essay about women's suffrage movement

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The woman suffrage movement in the united states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and Woman Suffrage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women Win the Vote in the West

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges and Opportunities at the Turn of the Century

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

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

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

Modern Suffragists and the Progressive Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NAWSA Struggles to Keep Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice Paul and the Congressional Union

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

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

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

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

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

Suffrage during World War I

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

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

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

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

The Final Struggle for the Federal Amendment

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion of the Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primary Sources

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

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

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

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

Links to Digital Materials

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

Women’s Suffrage

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 2, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Suffragettes Marching with Signs(Original Caption) New York: New York Society Woman Suffragettes as sandwich men advertise a mass meeting to be addressed by the Governor of the Suffrage states. Photograph.

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 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once. But on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Women’s Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War . During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States— temperance leagues , religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations—and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, but some men—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott .

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, “that all men and women are created equal, 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 they believed women should have the right to vote.

Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Susan B. Anthony, 1820‑1906 Perhaps the most well‑known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should […]

Early Women’s Rights Activists Wanted Much More than Suffrage

Voting wasn't their only goal, or even their main one. They battled racism, economic oppression and sexual violence—along with the law that made married women little more than property of their husbands.

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

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

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.

By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920 , the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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Series: Essays: Overview of Women's Suffrage

Women in America collectively organized in 1848 at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY to fight for suffrage (or voting rights). Over the next seventy years, not everyone followed the same path in fighting for women's equal access to the vote. The history of the suffrage movement is one of disagreements as well as cooperation. Explore this essay series to learn more about the women's suffrage movement and the legacy of the 19th Amendment.

Article 1: Introduction: Women's Suffrage

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) and Susan B. Anthony. Photo taken sometime between 1880 and 1902.

In 1848 women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York to advance the cause for women’s rights. Learn more about convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony and how they started the women's suffrage movement. Read more

Article 2: Ratification: Women's Suffrage

Alice Paul sewing state star into women's suffrage flag. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Discover the story behind the ratification of the 19th Amendment and how it empowered women in America. Read more

Article 3: In the Press: Women's Suffrage

Front page of the Woman's Journal and Suffrage News, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Explore how the debate for women's suffrage played out in newspapers across America. Read more

Article 4: Anti-Suffragists: Women's Suffrage

Men standing with their backs to camera under sign opposing women's suffrage. Library of Congress.

Find out why some women and men were against women's suffrage. Read more

Article 5: Who was excluded?: Women's Suffrage

Native American women standing together looking at the camera. Courtesy Library of Congress. CC0

Not all women shared the same freedom to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Find out why. Read more

Article 6: What happened after?: Women's History

Picture of Jimmy Carter signing an extension of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Find out what happened after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Read more

Leaving all to younger hands

The campaign to win passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote stands as one of the most significant and wide-ranging moments of political mobilization in all of American history. Among other outcomes, it produced the largest one-time increase in voters ever. As important as the goal of suffrage was, the struggle was always far broader than just the franchise, and it spoke to fundamental questions about women’s roles in politics and modern life: Who does the government permit to vote? What is the relationship between citizenship and suffrage? The suffragists challenged the political status quo at the time and in many ways can be thought of as the voting rights activists of their day. That observation is still true today as women approach their second century of full voting rights and leads us to explore why does the history of women’s suffrage matter?

The women’s suffrage movement always had a deep sense of its own history. In many ways, suffragists were our first women’s historians, none more so than Susan B. Anthony. When the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage appeared in 1902, the 82-year-old Anthony looked back with pride at what the movement had accomplished, but she also looked forward to what still needed to be done, penning this inscription in her friend Caroline Healey Dall’s personal copy:

This closes the records of the 19th century of work done by and for women— what the 20th century will show—no one can foresee—but that it will be vastly more and better—we cannot fail to believe. But you & I have done the best we knew—and so must rest content—leaving all to younger hands. Your sincere friend and coworker, Susan B. Anthony. 1

When she wrote those words, Anthony had devoted more than 50 years to the women’s suffrage movement and victory was nowhere in sight. Yet she remained proud of what she and her co-workers had done for the cause, and confident that the future would bring even more progress. I suspect that the suffrage leaders who guided the movement to its successful conclusion on August 26, 1920, felt the same way.

Once the 19th Amendment passed, suffragists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens.

“Shall Not Be Denied”

The 19th Amendment states that “the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment was originally introduced in Congress in 1878 but it took until 1919 before it enjoyed sufficient bipartisan support to pass the House of Representatives and the Senate. Then it needed to be ratified by the legislatures in three-fourths of the states. By March 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but that left suffragists one short. In August, Tennessee put the amendment over the top, paving the way for women to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Suffragists-turned-women-citizens

Once the 19th Amendment passed, suffragists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens. In many ways the suffrage movement was an anomaly, the rare time when a broad coalition of women came together under one banner. In the post-suffrage era, politically engaged women embraced a wide variety of causes rather than remaining united around a single goal. Their political ideologies ran the gamut from progressive to moderate to conservative, but when it came to politics and public life, their message was clear: “We have come to stay.”

In this enlarged perspective, the suffrage victory is not a hard stop but part of a continuum of women’s political mobilization stretching not just between the iconic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 but across all of American history. It is still appropriate, indeed welcome, to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment as an important marker in American women’s history. But, rather than positioning 1920 as the end of the story, it is far more fruitful to see it as initiating the next stage in the history of women’s political activism—a story that is still unfolding.

Throughout American history, women have been dedicated political actors even without the vote. Women’s political history is far broader than the ratification of a single constitutional amendment.

Passage of the 19th Amendment: An incomplete victory

When thinking about the larger implications of the suffrage victory, we also need to remember that many women, especially those in Western states, were already voting in the years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. In addition, many women across the country enjoyed the right to vote on the local level in municipal elections and for school committees. Focusing too much on the 1920 milestone downplays the political clout that enfranchised women already exercised, as well as tends to overshadow women’s earlier roles as community builders, organization founders, and influence wielders. Throughout American history, women have been dedicated political actors even without the vote. Women’s political history is far broader than the ratification of a single constitutional amendment.

Celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment also slights the plight of African American voters, for whom the 19th Amendment was at most a hollow victory. In 1920, the vast majority of African Americans still lived in the South, where their voting rights were effectively eliminated by devices such as whites-only primaries, poll taxes, and literacy tests. For Black Americans, it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, not the 14th, 15th, or 19th Amendments, that finally removed the structural barriers to voting.

In a parallel disfranchisement, few Native American women gained the vote through the 19th Amendment. Not until 1924 did Congress pass legislation declaring that all Native Americans born in the United States were citizens, which cleared the way for tribal women to vote. But Native American women still faced ongoing barriers to voting on the state and local levels, especially in the West, as did Mexican Americans. Puerto Rican women did not gain the vote until 1935 and Chinese American women not until 1943. When assessing who can exercise the right to vote, it is always essential to ask who cannot.

Suffrage and feminism

Women’s demand for fair and equitable treatment in the political realm emerges as an integral part of the history of feminism. To protest women’s exclusion from voting demanded an assault on attitudes and ideologies that treated women as second-class citizens; to formulate that challenge involved conceptualizing women as a group whose collective situation needed to be addressed. Unfortunately, white suffragists often failed to realize they were speaking primarily from their own privileged class and race positions. The fact that certain groups of women, especially women of color, were often excluded from this supposedly universal vision demonstrates how racism intersected with feminism throughout the suffrage movement and its aftermath. Contemporary feminists have significantly broadened their commitment to recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences and worked hard to include multiple perspectives within the broader feminist framework, but it is still a struggle. The suffrage movement is part of that story, warts and all.

A global struggle

The history of women’s suffrage also reminds us that the struggle for the vote was a global phenomenon. Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, American and British abolitionists forged connections that influenced the early history of the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first met at an antislavery conference in London in 1840. Women’s international networks were especially vibrant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1888, the International Council of Women was founded to bring together existing women’s groups, primarily from North America and western Europe, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as its prime instigators. Its offshoot, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, founded in Berlin in 1904 “to secure the enfranchisement of the women of all nations,” fed the growth of the women’s suffrage movement worldwide. Women today enjoy nearly universal access to the franchise, but it is a misnomer to say that women were “given” the vote. Just as in the United States, women around the globe had to fight for that right.

Empowered through solidarity

Participating in the suffrage campaign provided women with the kind of exhilaration and camaraderie often described by men in periods of war or political upheaval. Women were proud to be part of this great crusade, and they cherished the solidarity it engendered for the rest of their lives. Frances Perkins, a veteran of the New York suffrage campaign and the first woman to serve in the cabinet as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, remembered it this way: “The friendships that were formed among women who were in the suffrage movement have been the most lasting and enduring friendships—solid, substantial, loyal—that I have ever seen anywhere. The women learned to like each other in that suffrage movement.” 2

Factions within the movement

The history of women’s suffrage also confirms the difficulty of maintaining unity in social movements. Women’s rights and abolition were closely allied before the Civil War, but that old coalition linking race and gender split irrevocably in the 1860s. The dispute was about who had priority: newly freed African American men or white women, who also wanted to be included in the post-Civil War expansion of political liberties represented by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Suffragists such as Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe had hoped for universal suffrage, but once the amendments were drafted, they supported ratification despite the exclusion of women. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton adamantly refused to support the amendments, often employing racist language to imply that white women were just as deserving of the vote as African American men, if not more so. By 1869 the suffrage movement had split in two over this question, not to reunite until 1890.

That split was both strategic and philosophical, as was the one in the 1910s between Carrie Chapman Catt’s mainstream National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and Alice Paul’s upstart National Woman’s Party (NWP). Catt’s much larger group tended to favor a state-by-state approach, while Paul and her supporters focused on winning a federal amendment. In addition, NAWSA was committed to working within the system while the NWP took to the streets, silently picketing the White House to express their outrage at women’s voteless status. In the end both sides were necessary to win ratification, just as the 19th century split had allowed competing personalities with different approaches to advance the movement in their own ways.

It is a misnomer to say that women were “given” the vote. Just as in the United States, women around the globe had to fight for that right.

Toward the future of equality in practice as well as in law

By the early 20th century, women had already moved far beyond the domestic sphere and boldly entered public life, yet a fundamental responsibility and privilege of citizenship—the right to vote—was arbitrarily denied to half the population. The 19th Amendment changed that increasingly untenable situation, representing a breakthrough for American women as well as a major step forward for American democracy. The wave of female candidates in the 2018 midterm elections and the unprecedented number of women who ran for president in 2020 built directly on the demands for fair and equitable access to the political realm articulated by the women’s suffrage movement.

Historian Anne Firor Scott provides an especially evocative image of how winning the vote was part of larger changes in women’s lives and in American society more broadly: “Suffrage was a tributary flowing into the rich and turbulent river of American social development. That river is enriched by the waters of each tributary, but with the passage of time it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the special contributions of any one of the tributaries.” 3 Think of the contributions of the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file women who participated in the fight to win the vote as the tributaries that make up suffrage history. And then think of suffrage history as a powerful strand in the larger stream of American history, which is richer and stronger because it heeded Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s prescient statement at Seneca Falls that all men and women are created equal. While the United States still lacks truly universal suffrage and gender equity remains a widely debated issue, the 19th Amendment represented a giant step toward both goals and left a firm constitutional foundation for future progress. When Susan B. Anthony talked about “leaving all to younger hands,” I like to think this is what she had in mind.

This inscribed volume is found in the collections of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2019), p. 280.
Anne Firor Scott, “Epilogue,” in Jean H. Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 194.

About the Author

As is the case of all Brookings publications, the conclusions and recommendations presented in this article are solely those of its authors and do not reflect the views of the Brookings Institution, its management, or its scholars.

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Causes and Effects of Women’s Suffrage in the United States

Carrie Chapman Catt on the fight for women's suffrage

Women's Rights

The 19th Amendment guarantees American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation. Beginning in the mid-19th century, woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered radical change.

First introduced in Congress in 1878, a woman suffrage amendment was continuously proposed for the next 41 years until it passed both houses of Congress in 1919 and was ratified by the states in 1920. The campaign for woman suffrage was long, difficult, and sometimes dramatic, yet ratification did not ensure full enfranchisement. Many women remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory laws.

Explore photographs, textual, and other records related to suffrage in the National Archives Catalog.

Educational Resources

Explore teaching and learning resources for the Women's Suffrage, including primary sources, online tools, lesson plans, and multimedia on DocsTeach.org, our online tool for teaching with documents.

Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment, Primary Source Set
DocsTeach: Women’s Suffrage
DocsTeach: Petitions & Letters in Support of Women's Suffrage
DocsTeach: Photos of Women's Suffrage Protests & Activities
DocsTeach: Women of Color in the Suffrage Movement
DocsTeach: The Anti-Suffrage Movement
DocsTeach: Passage & Ratification of the 19th Amendment

Research at the National Archives: Suffrage

While many resources are available online for research, there are many more records to discover in National Archives’ research rooms across the country. The following records have been described at the Series and File Unit level, but have not yet been digitized. This list is not exhaustive; please consult our Catalog to browse more records, and contact the Reference Unit listed in each description for more information.

The Committee on Woman Suffrage was created in 1917 and continued to exist until 1927, when it was abolished during the 70th Congress. The resolution to establish the committee gave it jurisdiction over all proposed legislation touching the subject of woman suffrage, a subject that had been in the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. Committee Papers, 1919 - 1920 : This series contains the committee papers for the Committee on Woman Suffrage from the 66th Congress.
Petitions of the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, 3/10/1871 - 1946 . The records of the committee include woman suffrage, voting rights, direct election of Senators, and campaign financing.

Articles, Blog Posts, and Other Resources:

Woman’s Place in America: Congress and Woman Suffrage
A Petition for Universal Suffrage
19th Amendment
The Making of Women’s Equality Day : NARAtions blog
Putting the “Rat” in Ratification – Tennessee’s role in the 19th amendment : Pieces of History blog
The Women of World War I in photographs : The Unwritten Record blog
Taking a Stand for Voting Rights : Prologue Magazine

Library of Congress
Research Guides
Multiple Research Centers

American Women: Topical Essays

Marching for the vote: remembering the woman suffrage parade of 1913.

Introduction
American Women: An Overview
Sentiments of an American Woman
The House That Marian Built: The MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire
Women On The Move: Overland Journeys to California
“With Peace and Freedom Blest!”: Woman as Symbol in America, 1590-1800
The Long Road to Equality: What Women Won from the ERA Ratification Effort

General Inquiries : Ask a Librarian

Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.

Chat with a librarian , Monday through Friday, 12-4pm Eastern Time (except Federal Holidays).

Author: Sheridan Harvey, Women's History Specialist, Researcher & Reference Services (formerly Humanities and Social Sciences) Division (retired)

Editor : Laura Berberian , Reference Librarian, Researcher & Reference Services Division

Note: This guide is adapted from the original essay in "American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States," 2001.

Created: June 28, 2001

Last Updated: September 6, 2018

MOB HURTS 300 SUFFRAGISTS AT CAPITAL PARADE 1

“There would be nothing like this happen if you would stay at home.” 2

On Monday, March 3, 1913, clad in a white cape astride a white horse, lawyer Inez Milholland led the great woman suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital. Behind her stretched a long line with nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, about twenty-four floats, and more than 5,000 marchers. 3

Women from countries that had enfranchised women held the place of honor in the first section of the procession. Then came the “Pioneers” who had been struggling for so many decades to secure women's right to vote. The next sections celebrated working women, who were grouped by occupation and wearing appropriate garb—nurses in uniform, women farmers, homemakers, women doctors and pharmacists, actresses, librarians, college women in academic gowns. Harriet Hifton of the Library of Congress Copyright Division led the librarians' contingent. The state delegations followed, and finally the separate section for male supporters of women's suffrage. All had come from around the country to “march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded. 4

The procession began late, but all went well for the first few blocks. Soon, however, the crowds, mostly men in town for the following day's inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, surged into the street making it almost impossible for the marchers to pass. Occasionally only a single file could move forward. Women were jeered, tripped, grabbed, shoved, and many heard “indecent epithets” and “barnyard conversation.” 5 Instead of protecting the parade, the police “seemed to enjoy all the ribald jokes and laughter and part participated in them.” 6 One policeman explained that they should stay at home where they belonged. The men in the procession heard shouts of “Henpecko” and “Where are your skirts?” As one witness explained, “There was a sort of spirit of levity connected with the crowd. They did not regard the affair very seriously.” 7

Head of suffrage parade, Washington, D.C. Women suffragists marching on Pennsylvania Avenue led by Mrs. Richard Coke Burleson (center on horseback); U.S. Capitol in background. 1913. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Woman's suffrage parade, Wash., D.C. Mar., 1913. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Crowd breaking parade up at 9th St. Woman's suffrage procession in Washington, D.C. being stopped by a crowd. 1913. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

George Grantham Bain. Suffragette parade Mch. 3d 1913 . Photograph shows nurses marching to support women's suffrage near the U.S. Capitol. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

But to the women, the event was very serious. Helen Keller “was so exhausted and unnerved by the experience in attempting to reach a grandstand . . . that she was unable to speak later at Continental hall [ sic ].” 8 Two ambulances “came and went constantly for six hours, always impeded and at times actually opposed, so that doctor and driver literally had to fight their way to give succor to the injured” 9 . One hundred marchers were taken to the local Emergency Hospital. Before the afternoon was over, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, responding to a request from the chief of police, authorized the use of a troop of cavalry from nearby Fort Myer to help control the crowd. 10

Despite enormous difficulties, many of those in the parade completed the route. When the procession reached the Treasury Building, one hundred women and children presented an allegorical tableau written especially for the event to show “those ideals toward which both men and women have been struggling through the ages and toward which, in co-operation and equality, they will continue to strive”. The pageant began with “The Star Spangled Banner” and the commanding figure of Columbia dressed in national colors, emerging from the great columns at the top of the Treasury Building steps. Charity entered, her path strewn with rose petals. Liberty followed to the “Triumphal March” from “Aida” and a dove of peace was released. In the final tableau, Columbia, surrounded by Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace, and Hope, all in flowing robes and colorful scarves, with trumpets sounding, stood to watch the oncoming procession. 11 The New York Times described the pageant as “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country”. 12

At the railway station a few blocks away, president-elect Wilson and the presidential party arrived to little fanfare. One of the incoming president's staff asked, ‘Where are all the people?’;—‘Watching the suffrage parade,’ the police told him.” 13 The next day Wilson would be driven down the miraculously clear, police-lined Pennsylvania Avenue cheered on by a respectful crowd.

