history of women's right to vote informative essay

Background Essay: Gaining the Right to Vote

Directions:

Keep these discussion questions in mind as you read the background essay, making marginal notes as desired. Respond to the reflection and analysis questions at the end of the essay.

Discussion Questions

• How had the work of women to end slavery helped them develop skills that would ultimately be useful in the women’s suffrage struggle?
• What might be meant by the term, “the conscience of the nation,” and how did the fight against slavery help demonstrate that concept?
• What arguments might have been made against women’s suffrage?
• Why were Western states the first to grant suffrage to women?

Introduction

After the Civil War, the nation was finally poised to extend the promise of liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence to newly emancipated African Americans. But the women’s suffrage movement was split: Should women push to be included in the Fifteenth Amendment? Should they wait for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be adopted before turning to women’s suffrage, or should they seize the moment and demand the vote now? Not content to wait, Susan B. Anthony and other workers in the movement engaged in civil disobedience to wake the conscience of a nation. Meanwhile, railroads opened the West to settlement, and Western territories tried to boost population by offering votes for women.

Life for women in the mid-nineteenth century was as diverse as it is now. What was considered socially appropriate behavior for women varied widely across the country, based on region, social class, and other factors. Branches of the women’s suffrage movement disagreed regarding tactics, and some women (and many men) did not even believe women’s suffrage was appropriate or necessary. Ideals of the Cult of Domesticity, in which women were believed to possess the natural virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, were still a powerful influence on culture. An important debate and split in the women’s suffrage movement between a state and national strategy emerged during this period.

The Cult of True Womanhood

The Cult of Domesticity, also known as the Cult of True Womanhood, affirmed the idea that natural differences between the sexes meant women, especially those of the upper and middle classes, were too delicate for work outside the home. According to this view, such women were more naturally suited to parenting, teaching, and making homes, which were their natural “sphere,” happy and peaceful for their families. In other words, it was unnatural and unladylike for women to work outside the home.

Educator and political activist Catharine Beecher wrote in 1871, “Woman’s great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures [children] to obey the laws of God . . . first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world.” For Beecher and other writers, the role of homemaker was held up as an honored and dignified position for women, worthy of high esteem. Their contribution to public life would include managing the home in a manner that would support their husbands. According to this conception of the roles of men and women, men were considered to be exhausted, soiled, and corrupted by their participation in work and politics, and needed a peaceful, pure home life to enable them to recover their virtue.

Increasingly, women found their political voice through their work in social reform movements. Jane Addams, co-founder with Helen Gates Starr of Hull House and pioneer of social work in America, wrote in 1902, “The sphere of morals is the sphere of action . . . It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that ‘Ethics’ is but another word for ‘righteousness . . . ’” She noted that, to solve problems related to the needs of children, public health, and other social concerns that affected the home, women needed the vote.

In keeping with the feminine ideals of piety and purity, many women continued work within the temperance movement to campaign against the excesses of drunkenness. This cause was considered a socially permissible moral effort through which women could participate in public life, because of the damaging effects of alcohol abuse on the family. Annie Wittenmyer, a social reformer and war widow from Ohio who had reported on terrible hospital conditions during the Civil War, founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 to build support for the idea of abstaining from alcohol use.

According to the tradition of Republican Motherhood, education should prepare girls to become mothers who raised educated citizens for the republic. In a challenge to the Cult of Domesticity, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of broader academic opportunities for upper class females of college age in the United States. In the Northeast, liberal arts schools modeled after Wesleyan College (1836) in Macon, Georgia, opened. In 1844, Hillsdale College opened in Michigan, one of the first American colleges whose charter prohibited any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded in 1861, and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, founded in 1875, also expanded educational opportunities for women. Teaching was among the first professions women entered in large numbers. During and after the Civil War, new opportunities also developed for women to become nurses.

New York City — The sewing-room at A.T. Stewart’s, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, Broadway and Fourth Avenue / Hyde, 1875. Library of Congress.

The Changing Roles of Women

While these career options did not radically challenge the cultural ideal of traditional womanhood, the work landscape of America was changing. As the United States economy grew to provide more options, people began to see themselves as consumers as well as producers. Indeed, mass consumerism drove new manufacturing methods. During the second industrial revolution, the United States started moving from an agricultural economy toward incorporating new modes of production, manufacturing, and consumer behavior.

Young working-class women worked in the same laundries, factories, and textile mills as poor and immigrant men, often spending twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in hot, dangerous conditions. Also, women found work as store clerks in the many new department stores that opened to sell factory-made clothing and other mass-produced items.

The Suffrage Movement Grows

Women continued to work to secure their right to vote. The Civil War ended in April of 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified eight months later, banning slavery throughout the United States. A burning question remained: How would the rights of former slaves be protected? As the nation’s attention turned to civil rights and voting with the debates surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, many women hoped to seize the opportunity to gain the vote alongside African American men.

The Civil War had forced women’s suffrage advocates to pause their efforts toward winning the vote, but in 1866 they came together at the eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York. The group voted to call itself the American Equal Rights Association and work for the rights of all Americans. Appealing to the Cult of Domesticity, they argued that giving women the vote would improve government by bringing women’s virtues of piety and purity into politics, resulting in a more civilized, “maternal commonwealth.”

The Movement Splits

The American Equal Rights Association seemed poised for success with such well-known leaders as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass. But internal divisions soon became clear. Whose rights should be secured first? Some, especially former abolitionist leaders, wanted to wait until newly emancipated African American men had been given the vote before working to win it for women. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley urged, “This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation . . . I conjure you to remember that this is ‘the negro’s hour,’ and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims.” Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe agreed.

But for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the time for women also was now. Along with many others, they saw the move to put the cause of women’s suffrage on hold as a betrayal of both the principles of equality and republicanism. Frederick Douglass, who saw suffrage for African American men as a matter of life or death, challenged Anthony on this question, asking whether she believed granting women the vote would truly do anything to change the inequality under law between the sexes. Without missing a beat, Anthony responded:

“ It will change the nature of one thing very much, and that is the dependent condition of woman. It will place her where she can earn her own bread, so that she may go out into the world an equal competitor in the struggle for life.”

In the wake of this bitter debate, not one but two national organizations for women’s suffrage were established in 1869. Stone and Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Worried that the Fifteenth Amendment would not pass if it included votes for women, the AWSA put their energy into convincing the individual states to give women the vote in their state constitutions. Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). They worked to win votes for women via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution at the same time as it would protect the right of former slaves to vote. Anthony and Stanton started the NWSA’s newspaper, The Revolution, in 1868. Its motto was, “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

The NWSA was a broad coalition that included some progressives who questioned the fitness of African Americans and immigrants to vote because of the prevailing views of Social Darwinism. The racism against black males voting was especially prevalent in the South where white women supported women’s suffrage as a means of preserving white supremacy. In addition, throughout the country strong sentiment reflected the view that any non-white or immigrant individual was racially inferior and too ignorant to vote. In this vein, Anthony and Stanton used racially charged language in advocating for an educational requirement to vote. Unfortunately for many, universal suffrage challenged too many of their assumptions about the prevailing social structure.

Photograph of Lucy Stone between 1840 and 1860. Library of Congress.

The New Departure: Testing the Fourteenth Amendment

But there was another amendment which interested NWSA: the Fourteenth. In keeping with NWSA’s more confrontational approach, Anthony decided to test the meaning of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment. The Amendment stated in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” Anthony thought it was clear that this language protected the right of women to vote. After all, wasn’t voting a privilege of citizens?

The Fourteenth Amendment went on to state that representation in Congress would be reduced for states which denied the vote to male inhabitants over 21. In other words, states could choose to deny men over 21 the vote, but they would be punished with proportionally less representation (and therefore less power) in Congress. So in the end, the Fourteenth Amendment encouraged states to give all men over 21 the vote, but did not require it. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, banned states from denying the vote based on race, color, or having been enslaved in the past.

Susan B. Anthony on Trial

It was the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “privileges or immunities” that Anthony decided to test. On November 5, 1872, she and two dozen other women walked into the local polling place in Rochester, New York, and cast a vote in the presidential election. (Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant.) She was arrested and charged with voting in a federal election “without having a lawful right to vote.”

Before her trial, 52-year-old Anthony traveled all over her home county giving a speech entitled “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” In it, she called on all her fellow citizens, from judges to potential jurors, to support equal rights for women.

At her trial, Anthony’s lawyer pointed out the unequal treatment under the law:

“ If this same act [voting] had been done by her brother, it would have been honorable. But having been done by a woman, it is said to be a crime . . . I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned [accused] in a criminal court merely on account of her sex.”

The judge refused to let Anthony testify in her own defense, found her guilty of voting without the right to do so, and ordered her to pay a $100 fine. Anthony responded:

“ In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored . . . I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women.” She concluded by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Anthony’s case did not make it all the way to the Supreme Court. However, the Court did rule three years later in a different case, Minor v. Happersett (1875), that voting was not among the privileges or immunities of citizens and the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect a woman’s right to vote.

A caricature of Susan B. Anthony that appeared in a New York newspaper right before her trial. Thomas Wust, June 5, 1873. Library of Congress.

Suffrage in the West

While Anthony and other suffragists were agitating in the Northeast, railroads had helped open up the Great Plains and the American West to settlement. The Gold Rush of 1849 had enticed many thousands of settlers to the rugged West, and homesteading pioneers continued to push the frontier. These territories (and later states), were among the first to give women the right to vote: Wyoming Territory in 1869, followed by Utah Territory (1870), and Washington Territory (1883).

These territories had many reasons for extending suffrage to women, most related to the need to increase population. They would need to meet minimum population requirements to apply for statehood, and the free publicity they would get for giving women the vote might bring more people. And they did not just need more people—they needed women: There were six males for every female in some places. Some were motivated to give white women the vote to offset the influence of African American votes. And finally, there were, of course, those who genuinely believed that giving women the vote was the right thing to do.

Though several western legislatures had considered proposals to give women the vote since the 1850s, in 1869 Wyoming became the first territory to give women full political rights, including voting and eligibility to hold public office. In 1870, Louisa Garner Swain was the first woman in Wyoming to cast a ballot, and a life-sized statue honors her memory in Laramie.

Under territorial government, Wyoming’s population had grown slowly and most people lived on ranches or in small towns. Territorial leaders believed Wyoming would be more attractive to newcomers once statehood was achieved, as had been the case in other western states. The territory came close to reaching the threshold of 60,000 people for statehood, but many doubted whether that number had actually been reached.

Territorial Governor Francis E. Warren refused to wait for more people to move there. He set in motion the plans for a constitutional convention. Though they had the right to do so, no women ran for seats at the Wyoming constitutional convention. Borrowing passages from other state constitutions, delegates quickly drafted the constitution in September 1889. The new element of this constitution is that it enshrined the protections of women’s political rights by simply stating that equality would exist without reference to gender. Only one delegate, Louis J. Palmer, objected to women’s suffrage. Wyoming voters approved the document in November, and the territory applied for statehood.

In the House of Representatives there was some opposition, mostly from Democrats, because the territory was known to lean Republican. Debate did not openly center on party affiliation, but on a combination of doubts about whether Wyoming had truly achieved the required population and on reluctance to admit a state where women had political rights. In response, Wyoming’s legislature sent a telegram: “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women!” Wyoming officially joined the union in 1890, becoming the 44th state. Anthony praised Wyoming for its adherence to the nation’s Founding principles: “Wyoming is the first place on God’s green earth which could consistently claim to be the land of the free!”

Representative Women, seven prominent figures of the suffrage and women’s rights movement. Clockwise from the top: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Marie Child, Susan B. Anthony, Grace Greenwood, and Anna E. Dickinson (center). L. Schamer; L. Prang & Co. publisher, 1870. Library of Congress.

REFLECTION AND ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

• What was the Cult of True Womanhood, or Cult of Domesticity?
• How did the Industrial Revolution challenge the notion that upper- and middle-class women’s bodies were too delicate for work outside the home?
• Describe the events leading to the split in the women’s movement in 1869.
• What are some actions in which Susan B. Anthony worked for the cause of women’s suffrage in a very personal way?
• The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified
• Susan B. Anthony is jailed for voting
• Western territories give women the vote
• Other (explain)
• Principles: equality, republican/representative government, popular sovereignty, federalism, inalienable rights, freedom of speech/press/assembly
• Virtues: perseverance, contribution, moderation, resourcefulness, courage, respect, justice

03 Nov 2001 Susan B. Anthony on a Woman’s Right to Vote – 1873

Woman’s Rights to the Suffrage

by Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

This speech was delivered in 1873, after Anthony was arrested, tried and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election. 

Friends and Fellow Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people–women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government–the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household–which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century. Learn More About Us Subscribe to Our Updates

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• 20th Century: Post-1945
• 20th Century: Pre-1945
• African American History
• Antebellum History
• Asian American History
• Civil War and Reconstruction
• Colonial History
• Cultural History
• Early National History
• Economic History
• Environmental History
• Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy
• History of Science and Technology
• Labor and Working Class History
• Late 19th-Century History
• Latino History
• Legal History
• Native American History
• Political History
• Pre-Contact History
• Religious History
• Revolutionary History
• Slavery and Abolition
• Southern History
• Urban History
• Western History
• Women's History
• Share Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

The woman suffrage movement in the united states.

• Rebecca J. Mead Rebecca J. Mead Department of History, Northern Michigan University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.17
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Woman suffragists in the United States engaged in a sustained, difficult, and multigenerational struggle: seventy-two years elapsed between the Seneca Falls convention (1848) and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). During these years, activists gained confidence, developed skills, mobilized resources, learned to maneuver through the political process, and built a social movement. This essay describes key turning points and addresses internal tensions as well as external obstacles in the U.S. woman suffrage movement. It identifies important strategic, tactical, and rhetorical approaches that supported women’s claims for the vote and influenced public opinion, and shows how the movement was deeply connected to contemporaneous social, economic, and political contexts.

• woman suffrage
• voting rights
• women’s rights
• women’s movements
• constitutional amendments

Winning woman suffrage in the United States was a long, arduous process that required the dedication and hard work of several generations of women. Before the Civil War, most activists were radical pioneers frequently involved in the antislavery or other reform movements. Later, educational advances and the growth of the women’s-club movement mobilized large numbers of middle-class women, while wage work and trade-union participation galvanized working-class women. In the early 20th century , woman suffrage became a mass movement that effectively utilized modern publicity and outreach methods. Woman suffrage was never a “gift.” Skillful organization, mobilization, and activism were required to build a powerful social movement and achieve the long-sought goal.

Woman suffrage was a radical idea in the 19th century . Suffrage for non-elite white men was still limited in most countries and became the norm in the United States only in the decades before the Civil War—a time when women and people of color were considered deficient in the rational capacities and independent judgment necessary for responsible citizenship. Woman suffrage challenged the legal principle of coverture, which subsumed a married woman’s political and economic identity into her husband’s; it also challenged dominant gender roles that confined women to the domestic sphere. Additionally, suffragists often associated themselves with other radical or reformist political groups who supported the demand as a basic right, a strategy for enhancing democracy, or a practical way to gain allies.

