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The upcoming centennial of the 19th Amendment is a milestone in women's suffrage, marking a culmination of decades-long efforts by women who called for full citizenship. This history, Stanford historian Estelle Freedman says, can be traced back to the abolition movement in 19th-century America.

Go to the web site to view the video.

Here, Freedman discusses how the histories of the women's suffrage movement and abolitionism are closely intertwined: It was through their opposition to slavery that middle-class American women first became politically active, said Freedman. The anti-slavery movement pushed women out of the home and church and into politics, eventually leading some to advocate for their own rights as women.

For example, Freedman shares the stories of Angelina and Sarah Grimké, some of the early white female abolitionists, who noted in 1837 that advocating for the rights of enslaved people inspired them to examine their own role in American political society. Also advocating for women's rights - particularly the rights of Black women - was the formerly enslaved abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Freedman also discusses how the women's suffrage movement split over race after the Civil War, what it did and did not achieve, and what can be learned from this history.

Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Her research interests focus on the history of women and social reform, including prison reform, as well as the history of sexuality and sexual violence.
You have written about how anti-slavery activism inspired women's suffrage. Can you explain how these two movements are connected?
The history of suffrage cannot be separated from the history of race and class in America. The suffrage movement in part had its origins in the anti-slavery movement in the United States.

Anti-slavery activism drew both Black and white northern women into politics during the antebellum period, from the 1830s through the 1850s. While Black women sought freedom for their own race, some white women steeped in religious or moral training came to believe that slavery defied their ideals of womanhood and of justice. Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe's appeal in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which played to the sentiment northern middle-class women attached to the family by portraying enslaved families sold apart. Abolitionist literature alluded to the rape of enslaved women, which affronted ideals of female purity.

The 19th Amendment

As part of the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote, Stanford scholars reflect on this milestone in a three-part series:

While they found different paths into the small but vocal anti-slavery movement, northern women who joined it moved beyond the limits of the home and church. They formed hundreds of female anti-slavery societies and in the process engaged in politics. Some women merely tried to influence their husbands, sons or brothers - who were voting citizens - but others increasingly took action themselves. For example, during the campaign to send petitions to Congress to abolish slavery, the women's anti-slavery societies gathered the bulk of the signatures.

When female abolitionists tried to speak in public, however, the public condemned their unladylike behavior. Maria Stewart, a northern Black anti-slavery activist, justified her right to speak out politically, whatever her race or her sex. Angelina and Sarah Grimké, who left a slave-holding family in the South, also chafed under restrictions on their right to speak publicly against the evil of slavery. As Angelina Grimké explained, "The investigation of the rights of slaves has led me to a better understanding of my own." Sarah Grimké's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1837) articulated an early critique of misogyny, marriage and economic inequality, one considered far too controversial for the time. Both Stewart and the Grimké sisters, however, withdrew from public speaking.

The World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 provides another link between anti-slavery and suffrage. U.S. delegates Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott shared the humiliation of having to sit in the balcony as observers (where some male allies joined them). Eight years later, living near Seneca Falls, New York, the two women called together a convention on women's rights, which the leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass chaired. The subsequent convention movement called for married women's property rights, access to education and occupations, and woman suffrage.

What role did Black women play in the abolition movement and how did their efforts help shift perceptions of women's role in society?
I think a good example, and a link from the antebellum to the post-Civil War suffrage movement, is the formerly enslaved northern woman who chose the name Sojourner Truth when she became an itinerant preacher. Her speech at the Women's Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851 - erroneously remembered as "Ain't I a woman?" - responded to white male hecklers who claimed that women should stay on their protective pedestal rather than seek to vote. By invoking her own history, Truth exposed the appropriation of women's reproductive and productive labor under slavery. In effect, she insisted that racism contradicts the protected woman's sphere - you can't have both idealized womanhood and racism.

Less well known is Truth's 1867 speech in which she called for equal rights for both formerly enslaved men and all women. She argued that if the 15th Amendment expanded suffrage only to Black men, it would be "as bad as it was before" emancipation for Black women. In both instances, she articulated the inseparability of race and gender now known as intersectionality.
What led to the separation of these intertwined causes?
Let's start with the historical context of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. In the aftermath of the Civil War, industrial capitalism spawned wealth, poverty and intellectual justifications for both, such as social Darwinism, scientific racism and nativism. It was not an era conducive to progressive change. The southern quest to re-establish white supremacy culminated in Jim Crow segregation, the disenfranchisement of Black men and the rule of terror by extralegal lynch mobs. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson made segregation legal.

Within this context, the small and unpopular suffrage movement faced formidable challenges, including a bitter split among former abolitionists over supporting the 15th Amendment without including women. In the next generation, historians have identified a shift in arguments for suffrage, from an earlier call for justice to a later politics of expediency. How can we get to this end, suffrage? In the context of a racist society, some but not all white suffragists adopted rhetoric asking, "Why are ignorant, illiterate immigrants and Black men voting when educated white women can't vote?" They also tried to appease southern suffragists by excluding Black women's groups from national meetings.

I think that many white suffragists did not appreciate the importance of the vote for Black women. Given the disenfranchisement of southern Black men - through mechanisms like literacy tests, grandfather clauses and poll taxes - they may have considered Black women unlikely voters and thus, expendable. Black women, however, understood that they needed the vote even more than most white women, in order to advance their goals of racial justice. While the suffrage movement may have had a wide racist streak, it was not entirely a white women's movement. Black women joined mixed race groups and formed their own suffrage associations, and leaders like Mary Church Terrell refused to march at the back of the parade when she and other Black suffragists joined white allies in the mainstream.