Scene from a tableau held on the Treasury steps in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the Woman's suffrage procession on March 3, 1913 . Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

[German actress Hedwig Reicher wearing costume of "Columbia" with other suffrage pageant participants standing in background in front of the Treasury Building, March 3, 1913, Washington, D.C.] Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

[Women's suffrage procession in Washington, D.C. 1913, March 3, crowd around Red Cross ambulance] Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Washington march came at a time when the suffrage movement badly needed an infusion of vigor, a new way to capture public and press interest. Women had been struggling for the right to vote for more than sixty years, and although progress had been made in recent years on the state level with six western states granting women suffrage, the movement had stalled on the national level. Delegates from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA, and its predecessor associations) had arrived in the nation's capital every year since 1869 to present petitions asking that women be enfranchised. Despite this annual pilgrimage and the millions of signatures collected, debate on the issue had never even reached the floor of the House of Representatives. 14 In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party became the first major political party to pledge itself “to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.” 15 But the Progressives lost the election.

In November 1912, as suffrage leaders were casting about for new means to ensure their victory, Alice Paul arrived at the NAWSA annual convention in Philadelphia. A twenty-eight-year-old Quaker from New Jersey, she had recently returned to the United States fresh from helping the militant branch of the British suffrage movement. She had been arrested repeatedly, been imprisoned, gone on a hunger strike, and been forcibly fed, 16 an experience she described in an interview as “revolting.” Paul was full of ideas for the American movement. She asked to be allowed to organize a suffrage parade to be held in Washington at the time of the president's inauguration, thus ensuring maximum press attention. NAWSA accepted her offer when she promised to raise the necessary funds and gave her the title chairman of the Congressional Committee. 17 In December 1912, she moved to Washington where she discovered that the committee she chaired had no headquarters and most of the members had moved away or died. 18

[Alice Paul, half-length portrait, seated, facing slightly right, sewing suffrage flag] . [between 1912 and 1920]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The nation's capital : [Washington D.C.] . Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Alice Paul Talks . Philadelphia Tribune, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jan-10. [1909-1910]. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Undaunted, Alice Paul convened the first meeting of her new committee on January 2, 1913, in the newly rented basement headquarters at 1420 F Street, NW. She started raising funds; according to one friend, “it was very difficult to refuse Alice Paul.” 19 She and the others she recruited worked nonstop for two months. By March 3 this fledgling committee had organized and found the money for a major suffrage parade with floats, banners, speakers, and a twenty-page official program. The total cost of the event was $14,906.08, a princely sum in 1913, when the average annual wage was $621. 20 The programs and tableau each cost more than $1,000. 21

Why You Must March

Suffrage groups across the nation contributed to the success of the procession. From its New York headquarters, NAWSA urged suffrage supporters to gather in Washington:

Because this is the most conspicuous and important demonstration that has ever been attempted by suffragists in this country. Because this parade will be taken to indicate the importance of the suffrage movement by the press of the country and the thousands of spectators from all over the United States gathered in Washington for the Inauguration. 22

This call was answered. On February 12, with cameras clicking, sixteen “suffrage pilgrims” left New York City to walk to Washington for the parade. Many other people joined the original marchers at various stages, and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association's journal crowed that “no propaganda work undertaken by the State Association and the Party has ever achieved such publicity.” 23 One of the New York group, Elizabeth Freeman, dressed as a gypsy and drove a yellow, horse-drawn wagon decorated with Votes for Women symbols and filled with suffrage literature, a sure way to attract publicity. 24 Two weeks after the procession, five New York suffragists, including Elizabeth Freeman, reported to the Bronx motion picture studio of the Thomas A. Edison Company to make a talking picture known as a Kinetophone, which included a cylinder recording of one-minute speeches by each of the women. This film with synchronized sound was shown in vaudeville houses where it was “hooted, jeered and hissed” by audiences. 25

NAWSA officers prepared a strong letter to the president-elect for the “New York hikers” to carry to Washington. This letter urged that women's suffrage be achieved during his presidency and warned that the women of the United States “will watch your administration with an intense interest such as has never before been focused upon the administration of any of your predecessors.” 26 Despite the tone of the letter, when the group reached Princeton, where Woodrow Wilson lived, they requested only “an audience for not more than two minutes in Washington as soon after your arrival as possible.” 27 Less than two weeks after his inauguration, Wilson received a suffrage delegation led by Alice Paul, who chose to make the case for suffrage verbally and apparently did not deliver the hikers' letter. In response to the women's impassioned plea, he replied that he had never given the subject any thought, but that it “will receive my most careful consideration.” 28 Hardly the whole-hearted endorsement sought by the women.

The mistreatment of the marchers by the crowd and the police roused great indignation and led to congressional hearings where more than 150 witnesses recounted their experiences; some complained about the lack of police protection, and others defended the police. Before the inquiries were over, the superintendent of police of the District of Columbia had lost his job.

The public outcry and its accompanying press coverage proved a windfall for the suffragists. The Woman's Journal proclaimed, “Parade Struggles to Victory Despite Disgraceful Scenes, Nation Aroused by Open Insults to Women-Cause Wins Popular Sympathy.” 29 The New York Tribune announced, “Capital Mobs Made Converts to Suffrage.” 30 At its next convention, in November 1913, NAWSA praised the “amazing and most creditable year's work” of Alice Paul's Congressional Committee, stating that “their single-mindedness and devotion has been remarkable and the whole movement in the country has been wonderfully furthered by the series of important events which have taken place in Washington, beginning with the great parade the day before the inauguration of the president.” 31

Not one to mince words, famous reporter Nellie Bly, who rode as one of the heralds in the parade, bluntly stated in the headline to her article on the march—“Suffragists Are Men's Superiors.” With uncanny prescience, she added that it would take at least until 1920 for all states to grant woman suffrage. 32 Despite the pageantry of 1913, Nellie Bly was right. It was to take seven more years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women full rights to vote, finally passed both houses of Congress and was ratified by the required thirty-six states.

Behind this description of the 1913 Washington Suffrage Procession—one event in the long history of women's campaign for suffrage in the United States—lies a wealth of telling detail and the human stories that make history interesting and meaningful. A rich variety of suffrage materials in many formats lie scattered throughout the collections of the Library of Congress awaiting the curious reader in search of further details and other stories, of the sounds and sights of the fight for the vote.

The organizers of the parade intended its floats and pageant to have visual appeal for the media and thus to attract publicity for the movement. Photographers recorded the women's activities for newspaper readers and these images live on in newspapers and photo archives. Easily the single most heavily represented suffrage event in the Prints and Photographs Division's holdings, the march appears in more than forty images, including news photographs of the hike from New York to Washington, the marchers and crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the pageant performed at the Treasury Building. A surviving stereograph of the parade suggests that publishers of these images, which appeared in three dimensions when seen through a special viewer, expected that the public would be willing to pay for a permanent memento of the event.

Within the General Collections lie innumerable journal articles, autobiographies, and extensive secondary literature addressing the issues of women's suffrage. Further examples of these types of materials can be found in the microform collections.

Legal materials on women's suffrage—congressional hearings and reports, relevant laws, articles in legal journals, and books—are held in the Law Library. See a discussion of "State Suffrage Laws."

Contemporary press coverage of the suffrage movement can be found in newspapers from around the country and the world. Many of these valuable primary sources can be read in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, but some foreign-language newspapers are held by Area Studies reading rooms.

See the Music Division's section Topical Research in Popular Songs for ways to find music on suffrage. In the Recorded Sound Reference Center you can learn about the Sounds of the Suffrage Movement.

As you move through this Web site exploring the variety of formats available to study the women's suffrage movement, you will find many other sources to open new avenues for continuing the investigation of the long and fascinating fight for women's right to vote.

One of the great rewards of research is the exhilaration of new discoveries—uncovering a new fact, locating an unknown photograph, or hearing the voice of a person you are studying. At the Library of Congress you can hold a letter written by Alice Paul, follow the path of the suffrage parade on a map of Washington, watch a film of suffragists, or scan old newspapers for Nellie Bly's forthright words. If you listen carefully, our foremothers will speak to you. If you tell their story, they will live again.

*Authored the original essay in American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States (Library of Congress, 2001), from which this online version is derived. Others who contributed to this effort are identified in the Acknowledgments.

The women's march also inspired cartoonists, some of whom likened the suffrage movement to colonial America's fight for independence. James Harrison Donahey, for example, substituted women for men in a cartoon based on the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” In another such cartoon, women play the fife and drums in an imitation of Archibald Willard's painting “Spirit of '76” [ view picture ]. 33 Suffrage and anti-suffrage cartoons appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers of the day. 34

Vivid details about the march also turn up in a seemingly unlikely source. The Yidishes Tageblatt (Jewish daily news), a Yiddish-language publication from New York City with a circulation of seventy thousand, devoted two columns to the women's parade. The article claimed that twenty-five lost children stayed in police stations overnight and eighteen men asked the police to find their wives. 35

A 1974 magazine interview with eighty-nine-year-old Alice Paul reveals the problems for the historian of hindsight and memory. In two major respects Miss Paul's recollections of the event, sixty-one years after it occurred, differ from those of contemporary sources. She remembers a fairly peaceable parade in which the police did as well as could be expected: “Of course, we did hear a lot of shouted insults, which we always expected. You know the usual things about why aren't you home in the kitchen where you belong. But it wasn't anything violent.” 36 The Senate hearings, on the other hand, show that many people felt the crowd was hostile and the police inept.

The other major point in which Paul's memory differs from contemporary accounts is on the question of the place of African American women in the procession. In her view, the “greatest hurdle” in planning the parade came when Mary Church Terrell wanted to bring a group from the National Association of Colored Women. NAWSA had stated firmly that all women were welcome, but Paul knew “members from the South said they wouldn't march.” She recalls that the compromise was to have white women march first, then the men's section, and finally the Negro women's section. 37 A different picture appears in the Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After initial difficulties and attempts to segregate the African American women, “telegrams and protests poured in and eventually the colored women marched according to their State and occupation without let or hindrance.” 38 Ida B. Wells-Barnett was among those who objected strongly to a segregated parade; she walked with the Illinois delegation.

Moving beyond sources related to a single event to examine other aspects of the history of women's suffrage, researchers visiting the Library of Congress will discover collections of major significance in many different reading rooms. Most of these materials are discussed in greater detail elsewhere on this site—just follow the links.

Researching Women's Suffrage at the Library of Congress

Digital collections.

For researching women's suffrage in the Library's digital collections, see the following primary sources:

Women's Suffrage: Primary Source Set (for Teachers) The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.
Susan B. Anthony Collection The papers of reformer and suffragist Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) span the period 1846-1934. The collection, consisting of approximately 500 items (6,265 images) on seven recently digitized microfilm reels, includes correspondence, diaries, a daybook, scrapbooks, speeches, and miscellaneous items.
Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party This collection includes 448 digitized photographs selected from approximately 2,650 print photographs in the Records of the National Woman's Party, a collection of more than 438,000 items, housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Collection The papers of suffragist, reformer, and feminist theorist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) cover the years 1814 to 1946. Consisting of approximately 1,000 items (4,164 images), reproduced on five reels of recently digitized microfilm, the collection contains correspondence, speeches, articles, drafts of books, scrapbooks, and printed matter relating to Stanton and the woman's rights movement.
Mary Church Terrell Papers The papers of educator, lecturer, suffragist, and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) consist of approximately 13,000 documents, comprising 25,323 images, all of which were digitized from 34 reels of previously produced microfilm. Spanning the years 1851 to 1962, the collection contains diaries, correspondence, printed matter, clippings, and speeches and writings, primarily focusing on Terrell's career as an advocate of women's rights and equal treatment of African Americans.

Prints & Photographs

For suffrage images from the Library's Prints and Photographs collections, see the following pathfinders and collection guides:

Political Activity and Social Reform: Women's History Resources in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division This pathfinder is intended to give researchers a flavor for the variety of ways in which any given topic can be researched in the division's holdings, as well as offering a starting point for pursuing research in various topic areas that broadly reflect aspects of American women's lives.
One Hundred Years toward Suffrage: An Overview This timeline accompanies the Prints and Photographs Division reference aid, "Votes for Women: The Struggle for Women's Suffrage: Selected Images from the Collections of the Library of Congress," highlighting images found in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.
Votes for Women: The Struggle for Women's Suffrage: Selected Images From the Collections of the Library of Congress These images were selected to meet requests regularly received by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. They include portraits of women who campaigned for women's rights, particularly voting rights, and suffrage campaign scenes, cartoons, and ephemera. An accompanying women's suffrage timeline features many of the images.

Three especially useful image collections to search are:

National Photo Company Collection This collection documents virtually all aspects of Washington, D.C., life. During the administrations of Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, the National Photo Company supplied photographs of current news events in Washington, D.C., as a daily service to its subscribers. It also prepared sets of pictures on popular subjects and undertook special photographic assignments for local businesses and government agencies.
Bain Collection The George Grantham Bain Collection represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection richly documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s.
League of Women Voters (U.S.) records, 1884-1986 Correspondence, memoranda, minutes, proceedings, speeches, reports, project studies, subject files, biographical material, financial records, newspapers clippings, printed matter, and other records concerning the league's activities at the national, state, and local levels.

Rare Books and Special Collections

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds several important collections including personal and institutional libraries.

Susan B. Anthony Papers The papers of reformer and suffragist Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) span the period 1846-1934 with the bulk of the material dating from 1846 to 1906. The collection, consisting of approximately 500 items (6,265 images) on seven recently digitized microfilm reels, includes correspondence, diaries, a daybook, scrapbooks, speeches, and miscellaneous items. Donated by her niece, Lucy E. Anthony, the papers relate to Susan B. Anthony's interests in abolition and women's education, her campaign for women's property rights and suffrage in New York, and her work with the National Woman Suffrage Association, the organization she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded in 1869 when the suffrage movement split into two rival camps at odds about whether to press for a federal women's suffrage amendment or to seek state-by-state enfranchisement.
National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection is a library of nearly 800 books and pamphlets documenting the suffrage campaign that were collected between 1890 and 1938 by members of NAWSA and donated to the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress on November 1, 1938. The bulk of the collection is derived from the library of Carrie Chapman Catt, president of NAWSA from 1900-1904, and again from 1915-1920. Additional materials were donated to the NAWSA Collection from the libraries of other members and officers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller, and Mary A. Livermore.
Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks

Manuscript Collections

For materials in the Manuscript Reading Room, see Women's Suffrage. Some of the relevant collections are listed below.

Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party (1850-1975)
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection
Blackwell family papers, 1759-1960 (Finding Aid)
La Follette family papers, 1781-1988 (Finding Aid)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People records, 1842-1999 (Finding Aid)
Women's Suffrage (Primary Source Set for Teachers)
New York Evening Journal, March 4, 1913, p. 3 (N&CPR). Back to text
Suffrage Parade, Senate Hearing, March 6-17, 1913, p. 70 (JK1888 1913b GenColl; MicRR; RBSC NAWSA; LAW). Back to text
There is disagreement about the number of marchers. The New York Times, March 4, 1913, p. 4 (N&CPR), said 5,000. Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of the Woman's Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921; JK1901 .I7 GenColl ), 29, says 8,000. Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920; JK1901.S85 GenColl), 22, says 10,000. For a full-text version of Jailed for Freedom, see “Marching for the Vote” on the Topical Essays External Sites page Back to text
Procession details from throughout the Official Program: Woman Suffrage Procession (MSS, P&P, RBSC, MicRR); the quotation is from p. 2. The Library's copies of the program have different numbers of pages. All citations in this essay are from the copy in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Back to text
Suffrage Parade, 27, 68, 70. Back to text
Ibid., 94. Back to text
Ibid., 70, 59, 329. Back to text
Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1913, p. 2 (N&CPR). Back to text
Washington Post, March 4, 1913, p. 10 (N&CPR). Back to text
Suffrage Parade, testimony of Secretary Stimson, 120. Back to text
For a full description of the Allegory, with descriptions of costumes, props, and music, see the Official Program (RBSC), pp. 14, 16. The full program is available on the Library's American Memory Web site [full item]. The records of the National Woman's Party (described in the Manuscript Division's Women's Suffrage section) contain more than fifteen hundred items relating to the parade and its aftermath. All of the parade's many logistical details are documented, including efforts to recruit organizers, secure speakers, obtain permits, assemble the programs, invite members of Congress, and more. Back to text
New York Times, March 4, 1913, p. 4 (N&CPR). Back to text
Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (1926 RBSC NAWSA; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969; JK1896.C3 1969 Gen-Coll), 242. Irwin, The Story, 30, and Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 21, both say it was Wilson himself who asked the question as he drove through empty streets to his hotel. For a full-text version of Jailed for Freedom, see “Marching for the Vote” on the Topical Essays External Sites page. Presidential inaugurations were held on March 4 until the Twentieth Amendment (1933) changed the date to January 20. Back to text
Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996; HQ1410.F6 1996 Gen-Coll), 255. Back to text
National Party Platforms, compiled by Donald Bruce Johnson, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1978; JK2255.J64 1978 GenColl), 1: 176. Back to text
Irwin, The Story, 8-11. Back to text
Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 241. Back to text
Irwin, The Story, 18. Back to text
Ibid., 19. Back to text
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975; HA202.B87 1975 MRR Ref Desk and other locations), 1: 168. Back to text
National American Woman Suffrage Association, Forty-fifth Annual Report (New York: NAWSA, 1913; JK1881.N28 45th 1913 GenColl), 67. Back to text
Votes for Women Inaugural Parade, broadside, National Woman's Party, Records, Group I, box 14, “NWP Leaflets and Broadsides” (MSS). Back to text
Woman Voter and the Newsletter, 4: 3 (March 1913), p. 10 (JK1880 .W55 GenColl). Back to text
Ibid., p. 10. Back to text
The Library of Congress has preserved a print of the film, but unfortunately no known copies of the sound recording survive. Votes for Women, AFI/Tayler Collection (FEA 9595), Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1913; 1 reel, 368 ft., si., originally produced with sound recording on a cylinder; (the LC copy lacks the cylinder), 35mm ref. print (MBRS). Variety, April 11, 1913, p. 6 (microfilm 03722, MicRR, MBRS). Back to text
Officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to The Honorable Woodrow Wilson, February 12, 1913, in the National Woman's Party Records, Group I, box 2, “February 11-13, 1913.” This letter states that it was to be “borne” by the hikers to Wilson, but the presence of the signed original in the National Woman's Party Records indicates that it was never delivered. There is no copy in the Woodrow Wilson Papers (MSS). Although they did not present the letter, the suffragists did indeed focus their attention on President Wilson, and when he refused to join their cause, they began to picket the White House. Silent women holding banners stood outside the president's home every day, twenty-four hours a day, for eight months. The pickets endured taunts, arrests, and imprisonment but never faltered. It was still to take until January 1918 before Wilson joined the suffrage bandwagon. Back to text
Woman Voter and the Newsletter, 4:3 (March 1913), p. 10. Back to text
Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 23 (for a full-text version of Jailed for Freedom, see “Marching for the Vote” on the Topical Essays External Sites page). Anna Howard Shaw, president of NAWSA, complained that Paul's group had not told her of the meeting and so she did not attend (Ida Husted Harper, Scrapbooks, XI [JK1899.H4 RBSC], p. 31). Alice Paul and her Washington supporters were soon to establish their own, independent suffrage party, the National Woman's Party, to work solely on the passage of a constitutional amendment. Back to text
Woman's Journal and Suffrage News, March 8, 1913, p. 1 (RBSC-NAWSA, MicRR). Back to text
New York Tribune, March 8, 1913, p. 3 (N&CPR); Harper, Scrapbook, XI (RBSC), p. 28. Back to text
NAWSA, Forty-fifth Annual Report, 17. Back to text
New York Evening Journal, March 3, 1913, p. 3 (N&CPR). Back to text
Both cartoons were reproduced in Cartoons Magazine, 3:4 (April 1913), p. 216 (LC-USZ62-55985 P&P). Back to text
Many cartoons appear in newspapers, books, and articles in the General Collections and N&CPR. Life (1883-1936; AP101.L6 GenColl) is a rich source. For a collection of suffrage cartoons, see Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994; NC1425.S54 1994 GenColl). Back to text
Yidishes Tageblatt, March 4, 1913, p. 8 (AMED-Hebr). Back to text
Robert S. Gallagher, “I Was Arrested, of Course,” American Heritage, 25:2 (February 1974), p. 20 (E171.A43 GenColl). Back to text
Ibid., 20. Back to text
See the Records of the National Woman's Party (Group I, boxes 1-3) for correspondence on the role of African American women in the parade (MSS). See also Crisis, 5:6 (April 1913), p.267; reprint ed. (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; E185.5.C9 GenColl). For Wells Barnett, see the Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1913, p.2 (N&CPR). Additional sources of material on African American women and the march include the aforementioned records of the National Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (both collections are described in the Manuscript Division's Women's Suffrage section). Back to text
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Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage

By ellen dubois.

Given the seventy-two years between the one event and the other, a full third of our history as a nation, the story of the demand for equal suffrage involves many stops and starts, and numerous shifts and splits. Moreover, the exact terms and times of the triumphant end were not—and could not have been—envisioned by those present at the beginning. Differences in and conflicts over leadership, shifting political environments, and various strategies and tactics all mark the long and complex history of the women’s suffrage movement, which lasted far longer than its instigators imagined and yet was shorter than it could have been (when we consider, for instance, the additional three-and-a-half decades that elapsed before women won the right to vote in that other eighteenth-century revolutionary nation, France).

This essay will consider the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction epoch on the American battle for women’s suffrage. As of 1860, the right to vote was not the primary demand of the women’s rights movement, which focused much more on the economic rights of women—and especially of wives—to earn, inherit, and hold property. In addition, because the common reading of the federal Constitution was that it was up to the separate states to determine how to establish the electorate, women’s rights activists assumed that women’s suffrage—along with women’s economic and other rights—had to be fought for and won state by state. Thus, it was not anticipated that winning the right to vote would involve an epic battle over the federal Constitution. We should remember that as of 1860, only twelve amendments—ten of them consisting of the Bill of Rights dating from 1789, and the other two of largely procedural significance—had been ratified. What we know now—that the history of American federal constitutionalism would be marked by alternating periods of interpretation and amendment, of fierce battles waged far beyond Congress and the Supreme Court to alter and augment the shape and meaning of our foundational political document—was not obvious then; nor was it obvious that women’s suffrage would be the most prolonged of all these constitutional wars.

The very first of those periods of constitutional struggle occurred during the era of postwar Reconstruction, which is when the women’s suffrage movement took on many of the characteristics that it was to maintain for the next half century. Emerging out of the Civil War, the issue of political equality for women was inextricably bound up with the unsettled political status of the former slaves. When the Thirteenth Amendment passed Congress (with the help of a massive petition campaign engineered by the women’s rights movement) and was ratified by the states, the former slaves were freed, but the absence of chattel slavery did not specify what the presence of freedom meant legally and constitutionally. To resolve the anomalous position of the freed population, the Fourteenth Amendment declared that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens thereof," with all the "privileges and immunities" of national citizenship. Without specifying exactly what these privileges and immunities were, the second section of the amendment went on to address the crucial question of voting rights for the freedmen, a question of particular concern to the ruling Republican Party, which looked to them as a loyal constituency in the states of the former Confederacy.

The Fourteenth Amendment addressed the question of enfranchisement in an indirect, elaborate, and ultimately ineffective way: by pinning a state’s number of seats in the House of Representatives to the proportion of the adult population that was permitted to vote. There were, however, two qualifications to this population basis for determining representation: "Indians not taxed" were excluded, and the amendment specifically defined the potential electorate as "male." Here, for the first time, was an explicit reference to gender in the US Constitution. Since the women’s rights movement was now in its second decade and included a call for political equality in its platform, the amenders of the Constitution could no longer assume, as had the Founders, that "we the people" simply meant men, and did not include, in any politically significant way, women. Women had to be explicitly excluded or they would be implicitly included.

Women’s rights activists objected strongly to what Elizabeth Cady Stanton angrily called "that word ‘male.’" They sent petitions to Congress while the amendment was still being drafted, begging for a change in language, but the amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification with the disturbing qualification of gender intact within it. Women’s rights activists objected and criticized, but were caught between their recognition of the importance of political rights for the freedmen and their dedication to their own cause of women’s rights. So they stopped short of calling for non-ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Later, because the measures used in the Fourteenth Amendment to encourage black enfranchisement were too weak, a third postwar amendment was designed, this time to address the issue of suffrage directly. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1869 and ratified a year later, explicitly forbade the states to deny the right to vote to anyone on the basis of "race, color or previous condition of servitude" and authorized Congress to pass any necessary enforcement legislation. The wording, it should be noted, did not transfer the right to determine the electorate to the federal government, but only specified particular kinds of state disfranchisements—and "sex" was not one of them—as unconstitutional.

At this point, the delicate balance between the political agendas of the causes of black freedom and women’s rights became undone. The two movements came into open antagonism, and the women’s rights movement itself split over the next steps to take to secure women the right to vote. Defenders of women’s rights found themselves in an extremely difficult political quandary. Would they have to oppose an advance in the rights of the ex-slaves in order to argue for those of free women? At a May 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, a group that had been organized three years earlier by women’s rights advocates to link black and woman suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave vent to her frustration, her sense of betrayal by longstanding male allies, and her underlying sense that "educated" women like herself were more worthy of enfranchisement than men just emerged from slavery. She and Frederick Douglass had a painful and famous public exchange about the relative importance of black and woman suffrage, in which Douglass invoked images of ex-slaves "hung from lampposts" in the South by white supremacist vigilantes, and Stanton retaliated by asking whether he thought that the black race was made up only and entirely of men. By the end of the meeting, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had led a walkout of a portion of the women at the meeting to form a new organization to focus on women’s suffrage, which they named the National Woman Suffrage Association.

A second group, under the leadership of Massachusetts women Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, formed a rival organization, known as the American Woman Suffrage Association. This wing counted on longstanding connections with abolitionism and the leadership of the Republican Party to get women’s suffrage enacted once black male suffrage had been fully inscribed in the Constitution. Over the next few years, both the American and the National Woman Suffrage Associations spread their influence to the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. The National Woman Suffrage Association linked political rights to other causes, including inflammatory ones like free love, while the American Woman Suffrage Association kept the issue clear of "side issues." For the next few years, the two organizations pursued different strategies to secure for votes for women. Starting with an 1874 campaign in Michigan, the American Woman Suffrage Association pressed for changes in state constitutions. Because these campaigns involved winning over a majority of (male) voters, they were extremely difficult to carry out, and it was not until 1893 that Colorado became the first state to enfranchise women.

Meanwhile, the National Woman Suffrage Association refused to give up on the national Constitution. Doubtful that any additional federal amendments would be passed, the group sought a way to base women’s suffrage in the Constitution’s existing provisions. Its "New Departure" campaign contended that the Fourteenth Amendment’s assertion that all native-born or naturalized "persons" were national citizens surely included the right of suffrage among its "privileges and immunities," and that, as persons, women were thus enfranchised. In 1871, the notorious female radical Victoria Woodhull made this argument before the House Judiciary Committee. The next year, hundreds of suffragists around the country went to the polls on election day, repeating the arguments of the New Departure, and pressing to get their votes accepted.

Among those who succeeded—at least temporarily—was Susan B. Anthony, who cast her ballot for Ulysses S. Grant. Three weeks after the election, Anthony was arrested on federal charges of "illegal voting" and in 1873 was found guilty by an all-male jury. Anthony was prevented by the judge from appealing her case but another "voting woman," Virginia Minor, succeeded in making the New Departure argument before the US Supreme Court in 1874. In a landmark voting and women’s-rights decision, the Court ruled that although women were indeed persons, and hence citizens, the case failed because suffrage was not included in the rights guaranteed by that status. The 1875 Minor v. Happersett ruling coincided with other decisions that allowed states to infringe on the voting rights of the southern freedmen, culminating over the next two decades in their near-total disfranchisement.

Although these various Reconstruction-era efforts failed to enfranchise women, they did leave various marks on the continuing campaign for women’s suffrage: a shifting focus on state and federal constitutional action, a legacy of direct action, a women’s suffrage movement that was largely cut off from the efforts of African Americans for their rights, and, perhaps most fundamentally, an independent movement of women for women, which turned the campaign for suffrage into a continuing source of activism and political sophistication for coming generations of women.

Ellen DuBois is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-editor, with Richard Candida Smith, of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Intellectual (2007); co-author, with Lynn Dumenil, of Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents (2005); and author of Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997).

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Women’s Suffrage Movement

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Collection Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party

Tactics and techniques of the national womans party suffrage campaign.

Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National Woman's Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women's suffrage campaign. Using a variety of tactics, the party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress, and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote. In so doing, the NWP established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the right to dissent.

The NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation. Its tactics were versatile and imaginative, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources–including the British suffrage campaign, the American labor movement, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women's rights campaigns in the United States.

Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of NWP members, but these activities were supplemented by other more public actions–including parades, pageants, street speaking, and demonstrations. The party eventually realized that it needed to escalate its pressure and adopt even more aggressive tactics. Most important among these was picketing the White House over many months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists.

The willingness of NWP pickets to be arrested, their campaign for recognition as political prisoners rather than as criminals, and their acts of civil disobedience in jail shocked the nation and brought attention and support to their cause. Through constant agitation, the NWP effectively compelled President Wilson to support a federal woman suffrage amendment. Similar pressure on national and state legislators led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

View the complete essay (PDF) .

Home / Modernizing America, 1889-1920 / Woman Suffrage / Arguments for and Against Suffrage

Arguments for and Against Suffrage

A pair of documents that present competing arguments for and against women gaining the right to vote.

Women in the Home

New York State Woman Suffrage Association, Women in the Home , n.d. New-York Historical Society Library.


	Women are in charge of the home. This includes cleaning the house, serving healthy food, keeping the children healthy, and serving as a moral example.
if the neighbors are allowed to live in filth, she cannot keep her rooms from being filled with bad air and smells, or from being infested with vermin.	A woman cannot keep her house clean if her neighbors and neighborhood are dirty.
if dealers are permitted to sell poor food, unclean milk or stale eggs, she cannot make the food wholesome for her children.	A woman cannot serve healthy food if the food for sale is bad or rotten.
if the plumbing in the rest of the house is unsanitary, if garbage accumulates and the halls and stairs are left dirty, she cannot protect her children from the sickness and infection resulting.	A woman can take care of her own garbage, but she cannot keep her family safe if her street and building are filled with the garbage.
if the house has been badly built, if the fire-escapes are inadequate, she cannot guard her children from the horrors of being maimed or killed by fire.	A woman can avoid fire in the home, but she cannot keep her children safe if buildings and fire escapes are not strong.
to give her children the air that we are told is so necessary, if the air is laden with infection, with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, she cannot protect her children from this danger.	A woman can open windows to give her children fresh air, but they will get sick if the air is filled with disease.
if the conditions that surround them on the streets are immoral and degrading, from these dangers.	A woman can allow her children to play outside, but they will be in danger if there are immoral people around.
make these things right. or can?	A woman cannot address the issues above.
can do it—the that is of the interests of the people. decides what the city government shall do?	The city can address the issues above, but who controls the city?
of that government; and,	The city officials and the voters who elect city officials are men.
and for the	This means men are responsible for clean, safe, and healthy homes.
under which the children live, but we hold of those conditions.	Women are in charge of the home, but only men can address the issues that influence the home.
as to what these conditions shall be? There is Give them the same means that men have.	Women need a say in public issues. They need the vote.
	Women are natural housekeepers. Let them influence the city’s housekeeping too.

An image of an anti-suffrage essay written by Alice Hill Chittenden, the president of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Her essay is titled “Ballot Not a Panacea For Existing Evils.”

Ballot not a Panacea for Existing Evil

Alice Hill Chittenden, Ballot not a Panacea for Existing Evil , 1913. New-York Historical Society Library.