Women’s Status and Women’s Rights in the New Republic

Prior to the American Revolution, property restrictions limited even white male suffrage. Yet some colonial women voted if they paid taxes, owned property, or functioned as independent heads of households, although this was uncommon. The idea of universal suffrage (i.e., voting rights for all citizens) arose from the democratic ideology of the Enlightenment. Revolutionary rhetoric did not automatically result in equal citizenship rights, but it did provide powerful philosophical arguments that supported future struggles. In 1776 , New Jersey enfranchised “all inhabitants” who were worth “fifty pounds” and had resided in the county for a year prior to an election. Coverture still prevented married New Jersey women from voting. But especially after 1797 , unmarried women voted with enough frequency to generate complaints about “petticoat electors” who played critical roles in contested elections, and in 1807 New Jersey disenfranchised women altogether as well as African Americans and aliens. 1

The American Revolution gave rise to the ideal of the “Republican Mother” who educated her children to become future citizens and exerted beneficial moral influences within her family, an ideal that ultimately held important implications for citizenship and voting. To meet the new country’s need for responsible citizens, many schools were established for women (although they did not meet the standards of comparable men’s schools), while the expansion of public elementary education increased the demand for female teachers. By definition, women farmers, slaves, textile-mill operatives, and indigents could not meet emerging middle-class norms of female domesticity. 2

Rapid economic, political, and social change exacerbated prostitution, excessive alcohol consumption, and other problems associated with poverty, particularly in the urbanizing northeast. In response, some urban middle-class women became involved in “moral reform” societies, the most significant of which was the antislavery movement. Both white and African American abolitionist women formed female antislavery societies, but they were criticized when they assumed public roles. Most famously, when Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the transplanted daughters of a slave owner, began to speak before large mixed-race and mixed-sex (“promiscuous”) audiences, they were harshly, even violently, attacked. When the Massachusetts Council of Congregational Ministers issued a pastoral letter in 1837 denouncing their behavior as unwomanly, the sisters responded by defending equality of conscience, emphasizing the importance of female participation in the abolitionist movement, and drawing parallels between slavery and the disadvantaged status of women. 3

The Seneca Falls Convention and the Beginnings of an Organized Women’s Movement

Elizabeth Cady was already deeply embedded in various reform networks in upstate New York when she married fellow activist Henry Stanton and accompanied him to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840 . At the meeting, a fierce debate erupted over seating female delegates, and the women were forced to retreat to the gallery, where William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent and radical of the American abolitionists, joined them in protest. Furious, Stanton discussed this injustice with another attendee, Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott, and the two conceived the idea of holding a women’s-rights convention. For the next few years, Stanton was preoccupied with her growing family, but she and Mott met again in 1848 and decided to organize a women’s-rights convention in the small town of Seneca Falls. They placed an announcement in the local newspaper and were astonished when 300 people showed up (including 40 men, most notably Frederick Douglass, a former slave and the country’s most prominent black abolitionist). Stanton opened the meeting by reading the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document she had prepared by adapting the Declaration of Independence to address women’s issues. Stanton listed many grievances, including lack of access to education, employment opportunities, and an independent political voice for women. Companion resolutions were all approved unanimously except the demand for woman suffrage, which passed by a small margin after a vigorous discussion. The convention at Seneca Falls is traditionally seen as the beginning of the American women’s-rights movement, as well as launching Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s long career as its premier intellectual force. The enthusiasm generated at Seneca Falls quickly led to more women’s-rights conventions. Beginning in 1850 , similar gatherings were held nearly every year of the decade. 4

Conventions and new women’s-rights publications, including The Lily (Amelia Bloomer) and The Una (Paulina Wright Davis), helped activists stay in contact, discuss ideas, develop leadership skills, gain publicity, and attract new recruits, including Susan B. Anthony, a Quaker, temperance activist, and abolitionist. Initial efforts focused on convincing state legislatures to rectify married women’s legal disadvantages with regard to property rights, child guardianship, and divorce. In 1854 , Anthony traveled throughout New York State, organized a petition drive, planned a women’s-rights convention, and secured a hearing before the legislature that was addressed by Stanton. Thus Anthony and Stanton began their fifty-year partnership.

1a. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ca 1891. Their partnership lasted for over 50 years, although neither lived to see the final accomplishment of their goal.

1b. “The Apotheosis of Suffrage” (1896). Stanton and Anthony’s founding role in the women rights movements is acknowledged by their elevation to the national pantheon by their NAWSA colleagues.

Other important early white activists included Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Clarina Howard Nichols, and Frances Gage. Important African American suffragists included Sojourner Truth, Sarah Redmond, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Amelia Shadd, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Harriet Forten Purvis, Charlotte Forten, and Margaretta Forten. 5 The early women’s-rights movement included both black and white activists, yet relations sometimes became tense when white women ignored or appropriated African American experiences to suit their own purposes. For example, at a women’s-rights convention in 1851 , Sojourner Truth made brief remarks describing the hard work of slave women and citing religious examples to support women’s rights. Some accounts report resistance to allowing Truth to speak and introducing slavery references, but convention president Frances Gage intervened. Gage subsequently edited and reported Truth’s speech in the form of the famous “Ain’t I a Woman” version, which is problematic in its use of dialect and other editorial interventions. 6 After the Civil War, connections between race and gender equity became more problematic as racial attitudes hardened. Racial violence escalated during Reconstruction and continued for decades, while legal discrimination became firmly entrenched, legitimated by scientific racialist theories.

Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and Woman Suffrage

Women’s-rights advocates interrupted their efforts during the Civil War to concentrate on war work, but subsequent debates over the Reconstruction Amendments created new opportunities to reintroduce demands for women’s enfranchisement. Woman suffragists objected strenuously when the Fourteenth Amendment defined national citizenship and voting requirements by introducing the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. The Fifteenth Amendment established the right of freed black men to vote, but failed to extend the vote to any women, creating a controversy that split the suffrage movement. Some suffragists, including Lucy Stone, her husband and fellow reformer Henry Blackwell, and most (but not all) prominent black activists supported the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that black men needed the vote more urgently than women did, and expressing concerns that woman suffrage might prevent the amendment from passing. Stanton and Anthony vehemently disagreed and publicly opposed the amendment as they continued to demand universal suffrage. The American Equal Rights Association (AERA), organized in 1866 to promote both causes, supported the Reconstruction Amendments, and proposed the submission of a separate woman-suffrage amendment, first introduced as a Senate resolution in December 1868 . 7

In 1867 , the AERA became involved in two Kansas state suffrage referenda relating to woman and African American suffrage amendments. Stone, Blackwell, Stanton, and Anthony all actively participated, but the growing rift among suffragists soon became evident. The AERA tried to link the issues of black and women’s rights, but suffragists were disappointed when the Republican Party publicly opposed the woman-suffrage referendum. Stanton and Anthony’s overtures to dissenting Democrats—especially George Francis Train, an Irish Democrat, controversial financier, and outspoken racist, generated additional controversy. After a bitter struggle, the Kansas referenda for woman and black suffrage both failed. This crucial campaign effectively severed the connection between voting rights for blacks and women. 8

Convinced by their Kansas experiences that male political support was unreliable, Stanton and Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), an independent women’s-rights organization under female leadership, in 1869 . Several months later, Stone, Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and others established the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Initially these two groups pursued different strategies. A federal woman-suffrage amendment seemed unlikely to pass, so the AWSA concentrated on changing state constitutions. The NWSA articulated a broader women’s-rights agenda and sought suffrage at the federal level. The two organizations worked independently until they merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 . Each group published a women’s-rights journal. With Train’s financial backing, Anthony founded The Revolution early in 1868 and published many articles related to the problems of working women, prostitution, the sexual double standard, discriminatory divorce laws, criticisms of established religion, and denunciations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Revolution was very influential but unable to compete with the Woman’s Journal , introduced by the AWSA in 1870 . Although the Woman’s Journal was widely read until it ceased publication in 1931 , it was only one of many women’s-rights periodicals published during this period. 9

As part of its federal strategy, the NWSA also proposed a bold reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the “New Departure,” arguing that suffrage was a right of national citizenship and since women were citizens they should be able to vote. The Revolution urged women to go to their local polls and use the New Departure argument to try to vote, and a few succeeded. Anthony’s own attempt led to her trial and conviction for violating election laws, but she was not punished (except for a $50 fine, which she refused to pay), eliminating the possibility of legal appeal. In 1875 , the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the New Departure, reasoning in Minor v. Happersett . A Missouri suffrage leader, Virginia Minor, had sued the state for the right to vote, but the court unanimously held that while Minor was indeed a citizen, the right to vote was not one of the “privileges and immunities” that the Constitution granted to citizens. 10

The national woman-suffrage organizations were influential, but there were many independent, often regional, journalists and activists who addressed women’s rights during the postwar period. Few were as colorful or sensational as Victoria Woodhull, who addressed the House Judiciary Committee in 1871 —the first woman ever to do so—and made powerful constitutional arguments that persuaded a minority of representatives. Both Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, aroused controversy. At various times one or both were journalists, stockbrokers, Spiritualists, and labor activists, but Woodhull’s public advocacy of “free love” generated the most vehement criticism. Her basic position was that the right to divorce, remarry, and bear children should be individual decisions, but most of her contemporaries considered these ideas quite scandalous. Woodhull ran for president in 1872 as the nominee of the Equal Rights party, the first woman to do so. Initially Woodhull received some support from other suffragists, but as her notoriety grew, so did suffragists’ concerns about being compromised by association, and many began to repudiate or distance themselves from her ideas and activities (at least in public). 11

Social Change, Women’s Organizations, and Suffrage in the Late 19th Century

Many women became interested in suffrage through their membership in other activities and organizations, especially as a result of the rapid growth of the women’s-club movement. When the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) was established in 1890 , it represented 200 groups and 20,000 women; by 1900 , the GFWC claimed 150,000 members. Often initiated for educational or cultural purposes, discussions frequently turned to social issues such as child welfare, temperance, poverty, and public health. Women who became interested in reform soon realized that they had little political influence without the vote. The GFWC did not officially endorse suffrage until 1914 , however, because the diversity of its constituent groups made the subject contentious and consensus difficult.

African American clubwomen, barred from membership in white women’s organizations, formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 . In addition to community work and suffrage agitation, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and other prominent black women challenged contemporary negative stereotypes about African Americans and worked to increase public awareness of racial segregation, disfranchisement, and violence.

2. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (L) and Mary Church Terrell (R). Both women were prominent African American journalists and activists. Both were founding members of the NAACP and active in NAWSA. Among their many achievements, Wells-Barnett established the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, while Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women.

Many white women were indifferent to these issues, however, and some openly expressed the prejudices of the dominant society in their exclusionary rhetoric and organizational policies. 12

The largest of the many new national women’s organizations was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), established in 1874 . Under the dynamic leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU emphasized the impact of alcohol abuse on women and families in its agenda of “home protection,” but quickly adopted a much broader social-welfare program, established alliances with labor and reform groups, and supported woman suffrage as a means to achieve its goals. Liquor-control efforts provoked powerful opposition, leading many woman suffragists to distance themselves publicly from the temperance movement even as they appreciated the dedication of WCTU suffragists. 13

The expansion of women’s opportunities for higher education provided another catalyst for suffrage activism. In addition to the many public agricultural and technical colleges established under the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act, the establishment of a number of private women’s colleges began with Vassar in 1861 . Believing that education would be the key to women’s advancement, founders and administrators set high standards and offered curricula very similar to those at men’s institutions. After graduation, many women who found themselves largely excluded from professional training and employment opportunities channeled their skills and energies into civic engagement and social reform, especially with the rapid expansion of the American settlement house movement after the establishment of Hull House in Chicago in 1889 . As community centers located in poor neighborhoods, settlement houses offered a variety of classes and services, but when social workers realized that their efforts alone could not eradicate problems related to chronic poverty, many became active in reform politics. In addition, new protective and industrial associations tried to help impoverished working women living alone in the cities. While middle-class moral judgments often alienated their intended beneficiaries, these efforts began to establish ties with working-class constituencies and labor organizations that would eventually gain support for woman suffrage. 14

As industrial development, urbanization, and immigration increased, the growing numbers of women in the work force provided new arguments for woman suffrage. Working men understood that few working-class women could depend upon adequate male support, but they were hostile to low-wage female competition because it undermined their own abilities to fulfill the dominant male gender role of family breadwinner. The skilled trades and craft unions discouraged or discriminated against women, although the more progressive Knights of Labor included minorities and women. Urban working-class men were understandably reluctant to grant more power to middle-class women who condemned them as dirty, drunken immigrants and/or violent radicals. Their opposition defeated many state campaigns until working-class suffragists began to characterize the vote as a way to protect female wage earners and to empower the working class as a whole. 15

These socioeconomic and political developments would eventually strengthen support for woman suffrage, but suffragists still faced enormous difficulties. Small, poorly funded groups gathered signatures on petitions and lobbied state legislators to authorize public referenda on the right of women to vote. When successful, they faced the daunting challenge of organizing a statewide campaign. Many suffragists were politically inexperienced and criticized for violating prescriptive gender norms, but over time they built organizations, developed management and leadership skills, articulated effective arguments, and learned to maneuver through the political system. They experienced many disappointing defeats in the process: between 1870 and 1910 , seventeen states held referenda on woman suffrage, but most failed. By 1911 , only twenty-nine states allowed some form of partial woman suffrage: school, tax, bond, municipal, primary, or presidential. Partial suffrage was better than nothing, but it reduced the pressure for full suffrage and did not always motivate women to vote; when women did not turn out to vote, opponents asserted that they were not interested in politics. 16

Women Win the Vote in the West

Reviewing the record in 1916 , NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt counted 480 state legislative campaigns and forty-one state referenda resulting in only nine state or territorial victories, all in the western United States. 17 Indeed, by the end of 1914 , almost every western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens.

3. “The Awakening” by Henry Mayer (1915). This poster highlights the significance of the western woman suffrage state victories, which enfranchised four million women in the region and established important examples and precedents.

These western successes stand in profound contrast to the east, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment ( 1920 ), and to the South, where no women could vote and most African American men were effectively disfranchised. Early explanations attributed this unusual history to a putative “frontier” effect (a combination of greater female freedom and respect for women’s contributions to regional development), or western boosterism (efforts to attract settlers), but these reasons are too simplistic. 18 Western women gained the right to vote largely due to the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by western women. The success of woman suffrage required building a strong movement, but it was inseparable from the larger political environment, and the west provided suffragists with unusual opportunities. 19

Initially the territorial status of most western areas gave Congress and tiny territorial legislatures the power to decide who could vote. Every application for statehood required a proposed constitution, and the process always involved debates about voting qualifications. Wyoming Territory surprised the nation by adopting woman suffrage in 1869 , although its reasons for doing so remain unclear since there were some dedicated individuals, but no organized movement and little prior discussion. Most likely, the Democratic legislature hoped to embarrass the Republican governor, who signed the bill partly in deference to his wife. In Utah woman suffrage became entangled in the polygamy controversy. Determined to abolish this practice, some Republicans in the U.S. Congress suggested the enfranchisement of Utah women so that they could vote against polygamy. State Democratic Mormon politicians believed correctly that Utah women would vote to support polygamy and authorized woman suffrage in 1870 . In 1887 , Congress punitively disfranchised all Utah voters until the Mormons repudiated polygamy in 1890 , and the church leadership capitulated. The men of Utah were re-enfranchised in 1893 , but women had to wait until statehood in 1896 . In 1883 , the Washington territorial legislature passed a woman suffrage with bipartisan support, as an experiment which could be corrected, if necessary, when Washington became a state. Feeling threatened, vice and liquor interests organized a series of court challenges until the territorial supreme court finally dismissed the law in 1888 . Delegates to the 1889 constitutional convention refused to include the provision because they feared rejection by Congress, but the convention authorized separate suffrage and prohibition referenda on the ratification ballot. Organizers had little time to prepare for statewide campaigns, and both measures met firm defeat. 20

In the 1890s, the rise of the Populist movement provided the context for the first two successful state referenda in Colorado ( 1893 ) and Idaho ( 1896 ). Largely characterized as a western agrarian insurgency advocating an anti-monopoly and democratization agenda, Populism arose from predecessor organizations, such as the Grange and the Farmers Alliances, in which women were actively involved. At the state level, Populist suffragists had some success convincing their colleagues, but at the national level Populists sacrificed their more radical demands to gain broader support, especially after they merged with the Democratic Party in 1896 . Woman suffrage referenda failed in South Dakota in 1890 , and in Kansas and Washington in 1894 despite energetic efforts. NAWSA organizer Carrie Chapman Catt rose to national prominence as a result of her work in the 1893 Colorado campaign, and in 1896 , Susan B. Anthony personally took charge in California. During these campaigns, Anthony and other suffragists made strenuous and sometimes successful efforts to gain endorsements from political parties, but they already knew from bitter experience that unless all the parties supported the measure, the issue of woman suffrage succumbed to divisive partisanship. 21

Challenges and Opportunities at the Turn of the Century

These disappointments had a chilling effect on the suffrage movement leading to a period sometimes described as “the doldrums.” The older first-generation radicals passed on (Stanton died in 1902 , Anthony in 1906 ), and most of the younger leaders (e.g., Rachel Foster Avery, May Wright Sewall, and Harriet Taylor Upton)—privileged women who shared prevailing notions about proper female behavior and resisted radical public-outreach methods—failed to bring innovative new ideas and strategies to the movement. They also alienated key constituencies by complaining publicly that they could not vote but “inferior” (racial-ethnic, working-class, immigrant) men could. Suffrage leaders used economic arguments focused on the growing population of “self-supporting women,” but they rarely cooperated with working-class women and usually chose avoidance or discrimination over collaboration with African American suffragist colleagues. 22

