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Seneca Falls Convention July 19-20, 1848

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Seneca Falls Convention July 19-20, 1848

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The convention was the first major beginning of the women's suffrage movement. It was started by a group of women, the driving organizer being Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Original article (not annotated): https://www.history.com/topics/womens-rights/seneca-falls-convention

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The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the meeting launched the

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The Declaration of Sentiments was written to explain the capability of women and how their current situation had to be fixed soon. It displayed the dramatic difference between men's and women's rights.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/declaration-of-sentiments.htm

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Text of the Declaration of Sentiments, from the collections of the Library of Congress.
Read the full text here: https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm

During the summer of 1848 abolitionist Lucretia Mott left her home in Philadelphia and headed for upstate New York to attend a Quaker meeting and visit her pregnant sister, Martha Coffin Wright. While in the area, both Mott and Wright attended a tea party in Seneca Falls. Their friend Jane Hunt hosted the party. Invitations were also extended to Hunt's neighbors, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. By the end of the tea, the group was planning a meeting for women's rights. They published a notice in local papers reporting: "a Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religions condition of women."[1] Elizabeth Cady Stanton volunteered to write an outline for their protest statement, calling it a Declaration of Sentiments. Stanton and M'Clintock, then, drafted the document, from M'Clintock's mahogany tea table. The Declaration of Sentiments set the stage for their convening.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced the claims of the antebellum-era conventioneers at Seneca Falls by adopting the same language of colonial revolutionaries, decades prior. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was her template. Historian Linda Kerber perhaps best explains the significance of Stanton's rhetorical decision, writing: "By tying the complaints of women to the most distinguished political statement the nation had made [Stanton] implied that women's demands were no more or less radical than the American Revolution had been; that they were in fact an implicit fulfillment of the commitments already made."[2]

The Declaration of Sentiments was a clarion call in celebration of women's worthiness-naming their right not be subjugated. Most prominent among the critiques Stanton advanced were: women's inferior legal status, including lack of suffrage rights (which was true except both for some local elections and in New Jersey between 1790 and 1807); economic as well as physical subordination; and limited opportunities for divorce (including lack of child custody protections). These offences were particularly ironic considering the expansive civic wartime roles women performed, including their contributions to the nation's independence-by working as nurses and cooks, spies, and, even, fundraisers.[3]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments to dramatize the denied citizenship claims of elite women during a period when the early republic's founding documents privileged white propertied males. The document has long been recognized for the sharp critique she made of gender inequality in the U.S. Yet, her words also obscured significant differences in the lived experiences of women across racial, class, and regional lines. For example, at the very moment Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, Native Americans were being displaced to create space for westward expansion. This does not mean they had no relationship to the women's rights movement. Rather, matrilineal Native societies inspired women's rights advocates who referenced them in order to claim that women in the U.S. deserved greater autonomy.[4] Additionally, African Americans in New York were but a mere generation removed from slavery. There were black women advocates of the women's rights movement, but there is no evidence that they were invited to Seneca Falls.[5] Frederick Douglass played a prominent role in the proceedings. Making clear these distinctions creates a space to better understand both the inequalities that existed between women at the time of Stanton's call for women's rights and the intellectual tensions that existed in the movement during some of its earliest days. Yet, the Declaration of Sentiments as an idea created an important space for articulating the rights owed to women, one embraced by many now in a larger project of gender equality.

References:
Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999)
----"From the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments: The Legal Status of Women in the Early Republic, 1776-1848," Human Rights 6, No. 2 (Winter 1977): 115.
Sally Roesch Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (New York: Native Voices, 2001)
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)
Judith Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
----"Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention," Journal of Women's History, 3: 1 (Spring 1991), 9-37.

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The Declaration of Sentiments (U.S. National Park Service)

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During the summer of 1848 abolitionist Lucretia Mott left her home in Philadelphia and headed for upstate New York to attend a Quaker meeting and visit her pregnant sister, Martha Coffin Wright. While in the area, both Mott and Wright attended a tea party in Seneca Falls.