	The right to vote is not a cure all for society.
	Women claim they want the vote so they can make society better. But the vote does not clean streets, expand schools, improve tenements, or ensure healthy food.
	Suffragists support an old-fashioned belief that the vote will solve everything.
	Even men, who can vote, know that they cannot make changes through voting. Instead, they have created organizations and committees to address society’s problems.
	Men and women who organize outside of politics can influence lawmakers. Women can work with men and hold appointed positions that make a difference.
	Women sit on many important boards and committees in state and local government.
	Volunteer organizations and leagues have been very influential in making changes in society.
	The State Charities Aid Association is an example of an organization that helped in the areas of public health and childcare.
	Women who are opposed to woman suffrage believe in social reform. However, they believe that they can accomplish more through organizing outside the official political system.
	Women would lose power if they gained the right to vote. They are better off outside of politics.

By 1900, the fight over woman suffrage had persisted for over half a century, and a new momentum was building as women activists rallied on both sides of the debate. But suffragists and anti-suffragists had more in common than they wished to admit. Most women actively involved in the fight were white, educated, and financially stable. Even the arguments they used were similar. Both suffragists and anti-suffragists tended to favor a traditional view of womanhood that embraced women in the home . It was the power and importance of the vote that created the difference between these opposing views.

Instead of promoting a vision of gender equality, suffragists usually argued that the vote would enable women to be better wives and mothers. Women voters, they said, would bring their moral superiority and domestic expertise to issues of public concern. Anti-suffragists argued that the vote directly threatened domestic life. They believed that women could more effectively promote change outside of the corrupt voting booth.

For more about the arguments against suffrage, watch the video below.

This video is from “ Women Have Always Worked ,” a free massive open online course produced in collaboration with Columbia University.

About the document.

Both documents exemplify the types of materials created by suffragists and anti-suffragists to share their beliefs with a wider audience. Articles and broadsides were distributed at meetings, rallies, and parades, and displayed in meeting rooms, coffee shops, and other public places.

The first document is a pro-suffrage broadside created by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association in New York City. The second document is an anti-suffrage essay written by Alice Hill Chittenden, president of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

broadside: A single-sided printed piece of paper; often used as a flyer or poster.
municipal: Connected to a city, town, or local government.
non-partisan: Neither supporting nor representing a political party.
panacea: A solution that will cure all problems or symptoms.
suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to woman suffrage, or the right of women to vote.
suffragists / anti-suffragists: People who fought for or against the expansion of suffrage.
tuberculosis: A highly contagious and deadly disease.
unwholesome: Unhealthy.

Discussion Questions

What are the key arguments in each of these documents? Why do suffragists want the vote? Why do anti-suffragists want to prevent the vote?
To what extent do these documents offer a similar view of women’s roles? What does this tell you about the differences between suffragists and anti-suffragists?
Who is the audience for these materials? What did the authors hope to accomplish?

Suggested Activities

Dive deeply into pro-suffrage arguments. Analyze the first document in tandem with Rose O’Neill’s poster “ Together for Home and Family ” and Adella Hunt Logan’s article “ Colored Women as Voters .”
Consider how race played a role in the suffrage movement and how Black and white suffragists differed. Compare “Women in the Home” with Adella Hunt Logan’s article “ Colored Women as Voters ,” Fannie Barrier Williams’s article “ Fannie Barrier Williams Lauds Chicago Women ,” and the life stories of Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells .
Compare “Women in the Home” with the illustration from Life magazine depicting the evils of urban life. How do these two pieces present a case for women taking on a more active role in social and political issues?
Dive deep into anti-suffrage arguments. Analyze this document in tandem with the photograph of Southern anti-suffragists .
Compare both of these documents with the life story of Emma Goldman , who opposed suffrage for radical reasons. How were her beliefs different from the anti-suffrage arguments presented by Alice Hill Chittenden? How might she have responded to both articles?

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92 Women’s Suffrage Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best women’s suffrage topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting women’s suffrage topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about women’s suffrage, ❓ research questions about women’s suffrage.

Views on Women’s Suffrage by E.Kuhlman, L.Woodworth-Ney and E.Foner They have presented similar examples as factors in the enactment of women’s voting rights; these examples include the participation of women in wars at the home front and the contribution women made to build the […]
The Women’s Suffrage Movement It shows the cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of substantial funds for the campaigns of activists and the subsequent decision to accept money from the person ideologically opposed to the female participants with their agenda.
Women’s Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment Though the early Suffrage movement lacked diversity and the associated perspectives, it did lay the foundation for the 19trh Amendment despite quite vocal claims against change among some of the more racist Tennessee women, who […]
American Women in History: Feminism and Suffrage It is important to note that the key sharp issues discussed in this chapter are: a finding of the independent women suffrage movement, the role of the constituency in this process, the role of war […]
The Women’s Suffrage Movement in England in 19th Century It can also be claimed that the attempts of women to enter the sphere of politics have become the most important determinant in the construction of ideas about British democracy and culture. In this period, […]
Women Suffrage in Carrie Chapman’s Rhetoric The paper is a bright example of the in-depth analysis of the problem and a perfect insight into the future of womens participation in the political life of the country.
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Sojourner Truth: Slavery Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage The main aim of this step was to show that black people should also be given the right to participate in elections and chose the future of their own state.
Women’s Suffrage Movement The struggle for women suffrage augmented in the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of diverse associations. The formation of the International Council of Women occurred in the year 1888.
Women’s Suffrage in America Suffrage is the right to vote, and women’s suffrage is the right of women to take part in the process of voting.
Women’s Suffrage Discussion The entrenchment of equal rights of women and men and more noticeably the right of every American woman to vote came into being after the enactment of the nineteenth amendment.
How Did Women Change Their Stature in Society: Women’s Suffrage The status of women in society has been considerably changed and, now, women take leading positions in different spheres: women in education choose proper approaches to study children and help them develop their skills; women […]
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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote, Journal of American History , Volume 106, Issue 3, December 2019, Pages 662–694, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz506

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Soon after the U.S. Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in early June 1919, state legislatures began to deliberate the question of women's suffrage. Ratification proceedings, which persisted for more than a year, unfolded against a backdrop of extraordinary rage, fear, and uncertainty in the United States. After World War I the decline of manufacturing and the demobilization of soldiers contributed to a painful recession. Across the long red summer, mobs of angry whites terrorized African American communities, lynching dozens of persons and burning homes and churches. Emboldened by union activism and the specter of Bolshevist revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of brutal raids, arresting and attempting to deport thousands of immigrant workers. In Congress, the dry majority overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, heralding a new era of prohibition. Amid this social and political tumult, the Nineteenth Amendment wound its way toward ratification.

What did the amendment, a milestone of American democracy, mean to a nation so deeply committed to white supremacy and immigration restriction? What were its implications for an aspiring empire then exerting military power overseas? How, if at all, did it affect politics and law in the United States?

To promote critical reflection about the Nineteenth Amendment and its many complex legacies, the Journal of American History announces a new series, Sex, Suffrage, Solidarities: Centennial Reappraisals. This series, which will run throughout the coming year, will consist of research articles, special features, and reviews published across the JAH , the JAH Podcast , and Process: a blog for American history . Our theme for the project—sex, suffrage, solidarities—is intended to provoke new questions about the Nineteenth Amendment and the political, economic, and cultural transformations of which it has been a part. Our ambition is to foster creative thinking about suffrage, its discursive and material frameworks, and its often-unanticipated consequences. We intend to examine the intricate linkages among suffrage, citizenship, identities, and differences. We aim to facilitate global, transnational, and/or comparative perspectives, particularly those that compel us to reperiodize or otherwise reassess conventional ways of thinking about campaigns for women's rights and adult citizenship.

To inaugurate this series, we invited a panel of distinguished historians—Ellen Carol DuBois, Liette Gidlow, Martha S. Jones, Katherine M. Marino, Leila J. Rupp, Lisa Tetrault, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu—to join in conversation about the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage, and women's political activism more broadly. The Interchange that follows reads by turns as essential historiography, compelling critique, and honest personal reflection. It offers invaluable context for, and analysis of, the study of women's rights in the United States. We are grateful to the participants and to our associate editor Judith Allen for her creative direction of this project.

Ellen Carol Dubois is Distinguished Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981; 3rd ed., forthcoming, 2020), Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997), and Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights: Essays (1998). Her next work, Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote , will be published in 2020. Readers may contact Dubois at [email protected] .

Liette Gidlow is the 2019–2020 Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s (2004) and editor of Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (2012). She is now preparing a book manuscript entitled The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970 . Readers may contact Gidlow at [email protected] .

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015). Her next book, Vanguard: A History of African American Women's Politics , will appear in 2020. Readers may contact Jones at [email protected] .

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Stanford University dissertation won the Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history from the Organization of American Historians; she has since revised and published it as Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019). Readers may contact Marino at [email protected] .

L Eila J. Rupp is Distinguished Professor of feminist studies and associate dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published nine books and more than two dozen articles, among them Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), co-authored with Verta Taylor, and Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997). She is now researching queer college students in the contemporary United States. Readers may contact Rupp at [email protected] .

Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of the Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), which won the inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's and gender history book prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians. She is working on a book about where and how women's suffrage fit into the political landscape after the American Civil War and another project tracing the genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment. Readers may contact Tetrault at [email protected] .

J Udy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). She is now researching the career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Readers may contact her at [email protected] .

JAH: U.S. historians have closely studied women's suffrage. In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners of the new women's history wrote extensively about women's enfranchisement and citizenship, as well as the nineteenth-century reform movements that inspired support for—but also opposition to—them. These aspects of political history remained a core priority for women's historians in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The publication of numerous authoritative biographies, organizational studies, and documentary collections enriched our knowledge of these subjects.

As you think back over this field, what are your impressions? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What works, methodologies, or interventions do you find most crucial?

Leila J. Rupp : When I began my graduate work in 1972, it was pretty much possible to read all the existing scholarship on women's history. My introduction to women's suffrage began with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), Aileen S. Kraditor's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965), Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967), and the less well-remembered The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage by Alan P. Grimes (1967). As an undergraduate in Herbert Aptheker's class on African American history, I wrote a paper on the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, relying heavily on Lerner's work to guide me to the sources. Then in 1978 came Barbara J. Berg's The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism and the now-classic Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 , by Ellen Carol DuBois. 1

When I think about this early literature and the subsequent development of the scholarship on suffrage, citizenship, and the women's movement over time, three themes come to mind. The first is the increasing attention to the importance of race, ethnicity, and class. Both Flexner and Lerner, embedded in the progressive Left, attended to issues of race and class, but the racial complexities of the suffrage movement that grew out of the abolitionist struggle did not take center stage, as they would in later literature. DuBois, also coming out of a left feminist context, detailed the failure of a joint struggle for black suffrage and woman suffrage during Reconstruction, the inability of suffragists to forge an alliance with organized labor, and the racism and class bias that underlay and were exacerbated by these failures. Yet, the point of her book is that these developments led to the emergence of an independent women's movement, a positive development in the long run. Since 1978 we have, of course, learned much more about the role that black women, with a foot in both race and gender politics, played in achieving suffrage, from works such as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998). 2

A second theme that characterizes the direction of scholarship over the decades is the continuity of the struggle for women's rights in the aftermath of suffrage victory in 1920. For a time, the Nineteenth Amendment seemed to mark the end of organized efforts to win women full citizenship until the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s. Then a flood of studies addressed the intervening decades. What happened to the women's movement? Did it die out after suffrage was won? Scholarship on the 1920s and beyond—Susan D. Becker's The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (1981), Nancy F. Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2004), on labor activism, Cynthia Harrison's On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (1988), and my work with Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), to name just a few—argued persuasively that it did not die out, and that it took a variety of forms. We came to think of “waves” of the women's movement—the first suffrage wave giving way to the second wave in the 1960s, with third and fourth waves to follow—only to back off from that metaphor to emphasize greater continuity than the rise and fall of waves seems to suggest. 3

This brings me to a third theme in the scholarship: placing the U.S. suffrage movement and subsequent activism in the context of transnational developments. In my Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997), I argued that a history of what I called an international women's movement, which picked up steam in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that rather than “waves” of activism we should think of “choppy seas.” Increasingly, as in other fields of U.S. history, women's historians are paying attention to the global context. Bonnie S. Anderson's Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000) makes it impossible to think about the Seneca Falls Convention as a purely American event. To give just a couple of other examples, Allison L. Sneider, in Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (2008), connects women's suffrage to U.S. imperialism, and Katherine M. Marino's Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019) details the ways that Latin American feminists in the 1920s and 1930s took the lead in fighting for economic, social, and legal equality on the global stage. 4

Ellen Carol Dubois : I begin by challenging the premise of the question itself. In the revival of women's history inspired by the women's liberation insurgence of the late 1960s into the 1970s, the American woman suffrage movement was not a topic of great interest. I believe that when I published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, I was alone in reexamining the subject within a full-fledged scholarly monograph. 5

Other suffrage scholars—notably Eleanor Flexner and Aileen Kraditor—though highly influential, were not infused with the energies and the concerns of those women's liberation years. Others of my sister scholars in that pioneering women's generation addressed related subjects—I think particularly of Nancy Cott, Mari Jo Buhle, and Linda Gordon—and I was much influenced by them. But for the most part that entire generation of radical and social historians were not much interested in electoral politics. In our experience, established parties were indistinguishable and ineffective; many of us didn't even vote. Women's liberationists tended to dismiss the suffrage movement for leaving untouched the issues of women's oppression with which we were concerned. My challenge to that dismissal was reflected in the title of my first article on the subject, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement” (1975), published in an early issue of Feminist Studies . In it, I elaborated what I saw as the underlying premise of the suffrage movement, that women were full-fledged and rational individuals, not subservient to family. 6

Following the concerns of my late 1960s political generation, in Feminism and Suffrage I examined the emergence of the suffrage demand in the context of race and class politics. I considered at great length the terrible 1867–1869 schism between black suffrage and woman suffrage advocates. While lamenting the conflict, my conclusion, reflected in the book's title, was that the break freed suffrage leaders—Stanton and Anthony the boldest and most radically feminist of those—to pursue their own political path, no longer deferential to the concerns of racial equality dictated by the Republican party. Again, this argument reflected the experience of my own women's liberation generation as it separated itself from the influence of the male-dominated black power movement.

In my later JAH article, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878” (1987), I came to a different conclusion, emphasizing what was lost in 1869, the solidarity of these two movements. By then I was influenced by the first works of black suffrage scholars. Paula Giddings's brilliant When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) was particularly important for me; I thought of it as the Century of Struggle for black women's history in its scope and bold interpretive stance. Of course, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (1977) was very important, but it should be remembered that it was available only as a difficult-to-access dissertation until it was published as a book in 1998. I still believe it necessary, in reconsidering suffrage history, to return to this tragic foundational conflict, especially as what we learn about the traditions of African American suffragism continues to grow. 7

While the racial dimension of the history of woman suffrage has received ever more attention, its class aspects have not, and this is unfortunate. Two of the six chapters of Feminism and Suffrage focused on Anthony's efforts to reach out to wage-earning women and forge a bond with the labor movement of the era. Mari Jo Buhle and Christine Stansell laid the basis for further exploration of these concerns and Diane Balser, Carole Turbin, and Susan Levine pursued the subject, but it has dropped off of suffrage scholars' radar in the current century. As we look over suffragism's seventy-five-year history and its impact on women's political activism after 1920, we should surely be struck by the prominence of women, many of whom began as suffragists, in the twentieth-century labor movement. As suffrage scholars, we should make it our business to dig into the deep, complex, and crucial interactions of race and class in American feminist politics. 8

Martha S. Jones : I came to women's history in the mid-1990s and am a beneficiary of so much work that predated my own. I also came to the field as a historian of African American women. Thus, my starting place was not with, for example, Flexner's Century of Struggle , though I would eventually get to that. Ellen DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage would soon join my list of essential reads. But the work of Terborg-Penn first shaped my thinking. Her 1977 Howard University Ph.D. dissertation, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” defined the field long before being published as African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . 9

Terborg-Penn's study conveyed three enduring insights for historians of black women—indeed, for historians of all women—and the vote. The first was that the work demanded painstaking recovery across an archival terrain not built to preserve black women as political thinkers or activists. Her sheer doggedness in the combing of sources was both an instruction about method and a cautionary tale. The second lesson was that we should not defer to, or trust, the often-cited sources that had long informed histories of women's suffrage. I remember locking horns with fellow graduate students in the 1990s about how to use the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage (a project initiated by Stanton and Anthony in the 1870s, with the last volume published in 1922). A nod here to Lisa Tetrault's important contribution to this point with The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014). It was from Terborg-Penn that I learned the politics that animated those volumes and then how to set them aside and avoid being misled. Finally, Terborg-Penn taught me to be unflinching about how racism had infected the minds of some of the best-remembered white women's suffrage activists. I learned that racism had been woven into the fabric of the movement's strategies and tactics. Today, thirty years later, some historians still struggle with how to write about this dimension of the movement. Terborg-Penn put that dilemma squarely in front of us. 10