In the 1890s, NASWA turned its attention to the South. Activists in that region’s nascent movement argued that enfranchising white women would provide a gentler way to maintain white supremacy than the harsh measures being implemented to disfranchise African American men. Anti-black sentiments had marred the suffrage movement for many years. Indeed, Southern suffragists like Kate Gordon and Laura Clay protested that the presence of African American women in the suffrage movement undermined their strategy of enfranchising and mobilizing white women to outvote African Americans in order to preserve white hegemony. Personally uncomfortable with these attitudes, Anthony endeavored to keep the race issue separate from woman suffrage, but she did so by reluctantly endorsing “educated suffrage” (i.e., literacy qualifications) and rejecting appeals for help from black suffragists. She even asked her old friend, Frederick Douglass, not to attend the 1895 NAWSA convention in Atlanta for fear of offending southern suffragists. In New Orleans in 1903 , the NAWSA convention excluded black suffragists and approved of literacy requirements, though it was already clear that this “southern strategy” was not working. In the 1890s, southern states passed many measures to disfranchise black men but firmly rejected woman suffrage even with literacy and other restrictions attached. NAWSA retreated from blatant racism and from hopeless Southern state campaigns, but continued to tolerate segregationist policies within the organization and blocked efforts to address issues of racial injustice. NAWSA’s racist practices persisted throughout the struggle for a federal woman suffrage amendment and into the ratification process partly due to the difficulty of overcoming the implacable opposition of conservative states’ rights Southern politicians. 23

During the 1890s, state anti-suffrage organizations began to form, and the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was established in New York in 1911 . Suffragists routinely blamed their losses on the “liquor interests” (although political bosses and manufacturers also worried about the consequences of enfranchising reform-minded women) and dismissed women who opposed suffrage as pawns of these interests, but this was not always the case. Some female anti-suffragists supported reform more broadly, belonged to the same clubs as suffragists, and adopted many of the same innovative public-outreach and mass-marketing techniques. Yet many anti-suffragists opposed enfranchisement because they believed that direct female engagement in the dirty business of party politics and voting would deprive women of their claims to moral superiority and nonpartisanship. 24

Modern Suffragists and the Progressive Movement

By 1900 , a new generation of suffragists was growing impatient with what they perceived as timid leaders and tired, ineffective methods and began to employ more assertive public tactics. It was a period of massive political discontent throughout the entire country as many people felt disoriented by rapid modernization and concerned about its consequences. Ideas that had seemed too radical or regional when articulated by Populists in the 1890s now found mainstream support among middle-class urbanites involved in the Progressive reform movement. In the 1890s, Populism failed as a national political force, but it remained influential locally and regionally and appeared, reincarnated, in western Progressivism. 25 Although similar developments were occurring in the east, politically innovative western environments once again contributed to suffrage success. The breakthrough suffrage victories occurred in Washington state ( 1910 ) and California ( 1911 ), quickly followed by Oregon and Arizona ( 1912 ), and Nevada and Montana ( 1914 ). In Washington state, NAWSA organizer Emma Smith DeVoe became the leader of the state organization. DeVoe stressed the importance of good publicity and systematic canvassing while insisting upon ladylike decorum. Suffragists attended meetings of churches and ethnic associations and won endorsements from farmer and labor groups, often through the activism of working-class women. Those who rejected DeVoe’s leadership or moderate approach worked independently, often organizing parades and large public meetings. In 1910 , the referendum passed in every county and city in Washington state, breathing new life into the movement. 26

In California, where a strong progressive political insurgency won the referendum in 1911 , suffragists organized a massive public campaign. They held large public rallies, used automobiles to give speeches on street corners and in front of factories, produced a flood of printed material utilizing striking designs and colors, and coordinated professional press work. Working-class women organized their own suffrage group, the Wage Earners Suffrage League, while Chinese, Italian, African American, and Latina suffragists also worked within their communities. The NAWSA provided foreign-language literature generated locally by the members of the College Equal Suffrage League. Members of the WCTU worked vigorously but quietly. On election day, volunteers carefully watched polling places to discourage fraud, then held their breath for two days until they learned that the measure had passed by a mere 3,587 votes. They realized that victory would not have been possible without an impressive increase in urban working-class support since the last failed referendum in 1896 . 27

These new campaign tactics were quickly adopted by suffragists in other western states, frequently causing tensions between cautious older women and younger activists. In Oregon, for example, the region’s pioneer veteran suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, rejected public campaigns, arguing that they alerted and mobilized powerful opponents (mainly the liquor and vice interests). She insisted upon what she called the “still hunt” approach: quiet lobbying and speaking to groups to gain endorsements. Duniway also antagonized WCTU activists by insisting on a strict separation between suffrage and prohibition, especially if both measures were on the same ballot.

In 1902 , Oregon was the second state to adopt the initiative, a Progressive reform that allowed reformers to bypass uncooperative legislature and place measures directly on the ballot. Oregon suffragists subsequently utilized this process to place woman suffrage before voters every two years, but it did not pass until 1912 after frustrated younger women finally wrested control of the state organization from Duniway and implemented the modern model. 28

By 1915 , all western states and territories except New Mexico had adopted woman suffrage. These successes validated the efficacy of dramatic new tactics and created four million new women voters who could be enlisted to support the revived struggle for the federal amendment. In addition, many experienced western suffragists headed east, where similar developments were occurring, most notably in the rise of the National Woman’s Party, but where the opposition was also better organized and funded.

Catalyzed by the Progressive impetus and the excitement surrounding the 1912 presidential campaign, six states held suffrage referenda that year. Three western successes in Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona were counterbalanced by defeats in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. In Ohio, the “liquor interests” publicly boasted of defeating the measure; failure in Wisconsin was also attributed to the opposition of the state’s important brewing industry. In Michigan, massive electoral irregularities turned initial reports of victory into a loss (by only 760 votes). In 1914 , two western states approved woman suffrage (Montana and Nevada), but in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, and Ohio, hard-fought campaigns resulted in defeat. In 1915 , there were referenda in four major eastern states, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. If any of these large, urbanized, industrial states passed the measure, the eastern stalemate would be broken, but all failed in spite of massive efforts. The opposition seemed insurmountable in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, where state laws prohibited immediate resubmission, thus suffragists focused on New York, the most heavily industrialized, urbanized, and populated state, and the one with more representatives in Congress than any of the others. 29

The NAWSA Struggles to Keep Up

The still quite frequent assertion that the U.S. suffrage movement was languishing in “the doldrums” during these years rests partly on unquestioned and erroneous assumptions that “the suffrage movement” means events in the east and the activities of the NAWSA. Indeed, the NAWSA leadership seemed to lack the ability to develop more successful strategies and tactics, could not consolidate or focus the energies and innovations of the new generation of suffragists, and were often resistant or openly hostile to their ideas and methods. When Anthony relinquished the NAWSA presidency in 1900 , two women emerged as potential successors, Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. For several years, Catt had urged major administrative changes and systematic campaign plans coordinated by a strong central state organization under national supervision. Shaw was an old friend of Anthony who had overcome an impoverished background to earn divinity and medical degrees. She has often been described as a brilliant orator but a poor administrator, but a recent study has challenged this conclusion (while not completely overturning it) by noting that this judgment reflects biases in the original sources and overlooks the growth and diversification of the NAWSA membership, its increasingly sophisticated organizational structure, improved fund-raising techniques, and other significant developments during the decade of Shaw’s leadership. 30 Shaw succeeded Catt as president in 1904 when family health issues forced Catt to “retire,” but she remained actively involved in the international suffrage movement and later reestablished herself on the national scene through her work in New York state.

Transnational connections and influences had been important from the earliest days of the movement. In 1888 , American leaders established the International Council of Women (ICW) hoping to promote international suffrage activism, but were disappointed because the organization avoided controversial issues (like suffrage) to focus on moral reform and pacifism. In 1902 , Catt and other frustrated suffragists established the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). The topic of transnational suffrage activism has received significant scholarly attention recently, revealing extensive and dynamic connections among suffragists worldwide from the mid-1800s well into the 20th century . 31

By the time Catt returned to the U.S. movement in New York in 1909 , she observed many promising developments, especially the growing numbers of women at work and involved in various social-reform activities. Suffragists used affiliations with labor unions and reform groups to form cross-class suffrage coalitions and to appeal to urban working-class voters. They largely abandoned elitist, nativist, and racist rhetoric (at least in public) and emphasized arguments that linked political rights and economic justice for women of all classes. In New York, Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter) formed the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women in 1907 , which included experienced women trade unionists and suffragists like Leonora O’Reilly and Rosa Schneiderman. Blatch, a suffragist with strong labor and socialist sympathies, had previously lived in England and formed close associations with the British suffragettes. American suffragists consciously repudiated British militancy and violence, however, preferring clever, creative, and colorful activities that gained public attention and sympathy, like the annual suffrage parades Blatch began organizing in 1910 .

4. Suffrage parade in New York City, 23 Oct. 1915. In the early 1900s, the struggle for woman suffrage became a mass and public movement. Suffragists organized highly visible and colorful events, such as this pre-referendum parade in which 20,000 women marched in clear order to send a clear message of their determined purpose.

The basic demand for equal economic justice did not eliminate internal class conflict, however. Late in 1910 , the Equality League became the Women’s Political Union (WPU), indicating a shift to elite leadership and increasing British influence. In 1911 , O’Reilly left to form a separate Wage Earners’ League for Woman Suffrage. 32

In 1909 , Catt formed the Woman Suffrage Party (WSP) hoping to channel these energies and coordinate the movement under her direction. She soon controlled the state association and consolidated most of the state suffrage groups (with the notable exception of the WPU). After an intense lobbying effort, the legislature authorized a referendum vote in 1915 , and the suffragists mounted a huge campaign over the next ten months. They held thousands of outdoor meetings and events, targeted outreach to crucial constituencies, and flooded the state with literature. Catt’s plans included systematic door-to-door canvassing, which eventually reached over half the state’s voters. On election day, the measure lost by a narrow margin, but within days suffragists raised $100,000 and began the work all over again. After another massive campaign, woman suffrage passed in New York in 1917 by over 100,000 votes. The same year, seven states, including Arkansas, granted some form of partial suffrage. In 1918 , woman-suffrage referenda passed in Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma. The eastern blockade was broken, and the South had begun to crack. 33

While Catt exercised masterful managerial and strategic skills in New York, the NAWSA was having trouble keeping up, and Shaw came under increasing criticism from her NAWSA colleagues. Prominent suffragists such as Katherine McCormick, Harriet Laidlaw, and Jane Addams attempted to fill the perceived leadership gap, but many believed that Catt was the only one with the organizational skills to rescue what she herself described as a “bankrupt concern.” Catt resumed the NAWSA presidency in 1915 and began implementing her ideas for bureaucratic reorganization, legislative and partisan lobbying, and systematic campaigning. The previous year, Catt had secretly introduced her “Winning Plan,” which included winning a few targeted campaigns in the east and South under national direction, gaining party endorsements, and renewing the struggle for a federal amendment. Women voters were instructed to lobby their legislators; suffragists in states where referenda successes were considered possible were to coordinate their efforts under national direction; and the goal in the South was some form of partial suffrage. 34 None of these were new ideas, but Catt brought them together in this master plan, which she eventually implemented with remarkable success, but her hostility to militancy, independent activism, and rival leaders intensified when confronted with a dynamic new force, Alice Paul.

Alice Paul and the Congressional Union

Paul did not single-handedly reinvigorate a moribund U.S. suffrage movement, but she was a brilliant organizer and an inspiring leader who soon attracted a cadre of radical and committed activists frustrated by the apparent conservatism and inefficacy of the NAWSA leadership. Determined to win the federal amendment, they aimed to make life miserable for politicians until they achieved their objective. Paul learned this strategy from the British suffragettes during her involvement with them and transplanted it to the United States. As a Quaker, however, Paul rejected their violent tactics and developed other provocative and militant methods. She had an extraordinary talent for organizing highly public suffrage events. Her spirit was contagious and her goal compelling even for mainstream suffragists opposed to radical tactics.

Early in 1913 , Paul and her friend Lucy Burns revived the NAWSA’s quiescent Congressional Committee, initially with that organization’s blessing, but controversy and schism soon followed. Within two months of their arrival in Washington, DC, they had organized a massive suffrage parade, held on March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration. When the marchers were attacked by a mob and the police failed to protect them, the suffrage movement gained massive publicity and considerable sympathy. In April, Paul and Burns formed an independent organization, the Congressional Union (CU), quickly gathered 200,000 signatures on petitions, and started lobbying President Wilson and other prominent politicians. Paul lost her position as chair of the NAWSA Congressional Committee at the 1913 convention because she defied the national leadership’s efforts to tame her, and she rejected all subsequent reconciliatory approaches. 35

The split deepened when the CU implemented the British suffragette policy of “holding the party in power responsible” by sending organizers into nine western states to persuade women voters to oppose Democratic candidates during the 1914 election. Although politicians insisted that this effort had no impact on their campaigns, half of them lost, and soon thereafter woman suffrage was reintroduced in Congress for the first time in two decades. The proposed Shafroth-Palmer Amendment was not the “Anthony Amendment,” however, which since 1878 had simply stated that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The Shafroth-Palmer Amendment defined woman suffrage as a “states’ rights” issue, dictated a return to arduous state campaigns (which had largely been unsuccessful), and allowed discrimination against black women. The current NAWSA Congressional Committee chair, Hannah McCormick, endorsed it without consulting the organization’s board, and the proposal received some support from suffragists who saw no alternative to compromise with the Southern states’ rights bloc in Congress. Most suffragists rejected it, however, and continued to demand action at the federal level. After formally organizing the National Woman’s Party (NWP), Paul’s group reprised their attacks on western Democrats in the 1916 election.

5. “Women of Colorado” (1916). One of the first efforts of the NWP was to “hold the party in power” (i.e., the Democrats) responsible for lack of progress on the woman suffrage amendment. In 1914, their efforts to persuade western women voters to vote against the Democratic party were not very effective, but frightened politicians soon moved the amendment forward in Congress. In 1916, the NWP repeated this operation and posted this billboard.

This tactic infuriated Catt since it undermined her efforts to lobby politicians to gain their support. 36

Suffrage during World War I

When the United States entered the war in April 1917 , neither organization abandoned the suffrage struggle. In spite of earlier pacifist activism by Catt and others, the NAWSA urged women to engage in both war work and suffrage agitation, hoping that patriotic efforts would gain additional public support for the cause. The NWP concentrated exclusively on suffrage, continued using militant tactics, and introduced propaganda ridiculing claims that America could fight for democracy while denying women at home the right to vote. Most famously, in January 1917 the NWP began silent picketing outside the White House. Initially tolerated by the Wilson administration, harassment and violence by onlookers escalated, and in June arrests of the picketers began, ultimately affecting 218 women.

6. Picketing the White House. By August 1917, the Congressional Union (later the NWP) had been silently picketing the White House since January, tensions were running high, and crowd attacks on picketers increased. Arrests had begun in June, followed by months-long prison sentences, for the charge of “obstructing traffic.”

At first, charges were dismissed or sentences minimal, but penalties increased over the next few months. Some of the women began hunger strikes to protest the heavy punishment, bad conditions, and brutal treatment in prison; in response, authorities subjected them to forced feeding. Faced with terrible publicity, officials finally released all picketers in late November. That fall, both houses of Congress began to move toward voting on a federal amendment. By this time, all suffragists were focused intently on the federal amendment, but the NWP activists made it clear that they were not going to stop until they got it or died trying. 37

Women’s contributions to national war efforts did affect public opinion, but female enfranchisement did not follow immediately or easily. In January 1918 , President Wilson endorsed suffrage the day before the House of Representatives would vote again on the federal amendment, but the outcome was highly uncertain. Great efforts were made to guarantee every positive vote: several ailing representatives dragged themselves or were carried in, while another left his wife’s deathbed (at her urging), then returned for her funeral. Three roll calls were necessary to establish that the measure had passed with exactly the required two-thirds majority, supported by a significant number of western congressmen responding to pressure from enfranchised female constituents.

