Daring to Be Different: Missouri's Remarkable Owen Sisters

1. An Introduction

1 An Introduction For a female child born in the mid-1800s in St. Joseph, Missouri , or for that matter anywhere in the United States, opportunities available to her as she grew up would have been severely limited by her sex. The struggle for woman’s rights in the United States had just begun, and a long and difficult battle lay ahead for women who sought the right to own property, get an education , or work in fields long reserved for men. The right of women to vote or receive equal pay for equal work lay many years in the future. This was the period in which the Owen sisters were born and grew up. From about the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s vague longing for greater freedom became more specifically focused on issues such as access to professional and legal equality. The year 1848 is often cited as the beginning of the movement for woman’s rights. At Seneca Falls, New York, three hundred women and men gathered and developed a document called the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” which was based on concepts established in the Declaration of Independence. It included a plea to end discrimination against women in all spheres of society. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the historic document, which included the first formal demand for women’s right to vote.   Daring to Be Different Opposition to woman’s suffrage became fierce. It included the liquor interests (mostly working underground), political machines, the Catholic hierarchy and other religious leaders, and business interests. Many industrialists feared that women would use the right to vote to improve the conditions of working women. Not until 1890 did the first state—Wyoming—grant women the right to vote in all elections. In April 1919, Missouri governor Frederick D. Gardner signed a law to allow Missouri women to vote in the presidential election, and on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified by Congress, giving all women the right to vote. Only one signer of the 1848 Seneca Falls resolution lived to see women get the vote. Charlotte Woodward Pierce had been a teenager when she drove a horse-drawn wagon from her home in Waterloo, New York, to attend the historic gathering. In her lifetime she witnessed a revolution in the role of women in American society. In the 1800s, a woman’s role was largely restricted to the private sphere, where she was expected to personify the virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. The primary expectation for a girl child was marriage, usually while still in her teens, followed by the birth of a baby every two or three years until her childbearing years were over. If she came from a well-to-do family, she would be a better “catch” and have a better opportunity to marry because any property or money she had or inherited would automatically come under the control of her husband. She could not sign a contract, make a will, or sue in a court of law. Her husband could arbitrarily apprentice her children or assign them to a guardian of his choice. Any effort by married women to retain any legal identity or independence had little chance of succeeding. Middle-class women of the nineteenth century could share the economic and social status of the men but were excluded from the economic opportunities that maintained that status. The glorification of the go-getter businessman and the intrepid pioneer coexisted with an increasing restriction of middle-class women to domestic and ornamental functions. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,  An Introduction one of the early leaders in the woman’s rights movement, detailed the legal disadvantages of married women in an address to the New York legislature. A wife had “no civil existence, no social freedom. . . . She can own nothing, sell nothing. She has no right even to the wages she earns; her person, her time, her services are the property of another. . . . She can get no redress for wrongs in her own name.” Should a woman be unable or unwilling to become a wife, few alternatives were open to her. If she had acquired an education , she might look forward to teaching in elementary grades— but usually not in higher grades, which would be taught by a male teacher, however poorly qualified, if any were available. As a teacher, she would continue...