I also read Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter in the mid-1990s. It opens with the often-quoted words of the African American scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper from 1892: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood … then and there the whole … race enters with me.’” This quotation told us much that we need to know about African American women's politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Cooper and others like her were charting their own way forward as women by the 1890s. Giddings anticipated, if not called into being, the field of African American women's history, which blossomed by the early 1990s. 11

Giddings begins her study with Ida B. Wells's antilynching campaign. This choice is a lesson in the history of women's suffrage. Black activist women such as Wells did not focus on a single issue in their view of women's rights, including the vote. Women's rights were in the service of human rights—rights that extended to women and to men. Giddings recognizes that black women's striving for the vote was interwoven with concerns about antilynching, temperance, the club movement, and Jim Crow. Challenging the periodization of the women's suffrage movement, Giddings's section on Fannie Lou Hamer sent a clear signal: for black women, the movement for suffrage extended to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (not unlike ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment) was only one stop along a hard-won route to political power. 12

Neither Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) nor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993) was expressly about women suffrage. Still, I read them as essential studies of how, where, and when black women built political power. Rather than in parlors or conventions, the roots of black women's politics lay in labor, loss, and survival on plantations. There, cruel myths about black women were crafted; the battle against such ideas animated black women's suffrage politics. Higginbotham's study of black Baptist women runs parallel to the histories of the American Woman Suffrage Association ( Awsa ), the National Woman Suffrage Association ( Nwsa ), and the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( Nawsa ), as well as the so-called women's suffrage movement. But we see the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification from a new perspective when we take the point of view of hundreds of thousands of black Baptist women. They did their political work within religious communities. Locating black women's politics on the plantation and in the church changed forever the way we would tell the history of black women and the vote. 13

These threads and more run through my 2007 book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 . What I had learned from the earliest works in African American women's history was how the politics of suffrage, for black women, was always “bound up” with broad concerns, diverse institutions, and differences among and between women, black and white. 14

Lisa Tetrault : When I began reading in this field in the late 1990s, there was little published about post–Civil War women's suffrage. As a result, after I finished Ellen DuBois's necessary Feminism and Suffrage , and several of her seminal articles, I turned to History of Woman Suffrage simply to learn basic historical outlines. I was struck not only by the majesty of Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage's recovery and preservation work, but also by their enormous silences and unmistakable emphases. 15

Also in the 1990s, Nell Painter published Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996), which bore heavily on themes of narrativity and power. In her articles as well as her book, she emphasized how Truth had been mythologized rather than remembered as a fully rendered human being and complex historical actor. The origin of the oft-cited “ain't I a woman speech” in primary-document readers (and increasingly online) was often the History of Woman Suffrage , which reprinted that problematic formulation from Frances Dana Gage. Painter's work on narrative and its present-day legacies were deeply influential for me. 16

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published her highly respected dissertation in that decade as well, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . That book strove to unmask and rebuild a basic narrative around women and voting. It too underscored how Stanton and Anthony helped create many of the outlines around something bounded (if still vast) called women's suffrage that nevertheless left out many women and political projects. 17

Over the 1990s and into the early 2000s, scores of new works broke down the idea that women existed in a separate sphere removed from politics. Women need not be domestic and women need not be enfranchised to exercise political power, and women engaged in politics in plenty of places we hadn't thought to look. 18

At the same time, my reading of the rapidly transforming field of Reconstruction-era scholarship signaled the end to a debate that bled from the 1980s into the 1990s: Was women's suffrage radical or conservative? Consequential or inconsequential? The nuanced, fine-grained analyses of power, race, citizenship, gender, freedom, and voting in Reconstruction scholarship, combined with women's political history, underscored that there was no one fixed issue to assess. Whether women's suffrage was radical or conservative, consequential or inconsequential, now seemed beside the point.

Finally, historians such as Elsa Barkley Brown, Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and the political scientist Victoria Hattam all questioned whether the franchise was even a stable category. Did it too need to be contextualized, interrogated, and historically understood? They clearly answered, “yes.” 19

Liette Gidlow : I have always seen histories of women's suffrage as part of broad histories of political institutions, political culture, women, and gender. Perhaps this is because I came to the study of women's/gendered politics through a different door. When I arrived at my Ph.D. program in history I came with an undergraduate background in political science; work experience in the D.C. Public Defender's office, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the Ohio legislature; and a feminist consciousness sharpened on issues of campus sexual assault and workplace harassment. My first exposure to women's studies came as an undergrad through feminist literary criticism, and my early interest in race and public policy was cultivated by working with Gary Orfield on issues of racial equity in education and by serving as a staffer to Rep. Julian Dixon in the 1980s. Representative Dixon at the time was the only African American subcommittee chair on the House Appropriations Committee, meaning that all manner of policy issues related to African American constituencies found their way to his desk, and thus mine.

All of these pieces, and a few others, came together in graduate school in the 1990s in a historically grounded way when I started investigating the League of Women Voters' Get Out the Vote ( Gotv ) campaigns of the 1920s. “Politics” clearly extended beyond electoral politics to the full range of ways power was being deployed, and yet “officialness” still mattered. I was especially interested in the nexus of the politics of representation and discourse, on the one hand, and the politics of formal governmental institutions, on the other. How has civic legitimacy historically been constructed, institutionalized, and contested, and what do race, gender, class, sexual preference, religion, and other sources of identity have to do with it? In an era of ostensibly universal suffrage, why did the members of the League of Women Voters feel they needed Gotv campaigns? Why were they trying to get out the votes of middle-class whites, who had the highest turnout, and not those of the working class and/or people of color, who were much less likely to vote? And what did it mean for anyone to be a good citizen in an era in which a majority of eligible voters did not cast ballots, as was the case in 1920 and 1924? Clearly gender, class, and race had a great deal to do with the answers to these questions.

Scholarship on suffrage and Progressive Era women reformers laid crucial foundations for my explorations, and I was especially indebted to work by Paula Baker, Jean Baker, Sarah Hunter Graham, and Robyn Muncy. More theoretical works, in particular Joan W. Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” (1992), helped me think about meaning-making, because I was interested in not only what the vote accomplished but also what enfranchisement signified and how that changed over time. Scholarship outside the conventional categories of “women's history” and “suffrage history” helped me explore the interplay between formal political institutions and processes and the politics of meaning-making. Nancy Fraser's essay on counterpublics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1992), was essential in helping me think about discourse and resistance. Joseph R. Gusfield's The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (1981) made me think about the framing of public issues. James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980) made me think about resistance in new ways. Works by Warren Sussman, Louis Althusser, Clifford Geertz, and Antonio Gramsci made me think about power dynamics embedded in everyday processes of meaning-making. 20

It was really after graduate school that I immersed myself more deeply in historical treatments of women's politics, broadly defined—in part because I was beginning to teach women's history surveys, and in part out of a growing appreciation for the power of narrative and the richness of stories focused on people rather than political institutions. Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), Katherine Mellen Charron's Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009), Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent , and Lisa G. Materson's study of black women's electoral activism in the context of the Great Migration ( For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 [2009]) stand out among many books that helped open the way to my current book project, “The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970.” 21

JAH: Professor Gidlow mentioned biographies of Ella Baker and Septima Clark. Are there other biographies that have particularly influenced your thinking about women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, or women's political activism more broadly?

Jones : I'd like to focus on the role of biography in writing and rewriting the history of women's suffrage. Let me digress just long enough to say that I think nomenclature is important here, so I will use the phrase “women and the vote” rather than “women's suffrage.” With this, I am signaling that my discussions are generally about the broader question of women and the vote, and not about the Nineteenth Amendment in particular. A discussion too narrowly framed by the Nineteenth Amendment relegates many American women to the margins.

African American women's history has produced a robust body of book-length, scholarly biographical works. This genre makes plain that African American women have approached voting rights through campaigns directly organized around suffrage, but they also did so through many other collectives, from clubs and churches to political parties and antislavery societies. Black women's biographies inform my understanding of how to write black women's political history, including their concern with voting rights.

For example, I've come back to Jane Rhodes's biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary ( Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century , 1998). Rhodes was most interested in Cary's fascinating work as a journalist, but she takes us through a life that includes affiliation with the Nwsa and a role in suffrage campaigns in Washington, D.C. Melba Joyce Boyd's Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994) is at its heart a literary biography. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only African American woman to speak on the record during the fraught American Equal Rights Association meetings of the 1860s. Her interventions are essential to any telling of mid-nineteenth-century suffrage politics. When Harper told those gathered that they were “all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she asserted a human rights vision that remained at the core of black women's thinking about the vote and perhaps remains there today. 22

Nell Painter's magnificent Sojourner Truth refuses to let Truth's memory merely serve the interests of others. We must grapple with Truth's complex, multifaceted life if we are to write about her at all. Painter's insight into racism—both as animus and as paternalism—is an essential lesson. Those who patronized Truth should not be understood as having wholly respected or made space for the entirety of Truth's humanity, even if they incorporated her into women's conventions, the History of Woman Suffrage , and more. 23

Add to these Jean Fagan Yellin's Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004), which introduces sexual violence as a women's rights issue; two biographies of Harriet Tubman (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [2004] and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero [2004]), which remind us that in the last years of her life Tubman stumped for women's suffrage; and Marilyn Richardson's pathbreaking Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (1987), which wholly resets our periodization of women's rights in the United States with 1832 Boston as a point of origin. Together these biographies are a rich portrait of how black women thought about and worked toward their political rights, while also laboring for human rights. 24

Biographical works often take the point of view of insurgent activists. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the important work on Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is foundational to my thinking about suffrage versus the vote versus politics versus power. Wells-Barnett was frustrated by Congress and political parties in her antilynching campaign, leading her to adapt an old internationalist vision for her own times. Here, Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009) and Paula J. Giddings's Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (2008) are must-reads. 25

But when I invoke insurgent politics, I am suggesting that the history of black women's politics and power cannot be understood without appreciating those who rejected the politics of the vote for other visions. Again, biographies let us see this clearly. Consider works from Barbara Ransby— Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (2013)—and Ula Yvette Taylor— The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) and The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). I'd also place Sherie M. Randolph's Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (2015) on a shelf of histories that call into question whether frameworks such as “suffrage” and the “vote” are even central to understanding African American women's history. These insurgent histories are counternarratives that ask hard questions about whether and to what degree women who worked for inclusion and equity in parties and at the polls might have been misled, misguided, or just plain mistaken in their objectives. 26

A few works hit a sweet spot where both the mainstream and the insurgent come together in illuminating ways. First, Barbara Winslow's Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (2013), gives us a figure who both leveled a radical challenge and worked within U.S. politics, and fought her way in with integrity. And there is Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999), which also manages to hold on to both the critique of and the striving to gain state power. For yet another figure who just might thread that needle, I'd add Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming (2018). I can't say that Mrs. Obama is at the end of the day an insurgent, but she tells a story about how a black woman strikes a precarious balance when she engages with the mainstream. In this respect, her autobiography reaches all the way back to figures such as Sojourner Truth, black women who tried to make themselves legible to the nation by way of an intersectional analysis of their lives and of American political culture. 27

I'll pitch some biographies still to be written (better yet if they are being written at this very moment): Sarah Mapps Douglass, Jarena Lee, Sarah Parker Remond, Anna Julia Cooper, Julia A. J. Foote, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Eliza Ann Gardner all come immediately to mind as women whose lives we know a good deal about and, still, whose biographies would further our understanding of how black women came to politics. There is little room left, it's safe to say, for the old view that black women were not engaged with women's issues or that they somehow placed the interests of black men above their own.

Dubois : A few crucial figures have recently received their first scholarly biographies: Alva Belmont (Sylvia Hoffert's Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights [2011]) and Anna Howard Shaw (Trisha Franzen's Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage [2014]). Franzen makes a strong case that much of what we thought we knew about Shaw comes to us through the unflattering lens of Carrie Chapman Catt's evaluation. The biographies and political studies of Ida B. Wells continue to accumulate (Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely , Patricia A. Schechter's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 [2001], and the very interesting work of Crystal N. Feimster in Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching [2011]). Among other leading African American suffragists, Fannie Barrier Williams (in Wanda A. Hendricks's Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race [2013]) and Mary McLeod Bethune (in Joyce A. Hanson's Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism [2013]) now have their first biographies. Importantly, Alison Park is forthcoming with a new biography of Mary Church Terrell. Other especially compelling twentieth-century figures are also the subject of new biographies: Jeannette Rankin (Norma Smith's Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience [2002]) and Inez Milholland (Linda J. Lumsden's Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland [2004]). 28

Ernestine Rose has a new and interesting biography (Bonnie S. Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer [2017]). I've also dug a little into biographies of lesser-known figures such as Lillie Devereux Blake (Grace Farrell's Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased [2002]), Belva Lockwood (Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President [2007]), and Emma Devoe (Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal's Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe [2011]). There are several new studies of Alice Paul (Mary Walton's A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot [2010], Christine Lunardini's Alice Paul: Equality for Women [2013], and Jill Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry's Alice Paul: Claiming Power [2014]), and one of Lucy Stone (Sally G. McMillan's Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life [2015]). I particularly note the absence from this list of books on working-class suffragists such as Leonora O'Reilly and Rose Schneiderman. There is now, however, a much-needed study of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (Kathleen Nutter's The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 [2000]). 29

Two recent biographies have appeared (Lori D. Ginzberg's Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life [2009], and Vivian Gornick's The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton [2005]). With the publication of Ann D. Gordon's scrupulously edited and annotated six-volume Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997–2013), hopefully more should be forthcoming. Also in the category of important biographical resources, Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar's incredible Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 has done spectacular work in using crowd sourcing to build biographical dictionaries of relatively unknown African American suffragists, Congressional Union/National Woman's party militants, and the moderates of Nawsa . 30

JAH: How have historians' approaches to women's suffrage and women and the vote evolved since this first effusion of scholarship? What, if anything, has changed in the early twenty-first century?

Gidlow : I see the last twenty-five-years or so of scholarship as having replaced a single dominant narrative that was constrained and bounded with a profusion of perspectives that transcend many of those limits. In its purest form, the classic interpretation treated the suffrage struggle as a self-contained American story that began in 1848 in Seneca Falls and, after many trials and tribulations, was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1920 by heroic middle-class and elite white women with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Scholarship, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, chipped away at the temporal, geographical, racial, and class boundaries of the prevailing narrative through key works such as Ginzberg's Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (2005), Cott's “Across the Great Divide” (1990), Anderson's Joyous Greetings (2000), Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote (1998), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996), and DuBois's Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997). By the mid-2000s, the classic narrative gave way to bold new interpretations that borrowed insights from scholarship on historical memory, borders, and other fields. It was hardly possible to privilege 1848 after Tetrault's The Myth of Seneca Falls , or to see suffrage as a purely domestic political issue after Sneider's Suffragists in an Imperial Age . As the centennial of ratification approaches, more work is connecting woman suffrage to, or integrating it into, accounts of other key figures and issues in U.S. and global history, such as Charles Darwin and evolution (Kimberly A. Hamlin's From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America [2014]), and, in my own work, the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. These deep connections to other issues are powerful evidence, if any was needed, that “the” history of woman suffrage is not peripheral to national or transnational histories, but central and essential. 31

Katherine M. Marino : Numerous women's groups have pushed for the right to vote as one goal in multipronged and often-global platforms for birth control, labor rights, socialism, world peace, temperance, child welfare, freedom from sexual violence, antilynching legislation, and racial justice. Works that shine a light on the vital political work of African American women's rights activists that included and expanded beyond suffrage include Jones's All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (2013); Feimster's Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017); and Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race , in addition to already-named works by Terborg-Penn, Painter, and Giddings, and many others. 32

Vicki L. Ruiz's American Historical Review article on Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno (“Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930”), Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011), Gabriela González's Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), and Emma Pérez's The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) have explored the political work of turn-of-the-century Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Latinx women who took up “the woman question” alongside other goals for the health, education, and safety of their communities. Works that demonstrate the interrelationship between suffrage organizing and international peace, labor, and socialist movements include Rupp's Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois's 1991 New Left Review essay “Woman Suffrage and the Left”; Julia L. Mickenberg's American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (2017) and her 2014 JAH article, “Suffragettes and Soviets”; Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (1995); and Melissa R. Klapper's Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (2013), to name just a few. 33

These histories show us that suffrage was not one movement, but multiple movements. They also challenge the wave metaphor, showing us that U.S. feminism in the early twentieth century was not defined by a quest for the Nineteenth Amendment. At the same time, demands for political rights and equality have been an integral and ongoing part of U.S. feminisms.

