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American Suffrage and Citizen Participation - Evolution

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How have American suffrage and citizen participation evolved over the past centuries? How are they different?

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Solution Summary

This solution explains how American suffrage and citizen participation have evolved over the past centuries, as well as how they are different. References are provided.

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1. How have American suffrage and citizen participation evolved over the past centuries? I think it deals more in terms of who was eligible to vote around 1789 and...

The following timeline clearly illustrates how the American suffrage and citizen participation evolved over the past centuries. It provides a detailed description of this evolutionary process during the American suffrage movement.

For example,

1637 Anne Hutchinson is convicted of sedition and expelled from the Massachusetts colony for her religious ideas.
1652 The Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, is founded in England. Quakers will make vital contributions to the abolitionist and suffrage movements in the United States. One Quaker woman, Mary Dyer, will be hanged in 1660 for preaching in Boston.
1776 During the second Continental Congress, Abigail Adams entreats her husband John to "remember the ladies" in the new code of laws he is writing.
1790 The colony of New Jersey grants the vote to "all free inhabitants."
1807 New Jersey women lose their vote, with the repeal sponsored by a politician who was nearly defeated by a female voting block ten years earlier.
1829 Author Frances Wright travels the United States on a paid lecture tour, perhaps the first ever by a woman. She attacks organized religion for the secondary place it assigns women, and advocates the empowerment of women through divorce and birth control.
1838 Sarah Grimké publishes "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women." She and her sister Angelina will be active in both the suffrage and the abolitionist movements.
1840 The World Anti-Slavery Convention is held in London. Abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attend, but they are barred from participating in the meeting. This snub leads them to decide to hold a women's rights convention when they return to America.
1848 Three hundred people attend the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Among the attendees are Amelia Bloomer, Charlotte Woodward, and Frederick Douglas. Lucretia Mott's husband James presides. Stanton authors the Declaration of Sentiments, which sets the agenda for decades of women's activism. A larger meeting follows in Rochester.
1850 A women's rights conventions is held in Salem, Ohio; men are not permitted to speak at the meeting.

The first National Women's Rights Convention is held in Worcester, Massachusetts; among the attendees are Paulina Wright Davis, Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelly Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth.
1851 Sojourner Truth delivers her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.

The second National Woman's Rights Convention is held in Worcester, Massachusetts; celebrities new to the list of endorsers include educator Horace Mann, New York Tribune columnist Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Reverend Harry Ward Beecher, one of the nation's most popular preachers. Lucretia Mott presides. Westminster Review publishes John Stuart Mill's article, "On the Enfranchisement of Women." Mill later admits that the piece is the work of his companion, Harriet Hardy Taylor.
1852 Newspaper editor Clara Howard Nichols addresses the Vermont Senate on the topic of women's property rights, a major issue for the suffragists. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is published.
1853 On the occasion of the World's Fair in New York City, suffragists hold a meeting in the Broadway Tabernacle. It will go down in history as "The Mob Convention," marred by "hissing, yelling, stamping, and all manner of unseemly ...

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