The Final Struggle for the Federal Amendment

Hopes for a quick victory were soon shattered. Wilson was preoccupied with the war, so an impatient NWP resumed militant demonstrations that generated more arrests, jail sentences, and publicity. It took a year and a half for the Senate to vote, and only at the instigation of hostile senators confident that it would lose. On September 30, Wilson took the unusual step of addressing the Senate during the debate, describing enfranchisement as only fair considering all the contributions women had made to the war effort, but states’-rights advocates remained adamantly opposed, and it lost by two votes. By December, even the NAWSA threatened to mobilize against unsympathetic politicians in the 1918 elections, and both suffrage organizations did so. In February 1919 , the Senate defeated the amendment again—by one vote—but six more state legislatures had granted women the vote by the time Wilson called Congress into special session in May. This time the measure carried in the House by a wide majority (thanks to the election of over one hundred new pro-suffrage legislators) and passed the Senate on June 4 by a two-vote majority. 38

Ratification of the amendment required another long struggle. It came quickly in states where suffrage organizations remained active, but the process dragged on into 1920 . Finally only one more state was needed, but most of the holdouts were in the South. The battle came to a head in August in Tennessee, with relentless lobbying by pro- and anti-suffrage forces and reports of threats, bribes, and drunken legislators. The state senate passed the measure easily, but in the house there were numerous delays engineered by the opposition, and suffragists believed that they lacked the last votes needed for passage. When the roll call reached Harry Burn, a young Republican from the eastern mountains, he unexpectedly voted “aye,” later explaining that his mother had written urging him to support the measure.

7. Alice Paul and NWP members in August 1920 celebrating passage of the Nineteenth Amendment with a toast to the final 36 th star on the woman suffrage flag.

Thus the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution squeaked to victory. 39

Gaining the right to vote was a huge accomplishment, but it did not automatically guarantee women other political rights (e.g., running for office or serving on juries), nor did it rectify many other discriminatory practices embedded in the law. To address these issues, the NWP introduced the federal Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 , but nearly a century later, it remains unratified. To prepare women for their new civic responsibilities, in 1920 Catt converted the NAWSA into the League of Women Voters (LWV), an organization still dedicated to nonpartisan educational activity. Until recently, analyses of the impact of female enfranchisement focused on the national level during the conservative decade of the 1920s and found little to report: women did not form a solid voting bloc, so major parties soon lost interest in cultivating their support, and few women were elected to office. More recent research suggests a more complicated dynamic, especially at the state level. Although technically enfranchised, spurious restrictions and violence prevented African American women and men from voting for decades, especially in the South. Thus winning the vote did not guarantee all American women full equality, but it recognized their fundamental right of self-representation, permanently changed the composition of the polity, and provided the necessary foundation for subsequent achievements.

Discussion of the Literature

There has been relatively little scholarly interest in the U.S. suffrage movement in recent years. Since this topic was the primary focus of attention as the field of women’s history began to develop, perhaps people think it has been thoroughly examined. That assumption is incorrect for at least two reasons. First, more recent research has identified and investigated previously unexplored aspects, resulting in many new insights, while other topics still deserve fuller attention. Second, we still lack an up-to-date synthetic account that incorporates the findings of these studies, although several excellent essay collections are available. Scholars continue to rely upon the monumental work, The History of Woman Suffrage , compiled by NAWSA activists conscious of the need to document their historic struggle, but it is best treated with caution as a collection of primary sources. In 1959 , Eleanor Flexner published a now-classic synthesis, Century of Struggle (enlarged by Ellen Fitzpatrick and reprinted in 1996 ). This book remains the standard account, but it includes discussions of various contributing factors that have since been well studied as separate topics (e.g., women’s access to education and wage work). No one since has taken on the daunting task of producing a comprehensive account of this vitally important movement.

With surprisingly few modifications, the narrative of the U.S. suffrage struggle has remained static: the Seneca Falls convention was the moment the movement began; it split over controversies precipitated by the Reconstruction Amendments, western victories were anomalous, and the “doldrums” of the 20th century were followed by reinvigoration in the 1910s, culminating in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The many summary essays available online and books for young people may or may not integrate recent findings, but they all repeat this dominant narrative, so it is past time for a new synthesis that amends, refines, and expands our understanding of this long, complicated, and difficult struggle.

Heavily influenced by the publication of Aileen Kraditor’s book, The Ideas of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement ( 1965 ), subsequent studies thoroughly disrupted any lingering notions about a coherent suffrage “sisterhood.” Kraditor argued that late 19th-century suffragists stopped emphasizing the “justice” of their cause in favor of “expediency” arguments focused on how the vote could be used to achieve other goals. This argument set up a false dichotomy since suffrage arguments based on rights and justice continued to be frequently and powerfully employed, while the exercise of the vote has always been a commonly accepted means to achieve political objectives. Yet there is no doubt that Kraditor’s work made a huge contribution by revealing a movement deeply affected by the elitism, racism, and nativism of many suffragists. It stimulated extensive investigation into problematic tensions among different groups of suffragists as well as analyses of the negative impacts on their audiences.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement revived interest in women’s history and in the suffrage movement. The connections to a contemporaneous women’s-rights struggle led some writers to adopt an excessively heroic interpretation, but it did rescue several major figures from relative obscurity, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul. Beginning in 1975 with the publication of Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 , Ellen DuBois produced a series of carefully researched works that have had a major impact on the field. For several decades, many studies appeared that identified various groups of previously unrecognized activists (especially African American women, but also anti-suffragists), produced detailed regional studies, examined the influence of suffrage journalism, traced transnational suffrage connections, and reevaluated the consequences of female enfranchisement. In addition, many other scholars considered suffrage as an important element of other women’s reform initiatives, or examined the vote in the context of larger discussions of citizenship. Suffrage itself has not always fared well in these analyses. Was it a narrow goal that diverted attention and energy away from a larger feminist agenda? Ultimately was it even much of an achievement? These questions have received much attention in recent scholarship, especially those considering the impacts of women voters on political processes.

Regional studies of the South and the west have expanded our knowledge of suffrage activity beyond a narrow, eastern-based, focus on NAWSA, but this information remains inadequately integrated into “national” histories of the movement. Ironically, Southern stumbling blocks and the baneful effects of the “southern strategy” are better understood than the contributions of western victories to ultimate success. Many of the most recent studies examine important but previously overlooked state leaders and organizations, but they remain largely isolated from the national context. Some scholars have explored beyond U.S. borders, examining suffrage movements in other countries, the importance of transnational interconnections from the beginning of the movement, and associations with U.S. imperialism. Suffrage rhetoric, media strategies, advertising, and imagery have also received attention, but many texts present pictures and narrative without much analysis, especially those written for popular audiences.

Historians who study woman suffrage tend to focus on women’s organizations and activities, including efforts to build coalitions and influence politicians. Studies by political scientists have often focused on identifying the situations and processes by which the idea appealed to some groups of men and worked its way through the political system. Early efforts to find correlations between demographic characteristics and voting patterns on other issues found few links (with the exception of support for prohibition, even though the suffragists were aware of how problematic that relationship could be). Corinne McConnaughy’s recent book, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America , analyzed the successes and/or failures of efforts to establish political or reform coalitions and influence legislators, but her study is limited to five states and the U.S. Congress. An extensive body of work of Holly J. McCammon and others has emphasized the “various political and gendered opportunities” that encouraged the mobilization of women, as well as and the ways in which they adapted their tactics to fit specific circumstances and framed their arguments to appeal to particular groups. Thus better interdisciplinary integration would be valuable in future research and essential in any new synthetic account.

Currently, much of the interest in suffrage relates to its impact after the vote was won, with considerable debate over the consequences. Such studies examine female voter turnout, women’s relationships with the major political parties, their success (or lack thereof) in running for office, and the impact of the vote on achieving various reforms. Several recent publications by Kristi Anderson, Melanie Gustafson, and others reveal a great deal of female political involvement in the 1920s, usually at the local, state, or regional levels. Other analysts, including Nancy Cott and Anna Harvey, are more pessimistic in discussing how the national women’s movement split and fizzled out in the 1920s once the common goal had been achieved, racial and class divisions increased, political parties became indifferent, and inexperienced women voters adapted poorly to partisan politics.

In a recent essay, “Getting Right with Women’s Suffrage,” Jean Baker reviewed these various developments and suggested ways to revitalize suffrage studies. These include: better integration into survey courses and related examinations of the American political system, renewed attention to organizational requirements for individual and associational leadership, expanded emphasis on transnational activism, and continued discussion of suffrage in the context of citizenship definitions and nation building. Additional work on specialized aspects will always be welcome, but better integration of our existing knowledge is necessary to provide a firmer foundation for future scholarship in this important field.

Primary Sources

The best collection of primary sources remains the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage , edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper. Keenly aware of the historic significance of their work, suffragists thoroughly documented their efforts and published the first volume in 1887 . As a collection of reports, conference proceedings, state histories, and other material, it remains invaluable. Because the authors were themselves activists in the suffrage movement, however, this volume also reveals their biases and rivalries and must be used carefully in conjunction with other sources. It is available in a reprint edition, as a CD, and online ( Internet Archive ). 40 A selection of these materials is available in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Mari Jo and Paul Buhle. A more recent book of primary sources is Women’s Suffrage in America , edited by Elizabeth Frost-Knappman and Kathryn Cullen-Dupont , which combines a variety of documents with introductory essays and chronologies. 41

Available on microfilm are The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and History of Women Microfilm Collection . 42

Major archival repositories include the following: the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC, contains the Susan B. Anthony Papers, Blackwell Family Papers, Nannie Helen Burroughs Papers, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Mary Church Terrell Papers, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, the National Woman’s Party Papers, and the League of Women Voters Collection. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, holds the Blackwell Family Papers, Carrie Chapman Catt papers, Olympia Brown Papers (microfilm), Elizabeth Boynton Harbert Papers, Harriet Burton Laidlaw Papers, Catharine Waugh McCulloch Papers, Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Anna Howard Shaw Papers, Sue Shelton White Papers, Matilda Joslyn Gage Papers, Maud Wood Park Papers (microfilm), New York Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women Papers, and the Women’s Rights Collection. Many of these collections are available on microfilm.

Other major repositories holding specific archival collections, and much additional related material, include the New York Public Library and the Sophia Smith Collection, Women’s History Archives at Smith College, Northampton, MA. A wealth of information can be found all over the country in university collections, and in state and local historical societies and archives.

Links to Digital Materials

• The Library of Congress , The Seneca Falls Convention.
• The Library of Congress , Woman Suffrage Teacher’s Guide .
• National Archives: Teaching With Documents: Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment .
• National Women’s History Museum , including online exhibits on “Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage” and “Votes for Women”.
• The History Channel , “History of Woman’s Suffrage in America”.
• “The Fight for Woman Suffrage” .
• PBS , “Not for Ourselves Alone.”
• Alexander Street Press , “‘Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000” (database available through subscription only).

Further Reading

• Adams, Katherine H. , and Michael L. Keene . Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Anderson, Bonnie . Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Anderson, Kristi . After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Baker, Jean H. , ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited . New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Baker, Jean H. “Getting Right with Women’s Suffrage.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5.1 (January 2006): 7–17.
• Beeton, Beverly . Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 . New York: Garland Press, 1986.
• Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
• DuBois, Ellen Carol . Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
• DuBois, Ellen Carol . Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights . New York: New York University Press, 1998.
• Finnegan, Margaret . Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women . New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
• Flexner, Eleanor , and Ellen Fitzpatrick . Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States . Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996.
• Gordon, Ann D. , and Bettye Collier-Thomas , eds. African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
• Graham, Sara Hunter . Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
• Green, Elna C. Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
• Gustafson, Melanie , Kristie Miller , and Elisabeth Israels Perry , eds. We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
• Harvey, Anna L. Voters without Leverage: Women in American Politics, 1920–1970 . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Kraditor, Aileen S. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 . New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
• McConnaughy, Corrine M. The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Marilley, Suzanne M. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Materson, Lisa G. For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 . New York: New York University Press, 2004.
• Scott, Anne F. , and Andrew W. Scott . One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage . New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.
• Sherr, Lynn . Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words . New York: Random House, 1995.
• Sneider, Allison . Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn . African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 . Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill . New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill , ed. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement . Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995.
• Zahniser, J. D. , and Amelia Fry . Alice Paul: Claiming Power . New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

1. Jan Ellen Lewis , “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Rutgers Law Review 63.3 (2011): 1017–1035.

2. Linda Kerber , Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Margaret A. Nash , Women’s Education in the United States, 1790– 1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

3. Kathryn Kish Sklar , Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000).

4. Many authors have addressed these events and their significance; see, for example, Ellen Carol DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 21–52, and Sally M. McMillen , Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). In addition to Stanton’s autobiography, there are many biographies, most recently Lori Ginzberg , Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

5. Eleanor Flexner , Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States , rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1975), 82–92; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn , African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13–35.

6. There is no definitive version of the text and no agreement whether Truth was met with approval or resistance when she rose to speak. It took almost 150 years for the historical record to be corrected; see Nell Irvin Painter , “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” The Journal of American History 81.2 (September 1994): 461–492.

7. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 52–78, 162–202; Terborg-Penn, African American Women , 23–35; and Flexner, Century of StruggleI , 145–152.

8. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 84–103.

9. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 79–161; Flexner, Century of Struggle , 153–156; and Martha M. Solomon , ed., A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840–1910 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

10. Ellen Carol DuBois , “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights , ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 114–138; and Flexner, Century of Struggle , 156–158;

11. For a recent review of several biographies of Woodhull, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz , “A Victoria Woodhull for the 1990s,” Reviews in American History 27.1 (March 1999): 87–97.

12. Karen J. Blair , The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).

13. Ruth Bordin , Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

14. Barbara Miller Solomon , In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Robyn Muncy , Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform: 1890–1935 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); and Kathryn Kish Sklar , Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

15. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 134–144, 197–207, 236–240.

16. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 228, 269–270, 300, 319–320.

17. NAWSA , Victory: How the Women Won It: A Centennial Symposium (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 53, 72–73.

18. Alan P. Grimes , The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); T. A. Larson produced many articles about woman suffrage in various states that are still factually informative, but the analytical arguments of both these authors are now considered obsolete.

19. Rebecca J. Mead , How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Holly J. McCammon and Karen E. Campbell , “Winning the Vote in the West: The Political Successes of the Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866–1919,” Gender and Society 15.1 (February 2001): 55–82; and Beverly Beeton , Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland Press, 1986).

20. Mead, How the Vote Was Won ; 35–52; and Allison L. Sneider , Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 57–86.

21. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 53–95; Suzanne M. Marilley , Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820– 1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 124–158; Flexner, Century of Struggle , 228–231; Michael L. Goldberg , An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Susan Scheiber Edelman , “‘A Red Hot Suffrage Campaign’: The Woman Suffrage Cause in California, 1896,” California Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 2 (1995): 51–131.

22. Aileen S. Kraditor , The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 123–218.

23. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement , 213–214; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women , 109–135. The Southern suffrage movement was not monolithic in its goals and methods, but it was dominated by elite women, some more volubly racist or conservative than others. See Marjorie Spruill Wheeler , New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993); and Elna C. Green , Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

24. Susan E. Marshall , Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Susan Goodier , No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

25. The Progressive movement has been studied exhaustively, and there are many studies describing women’s involvement. For a general review of its impact on woman suffrage, see Eileen L. McDonagh and H. Douglas Price , “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Patterns of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910–1918,” American Political Science Review 79.2 (June 1985): 415–435.

26. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 97–118. After winning the vote, DeVoe organized a National Council of Women Voters to focus the power of western women voters on the federal amendment effort, working briefly with the Congressional Union until shifting to support Catt’s Winning Plan; see Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal , Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

27. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 119–149; Gayle Anne Gullett , Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Susan Englander , Class Coalition and Class Conflict in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907–1912: The San Francisco Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Research University Press, 1989).

28. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 101–107; see also Ruth Barnes Moynihan , Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (London: Yale University Press, 1983).

29. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 269–270, 279–281.

30. Trisha Franzen , Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1–15.

31. See, for example, Bonnie Anderson , Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Leila J. Rupp , Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Patricia Greenwood Harrison , Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000).

32. Ellen Carol DuBois , Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 88–147; and Annelise Orleck , Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 87–113.

33. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 258–263, 281, 300–301. DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch , 88–181. Convinced that a second campaign in 1917 would fail, Blatch did not participate.

34. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 266–267, 281–285; and Robert Booth Fowler, “Carrie Chapman Catt, Strategist,” in One Woman, One Vote , ed. Wheeler, 295–314. There are several biographies of Catt available; see, for example, Jacqueline Van Voris , Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1987).

35. J. D. Zahniser and Amelia Fry , Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene , Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

36. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul , 141–156; Inez Haynes Irwin Gilmore , The Story of the Woman’s Party . Reprint. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971); and Linda G. Ford , “Álice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement , ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press: 1995), 277–294.

37. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul , 157–241; see also Kimberly Jensen , Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

38. Eileen L. McDonagh , “Issues and Constituencies in the Progressive Era: House Roll Call Voting on the Nineteenth Amendment, 1913–1919,” Journal of Politics 51.1 (February 1989): 119–136.

39. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 286–303, 317–337.

40. Salem, NY: Ayer, 1985; and Louisville, KT: Bank of Wisdom.

41. Facts on File Eyewitness History Series (2005).

42. The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , eds. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, c. 1991); History of Women Microfilm Collection (New Haven, CT, Research Publications, 1976–1979).

Related Articles

• Race, Gender, and the Making of New Netherland
• Women’s Rights, Abolitionism, and Reform in Antebellum and Gilded Age America
• Black Women and Beauty Culture in 20th-Century America
• The United States in the 1920s

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 10 December 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|185.194.105.172]
• 185.194.105.172

Character limit 500 /500

A blog of the U.S. National Archives

Pieces of History

Susan B. Anthony: Women’s Right to Vote

The National Archives is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment with the exhibit Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote ,  which runs in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives in Washington, DC, through January 3, 2021. Today’s post comes from Michael J. Hancock in the National Archives History Office.

More than any other woman of her time, Susan B. Anthony recognized that many of the legal disabilities women faced were the result of their inability to vote.

Anthony worked tirelessly her whole adult life fighting for the right to vote, and she was instrumental in bringing the issue to the forefront of American consciousness.

She spoke publicly, petitioned Congress and state legislatures, and published a feminist newspaper for a cause that would not come to fruition until the ratification of the 19th Amendment , 14 years after her death in 1906.

Despite this, she found satisfaction in casting a ballot (albeit illegally) in Rochester, New York, on November 5, 1872. What followed was a trial for illegal voting and a unique opportunity for Anthony to broadcast her arguments for woman suffrage to a wider audience.

Anthony had planned to vote long before 1872. She reasoned that she would take the first opportunity as long as she met the New York state requirement of voters residing in their homes for at least 30 days prior to the election in the district where they cast their vote.  Anthony’s logic was based on the recently adopted 14th Amendment that stated that “all persons born and naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States.” Anthony reasoned that that since women were citizens, and the privileges of citizens of the United States included the right to vote,  states could not exclude women from the electorate.

The 15th Amendment’s reference to the “right of citizens of the United States to vote” suggested women’s right as citizens to vote. Fundamentally, woman suffragists’ objective was to validate their interpretation  through either an act of Congress or a favorable decision in Federal courts.

On November 5, 1872, in the first district of the Eighth Ward of Rochester, New York, Anthony and 14 other women voted in an election that included choosing members of Congress. The women had successfully registered to vote several days earlier but, a poll watcher challenged Anthony’s qualification as a voter.

Taking the steps required by state law when a challenge occurred, the  election inspectors asked Anthony under oath if she was a citizen, if she lived in the district, and if she had accepted bribes for her vote. Anthony answered these questions to their satisfaction, and the inspectors promptly placed her ballot in the boxes.

Nine days after the election, U.S. Commissioner William Storrs, an officer of the Federal courts, issued warrants for the arrest of Anthony and an order to the U.S. Marshal to deliver her to county jail along with the 14 other women who voted in Rochester. Based on the complaint of Sylvester Lewis, a poll watcher who challenged Anthony’s vote, the women were charged with voting for members of the U.S. House of Representatives “without having a lawful right to vote,” a violation of section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870.

Anthony’s attorneys researched a way to appeal her arrest and detention to the Supreme Court of the United States. They decided that a petition to the district court for a writ of habeas corpus would ensure it would reach the Supreme Court, even though Congress in 1868 had repealed the provision for appeals on writs of habeas corpus from the lower Federal courts to the Supreme Court. Attorney John Van Voorhis argued that Anthony had a right to vote and petitioned the district court for a writ of habeas corpus that would bring Anthony before the court so that the judge could rule if she were properly held in custody.

Judge Nathan Hall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York granted the petition. The U.S. attorney announced that he was unprepared for argument, and the judge rescheduled the hearing for January in Albany.

At the district court session in Albany, Anthony’s attorney Henry Selden broadened the argument he made previously and insisted Anthony had a right to vote. He acknowledged that the question of women’s right to vote was still unresolved and that the government had no justification for holding her as a criminal defendant. Anthony’s release from custody was eventually denied.

Anthony’s trial began in Canandaigua, New York, on June 17, 1873. Before a jury of 12 men, Richard Crowley stated the government’s case and called an inspector of election as a witness to confirm that Anthony cast a ballot for congressional candidates.

Henry Selden had himself sworn in as a witness and testified that he advised Anthony that the Constitution validated her capacity to vote. In transcripts of Susan B. Anthony’s testimony in her own defense, it is clear that she was thoughtful and deliberate in her account of how she made the progression from interpretation of the Constitution to affirming her perceived rights under its principles.  

Judge Hunt declared that “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law.” He rejected Anthony’s argument that her good faith prohibited a finding that she “knowingly” cast an illegal vote and stated that “Assuming that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of law.” He surprised Anthony and her attorney by directing the jury deliver a verdict of guilty.  

In her sentencing, Susan B. Anthony was given the opportunity to address the court, and what she said stunned everyone in the courthouse:

Your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural right, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government. 

Ultimately, Anthony was fined $100 and the cost of prosecution. In steadfast defiance, she declared that she would never pay a penny of her fine, and the government never made a serious effort to collect. In the end, Susan B. Anthony’s protest echoed the old revolutionary adage that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Share this:

6 thoughts on “ susan b. anthony: women’s right to vote ”.

Very interesting info, thank you!

thats all…

This is the amazing post which I liked the most, Thanks for creating such good content!

Source: https://tractorguru.in/vst-tractors

It was a good experience while reading your blogs. Thanks for sharing with us.

I’m lucky enough to live right across the street from Mount Hope Cemetery where this tremendous patriotic women has been buried along with her family. We visit her every week & will especially visit her today & ask her to PLEASE watch over & bless this country and city she loved so very much🇺🇸 Thank you Susan

• Pingback: Images of the Week: Vote, Voting, Voted! – The Unwritten Record

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement

September 23, 1995

ITEM DETAILS

Article Text

(Automatically generated)

Sandra Day O'Connor Thank you. And that was the best introduction I've ever had. From the best sister I've ever had. I can't tell you how pleased I am to be here with you today to commemorate the ratification of the 19th amendment. We're starting this talk a little early. Maybe before you're finished with lunch, and we're doing that because I have so much to tell you today. I normally try to be very brief in my speeches. I'm not going to be brief today. Because this is a story that needs telling, and you need to know it if you don't already.

I find it difficult to imagine that only seventy-five years ago, a woman's right to vote was not protected by our Constitution. It is hard to remember that a right I have taken for granted all my life is one that some of our grandmothers never enjoyed. But it is important to remember such things, to celebrate the amendment that extended to women one of the fundamental rights of citizen participation, and to reflect upon how far we have come.

In order to appreciate the tremendous progress made by American women in the last century, we should consider the point from which we started. The history of the suffrage movement is a colorful and entertaining one, and a tale from which we can draw many lessons.' It begins in the late eighteenth century, as this country's political, governmental, and social frameworks were only beginning to take shape. When the wife of future-President John Adams implored her husband in 1776 to "remember the ladies"2 in drafting our new nation's charter, her plea fell on deaf ears. The American

* Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court. This Essay was originally delivered as a speech at a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in Phoenix, Arizona on September 23, 1995. I would like to extend my appreciation to Julia Bunting Shelton and Simon Steel, who provided valuable assistance in the preparation of this Essay.

1. The material for the first part of this Essay is drawn largely from Olivia Coolidge, Women's Rights: The Suffrage Movement in American, 1848-1920 (Dutton, 1966), and Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Harvard U., 1975).

2. Flexner, Century of Struggle at 15 (cited in note 1).

Constitution, signed in September 1787, was produced by fifty-five men for a nation in which men were to govern. Women were subject to its terms but "unacknowledged in its text, uninvited in its formulation, [and] unsolicited for its ratification."3 In permitting each state to determine the qualifications of voters for Congress, the Constitution implicitly endorsed laws, then existing in virtually every state, that prohibited women from voting. Although neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights explicitly denied equal rights to women, it seems fair to say that the Framers envisioned no role for women in the new American government.

In the early nineteenth century, American men and women moved in strictly separated spheres. The commercial, political, and professional realms were dominated by men, while women were relegated to the domestic arena. The notion of gender-specific spheres had its roots in the belief that women were subordinate to men by nature, almost certainly less intelligent, and biologically less suited to the rigors of business and politics. Even at the turn of the century, the law still firmly enshrined the separate-spheres theory of gender relationships. Women generally could not serve on a jury, as a justice of the peace, or as a notary public. In many states, they could not hold elected office or practice law. A married woman could not enter contracts, hold or convey property, retain her own earnings, bring legal actions, or acquire a passport based on her own nationality. In the words of the English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a wife stood in relation to her husband as something just "better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.''4

The seeds of change were sown in the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. As the nation struggled morally and intellectually with the continued existence of slavery, women entered the movement with enthusiasm. By 1850, women constituted a majority in Northern antislavery societies and were the leading organizers of abolitionist petition drives. It was in the abolition movement that women reformers sharpened their organizational skills and learned to hold public meetings and conduct petition campaigns. As abolitionists, women first won the right to speak in public. They then began to put these newly acquired skills to use in pressing for their own rights, particularly the right to vote.

3. Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law 20 (Harvard U., 1989).

4. Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall 29 (Fields, Osgood, 1869).

The impetus for much-needed organization in the women's movement came in the summer of 1840. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the United States was represented by a delegation that included a number of women. Trouble began even before the convention opened. Despite strong objection by some of the American leaders, and following a heated debate on the floor of the convention, it was ruled that only the male delegates would be seated. Among the women forced to sit passively in the galleries were Lucretia Mott, an ardent abolitionist and founder of the first Female Anti-Slavery Society, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the young wife of an abolitionist leader. After the sessions, the two women talked of the irony of workers devoted to the antislavery cause being denied a voice in the convention simply because they were women. They recognized the need for concerted action.

Elizabeth Cady was the privileged daughter of a New York judge. She spent hours as a small child crouched in the corner of her father's office listening to people plead for help with legal problems. Many of those seeking Judge Cady's help were women who complained that their husbands and fathers had disposed of their property, spent their earnings on liquor, or had the sole right to guardianship of their children in the event of a separation. Judge Cady was forced to explain time and again that they had no legal redress, and young Elizabeth was forever marked by that lesson. Years later, she married Henry Stanton, an abolitionist leader, and moved to Seneca Falls, New York. Looking back, she wrote in 1898:

My experiences at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as if all the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not see what to do or where to begin-my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.5

During a visit to Seneca Falls, Lucretia Mott gathered with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several other women. They decided to call a convention. The following day, an announcement appeared in the Seneca County Courier of a "woman's rights convention" to be held in July of 1848.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton shouldered much of the responsibility for organizing and animating the convention. As she prepared for the

5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897 at 147-48 (T. Fisher Unwin, 1898) (quoted in Flexner, Century of Struggle at 73-74 (cited in note 1)).

upcoming meeting, Elizabeth read to her husband the draft of a proposed resolution demanding that women be given the right to vote. Henry, the passionate abolitionist, warned her that if she presented it to the convention, he would have nothing to do with it and would go so far as to leave town to avoid embarrassment. Well, she did present the resolution, and Henry did leave town. In fact, only Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist leader, approved of Elizabeth's daring resolution and promised to support its introduction at the convention.

Despite the fact that only one issue of the Seneca Falls newspaper had carried the brief notice, some three hundred people came to the convention from a fifty-mile radius. But when the convention-goers arrived at the little Wesleyan chapel where the meeting was to be held, they found the door locked. Not to be discouraged, the crowd boosted one of Elizabeth's nephews through a window and the convention proceeded as planned. Eloquent speeches and lively discussion filled the days. Some of the liveliest discussion was inspired by Elizabeth Cady Stanton's reading of Resolution Nine: "Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise."6 Resolution Nine carried by a small margin. It was the only resolution not to pass unanimously. A young woman by the name of Charlotte Woodward was the only woman at the Seneca Falls Convention who lived to cast a vote in a national election. In 1920, at the age of ninety, she reportedly declared, "I am going to the polls if they have to carry me."7

The birth of the women's rights conventions followed, and the movement picked up steam. The first National Women's Rights Convention was held in 1850, and a similar convention followed every year for the next ten years. It gradually became clear that women agreed on their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs but had yet to develop an ideology or a set of goals to guide their cries for change. Few felt as strongly as Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the importance of securing the vote. More pressing concerns included women's inability to control property and earnings, their limited opportunities for higher education and employment, and their lack of legal status. But one obstacle to correcting these problems soon became obvious: how could women bring about a change in the laws without the right to vote?

The Civil War and the emancipation of former slaves brought the suffrage question to the forefront. If newly freed blacks were to be

6. Flexner, Century of Struggle at 77 (cited in note 1).

7. Coolidge, Women's Rights at 31 (cited in note 1).

guaranteed the same civil rights, including suffrage, as all other citizens, there was no reason that women should not also be swept up by the momentum and included in the resulting expansion of the right to vote. The reformers were in for quite a shock, however. The draft of the Fourteenth Amendment, introduced into Congress in 1866, sought to incorporate an unprecedented gender restriction into the Constitution. The draft declared that the right to vote should not be "denied to any of the male inhabitants" of a state.8

The reformers realized that if this proposal were adopted, yet another constitutional amendment would be required to give women the right to vote in federal elections. Elizabeth Cady Stanton recognized what a monumental task securing such an amendment would be. She believed that the women's suffrage movement would be set back a full century if the proposal were adopted. In fact, she was not far wrong: it took another sixty years. The Fourteenth Amendment, which includes the word "male" not once but three times, was ratified in July 1868. The Fifteenth Amendment, which followed less than two years later, also failed to provide the suffragists with any cause for optimism. It decreed that no citizen could be denied the right to vote because of "race, color or previous condition of servitude," but made no mention of gender. Taken together, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments caused women to wonder if they were indeed fully citizens of the United States.

Angered by the lack of progress, Elizabeth Cady Stanton decided to take matters into her own hands. In 1866 she declared herself the first female candidate for Congress. No one challenged her right to run, but she received only twenty-four of the 22,026 votes cast.9 Following in Cady Stanton's footsteps, Victoria Woodhull obtained permission in 1871 to present a petition to the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that the recent constitutional amendments had secured the vote for women as well as blacks. She claimed that, under Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, women are citizens of the United States and are thus guaranteed the same rights and privileges of citizenship as men, including the right to vote. The committee rejected the petition, and the Supreme Court in turn rejected the argument in 1875. The Court ruled that women had no right to vote under the United States Constitution. 10

8. Flexner, Century of Struggle at 146 (cited in note 1).

9. Elizabeth Frost and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Women's Suffrage in America: An Eyewitness History 172 (Facts on File, 1992).

10. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wallace) 162, 178 (1874).

Despite these setbacks, many women embraced Victoria Woodhull's claim that women were immediately entitled to exercise the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony resolved to dramatize the issue by voting in the presidential election of 1872. She did so and was joined by several other women, but their punishment was swift and sure. Within weeks, all were arrested. Susan B. Anthony planned to rely on the Fourteenth Amendment for her defense. She claimed that it had confirmed her right to cast a ballot. At her trial, however, the judge ruled that women were incompetent to testify in court. Anthony was therefore prohibited from speaking in her own defense. The judge concluded that as "a person of the female sex" her vote was per se against the peace of the United States of America and their dignity.11 Since she did vote, she was admittedly guilty, and there remained no issue to be presented to the jury. The judge instructed the jurors (who were of course all male) to enter a verdict of guilty.

