Major Historical Event in US History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Major Historical Event in US History - Essay Example Thus, the agenda of 'legal equality' and then 'social equality' will be the general themes that brings together or provides a cohesion for the woman's movement in US history from 1865 to the present. The period of 1865 to 1876 can be said to be pivotal to the woman's movement in U.S. history. The introduction of the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. is largely thought to be a step backward. That is, as far as the goal of bringing the franchise to women and other groups not yet recognized to have a legal right to vote. In U.S. history, the right to vote for women was an agenda that went back as far as the early to mid seventeenth century, and historians trace the first legal challenge in the U.S. as occurring at that time in the state of Maryland. A one-time governor named Leonard Calvert, appointed a woman named Margaret Brent as his personal executor. Brent was an attorney which was exceptional in the seventeenth century, and found herself in 1648 petitioning the government of Maryland for the right to vote as well as the right to carry out her duties as executor. She was a property holder, and a successful attorney at the time. By 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was introduced, there had already been a significant woman's suffrage movement, and indeed, legal challenges for the right to vote [Mays 58-9]. ... Unit one as associated with post 1865 is the beginning of the period known as reconstruction, and what follows in the aftermath of the Civil War (1860-1865) is a fairly reactionary political mandate. Arguably, the period following the Civil War can be characterized as a period where a great number of concessions were made to the interests of Southerners who had been defeated in the war that was centered around the issue of slavery. During the period in question or the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the notorious â€Å"Jim Crow† legislation throughout the South had introduced a pattern of which distinct traces can still be seen in the southern states. The new laws stated that no one could vote unless a poll tax had been paid and in some places, unless the voter could pass a literacy test, too. Blacks were not allowed to use the same railway cars, schools or residential areas as whites. These laws contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment but the Supreme Court seems to h ave turned a blind eye to what these state laws meant in relation to the laws of the central government. By this time, northerners seem to have allowed themselves to feel less responsible for post-War developments in the South. Blacks would feel abandoned by the north while facing southern hatred expressed both officially and violently. As Gillett explained, even white reformers seemed more concerned by what ought to be done with Blacks, as opposed to for Blacks and with many content to state that the slaves had been freed by the northern Civil War effort and that they now must work towards their own betterment [Gillett 368]. Segregation continued in a system which managed the Black population by keeping them separate from