The Fight For Women 's Suffrage Movement

Peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a free society. Looking back at examples from history, without Rosa Parks, the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, or Martin Luther King Jr., the society we live in would be extremely different. Civil disobedience continues to contributes a huge positive impact on the world we live in today.

The fight for women’s suffrage took over half a century. The reason women’s suffrage took over half a century because women were put on the back burner and told to wait their turn. For example,in the between years of 1865 and 1869, the Republican party were good friends with the feminist backing up the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendment. However, when women asked to have the amendment include women the Republican party denied them the right to vote. In result, the women divide from the Republican party in 1869 and created the National American Women's Suffrage Association .

The nineteenth amendment was passed by congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920. The nineteenth amendment succeeded in giving women in the United States of America the right to vote.

In 1914, World War I, men went off to fight in the war. During that time, women had to handle all the work that the men would do. In this period of time, women had moments of realization that they can be independent and can live on their own without men. Women have been fighting for equality for a while, since before the Civil War. Multiple women began to go against the typical women.

On the other hand, women started to fight for their rights at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty century “the changes came in part because of practical problems of maintaining property, inheritance, and settlement in new states and territories” (Lowi 109) since women at that time could not own property. The women suffrage movement was created and with this many women and men contribute to the “National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) [which] was formed in New York, and it immediately began an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow women to vote” (Lowi 109). It wasn’t until 1919 that “Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote… the amendment was ratified by the states,

Some scholars like Ellen DuBois, in The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement, argue that the vote was a complete necessity in order for women to assert their own foothold in the public sphere, defined by DuBois as “operating in the public world of work and politics.” Opposing this position, William O’Neill argued that the vote would provide no advance in the woman condition and that when the vote was gained, “feminists were in the same place they were before the movement even began.” Heidi Williamson does not necessarily take a side in this argument but she does proclaim that “voting ensures women’s reproductive and economic progress” because it causes candidates running for office to “cater” to the women condition in order to gain more support. As Williamson is simply observing what the vote did for women, and she does not speak to what the Women’s Movement hoped to attain, she does not intervene in the discussion between DuBois and O’Neill; however, using the premise of Williamson’s observations it is clear that women of the early twentieth century were motivated by the discrimination in the workplace to gain their right to ballot so that they could use the vote to strive for pay equality, a better environment in the workplace, and gain the possibility to advance their position in said environment.

One of the first major civil rights movements in the United States began with the women’s suffrage movement in the 1848 with the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls (1). It was organized by women who had been active in pursuing temperance and abolition, and called attention to the way women were treated as less than full citizens. Suffrage was pursued for decades, not gaining much influence until 1917 when the National Women’s Party picketed the White House and gained national attention.(2). They endured abuse, imprisonment, and force feeding during their hunger strikes. Ultimately their efforts culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment being ratified in 1920, allowing women the right to vote (3).

On August 18, 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex, was ratified. This amendment represented nearly eighty years of struggle for American suffragists. Throughout this arduous journey the suffrage movement evolved alongside the women who embodied it, each generation splintering into moderate and radical factions. Since its founding in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had been the leading women’s suffrage organization. However in 1916, growing disillusioned with NAWSA’s moderate style and political theory, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns broke away and formed their own coalition: the National Woman’s Party. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate that these two organizations, while different in political tactics, were equally effective in securing suffrage for women due to the combination of their independent activities.

The right to vote, the right to go to college, the right to own property. Some people take it as a right that they had all along. That is far from the truth. Suffragists fought long and hard for many years to gain women suffrage. Before the suffrage movement began, women did not have the right to vote, child custody rights, property rights, and more (Rynder). The American Women Suffrage Movement was going to change that. People known as suffragists spoke up, and joined the effort to get women their rights. Without them, things would be very different today. The American Suffrage Movement lasted over the course of many years and changed the lives of American women forever.

One of them was Sojourner Truth. Her contribution in both movements was conspicuous. Born into slavery, she managed to escape and become a anti slavery speaker and activist. She was a highly visible figure and spoke at the first national women’s rights convention in 1850, and in 1851 delivered her most famous speech known as “Ain’t i a woman?”4 at the Akron women’s rights convention. Her main assessment was that excluding black women from the suffrage movement would just delay rights achievement for all women. She would also continually remind her allies in the abolitionist movement that black women were half the slave population, and that without changing the conditions of all women’s oppression, there would not be a complete Freedom for African

The woman suffrage movement, which succeeded in 1920 with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, coincided with major national reform movements seeking to improve public education, create public health programs, regulate business and industrial practices, and establish standards agencies to ensure pure food and public water supplies. In 1870, the first attempt that Virginia women, as a campaign, fought for the right to vote in New Jersey when native Anna Whitehead Bodeker invited several men and women sympathetic to the cause to a meeting that launched the first Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association in Richmond. Though it is not the same concept as fight for the right to vote, women have been fighting an invisible fight for along time in the terms of rape culture on college campuses. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women are sexually assaulted while in college. The fight women take to get help on college campuses is a hard battle when many times put through victim blaming and rejection by the police. Those who chose to stand up for their rights against the injustice, often placed upon them by societal and cultural expectations, make progress towards

The women 's suffrage movement, the time when women fought for their rights, began in the year 1848 and continued on all the way through the 1860s. Although women in the new republic had important roles in the family, the house, and other obligations, they were excluded from most rights. These rights included political and legal rights. Due to their gender, they have been held back because they did not have as much opportunities as the men did. The new republic made alterations in the roles of women by disparaging them in society. During this era, men received a higher status than women. Because women were forced to follow laws without being allowed to state their opinions, they tried to resist laws, fight for their freedom and strive to gain equality with men. This leads to feminism, the belief in political, social, and economic equality between men and women. It is the feminist efforts that have successfully tried to give rights that men had, to women who have been denied those rights. Upon the deprivation of those rights, the Seneca Falls convention and the Declaration of Sentiments helped women gain the privileges and opportunities to accomplish the task of equality that they have been striving for.

Throughout the semester we have discussed how various social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries have used popular culture to fight gender discrimination, however, they have often ignored or even reinforced other forms of discrimination, such as; classism, ableism, and racism. This is clear through the readings of; Donkin, Rebick, Stowell, and Lees. Even though these social movements that used popular culture were what seemed to be a step in the right direction they still unintentionally included other forms of discrimination.

Over the past century, Virginia and the United States have encountered a number of drastic historical changes. As both men and women had the right to cast a vote in the most recent election, a little less than a century ago women did not have to right to vote. It was not until women throughout the United States came together to spark a suffrage movement that lead to congress passing the Nineteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution which provided women with the right to vote.

The fight for women’s rights is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Women have won the vote, the right to obtain equal employment, and the right to pursue higher education just like men. However, the struggle still continues to solve various issues such as equal pay regardless of gender and maternity leave. Many women feel like they are fighting an uphill battle, and many women feel like they are being oppressed by the opposite gender. Sylvia Plath was one of these women who felt like she was oppressed by men and even her own father, who died early in her life. Sylvia Path turned to using imagery in her poem “Daddy” such as comparing her father and men to ghastly statues, Nazis, and even vampires; meanwhile she compares herself, and to a larger extent all women to the Jews in concentration camps. Plath’s use of imagery relays her feelings of enslavement by men expertly to the reader.