preview

Essay about Women's Suffrage

Good Essays

Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These women lived at the turn of the century, and fought vehemently for a cause they believed in. They knew that they were being discriminated against because of their gender, and they refused to take it. These pioneers of feminism paved the road for further reform, and changed the very fabric of our society. Although they were fighting for a worthy cause, many did not agree with these women’s radical views. These conservative thinkers caused a great road-block on the way to enfranchisement. Most of them were men, who were set in their thoughts about women’s roles, who couldn’t understand why a woman would deserve to vote, let alone want to vote. But there were also …show more content…

In 1890, after competing for support and trying to overcome difficult opposition all around, the NWSA and the AWSA put their differences aside and converged into one group, NAWSA. But even as one unified group, they still had a hard road ahead. The anti-suffragists (antis’) all had their reasons for not wanting women to be able to vote, but most of them were based on the view that men are superior over women, and that most women don’t want to vote, anyways. 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). The

Get Access