Abstract
This thesis analyzed the period between the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and the Declaration of the Rights of Women (1876) and found that the American Civil War was a catalyst for change in white and black women’s rights and roles. A major part of the data came from secondary sources, although primary sources were interwoven and provided supporting evidence. All socioeconomic classes of Northern white women experienced change in their public sphere roles/status during and immediately after the Civil War. Southern white women, who started with more restricted roles and status, underwent even larger wartime and postwar changes than Northern white women. Middle and upper-class Northern black women; self-confident, networked, and educated, were involved in the public sphere with freedperson’s and black soldier’s support programs. Working and lower class Northern black women expanded their roles and activities in economic support of their families. In the late antebellum and early Civil War periods Southern enslaved black women experienced sexual assault, loss of their children to the slave market, and abuse at the hands of white slaveholders. Formerly enslaved Southern black women’s status changed by degrees after emancipation as they gained more control of when, how, and for whom they worked. The threads representing equal rights for women, sewn first in a small northern New York town in 1848, would be used to repair the torn fabric of war, resulting in a new wardrobe of women’s rights after 1865. By 1876 and thereafter, this new wardrobe would experience periods of wear and tear, but the continued fight for equality changed women’s public sphere roles and rights forever.
