Women’s Voting Rights

American women as far back as Abigail Adams had consistently pressed for voting rights but they were fighting against the enormous odds of church and an all male power structure. Many who believed women were divinely ordained to play second fiddle to men. But in the nineteenth century more women were into the work force and were gaining strength.

In the 1860s in Lynn Massachusetts, during a shoe workers strike more than 10,000 workers who marched in protest were women. At that time the women made one dollar a week opposed to the three dollars paid to men. To the male abolitionist, allowing the black men to vote carried more weight than equality of the sexes. And it was the exclusion of women from an abolitionists gathering that sparked the first formal organization for women’s rights.

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On July 19,1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Caddy Stanton called for a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, after they were ordered to sit in the balcony at a London antislavery meeting. Of the major abolitionists figures only Lloyd Garrison supported equality for women. The abolitionists movement did produce two of the most courageous women of the era, Harriet Tubman the escaped slave, who became an Underground Railroad conductor and later a union spy during the Civil War, and Sojourner Truth a black spiritual leader and spokeswoman for the rights of women.

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After the Civil War when the right to vote was presented to black men, women petitioned to be included, but again women had to wait as politicians told them the freed slaves took priority. Some women agreed which caused a split in the women’s movement. Hardliners followed Elizabeth Cady Stanton into the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the moderates started the American Suffrage Association. The separation lasted two decades until they reunited in 1890 in the National American suffrage Association, with Stanton as it’s first president.

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Susan B. Anthony came from the same Quaker background as Stanton, and the two women became powerful allies. Forceful and tireless they pushed for reforms locally while continuing to work toward the vote at the national level, but at the turn of the century Anthony fell from favor, and women shifted tactics. They began concentrating on strategies used by their British counterparts. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, British suffragettes chained themselves to buildings, invaded Parliament, and burned buildings. They were imprisoned and went on hunger strikes. These tactics were brought back to America by women who had marched with the British.

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After Wilson’s election, the protest was taken to his doorstep. Women began to picket around the clock at the White House. Imprisoned, they imitated the British tactic of hunger strikes. Sympathy turned in favor of the women. In 1918 Montana’s Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress introduced a constitutional suffrage amendment onto the House floor. It was approved by a one vote margin. It took the Senate another 18 months to pass it, but in June 1919 the Nineteenth Amendment was submitted for ratification. Wilson shifted to support the measure and on August, 26, 1920, Tennessee delivered the last vote needed and the amendment was added to the Constitution. It stated, “the right of citizens of the United states to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

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