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Sojourner Truth was a woman who experienced discrimination from both racism and women's rights. She gave a speech that spoke for the rights of African Americans and Women.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm

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"I sell the shadow to support the substance." -- Sojourner Truth. Carte de Visite, circa 1864, in the collections of the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97513239/)

Born into slavery in 1797, Isabella Baumfree, who later changed her name to Sojourner Truth, would become one of the most powerful advocates for human rights in the nineteenth century. Her early childhood was spent on a New York estate owned by a Dutch American named Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh. Like other slaves, she experienced the miseries of being sold and was cruelly beaten and mistreated. Around 1815 she fell in love with a fellow slave named Robert, but they were forced apart by Robert's master. Isabella was instead forced to marry a slave named Thomas, with whom she had five children.

In 1827, after her master failed to honor his promise to free her or to uphold the New York Anti-Slavery Law of 1827, Isabella ran away, or, as she later informed her master, "I did not run away, I walked away by daylight...." After experiencing a religious conversion, Isabella became an itinerant preacher and in 1843 changed her name to Sojourner Truth. During this period she became involved in the growing antislavery movement, and by the 1850s she was involved in the woman's rights movement as well. At the 1851 Women's Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered what is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women's rights speeches in American history, "Ain't I a Woman?" She continued to speak out for the rights of African Americans and women during and after the Civil War. Sojourner Truth died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain't I A Woman?
Delivered 1851
Women's Rights Convention, Old Stone Church (since demolished), Akron, Ohio

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.[1]

But Wait!
There is some controversy regarding Sojourner Truth's famous 'Ain't I a Woman?' Speech listed above. There are different versions of the speech. The popular 'Ain't I a Woman' Speech was first published by Frances Gage in 1863, 12 years after the speech itself. Another version was published a month after the speech was given in the Anti-Slavery Bugle by Rev. Marius Robinson. In Robinson's Version the phrase 'Ain't I a Woman' is not present.

Compare the speeches and decide yourself at the Library of Congress or at The Sojourner Truth Project. [2]

[1] This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
[2] This article first appeared on the Women's Rights National Historical Park website.

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Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman? (U.S. National Park Service)

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Born into slavery in 1797, Isabella Baumfree, who later changed her name to Sojourner Truth, would become one of the most powerful advocates for human rights in the nineteenth century. Her early childhood was spent on a New York estate owned by a Dutch American named Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh.

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Women's rights during the Civil War, 1861

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Women's rights during the Civil War, 1861

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The Civil War put a temporary pause on the movement, but the women part of it, kept persisting through, even if it was just a little contribution. Each contribution would prove helpful later, after the war.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/womans-rights-activists-during-civil-war#:~:text=During%20the%20Civil%20War%2C%20reformers,Clara%20Barton%2C%20served%20as%20nurses.

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During the Civil War, reformers focused on the war effort rather than organizing women's rights meetings. Many woman's rights activists supported the abolition of slavery, so they rallied to ensure that the war would end this inhumane practice.

Some women's rights activists, like Clara Barton, served as nurses. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the Women's Loyal National League. The group called for the immediate end of slavery and full citizenship rights for newly freed blacks. Women's rights activists also were part of the United States Sanitary Commission, a large national volunteer association that raised money and sent supplies to Union soldiers.

African American women played a crucial part in the war effort. Harriet Tubman had been helping slaves escape to freedom since 1851. Because of her network of friends and familiarity with the landscape, she also became a spy for the Union Army during the war. The Women's Loyal National League raised money to support Tubman's work. Sojourner Truth, the prominent reformer and lecturer, envisioned what life would be like for newly freed men and women and led efforts to settle freed people in Kansas.

Although the Civil War temporarily disrupted the women's rights movement, women's efforts and the organizations they created laid the foundations for a stronger movement after the war.

By Allison Lange, Ph.D.
2015

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Woman's Rights Activists during the Civil War

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During the Civil War, reformers focused on the war effort rather than organizing women's rights meetings. Many woman's rights activists supported the abolition of slavery, so they rallied to ensure that the war would end this inhumane practice. Some women's rights activists, like Clara Barton, served as nurses.