These readings have also been useful for my own work on Pan-American feminism in the interwar years. On the heels of the Nineteenth Amendment, Anglo-American women, believing they were the global leaders of feminism because of their recent suffrage victory, sought to dictate the terms of feminism to their Latin American counterparts. U.S. leaders often instructed Latin American feminists to make a single-minded push for suffrage. However, Latin American feminists exerted their own broader meanings of feminismo , defined not only by equality under the law but also by social and economic rights, and anti-imperialism, among other goals. Anti-imperialism was a driver of suffrage activism in Latin America, especially in Central America, in the 1910s and 1920s. In the mid-1930s–1950s period, when suffrage passed in most Latin American countries, antifascism and Popular Front coalitions of socialist and labor groups vitally energized women's suffrage campaigns. This Popular Front Pan-American feminist movement was critical to developing frameworks for international human rights. It advocated a broad meaning of international human rights—for political, civil, social, and economic rights for men and women, and antidiscrimination based on race, sex, class, or religion—that it pushed into inter-American venues and eventually into the founding of the United Nations. In the Un , a group of Latin American feminists were critical to inserting women's rights in the founding 1945 Un Charter and to promoting the inclusion of both women's and human rights. This is just one example of how it can be useful to de-center the United States, while also keeping in mind the relationship between U.S. suffrage and imperial histories. 34

Dubois : I have been impressed with several clusters of recent scholarship. Political scientists are delving into the theoretical foundations of suffrage thought and the impact of enfranchisement on voting rates. Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (2016), by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, uses sophisticated new techniques to assess how women voted in their first presidential elections. They break the vote down by state and region and thus offer an alternative to the oversimplified, long-standing, and unsubstantiated claim that women did not make use of their new voting rights. They and others have suggested that we pay attention to the role played in the political realignment of 1932 by the massive expansion of the electorate that the Nineteenth Amendment effected. Republicans had long claimed to be the party that supported woman suffrage, but that claim had grown very thin by the late 1920s. It is not without significance that while Herbert Hoover promised the first woman cabinet member, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who appointed her. 35

I noted in my first answer that working-class suffragism could use more research. By contrast, there is much fine scholarship on upper-class suffragism. In addition to Sylvia Hoffert's Belmont biography already noted, Johanna Neuman has written about “Gilded Age socialites” ( Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote , 2017), and Joan Marie Johnson has done very good work on suffrage philanthropy ( Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 , 2017). Somewhat related is Brooke Kroeger's work on male suffrage supporters ( The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote , 2017). Note that these last three books focus on New York suffragism, as does the work of Susan Goodier ( No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement [2017] and, coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State [2017]). Almost every other state has yet to receive its own study, which will be of great help in understanding the grassroots of suffragism. 36

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu : I will focus on the value of citizenship, both for those excluded from eligibility and political rights due to race and immigration status as well as for those who had citizenship forced upon them by the U.S. Empire. These perspectives illuminate how whiteness and settler colonialism underlie so-called women's suffrage. I focus my comments primarily on Asian American and Pacific Islander women, although forms of racialized exclusion and forced colonization resonate more broadly.

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 happened just four years before the 1924 Immigration Act, which systematically codified earlier laws and court cases that denied Asian immigrants entry into the United States and deemed them “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This designation, a legal status that influenced social and cultural representations of Asian people in the United States, held implications not only for the right to vote but also for the right to serve on juries, own property, marry interracially, and so on. For Asian women, whose status was “covered” by that of their husbands or fathers, their alienness by association not only translated to distinctly gendered barriers at the border (where they were monitored for gender-inappropriate behavior and suspected of prostitution) but also affected their legal rights (U.S.-born women would lose their citizenship if they married men who were aliens ineligible for citizenship). The scholarship of Sucheng Chan, Martha Gardner, Judy Yung, and others reveal how U.S. citizenship fundamentally represented racialized and gendered privileges, which were out of grasp for those deemed forever foreign. This issue continues to be relevant, given the substantial undocumented population in the United States, including Asian Americans, the fastest growing segment of this community. 37

It is also important to note instances of forced incorporation into the U.S. Empire, which conferred the unwanted gift of unequal legal rights. As Allison Sneider, Kristin Hoganson, and others argue, the U.S. women's suffrage campaign blossomed in the contexts of U.S. westward expansion and overseas empire. White suffragists insisted on their political rights in response to U.S. colonial endeavors. As Susan B. Anthony stated in her 1902 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage, “I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered people, who know nothing about our institutions.” As the U.S. expanded into the Caribbean and across the Pacific, Filipinos became “nationals,” neither citizens nor aliens. The last Native Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was forcibly deposed by a coalition of white businessmen, U.S. military forces, and Christian missionary interests. Given this history of U.S. Empire, coerced inclusion, and racialized arguments for white women's suffrage, what is the value of attaining “equal” rights within an inherently unjust nation? 38

To help address these legacies of racial exclusion and imperial incorporation, I especially appreciate the work of Cathleen Cahill, whose forthcoming book focuses on women of color, particularly indigenous, Latina, and Asian/American women who advocated for suffrage. I'm also in awe of the substantial black women's suffrage project that Dublin and Sklar have launched as part of the Women and Social Movements in the United States journal. 39

I explore the ramifications of race and empire in a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. Mink was elected from Hawaii and lived through the islands' transition from “territory” to “state.” She also articulated what I describe as a Pacific feminism. Mink's denizenship from islands in the middle of the Pacific framed how she understood political issues, ranging from Cold War militarism, race relations, environmentalism, and women's politics. The racial, the colonial, and the international were intertwined for Mink, a third-generation Japanese American, as they are for other racialized individuals who arrived on U.S. shores or whose homelands were crossed by U.S. borders. 40

Tetrault : I appreciate Judy Wu's reminder that extension of suffrage “rights” also implied colonization in the lives of many. In my reading about native and indigenous peoples voting “rights,” gaining citizenship and the vote meant the loss or diminishment of tribal sovereignty. We need to be careful not to reify the whiteness of the standard narrative by cheerfully adding additional dates—when native women “got” the vote, for example—or by treating voting as if it is always, on the face of it, desirable. The latter idea betrays a kind of triumphant American exceptionalism that often runs through discussions about voting “rights.” More work is needed here. Certainly, once enfranchised, colonized people creatively figure out how to leverage the ballot in their lives, for resistance and survival. And this too is an important part of the story. 41

Leila J. Rupp posed this question: Liette Gidlow's comments about the breakdown of a dominant narrative of suffrage as a self-contained and American story, along with Judy Wu's focus on the history of both systematic exclusion and imperialist incorporation of Asian and other women of color, raises for me these questions: Do we have anything to celebrate about the suffrage victory? Given the complicated history of suffrage that has emerged, are there positive developments we can point to regarding women's enfranchisement? What did women's votes bring to politics?

Gidlow : There is a sense that somehow the Nineteenth Amendment was rather a disappointment, that it doubled the electorate but didn't really change anything, in part because many women did not vote, and because those who did vote did not vote as a bloc. That is, that the Nineteenth Amendment did not produce a “women's vote.”

I argue, however, that over time a women's voting bloc did emerge, one that is cross-class and stable, with high voter turnout and a sharp preference for one party. That bloc emerged not among white women, but rather among African American women. It took the better part of a century, but by the early twenty-first century “the” black women's vote had become transformative in U.S. politics, just as southern white supremacists who had feared woman suffrage a century ago had feared.

The fear that the Anthony Amendment would enfranchise southern black women and open the door to the return of southern African American men to the polls was central to the debate over the Anthony Amendment in the late 1910s in Congress and in 1920 in Tennessee. In 1915 the Richmond ( Va ) Evening Journal editorialized that if the Anthony Amendment became law, “twenty-nine counties will go under negro rule,” a development that would force “the men of Virginia to return to defending white supremacy through fraud and violence” and “return to the slimepit from which we dug ourselves.” As I pointed out in a 2018 article in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , southern members of Congress routinely cited these concerns when they explained their opposition to sending the amendment to the states for ratification (“The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote”). Kimberley Hamlin develops evidence along these lines beautifully in her forthcoming book, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener . And Elaine Weiss's account of the ratification battle in Tennessee ( The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote , 2018) shows frequent recourse to the fear of black women's—and men's—votes. When black women showed up in the fall of 1920 to register and vote—and they did show up—local papers reported near panic at their surging interest. 42

In some locations, the sheer number of registrants suggests that the mobilization of black women voters was cross-class. A letter writer to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( Naacp ) noted that six hundred African American women tried to register in Caddo Parish, Louisiana—a breadth that suggests working-class mobilization—but that fewer than five succeeded, most of those, as the letter-writer states, “on account of “thair propity.” In Jacksonville, Florida, thanks to painstaking data collection by Paul Ortiz, we have direct evidence of cross-class mobilization ( Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 , 2005). There, the occupations with the most female registered voters were laundry workers, maids, and cooks, but the list of registrants also included dressmakers, clerks, and teachers. 43

Voter registrars employed a variety of strategies to disfranchise middle- and upper-class African American women. They had the discretion to decide how to test applicants and whether they had done well enough to pass. Class status alone did not secure voting rights for African American women in the South after ratification. Some black women turned then to gender-based strategies, trying to enlist the help of white women who had worked and sacrificed to enact woman suffrage. They quickly learned that there was little gender solidarity across racial lines. The two major suffrage groups ( Nawsa , reconstituted in the summer of 1920 as the League of Women Voters, and the National Woman's party) both declined to get involved. 44

Class-based strategies did not work, and gender-based strategies did not work, so African American women redoubled their efforts to push forward race-based strategies, working with African American men through the Naacp , churches, institutions of higher education, and other organizations. They attacked the white primary and made for themselves a place in the “Roosevelt” Democratic party. Women such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark developed educational programs that helped community members pass literacy tests. After the Voting Rights Act, despite ongoing resistance, they registered and mobilized en masse. Their votes made a difference; sometimes they made the difference. 45

It took the better part of a century, but the Nineteenth Amendment did produce a “women's vote.” Since at least the 1990s, African American women have displayed the most intense partisan preference of any demographic group. In 2008 and 2012, they had the highest voter turnout of any group and made crucial contribution to Barack Obama's historic presidential wins. When southern white supremacists opposed the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, they feared the power of black women's votes. A century later we can see that their fears were well-founded.

Marino : When I teach U.S. women's and gender history, I trouble the assumption that the Nineteenth Amendment was the major turning point that students sometimes assume it was. I ask my students to consider a question my adviser Estelle Freedman instilled in us: “Which women?”—Which women benefitted from the Nineteenth Amendment? As Judy Wu has pointed out, immigration restrictions meant that most Asian and Asian American women did not. Polling taxes, literacy requirements, and violence constricted citizenship rights for many African Americans in the South. The deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s further eroded men's and women's citizenship rights. Relatedly, the racism of white suffrage organizations, their use of U.S. imperial expansion as justification for a federal suffrage amendment, and their failure to organize intersectionally in the wake of suffrage, challenge the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment was a major turning point. 46

At the same time, I also emphasize that movements for suffrage were extremely important in chipping away at the legal exclusion of women from political citizenship, and that suffrage demands were a key part of broader movements that upheld multiple goals. To understand the stakes of women's suffrage it helps to realize that figures as diverse and as radical as Sojourner Truth, Clara Zetkin, Ida B. Wells, and Jovita Idár were demanding it and to great effect. One example: In 1913, the same year she rejected white suffragists' instructions to march at the end of the Washington, D.C., parade, Wells founded the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club. That club registered over seven thousand new African American women voters who helped elect the city's first black alderman. It is important to understand that Wells's suffrage and electoral activism was connected to her activism against lynching and sexual violence. 47

Tetrault : I appreciate Liette Gidlow's deft summary of the field: from a dominant, contained narrative to a profusion of narratives that can no longer be contained and now spill over into so many other stories. At the same time, this centennial is causing quite a bit of confusion, as the old, contained narrative of the Nineteenth Amendment extending the “right to vote” to women keeps intruding onto how we now brand the amendment. I think the conventional story has contributed negatively in unseen ways to understandings of American history, by lulling (often white) Americans into believing that a “right to vote” exists. Historians constantly refer to suffrage activism as women pursuing and then winning “the right to vote.” That framing enshrines this right as something that has been realized, when it has not. It's no surprise, then, that a majority of white Americans today think that voter suppression is not currently underway, even as it is sharply on the rise. 48

Bringing the text of the Nineteenth Amendment into anniversary discussions helps us see a place where we are still getting tripped up by older, inherited—and triumphant—narratives. When the amendment was drafted in 1878 it might have been worded affirmatively, as a directive: the federal government shall protect the right of women to the elective franchise. But it wasn't, owing to complicated factors. Instead, the Nineteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment upon which it was modeled, is negatively worded. The Fifteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “race,” while the Nineteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “sex.” The Nineteenth Amendment doesn't enfranchise anyone directly. It works indirectly, by removing the word “male” from state constitutions, where voting qualifications were defined. That's it. It's true that the opening of the short, thirty-nine-word amendment (like the Fifteenth Amendment) references a “right to vote,” but that right did not, in fact, exist. It's an illusory referent point, something the amendment leaves imagined rather than demanded. The Constitution leaves the appointment of voters up to individual states. It does not contain the right to vote.

Leading white suffragists could have seen how flaccid the Fifteenth Amendment turned out to be in protecting black men's votes, as southern states legally disfranchised them on other grounds—something permitted by the very narrow and negative wording of that amendment. Yet, even as the shortcomings of the Fifteenth Amendment became clear over the 1880s and 1890s, neither Stanton nor Anthony, nor any other suffragists, sought to revise the text of the proposed federal amendment. They left it modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, even as that amendment crumbled before them.

This wording is, I think, a concession to American racism. Historians talk about the amendment's effect but rarely about its creation. Stanton, in particular, had always believed that voting should be extended to the “educated” and kept from the “ignorant” (read, immigrants and many folks of color). Stanton supported discrimination in voting, and the amendment ultimately made allowances for that (explored in my current work). Future, mainstream white suffragists made these same allowances by not revising the amendment's text.

Removing “male” from state-defined voter qualifications, by declaring that requirement unconstitutional, was a huge victory, particularly in an era when discrimination on the grounds of sex was thought not only permissible but also necessary given that women and men were understood to be vastly different biological entities. But how can we tell a story today that doesn't falsely enshrine a “right to vote” and still honor this amendment? There, I think, we still have work to do.

Finally, that we still narrate the mainstream suffrage story as a story of the federal amendment is, I think, another legacy of the earlier dominant narrative that centers Stanton and Anthony. The federal amendment was their baby, but many other suffragists—especially in the forgotten American Woman Suffrage Association—thought it was unconstitutional, because the Constitution clearly gave authority over voting to the states, something not discussed in references to their promotion of a state strategy.

When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, women were already voting, in some form, in all but eight states. We have very little history of how women on the ground, including women of color, were trying to create and safeguard a “right” to a ballot. What we do know is that we can't talk about women's first election as if it happened after 1920; millions of women were already voting before then.

If we broaden our focus beyond the federal amendment, we see that there is no single date when women gained ballot access. This is a more accurate, if a much less satisfying, story.

Dubois : It bears emphasis that the wording of the amendment that Lisa critiques was offered by senators, not by Stanton and Anthony. Through much of the 1870s, Stanton and Anthony advocated affirmative wording linking women's voting to universal national suffrage, but that phrasing received no support in Congress.

Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment? I must say that I honestly don't understand how this question can be asked and so how to answer it. Perhaps it is intended as a productive provocation. Nonetheless, my strong position is that any significant political goal that women wished to achieve, any effort to effect social change for women or for the larger society, could not be secured without the fundamental tool of democratic society, the franchise. Would we want to envision a counterfactual history in which American women would wait, like the women of France, Italy, Mexico, Belgium, and many other countries, until after the Second World War to vote? Nor can we reasonably claim that these, or our, or virtually any other national enfranchisements of women could have occurred without the often-long-running, organized demands by women themselves.

The Fifteenth Amendment certainly did not secure African American men's right to vote against attack and required another century of struggle to fully reinstate it. Nonetheless, I doubt any of us would think it a better outcome if de jure suffrage rights had not been won during Reconstruction. In the modern world, where even autocratic leaders must make use of the popular vote, no one except an occasional far-right pundit seeking attention seriously asks whether women's enfranchisement should have happened. Women's votes are such a rich prize that all sides fight furiously to claim them.

Gidlow : Voting is hardly the whole story of American democracy and political participation. But there is a singular quality to enfranchisement because it certifies the enfranchised person's status as a legitimate decision maker in civic affairs. (Judith Shklar's classic 1991 work, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion , is so valuable here.) The imprimatur of official status matters, even if the act of voting does not achieve all we might wish. This is not to say that the import of enfranchisement is merely symbolic. When women cast votes, they are helping make decisions that everyone, including men, must abide. This power remains deeply contested, in politics and well beyond, even a century after ratification. 49

Jones : Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment anniversary? I don't think “celebration” is a historian's approach to the past—it leans too far in the direction of hagiography for my tastes. I don't even think, as I've written elsewhere, that commemoration is the work of historians. On this point I am indebted to Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his devastating analysis of the 1992 “celebration” of Christopher Columbus in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). Anniversary dates are an opportunity to teach history to a broader public. Some of what we teach may encourage or fuel commemoration or celebration. But if we give in to the tug of mythmaking and sanitization that these sort of rituals require, we are doing something else. 50

JAH: In what ways have histories of women and the vote contributed to our broader understanding of U.S. history? What difference has this work made to the field at large?

