Women's Rights - Week 2

           In this past week of American Studies, we learned quite a bit of history on John Adams and his viewpoint on the creation of the Declaration. We viewed a documentary that was quite informative and had lots of details regarding the Declaration and what happened inside of Congress. Another big topic we talked about in class was women's rights. We read a letter that Abigail Adams had sent to her husband, John Adams. In the letter she asked basic questions such as how is the war doing, is everything OK, and things of that fashion. But she also had a few suggestions of her own for the Declaration. She suggested to include women's rights as it was extremely important to society. She believed that without women, that men would go somewhat out of control, and all men could become tyrants if they didn't have a proper women to guide them. This ideal is somewhat similar to the Puritan ideal of man being evil, but also differs in the fact that Puritans did not give women rights at all. Near the end of the week. we read a court case involving a dispute over land and ownership of the land. In class, we got in a discussion about the Americans and how they had to send the Natives out of their home territory and into reservations, and the argument that had popped up was that, was it progress from actually killing all them. I believed it wasn't since the Americans were forced to do it, and if they did kill most of them, there would be a war at hand. And on top of that, 1/3 of the Native population died while traveling to the reservation.