As we commemorate the milestone of women's right to vote, what do you want to see in the discussion of this celebration?
We can see it as a great victory, the culmination of decades and decades of effort by women who spoke, wrote and lobbied for the suffrage; who tried to vote, as Susan B. Anthony did in 1872. Whether they claimed that women's maternal qualities would vote in a better world or, as younger self-identified feminists insisted, that women were no different than men, they eventually won over male legislators. We can see the 19th Amendment as a benchmark in the long movement for full citizenship for women, a major political hurdle passed. We can also see it as a limited victory, given the continued disenfranchisement of southern Black and Native American women at the time. But I think we can't make it into the endpoint of a historical "wave."

"Suffrage had the potential to enable political change by creating a group of new women voters."

-Estelle Freedman

The Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History

Before and after 1920, women who supported suffrage also sought better working conditions and women's access to the professions. They created an international peace movement. Black women campaigned against lynching and some white women, even in the South, supported them. I have written about anti-rape efforts in the suffrage era, long before an organized anti-violence movement emerged. Once enfranchised, women aspired to jury service, office holding and military service. In 1923 the National Woman's Party introduced the Equal Rights Amendment and lobbied Congress for decades. In so many ways, suffrage alone did not achieve the larger agenda of the women's movement.

That said, the vote did make a difference. Suffrage had the potential to enable political change by creating a group of new women voters. Understand, though, that it took a full generation between the ratification of the suffrage amendment and the first time when women began to vote in the same proportion as men. It would take another full generation before a women's political agenda and a gender gap in voting emerged.

While it is important to create these historical benchmarks and to celebrate these anniversaries, we always have to think about what we have gained, at what costs, for whom, and what unfinished agenda remains. What strengths of the movement can we adopt? What flaws do we want to avoid?
What can be learned from this history?
I think that one of the things we've learned over the decades is the importance of alliance, of being wary of single-issue causes. We need to keep our vision broad. What do the rights we seek at any given moment mean for people who are different from us? How can we support the rights that others seek and find the overlapping links between them? In our own time, we witness women of color taking the lead in identifying the intersections of race and gender, whether in Black Lives Matter, reproductive justice or environmental movements. Gender runs through all of these, race runs through all of them, our humanity runs through all of them, and we can never separate entirely any one cause from another. Feminism has to expand to question all social hierarchies to truly achieve what it professes.

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19th Amendment is a milestone, not endpoint, for women

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The upcoming centennial of the 19th Amendment is a milestone in women's suffrage, marking a culmination of decades-long efforts by women who called for full citizenship. This history, Stanford historian Estelle Freedman says, can be traced back to the abolition movement in 19th-century America. Go to the web site to view the video.

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Contains first hand sources from Dickinson who was a known reformer

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The papers of lecturer, reformer, actress, and author Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) span the period 1859-1951, but are chiefly concentrated in the years from 1859 to 1911. The collection consists of approximately 10,000 items (20,221 images), most of which were digitized from 25 microfilm reels. Included are family correspondence, general correspondence, speeches and writings, a legal file, financial papers, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and research notes of Dickinson's biographer, Giraud Chester.

Dickinson was a teenage phenomenon on the antislavery lecture circuit, whose electrifying speeches made her one of the campaign's most sought-after speakers. In 1863, she toured the country on behalf of Republican Party candidates, and after the Civil War, she became a star of the lyceum circuit, drawing large crowds and commanding huge speaking fees. She was among the celebrities who were aboard the first transcontinental railroad trip to California and also grabbed headlines when she climbed Pike's Peak and other summits. Her familiarity with the stage later led to a less successful career as an actress and playwright.

Dickinson had a particularly close relationship with Susan B. Anthony and shared the latter's interest in women's rights and temperance. She also advocated for the rights of African Americans and corresponded with escaped slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass as well as with other notable figures of her time. Although Dickinson did not retain copies of most of her correspondence, she obtained many of the letters she wrote while on national lecture tours to Mary Dickinson, her mother, and Susan Dickinson, her journalist sister. This correspondence described her travel itineraries, her impressions, and her joys and misgivings. They show the reactions of a person whose plays and performances, including A Crown of Thorns and The Test of Honor, were not well received.

By 1900, Dickinson was estranged from her sister Susan, formerly her closest friend and housemate, and she had outlived most of her associates. As recorded in the legal file and in her scrapbooks, she initiated several lawsuits between 1895 and 1901 as a result of her confinement at the State Hospital for the Insane in Danville, Pennsylvania. Other topics include the elections of 1872 and 1888, the Republican Party, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and education.

A finding aid ( PDF and HTML) to the Anna E. Dickinson Papers is available online with links to the digital content on this site.

The collection is arranged in seven series:

Family Correspondence, 1860-1904 (Reels 1-5)
Letters sent by Anna Dickinson and received from her mother, sister, brother, and other family members. Arranged chronologically.

