The Women's Suffrage Movement

Did you know that women in the United States did not have the right to vote until the year 1920? Exactly 144 years after the United States was granted freedom from Great Britain. The women’s suffrage movement, however, did not actually start until 1848, and lasted up until they were granted the right to vote in 1920. Women all over the country were fighting for their right to vote in hopes of bettering their lives. The women’s suffrage movement was a long fought process by many people all over the world, over all different races, religions, even gender. (Cooney 1)

Dolly Parton once quoted, “If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.” This quote helps understand the impact the Women’s Suffrage Movement makes on the present day. In 1848 the battle for women’s privileges started with the first Women 's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment, which provided full voting rights for women nationally, was ratified in the United States Constitution when Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it (Burkhalter). Freya Johnson Ross and Ceri Goddard stated a quite valid argument in a secondary source Unequal Nation saying, “Since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, major social changes have transformed the lives of women and men in many ways but the United States has not noticed how far away our nation is from the gender equal future” (5). When women were finally granted the right to vote, barriers were broken which would allow an increasing chance to make progressive steps to a more equal nation, but our nation has yet to realize our full potential.

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.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement of the 1920’s worked to grant women the right to vote nationally, thereby allowing women more political equality. Due to many industrial and social changes during the early 19th century, many women were involved in social advocacy efforts, which eventually led them to advocate for their own right to vote and take part in government agencies. Women have been an integral part of society, working to help those in need, which then fueled a desire to advocate for their own social and political equality. While many women worked tirelessly for the vote, many obstacles, factions, and ultimately time would pass in order for women to see the vote on the national level. The 19th Amendment, providing women the right to vote, enable women further their pursuit for full inclusion in the working of American society.

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

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enforcing that all American women had the right to vote, and were granted the same rights and responsibilities as men in terms of citizenship. Until this time, the only people who were allowed to vote in elections in the United States were male citizens. For over 100 years, women who were apart of the women’s suffrage movement fought for their right to vote, and faced many hardships and discrimination because of it. The American women’s suffrage movement was one of the most important political movements in history, and could not have been successful without the perseverance of many women over many years.

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 women’s movement for the right to vote provided a basis for similar movements to commence as the entire nation struggled to gain social and political equality. While the women’s suffrage movement remained the largest and most successful, its platform of success elevated skeptical citizens captured in harsh working conditions to speak out about this mistreatment: “The employers didn't recognize anyone working for them as a human being. You were not allowed to sing. Operators would have liked to have sung, because they, too, … weren't allowed to sing” (Newman 2). Because the progressive period exposed social standards in general, this exhibition of unsatisfactory treatment by corporations of all employees provoked anger in the nation’s working

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.

Zoe, its interesting that you mention that the change was hard because of the many “differences that were present within the community of women’s suffrage”. Although, as women they shared many inequalities there were many inequalities to pin point at and come to a clear conclusion of which problem was most important. It prohibited women from become more organized. As some women fought for one thing others fought for another. Evidently, there were many differences and for this reason the women’s movement had a different meaning to women from different social class and race. The typical housewife that enjoyed taking care of her husband children and home was a luxury enjoyed by middle class women. “The problem that has no name persists in women

As a woman, I am grateful to all the strong female activists that have paved the way that has allowed all United States female citizen’s the rights we have today.

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.

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 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

Before the 1700s, women in the United States didn’t receive any good education. When women did start to get good education, they started to get more into politics and started asking questions about why couldn’t they vote among other things. The year 1948, marked the birth of women suffrage movement when the first women’s right convention was held in Seneca Falls. The convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Together with other women they declared that women should have rights in education, voting, property and more.