Yet in another respect, Susan B. Anthony was the clear victor. Her treatment at the -hands of the judicial system won for her the sympathy even of those who had been opposed to her original act. Letters of support and funds for her defense poured in. The following year, one newspaper even called her "America's best-known woman.12 Much like many of contemporary society's widely recognized figures-Cher, Roseanne, O.J., and even Newt, to name just a few–one had only to speak or print the name Susan and it was evident to whom one referred.

At the same time, change was taking place in the states. The first major victory for women's suffrage occurred in the Wyoming Territory where a bill to enfranchise women was signed into law in 1869. Contrary to predictions, the elections that followed did not result in disaster and dissolution of the existing order. Moreover, an interesting development occurred. Once women enrolled as voters, their names began to appear on lists of prospective jurors. Women's presence on Wyoming juries actually stirred up more excitement than their presence at the voting booths! A great many husbands were opposed to their wives' participation, but it appears that many Wyoming women welcomed the opportunity to serve. In Laramie City Court in the spring of 1870, the judge allowed prospective female jurors to decide for themselves whether they wished to be excused. Only one woman withdrew. The remaining women served out their term, and,

11. Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women 157 (N.Y.U., 1991).

12. Coolidge, Women's Rights at 63 (cited in note 1).

legend has it, that particular jury "became such a terror to evil-doers that a stampede began among them, and very many left the state forever."13

When Wyoming sought statehood in 1890, pressure was applied from Washington to repeal women's suffrage in the territory. Indeed, the bill to admit Wyoming to the Union met tremendous resistance in both chambers of Congress. One senator even predicted that allowing women to vote would result in a disastrous reversal of traditional gender roles: women would "do military duty" and "work the roads" while men would be forced to "nurse the children" and "stay at home while the ladies go out and make stump speeches in canvasses."14 Wyoming leaders replied that they would rather remain outside the Union than join without women as voters. The bill to admit Wyoming passed by a vote of twenty-eight to eighteen, and women enjoyed the right to vote in one state of the Union.

Following Wyoming's example, Utah enacted a law granting women the right to vote in 1870. The law was revoked in 1887, but women in Utah regained the right to vote when Utah was admitted to statehood in 1896 under a constitution that provided for women's suffrage. By that time, both Colorado and Idaho had joined the states that granted women the right to vote, and other Western states had granted limited suffrage rights on specific issues.

The suffragists next turned their attention to Arizona and Oklahoma, the two remaining territories, but they were not so successful. As Arizona prepared for statehood, the suffragists campaigned vigorously for a women's suffrage provision in the new state's constitution. Yet, once again, they met defeat. The fifty-two male delegates to the state constitutional convention rejected their pleas, at least in part for fear that President Taft would veto a statehood bill that provided for universal suffrage. Not to be discouraged, the Arizona suffragists turned to newly established weapons of democracy-the initiative and referendum. One newspaper, the Arizona Gazette, had predicted that the effort to include universal suffrage in the proposed constitution would fail, but that male voters would grant women the right to vote in a post-statehood election. This is precisely how events unfolded. Petitions for a referendum on women's suffrage were filed in Arizona in July 1912, and in the November election male voters approved the universal suffrage initiative by a margin of

13. Flexner, Century of Struggle at 162 (cited in note 1).

14. 21 Cong. Rec. 6527 (June 26, 1889) (statement of Sen. Reagan, Oregon).

greater than two to one. 15 Just two years later, in 1914, Frances Willard Munds, who had been a vigorous lobbyist for a universal suffrage bill before the Arizona territorial legislature, became the second woman in America to be elected to a state senate. And just six short years later, Arizona would be one of the thirty-six states to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

The relatively enlightened views that permitted and even encouraged the enfranchisement of women in the Western states in the late 1800s were not sentiments universally shared. In 1874, the question of women's suffrage was presented to Michigan electors via a statewide referendum. As Susan B. Anthony stood beside a polling booth on election day encouraging voters to support the suffrage measure, an unkempt man carrying a ballot sheet approached her and asked, "What kind of a ticket is that?"

Susan B. Anthony replied, "Why, you can see for yourself," and pointed to his ballot sheet.

"But I can't read," he responded.

"What? Can't you read the ballot you have there in your hand-which you are about to vote?"

"No, I can't read at all," he answered.

"Well," she explained, "the ballot means that you are willing to let the women, as well as the men, vote."

The man shook his head. "Is that so? Then I don't want it. The women don't know enough to vote."16

Even as the turn of the century drew near, it was clear that the suffragists faced an uphill battle in generating support for a national suffrage amendment.

By the late 1800s, two formidable organizations were pressing for the enfranchisement of women: the National Woman Suffrage Association, which lobbied for a federal constitutional amendment, and the American Woman's Suffrage Association, which preferred to work at the state level to secure a woman's right to vote. In 1889, the two suffrage groups merged into a single association, which then turned its energies to state-level suffrage campaigns. Pressure on Congress to pass a national amendment thereby diminished. By 1900, however, concrete progress, measured by increases in the number of states granting women the right to vote, had slowed almost to a halt. In terms of access to education and opportunities for

15. Carrie Chapman-Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement 177 (U. Wash., 1969).

16. Coolidge, Women's Rights at 9 (cited in note 1).

profitable employment, the women's movement had much to celebrate and ample reason to continue the press for enfranchisement. It was only enthusiasm that was lacking.

The necessary jolt came from England, where the women's suffrage movement was marked by militancy, sensationalism, and calls for direct action. One English suffragette went so far as to throw herself in front of the King's horse as it was winning the derby, sacrificing her life to garner attention for the suffrage movement. 1 7 The American suffragists were quick to learn their lessons from the English. Under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, the movement resolved to draw in working women who stood to benefit most from enfranchisement. From these alliances, the Women's Political Union was born. The Union conducted open-air meetings, covered polls with propaganda, and held elaborate parades. On another front, the Woman Suffrage Party, led by Carrie Chapman-Catt, held suffrage bazaars and balls, sold suffrage calendars and buttons, and hung suffrage posters on every available surface. The pressure on non-suffrage states quickly intensified. But opposition to suffrage increased in tandem. Wellfunded groups were dismayingly successful at killing suffrage motions or, if necessary, bribing or threatening state legislators to ensure defeat of the proposals. The time was coming once again to return the focus of the movement to a national pitch for a constitutional amendment.

But the suffragists met significant resistance at the national level as well. Even former President Grover Cleveland was anxious to place, and keep, women on a pedestal. In his 1905 contribution to the Ladies' Home Journal opposing women's suffrage, he explained the truth as he saw it:

Thoughtful and right-minded men… base their homage and consideration for woman upon an instinctive consciousness that her unmasculine qualities, whether called weaknesses, frailties, or what we will, are the sources of her characteristic and especial strength within the area of her legitimate endeavor. They know that if she is not gifted with the power of clear and logical reasoning she has a faculty of intuition which by a shorter route leads her to abstract moral truth; that if she deals mistakenly with practical problems it is because sympathy or sentiment clouds her perception of the relative value of the factors involved.18

17. Id. at 99.

18. Grover Cleveland, Would Woman Suffrage Be Unwise?, Ladies' Home J. 7 (Oct. 1905).

It was apparent that a powerful effort was needed to bring about change at the national level.

In 1912, it had been sixteen years since either chamber of Congress had issued a report on a suffrage amendment. A small band of young, well-educated women descended on Washington, determined to be heard. By now, eight states had granted full suffrage to women, and these voters became a formidable force, pressuring their delegates to support a national amendment. What followed in the capitol were several years of lobbying, visits to President Wilson, picketing, parades, pilgrimages, and petitions. When the suffragists discovered that President Wilson's 1916 address to Congress made no reference to suffrage, they decided to bring the issue to the forefront on their own. Five women procured seats in the front of the gallery. One of the women concealed a large yellow banner under her skirt, which she unrolled and dropped over the balcony at a predetermined time. The banner demanded: "Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?"19 President Wilson's speech faltered for only a moment, but the damage was done. By the time a page on the floor was able to jump up, catch one corner of the banner, and tear it down, the women were already busy handing out mimeographed reports on the episode to the press.

In the ensuing months, suffragists were jailed repeatedly for picketing the White House. When the new Russian Republic extended the vote to women following its revolution, suffragists taunted President Wilson with the lack of similar progress in the United States. Meanwhile, the National-American Association had at last turned its sights once again to the need for a national amendment. And to its surprise, much of the opposition it had once faced was absent. Liquor interests, long hostile to the suffragists, were busy fending off the likelihood of a national prohibition amendment and could not be bothered with the women's suffrage movement. Progress, long overdue, came quickly. At its 1916 convention, the Republican Party recommended extension of suffrage to women, but decided that this ought to be accomplished by the states. The Democratic Party followed suit. In 1917, the House set a vote on the suffrage amendment. Meanwhile, the suffragists were busily lobbying behind the scenes in a well organized effort to bring pressure to bear on the congressmen who would be participating in the decisive vote. By the end of 1917, six state legislatures had granted women the right to vote in presidential elections. Even New

19. Coolidge, Women's Rights at 122 (cited in note 1).

York, the most populous state in the Union, yielded to the demand for women's suffrage. States began sending resolutions to Congress calling for a federal amendment.

The vote on the national amendment was set for January 10, 1918. As the day drew near, however, suffragists believed that they were forty-five votes short of the two-thirds majority they needed. Their nerves were not eased by the fact that, on the day of the vote, several representatives who were believed to favor the federal amendment encountered an array of misfortunes, ranging from a train wreck to physical illnesses and injuries to the death of one representative's wife. On at least one occasion during the roll call, the opposition appeared to believe it had carried the day. But when the dust settled, the suffragists at long last had cause to celebrate. The amendment passed the House by just two votes more than the necessary two-thirds majority. That the vote was too close for comfort is highlighted by one hopelessly undecided representative's story. The representative told his brother that if the child his wife was expecting turned out to be a girl, he would vote in favor of women's suffrage. Well, his wife gave birth to a beautiful daughter, and the representative was recorded in favor of the amendment.

The suffragists faced their next hurdle with equal enthusiasm. It initially appeared that they lacked ten votes to reach the necessary two-thirds in the Senate. A whole variety of supporters of the amendment urged its passage. The Democratic and Republican National Committees, Theodore Roosevelt, members of the Cabinet, and a number of states that had granted suffrage all pleaded for a favorable vote. Even President Wilson made a personal plea to the Senate. The President's appeal did not in the end tip the scales in favor of passage, however, as the amendment fell one vote short in the Senate.

The suffragists geared up for a renewed battle in the Sixty-sixth Congress. In May 1919, the suffrage amendment once again passed in the House, this time by a vote of 304 to 90. A similar victory in the Senate was almost a foregone conclusion: the amendment passed with two votes more than necessary. Seventy-one years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the extension of the vote to women seemed, if not certain, at least probable. Only one hurdle remained-ratification in three-fourths of the states. By June 1920, thirty-five states had ratified the proposed amendment, and suffragists began to hunt about for a final state. Both Connecticut and Vermont seemed likely prospects, but the governors in both states were opposed to women's suffrage. Thus the suffragists turned to an unlikely setting for the last great battle of the suffrage movement-Tennessee.

The Governor of Tennessee, eager to be credited with passing the amendment, called an emergency session of the state legislature. Despite bribes, threats, and other machinations by opponents of suffrage, the measure passed the state senate. Opponents then turned their attention to the upcoming vote in the Statehouse. Once again, anti-suffragists engaged in a great deal of maneuvering in hopes of ensuring defeat. When the measure was brought to a vote in mid-August, however, opponents expected to prevail by only two votes. When one of their anticipated allies voted in favor, all attention turned to Harry Burn, a twenty-four-year-old representative of a rural district opposed to suffrage. Although his electors opposed the measure, Burn had only recently received a letter from his mother urging him in strong language to vote in favor of suffrage. Burn resolved that, if the measure required a single vote for passage, he would supply it. He did so, and the count in favor of suffrage stood at forty-nine to forty-seven. The speaker of the House quickly changed his vote to yes, hoping to take advantage of a parliamentary maneuver allowing reconsideration of the issue. When opponents failed to muster enough votes to defeat ratification on reconsideration in the days that followed, the suffragists attempted to request reconsideration themselves, planning to vote it down immediately. When they assembled, however, they found that they lacked a quorum: the antisuffragists had fled en masse across the Alabama border hoping to prevent reconsideration! The suffragists pressed ahead without them, and the governor notified Washington of the vote. On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the Nineteenth Amendment into law.

This is a flavor, at least, of the seventy-year struggle for the women's right to vote. But what was it all for? Suffragists were jailed, attacked, harassed, and divorced in their quest for the American dream of full citizenship and civil rights. So it behooves us to consider what, seventy-five years on, we have made of their ideals. Are we making good use of the vote? Have we reached full and equal citizenship in other respects? And in what ways are the suffragists' concerns still pertinent to our world today?

Like most revolutionary changes, suffrage took some time to sink into the popular consciousness. Women got the vote too late to have a significant impact on the 1920 elections; indeed, several states refused to reopen their rolls to allow women to register to vote in time. And, in 1924, barely one-third of eligible women voters turned out to vote in the national elections, leaving Calvin Coolidge the least supported President-elect of the twentieth century, with the votes of less than twenty-four percent of the eligible population.2)

Gradually, however, the women of America discovered their long-suppressed will to vote. By the time of the 1952 elections, my own generation of women was at the polling booths. They had better access to higher education and employment opportunities than their predecessors and had grown up with the vote. In the presidential election that year, the female majority showed itself as an independent and decisive electoral force. Not only did the female vote finally catch up with the male vote-at thirty million each, a fifty percent national turnout-but the female vote also diverged from the male vote, giving the lie, for at least a substantial number of women, to the prewar stereotype of women following their husbands or fathers, sheeplike, into the polling booth. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower had a slim 1.7 million majority over Adlai Stevenson in ter

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 23, 2024 | Original: October 14, 2009

Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. But for almost 100 years, women (and men) had been fighting for women’s suffrage: They had made speeches, signed petitions, marched in parades and argued over and over again that women, like men, deserved all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The leaders of this campaign—women like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells—did not always agree with one another, but each was committed to the enfranchisement of all American women.

Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906

Perhaps the most well-known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in Massachusetts . Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers , believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.

Did you know? Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in a part of upstate New York that would become known as the “Burnt District” or the “Burned-Over District” because it was home to so many religious revivals, utopian crusades and reform movements: They swept through the region, people said, as unstoppably as a forest fire.

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York , where she was a teacher at a girls’ school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused.

However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a “women’s issue.” Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women’s interests in mind.

How Suffragists Pioneered Aggressive New Tactics to Push for the Vote

Women infused their protests with creativity, PR savvy and in‑your‑face urgency.

5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More

Obtaining the vote was just one item on a long civil rights agenda.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement Started with a Tea Party

It was at this small gathering where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others let the discontent of their lives boil over—and decided to do something about it.

In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women’s property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society , delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that Black men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.

This led to a dramatic schism in the women’s rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to Black Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association).

Opposing them were those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former enslaved persons , even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new women’s suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association—Anthony was its second president. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.

Alice Paul, 1885-1977

Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the woman suffrage movement. Born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey , Paul was well-educated—she earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania —and was determined to win the vote by any means necessary.

While she was in graduate school, Paul spent time in London , where she joined the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s radical, confrontational Women’s Social and Political Union and learned how to use civil disobedience and other “unladylike” tactics to draw attention to her cause.

When she returned to the United States in 1910, Paul brought those militant tactics to the well-established National American Woman Suffrage Association. There, as the chair of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, she began to agitate for the passage of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution like the one her hero Susan B. Anthony had wanted so badly to see.

On March 3, 1913, Paul and her colleagues coordinated an enormous suffrage parade to coincide with—and distract from—the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson . More marches and protests followed.

The more conservative women at NAWSA soon grew frustrated with publicity stunts like these, and in 1914 Paul left the organization and started her own, the Congressional Union (which soon became the National Woman’s Party). Even after the U.S. entered World War I , the NWP kept up its flamboyant protests, even staging a seven-month picket in front of the White House .

