英文解釈教室の出典を探る(63)

Chapter 10 修飾語の位置（１）

例題 10.1.2

女性の目覚めは一人の女性がきっかけだった。

…Susan B. Anthony's teachers refused to instruct her in long divison, and were at a loss to understand why a girl should want to learn it. Of course, women were not permitted to vote. The awakening of women began with the visit of Frances Wright, a Scotchwoman of advanced views, to this country in 1827. Her appearance before audiences to deliver lectures on slavery, theology, and woman's rights shocked the public, unaccustomed to seeing a woman in such a role; but her example soon aroused to action such great figures in the American feminist movement as Sarah and Angelina Grimké from South Carolina, Lucretia Mott, a Quakeress of Philadelphia, and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton of New York. Keenly alive to the humanitarian trend of the times  these women devoted their energies not only to feminism but also to antislavery, labor welfare, and temperance reform. They had to brave the fierce contempt of most of their own sex as well as that of the men, and they stood in constant peril of physical violence at the hands of mobs because of their bold and "unwomanly" conduct. In 1840 several feminine delegates from the United States were denied admission to a World's Antislavery Convention in London because of their sex. This indignity prompted the American women to resolve to launch a militant and organized crusade for equal rights; and on July 19, 1848, a woman's rights convention, the first in the history of the world, was held at Seneca Falls, New York. The delegates drew up an impressive declaration of sentiments patterned closely upon the Declaration of Independence. They asserted "that at all men and women are created equal" and demanded equality with the male sex before the law, in educational and economic opportunities, and in voting. Though greeted by the ridicule and condemnation of press and pulpit, woman's rights conventions came to be almost yearly occurrences until the outbreak of the Civil War diverted the attention of the feminist leaders for a time to other matters. The condition of wage-earners during these years differed from that of women in that they had no system of laws to batter down but new economic conditions ...

出典：Arthur M. Schlesinger, "A History of American Life",1927

（参考1）

（参考2）女流作家の活躍