Dubois : Regarding the beginning and end of the suffrage period, historians of the United States have done a modestly good job of paying attention to suffrage historiography. By beginning, I mean from the period of antislavery activism to the Reconstruction era, 1836–1876. The abolitionist origins of women's rights and the controversy surrounding woman suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment have both drawn historians' attention. I recently noticed a very good law review article by Adam Winkler on the suffrage New Departure, which made an innovative constitutional argument for women's enfranchisement largely based on the Fourteenth Amendment, as an early and underappreciated episode in the reenvisioning of the Constitution as a “living document,” an approach not recognized by virtually any jurists at the time (“A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” 2001). By end, I mean the Progressive Era, 1900–1920. Women's political activism in those years is so central to the social welfare dimension of state and national policies, it is hard to ignore. 51

The middle period of suffrage activism has not been integrated into general U.S. history for two reasons. First, suffrage historiography is weak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, perhaps because there is little suffrage radicalism to inspire modern students of the movement. Second, U.S. history overall is weak in this period, with no consensus on how to narrate the era, or even what to call it: the age of class division, the age of industrialization, the woman's era, the Gilded Age, the racial nadir, post-Reconstruction reaction?

Jones : One approach to this question is to ask more directly: How have histories of women's suffrage contributed to our understanding of women's politics and power? Once we do, at least two important things happen. First, our attention is drawn away from so-called women's suffrage associations, and we focus on sites where black women were struggling over their political rights and power. This is why, for example, the Ann D. Gordon's edited collection African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (1997) ranges from the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women to the Voting Rights Act. That volume examines black women not only in suffrage associations but also throughout African American public culture: in the colored convention movement, antislavery societies, churches, the antilynching movement, the club movement, and more. To answer the question directly, the history of women's suffrage (and its shortcomings) encouraged historians of black women to rewrite the histories of black public culture as histories of women and to better understand the full range of how and where women's politics unfolded. 52

Today, in the field of African American women's history, a great deal of important work is being done on women's politics and power, but not very much of this work focuses on the history of suffrage or of voting more generally. This stands in contrast to the great interest in contemporary voter suppression, treated in Carol Anderson's excellent One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Still, we don't think of the era before the Nineteenth Amendment as one of “voter suppression” even as many black women were barred from the polls as women after the Civil War. The histories that stick closest to black women and the vote are those that are most concerned with black women's intellectual history, such as Cooper's Beyond Respectability and Treva Lindsey's Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (2017). 53

African American women's history opens up onto of a set of questions, we might even say a skepticism, about political histories that center too firmly on the vote, political parties, and the state. The vast, ubiquitous, and enduring ways racism and white supremacy have been woven into people, ideas, and institutions have required that the field always understand how black Americans critiqued and then worked against racism and white supremacy. That is to say that an essential counterpoint to histories of the vote are histories of how voting was not enough.

I see the exciting new work on black women's internationalism as the cutting edge of new histories of politics and power. Examples include Keisha N. Blain's Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and the volume edited by Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019). These histories defy conventional frameworks such as that of the nation-state or of electoral politics. As Grace V. Leslie's essay in that collection (“‘United, We Build a Free World,’”) illustrates, even a figure such as Mary McLeod Bethune, whom I associate with the National Association of Colored Women and Fdr 's “black cabinet,” must be remembered for her broad political vision, which included a critique of racism and colonialism and was aimed at linking women across the black diaspora. The vantage point of this work dovetails importantly with that of Marino's new Feminism for the Americas . 54

Has the history of black women and the vote remade U.S. political history? The answer is yes and no, and perhaps that is just right. Certainly we have made the case for black women in mainstream politics—from suffrage to the vote, parties, and the state. We've helped expand the notion of political history by making the case for insurgent politics as part of the American story. And we've even pressed on the geographies of political history, insisting on a politics rooted in the United States but transnational in its vision and its aims.

Marino : Histories of women's politics have, on a fundamental level, contributed to a recognition that to understand politics or political citizenship, we need to understand gender, race, class, and ethnicity, among other hierarchies of power. Decades of scholarship have shown that these areas of focus are not separate. (Women's and gender histories, however, too often still get tokenized.)

To point to a few useful contributions, Paula Baker's 1984 AHR essay, “The Domestication of Politics,” demonstrated that a changing understanding of what counted as “politics” in the United States was wrought by women's Progressive Era civil and social engagement and by a burgeoning welfare state. This “domestication” of politics abetted the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. More recently, Dawn Langan Teele's book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (2018), provides a fine-grained comparative analysis of how women's suffrage was accomplished in England, France, and the United States. It underscores the importance of strategic maneuverings and alliances between suffragists and political parties seeking to gain power. Blain's Set the World on Fire not only explores the range of black nationalist women's engagements in the United States and transnationally around a range of goals but it also places women at the center of black nationalism. 55

These histories have also increasingly demonstrated that the “personal” is indeed “political.” Freedman's Redefining Rape argues that the definition of rape—including the race-, class-, and gender-specific notions of who can perpetuate it and who be a victim of it—is fundamental to political citizenship. Her book underscores the connections between sexual violence, gender, race, the vote, and broad meanings of political citizenship. “Suffrage” is in the subtitle, and she examines a diverse group of female and male activists, black and white, including suffragists from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century who sought to expand the definition of “rape” beyond the typical one of this period: a forcible attack on a chaste white woman by a nonwhite male perpetrator. The book explores the importance of women's voting power at the state and national levels to the passage of statutory rape laws. It also explains how the right to serve on a jury for white women and African American men and women was critical both to addressing sexual violence and to changing this narrow definition. 56

As Freedman's work indicates, race and class often divided women's efforts. Although some white women sought to curb white male patriarchy, many more white suffragists sought to, in Freedman's words “empower white women.” Some, such as the southern temperance activist and suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton, allied with forces that encouraged lynching black men to “protect white womanhood.” Feimster explores Felton in great depth in her excellent book Southern Horrors , which also centrally explores Ida B. Wells's antilynching activism and work for the protection of African American women. Feimster's book illuminates the history of women's engagement around sexual violence, lynching, and political power, while also shedding light more broadly on the history of race and politics of the postbellum United States. 57

Another bourgeoning body of scholarship has underscored the centrality of white women's political power to the rise of the New Right, modern conservatism, and modern white supremacist and antifeminist politics. These works include Catherine E. Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (2006); Michelle M. Nickerson's Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012); and Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018). Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017) highlights women's feminist and antifeminist activism around the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, a key moment when debates over the body, sexuality, reproduction, and “the family” fostered schisms that continue to shape our political landscape today. 58

Gidlow : Women's enfranchisement has not shaped the development of broad narratives in and beyond U.S. history nearly as much as it could. Historians searching for short-term results of women's new power to vote have generally been disappointed. The Nineteenth Amendment did not usher in a new and powerful wave of progressive reform. Former suffragists in the 1920s remained as divided as they were before ratification, now over questions of the equal rights amendment and labor protections. Lots of women failed to cast ballots. In short, the Nineteenth Amendment seems to have landed with a thud.

Looking for the effects of women's enfranchisement over a longer time frame, however, may suggest other questions historians might fruitfully pursue. How did various political institutions respond to the fact of women's enfranchisement, whether or not women actually could or did vote? For example, did women's enfranchisement contribute to the trend that Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter once called “politics by other means”—that is, the twentieth-century shift of decision making out of bodies that were directly accountable to voters to bureaucracies that are more insulated from the electorate ( Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America , 1990)? Or, here's another: Once women had the vote, what happened to white men's privileged status as civic actors? If they lost some of that status, did they shore up their civic privilege in other ways? If they retained it, how did they do that? 59

In my own work on southern African American women's efforts to vote in the 1920s and beyond, I argue that the successes and the failures of aspiring southern African American voters in the 1920s, women but also men, resonated through the decades and helped change the American political landscape in important ways. Their surge to the polls after ratification triggered violent reprisals and helped fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan. Their interest in voting forced a feeble southern Republican party to affirm its identity as a white party, laying the groundwork for the late twentieth-century realignment of southern white voters that made the Republican party dominant in the region by the 1980s. The failures of white former suffragists in the National Woman's party and the League of Women Voters to stand up for southern black women's voting rights cast a shadow long enough to darken the prospects for a truly collaborative women's liberation movement across the color line five decades later. 60

Wu : These questions are particularly relevant for my current work, a biography of a woman of color political advocate who very much believed in the promise and potential of political liberalism. I envision Patsy Mink trying to dismantle or at least significantly renovate the master's house with the master's tools. Mink's strategy of full inclusion and transformation, however, also exists in tension with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander efforts to critique U.S. empire and Asian American settler colonialism. Full inclusion in the U.S. state meant continued occupation. For example, the campaign for statehood in Hawaii, which Mink advocated, foreclosed the possibility of independence for Hawaii. Asian Americans, although discriminated against in the plantation economy and the political state, nevertheless gained economic and political power that contributed to the dispossession of Native Hawaiians. Their status led Haunani-Kay Trask to describe Asian Americans as settlers who came to steal and take. Jodi Byrd distinguishes between “arrivants,” those who arrived as racialized subjects, and settlers. However, Dean Saranillio reminds us that being an “arrivant” does not absolve one of the responsibilities of challenging the settler state. 61

The tensions between racial/gender inclusion and settler colonialism remind me of two sets of conversations related to women's political rights. First, the political scientists Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes have identified three different formulations of women's citizenship: formal, descriptive, and substantive citizenship ( Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective , 2017). Formal representation asks: Do women have the same rights as men to participate in politics? Descriptive representation asks: Does access to equal rights result in equal representation in terms of numbers? And substantive representation asks: Are women's interests being advocated in the political arena? Formal representation (the right to vote) clearly does not result in descriptive representation. The year 2018 marked record numbers of women in Congress: 102 women in the House and 25 in the Senate. Nearly one hundred years after the passage of suffrage, women constitute not quite 25 percent of the elected representatives in Congress and still have not cracked the glass ceiling of the White House. Despite these numbers, women and their allies have been able to secure legislation that addresses issues fundamentally important to women. Formal representation, coupled with a range of political strategies, could lead to substantive representation, despite the lack of descriptive representation. However, I look forward to the day when women might obtain proportionate representation to their demographics in the country. 62

Second, another way to consider why voting matters is to focus on the gendered and racialized process by which subjects of empire become subjects of republics. The works of Carole Pateman ( The Sexual Contract , 1988), Christine Keating ( Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India , 2011), and others emphasize the gendered dimensions of racialized state formation. Pateman argues that men who engage in political contracts to form democratic states also tended to reinforce a “hidden sexual contract” that affirms patriarchy. Keating argues that decolonizing states that transition political power from a white colonial elite to a nonwhite “native” male population may nevertheless reinforce gender, religious, and ethnic/racial hierarchies as a form of “compensatory domination.” Various postcolonial feminist scholars have pointed out how “native” women are overdetermined as symbols of the purity of home, nation, and culture as the political economies of developing nations “modernize.” These “hidden sexual contracts,” “compensatory [forms of] democracy,” and the privatization and valorization of womanhood create historical patterns of gendered political exclusion for decolonizing nations. 63

Scholars who focus on women's political exclusions and engagements have made multiple contributions to U.S. and global histories. I am struck by the continued resistance of those who persist in ignoring or tokenizing this scholarship. I'd like to quote Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, advocating for federal funding for the 1977 National Women's Conference ( Nwc ). The supporters of the Nwc battled to receive $5 million, approximately 4 cents for every woman in the United States at the time. Female legislators constituted 4 percent of the House and 0 percent of the Senate in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial year. As Chisholm reminded her legislative colleagues, “I really do sincerely hope that the gentlemen will, for once in their lives, as this country approaches its 200th anniversary, realize that 51 percent or 52 percent of the population is a very important segment of the population.” I hope our historian colleagues will also keep these demographics in mind as they write lectures, assign readings, as well as make hiring and promotion decisions. 64

JAH: In this Interchange, we have looked back over the field of women's suffrage activism and enfranchisement. Before we close, let's look ahead. What gaps or holes remain to be filled in the history and historiographies of women and the vote? What do we have left to learn?

Rupp : There is still more to learn about how many and which women voted, how they voted, and why they voted the way they did, although I understand the difficulties of researching these questions. What might a systematic history of women's voting behavior tell us? Did antisuffrage women vote? Were those who thought women would vote the same way as their husbands, if they had them, right? When thinking of women and voting, it is difficult not to think of the contemporary question—Why did 53 percent of white women vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election?

We also need to know much more about the impact of the final years of the suffrage movement on subsequent rounds of mobilization of all kinds of women's movements. We know that, among transnationally organized women, the winning of the vote in some places divided the movement into suffrage “haves” and “have-nots,” with consequences for debate about what were the most important issues for organizations to target. Should the movement move on to what the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance called “Equal Citizenship?” The International Woman's Suffrage Alliance in the 1920s took up the issue of women losing their citizenship if they married a noncitizen and the double standard of morality, and divided over the question of whether protective labor legislation for women was discriminatory. Increasingly, however, its focus turned to peace. 65

What did the winning of suffrage mean nationally, especially regarding social movement realignment? We know about the transformation of suffrage organizations into the League of Women Voters and the National Woman's party, but how did the Nineteenth Amendment affect the organized black women Martha Jones discusses, women in the labor movement, women in the peace movement, women in right-wing movements, and so many others?

Tetrault : We need to jettison the 1848–1920 framework and begin to tie this history to other dates and other developments. Only then can this rich and complicated history begin to grow into itself.

As just a few examples, Martha Jones has shown how important it was for churchwomen to be advocating for the vote inside their churches, as early as the 1870s, yet this is still not a conventional piece of suffrage history (“Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” 2005). Lori Ginzberg ( Untidy Origins ) and now Dawn Winters (“‘The Ladies Are Coming!’: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism,” 2018) have shown that women were petitioning for the vote in 1846. In Winters's work that demand was coming out of temperance, not abolition, upending the standard narrative. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, when most women became enfranchised, was legislation that women fought for, alongside men. Vast expanses before and after 1920 are begging to be connected to this story, which will surely reposition 1920 as important, but not definitive. Meanwhile, without a positive assertion of the right to vote in our Constitution, voter disfranchisement proceeds apace, especially since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This story is, in fact, multiple stories, with multiple antecedents, and it is far from over. 66

Marino : I would like to make a special plug for U.S. historians to do more research outside the United States. Engaging seriously with histories of women's voting rights outside the United States promises not only to shed light on post-1920 activism, including that of women of color and women in the labor and peace movements, but also to stretch our understandings of what is politically possible. Exploring these histories would de-center the idea that the United States or Western Europe “invented” feminism and challenge U.S.-exceptionalist understandings of voting activism and feminism globally.

In my research on Latin American histories of suffrage, I have investigated frente popular (popular front groups) in Latin America, which were social movements, often electoral coalitions of political parties. Many of them believed that including women in the electorate would enhance frente popular political power nationally. In the 1930s and 1940s, these groups aligned with multiple causes: a new inter-American labor movement, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, Puerto Rican independence, solidarity with Ethiopia after Italy's invasion, antiracism, and, because of the power of inter-American feminism, women's rights, including women's voting rights. Popular front groups in Latin America had strong ties to labor activists and peace activists in the United States, and to women of color. These groups were aware of the antifeminism of right-wing dictatorships throughout the world. 67

Women's suffrage legislation passed throughout Latin America in the years after World War II, many times after new governments had overthrown dictatorships, often thanks to antifascist women's long-standing activism and international decrees such as the 1945 United Nations Charter and 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm currently researching Felicia Santizo, an Afro-Panamanian feminist and educator. A leading suffragist from the 1920s through 1930s, Santizo called for universal suffrage without race, class, or sex restrictions, which was adopted in Panama's 1946 constitution. She also organized an important new antifascist women's group that focused on school lunches for impoverished children and child and adult literacy programs. She later became a leader of the Partido del Pueblo (the communist party of Panama), which had vital transnational connections, including with the Women's International Democratic Federation.