General Correspondence, 1859-1911 (Reels 6-17)
Letters received and copies of letters sent by Dickinson, including postcards, calling card messages, telegrams, and enclosed material. Correspondents include William B. Allison, Susan B. Anthony, Samuel Bowles, Noah Brooks, Benjamin F. Butler, Fanny Davenport, Frederick Douglass, Ellen Everett, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Wendell Phillips, Samuel C. Pomeroy, Whitelaw Reid, Carl Schurz, Theodore Tilton, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Arranged alphabetically by name of correspondent and chronologically thereunder. Anonymous, incomplete, fragmentary, initialed, and unintelligible or unidentified correspondence is filed at the end of the series.

Speeches and Writings File, 1868-1907 (Reels 17-21)
Speeches, plays, and miscellaneous unidentified notes and manuscripts. The Speeches and Writings File contains several of Dickinson's earliest speeches and stage manuscripts. Those not present are often documented by newspaper clippings and scrapbooks. Arranged by type of material and thereunder alphabetically by title.

Legal File, 1881-1898 (Reel 22)
Correspondence, court records, notebook of confinement, and miscellaneous legal documents. A notebook in the Legal File records her experiences at the State Hospital for the Insane. Arranged alphabetically by topic and chronologically thereunder.

Miscellany, 1863-1951 (Reels 22-25)
Address books, calling cards, financial papers, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and other miscellaneous subject and printed matter concerning Dickinson, including research material compiled by Giraud Chester. Only obituaries and a few financial papers relate to her final two decades. Arranged alphabetically by topic or type of material. Research notes are located at the end of the series.

Addition, 1862-1933 (not filmed)
Correspondence, photographs, engraving plates, printed matter, scrapbooks, and other papers. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.

Oversize, 1863-1877 (Reels 24-25)
Oversize scrapbooks. Organized and described according to the series, containers, and folders from which the items were removed.

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About this Collection | Anna E. Dickinson Papers | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The papers of lecturer, reformer, actress, and author Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) span the period 1859-1951, but are chiefly concentrated in the years from 1859 to 1911. The collection consists of approximately 10,000 items (20,221 images), most of which were digitized from 25 microfilm reels.

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Crash course on women's suffrage

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Women's Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31

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All about women's suffrage

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When the 19 th Amendment took effect on Aug. 18, 1920, it followed over a century and a half of activism by and for women. Passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, the constitutional amendment promises, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by a State on account of sex." Although 1920 is often celebrated as the year that women won the right to vote, in some parts of the U.S., women already had that right - and in other places, women would be denied the right for many years to come.

Abigail Adams foresaw how difficult it might be to persuade men in power to extend rights to other groups when she implored her husband to "remember the ladies" in March 1776. Women lacked more than the right to vote. For much of the 19 th century, the legal custom of "coverture" linked a woman's legal identity with her father or husband. Married women were thus prohibited from owning or inheriting property, controlling finances and entering contracts or lawsuits. Enslaved women were considered property themselves, and their children were born enslaved. Free Black women had even fewer opportunities and protections than white women. When afforded the right to vote, women and African Americans exercised it; in New Jersey, the state constitution granted suffrage to property-owning residents regardless of race and gender until 1807.

The first and most successful political efforts of women revolved around their role as the moral center of American society, advocating for causes like temperance, child labor laws and the abolition of slavery. In the 1830s, states began the long process of dismantling coverture by passing married women's property acts. Originally designed to protect family assets, these laws gave women the right to own and eventually control property. By the 1840s, an organized women's rights movement had formed, led by women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. They spoke out at a time when few Americans had witnessed a woman speak publicly - it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton's and Lucretia Mott's exclusion from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 that led them to organize the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. The convention resolved to secure women's "sacred right to the elective franchise," publicly addressing women's suffrage as a political resolution for the first time.

The Civil War put the question of suffrage on hold. The issue did not come to a head until the proposal of the 14 th and 15 th Amendments, which divided the women's rights movement. In 1866, women's suffragists objected to the wording of the proposed 14 th Amendment, which defined "citizens" and "voters" as male. The 15 th Amendment then introduced language to grant suffrage regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," but not gender. The Republican Party adopted the cause of Black suffrage, while Anthony and Stanton continued to campaign for women's suffrage, adopting anti-Black racist rhetoric and enlisting the help of outspoken racist George Francis Train in the process.

Anthony and Stanton's opposition to the 15 th Amendment split the women's suffrage movement between two groups: their women-only National Woman Suffrage Association, which condemned the 15 th Amendment and advocated broadly for women's rights, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on achieving women's suffrage by constitutional amendment at the federal or state level under the leadership of Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and Julia Ward Howe. The groups worked separately for two decades, a time that saw the introduction of a failed woman's suffrage amendment in 1878 by California Senator Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Anthony's. In 1890, the two groups merged again to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Portrait of Ida Wells-Barnett, c. 1893. Photograph courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. [Click image for more information]

From the earliest days of the women's suffrage movement, Black activists like Truth and Frances Watkins Harper spoke out against the racism they observed in the movement's organizations and leadership, which did not share the priorities of their Black members or provide opportunities for them to lead. As the 20 th century approached, both Northern and Southern states had instituted segregation and Jim Crow laws to varying degrees, and lynchings targeted African Americans in rising numbers. Black women were vulnerable to the effects of both racism and misogyny, particularly in the South, with lower wages, less educational opportunity and less power to advocate politically for themselves than was afforded to Black men and white women. Many Black women found their concerns better represented by African American activists including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black women's clubs that made up the National Association of Colored Women.

