In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss the issue of women’s rights. Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed:
American women were autonomous individuals
who deserved their own political identities.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, that . . .
all men and women are created equal.
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam but lost momentum when the Civil War began. After the war ended, the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship. The 14th Amendment extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—
but defines “citizens” as “male.”
Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for universal suffrage. They refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by black votes.
(yikes)
The pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.
In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association, NAWSA, was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.
Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, the NAWSA unveiled what they called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last—a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country. A splinter group called the National Woman’s Party focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House picketing, for example—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.
World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument, nonetheless. Women’s work on behalf of the war effort proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.
In 1920, women won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
On November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time. After 72 years of organized struggle, American women finally achieved the same rights as men at the polling box.