Relatedly, it's important to continue interrogating how U.S. international suffrage debates mapped onto global empire. U.S. occupations in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines utilized the idea that U.S. political culture was superior because of the supposed “freedoms” given to U.S. women. More research could be done in diplomatic and foreign relations archives to complement existing works on this topic. We still know more about British and French imperial feminism than about U.S. imperial feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Doing this work continues the project Leila Rupp laid out for us in Worlds of Women , of interrogating “who's in” and “who's out” of these international networks and how language, class, race, nation, among other categories, shaped these boundaries. 68

Language provides a particularly rich lens through which we can analyze transnational and imperial feminisms. I recently found that the Spanish feminist María Espinosa expressed outrage, in her 1920 book, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation), that the International Alliance of Women had asked Spanish suffragists to host a conference in Spain but refused to include Spanish as an official language. Espinosa invoked a Pan-Hispanism that expressed solidarity with Latin America. At the same time, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-speaking feminists were often imperialist in their own ways. They often excluded women who spoke indigenous languages. 69

From Tetrault's book The Myth of Seneca Falls I learned more about the founding of the International Council of Women by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1888. These large Euro-American-led organizations (the International Alliance of Women and International Council of Women) inspired feminists around the world, but they also forwarded the idea that Anglo-American leaders invented feminism. It would be useful to explore the reverberations of that idea. U.S. and Western European feminists' pretentions to superiority often encouraged women's groups in various parts of the world to ally with each other more strongly in opposition to empire. 70

These insights connect to points made in Tetrault's book and by Martha Jones when she invoked Trouillot's Silencing the Past . We need to continue thinking critically about who had the power and the resources to create the archives and to tell the story. We should consider how inequalities in historical preservation along lines of class and race, and between the “global North” and “global South,” have deeply shaped our historical understandings. Exploring transnational movements and non-U.S. histories sheds light on the vital work of activists and groups that did not always have the ability to create archives (or whose archives are not as easily accessible to U.S. researchers). They also help us de-center a history of feminism that places the United States, and Anglo-American players specifically, at the forefront, and avoid what the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story.” 71

Dubois : I would identify three areas of future research. The most obvious is to dig into local records (starting with the History of Woman Suffrage ) to examine activism at the rank-and-file level. How will the interests and arguments of those involved, and the political activities at these levels, challenge or enlarge what we claim about the movement when we study national leaders and major state and city environments? Just as historians of the women's liberation movement have shown that New York City and Boston feminism is in no way representative of the national range of activism, so too can we do similar work for suffrage activism.

The second direction that I would like to see explored more closely are the devices used by national, state, and even local politicians to oppose woman suffrage demands. Suffrage historians have tended to look at factors internal to the suffrage movement to explain slow progress and repeated defeats. But the more I look, in virtually every period, suffragists confronted the deliberate mobilization of good old-fashioned political opposition. Doing this work will deepen historians' sense of suffrage as a genuinely political movement, using political tools.

Finally, I look forward to increasing scholarship on the post-1920 years and on the impact (or lack thereof) of the Nineteenth Amendment. Recently political scientists have begun the important work of digging into voting activity in the first two or three postsuffrage elections, with excellent results. We know southern African American women faced powerful tools of disfranchisement. What else can we learn? I would especially like to see more work done on the impact of women's enfranchisement on the dramatic political shift, four presidential elections later, from which emerged the modern Democratic party and the Roosevelt New Deal. Surely the doubling of the electorate had an impact.

Wu : As a scholar invested in analyzing immigration, race, and empire, I am interested in what histories of the long suffrage movement (before and after 1920, in and beyond U.S. national boundaries) might reveal about the meaning and practice of democracy. How is the political right to vote linked to or distinct from cultural and economic forms of citizenship? How does women's suffrage reinforce U.S. exceptionalism and justify settler colonialism and militarism? And, how do various women who occupy a range of marginal and privileged statuses simultaneously, due to intersecting forms of social hierarchy, position themselves to claim political power? I look forward to new scholarship to help us understand the complex relationship between suffrage, citizenship, and the nation-state.

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston, 1967); Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967); Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism—The Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York, 1978); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978).

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's dissertation had wide impact for years before the book appeared. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998).

Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (Westport, 1981); Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley, 1988); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987).

Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, 1997), 48; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York, 2008); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Mari Jo Buhle, Women American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, 1981); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976). Ellen DuBois, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” Feminist Studies , 3 (Autumn 1975), 63–71.

Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 836–62; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984); Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Right to Vote .

Buhle, Women and American Socialism ; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986); Diane Balser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston, 1987); Carole Turbin, Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864–1886 (Urbana, 1992); Susan Levine, Labor's True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984).

Flexner, Century of Struggle ; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., Rochester, 1881–1922). Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, 2014).

Giddings, When and Where I Enter , unpaginated front matter.

Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2007).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York, 1998); Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage .

Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996). Nell Irvin Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's Knowing and Becoming Know,” Journal of American History , 81 (Sept. 1994), 461–92.

Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1998); Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry, eds., We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 (Albuquerque, 1999); Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996).

Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture , 7 (Fall 1994), 107–46; Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political History, 1865–1880,” in African-American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 66–99. Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 863–83. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Victoria Hattam, “Economic Visions and Political Strategies: American Labor and the State, 1865–1896,” in Studies in American Political Development , 4 (Spring 1990), 82–129; Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993).

Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review , 89 (June 1984), 620–47; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983); Sarah Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991). Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review , 91 (Dec. 1986), 1053–75; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs , 17 (Winter 1992), 251–74. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere , ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 109–43; Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago, 1981); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, 1980). Warren I. Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1993); Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1972).

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003); Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill, 2009); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent ; Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, 1998); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit, 1994). H. M. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York, 1866), 46.

Painter, Sojourner Truth .

Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York, 2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York, 2004); Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, 1987).

Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York, 2009); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York, 2008).

Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, 2013); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill, 2002); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill, 2017); Sherie M. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (Chapel Hill, 2015).

Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (New York, 2013); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, 1999); Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York, 2018).

Sylvia Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights (Bloomington, 2011); Trisha Franzen, Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Urbana, 2014); Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely ; Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (Urbana, 2013); Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia, Mo., 2013); Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience (Helena, 2002); Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington, 2004).

Bonnie S. Anderson, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (New York, 2017); Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased (Amherst, Mass., 2002); Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York, 2007); Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle, 2011); Mary Walton, A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York, 2010); Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Philadelphia, 2013); J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York, 2014); Sally G. McMillan, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York, 2015); Kathleen Nutter, The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 (New York, 2000).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009); Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 2005); Ann D. Gordon, ed., Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (6 vols., New Brunswick, 1997–2013); Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 , http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/ .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, 2005); Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics before and after 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change , ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), 153–76; Anderson, Joyous Greetings ; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote ; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997); Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls ; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014).

Jones, All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Feimster, Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, 2017); Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review , 121 (Feb. 2016), 1–16; Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin, 2011); Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York, 2018); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, 1999); Rupp, Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review (no. 186, March–April, 1991), 20–45; Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago, 2017); Julia L. Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of American History , 100 (March 2014), 1021–51; Anderson, Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (New York, 2013).

Katherine M. Marino, “Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944,” Journal of Women's History , 26 (Summer 2014), 63–87; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (New York, 2016).

Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont ; Johanna Neuman, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote (New York, 2017); Joan Marie Johnson, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 (Chapel Hill, 2017); Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Albany, N.Y., 2017); Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana, 2017); Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, 2017).

Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia, 1991); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of Citizens: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, 2005); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995).

Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Susan B. Anthony quoted in Kristin Hoganson, “‘As Badly off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women's Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History , 13 (Summer 2001), 17.

Cathleen D. Cahill, Raising Our Banners: Women of Color Challenge the Mainstream Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, forthcoming, 2020); Dublin and Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States .

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, The First Woman of Color in Congress: Patsy Takemoto Mink's Politics of Peace, Justice, and Feminism (New York, forthcoming).

Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review , 16 (no. 1, 1991), 167–202; Jennifer L. Robinson, “The Right to Vote: A History of Voting Rights and American Indians,” in Minority Voting in the United States , ed. Kyle Kreider and Thomas Baldino (Santa Barbara, 2015); Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Eng., 2007).

Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), 128; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 17 (July 2018), 433–49. Kimberly Hamlin, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (New York, forthcoming, 2020); Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York, 2018). “Disfranchisement in Congress,” Crisis , 4 (Feb. 1921), 165.

T. G. Garrett to “The N.A.A.C.P.,” Oct. 30, 1920, Records of the Naacp (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 150; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis to the Editor, Nation , March 26, 1921.

Charron, Freedom's Teacher ; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976).

On the connections between U.S. empire, race, and suffrage, see, for instance, Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Enfranchasing Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race , ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, 1998), 41–56; Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy (London, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, 1888 to 1902,” in Women's Suffrage in Asia , ed. Edwards and Roces, 220–39; Rumi Yamusake, “Re-franchising Women of Hawai'i, 1912–1920: The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World , ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden, 2017), 114–39; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourse: Links between the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe , 5 (Spring 1993), 9–34; and Laura Prieto, “A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 12 (April 2013), 199–233.

On the Alpha Suffrage Club work and voter registration, see Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1970), 346; Giddings, Ida , 523–46; Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Mass., 2019), 99–110; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote , 139–40; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression Is Warping American Democracy,” Atlantic , July 17, 2018.

Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Michel-Roph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).

Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review , 76 (Nov. 2001), 1456–1526.

Ann D. Gordon, ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst, Mass., 1997).

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York, 2018); Cooper, Beyond Respectability ; Treva Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (Urbana, 2017).

Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018); Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana, 2019); Grace V. Leslie, “‘United, We Build a Free World’: The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” ibid. , 192–218; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

Baker, “Domestication of Politics”; Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (Princeton, 2018); Blain, Set the World on Fire .

Freedman, Redefining Rape .

Feimster, Southern Horrors .

Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, 2012); Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York, 2018); Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York, 2017).

Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (New York, 1990).

Liette Gidlow, “More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women's Vote,’ Journal of Women's History , 32 (Spring 2020).

Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1999); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood (Durham, N.C., 2018).

Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective (2007; Los Angeles, 2017).

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988); Christine Keating, Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India (University Park, 2011). See also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1999). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, 1991); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C., 2003).

Shirley Chisholm, “Providing for a National Women's Conference,” Congressional Record—House , Dec. 10, 1975, H12201-2, folder 7, box 562, Patsy T. Mink Papers (Manuscript Division). These remarks are also available at Congressional Record , 94 Cong., 1 sess., Dec. 10, 1975, p. 39719.

On the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance and “equal citizenship,” see Rupp, Worlds of Women .

Martha S. Jones, “Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, 2010), 121–43; Ginzberg, Untidy Origins ; Dawn Winters, “The Ladies Are Coming!”: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2018); Anderson, One Person, No Vote .

Numerous works have illuminated different national iterations of popular-front feminism in Latin America, including Yolanda Marco Serra, “Ser ciudadana en Panamá en la década de 1930” (Being a citizen in Panama in the 1930s), in Un siglo de luchas femeninas en América Latina (A century of female struggles in Latin America), ed. Asunción Lavrin and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz (San José, 2002), 71–86; Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente único pro derechos de la mujer, 1935–1938 (Women who organize: The single front for women's rights, 1935–1938) (Mexico City, 1992); Enriqueta Tuñón, ¡Por fin … ya podemos elegir y ser electas! El sufragio femenino en México, 1935–1953 (At last … we can now choose and be elected! Female suffrage in Mexico, 1935–1953) (Mexico City, 2002); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2005); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Corinne A. Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era: Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh), 1935–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996); Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Argentine Women against Fascism: The Junta de la Victoria, 1941–1947,” Politics, Religion, and Ideology 13 (no. 2, 2012), 221–36; Sandra McGee Deutsch, “The New School Lecture—‘An Army of Women’: Communist-Linked Solidarity Movements, Maternalism, and Political Consciousness in 1930s and 1940s Argentina,” Americas , 75 (Jan. 2018), 95–125; and Adriana María Valobra, “Formación de cuadros y frentes populares: Relaciones de clase y género en el Partido Comunista de Argentina, 1935–1951” (Formation of cadres and popular fronts: Class and gender in the Communist party of Argentina, 1935–1951), Revista Izquierdas (no. 23, April 2015), 127–56. On suffrage activism in Latin America, see Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, 1995); Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, 1991); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque, 2005); K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1991); Rina Villars, Para la casa más que para el mundo: Sufragismo y feminismo en la historia de Honduras (For the house more than the world: Suffragism and feminism in the history of Honduras) (Tegucigalpa, 2001); June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1990); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Victoria González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park, 2011); Elizabeth S. Manley, The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, 2017); Charity Coker Gonzalez, “Agitating for Their Rights: The Colombian Women's Movement, 1930–1957,” Pacific Historical Review , 69 (Nov. 2000), 689–706; Patricia Faith Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves: The Social and Political Roles of Guatemalan Women, 1871–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2007); Takkara Keosha Brunson, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); and Grace Louise Sanders, “La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2013).

Rupp, Worlds of Women .

María Espinosa, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation) (Madrid, 1920).

Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls .

Trouillot, Silencing the Past ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story .

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Women's suffrage
In Great Britain woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the 1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet.
The Womans Suffrage Movement In America History Essay
The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was formed by Josephine Dodge in New York City during a convention of anti-suffrage groups in 1911. The group was formed to fight the suffrage movement. Dodge believed that "woman suffrage would decrease women's work in communities and their ability to effect societal reforms (National)."
The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States
Summary. Woman suffragists in the United States engaged in a sustained, difficult, and multigenerational struggle: seventy-two years elapsed between the Seneca Falls convention (1848) and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). During these years, activists gained confidence, developed skills, mobilized resources, learned to maneuver ...
Women's suffrage in the United States
Feminism. Women's suffrage, or the right of women to vote, was established in the United States over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first in various states and localities, then nationally in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. [ 2] The demand for women's suffrage began to ...
Women's Suffrage ‑ The U.S. Movement, Leaders & 19th Amendment
The women's suffrage movement was a decades‑long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified ...
Series: Essays: Overview of Women's Suffrage
Article 1: Introduction: Women's Suffrage. In 1848 women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York to advance the cause for women's rights. Learn more about convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony and how they started the women's suffrage movement. Read more.
Black Women's Activism: Historical Insights for Today
Once the 19th Amendment passed, suffragists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens. In many ways the suffrage movement was an anomaly, the rare time when a broad coalition of women came ...
PDF Let's Talk About It! Essay by Melissa Bradshaw, PhD
Let's Talk About It: Women's Sufrage starts with The Woman's Hour, which shows us just how close anti-sufragists came to defeating the Nineteenth Amendment. Next, we'll explore a collection of essays that provides an overview of the movement's history. These reading selections spotlight the fight for the vote in diferent regions, the ...
Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment
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 ...
Women's Suffrage in the United States
One study found that as American women gained the right to vote in different parts of the country, child mortality rates decreased by up to 15 percent. Another study found a link between women's suffrage in the United States with increased spending on schools and an uptick in school enrollment. Women increasingly have won elections in the ...
Suffrage
The 19th Amendment guarantees American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation. Beginning in the mid-19th century, woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered radical change. First introduced in Congress in 1878, a ...
American Women: Topical Essays
Part of the American Women series, these essays provide a more in-depth exploration of particular events of significance in women's history, including the 1913 woman suffrage parade, the campaign for the equal rights amendment, and more. ... The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard ...
Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage
This essay will consider the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction epoch on the American battle for women's suffrage. As of 1860, the right to vote was not the primary demand of the women's rights movement, which focused much more on the economic rights of women—and especially of wives—to earn, inherit, and hold property. In ...
(PDF) Women's Suffrage Movement
DVD. (ISBN: 1415702543). An introduction into the women's suffrage movement told through the lives and friendship of the two most iconic members of the movement, the pragmatic Susan B. Anthony, and the visionary Elizabeth Cady Stanton. One Woman, One Vote. Written and produced by Ruth Pollack. 1995/2005.
Women's Suffrage in the Progressive Era
Previous Section U.S. Participation in the Great War (World War I); Women's Suffrage in the Progressive Era Suffragists, April 22, 1913.. Immediately after the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony, a strong and outspoken advocate of women's rights, demanded that the Fifteenth Amendment include a guarantee of the vote for women as well as for African-American males.
Tactics and Techniques of the National Womans Party Suffrage Campaign
Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National Woman's Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women's suffrage campaign. Using a variety of tactics, the party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress, and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women ...
Arguments for and Against Suffrage
Women are, by nature and training, housekeepers. Let them have a hand in the city's housekeeping, even if they introduce an occasional house-cleaning. NEW YORK STATE WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION. 303 Fifth Avenue. New York City. Printed by the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE PUBLISHING CO., INC., New York City: Women are natural housekeepers.
92 Women's Suffrage Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
The Women's Suffrage Movement. It shows the cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of substantial funds for the campaigns of activists and the subsequent decision to accept money from the person ideologically opposed to the female participants with their agenda. Women's Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment.
Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right
My introduction to women's suffrage began with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), Aileen S. Kraditor's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (1965), Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967), and the less well-remembered The ...
Lesson Module: Women's Suffrage in the United States
In this module, we offer resources, information, and ideas for examining the role of women in politics as voters and the history of their increased participation in the political sphere. Goal: The goal of this module is to provide resources and information about the history of women's vote in the U.S. Looking at the women's suffrage ...
Womens Suffrage movement essay
The Women's Suffrage Movement and the Nineteenth Amendment is a significant historical event because it brought big changes to American history, which gave women the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment The women's suffrage movement was a decades-long (1848-1920) fight to win the right to vote for women in the United ...
Essay about The History of the Women's Suffrage Movement
Essay about The History of the Women's Suffrage Movement. Women's suffrage, or the crusade to achieve the equal right for women to vote and run for political office, was a difficult fight that took activists in the United States almost 100 years to win. On August 26, 1920 the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ...
Women Suffrage Essay
The fight for women suffrage was a movement in which women, and some men included, pleaded for equal rights regarding voting and women's voice within the political realm. Women's suffrage was not a matter of instant success; it endured a prolonged time to achieve. It was not until August 1920, about 14 decades subsequent after Abigail Adam's