Abigail Adams, in her letters to her husband, John Adams, asked for the men to

think of the women when writing the “New Code of Laws”. She had recognized, like

many other women at the time, that they were being treated unfairly for no apparent

reason. Her way of bringing this to the forefront, as well as potentially fixing the issue,

was to ask her husband. He was one of the people who were writing the document that

would become the declaration of independence, as well as writing the “New Code of

Laws” that they would need after freeing themselves from Great Britain. Abigail had

hoped that by contacting her husband about these issues, he might bring it up to the

other men at the conference and solve the problem. She asked that they be more

generous and favorable to them than the ancestors of the past, and to “not put such

unlimited power into the hands of the husbands”. Abigail had also stated that men are

naturally tyrannical and she was asking that they drop the “harsh title of master for the

more tender and endearing one of friend”. Unfortunately, her words had little impact on

the grand scheme of things as the men at the conference did not listen.

On a slightly more successful note is the Seneca Falls conference of 1848, which

not only addressed women’s rights but also solved many of the issues given by women

at the time. Some of the issues resolved at the Seneca Falls conference include giving

women the right to vote, having women act more decent in public than men, and having

women be placed lower at jobs than men. All of these issues and more were discussed

and resolved at the Seneca Falls conference by Lucretia Mott, Thomas McClintock,

Mary Ann McClintock, Amy Post, Catherine A. F. Stebbins, and many more. It was

extremely effective in doing what it set out to do; fighting for women’s rights.
 Another individual who fought for women’s rights was Sojourner Truth. She, in

her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a woman?”, spoke about all of the things a man can do that she

could also do to an equal degree. Are speech, while unplanned, was passionate and

filled with a drive to fight for equal rights. There are conflicting accounts of her speech,

with some even saying that she popped open her blouse, but the main message

remains unchanged. Some of the specific examples she gave were that she can eat as

much as any man, can carry as much as any man, and work as hard as any man. There

was somebody at the conference who stated that women should not have equal rights

to men because men are intellectually superior, and to that Sojourner Truth said that if a

man has a quart and a woman has a pint to let the woman fill her pint because she

won’t take more than that. Another person had stated that women should not have

equal rights because Christ was a man, to which she replied that Christ man from God

and a woman with men having nothing to do with it. She gave many more examples in

this passionate and whole-souled speech that was effective in setting ablaze the hearts

of women’s rights activists who heard it.

In conclusion, I believe that thing or person most effective was the Seneca Falls

conference. This conference actively addressed the issues in a controlled and

thought-out environment, and actually was able to resolve a lot of issues directly. Even

though it was not able to cure sexism outright, it was absolutely able to keep the ball

rolling in such a way that would help future endeavors to solve the issue.