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The first woman to address a house committee, Jan 11, 1871

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The first woman to address a house committee, Jan 11, 1871

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Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to address a house committee and proved that she was a role model for women by continuing to accomplish things while there. Unfortunately, she still didn't get her appeal approved.  ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-woman-to-address-a-congressional-committee/#:~:text=On%20this%20date%2C%20Victoria%20Woodhull,to%20address%20a%20House%20committee.

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On this date, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to address a House committee. Woodhull was one of the more colorful suffrage figures of the era: an advocate of free love, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street, a self-proclaimed "medical clairvoyant," and the first woman presidential candidate, nominated by the Equal Rights Party in 1872. Wealthy, forthright, and persuasive, she spent several months in the capital city agitating for woman suffrage, and convinced the Judiciary Committee's Benjamin Butler-a high-ranking, Massachusetts Republican who would later chair the panel-to allow her to deliver her "Woodhull memorial" in person. Flanked by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Isabella Beecher Hooker, Woodhull declared before the committee that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments implicitly granted women the right to vote. She believed that "whereas, the continuance of the enforcement of . . . local election laws, denying and abridging the Right of Citizens to Vote on account of sex, is a grievance to your memorialist and to various other persons" that the committee should draft legislation granting women the vote. Only Butler and Representative William Loughridge, an Iowa judge, supported the proposal. Their minority report recommended the House confirm and uphold the right of women to vote. The committee, however, overwhelmingly voted to table the request. For several weeks after Woodhull's testimony suffragists descended on Capitol Hill, according to the New York Times, setting up headquarters in a room belonging to the House Committee on Education. In early February, the House rejected an appeal by Woodhull to use the chamber to deliver a suffrage address. Women nationally were not granted suffrage until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Related Highlight Subjects

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The First Woman to Address a House Committee | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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On this date, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to address a House committee. Woodhull was one of the more colorful suffrage figures of the era: an advocate of free love, the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street, a self-proclaimed "medical clairvoyant," and the first woman presidential candidate, nominated by the Equal Rights Party in 1872.

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Two women's rights groups with two separate views, merged together to make one big Women's rights group despite their differences. They realized that things would go a lot faster if they worked together.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/nawsa-united#:~:text=but%20were%20unsuccessful.-,Alice%20Stone%20Blackwell%2C%20the%20daughter%20of%20the%20American%20association%20leader,Woman%20Suffrage%20Association%20(NAWSA).

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Horse drawn float declares National American Woman Suffrage Association’s support for Bristow-Mondell amendment

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National American Woman Suffrage Association — History of U.S. Woman’s Suffrage

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The two competing national suffrage organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association and American Woman Suffrage Association—joined in 1890 to become the National American Woman Suffrage Associatin.  Alice Stone Blackwell, the daughter of the American association leader Lucy Stone, spe

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Western states started to let women vote but the southern and eastern states still resisted letting women participate in voting.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage

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The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100

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After many years of fighting, women and some men even came together and marched for women's rights.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/03/03/this-day-history-1913-womens-suffrage-parade

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On this day 103 years ago, thousands of women gathered in Washington, D.C. to call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. While women had been fighting hard for suffrage for over 60 years, this marked the first major national event for the movement.

The huge parade, which was spearheaded by Alice Paul and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was held on March 3, 1913. Riding atop a white horse, lawyer and activist Inez Milholland led over five thousand suffragettes up Pennsylvania Avenue, along with over 20 parade floats, nine bands, and four mounted brigades.

The organizers of the parade also maximized attention on the event by strategically hosting it just one day before the inauguration of President-elect Woodrow Wilson. This tactic worked. As the women marched from the U.S. Capitol toward the Treasury Building, they were met by thousands of spectators, many in town for the inauguration.