Women's Suffrage Campaigners, 1917. Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing photograph collection. [Click image for more information]

National attention turned again to the women's suffrage movement in the early 1900s as a tide of reform instituted social, political and economic change. In 1913, the Women's Suffrage Parade marched on Washington, D.C., a procession that took several hours due to the harassment of its participants. Organized by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns for the NAWSA, it was the first organized march on Washington for a political cause: amending the constitution to give women the vote. This march was itself segregated, placing Black women's groups from Howard University at the end of the procession.

Learn more about the integral role women played in World War I.

By the time the U.S. entered the Great War in 1917, 15 states had passed full women's suffrage. In fact, Montana had already elected a woman, Jeanette Rankin, to the House of Representatives, highlighting the reality that women could run for national office but could not vote in national elections. As the war continued, Paul's radical National Women's Party protested peacefully outside the White House.

Front and back view of a 1917 pocket calendar, encouraging soldiers to vote for Women's Suffrage in New York. [Click image for more information]

Suffragists maintained a silent picket with signs criticizing President Woodrow Wilson's lack of support for women's enfranchisement. At first tolerated by police, protesters endured harassment and attacks without police protection and were later arrested for obstructing traffic. In jail, Paul and others maintained their protest. After a hunger strike, they were force-fed and beaten brutally. Two months after their release, and almost exactly one year after Paul's group began their protests, President Wilson announced his support for women's suffrage on Jan. 9, 1918.

Woman with banner picketing the White House, 1917-1918. Photograph courtesy of National Archives. [Click image for more information]

It took the election of 1918, which ushered in new members of Congress friendlier to suffrage, to pass the 19 th Amendment, using the same language that Sen. Sargent had first introduced 40 years earlier in 1878. The House of Representatives voted to approve it May 21, 1919, and the Senate followed June 4. The legislatures of 36 states had to vote for it. By the end of 1919, 22 states had done so, but anti-suffragists defeated the measure in some Southern states, where white legislators opposed federal laws enforcing voting rights due to fears about disrupting segregation. Tennessee was the last state to ratify the amendment. As the story goes, a 24-year-old representative received a last-minute note from his mother urging him to vote yes. Eight days after the state of Tennessee voted to ratify the amendment, it was delivered via mail to the Secretary of State, becoming law on Aug. 26, 1920.

The 19 th Amendment prohibits the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the basis of sex, but it did not guarantee the right to vote to all women. First-generation Asian Americans of all sexes were barred from citizenship until 1952. Congress granted citizenship to Native Americans in 1924, but some states barred them from voting until 1957. Poll taxes, literacy tests and voter intimidation prevented generations of African American voters from going to the polls until the 24 th Amendment banned poll taxes in 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting. In Puerto Rico, local voting rights for all women were not assured until 1935, and language barriers still kept some from voting until bilingual ballots were required in 1975. To date, full access to federal voting rights are not assured in U.S. territories.

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Women's Suffrage | National WWI Museum and Memorial

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When the 19th Amendment took effect on Aug. 18, 1920, it followed over a century and a half of activism by and for women. Passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, the constitutional amendment promises, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by a State on account of sex."

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Pull out a lot of information and names

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An immersive story about the bold and diverse women who helped secure the right to vote is on view at the National Portrait Gallery

smithsonianmag.com

History is not static, but histories can paint a picture of events, people and places that may end up being forever imprinted as the "way it was." Such has been the case with the tale of how women secured the right to vote in America. A new exhibition "Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence," on view through January 2020 at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, aims to expose and correct the mythology that has informed how most Americans have understood the suffrage movement.

"Votes for Women" offers a wide-ranging overview-through 124 paintings, photographs, banners, cartoons, books and other materials-of the long suffrage movement that originated with the abolitionist movement in the 1830s.

The show's ample 289-page catalog provides rigorously-researched evidence that the history we've relied on for decades, delivered in grade school civics classes was in part myth, and, a literal white-washing of some of the movement's key players.

White suffragists frequently sidelined the African-American women who advocated and agitated just as much for their own voting rights. These activists endured a dual oppression because they were black and female. "This exhibition actually tries to take on the messy side of this history, when women were not always supportive of each other," says Kim Sajet, the museum's director.

In the catalog's introduction, exhibition curator Kate Clarke Lemay writes "Votes for Women" is designed to help Americans "think about whom we remember and why," adding, "Today, more than ever, it is critical to consider whose stories have been forgotten or overlooked, and whose have not been deemed worthy to record."

Lemay chose to feature portraits of 19 African-American women. Locating those portraits wasn't easy. Just as they were often erased from histories of the suffrage movement, black women were less frequently the subjects of formal sittings during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Lemay says.

The overall show is a bit of an anomaly for a museum not dedicated to women, Lemay says. With the exception of one woman's husband, the exhibition doesn't include any portraits of men. A pantheon of key suffragists hangs in the entry hallway, featuring the well-known Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, along with the lesser known activists Lucy Stone and Lucy Burns. Also present as members of this pantheon are black women, including Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

"One of my goals is to show how rich women's history is and how it can be understood as American history, and not marginalized," says Lemay. Take for example, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who was a highly celebrated speaker on the lecture circuit during the 1870s.

Renowned for inspiring hundreds of men and women to take up the suffragist cause, Dickinson is the center figure in an 1870 lithograph of seven prominent female lecturers, titled Representative Women by L. Schamer. At age 18, Dickinson began giving speeches, eventually earning more than $20,000 a year for her appearances and becoming even more popular than Mark Twain.

