Women's Suffrage hikers who took part in the walk from New York City to Washington, D.C., to join the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade of March 3, 1913.
With all the reforms that happened in the early 20th century, it is amazing how long it took women to win the right to vote. Many women fought for suffrage--the right to vote--as far back as before the Civil War. They formed organizations such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) that pushed to have the Constitution ratified to allow voting rights for women. They were finally successful on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women this right.
A 1913 photo shows the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, women had called for the right to vote. After the Civil War, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving voting rights to freed men, but not to women. Some leading abolitionists became suffragists, men and women who fought for woman suffrage, or women’s right to vote.
Like other reformers, the suffragists formed organizations to promote their cause. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which called for a constitutional amendment allowing women to vote in national elections. A second organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, focused on winning woman suffrage in state elections. In 1890, the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Led by Anna Howard Shaw, a minister and doctor, and Carrie Chapman Catt, an educator and newspaper editor, this organization grew to more than two million members by 1917.
A 1916 billboard urges opposition to the Democratic Party for its stance against equality for women.
Groups formed to protest the idea of giving women the vote. These organizations—supported by some women as well as by men—claimed that woman suffrage would upset society’s “natural” balance and lead to divorce and neglected children. The suffrage movement gained strength, however, when respected public figures such as Jane Addams spoke out in support of the vote for women.
The suffragists won their early victories in the West. First as a territory in 1869 and then as a state in 1890, Wyoming led the nation in giving women the vote. Between 1910 and 1913, five other states adopted woman suffrage. By 1919, women could vote in at least some elections in most of the 48 states.
Women suffragists picket at the White House in 1917.
In the meantime, suffragists continued their struggle to win the vote everywhere. Alice Paul, a Quaker who founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916, was a forceful leader of the suffragist movement. She sought greater economic and legal equality as well as suffrage for women. During a visit to Great Britain, Paul saw suffragists use protest marches and hunger strikes to call attention to their cause. When she returned to the United States, she, too, used these methods in the fight for suffrage.
In 1917, Alice Paul met with President Woodrow Wilson but failed to win his support for woman suffrage. Paul responded by leading women protestors in front of the White House. Day after day they marched carrying banners demanding votes for women. When Paul and other protestors were arrested for blocking the sidewalk, they started a much-publicized hunger strike. Alva Belmont, one of the protestors, proudly declared that all the women had done was to stand there “quietly, peacefully, lawfully, and gloriously.”
By 1917, the national tide was turning in favor of woman suffrage. New York and, a year later, South Dakota and Oklahoma granted equal suffrage. Meanwhile Congress began debating the issue, and Wilson agreed to support an amendment to the Constitution. In 1919, the Senate voted in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, which allowed woman suffrage. The amendment was ratified in 1920, in time for women to vote in that year’s presidential election. For the first time, American women were able to participate in the election of their national leaders.
