Women’s Suffrage

Women’s Suffrage

In the United States, March is Women’s History Month. To celebrate and better understand women’s history in this country, we need to look at voting rights. When the country was founded, women did not have the right to vote. It took the efforts of numerous women suffragists, those who fight for voting rights, before women’s voices counted as equal to men’s at the polls.

Interest in American women’s rights began to take hold in the early nineteenth century. At that time, women had very little freedom. Married women were not legally recognized as individuals; instead they were essentially governed by their husbands. Challenged by this disenfranchisement and inspired by the growing women’s rights movement in Europe, feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 in her hometown in New York state. She and prominent women’s rights activist Lucretia Mott co-authored the Declaration of Sentiments—a document outlining the discrimination against women—and presented it at the convention. Stanton first suggested women’s suffrage in Seneca Falls, but was met with strong opposition. It would not be until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, almost seventy years later, that women would finally be granted the right to vote.

At this same time, very little emphasis was placed on women’s education. Women were expected to become housewives and mothers, and many believed that if women became academics they would lose interest or even capability in these traditional roles. However, by the late 1800s, over 40,000 women had gotten a college education. Women became more aware and interested in the societal ills of the time. They wanted to find a way to help. Many women supported abolishing slavery and enacting child labor laws. Support-ers of women’s suffrage suggested that women’s traditional nurturing role made them more interested in the welfare of children and of marginalized groups. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and longtime friend Susan B. Anthony founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1869. They believed that getting involved in politics was the key to bringing about social reform.

Other women’s groups began to spring up in the late nineteenth century. The American Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869 and merged with NAWSA in 1890, taking its name. The association functioned primarily in the interest of white women, so the National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896. Together, these groups organized protests and marches. They even picketed the White House. On the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration, March 3, 1913, thousands of women took to the streets of Washington D.C., in the Woman Suffrage Procession.