And yet, "who do you remember today?" asks Lemay.

The Myth of Seneca Falls

Elizabeth Cady Stanton started her activism as an ardent abolitionist. When the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London devolved into a heated debate about whether or not women should be allowed to participate, Stanton lost some faith in the movement. It was there that she met Lucretia Mott, a longtime women's activist, and the two bonded. Upon their return to the United States, they were determined to convene a women's assembly of their own.

It took until 1848 for that meeting, held in Seneca Falls, New York, to come together with a few hundred attendees, including Frederick Douglass. Douglass was pivotal in getting Stanton and Mott's 12-item Declaration of Sentiments approved by the conventioneers.

Three years later, Stanton recruited a Rochester, New York, resident, Susan B. Anthony, who had been advocating for temperance and abolition, to what was then primarily a women's rights cause.

Over the next two decades, the demands for women's rights and the rights of free men and women of color, and then, post-Civil War, of former slaves, competed for primacy. Stanton and Anthony were on the verge of being cast out of the suffragist movement, in part, because of their alliance with the radical divorcée Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, in 1872. Woodhull was a flamboyant character, elegantly captured in a portrait by the famed photographer Mathew Brady. But it was Woodhull's advocacy of "free love"-and her public allegation that one of the abolitionist movement's leaders, Henry Ward Beecher, was having an affair-that made her kryptonite for the suffragists, including Stanton and Anthony.

A quarter of a century after the meeting at Seneca Falls took place, memory of the event as a pivotal moment for woman's suffrage was "almost non-existent," writes women's history scholar Lisa Tetrault in the catalog. "Some of the older veterans still remembered the event as the first convention, but they attached no special significance to it," she writes. "Almost no one considered Seneca Falls the beginning of the movement."

Stanton and Anthony needed to re-establish their bona fides. "If they originated the movement, then it stood to reason that they were the movement," writes Tetrault. So, according to Tetrault, they fashioned their own version of an origin story about the movement and inflated their roles.

Stanton and Anthony reprinted the 1848 proceedings and circulated them widely to reinforce their own importance. With Anthony presiding over the 25th anniversary celebration, she almost by osmosis implicated herself into the founding story. "Anthony had not even been at the famed 1848 meeting in Seneca Falls. Yet newspapers and celebrants alike constantly placed her there," writes Tetrault. Anthony herself never claimed to have been at Seneca Falls, but she became accepted as one of the founders of the suffragist movement, notes Tetrault.

In the 1880s, the pair collaborated on the 3,000-page multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage, which furthered their own self-described iconographic places in the movement. The History left out the contributions of African-American women.

"To recount this history strictly according to the logic of the Seneca Falls origin tale is, in fact, to read the end of the story back onto the beginning," writes Tetrault. "It is to miss just how contested and contingent the outcome was, as well as how important history-telling was to the process."

Even today, Stanton and Anthony are lightning rods. New York City's Public Design Commission in late March approved a design for a statue of the two-commemorating them as the originators-to be placed in Central Park. The statute has drawn criticism for ignoring the hundreds of other women-black, Latina, Asian and Native Americans-who contributed to the movement.

The Split

The clash and upcoming schism between white and black suffragists would perhaps be previewed at an 1869 American Equal Rights Association meeting, when Stanton "decried the possibility that white women would be made into the political subordinates of black men who were 'unwashed' and 'fresh from the slave plantations of the South,'" writes historian Martha S. Jones in the catalog.

It was a shocking speech to hear from someone who first gained notoriety as an abolitionist. Stanton was railing against the 15th Amendment, which gave men the vote, without regard to "race, color or previous condition of servitude."

Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American teacher and anti-slavery activist, spoke out at that meeting. "You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs," she said. To black men, she said she "had felt 'every man's hand' against her," Jones wrote. Watkins Harper warned that "society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse of its own soul."

The damage was done, however. White women divided their efforts into the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, who advocated for universal suffrage, and the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Anthony and Stanton.

African-American women lobbied for their rights through their churches, and through women's groups, especially in the Chicago area, where so many free men and women migrated from the oppression of the post-Reconstruction South.

In the 1890s, as the Jim Crow laws took effect in the South-and lynchings gave rise to terror-black women found themselves fighting for basic human rights on multiple fronts. Seventy-three African-American women gathered in 1895 for the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America. Soon thereafter, journalist Ida B. Wells and teacher Mary Church Terrell formed the National Association of Colored Women, which became a leading women's rights and black woman suffragist organization.

Meanwhile, Stanton and Anthony saw the need to reinvigorate their efforts. They found new funding from an unlikely source, the bigoted railroad profiteer George Francis Train. "They made their bed with a known racist and then basically tainted themselves for the rest of history," says Lemay. But, the two may have felt that they had no choice-it was take his money or let the movement die.

Lemay says that despite all this, she believes that Stanton and Anthony are deserving of significant credit. "It is clear that they were brilliant logistical and political tacticians," she says. "They haven't been revered as such, but they absolutely should be. They kept the movement alive."

The Breaking Point

By the time Stanton and Anthony died in 1902, and 1906, respectively, the movement over the next decade took on more urgency. Women were becoming a social force, riding bicycles, wearing pantaloons and challenging society's normative views of how they should act. One of the first feminist writings appeared, the 1892 short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, delivering a tale of a woman's slow descent into insanity, a victim of a patriarchical society.

