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→Origins of First Wave Feminism
The 19th century also emerged as a period of emancipation, not only in the US, which was relatively late in freeing their slaves, but also in the UK, other European countries and in the Americas. This led to the emergence of women, who had campaigned for the freeing of slaves, to develop their own political thoughts and ideas about what emancipation really meant. In the United States, mid-19th century women emerged advocating emancipation for slaves and soon greater freedom for women comparable to men. This included Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and, among the most well know, Susan Brownell Anthony. Interestingly, many early congresses calling for the emancipation of slaves often shunned women or gave them secondary roles. One key obstacle was many had interpreted their faith to stand against slavery, but at the same time they saw had God created the sexes differently. This contradiction, therefore, became an obstacle for early feminists.
Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, after the Civil War and in 1868, began to focus on creating a platform for women to rally around. They created the a newspaper called <i>The Revolution</i>. This helped to rally support to what they saw was one of the first great obstacles to greater freedom, which was the right to vote. In effect, this helped to launch the suffrage movement in the United States. Other countries also, at about the same time or even earlier in some cases, began to have women organizations calling for greater female rights and literature advocating voting for women. This included Scottish Marion Reid, who began to see greater interest in the ideals of a virtuous woman creating a repressive standard for women. While some women, such as Barbara Leigh Smith, focused on employ and education for women, others saw other goals as necessarry. In particular, the late 19th century was increasingly focused on obtaining voting rights for women. To counteract the power of the church's interpretation of sex-based hierarchy, Stanton produced an influential work called <i>The Woman's Bible</i>, written in 1895. Although it was much maligned by Biblical scholars, Stanton tried to argue for equality using the Bible.
==First Wave Around the World==
