On August 18th 1920 the nineteenth amendment was ratified in the United States granting women the right to vote. Over that time women have gone out and exercised their right to vote, since so many fought for this privilege. However, in this current day are women still motivate and women are still an easy group to mobilize? Logically the answer would be yes since hundreds of suffragettes fought for this fundamental right, but in the most recent presidential election about only 55.6% of all Americans exercised their right to vote. In the United States gender influences a multitude of different experiences, decisions and affiliations many would think more would go out and vote. Throughout this paper it will focus on both voter mobilization and party affliction for women overall. In the ANES Codebook (2012) over 3000 women were respondents compared to the “2847” male respondents. This alone shows how females are a fundamental and an extremely influential part of the voting process, which means their opinion can either make or break a candidate. If women feel that a certain candidate will not provide them certain rights the percentage of women voting for that particular candidate should decease, and vise versa. The reason this relationship exists is because many women in this country strive for equality and most want political figures to help provide certain benefits to eventually achieve gender equality. Throughout this paper I will provide literature that focuses on the subject
To begin with, the American political system developed into a more involved citizen base. According to Document 6, the pattern of voter turnout rose exponentially from in 1828. We also saw another great increase in voting in 1840. This rise in participation can be accredited to the domestic issues that impacted America during the 1820s [Document 1]. One can also point out that the increase in voter participation can be directly linked to women’s suffrage. Women were oppressed during those times; they ached for equality [Document 7].
In most modern governments, such as the United States of America, give the right to vote to almost every responsible adult citizen. There were limiters on the right to vote when the US Constitution was written, and the individual states were allowed to setup their own rules governing who was allowed to vote. Women were denied the right to vote until the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution which was passed in 1920. In order to understand how women struggled to obtain the right to vote, some key factors must be looked at in further detail; why suffrage rights were not defined in the Constitution, the efforts that women put forth to obtain the right to vote, why there are present-day restrictions on
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.
Women’s suffrage was a major discussion point in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and many people had very strong feelings about whether or not women should be allowed to vote. People for women’s suffrage believed that allowing women to vote would open new doors for the government and lead countries in the right direction. However, the people who fought against women’s suffrage believed that women were too weak, emotional and irrational to make beneficial decisions that had their government and country’s best interest in
The lack of success of the movements for women’s suffrage in achieving their aims by 1918 cannot be held accountable to solely one reason due to the abundance of causes for this. Voting, however, was not the only area where women were subjected to inequitable treatment: in1850 women were regarded as second class citizens. It was common belief that their brain was smaller than their male peers and they were therefore provided with very little or no form of education which, consequentially, meant that jobs for women were unskilled and low paid. Many professions would not employ a female as it was considered that a woman’s place was in the home. Politics was an additional area where women were uninvolved. Political parties (except
It was not until after the Civil War that these ideas started to change in America. “Dozens of women’s colleges were founded after the Civil War, and many formerly all-male colleges began admitting women.” (Shi and Tindall, pg. 569) By 1900 nearly one-third of college students were women (pg.569) In the early 1900’s women began to liberate themselves from the home, their social roles, and even some of their character traits. New public venues for female interaction were created, from charitable associations to women’s clubs. The increase of female interaction brought a means to change the lack of female influence in government. In 1869 the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which not only campaigned for woman suffrage, but also for new laws to make an abused wife get a divorce easier and for female workers to get higher pay (pg. 712-714) It was not until the spring of 1919 after WWI that the Nineteenth Amendment was passed giving women a Constitutional guarantee of their right to vote (pg. 775). Women gaining the right to vote was one of the greatest social developments that happened in America because since women made up forty percent of the electorate they had the capability to change the course of politics (pg.
