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The battle for women's rights began in the state of New York, the birthplace of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the longtime home of Susan B. Anthony. In Seneca Falls, the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments was proclaimed in 1848. Arguments of the time centered around changes in state law to establish women's guardianship rights over their children, granting property and earnings rights to married women, and delivering woman suffrage (The Next Generation of Suffragists, Dubois). -
WY granted suffrage more than 20 years before anywhere else, and a half-century before national suffrage. Historians give several explanations: a "practical" need for white women's votes to "offset those of black men" after the passage of the 15th amendment," a desire to "put remote areas on the map, leading to growth and prosperity," and a need for "more women to emigrate, balancing gender ratios and providing the best conditions for the growth of families" (Edwards, Pioneers at the Polls). -
"Women, many from southern and eastern Europe, moved to cities, seeking economic survival and family stability. Women worked on farms and in factories, some emerging as populist agitators, socialist activists, and labor organizers. Women also became progressives and pacifists, serving in the vanguard of those struggling for economic and social justice and world peace" (Kerber and DeHart, Industrializing America)
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"Among the earliest and most dynamic vehicles of progressivism were the settlement houses established in working-class neighborhoods, largely by young women from muddle- and upper-class homes who sought to east the transition of immigrants into American life." Also, early 20th century strikes "saw young immigrant women step to the forefront of the labor struggle." -Social Settlements and Municipal Housekeeping, Who Built America?
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"In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, there were more women in the labor force, more with experience in labor struggles. Some middle-class women, conscious of women's oppression and wanting to do something, were going to college and becoming aware of themselves not just as housewives" (Zinn 343).
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"On November 23, 1909, New York City awoke to a general strike of shirtwaist makers, the largest strike by women workers the United States had ever seen. Overnight, between 20,000 and 40,000 workers - most of them teenage girls - silenced their sewing machines to protest the low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions" (Orleck, From the Russia Pale to Labor Organizing in New York City). -
"New Yorkers from all walks of life had come to pay tribute to the unidentified victims of the Triangle fire: the deadliest
workplace accident in the city's history. A few weeks earlier, the workers had been forgotten cogs in America's immense industrial machine; now, one in 10 New Yorkers were there to claim them as their own" (Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, PBS). -
"Women war workers were better situated to demand social and political rights and advance the movement for woman suffrage. In NYC, working-class suffragists saw a close link between the vote and the conditions on the job." Suffragists "tried to use Wilson's [wartime] rhetoric to their own advantage...By asking Americans to fight for 'democracy versus autocracy,' Wilson put compelling logic behind the drive for universal suffrage." -Social Settlements and Municipal Housekeeping, WBA
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Suffragists had learned to work together on a number of levels at once and to benefit from a set of coalitions. They campaigned door to door. They held meetings on street corners. They organized parades. They chained themselves to the White House fence. They lobbied senators. Some tried to bridge racial gulfs; others avoided them. African-American women and Latinas had long fought for the vote. Suffragists came in every style, race, and ethnicity. And suddenly, it was over" (Deutsch).