ependence, the issues of personal freedom, voting rights and individual liberty had been major points of conflict in the nations of Europe and eventually North America. Gradually, the power of kings and queens was being compromised, and the rights of common people were being recognized. England established a constitutional monarchy with an elected Parliament, and by the end of the eighteenth century both the United States and France stood as independent republics. Democracy seemed to be on the rise. Men had been given the right to vote and they were using it.
At the time, all of the hard-won democratic rights that were being granted were enjoyed only by men. It was as though women did not matter, or worse, that they were simply men's property. Conventional theory in Europe—and indeed in much of the world— held that "a woman's place was in the home" and not in the halls of public life or where public policy was ratified. A growing awareness of the inequity of women's legal inequality to men occurred somewhere before the end of the eighteenth century. In 1789 in France, Olympe de Gouges (olimp da goozh) published Declaration of the Rights of Woman, a reaction to what she considered an obvious omission from the French Revolutionists' Declaration of the Rights of Man. A petition for woman's suffrage presented to the French National Assembly that same year was refused, and in fact, the code of laws promulgated under Napoleon deprived French women of many rights they had formerly enjoyed.
At the same time, an English governess named Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), inspired by the French Revolution and Olympe de Gouges' protest, published A Susan B. Anthony, proponent of women's rights.
Vindication of the Rights of Women, which has remained a landmark text in the women's rights movement. Ms. Wollstonecraft believed that girls and women should be permitted equal access to education, that they should be allowed to hold jobs other than as maids and governesses, and that they should be allowed to become doctors and own their own businesses. Women's rights, having long been denied, became a burning issue, one that would not go away.
Progress was slow in the nineteenth century, although women were given greater access to education. In America, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) was a leader in the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements. It was not until the twentieth century, however, that women were able to exercise one of the most basic rights of a democratic society: the right to vote. Australian women gained the right in 1902, English women in 1918 and American women, through the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, on August 26, 1920, although the Territory of Wyoming had passed a women's suffrage law in 1869. French women were finally given the vote in 1945.