a.) The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and it made a big impact on the electorate because the size of the eligible voting population increased. Nevertheless, until 1980, women voted at a lower rate than men. After 1980, the reverse is true and women have voted at higher rates than men. After the 19th amendment was passed in 1920, there was not much change in the results of elections or government policy because women tended to vote in a similar manner as their spouses. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows that there is a currently a gender gap whereby women vote differently on certain issues than men. Women tend to vote for issues such as universal health care and gay marriage. In addition, women tend to vote with the democratic party as seen in the 2008 election when 56% of women voters voted democrat and 33% voted republican in contrast to the men who voted 46% democrat and
“The only Question left to be settled now is: Are Women Persons?” Susan Brownell Anthony inquired in a speech she divulged during the 1800s after she was arrested and fined for voting the year before (women 's rights to the suffrage pg. 2). During the 1900s, and many years before that, women became vile to the fact of feeling suppressed. Two particular women became repulsive to the fact that women voting was a taboo subject. Because of the impact, these women had on the society, The women 's suffrage movement took place. Eventually, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, causing acceptance to women voting. Due to the hardiments of determined female’s, because of their hostile feelings toward women’s suffrage,
Jane Addams once posed the question “Why is it that women do not vote upon the matters which concern them so intimately?” The answer is that, firstly by law women were not allowed to vote on any matter, and secondly, society did not build a supportive, empowering foundation to encourage women to make their own decisions. Susan B. Anthony recognized that even law the uses gender to discriminate against women’s rights; this oppression was established in the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Both Jane Addams and Anthony both acknowledged this divide between the sexes, and noted that it was prominent in the U.S. government. These ideas influenced the people leading the anti-imperialist movement as well; a structure established in politics and social culture naturally affected the political and social anti-imperialist
Up until the 1920s, women’s struggle for their right to vote seemed to be a futile one. They had been fighting for their suffrage for a long time, starting numerous women's rights movements and abolitionist activists groups to achieve their goal. “The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had enfranchised almost all white males (“The Fight for Women's Suffrage” ). This sparked women to play a more emphatic role in society. They began to participate in anti-slavery organizations, religious movements, and even meetings where they discussed that when the Constitution states "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain
Many antis’ were under the impression that “women did not have the intellectual capacity of men because their brains were smaller and more delicate...Since women could not be trusted to behave rationally, they would be extremely dangerous in a political setting” (Mayor, 67). Antis’ were also under the impression that women wanted to vote because they wanted to imitate men, and that once the traditional familial roles were tampered with the family structure would fall apart. They argued that women had a ‘separate but equal’ power, which was to shape their children, and if they had male children, they could shape them to vote in the way that they themselves would have, and so they indirectly have the vote anyways. The antis’ were also worried about the honesty of women voters, expressing their concerns about women being able to vote more than once by concealing extra ballots in their voluminous sleeves, and slipping them quickly into the ballot boxes (Goldstein-LaVande).
Even though, the League of Women Voters was founded in the year 1920 with the goal of ensuring women’s involvement in the elections and fostering women’s suffrage (League of Women Voters, 2015). Over time, the organization’s focus has
Research by Singleton (2005) indicated that the wave of equal right revolutions significantly increased the participatory willingness of women in politics. Compared to the late 1880s, women could now fully vote and participate in the national elections. The number of women who came forward for elective posts in the American system such as senators, Governors and Congress representatives significantly increased in the 1980s onwards. In fact, 1992 experienced the highest number of women participants and aspirants for the various elective posts in the American political systems. Afterwards, women could even vie for the presidency as it was the case for the US 2016 elections for the post of POTUS. This is a wave that developed from the
Women had attempted to call attention to the issue of woman’s suffrage for hundreds of years. Until August 18th, 1920 women had no right to vote for the politicians that governed them. Many women wondered why they had not been given suffrage, but African American men were given the right to vote nearly 50 years earlier. The fifteenth amendment states that citizens “shall not be denied the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. Why couldn’t gender have been included in the amendment? Many claimed that was not fair to the women who had helped Americans in the most crucial of times. During previous wars women were left to take care of the household while men were at war. They also worked
Women’s Rights was one of the major social changes that began to gain attention in the media and to peak in active activity during the twentieth century. Women’s rights had been in the making since the eighteenth century. Some of the earliest documented words for Women’s rights appeared in a letter to John Adams by his wife Abigail Adams. During the making of the United States constitution (from the eighteenth to nineteenth century), she wrote to her husband and asked him to “remember the ladies”. The first state to permit women to vote in the United States (before the nineteenth amendment was drafted) was New Jersey. However, there were restrictions upon who was eligible to vote. Some of these restrictions included