As white males were discovering and outlining their inalienable rights, women were still largely trapped within a patriarchal family system, kept there by economic necessity and rigid social convention. Basically considered the property of husband or father, women were not permitted to vote, own property, operate businesses, attend colleges, or make legal decisions concerning their children or themselves. Politically aware women had already began the work to change these conditions, such as Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis, who unsuccessfully lobbied the authors of the United States Constitution to include women's rights in their plan for the new country, and Britain's Mary Wollstonecraft, who published the landmark
Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.
By the early 1800s, many progressive men and women began to join the abolitionist movement to work for the end of slavery. One liberation ideology led naturally to another, and a number of abolitionist women drew parallels between the slavery they fought and the plight of women. "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own," wrote anti-slavery activist Angelina Grimke in 1836.
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