst. Though in different forms and different pursuits these four authors pursued the same ultimate goal, equality. Virginia Woolf was an author during the turn of the century and in her piece, “A Room of One’s Own” she draws meaning from the injustice between the sexes in the time and in the industry of literature and art. In her piece, after referring to Shakespeare, she says, “A highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people…No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish…for chastity may be a fetish invented…” (298). Prior to this quote Woolf spoke about the history of Shakespeare and how...
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...difference to women’s status in political life.’ Discuss. It is true that the mere winning of the vote for women made little immediate difference to their status in political life, and yet, it was a necessary beginning to establishing and later asserting their power. As the great suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett stated, women’s suffrage did ‘not in itself represent any extensive change for it would come as a necessary corollary of other changes’. From 1918 onwards, while the limited suffrage opened by the Representation of the People Act provided the vehicle for the changes British women desired to see in their society, feminists and people with an interest in women’s issues were well aware that much work had to be done in order to contribute to their progression in political life. This essay will begin with a brief summary of the state of women prior to 1918, as well as the aspirations and expectations of suffragists and anti-suffragists. Following this, it will describe how women were subsequently viewed as voters and political leaders by others of their sex, men, and the various political parties. The essay will assess how women sought to secure their interests, both politically and socially, and which methods were most effective. While significant changes for women did not happen quickly or immediately, this essay seeks to communicate the optimistic view that with time and the on-going determined efforts of feminists and other interested parties, women’s status in political...
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...In 1892, the Progressives drafted the Omaha Platform. This platform was extremely forward for the time in which it was drafted, and several of its plans were not legitimized until the twentieth century. Each of its plans worked towards establishing equality of opportunity in the United States. The Omaha Platform called for direct election of senators, which eventually became the seventeenth amendment of the Constitution: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof.” It also called to ratify state laws by passing initiatives and referendums, and grant unlimited coinage of silver to increase the money supply. The sixteenth amendment, which is a graduated income tax, was like the seventeenth amendment, which was proposed as part of this platform. The graduated income tax ensures that “the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever...
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...Before women started fighting for themselves, they were just considered to finish domestic tasks and to take care of their children. As time went on and they started creating women's suffrage groups, they were able to increase their part in society. The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee lobbied more aggressively for social welfare legislation. The organization’s efforts resulted in a pension program for poor women with children. It also resulted in the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided funds for health programs to help women and children. This goes to show that women were able to do more for society as a whole and were able to take care of the poor ones in society, creating higher expectations for women’s role in society. By the early twentieth century, women were able to attend college and to train for professions, even though it was not in the same numbers as men. Women also began to enter male dominated professions such as law and medicine. Also, women initiated many new institutions that serve educational purposes. Overall, The Women's Suffrage movement enabled women to secure their own place in society and get even closer to full equality with men in...
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...October 25, 2012 Until the early twentieth century, the age of consent, the legal age at which a girl could consent to sexual relations, was in most states the age of ten or twelve. In one state, Delaware, the age of consent was as low as seven years. In the late nineteenth century, women reformers sought to raise the age of consent to sixteen years. The campaign consisted of mostly white middle class women who believed male sexual privilege was dangerous toward the young girls who men took advantage of. In the late nineteenth century, women were increasingly becoming more involved in society, getting hired for more and more jobs. As opposed to earlier in the century when women were strictly working around the house, many women had jobs in factories, office buildings, and schools. This put them in a situation where male co-workers and employers would seduce them into having sex. Reformers believed that wage-earning girls, lacking protection of the home, were often lured into “White Slavery.” White slavery, as described in the text, is a system of “prostitution in which women were bought and sold, while other girls were left to suffer a fate worse than death: the loss of their virtue.” Since women were often brought up in ignorance to sex and relationships, men were able to take advantage of them. While white middle class women were the bulk of the campaign, other activist groups shared concern over the age of consent. The suffrage movement supported the cause because...
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...in order to stop the outbreak of the First World War. In the early chapters of the book the conservative Earl of Walden is visited by Winston Churchill and is convinced to negotiate an alliance with Russia. In doing so, a young Russian admiral named Prince Aleksey Andreyevich Orlov is sent to London with plans of negotiating the alliance between the Russian and British government. However, little does he know Feliks Kschessinksy a Russian anarchist plans to assassinate him, decreasing the possibilities of an alliance and saving the lives of millions of innocent Russians who would be forced to take part in the war. Although this book is fictional I believe that Ken Follet did an exceptional job portraying the reality of the early twentieth century. He was able to describe not only the class systems but the ideologies and points of view from all angles based the characters background and beliefs. He was also able to put into perspective the different political views and battles that occurred between different European governments. Much like the society we live in today people are not only based on their social status but also by where they came from and I believe Ken Follet was able to depict that as well. What stood out to me the most was how he portrayed Feliks Kschessinksy a Russian anarchist beliefs and values. In the book Feliks displayed compassion for Russian peasants much like himself and realized the danger joining the war would put innocent people in. He made the effort...
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