Women's Suffrage Movement

By KelseyKluck

  • Susan B. Anthony

    After the Seneca Falls convention, women split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which granted equal rights including the right to vote African American men, but excluded women. Susan B. Anthony, a leading proponent of women suffrage, said “I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask the ballot for the black man and not women.”

  • Illegal Voting

    Susan B. Anthony and other women tested the question “Aren’t women citizens too?” 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 WCTU spearheaded the crusade for prohibition. As momentum grew, Frances Willard transformed the Union. Boasting 245,000 members by 1911, the WCTU became the largest women's group in the nations history. The WCTU reform activities, like those of the settlement house movement, provided women with expanded public roles, which they used to justify giving women voting rights.

  • NAWSA formed

    In 1869 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the NWSA, which united with another group in 1890 to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Other prominent leaders included Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe.

  • Carrie Chapman Catt and New NAWSA Tactics

    Suffragists’ developed three things: The increased activism of local groups, the use of bold new strategies to build enthusiasm for the movement, and the rebirth of the national movement under Carrie Chapman Catt. The suffrage movement was given new strength by growing numbers of college-educated women.

  • 19th Amendment

    The efforts of Catt and the national movement, and America's involvement in world war I, finally made suffrage inevitable. Patriotic American women who head committees, knitted socks fir soldiers, and sold liberty bonds now claimed their overdue reward for supporting the war effort. In 1919, Congress passed the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote. The amendment won final ratification in 1920-72 years after women had first started demanding it at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848