The Women's Suffrage Movement Fight for the Employment Rights

The employment of women helped them with getting better opportunities by joining labor unions, holding strikes for higher pay, and protested for better working conditions. Labor or can be called a trade union is an organization of workers dedicated to protecting members interests and improving wages, hours, and working conditions for all. For example of employment of women, going back to facts based on the Civil War, the women’s jobs were to be a stay at home mom and tend to the children, do household chores such as laundry, cooking, and more, while the men were out earning all the money to provide for the wife and kids.

After the Civil War women were able to join the workforce. The benefits to unions were that extremely helpful such as medical health, paid when sick, and retirement accounts. This was only for the union workers compared to the non-union workers that didn’t get exactly what they wanted and asked for. The non-union workers asked for better wages unlike the union workers who got paid better and treated kindly based on the hard work they did. As union workers gained a twenty percent in wages benefits wouldn’t be included bear comparison with the same jobs but weren’t supported by the unions caused it to be no higher wages for the non-union workers.

In contrast, union workers didn’t get their point across as they wished but the union votes for one representative in spite of everyone of the union to get a better chance to get what they want. Therefore, union representatives work on everyone’s behalf to get that point across for better working conditions and better pay.

Women all over strived to get higher pay until they were recognized as hard working women so with that they held strikes for higher pay out of holding protests, asking for representatives to help, and petitioning. Lucy Burns was a women’s rights advocate that was very passionate about women and their rights. She and Alice Paul are known for forming the National Woman's Party. They both were activists that wanted women to have equal rights as the men had theirs. In 1917, Alice called for members of the National Women’s Party to protest the White House to persuade the president to push the democratic senators to vote on a legal suffrage amendment. Lucy did most of leading the members to the White House to protest. Furthermore, in 1917 members were arrested on site for protesting but it was only to keep the president interested in the cause. The women eventually got sentenced. Union representatives were the voice of every worker that didn’t have the right pay, working conditions, and equality as the union workers had.

Representatives were used for personal issues occuring with the employer. The way how union representatives jobs went were like so to just give a message out and have the people in power to change the statuses of workers in the union. In contrast, of non-union employees their job was to contact the company’s human resources department for assistance. This task was difficult because the departments were apart of the company so that meant the representative was not the messenger for the workers. At the National Women’s convention women raised over 500,000 in signatures for the suffrage petition. This showed that women were dedicated to change the congress and testified it’s laws over other activities. In addition, women didn’t give up their position to fight for justice and what they believed in. Women wanted to show that they aren’t any different than men when it comes to working.

Women who protested for better working conditions not only had a help but the had to work long hours, have strict discipline, and they had low wages. While many women worked for jobs the other women stayed at home or worked for professional jobs or already had professional jobs. That led to young women to organize a protest to get better pay and working conditions. The young women working for the Boston Manufacturing Company went on strike for two days when their wages were cut in 1821. For example, in the 1830s the workers formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association to make people acknowledge that their wages were being cut so the striked until something changed. After doing so they protested about the long twelve hour work day with no breaks or anything of sort unless told to.

The actions taken to do so inquired a regular newspaper article with the details are the terrible and terrifying work experiences. The stikes weren’t always accomplished but they somehow gave a little people some sense of fairness towards these sometimes young women who were good at what they did but aren't fond of the conditions. They eventually tried making it public as they shared the negative work experiences with people who weren't aware of the poor conditions that the states of these women were in. The strict discipline that these women took to protest against the bad conditions ended up in white women refusing or electing themselves to be a stay at home wife, have a professional job at being a housewife, and this resulted in the cult of domesticity.

Women felt empowered when they were at home as a wife they felt as if the were in control in spite of a real job that they could get equally as others. For example, Catharine Beecher, she was an early feminist who suggested that all women were abnormally able to educate. As a result, her suggestives were made teaching became “feminised” so the men fled the teaching houses or also known as schools to let the women take over. Low wages in the south were brutal because African Americans were enslaved and didn’t have money to do anything even if they had worked on the plantations with long hours and poor working conditions.

Inconsistently, women were still responsible to do domestic duties or better said as housework. Lastly, women were treated unfairly and deserved better because scientifically women are generally smarter than men and women in the movement didn’t stop until they got what they wanted.