Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Traditional history locates the birth of the women's rights movement in the nineteenth century, coinciding with the development of a women's political rights movement. Viewing any woman's written expression or individual action that strayed from the traditional patriarchal definition of female roles and behavior, however, feminist historians have broadened this scope in the last thirty years. They have shown that, though women's resistance to patriarchal dominance has not always been a movement, a level of consciousness, a firm stance, and an attitude of confidence, has done just as much as the organized, collective effort in challenging oppression. The oppositional efforts of women in the United States began with isolated radical insights and sparks of feminist consciousness expressed through the actions of individual women long before the nineteenth-century birth of the women's rights movement . The legitimization of male dominance and female subordination in colonial American society was linked to church teachings, specifically Genesis and the story of the Fall (Genesis 3:1–24). Eve's guilt in bringing about the fall of man and the loss of paradise was accepted as evidence of the natural weakness of women and God's punishment of subordination to her husband. New Testament texts most often cited derive from St. Paul, who seems to dictate women's submissiveness and public silence: ... log in or subscribe to read full text