1. Begin by writing a response to the following question:
A. What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States of America?
2. Discuss your responses with the teacher and other students. Consider the rights and responsibilities of a citizen. How do we know what these rights and responsibilities are? Does the definition of citizen ever change? Are there different degrees of citizenship? Are different groups of citizens treated differently? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a citizen? These are the questions you will consider throughout this lesson as you examine American life during the early 19th century. The group of Americans you will focus on is women. You will see that women did have different rights and responsibilities. Your job will be to understand what some of those differences were and then why it was difficult to change them.
A. As part of this discussion, the teacher will ask you to review the fundamental values of the United States by referring to the country’s founding documents as well as the Enlightenment writings that inspired their creation. Two especially important documents for consideration are the Declaration of Independence and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Women (see Appendix A).
3. Together as a class, review the goal of this lesson:
A. Understand characteristics of life for a woman living in the United States in the early 1800s.
B. Discover the conditions that motivated women and men to join together at the first national women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
C. Understand the major goals of the Seneca Falls Convention by examining the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.
D. Discuss and determine the reasons for and against supporting the Declaration.
E. Finally, recognize both short term and long term effects of the convention including ways the nature of the term “citizen” changed.
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