Women’s Suffrage in the United States

"I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet."
– Susan B. Anthony

The quest for equality is a cornerstone of American history, and few struggles embody this ideal more profoundly than the fight for women’s suffrage. It was a battle waged across decades, fueled by unwavering determination and a vision of a more just and equitable society. This movement, a testament to the power of collective action, ultimately reshaped the American political landscape.

As the foundational documents of the nascent United States were being painstakingly crafted, Abigail Adams, the insightful and influential wife of John Adams, the second U.S. President, penned letters to her husband urging him and his fellow drafters to "Remember the Ladies." This plea, though seemingly simple, carried the weight of centuries of inequality and foreshadowed the long and arduous journey toward women’s enfranchisement. However, her prescient words, advocating for the inclusion of women in the burgeoning nation’s framework, would remain largely unheeded for generations to come. It would be many years before the ladies were “remembered” and guaranteed equal rights in the United States.

The seeds of the Women’s Suffrage in the United States movement were sown in the early 19th century, as a growing chorus of voices began to advocate for equal rights for both men and women. This burgeoning awareness culminated in the first women’s rights convention in the United States, a pivotal event held on July 19-20, 1848, in the picturesque town of Seneca Falls, New York. This gathering is widely recognized as the formal beginning of the women’s rights movement, a movement that sought to dismantle the myriad legal, social, and political barriers that relegated women to a subordinate position in American society. At the time of the convention, women were denied the fundamental freedoms enjoyed by men, facing systemic discrimination in the eyes of the law, the church, and the government. Women were barred from voting, holding elective office, attending institutions of higher learning, and earning a living on equal terms with their male counterparts. Furthermore, married women faced even greater restrictions, unable to enter into legal contracts, divorce abusive husbands, or gain custody of their own children.

The Seneca Falls Convention was the brainchild of five remarkable women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a brilliant orator and intellectual; Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister and abolitionist; Martha Wright, a dedicated advocate for social reform; Mary Ann M’Clintock, a prominent figure in the abolitionist movement; and Jane Hunt, a social reformer with a deep commitment to equality. Together, these women orchestrated an event that would ignite a firestorm of change, forever altering the course of American history.

At the heart of the convention was the presentation of a groundbreaking document known as the Declaration of Sentiments. This declaration, cleverly modeled after the Declaration of Independence, echoed its powerful language and core principles, but with a revolutionary twist. Boldly proclaiming that "all men and women are created equal," the Declaration of Sentiments laid out a comprehensive list of grievances and demands, calling for equal rights for women across all spheres of life. Among these demands was a truly radical idea for the time: the right to vote. This audacious proposal, challenging the very foundations of political power, sparked intense debate and controversy, but it also served as a rallying cry for a movement that would not be silenced. An estimated 300 people attended the convention; 68 women and 32 men ratified and signed the document.

Following the groundbreaking event in Seneca Falls, the Women’s Suffrage in the United States movement gained momentum and spread rapidly across the nation. Just two weeks later, a second Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Rochester, New York, on August 2, further solidifying the movement’s growing influence. State and local conventions soon followed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, demonstrating the widespread appeal of the cause. In 1850, the first National Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, marking a significant step toward the creation of a cohesive national network of individuals committed to changing society. The Women’s Suffrage in the United States movement grew into a cohesive network of individuals committed to changing society.

The eruption of the Civil War in the 1860s temporarily disrupted the suffrage movement, as women turned their energies toward supporting the war effort, engaging in activities such as nursing, fundraising, and providing aid to soldiers and their families. However, when the war finally came to an end, political activism resumed with renewed vigor. In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two of the most iconic figures in the movement, joined forces to form the American Equal Rights Association, an organization dedicated to the pursuit of universal suffrage for all Americans, regardless of race or gender.

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, extending the protections of the Constitution against unjust state laws to all citizens. However, this landmark amendment also contained a provision that explicitly defined "citizens" and "voters" as "male," effectively excluding women from the franchise and further fueling the outrage of the suffrage movement. The ladies remained unremembered.

The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment sparked a deep division within the Women’s Suffrage in the United States movement, leading to the formation of two distinct factions in 1869. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, advocating for a more radical approach, established the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in New York. This organization focused on agitating for a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would guarantee women the right to vote. Meanwhile, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, favoring a more conservative strategy, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). This group opted to work through state legislatures, seeking to gradually enfranchise women on a state-by-state basis. Interestingly, during this same year, the Wyoming territory took a progressive step by organizing with a woman suffrage provision, demonstrating a glimmer of hope for the future of women’s rights. In 1890, Wyoming was admitted to the Union with its suffrage provision intact.

