The Fight For Women s Rights - 1359 Words

The fight for women’s rights has been a long and ongoing battle. It was not until the twentieth century that the majority of women demanded legal and social rights for themselves. Society’s way of thinking in the eighteenth century was a patriarchal and conservative one. Women stayed at home and took care of the family while the men went to work, and while there was some opposition to this, the majority of men and women did not mind. This can be seen in the formation and vast acceptance of the Cult of Domesticity. The Cult of Domesticity, also known as The Cult of True Womanhood, was a set of ideals that women closely followed in the nineteenth century. The movement was made up of mainly middle or upper class white women who followed four†¦show more content†¦The women made the homes into moral sanctuaries and taught their children Christian values . This included teaching the children Protestant beliefs and traditions which instructed the children to be  "moral† or respectable members of society. The Cult encouraged women to decorate their homes with religious symbols in order to declare the home as a â€Å"Christian† home. This tradition continued late into the twentieth and twenty first century as many homes are adorned with crosses and other religious symbols. If women did not follow this tradition, they were seen as going against the Cult and every woman was judged by the appearance and orderliness of their home. The idea of judging a woman by the appearance of her home put the woman’s worth in her appearance, rather than her intelligence or personality. It was dehumanizing. Participating in religion was a major part of the Cult because it did not take a woman away from her home. Church did not make women any less submissive to their husbands, therefore it was seen as an acceptable place for women to attend. The fact that women were only allowed to go to church and not anywhere else shows that the beliefs of the Cult were actually restricting to women rather than empowering. This idea of going to church and keeping the home in order for visitors and displaying tokens of religion continued on for years after the nineteenth century. A woman in the Cult of Domesticity was expected to be