ABSTRACT
In the 1850s, white men had control over most of the social, economic, legal and political conditions of women’s lives. As justification, men (in their roles as clergymen, newspaper editors and writers, political leaders, husbands and fathers) encouraged women to believe that they held a special social status as wives, mothers and daughters, and that this status afforded them men’s protection and guidance. Men claimed responsibility for dictating the laws and social customs (that is, constructing and controlling the political, educational and economic institutions), and of protecting women from the public world of strife and turmoil. Women’s dependence on men was therefore supposedly in women’s best interests. Woman’s rights advocates did not accept this formulation, and in the following section, women directly challenge men’s bigoted and paternalistic views of women most strikingly evidenced in men’s responses to the women’s movement (see, for instance, “Licentious ‘Lords of Creation’”).