In the 1870s, frustrated by the slow progress of the federal amendment strategy, suffragists explored alternative approaches to achieving their goals. One such approach involved challenging their exclusion from voting in the courts, arguing that as citizens, they could not be deprived of their rights as protected by the Constitution. In a bold act of defiance in 1872, Susan B. Anthony deliberately attempted to vote, hoping to be arrested and thereby gain the opportunity to test this legal strategy in the courts. As anticipated, she was arrested and indicted for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully voting for a representative to the Congress of the United States." Despite being found guilty and fined, Anthony defiantly refused to pay a single dollar, vowing to continue the fight for women’s suffrage. Meanwhile, Virginia Minor, a prominent suffrage leader in St. Louis, Missouri, successfully brought the issue before the United States Supreme Court. However, in 1875, the Court ruled unanimously that citizenship did not automatically confer the right to vote and that the issue of female enfranchisement should be decided within the individual states.

These differing approaches – whether to pursue a federal amendment or to work for state amendments – kept the woman suffrage movement divided until 1890. In that year, the NWSA and the AWSA finally reunited, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Later leaders included Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. Several states and territories (with Wyoming first, in 1869) granted suffrage to the women within their borders.

Several years after the Supreme Court ruling on the issue of women voting, in 1878, a Woman Suffrage Amendment was introduced in the United States Congress. However, nothing would become of it for more than four decades. When the amendment finally passed both houses in 1919, the wording remained unchanged.

Through these many years, women organized, petitioned, and picketed to win the right to vote. Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goals varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state, while others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. Militant suffragists used parades, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Often, supporters met fierce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically abused them.

In 1890, when the NWSA and the AWSA were reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, slow progress continued to be made in securing the vote for women. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Republican Party became the first national political party to adopt a women’s suffrage plank. By 1913, only nine states – all in the West – provided women the right to vote. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to represent her state in the U.S. House of Representatives.

When New York adopted women’s suffrage in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and two weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, it passed its final hurdle of obtaining the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920, changing the face of the American electorate forever.

The 19th Amendment guaranteed all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest. In the mid-19th century, several generations of women suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical constitutional change. Few early supporters lived to see the final victory in 1920.

Its victory accomplished, the NAWSA ceased to exist, and the organization became the nucleus of the League of Women Voters. This group focused on many of the same social and political issues that occupied other women’s groups. Its emphasis was on educating voters, particularly newly enfranchised women, about candidates and campaign issues, especially relating to child labor and welfare, citizen participation, civil rights, consumer affairs, environmental concerns, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, immigration, labor, national security, and women’s legal status and rights.

In addition to promoting its own programs, the league was also a prime mover behind the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, an umbrella organization of various women’s and social reform groups that was formed in 1920 to serve as an information clearinghouse and lobbying force for pending federal legislation. Among the charter members was the League of Women Voters, National Consumers’ League, National Women’s Trade Union League of America, National Council of Jewish Women, and six other groups. More organizations joined a few years later to promote legislation against lynching and for maternity and infant health protection, independent citizenship for married women, funding for the federal women’s and children’s bureaus, and the creation of a Department of Education.

One group that did not join the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee was the National Woman’s Party, the leading proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, which National Woman’s Party chair Alice Paul drafted in 1923. The amendment proposed to eliminate discrimination based on gender.

The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee resisted the Equal Rights Amendment as a threat to the sex-based protective labor legislation its members had fought for years to secure. Several decades passed before the influential League of Women Voters and other former Women’s Joint Congressional Committee members supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress did not pass until 1972.

The long and difficult struggle for Women’s Suffrage in the United States is one of the best-documented, most widely researched, and most seriously debated topics in American women’s history. Those historians know as much as they do about the suffrage campaign mainly because of its participants’ conscious efforts to record their movement’s history. In the late 1870s, in the very midst of their campaign, leading suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage began chronicling the movement in The History of Woman Suffrage, published in three monumental volumes between 1881 and 1886. The early leaders supplemented this history by publishing various autobiographies and memoirs and collecting clippings, books, and pamphlets about their efforts. Many of these original documents are held today at the Library of Congress in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

"I always feel… the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end."
– Alice Stokes Paul, suffragist and author of the Equal Rights Amendment