Not all spectators were kind. Some marchers were jostled, tripped, and violently attacked, while police on the parade route did little to help. By the end of the day, over 100 women had to be hospitalized for injuries. However, the women did not give up; they finished the parade. Their experiences led to major news stories and even congressional hearings. Historians later credited the 1913 parade for giving the suffrage movement a new wave of inspiration and purpose.

"In the face of discrimination and undue hardship, [women] have never given up on the promise of America: that with hard work and determination, nothing is out of reach."

President Obama proclaiming Women's History Month 2016

While it took another seven years for the Nineteenth Amendment to be ratified on August 18, 1920, the women who marched on this day in history accomplished their goal of reinvigorating the suffrage movement. As the official parade pamphlet read, they gave "expression to the nation-wide demand for an amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchising women."

"For too long, women were formally excluded from full participation in our society and our democracy. Because of the courage of so many bold women who dared to transcend preconceived expectations and prove they were capable of doing all that a man could do and more, advances were made, discoveries were revealed, barriers were broken, and progress triumphed."

President Obama proclaiming Women's History Month 2016

Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, and the others who marched in 1913 are just some of the women who made a more just and prosperous future possible for all Americans. While these women paved the way for equality at the ballot box, the Obama Administration is still fighting every day to increase equality for women and girls. From creating the White House Council on Women and Girls, to appointing two women to the Supreme Court and a strong team of women leaders to his Cabinet and White House staff, President Obama has taken concrete steps to ensure that women's voices are heard in government and society.

Throughout Women's History Month, we'll update you on the important work the Obama Administration is taking to support women in the workplace, expand women's access to quality and affordable health care, increase opportunities for girls pursuing STEM education, protect women from violence, support women in the military and female veterans, and much more.

During #WomensHistoryMonth, we remember the trailblazers who opened doors for women today → https://t.co/kgDEpU4IJn pic.twitter.com/rJcyuNtI6i
- White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) March 1, 2016

Danielle Cohen is an intern in the Office of Digital Strategy

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This Day in History: The 1913 Women's Suffrage Parade

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On this day 103 years ago, thousands of women gathered in Washington, D.C. to call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. While women had been fighting hard for suffrage for over 60 years, this marked the first major national event for the movement.

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Jeannette Rankin joined the fight for women's rights and powered through to become the first woman in congress. There she continued to press for voting rights to be accepted by all.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jeannette-rankin-assumes-office

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Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, takes her seat in the U.S. Capitol as a representative from Montana.

Born on a ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory, in 1880, Rankin was a social worker in the states of Montana and Washington before joining the women's suffrage movement in 1910. Working with various suffrage groups, she campaigned for the women's vote on a national level and in 1914 was instrumental in the passage of suffrage legislation in Montana. Two years later, she successfully ran for Congress in Montana on a progressive Republican platform calling for total women's suffrage, legislation protecting children, and U.S. neutrality in the European war. Following her election as a representative, Rankin's entrance into Congress was delayed for a month as congressmen discussed whether a woman should be admitted into the House of Representatives.
READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About Jeannette Rankin
Finally, on April 2, 1917, she was introduced in Congress as its first female member. The same day, President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress and urged a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted for war by a wide majority, and on April 6 the vote went to the House. Citing public opinion in Montana and her own pacifist beliefs, Jeannette Rankin was one of only 50 representatives who voted against the American declaration of war. For the remainder of her first term in Congress, she sponsored legislation to aid women and children, and advocated the passage of a federal suffrage amendment.

In 1918, Rankin unsuccessfully ran for a Senate seat, and in 1919 she left Congress to become an important figure in a number of suffrage and pacifist organizations. In 1940, with the U.S. entrance into another world war imminent, she was again elected as a pacifist representative from Montana and, after assuming office, argued vehemently against President Franklin D. Roosevelt's war preparations. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the next day, at Roosevelt's urging, Congress passed a formal declaration of war against Japan. Representative Rankin cast the sole dissenting vote. This action created a furor and Rankin declined to seek reelection. After leaving office in 1943, Rankin continued to be an important spokesperson for pacifism and social reform. In 1967, she organized the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, an organization that staged a number of highly publicized protests against the Vietnam War. She died in 1973 at the age of 93.

