Alice Paul: Women's Suffrage In The 19th Century

Women, like black slaves, were treated unequally from the male before the nineteenth century. The role of the women played the part of their description, physically and emotionally weak, which during this time period all women did was took care of their household and husband, and followed their orders. Women were classified as the “weaker sex” or below the standards of men in the early part of the century. Soon after the decades unfolded, women gradually surfaced to breathe the air of freedom and self determination, when they were given specific freedoms such as the opportunity for an education, their voting rights, ownership of property, and being employed.

It was January 11, 1885 and in Moorestown, New Jersey what I would call a rook in the chess game of women’s suffrage, was born. It’s hard to believe that such an overwhelming infatuation in equality could be so deeply immersed in a woman only twenty-seven years of age. However, when you know that this person is none other than Alice Paul, believing gets easier. It was the defiance caged up inside this fire-cracker of a woman that led her steadily through the great battle of woman's suffrage.

With the advancement of suffrage to equal pay, over the last century, women’s rights have progressed immensely. Through historic marches and demonstrations across the United States, women protested for their equal place in politics and social progress. Despite the fear-mongering components used in achieving these rights, women’s rights are still thoroughly debated within society today. Over the last century, incredible and unreachable goals have been fulfilled for women, such as the right to vote and a sense of equal state in the “Free World,” and can only improve in the years to come.

My topic of choice is the background behind the 19TH Amendment of the United States. Voting is important in the United States because its shows that we’re a part of a movement that allows us to vote for whose best for running our country. Well what if you were denied this right not because of your race, but your gender? Women were denied the right to vote for years because men felt that they weren’t an important part of decision making in America. They believed we were already busy with raising children, taking care of the home, and “serving” our husbands, that we shouldn’t have to deal with the pressure of voting.

This section on women's history will show the events that led to the suffrage movement and what the outcome was after the movement, plus how those events are involved in today's society. The women of the post suffrage era would not have the ability to the wide variety of professions were it not for their successes in the political arena for that time. In the early 1900’s when women were barred from most professions and limited in the amount of money they could earn, a group of suffragists led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started to develop the women into an influential and powerful leaders of this country. The original women who started the suffrage movement had nothing to

go to the House of Lords and pay also to get the divorce, which was a

Women have come a long way ever since the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920 and thereafter with the Equal Rights Amendment Act in 1972 to the U.S Constitution. After decades of struggling and protesting, the 19th Amendment was passed and ratified to grant women the right to vote. Fifty-two years later worth of revisions and persistency, the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified in which it declared that everyone had both Human and Civil rights in the States regardless of sex. Not only did these amendments have an immense impact on the lives of women and sequentially with the rest of the citizens of this nation, but on the people of today’s century. Women have done a tremendous job in proving society wrong about the roles women are

For my unit plan I decided to teach Women Suffrage and examine the 19th Amendment. Throughout the unit I want to explore what occurred from the first National Women’s Convention in 1848 until 1919 when women received the right to vote. By the end of the lesson I hope that my students will be able to identify the important leaders of the movement and understand the important events that led up to the amendment being passed.

The fight for women’s suffrage went on for about seventy years. Crazy right? In the early 1800’s, women were considered second class citizens. The role that we see women have to was not nearly as close to the roll they had back then. A woman’s place was to be at home, baring children, taking care of the family and the home. They were not allowed to have any interest in anything but home and family; nor were they encouraged to pursue a career or have an education. Many women did not even have the right to own property. Women today would not be where they are if it weren’t for the women’s suffrage movement. The first fight for women’s suffrage started with the Seneca Falls Convention

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This sentence from the Deceleration of Independence is one of the most well known of American documents. However, consequently we have all become comfortably numb to this statement and don’t take into consideration the struggles, fights, and deaths from our history that made this statement true. Due to the unceasing fight of men and women of three different groups, America was altered for the better. The late 1800 to early 1900 was an essential time for three key groups women, African Americans, and Indians to fight for their constitutional rights.

    Women’s rights in the United States have come a long way in the last two centuries. Women have gone from being seen as minorities to being viewed as powerful and independent by many. Basic rights such as initiating divorce, working and earning a salary, going to college, owning property, and voting were denied to them. The list of these denied rights goes on, but women such as Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Elizabeth Blackwell worked to change this. They helped women gain the rights they know today.

All through American history women have frequently asked and ordered the right to vote. Roughly, they were prohibited. One of the first recorded noting of the request for women’s voting advantages were from Abigail Adams, who was the first lady of the second president. She asked her spouse in a letter to not ignore the right to vote for women. She primarily said that if women cannot vote, then they would not have a reason to pursue the new legislation acts.

Women finally found their freedom and voice in politics and strived to better not only themselves but to also educate those around them to show that they too were capable of much more than being the domesticated housewife bound by their children and husband. The persistence of women paved the way for them to have the right to vote alongside men, to be in control of their own life with the help of birth control and to educate people through political movements to raise awareness of the social problems America seemed to ignore. In conjunction with other reformers like muckrakers, social problems that were hidden in the dark were finally exposed to the public in hopes of achieving social freedom and justice for

“Remember the ladies”, wrote boldly by the soon to be First Lady Abigail Adams to her husband John Adams in March 1776. Abigail Adams’s words were one of the first noted mentions in the United States foreshadowing the beginning of a long suppressed battle towards women’s suffrage. 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 later after Abigail Adam’s words, that the 19th amendment which had provided everyone the right to vote regardless of a person’s “sex”, had passed. Although the 19th amendment nationalized equal voting rights in the country in 1920, many states ratified this amendment in even later years. The lengthy period and long complex battles towards victory were the result of many obstacles between suffragists and anti-suffragists; obstacles which hindered the movement’s progress and which are not limited to: traditionally accustomed values, religion, split arguments within the movement, and other national political setbacks. If these setbacks were handled differently in a more urgent manner, women suffrage might have achieved earlier than 1920 or in a shorter amount of gruesome activism period.

Social change in Britain has been achieved primarily through the hard work of organized political groups. These groups created events to recruit and educate supporters of social equality to join them in fighting for progress. The Women’s Suffrage Movement between 1866 and 1928 in Britain is no exception to this trend. The reason for the great efficacy of these political groups, including the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Women’s Social and Political Union, was the women who pioneered the groups and fought alongside them to create the change that they believed in. The goal of these political groups was finally realized in 1928 with the passing of the Representation of the People Act. However, the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain would not have been successful without the influential actions of several significant women. In addition to the overall necessity of female leadership for British Women’s Suffrage, the central efforts of Millicent Fawcett, Lydia Becker, and Emmeline Pankhurst particularly played a large role in the movement’s success.