Women's Suffrage Movement

  • Seneca Falls Convention

    Women split over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted equal rights including the right to vote to African American men, but excluded women. Susan B. Anthony, a leadering proponet of women suffrage, the right to vote, said, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than as the ballot for the black man and not for women."
  • Illegal Voting

    Women pursued court cases to test the 14th Amendment, which stated that states denying their male citizens the right to vote would lose congressional representation. In 1871 and 1872, Susan B. Anthony and other women tested that question by attempting to vote at least 150 times in ten states and the District of Columbia. The supreme court ruled in 1875 that women were indeed citizens-but then denied that citizenship automatically conferred the right to vote.
  • Carry Nation and the WCTU

    The Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland 1874. The WCTU believed that alcholic bevergaes were undermining American morals. They went from saloon to saloon singing, praying, anf urging saloonkeepers to stop selling alchol.
  • NAWSA Formed

    In 1869, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA), which united with another group in 1890 to become the Nation Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA. Other prominent leaders included Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe, the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
  • Carrie Chapman Catt and New NAWSA Tactics

    When Catt returned to NAWSA after organizing New York's Women Suffrage Party, she concentrated on five tatics: (1) painstaking organization; (2) close ties between local, state, and national workers; (3) establishing a wide base of support; (4) cautious lobbying; and (5) graciious, ladylike behavior.
  • 19th Amendment

    In 1919, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The amendment won final ratification in August 1920-72 years after women had first convened and demanded the vote at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848.