For this “unpatriotic” act, Paul and the rest of the NWP suffragists were arrested and imprisoned. Along with some of the other activists, Paul was placed in solitary confinement; then, when they went on a hunger strike to protest this unfair treatment, the women were force-fed for as long as three weeks. These abuses did not have their intended effect: Once news of the mistreatment got out, public sympathy swung to the side of the imprisoned activists and they soon were released.

In January 1918, President Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would give all female citizens the right to vote. In August, ratification came down to a vote in the conservative Southern state of Tennessee . The battle over ratification in Tennessee was known as the “War of the Roses” because suffragists and their supporters wore yellow roses and “Antis” wore red.

While the resolution passed easily in the Tennessee Senate, the House was bitterly divided. It passed by one vote, a tie-breaking reversal by Harry Burn, a young red-rose wearing representative who had received a pro-suffrage plea from his mother . On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.

In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. (“Men and women,” it read, “shall have equal rights throughout the United States.”) The ERA has never been ratified.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the foremost women’s-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815, to a prominent family in upstate New York, she was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: Female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.

This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she—along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott and a handful of other reformers—organized the first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.”

One hundred of the delegates—68 women and 32 men—signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence , declaring that women were citizens equal to men with “an inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.

Like Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was a committed abolitionist; however, she too refused to compromise on the principle of universal suffrage. As a result, she campaigned against the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote but denied it to women.

After the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton continued to push for women’s political equality, but she believed in a much broader vision of women’s rights. She advocated for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, the expansion of educational opportunities for girls and even the adoption of less confining clothing (such as the pants-and-tunic ensemble popularized by the activist Amelia Bloomer) so that women could be more active. She also campaigned against the oppression of women in the name of religion: “From the inauguration of the movement for woman’s emancipation,” she wrote, “ the Bible has been used to hold her in the ‘divinely ordained sphere.’” In 1895 she published the first volume of a more egalitarian Woman’s Bible.

Stanton died in 1902. Today, a statue of Stanton, with fellow women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Lucy Stone, 1818-1893

Lucy Stone, born in Massachusetts in 1818, was a pioneering abolitionist and women’s-rights activist, but she is perhaps best known for refusing to change her last name when she married the abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. (This tradition, the couple declared, “refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being” and “confer[red] on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.”)

After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society–advocating, she said, “not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” She continued her activism on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights until 1857, when she retired from the anti-slavery lecture circuit to care for her baby daughter.

After the Civil War, advocates of woman suffrage faced a dilemma: Should they hold firm to their demand for universal suffrage or should they endorse—even celebrate—the 15th Amendment while they kept up their own campaign for the franchise? Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the 15th Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment.

Stone, on the other hand, supported the 15th Amendment; at the same time, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which fought for woman suffrage on a state-by-state basis.

In 1871, Stone and Blackwell began to publish the weekly feminist newspaper The Woman’ s Journal . Stone died in 1893, 27 years before American women won the right to vote. The Woman’ s Journal survived until 1931.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931

Ida B. Wells, born in Mississippi in 1862, is perhaps best known for her work as a crusading journalist and anti-lynching activist. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells wrote for the city’s Black newspaper, The Free Speech .

Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their Black neighbors.

Wells’s insistence on publicizing the evils of lynching, in particular, won her many enemies in the South, and in 1892 she left Memphis for good when an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and warned that they would kill her if she ever came back.

Wells moved north but kept writing about racist violence in the former Confederate states , campaigning for federal anti-lynching laws (which were never passed until 2022) and organizing on behalf of many civil rights causes, including woman suffrage.

In March 1913, as Wells prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural celebration, organizers asked her to stay out of the procession: Some of the white suffragists refused to march alongside Black people .

Early suffrage activists had generally supported racial equality—in fact, most had been abolitionists before they were feminists—but by the beginning of the 20th century, that was rarely the case. In fact, many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists’ cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of “their” women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the Black vote.

Wells joined the march anyway, but her experience showed that to many white suffragists, “equality” did not apply to everyone. Wells continued to fight for civil rights for all until she died in 1931.

Frances E.W. Harper (1825–1911)

Born to free Black parents in Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was orphaned while she was still very young. She was raised by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins, an abolitionist who set up his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper attended the academy, began writing poetry as a teenager and later became a teacher at schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Barred from returning to Maryland by an 1854 law mandating that free Blacks who entered the South would be forced into slavery, she moved in with her uncles’ friends, whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad .

Through her poetry, which dealt with issues of slavery and abolition, Harper became a leading voice of the abolitionist cause. She began traveling the country, lecturing on behalf of anti-slavery groups, and advocating for women’s rights and temperance causes. She also continued to write fiction and poetry, including short stories and a novel, Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the United States.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Harper was one of only a few Black women included in the growing women’s rights movement. In 1866, she delivered a famous speech at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York, in which she urged white suffragists to include Black women in their fight for the vote.

During the debate over the 15th Amendment (which Harper supported), she and other abolitionists split with white suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped form the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA). In 1896, Harper and others founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), which advocated for a number of rights and advancements for Black women, including the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Terrell grew up in an affluent family in Tennessee; her formerly enslaved parents both owned successful businesses, and her father, Robert Reed Church, was one of the South’s first Black millionaires. After graduating from Oberlin College , she began working as a teacher in Washington D.C. , and became involved in the women’s rights movement.

Terrell joined Ida B. Wells in her anti-lynching campaign in the early 1890s, and later co-founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) with Wells and other activists. Terrell served as the organization’s first president until 1901, writing and speaking extensively on women’s suffrage as well as issues such as equal pay and educational opportunities for African Americans.

Terrell joined Alice Paul and other members of the National Women’s Party in picketing for women’s voting rights outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House. In her view , Black women should be dedicated to the suffrage cause, as “the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount...both sex and race.”

As a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples ( NAACP ), Terrell remained an outspoken fighter on behalf of civil rights after passage of the 19th Amendment. In her 80s, she and several other activists sued a D.C. restaurant after being refused service, a legal battle that led to the court-ordered desegregation of the capital’s restaurants in 1953.

Life Story: Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931). New-York Historical Society Museum & Library . Mary Church Terrell. National Park Service . Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. National Women’s History Museum . Lucy Stone. Iowa State University: Archives of Women’s Political Communication . For Stanton, All Women Were Not Created Equal. NPR . Who Was Alice Paul? Alice Paul Institute . Her Life. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House .

HISTORY Vault: Women's History

Stream acclaimed women's history documentaries in HISTORY Vault.

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Get New Issue Alerts
• American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences

Women & the Vote

There are four contexts in which women have won voting rights: as part of a universal reform for all citizens (15 percent of countries that granted women suffrage); imposed by a conqueror or colonial metropole (28 percent); gradually, after some men had been enfranchised (44 percent); or a hybrid category, often in the wake of re-democratization (14 percent). This essay outlines the global patterns of these reforms and argues that in a plurality of cases, where women’s suffrage was gradual, enfranchisement depended on an electoral logic. Politicians subject to competition who believed women would, on average, support their party, supported reform. The suffrage movement provided information, and a potential mobilization apparatus, for politicians to draw on after the vote was extended. Together, both activism and electoral incentives were imperative for reform, providing impor­tant lessons for feminist mobilization today.

Dawn Langan Teele is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of Field Experiments and Their Critics (2014), coeditor of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (2020), and author of Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (2018).

Voting, either by voice or by secret ballot, has been around for a long time. But the idea that all citizens living under democratic governments should have the right to vote, regardless of sex, was once radical for both its class politics and its gender politics. Although many autonomous European communities used voting to determine local policy, voting as a way to organize political contests in large nation-states really began to take hold in the late eighteenth century. With the exception of France–which decreed that all men could vote during its (hastily reversed) first revolution in 1789–most of the first nations to adopt electoral governance extended the vote only to a select group of men. Typically, these men were from the landed elite and often had to be “householders,” meaning that they were the person legally responsible for others that resided in their household. Under these rules, sons who lived at home may not have been allowed an independent vote, and in some places, such as the United Kingdom and Sweden, possession of more than one domicile (for example, a country house) allowed male householders an additional vote for each place where their property was located. Since plural voting arrangements gave men with more property more official say, social class and sex determined early voting rights in a concrete way.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, many countries in Western Europe and the Americas experienced economic growth due to imperialism (which thrived on resource extraction and slave labor) and industrialization (which thrived on primary goods from the new worlds and poorly paid labor of men, women, and children). In places where voting rights were tied to specific levels of wealth, or to educational or literacy requirements, men could gradually acquire voting rights as their incomes rose above the threshold or as they became educated. 1 Although there are a few exceptions, women, even if they met income or educational requirements, were typically unable to select their representatives or represent others in government. 2 By the mid-nineteenth century, the few places where women had previously cast ballots (like in New Jersey or present-day Québec) rewrote their rules to make explicit that only men were included. The illiberality of the so-called liberal regimes of the nineteenth century has thus been an important topic of study among gender scholars. 3

Popular movements for men’s and women’s franchise rights began to percolate after the 1840s, and in 1848, Switzerland became the first country to grant a lasting manhood franchise (though, ironically, it was the last major European country to allow women to vote, in 1971, trailed only by Liechtenstein). 4 In country after country the connection between property and “interest,” that is, between land ownership and a philosophically decreed legitimate stake in governance, was shucked off in favor of a system of one man, one vote. Of course, most countries did not go so far as to say that all men could vote. 5 Many countries that moved to a broad male franchise continued to exclude ethnic and racial minorities. And other groups that were considered dependents–like children and wards of the state, convicts, or the mentally ill–could easily have their voting rights taken away. By the logic of economic dependence, women, who were legal property of first their fathers and then their husbands, were necessarily excluded. In most countries, if a woman needed to contract or earn wages, the signature of a man was crucial. If a woman committed a crime, the men of her family could be held responsible. Although women were considered citizens (as jurisprudence and court cases in many countries established), their duties were often different, and their rights were circumscribed. 6 But during the course of the nineteenth century, the gradual acceptance of women’s legal personhood, and the collapse of the householder as the basis for male political participation, cleared the legal hurdles that had prevented women’s enfranchisement. The rest, as they say, is political history.

This essay paints, with broad strokes, the global picture of women and the vote. I identify four different institutional settings in which women were enfranchised and outline the global and regional patterns of enfranchisement. After briefly summarizing the big debates about causes of women’s suffrage, I argue that for the largest set of countries, electoral politics and women’s activism were crucial determinants of the timing of women’s enfranchisement. I make the case that feminists today have a lot to learn from the failures and successes of the women’s suffrage activists. Far from being a mere bourgeois women’s movement that serves to embarrass rather than inspire, it bears stressing that in most countries, suffrage activism encompassed women from across the class and racial and ethnic spectra. The way that movement leaders at times successfully corralled these different sets of actors, all with different interests, and sometimes gave into baser impulses in their single-minded quest for the vote, are informative for the intersectional politics of the twenty-first century.

There are many levels of government in which elections can be used to pick leaders: from local school board elections, to municipal or state level elections, to national parliamentary or congressional elections, to super-­national elections for the European Union. Although in most countries a single national body determines who has the right to vote at these different electoral levels, some federal countries–like the United States, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Switzerland–allow subnational governments to delineate voting rules. Often, governments tested the waters of women’s electoral participation by allowing women to partake in local elections prior to extending national voting rights. These lower levels of enfranchisement may have been “concessions” to stave off more encompassing demands for gender equality, or they may have served a trial function, allowing politicians to observe and learn more about women’s political engagement and decision-making.

In addition to the multiple sites where voting occurs, voting rights can also take on multiple forms. “Limited male suffrage” rules allowed only some men to vote, while “manhood suffrage” allowed all men to participate. Many countries–even those that had granted manhood franchise–first experimented with women voters under limited rules, for example by allowing wealthy women to vote prior to opening the polls to all women (Norway and the United Kingdom). If the rules were applied in the same way for men and women, then we say that women had “equal suffrage.” If all adult men and women could vote, we call this “universal suffrage.” As several scholars have noted, countries in Latin America that used educational or literacy requirements to determine voting rights, or the United States, Canada, and South Africa, which maintained racial exclusions until the 1960s or later, allowed women to partake in equal suffrage throughout most of the twentieth century, but did not achieve universal suffrage until relatively recently.

In 1880, virtually no women had access to the electoral franchise at the national level. The first movers included the Isle of Man, which allowed women to vote for its independent legislature, the Tynwald, beginning in 1881; several states on America’s Western frontier (which had authority to grant suffrage at all levels of election); and the semisovereign governments in New Zealand and Australia. Beginning in the 1910s, equal suffrage rights–that is, women’s right to vote on the same terms as men–proceeded at a quick clip. 7 By 1930, more than thirty countries had extended the equal franchise and, since 1950, every new constitution that provided for male franchise rights has included women on the same terms. 8

There were distinctive regional patterns of enfranchisement around the world. Figure 1 presents the number of countries in each region that extended equal suffrage to women by decade. The charts are organized by the earliest average regional date of enfranchisement to the latest. Since some regions (like North America) have fewer countries than other regions (like Europe and Central Asia), the lines will be lower for the whole region, but the figure highlights key moments of change.

The North American and European countries were the first to rapidly expand franchise rights to women, with high growth rates beginning in 1910 and again around the end of World War II (when France, Spain, and Italy enfranchised women). The early European surge includes Finland, the first to extend universal voting rights in 1911, and a large number of its neighboring countries that agglomerated into the Soviet Union at the end of World War I. Suffrage adoption took off in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as the Latin American countries, in the 1940s. Nearly every Latin American country had granted women voting rights by the 1960s, but several countries in East Asia and the Pacific held out until later in the century. 9 Sub-Saharan Africa saw a large expansion in women’s rights around the 1950s, which peaked with the massive decolonization efforts and shift toward independence in the 1960s.

In addition to regional diversity in the timing of enfranchisement, there were several different pathways that countries took to women’s suffrage: universal, imposed, gradualist, and hybrid (see Figure 2). 10 In the universalist path, countries granted universal franchise to men and women at the same time, the first time suffrage was extended. The imposed route occurred when a colonial metropole decreed women’s suffrage in its territories, or when suffrage was insisted upon by an occupying power, for example at the end of a war. The gradualist route implies an alternation between men’s and women’s inclusion. There are several variants of this, but typically countries went from limited male, to manhood, to universal suffrage. 11 Finally, there are hybrid cases where countries may have allowed some men to vote early on, and then a new constitution implemented after regime change (or after periods of dictatorship) allowed for universal suffrage. In the world as a whole, universal franchise was implemented in 15 percent of countries that granted women’s suffrage, while the hybrid category applies to 14 percent of countries. Imposed suffrage was second most common (28 percent), while gradual enfranchisement was the most common pathway (about 44 percent of today’s countries).

Figure 2 reveals striking differences in the pathway to enfranchisement by region. For example, the most common route to enfranchisement in East Asia and the Pacific countries, and nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, which were heavily colonized, was by imposition. After independence, many of the later democratizers in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as in South Asia, went for universal extension in one fell swoop. We see too that the gradualist path dominated North America, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe and Central Asia, a pattern that is related to early moves in some of these countries toward limited male franchise rights. The varying regional patterns of enfranchisement hint at the notion that women’s enfranchisement was related to the conditions of imperialism and the overall trajectory of democratization within countries, although we know a lot less about imposed suffrage than we should.

Figure 3 provides a final way of visualizing the path toward suffrage over time, demonstrating the historical prominence of the gradualist path–most countries that adopted suffrage for women had already extended some form of voting rights to men–and of the imposed path, suggesting that once the first democracies adopted suffrage they were not shy to impose these values on the world at large, particularly in their imperial outposts.

Over the years, there have been many social-scientific arguments forwarded to explain variations in the timing of women’s suffrage, including that women won voting rights because of their participation in war, that enfranchisement happened naturally as a result of industrialization, that it was an apolitical gift when the stakes were low, or that it stemmed from men’s political needs. 12 Typically, these theories evolved from thinking about cross-national differences in the timing of suffrage, rather than from thinking about specific cases of women’s enfranchisement.