But powerful voices upheld the status quo. Former President Grover Cleveland denounced women's suffrage as "harmful in a way that directly menaces the integrity of our homes and the benign disposition and character of our wifehood and motherhood."

Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone, had helped to unite the National and American suffrage associations in 1890, and became one of its leaders in 1909. The group advanced a universal suffrage agenda and lead the way towards the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, but the organization's leadership positions were closed to black women.

By this time, referendums in western states had gradually awarded women the vote, but in the East multiple state referenda failed, significantly in New York. Now, women looked to take national action with a Constitutional amendment. Evelyn Rumsey Cary responded with an art deco oil painting, Woman Suffrage, that became iconic. A young, gowned female figure looms over what appears to be the U.S. Supreme Court, arms upraised to become tree branches bearing fruit.

In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage to bear down on the federal government. Paul, who had studied in England, brought the British movement's radical tactics back to the U.S. She and Burns organized a huge march on Washington in 1913. On the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, some 5,000 women participated, while 500,000-mostly men-looked on. Many attacked the women in anger. The pageantry of the Woman Suffrage Procession-including a Joan of Arc on horseback and a gowned Columbia (the allegorical symbol of the U.S.)-garnered huge national attention.

Wilson, however, was unmoved. In March 1917, Paul's Congressional Union joined with the Women's Party of Western Voters to create the National Woman's Party, with the aim of a concerted campaign of civil disobedience. The White House-and by extension, Wilson-became their primary target. Women-wearing suffragist tri-colored sashes and holding banners- began picketing along the White House fence line. Action came quickly. In April 1917, just days before the U.S. entered World War I, the "Anthony Amendment"-which would give women the right to vote and was first introduced in 1878-was reintroduced in the Senate and House.

Even so, the "Silent Sentinels," as the newspapers called them, continued their protests. Questioning Wilson's commitment to democracy at home during a time of war outraged many Americans. Anger at the suffragists hit a boiling point on July 4, 1917, when police descended on the White House sidewalk and rounded up 168 of the protesters. They were sent to a prison workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, and ordered to do hard labor.

Burns, Paul, and others, however, demanded to be treated as political prisoners. They went on a hunger strike to protest their conditions; guards responded by force-feeding them, for three months. Another group of suffragists was beaten and tortured by guards. The public began to have regrets. "Increasing public pressure ultimately led to the suffragists' unconditional release from prison," writes Lemay.

Meanwhile, during the war, women were taking on men's roles. The National Woman Suffrage Association-hoping that women's war-related labor would be rewarded with the vote-funded an entirely self-sufficient 100-woman-strong unit of physicians, nurses, engineers, plumbers and drivers who went to France and established several field hospitals. Some of the women received medals from the French military, but they were never recognized during the war or after by the American military. To this day, says Lemay, the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor is Mary Edwards Walker-and it was rescinded, but she refused to give it back.

Finally, the federal suffrage amendment-the 19th Amendment-was approved in 1919 by Congress. It was then sent on to the states for ratification.

That 14-month ratification battle ended when Tennessee became the 36th state to approve the amendment, in August 1920. Afterwards, a smiling Paul was captured raising a glass of champagne in front of a banner that kept track of the states ratifying the amendment.

The Legacy

While the 100th anniversary of that achievement will be celebrated in 2020, for many women, full voting rights did not come until decades later, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Many states had found loopholes in the 19th Amendment that they believed allowed them to levy poll taxes or demand literacy tests from prospective voters-primarily African-Americans. Native-Americans weren't recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924, but also have endured discrimination at the polls, as recently as the mid-term elections of 2018, Lemay points out, when North Dakota required anyone with a P.O. box or other rural address to secure a numbered street address to vote. The law disproportionately had an impact on Native-Americans on tribal lands, where the required street addresses are not used. In Puerto Rico, literate women could not vote until 1932; universal voting became law three years later. Activist Felisa Rincón de Gautier helped secure that right.
"Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence," curated by Kate Clarke Lemay, is on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery through January 5, 2020.
"Votes for Women" recognizes some of the other suffragists who took up the cause for their people, including Zitkala-Sa, who fought for Native American citizenship rights and later founded the National Council of American Indians, and Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader in the Civil Rights movement. Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, is also celebrated for her shaping of the Voting Rights Act and passage of Title IX.

The exhibition demonstrates "how important women are, period, in history," says Lemay. Much work remains to be done, she says. But, if viewers "look at the historic record and see it as a change agent, that is great, that's what I'm hoping people will do."

About Alicia Ault

Alicia Ault is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wired. When not chasing down a story from our nation's capital, she takes in the food, music and culture of southwest Louisiana from the peaceful perch of her part-time New Orleans home.

Read more from this author | Follow @aliciaault

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How Women Got the Vote Is a Far More Complex Story Than the History Textbooks Reveal

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smithsonianmag.com History is not static, but histories can paint a picture of events, people and places that may end up being forever imprinted as the "way it was." Such has been the case with the tale of how women secured the right to vote in America.

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Why was this moment significant for women as well as other groups?

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I added this because I like how it shows the women coming together to fight for themselves

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Explains what the amendment is   as well as some background info

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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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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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19th Amendment - Definition, Passage & Summary

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The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 guaranteed women the right to vote. Learn how suffragists fought for the cause and hear a summary of amendment in this brief video.

