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Earnest Elizabeth Expected Equality! (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
Carlene Jennings
Overview of The Abolitionist & Suffrage Movements
Students will examine the main ideas of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Students will watch a video segment and/or read a play about the suffrage movement. Then they will compare and contrast Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments with Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
-White board and marker or sentence strip with lesson title (Earnest Elizabeth Expected Equality)
-dictionaries
-copies of "Failure is Impossible" script which is available at the website:
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/script.html
-website with picture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/suffrg:@field(mailto:NUMBER+@band(cph+3a02558))
-website with video clip "Women's Suffrage Movement: Gaining Equality for Women (3:17)
Discovery Channel School. "TLC Elementary School: American Diversity ."
unitedstreaming: http://www.unitedstreaming.com/
-highlighters or pencils
-key vocabulary terms may be posted on a word wall or chart and may include: women's rights, equality, suffrage, suffragist, 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments, cause, enfranchisement, etc.
The Declaration of Independence may be accessed at this website:
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm
The Declaration of Sentiments may be accessed at this website:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/wori/declaration.htm
50 min.
4
What roles do race and gender have in creating and interpreting history?
Content specific:
What role did Elizabeth Cady Stanton play in the women's suffrage movement?
Have students write and try to memorize the alliterative lesson title or tongue twister (Earnest Elizabeth Expected Equality!) Ask them to look up the meanings of the words "earnest" and "equality" in the dictionary.
Write these questions on the board and ask students to respond in their notebooks:
Should women athletes be paid the same as men athletes?
Why is pay for women taking so long to catch up with pay for men?
Ask all the students to stand. Separate boys from the girls. Have the boys to stand in a line on one side of the room facing the girls. Tell the students that they are going to elect a class president, but there are some rules they must follow:
1. The new class president must be male.
2. Only the males in the class will be able to vote for the new class president.
Ask the girls if that is acceptable to them. Why or why not?
Allow both boys and girls to discuss their opinions about 'the rules" for the class election.
Show students a picture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Photographs are available from these websites:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/suffrg:@field(mailto:NUMBER+@band(cph+3a02558))
The teacher may wish to provide informational background by using the information in the NOTES Section below.*
If the teacher has access to United Streaming video streaming, he/she may wish to show a three minute, seventeen minute video segment called "Women's Suffrage Movement: Gaining Equality for Women. The segment gives an excellent summary of the suffrage movement, including photographs of Stanton and the Declaration of Sentiments. The video segment may be accessed at the website:
Explain to students that they will learn more about Stanton and the suffrage movement as they read a Reader's Theatre play titled "Failure is Impossible." The teacher may have students read the play through silently and then allow volunteers to read aloud.
Have students designate statements of Elizabeth Cady Stanton as they read them.
Lead a discussion of her ideas, asking probing questions such as:
"How is Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments similar to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence?
The teacher may wish to have students examine the documents on the websites listed under MATERIALS and/or write these excerpts on the board:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal"...(from the Declaration of Sentiments)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"...(from the Declaration of Independence)
Point out that where Jefferson had written "all men are created equal", Stanton substituted "all men and women are created equal."
Have students turn to a partner and explain the role that Elizabeth Cady Stanton played in the women's suffrage movement. The teacher may wish to have the students write their summarizing statements in their notebooks or on a slip of paper as a "ticket out the door."
*Explain to students that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an early leader of the women's rights movement. She was born in 1815, and in those days, women were not allowed to vote or serve on juries. Nor could they practice law or medicine. Very few colleges would accept them as students. If a woman was married, her husband had control over her money and property.
In her own life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton seemed determined to prove that women were equal to men. She lived in Seneca Falls, New York, where she and other women met and discussed women's rights. She helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association, and she served as its president until 1890. She thought that women should have the right to vote. She said that all men and women are created equal. She persuaded Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California to sponsor a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1878. The amendment was reintroduced every year until Congress finally approved it, granting women the right to vote in 1920. (This was after Stanton's death in 1902.)
To learn more about the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the teacher may wish to visit this website which has a collection of the association's documents from 1848-1921:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html
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