"Adress on Woman's Rights," The National Anti-Slavery Standard, Sep 16, 1852

"Adress on Woman's Rights," The National Anti-Slavery Standard, Sep 16, 1852

Black Periodicals

Criticism

Gender Norms

Gossip

Scandal

"Address on Woman's Rights," adopted by The Woman's Rights convention assembled a week earlier and printed here in The National Anti-Slavery Standard, includes an argument against restricting women to the private sphere and limiting them to  such trifling pastimes as "gossip and scandal."

Credit

Readex: African American Newspapers, Series 2

1852-09-16

Reference

"All women are not wives and mothers, but all have spirits needing development, powers that grow with their exercise. Those who are best acquainted with the state of society, know that there is, at this time a vast amount of unhappiness among women for want of free outlets. for their powers, that thousands are yearning for fuller development, and a wider field of usefulness. The same energies which in man find vent in the professions, and in the thousand forms of business and study, must find an ennobling channel in woman, else they will be frittered away in trifles, or turned into instruments to prey upon their possessor.
To follow the empty round of fashion, to retail gossip and scandal, to be an ornament in the parlour or mere drudge in the kitchen, to live as an appendage to any human being, does not fill up nor satisfy the capacities fo a soul awakened to a sense of its true wants, and the far-reaching and mighty interests which cluster around its existence.
We protest against the tyranny of that public sentiment which assigns any arbitrary sphere to woman."

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