Progressive era (part i)  (Page 17/19)

Needless to say, there was never a meaningful attempt to elevate the pay of working women to the level earned by prostitutes. Ultimately, prostitution was driven underground where criminal elements increasingly controlled the trade.

Woman Suffrage

In the decades following the Civil War, American women sought two parallel tracks in their attempt to achieve political equality. Some sought to amend the Constitution, allowing all women across the country to engage their right to vote through the efforts of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Others believed that changes to society must come from within the borders of states and worked among state legislatures to pass laws allowing women the right to vote within their state elections, such as the American Women’s Suffrage Association. Before the end of the nineteenth century, these two groups came together and formed the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NASWA). They worked to get women the right to vote simultaneously at the state level and at the national level.

Of all the Progressive era reforms, there was possibly no more difficult fight than for women’s political equality. Women were prohibited from owning property through the Civil War. Women were, in some localities, allowed to vote in local board of education elections during the Gilded Age. Women authors of the late nineteenth century mirrored many of the ideas of equality first penned by the English author Mary Wollstonecraft in the years following the American War for Independence.

After the Civil War, thousands of Americans toured the world and upon their return hundreds wrote travel books: linear narratives of what they saw, usually injected American-Christian superiority and calls for help to reform the “heathen” all over the world, to include elevating the status of women. Palestine was a particularly important destination for American women travelers in the nineteenth century. These women tended to demonstrate to their readers the superiority of Protestant women by spreading rumors about Muslims. Some, such as Lucia A. Palmer, believed that Muslims were naturally bloodthirsty creatures who literally killed Christians, just for fun:

The Mohammedan hates the Christian, and when he wishes to amuse himself, he takes a holiday and kills off a few hundred or a few thousand in Bulgaria, Palestine, or Armenia, in whichever country he chooses to hunt. Then the Christian world raises its hands in horror, and hold meetings, and dispatches to the Turkish government long demands and commands . . . and the Moslem answers by slaughtering more Christians.

Their published travel writings suggest that many of these average American women supported suffrage as a social equalizer for the poor, tired, and downtrodden women of the Islamic Middle East. For example, when an American traveler named Kate Kraft was in Egypt, she called for a Woman’s Rights Convention because Egyptian women, unlike their American counterparts, were doing nothing to secure their right to vote.