Feministing.org

Important to recall that 100 years after the country's founding, women were disenfranchised. Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States. Here are a couple of the items enumerated that men, but not women, enjoyed. 

Universal Manhood Suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.

The Judiciary of the Nation has proved itself but the echo of the party in power, by upholding and enforcing laws that are opposed to the spirit and letter of the Constitution. When the slave power was dominant, the Supreme Court decided that a black man was not a citizen, because he had not the right to vote; and when the Constitution was so amended as to make all persons citizens, the same high tribunal decided that a woman, though a citizen, had not the right to vote.16 Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people.

Even now, there are still subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) attempts to keep women in their *place*, to deny them the right to be full citizens treated as individuals, even when married. But thanks to the efforts of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, eventually, in 1920, women got the right to vote. Other rights came slowly over years. 

And now, at the close of a hundred years, as the hour hand of the great clock that marks the centuries points to 1876, we declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself – to all the opportunities and advantages life affords to her complete development; and we deny that dogma of centuries, incorporated into the codes of nations – that woman was made for man – her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will. We ask our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.

So happy on THIS July 4, 2015 to see the progress that has been made for women, people of color and LGBT. Truly wonderful to live in America.