Women's Suffrage Dbq

The way the world sees women has always played a part in shaping history. Attitudes toward women were the spark that set suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth aflame for women’s rights. Their efforts towards women’s suffrage managed to ignite the tempers of men who did not share their passion for equality. The attitudes of those opposing the suffrage movement helped women gain the attention they needed to push women’s rights. When women were finally victorious in earning the right to vote, attitudes toward women began to change.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, it was a shared belief that women belonged at home. Their most important roles were that of a wife and a mother, but many women were finding themselves unsatisfied with that life and the opportunities available to them.

They could work, but were paid a fraction of a man's salary for the same work. While men fought the Civil War, women stayed home, fighting in their own way by working in factories and doing the jobs that had once belonged to men. (Keenan) When the war finally ended five years later, the men left the battlefield and returned back to their previous lives. Women were forced back into their place in the home, but it was too late. Women everywhere had tasted freedom and all of a sudden that once comfy life was ill-fitting and chafed at women’s skin. (Women’s Suffrage)
Suffragists, women who fought for their right to vote, were often mistreated and harassed. Unlike women in many other countries, American women protested peacefully. Despite their non-confrontational parades and bloomers, suffragists were met with violence. Sojourner Truth, a black abolitionist and suffragist, preferred to walk everywhere she went to speak. She was often "heckled and sometimes beaten while touring", especially in the South due to her