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Women's Suffrage Selfish

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The women of the suffrage movement were selfish for the right reasons. They were selfish because they decided to take ownership over their lives and bodies as women, rather than continuing to sacrifice themselves as ideas or objects to function for the control of men. The traditional view for women were to stay at home, clean, cook, raise children, and to help with the family farm. Men, however, dominated the households; including the women and children.Therefore, women were foreseen as too weak and unintelligent to make self-governed decisions, especially when it came to participating in such rigorous decison making as voting and politics. This is reflected in Jane Adams statement, "A woman's simplest duty... is to keep her house clean and …show more content…
she is utterly dependent upon the city administration for the conditions which (make) decent living possible." (Cited from Jane Adams, "Why Women Should Vote," Ladies Home Journal, January,1910.) It is obvious here that women cannot even properly care for their families, because what they need for survival and homelife is overlooked by men in power. Resulting in clear evidence as one of the reasons behind why women needed the right to vote. These women simply wanted equality and adequate care for themselves and their children. Another supporting example is this quote from an anti-suffrage newspaper article: "The Suffragists teach women to revolt against the daily task of tending to child and house, and we sadly see the results in the nation's poor heath and lowered physique." (Cited from The Woman's Protest Against Woman's Suffrage, published by the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, in October 1912.) The blatant disregard for women's right to equality in the previous text is exactly the reason why the suffragist movement took place. Notice how women are shamed for caring about their needs and not being only concerned for everyone else. Women are not mindless caretakers or sacrifical pawns to be controlled. Women deserve to have just as much say-so over their themselves and their communities as men, even through practicing such things as voting. Women are humans and deserve to be treated as such. This is why the suffrage movement is one of the historical movements that mattered; because equality is always

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