Conceptions of equality continually changed during the nineteenth century.  Political and legal equality--the liberal struggle to secure laws that applied equally to all and to secure the right to vote--was the central concern inherited from the American and French Revolutions. One focus of this struggle was the idea that women should be included in the "political nation," in the legal category implied by the word "citizen." Despite the fact that pioneers like Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft had argued for women's rights in the era of the French Revolution, such arguments remained on the fringes of debate, since virtually all Western societies defined women's legal status in patriarchal terms; that is, a woman had almost no civic or legal rights whatever apart from her relationship to either a father or a husband. Gaining the right to vote became one goal of an emerging women's rights movement, but as documents like the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and Susan B. Anthony's speech on Wages and the Franchise (Documenting the Modern World, pp. 95-99) make clear, the struggle for women's rights implied a broad redefinition of economic, social, and political relationships based on gender. After you read the Declaration of Sentiments, examine this web site on Seneca Falls (Document 6-1), which provides interesting background on the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in upstate New York (the first of its kind) that led to the Declaration and on the people who played a role in it. The site comes from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and includes links to ortraits of early feminist leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured above). You may also want to examine this site on the Susan B. Anthony House(Document 6-2) in Rochester, New York. Today the house where Anthony lived and worked is a museum, and the site provides us with a "virtual tour" of some of its rooms. There are many web sites devoted to women's history. This site on Women and Social Movements in the United States (Document 6-3) is an excellent place to begin exploring the subject on the web.

Activists like Stanton and Anthony worked tirelessly to get the vote for American women. But success did not come until almost a generation after their deaths. (Stanton died in 1902, Anthony in 1906.) In the period leading up to World War I, women's rights activists stepped up their campaign. See, for example, the arguments of British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst (Documenting the Modern World, pp. 101-102), who justifies the use of aggressive, violent tactics to pursue the cause of women's suffrage. For more on Pankhurst, see pp. 159-160 in The Modern World, and click on this site (Pankhurst Background [Document 6-4]). The same tactics were also pursued in the United States, where activists called attention to their cause by publicly burning speeches of President Woodrow Wilson and chaining themselves to the fence outside the White House. In large part because he needed to shore up support for his war policies in 1917, President Wilson agreed to support the proposed constitutional amendment that would award women the the right to vote. It was finally ratified by the states in 1920 and became law as the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin (pictured below on the left in an illustration from a textbook printed in 1902) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, one of the most important books in modern history. Darwin's theory--that species were continually evolving from earlier and simpler forms of life over immense periods of time--challenged prevailing views of God and nature, for which the Bible had traditionally been the most authoritative source of knowledge. In 1871 he published The Descent of Man, in which he explained how human beings (not much discussed in The Origin of Species) fit into his theory. He concluded that humans are descended from "a hairy, tailed quadruped," quite likely a creature much like an ape or a baboon (see Documenting the Modern World, p. 109). While Darwin had many admirers, objections to his ideas remained (and remain) part of modern life. In 1925, John Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Tennessee, deliberately challenged a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution. The subsequent trial, known as the Scopes Trial or the "Monkey Trial," attracted world-wide attention. The highlight of the trial was a confrontation between the two lawyers, Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes (and by implication Darwin), and William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted the case for the state of Tennessee and was well-known for his religious convictions. Darrow and Bryan were enormously famous men. Their confrontation in the courtroom symbolized the confrontation between modern science and religious faith. Read the Darrow and Bryan Transcript (Document 6-5) to see how the dramatic argument between Darrow and Bryan played out during the trial. Can you imagine a similar debate today? For a detailed view of the whole event, see this comprehensive site on the Scopes Trial (Document 6-6), maintained by the law school at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. The cartoon below, which you can find at the Scopes Trial web site, was printed in a Chicago newspaper during the trial.
 
 

Darwin's theory held that the "natural selection" of species resulted from a "struggle for existence," the complex interplay of inherited characteristics and environmental conditions. If a bird had a shorter, thicker beak, in an environment where that characteristic permitted access to food better than a longer, thinner beak, then longer-beaked birds would, in the long run, not be able to reproduce and would die off. The shorter-beaked bird therefore won the struggle in a process Darwin's friend and supporter Herbert Spencer called "survival of the fittest." By the 1870s some of Darwin's readers had begun to think that the "struggle for existence" applied not just to biological species, but to human society. To these "Social Darwinists," Darwin's ideas could be applied to social classes, ethnic groups,  racial groups, and nations. Thus a writer like the American Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner could say that "millionaires are a product of natural selection" (Documenting the Modern World, p. 113), and the British imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes argued that the "Anglo-Saxon race" should rule the whole world (Documenting the Modern World, p. 88). At a time when Europeans were conquering vast empires, their industrial civilization far outstripped the technologies of non-Western peoples, and immense gaps between rich and poor characterized their own societies, Social Darwinism distorted a scientific theory into a justification of existing relations of power based on class, nation, and race. The racial--and racist--dimension of Social Darwinism gained great appeal toward the end of the nineteenth century, influenced by earlier writers like Joseph Arthur Gobineau (Documenting the Modern World, p. 111-112). Some Social Darwinists came to believe that human societies should be shaped and molded in the same way dogs or roses are bred. This was the "science" of Eugenics  (Document 6-7), the conviction that human populations can be controlled by encourgaing the "fittest" to reproduce and preventing the "weaker," less fit from taking up valuable resources. This site on Francis Galton (Document 6-8), the man who founded the American eugenics movement in 1883, contains fascinating photographs. Examine the material on this site, especially the photographs. What does this visual evidence tell you about the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century?