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How does the amendment show a progression for women?

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Why was the amendment created?

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Why is this moment significant?

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How did this amendment change how women were treated then compared to how they are treated now?

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How did women's suffrage lead to getting the right to vote?

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Brings light on how women of color were affected

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After the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women of color were often kept from the polls through a variety of tactics. They faced racial and ethnic discrimination and were often discouraged from voting via violence.

As we celebrate the 100 th anniversary of women's suffrage this year we celebrate the hard won achievements of the women who made possible the modern right to vote!

We have come a long way, but we still have miles to go to achieve equality for all and especially for women of color. The Commission on the Status of Women and Girls enters this centennial with a new commitment to be intentionally inclusive of all women, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous women, members of the LGBTQ community, young women, and those most vulnerable among us. Specifically, the Commission has been hard at work to re-imagine the role we play as a support system for the women and girls of California and the ways in which we celebrate our history.

As a companion to our effort to encourage voting through the Your Vote is Your Voice campaign, we are proud to celebrate the contributions of women of color specifically to the struggle that made votes for women possible.

Below you will find links to exhibits, articles, videos, and timelines as well as a small snapshot of some of the suffragist heroines we don't always get to see or celebrate. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to request that include additional links to this collection.

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Women of Color and the Fight for Women's Suffrage

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Writes how it is today as well as how it was a misunderstood movement

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Harris & Ewing/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

The suffragists' long-awaited victory in 1920, she says, was sweeping: "More people gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment than with any other changes we have made to the Constitution or in statutes. It's really an incredible moment in American history that many people don't know too much about, except for maybe a sentence or two."

A misunderstood movement

Experts point out the aspects of the suffrage movement that have long gone ignored or unexamined, like the racism that black suffragists faced within the movement, as well as the failure of the 19th Amendment to extend the vote to all women.

"There's nothing in the 19th Amendment that prevents states from denying women the vote for reasons other than sex," Porter says. "So, beyond 1920 you see a diverse set of women denied the vote for a multitude of other reasons."

This included women who weren't recognized as U.S. citizens, like many Native American and Asian women, as well as those who didn't live in states, like residents of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Black women in the Jim Crow South also remained effectively disenfranchised for decades after 1920 (as were black men and people of color more generally) because of discriminatory barriers like literacy tests that wouldn't be fully struck down until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965.

"While it is important to mark this occasion, it's equally important to recognize that this was the beginning of the fight for the vote, not the end, and the story continued well after 1920," says Holly Hotchner, president and CEO of the National Women's History Museum, which is offering virtual programming to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

For lawyer Barbara Arnwine, chair of the Voting Rights Alliance and founder and president of the Transformative Justice Coalition, acknowledging the struggle for voting rights in the decades following 1920 requires a bit of recalculating when it comes to this year's centennial celebrations.

"I always say that when you consider this anniversary, you have to say 'plus 45 years,'" she says. "It would take 45 years for women of color - African American women, Latina women, Native American women and Asian women - to really achieve the right to vote."

The struggle for voting rights today

Even today, Arnwine says, various forms of voter suppression persist - including those that harm older voters in particular, like long lines at polling places or a lack of disability accommodations.

The COVID-19 pandemic is poised to present additional challenges this election year, she says, particularly for older voters who are still self-isolating in their homes or who need help casting a ballot by mail.

Arnwine encourages older voters to take steps to empower themselves in the coming election, like checking to see if they are properly registered, reminding friends and loved ones to do the same, and checking in on their social circles as Election Day nears - something that Arnwine says her own mother, who is 89, excels at.

"The first thing she does is get on the phone. She starts calling everybody she knows and says, 'Are you voting today?'"

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The Women's Right to Vote 100 Years Later

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Harris & Ewing/Buyenlarge/Getty Images The suffragists' long-awaited victory in 1920, she says, was sweeping: "More people gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment than with any other changes we have made to the Constitution or in statutes.

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Includes many first hand documents

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources
Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
Teaching Activities

Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women's voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women's rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage - the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 - they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women's access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women's clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women - victims of racism as well as sexism - needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement's leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman's Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners - comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany - speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment - the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

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7 interesting facts

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1. The US women's suffrage movement had its roots in the abolition movement.

In the fight for women's suffrage, most of the earliest activists found their way to the cause through the abolition movement of the 1830s. Abolitionist groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), led by William Lloyd Garrison, provided women with opportunities to speak, write and organize on behalf of enslaved people-and in some cases gave them leadership roles. Prominent female abolitionists included the sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the former slave Sojourner Truth, whose "Ain't I a Woman?" speech in 1851 earned her lasting fame.

In 1840, when Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they were forced into the gallery along with all the women who attended. Their indignation led them, eight years later, to organize the first U.S. women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.

2. After the Civil War, many abolitionists and women's rights activists parted ways over women's suffrage.

In the early years of the women's rights movement, the agenda included much more than just the right to vote. Their broad goals included equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage, and a married woman's right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body.

After the Civil War, debate over the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution- which would grant citizenship and suffrage to African-American men-inspired many women's rights activists to refocus their efforts on the battle for female suffrage. Some, like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, campaigned against any suffrage amendment that would exclude women, while some of their former allies-including Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and Frederick Douglass-argued that this was "the Negro's hour" and female suffrage could wait.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony founded the female-only National Woman Suffrage Association, which stood in opposition to Stone and Blackwell's American Woman Suffrage Association. The rift between the two sides endured until 1890, when the two organizations merged to form the National American Women's Suffrage Association.