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Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to U.S. Congress, assumes office

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Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, takes her seat in the U.S. Capitol as a representative from Montana. Born on a ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory, in 1880, Rankin was a social worker in the states of Montana and Washington before joining the women's suffrage movement in 1910.

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After a long fight, the 19th amendment was finally passed on August 18, 1920, to declare that women could vote.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/19th-amendment-1

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Contents

1. Women's Suffrage

2. Seneca Falls Convention

3. Declaration of Sentiments

4. National Suffrage Groups Established

5. Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

6. State-level Successes for Voting Rights

7. Protest and Progress

8. The Final Struggle For Passage

9. When Did Women Get the Right to Vote?

10. What Is the 19 Amendment?

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known as women's suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending almost a century of protest. In 1848, the movement for women's rights launched on a national level with the Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Following the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women's rights movement. Stanton and Mott, along with Susan B. Anthony and other activists, raised public awareness and lobbied the government to grant voting rights to women. After a lengthy battle, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Despite the passage of the amendment and the decades-long contributions of Black women to achieve suffrage, poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions continued to block women of color from voting. Black men and women also faced intimidation and often violent opposition at the polls or when attempting to register to vote. It would take more than 40 years for all women to achieve voting equality.
WATCH: Women's History Documentaries on HISTORY Vault
Women's Suffrage

During America's early history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male citizens.

For example, married women couldn't own property and had no legal claim to any money they might earn, and no female had the right to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and motherhood, not politics.

The campaign for women's suffrage was a small but growing movement in the decades before the Civil War. Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated across the U.S. including temperance leagues, the abolitionist movement and religious groups. Women played a prominent role in a number of them.

Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the ideal woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.
READ MORE: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women's Right to Vote
Seneca Falls Convention

It was not until 1848 that the movement for women's rights began to organize at the national level.

In July of that year, reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York (where Stanton lived). More than 300 people-mostly women, but also some men-attended, including former African-American slave and activist Frederick Douglass.

In addition to their belief that women should be afforded better opportunities for education and employment, most of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

Declaration of Sentiments

A group of delegates led by Stanton produced a "Declaration of Sentiments" document, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which stated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, among other things, was that the delegates believed women should have the right to vote.
WATCH: Susan B. Anthony and the Long Push for Women's Suffrage
Following the convention, the idea of voting rights for women was mocked in the press and some delegates withdrew their support for the Declaration of Sentiments. Nonetheless, Stanton and Mott persisted-they went on to spearhead additional women's rights conferences and they were eventually joined in their advocacy work by Susan B. Anthony and other activists.

National Suffrage Groups Established

With the onset of the Civil War, the suffrage movement lost some momentum, as many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the conflict between the states.

After the war, women's suffrage endured another setback, when the women's rights movement found itself divided over the issue of voting rights for Black men. Stanton and some other suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would give Black men the right to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.

That same year, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA); the group's leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not pass if it included voting rights for women. ( The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.)

The AWSA believed women's enfranchisement could best be gained through amendments to individual state constitutions. Despite the divisions between the two organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the right to vote. (When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, women's suffrage remained part of the state constitution.)

By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage movement had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S. Congress for a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to study and debate the issue. However, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization's strategy was to lobby for women's voting rights on a state-by-state basis. Within six years, Colorado, Utah and Idaho adopted amendments to their state constitutions granting women the right to vote. In 1900, with Stanton and Anthony advancing in age, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped up to lead NAWSA.

Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

During debate over the 15th Amendment, white suffragist leaders like Stanton and Anthony had argued fiercely against Black men getting the vote before white women. Such a stance led to a break with their abolitionist allies, like Douglass, and ignored the distinct viewpoints and goals of Black women, led by prominent activists like Sojourner Truth and Frances E.W. Harper, fighting alongside them for the right to vote.

