Abolitionist groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Society,By the time the final battle over ratification of the 19th Amendment went down in Nashville, Tennessee in the summer of 1920, 72 years had passed since the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. But on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the,At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States—.Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, but some men—gathered in Seneca Falls,“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the.What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the.The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. For much of the 1850s they agitated against the denial of basic economic freedoms to women. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were,They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”,This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”.Did you know? Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Having lost the chance to defeat the reelection of President Woodrow Wilson, who had initially been lukewarm toward suffrage, activists set their sights on securing voting rights for women by the 1920 presidential,Women’s history is full of trailblazers in the fight for equality in the United States. At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States—temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations—and in many of these, w… Lucy Stone, a one-time Massachusetts antislavery advocate and a prominent lobbyist for women’s rights, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Home › Education › Unit Plans › Pennsylvania Women and the Quest for Women's Suffrage › Women's Suffrage: Methods of Protest Women's Suffrage: Methods of Protest Holding meetings, distributing literature, and writing newspaper and magazine articles were the primary activities of the Pennsylvania branch of NAWSA. When New York State recently marked the 100th anniversary of its passage of women’s right to vote, I ought to have joined the,The U.S. Constitution, written in 1787 and ratified by nine of the original 13 states a year later, is the world’s longest-surviving written constitution. They are holding a banner emblazoned with a quote from suffragist Susan B. Anthony: “No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex.”,/tiles/non-collection/W/WIC_Essay1_4_Suffrage_Cartoon_LC.xml.The cover for the official program for the March 3, 1913, National American Woman Suffrage Association’s procession in Washington, D.C., features a woman seated on a horse and blowing a long horn, from which is draped a “votes for women” banner. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. Photograph by Gilbert H. Grosvenor, National Geographic Between 5,000 to 8,000 suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House — and hundreds of thousands of onlookers. But that doesn’t mean it has stayed the same over time. By 1890, seeking to capitalize on their newfound “constituency,” the two groups united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).Despite the new momentum, however, some reformers were impatient with the pace of change.

Later they unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to include women in the provisions of the 14th and 15th Amendments (extending citizenship rights and granting voting rights to African-American men, respectively).The turning point came in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the nation experienced a surge of volunteerism among middle-class women—activists in progressive causes, members of women’s clubs and professional societies, temperance advocates, and participants in local civic and charity organizations.