Marilyn M. Adams What Hath Eve Wrought? or W.H.E.W.!

Annotation

What Hath Eve Wrought? or W.H.E.W! is an historical view of how the Creation story of Eve as the "sinner" in the Garden became an all important element in the nineteenth century to suppress the idea of the equality of womankind. Many women began to realize their sub-citizen status had been perpetrated for centuries by a myth, holding that all women, descendants of Eve, were relegated to a position below that of superior man. The first woman's convention, held in 1848, and led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton brought nation-wide attention to the demands for voting rights, for the social and legal rights that had been withheld from all women. Now the fear of what the equality of women would do to the long-held superiority of men became the basis for decades of gynephobia. Few of the events of the long struggle for equality have been reported in history text books; a paltry number of suffragists have been acknowledged; the words of the anti-feminist men have seldom been disclosed; the voices and deeds of the many pro-feminist men who bravely assisted in the struggle that eventually led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment surfaced late in the last century. What is presented, what is read and taught in educational institutions regarding the long fought battle for equality, must become a necessary ingredient in the discipline of American History. What Hath Eve Wrought? intends to begin that process.