As the fight for voting rights continued, Black women in the suffrage movement continued to experience discrimination from white suffragists who wanted to distance their fight for voting rights from the question of race.
READ MORE: 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment
Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 by a group of women including Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. They fought hard for the passage of the 19th Amendment, seeing the women's right to vote as a crucial tool to winning legal protections for Black women (as well as Black men) against continued repression and violence.

State-level Successes for Voting Rights

The turn of the 20th century brought renewed momentum to the women's suffrage cause. Although the deaths of Stanton in 1902 and Anthony in 1906 appeared to be setbacks, the NASWA under the leadership of Catt achieved rolling successes for women's enfranchisement at state levels.

Between 1910 and 1918, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington extended voting rights to women.

Also during this time, through the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women's Political Union), Stanton's daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced parades, pickets and marches as means of calling attention to the cause. These tactics succeeded in raising awareness and led to unrest in Washington, D.C.

Did you know? Wyoming, the first state to grant voting rights to women, was also the first state to elect a female governor. Nellie Tayloe Ross (1876-1977) was elected governor of the Equality State-Wyoming's official nickname-in 1924. And from 1933 to 1953, she served as the first woman director of the U.S. Mint.

Protest and Progress

On the eve of the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, protesters thronged a massive suffrage parade in the nation's capital, and hundreds of women were injured. That same year, Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which later became the National Woman's Party.

The organization staged numerous demonstrations and regularly picketed the White House, among other militant tactics. As a result of these actions, some group members were arrested and served jail time.

In 1918, President Wilson switched his stand on women's voting rights from objection to support through the influence of Catt, who had a less-combative style than Paul. Wilson also tied the proposed suffrage amendment to America's involvement in World War I and the increased role women had played in the war efforts.

When the amendment came up for vote, Wilson addressed the Senate in favor of suffrage. As reported in The New York Times on October 1, 1918, Wilson said, "I regard the extension of suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged."
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However, despite Wilson's newfound support, the amendment proposal failed in the Senate by two votes. Another year passed before Congress took up the measure again.

The Final Struggle For Passage

On May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Mann, a Republican from Illinois and chairman of the Suffrage Committee, proposed the House resolution to approve the Susan Anthony Amendment granting women the right to vote. The measure passed the House 304 to 89-a full 42 votes above the required two-thirds majority.

Two weeks later, on June 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Amendment by two votes over its two-thirds required majority, 56-25. The amendment was then sent to the states for ratification.

Within six days of the ratification cycle, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin each ratified the amendment. Kansas, New York and Ohio followed on June 16, 1919. By March of the following year, a total of 35 states had approved the amendment, just shy of the three-fourths required for ratification.

Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them- Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia-had already rejected it before Tennessee's vote on August 18, 1920. It was up to Tennessee to tip the scale for woman suffrage.

The outlook appeared bleak, given the outcomes in other Southern states and given the position of Tennessee's state legislators in their 48-48 tie. The state's decision came down to 23-year-old Representative Harry T. Burn, a Republican from McMinn County, to cast the deciding vote.

Although Burn opposed the amendment, his mother convinced him to approve it. Mrs. Burn reportedly wrote to her son: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."
READ MORE: How American Women's Suffrage Came Down to One Man's Vote
With Burn's vote, the 19th Amendment was fully ratified.

When Did Women Get the Right to Vote?

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified by U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, and women finally achieved the long-sought right to vote throughout the United States.

On November 2 of that same year, more than 8 million women across the U.S. voted in elections for the first time.

It took over 60 years for the remaining 12 states to ratify the 19th Amendment. Mississippi was the last to do so, on March 22, 1984.

What Is the 19 Amendment?

The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and reads:

"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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

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Women's Suffrage Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments National Suffrage Groups Established Black Women in the Suffrage Movement State-level Successes for Voting Rights Protest and Progress The Final Struggle For Passage When Did Women Get the Right to Vote? What Is the 19 Amendment? The 19th Amendment to the U.S.

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The Seneca Falls Convention was the most important event of the women's suffrage movement.