Reply #123: Yes, "demand the impossible"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

At the Seneca Falls conference in 1847, women's suffrage was not even on the agenda. The conference had been convened to discuss ways of getting property rights for married women, since in those days, a woman who married ceased to exist legally, and her husband gained full control of all her possessions and property, including anything that she had worked and paid for or inherited. (That's why eighteenth and nineteenth century novels are full of men eager to marry heiresses.) A divorced woman was not only disgraced but pennyless and lost all rights ever to see her children again, even if her husband was abusive.

One delegate proposed that the ways in which the legal system was stacked against women could be rectified if women were allowed to vote.

This was such a radical idea that even the conference organizers were shocked. Why, espousing such an idea, which had never been seriously considered anywhere in the Western world, would turn the "moderates" of the day off to property rights and child custody rights.

But somehow the "radicals" prevailed, and the women's suffrage movement gots its start.

It took seventy years to get the vote nationwide, but along the way, you know what happened? American women got property rights and child custody rights and all kinds of other rights, including voting rights in some states as early as 1869, that may have taken longer if they hadn't thought big.

If you start from a radical, easily understood stance, such as "votes for women," and keep making noise about it, you get the opposition thinking, "Welll, maybe they shut up if we give them property rights."