3. Susan B. Anthony (and 15 other women) voted illegally in the presidential election of 1872.

In 1868, a group of 172 Black and white women went to the polls in Vineland, New Jersey, providing their own ballots and box in order to cast their votes in that year's national election. Between 1870 and 1872, around 100 women tried to register and vote in the District of Columbia and states around the country. Finally, in 1872, Susan B. Anthony led a group of 16 women in demanding to be registered and vote in Rochester, New York.

All 16 were arrested, but only Anthony would be tried for violating the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed "the right to vote...to any of the male inhabitants" of the United States over 21 years of age. Judge Ward Hunt would not permit Anthony to take the stand in her own defense, and eventually directed the jury to issue a guilty verdict. He sentenced Anthony to pay a $100 fine, which she refused to do, challenging the judge to hold her in custody or send her to jail. Hunt declined, knowing this would allow her to appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although her case was closed at that point, "Aunt Susan" earned widespread respect and inspired younger women with her courageous example, helping to ensure that her cause would eventually triumph some 14 years after her own death.

4. The women's rights movement launched its own fashion craze.

In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York debuted a radical new look: a knee-length skirt with full Turkish-style pantaloons gathered at the ankle. Amelia Jenks Bloomer, publisher of a trailblazing newspaper for women called The Lily, wrote articles about Miller's outfit and printed illustrations of it. She even wore something similar herself and urged other women to shed their heavy, bulky hoop skirts in favor of the new style. In addition to revealing the fact that women actually had legs under their skirts (shocking!), the so-called "bloomers" made it easier for their wearers to get through doorways, onto carriages and trains and along rainy, muddy streets.

Bloomers quickly grew so popular that they became synonymous with the women's rights movement-and infamous among the movement's critics. Though activists such as Susan B. Anthony discarded the style after they realized they were getting more attention for their dress than their message, this early fashion rebellion would eventually help women claim the freedom to wear what they wanted.

5. A woman ran for political office nearly 50 years before women got the vote.

Victoria Woodhull, one of the most colorful and vivid figures of the U.S. women's suffrage movement, rose from poor and eccentric origins. As children, she and her sister Tennessee Claflin gave psychic readings and healing sessions in a traveling family show. In 1870, with backing from railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, the sisters opened a stock brokerage firm. They used their Wall Street profits to bankroll a controversial newspaper, which supported such causes as legalized prostitution and free love.

Victoria won increased respect from women's rights activists when she argued on behalf of female suffrage in front of the House Judiciary Committee in early 1871, and the following year the Equal Rights Party nominated her for president of the United States. By the time of the general election in 1872, Woodhull's enemies had gotten the better of her temporarily, and she spent Election Day in jail after publishing an article that accused the popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery. She was eventually acquitted of all charges, moved to England and married a wealthy banker.

6. Britain's women's suffrage movement was far more militant than its counterpart in the US.

While the female suffrage movements in Britain and the United States had many commonalities, they also had significant differences. For one thing, British women seeking the vote called themselves "suffragettes," while Americans preferred the more gender-neutral "suffragists." And the British activists were far more militant. Under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), thousands of suffragettes demonstrated in the streets, chained themselves to buildings, heckled politicians, broke store windows, planted explosive devices and engaged in other destructive activities in order to pressure Britain's Liberal government to give women the vote. In a particularly gruesome (and public) display, Emily Wilding Davison was fatally trampled by a racehorse owned by King George V when she tried to pin a sash advertising the suffragette cause to the horse's bridle during the Epsom Derby in 1913.

More than 1,000 suffragettes were imprisoned between 1908 and 1914; when they engaged in hunger strikes to draw public attention to their cause, prison officials responded by force-feeding them. Such militant tactics ceased when World War I broke out, as Pankhurst and the WSPU threw all their support behind the patriotic cause. In 1918, the British government granted suffrage to all women over the age of 30, ostensibly in recognition of women's contributions to the war effort.

7. But some American suffragists, inspired by the British, adopted militant tactics themselves.

In 1907, an American Quaker named Alice Paul was studying in England when she joined British women in their campaign for suffrage. Over the next three years, while doing graduate work at the Universities of Birmingham and London, Paul was arrested and jailed three times for suffragist agitation. After returning to the United States, she joined the National American Suffrage Association, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, but soon grew impatient with that organization's mild-mannered tactics. In 1913, Paul and fellow militants formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later the National Woman's Party.

Their demonstrations outside Woodrow Wilson's White House in 1917 culminated in the so-called "Night of Terror" that November, during which guards at Virginia's Occoquan Workhouse brutally beat some 30 female picketers. At the time, Paul herself was serving a seven-month stint in prison, where she was force-fed and confined to a psychiatric ward. In January 1918, a district court overturned all the women's sentences without ceremony; that same month, President Wilson declared his support for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (later the 19th Amendment) granting female suffrage.

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7 Things You Might Not Know About the Women's Suffrage Movement | HISTORY

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In their battle to win the vote, early women's rights activists employed everything from civil disobedience to fashion innovations to hungers strikes.

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What would it be like today if this movement failed?