Historians and most feminist political scientists and sociologists who have studied suffrage extensions in specific cases give more credence to the importance of women’s mobilization for the vote, both within domestic movements and within international feminist organizations. 13 What I suggest in my recent book Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote is that while there may not be a unified cause of women’s enfranchisement, specific logics may have emerged within particular pathways. I focus on explaining gradualist cases: that is, women’s enfranchisement in a context where some men had already attained the right to vote. In this set of countries, I argue that heightened electoral competition could provide an incentive for politicians to reform electoral law. When the strategy of the women’s movement provided information consistent with certain parties’ electoral needs–in other words, when some parties believed they would benefit electorally from the votes of mobilized women–electoral competition, in combination with a strong movement, produced reform. 14

The electoral argument helps to make sense of a series of puzzles that crop up in country-specific accounts of enfranchisement related to the timing of reform and the political alliances that brought reform to bear. For example, why did some countries resist reform in one year but then accept it the very following legislative session? Well, this could happen if an election was on the horizon and one of the vulnerable but powerful parties hoped to win with women’s votes (such was the case with the Liberal Party in Québec in 1939). 15

In addition to making sense of quick reversals regarding suffrage legislation, the electoral politics argument also helps to combat the idea that conservative ideology was what prevented women from winning the vote. Indeed, if we look at which party was in power when suffrage was granted in thirty-two countries from Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia, we find that the ideology of the head of state was nearly evenly split between left, center, and right. 16 That is to say, conservatives were just as likely to preside over suffrage reform as centrist liberals or as far leftists. (In Latin America, however, where the suffrage extensions occurred slightly later than in Europe, a leftist was the head of state in seven of the twelve countries for which I have information.) Why would conservatives support women’s votes? Several electoral reasons emerge, including that they might try to put their stamp on a reform they knew was coming down the line so as not to lose out in the next election (the strategy of the conservatives in federal Canada in 1917–1918). But perhaps more important, in many countries, conservatives thought they could win the lion’s share of women’s votes (as in Chile, where the Catholic Church was believed to have, in the disfranchised women’s population, a “feminine reserve”). 17

Finally, electoral competition also helps to explain why many of the initial extensions of voting rights to women were limited: that is, on different terms than men, often requiring women to be wealthier or older than men had to be to vote. Such was the case in the first Norwegian suffrage extension in 1907 to only propertied women, and the 1918 reform in the United Kingdom that limited the vote to wealthier, older women. 18 When conservative parties could be forced to agree to reform, they would only do so under conditions that they thought would not put them at an extreme disadvantage. This often included demanding that only women who were potential supporters of their party (and hence would act as a force for stability) be included.

The age-old question for scholars of suffrage is: did the women suffragists matter and to what extent? It can be difficult to argue that women were responsible for their own political emancipation because women did not take up arms against the state in order to win the vote, but instead had to earn it in the context of electoral and legislative politics. This can make it seem like women were merely there to march in flowing gowns for a public that had already changed its mind about women’s rights. But to the extent that we can say any social movement mattered for securing whatever particular right, it is definitely safe to say that the suffrage movement was important.

Scholars disagree about the way in which the movement mattered, offering explanations like the use of public demonstrations (in the United Kingdom and Switzerland), the collection of large-scale petitions (in New Zealand, the United States, and Sweden), the pressure of the international feminist movement (in Latin America), the deployment of insider tactics like corralling legislators and log-rolling, changing public opinion, or doing favors for politicians or campaigns. Many scholars have noted that the places with the largest movements were in the first wave of enfranchising countries, and that the use of public tactics like holding rallies and marches was correlated with early enfranchisement. 19 The late enfranchisement in places like France and Switzerland and in many Latin American countries are thus partly attributable to the more circumspect actions of wishful suffragists.

Yet the fact that male legislators in elected chambers presided over reforms has made it difficult to claim that any movement was decisive . This is especially because good cross-national data on the size of the suffrage movement over time do not exist, and because it is clear that a few countries extended the vote to women in the absence of a massive local push by women for these rights (for example, in Turkey). Hence the exact role the women’s movement played for winning suffrage is part of a scholarly dispute. A key intuition from political economy, though, is that powerful groups do not concede power to others without some impetus, and women’s mobilization was the crucial impetus that put suffrage on the political agenda locally, nationally, and internationally.

This is not to say that women who wanted the vote came together harmoniously to forward their agenda. In fact, the internal and external tensions between suffragists and would-be suffragists across class and racial groups have been the subject of many excellent monographs in history and political science. Although in the United States the racial conflict was a particularly pernicious cleavage that affected the nature of the suffrage movement, it is important to understand that each country had its own cleavage. In France, the cleavage was related to church-state relations and republicanism; in parts of Latin America, it was about the Church’s role in fledgling democracies and conflicts over regime type; 20 in Switzerland, the linguistic and cantonal cleavage reigned supreme; and in many of the African countries, the cleavage was racial and ethnic, between colonizers and colonized. When women from the more privileged classes were very distant–ideologically and materially–from the majority of women, the difficulties of forming a cross-cleavage alliance among disparate groups of women loomed large.

My contention is that the size of the movement in any given country was related to the interests of would-be movement leaders. Many of the countries that extended the vote later in the twentieth century had high degrees of inequality throughout the 1900s. In these places, the types of women who may have had the education, initiative, and resources to commit to a long-term social campaign were often more concerned with maintaining their class privilege, or with preserving their preferred form of government, than with casting a ballot. 21 In some countries, commitment to other political goals, like socialism and anti-imperialism, crowded out suffrage mobilization among otherwise feminist activists. Thus, the size of the movement can itself be viewed as a response to local level political and economic conditions and the desires of would-be suffragists. Viewed in this way, it becomes possible to understand some of the tensions that have been well documented between women’s organizations, such as why massive antisuffrage organizations emerged in many countries (with women in charge of the political campaign against women’s involvement in politics). It also helps to understand why, in contexts where male suffrage had already reached manhood status, women’s suffrage groups were often less well organized than when there was a limited male suffrage: suffrage extensions would have much more profound consequences when they had to apply to all women, and often representatives from the upper class were unwilling to take that bargain.

Finally it is important to acknowledge that although much of the pressure for the first women’s suffrage extensions was internally derived (albeit with early and fruitful friendships and correspondences of women hailing from different nation-states), in many cases, the international suffrage movement proved important both for inspiring and motivating local political suffragists, and for exerting a fair amount of moral suasion on male politicians. Although national level politics were still instrumental for determining the exact coalitions that supported women’s votes and the timing of the enfranchisement, the international democratic consensus exerted considerable normative pull in the post–World War II era in the direction of minimally equal political rights for women. 22

What can we learn from the suffrage movement that can inform the feminist politics of this new century? The first key lesson is that women did not win the vote primarily by waiting for men to wake up and realize the justice of the claim, but instead had to fight–both meticulously behind the scenes as well as loudly in public–to be taken seriously. Although notable men did aid suffrage in many contexts, the main protagonists in this movement, and all of its true leaders, were women. 23  For those women, the activities that they engaged in were pushing the boundaries of the time, even if the mainstream suffragists were less avant-garde than some of the far-left feminists.

Second, the class and racial politics that cleaved through the movements, many of which may seem like an embarrassing stain on a momentous achievement, actually provide analytic leverage for understanding the size and scope of social movements today. The fact that many of the leaders of the suffrage movement were upper-middle class does not imply that the movement was won by and for the bourgeois. To the contrary, the integration of women from all walks of life, and particularly the activism of immigrants and the working classes, were crucial in most countries, and particularly in those with the two longest and most sustained movements, the United States and the United Kingdom. 24 But what the suffragists had that feminists today have not found is a single issue to guide their fundraising and focus. Although suffragists wanted policy changes in a host of arenas, coalescing on a single issue may have provided the momentum for their sustained social movement. It also allowed many of the largest umbrella organizations to claim nonpartisanship and therefore court women from many camps. The feminist impulse today does not seem to have such a unifying impulse, and perhaps too few efforts are made to coordinate with women from very different ideological traditions.

Yet even if feminists can find an issue to agree upon, this does not mean that dissent from the radical fringe should be suppressed. Because leaders of the more mainstream movement often decried the tactics of the radical fringes–such as with the steady Millicent Fawcett and the pugnacious Emmeline Pankhurst in the United Kingdom, or the formidable Carrie Catt and the brazen Alice Paul in the United States–historians (and the popular arts) have and will continue to have a lot to say about the seeming “cat fights” between suffragists and suffrage organizations. But the radicals may have served an important function for the success of the mainstream movement. The existence of a militant wing allowed the moderates access to the press and to politicians under the mantle of respectability. This increased the status and sway of the suffrage centrists. In this sense, if the radical fringe allowed the demands of the centrists to be viewed more favorably by men in power, both wings were integral to the victory.

Third, although women did not form a solid voting bloc in most countries, it bears stressing that many major changes in women’s rights were achieved along the road to suffrage. 25 Many of the same women who fought for suffrage argued for the right to own property, to transact commercially, to have intellectual rights to their own inventions, to safe working conditions, to maintain their citizenship even if they married foreigners, and to birth control. These legislative achievements should be viewed as part of the legacy of the suffrage movement. What these lessons imply for politics today is that women’s rights are not just normal goods that emerge automatically over time, but rather are fragile resources that have to be demanded, tended, and defended. As the saying goes, well-behaved women have rarely made history.

• 1 On earning-into the voting population in the United States, see David A. Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On literacy requirements and the vote, see Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World,” The Journal of Economic History 65 (4) (2005): 891–921.
• 2 Electoral laws often differentiated between “active” suffrage–the right to vote–and “passive” suffrage–the right to hold office. Most countries extended both to women at the same time, but there are some exceptions like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Nepal; see Dawn Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 193, note 52. Although typically women could not vote at all until the twentieth century, John Markoff suggests a few exceptions: in medieval and early modern Europe, communities in which local rules were decided by vote often allowed women who owned property to partake in decision-making. In colonial times, New World enclaves saw voting by property owning, tax-paying women and widows in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and parts of present-day Québec. John Markoff, “Margins, Centers, and Democracy: The Paradigmatic History of Women’s Suffrage,” Signs 29 (11) (2003): 85–116.
• 3 Important works in political theory include those by Susan Okin, who famously argued that the assumption of the “private sphere” of women’s lives meant that women were only partially individualized in liberal societies. The ideological constraints of liberal thought have put feminists in a constant tension as to whether to pursue policies that accept difference between men and women or to argue for equality tout court. Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” The American Historical Review 103 (5) (1998): 1440–1474. And as Eileen McDonagh shows, states that clung longer to hereditary monarchial institutions often ended up being more inclusive toward women in politics due to their emphasis on kinship networks. Eileen McDonagh, “Political Citizenship and Democratization: The Gender Paradox,” American Political Science Review 96 (3) (2002): 535–552.
• 4 For an account of the Swiss suffrage movement, see Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Suffrage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
• 5 For a theoretical discussion of the ethics of disenfranchisement of various groups, see Claudio López-Guerra, Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• 6 Whether women were citizens and whether citizens had voting rights was adjudicated in several countries. For example, the Chilean Civil Code from the nineteenth century established that the masculine noun ciudadano applied to both men and women, but women who tried to register to vote in 1875 were prevented from doing so. Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 288. Note that in some countries, women who married foreigners often lost their citizenship rights, though not so for men (this was the case in the United States until the Cable Act in 1922). See Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States.” Women in many Latin American countries including Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay had better nationality rights than women in the United States. International feminists tried to standardize the laws during the Hague Codification Conference of 1930. See Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
• 7 Australia excluded aboriginals in its initial constitution, and the U.S. states, via Jim Crow, excluded most Black people from voting, hence both are cases of equal suffrage. Since New Zealand’s colonists included Maori voters among their electorate, the 1893 reform was universal.
• 8 The global norm change after the 1950s could be due to the 1945 Equal Rights Section of the UN Charter and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As Marino describes in Feminism for the Americas , the UN declarations were important for cementing the legitimacy of women’s rights, including suffrage, in internationalist circles in Latin America. On diffusion, see Francisco O. Ramirez, Yasemin Soysal, and Suzanne Shanahan, “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990,” American Sociological Review 62 (5) (1997): 735–745.
• 9 On the literacy and property requirements that remained in Latin America after the 1960s, refer to Engerman and Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World.”
• 10 These are my categories; see Teele, Forging the Franchise , introduction. But another way to conceptualize the pattern is whether the reforms were “joint track” with the male working classes or piecemeal, with wealthier women included before the masses; see Blanca Rodríguez-Ruiz and Ruth Rubio Marín, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe: Voting to Become Citizens (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), introduction.
• 11 Norway is one of the few places that had manhood franchise (1898) but that limited the women’s vote, at first to property holders in 1907. By 1913, the contradiction was eliminated and universal franchise instantiated.
• 12 For an in-depth discussion of social scientific theories of women’s enfranchisement, see Teele, Forging the Franchise , chap. 2 . On the role of war, see Daniel L. Hicks, “War and the Political Zeitgeist: Evidence from the History of Female Suffrage,” European Journal of Political Economy 31 (C) (2013): 60–81. Hicks finds that the correlation between war and suffrage is driven by European countries and World War II (ibid., 67).
• 13 Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail . See also Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review 186 (1996): 20–45; and Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1995). For broad exposure to movements for suffrage around the world, there are a few great edited volumes that feature chapters by country experts. On Australasia and the Pacific, see Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), 127–151; and Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan, eds., Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1994). On Western Europe, see Rodríguez-Ruiz and Marín, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe . And for work on a variety of countries, including some in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, see Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-­Nurmi, and Pirjo Markkola, eds., Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). To read about internationalism in the suffrage movement, especially in Latin America, see Ann Towns, “The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage, 1920–1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42 (4) (2010): 779–807.
• 14 Recently some government scholars have argued that instead of looking to the women’s movement for information about how women will vote, politicians in New Zealand used the heuristic of women’s dispositions to infer women’s future political loyalties. Mariel J. Barnes, “Divining Disposition: The Role of Elite Beliefs and Gender Narratives in Women’s Suffrage,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming).
• 15 Sylvie D’Augerot-Arend, “Why So Late? Cultural and Institutional Factors in the Granting of Québec and French Women’s Political Rights,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (1) (1991): 138–165; and Manon Tremblay, Québec Women and Legislative Representation , trans. Käthe Roth (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
• 16 These figures are calculated for thirty-two countries using Thomas Brambor, Johannes Lindvall, and Annika Stjernquist, “The Ideology of Heads of Government, 1870–2012,” Codebook, Version 1.5 (Lund: Department of Political Science, Lund University, 2017).
• 17 Joan Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018). On Chile and the Catholic Church, see Erika Maza Valenzuela, “Catolicismo, anticlericalismo y la extensión del sufragio a la mujer en Chile,” Estudios Públicos 58 (1995): 137–197.
• 18 Key sources on the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom include Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2005).
• 19 Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail ; Patricia Grimshaw, Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1972); and Holly J. McCammon, Karen E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg, and Christine Mowery, “How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919,” American Sociological Review 66 (1) (2001): 49–70.
• 20 See Isabel Castillo, “Explaining Female Suffrage Reform in Latin America: Motivation Alignment, Cleavages, and Timing of Reform” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2019).
• 21 In Teele, Forging the Franchise , I present evidence of the ambivalence about the vote for feminists in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, but other authors have noted similar patterns elsewhere. For example, in 1922, a prominent Chilean feminist and newly minted suffragist Amanda Labarca wrote to the famous Uruguayan feminist Paulina Luisi expressing concerns that women would vote according to the will of Church leaders: “Would the vote of women in Chile favor the liberal evolution of the country or would it delay it by increasing the numbers and the power of the clerical-conservative party?” Cited in Corinne A. Pernet, “Chilean Feminists, the International Women’s Movement, and Suffrage, 1915–1950,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (4) (2000): 672. Pernet attributes the “slow pace” of Chilean women’s activism for the vote to Labarca’s concerns.
• 22 The scholarship on the international women’s movements and collaborations is quite well developed. An early text is Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). In addition, see Towns, “The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage”; and Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). For a devastating account of the imperialism of U.S. suffragists in the Americas writ large (which also highlights Latin American feminists’ contributions to antifascist movements and to human rights in the international sphere), see Marino, Feminism for the Americas .
• 23 Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (New York: SUNY Press, 2017); and Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• 24 For instance, see Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981); Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015); Ellen Carol DuBois, “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909,” The Journal of American History 74 (1) (1987): 34–58; Holton, Feminism and Democracy ; Pugh, The March of the Women; Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Susan Englander, Class Conflict and Coalition in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907–1912: The San Francisco Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).
• 25 J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women’s Ballots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Anna L. Harvey, “The Political Consequences of Suffrage Exclusion: Organizations, Institutions, and the Electoral Mobilization of Women,” Social Science History 20 (1) (1996).