essay question women's suffrage

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Women’s Suffrage

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 2, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once. But on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Women’s Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War . During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States— temperance leagues , religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations—and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, but some men—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott .

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, “that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Susan B. Anthony, 1820‑1906 Perhaps the most well‑known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should […]

Early Women’s Rights Activists Wanted Much More than Suffrage

Voting wasn't their only goal, or even their main one. They battled racism, economic oppression and sexual violence—along with the law that made married women little more than property of their husbands.

5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More

Obtaining the vote was just one item on a long civil rights agenda.

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.

By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920 , the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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Course: US history   >   Unit 7

The nineteenth amendment.

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• The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. It declares that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
• The amendment, which granted women the right to vote, represented the pinnacle of the women’s suffrage movement, which was led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
• In their decades-long struggle for female enfranchisement, women’s rights advocates met with strong opposition from anti-suffrage activists.

The women’s suffrage movement

Opposition to women’s suffrage, what do you think.

• For more on the Seneca Falls Convention, see Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 10.
• Corrine M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2-3.
• For more on the anti-suffrage movement, see Anne Myra Benjamin, Women Against Equality: A History of the Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920 (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing Services, 2014).
• For more on the women’s rights movement, see Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).

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When did the women's suffrage movement start?

Where did women’s suffrage start, how did the women's suffrage movement end.

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• Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture - Woman Suffrage Movement
• National Park Service - Gateway Arch - Virginia Minor and Women's Right to Vote
• 64 Parishes - Woman Suffrage
• HistoryNet - Women’s Suffrage Movement — Facts and Information on Women’s Rights
• National Geographic - Education - Woman Suffrage
• The National WWI Museum and Memorial - Women’s Suffrage
• Spartacus Educational - Women's Suffrage
• NCPedia - Women Suffrage
• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Women's Suffrage
• U.S. House of Representatives - Exhibitions & Publications - The Women's Rights Movement, 1848–1920
• BBC - Bitesize - Why women won greater political equality by 1928
• CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture - Women's Suffrage Movement
• women’s suffrage - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What did the women's suffrage movement fight for?

The women’s suffrage movement fought for the right of women by law to  vote  in national or local elections .

The women’s suffrage movement made the question of women’s voting rights into an important political issue in the 19th century. The struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain  and in the  United States , but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis.

By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in  New Zealand  (1893),  Australia  (1902),  Finland  (1906), and  Norway  (1913). World War I  and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections.

In the 21st century most countries allow women to vote . In Saudi Arabia women were allowed to vote in municipal elections for the first time in 2015. The  United Nations  Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.”

women’s suffrage , the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections.

Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights . The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States , but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913). In Sweden and the United States they had voting rights in some local elections.

World War I and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections. Those countries included Soviet Russia (1917); Canada , Germany , Austria , and Poland (1918); Czechoslovakia (1919); the United States and Hungary (1920); Great Britain (1918 and 1928); Burma ( Myanmar ; 1922); Ecuador (1929); South Africa (1930); Brazil , Uruguay , and Thailand (1932); Turkey and Cuba (1934); and the Philippines (1937). In a number of those countries, women were initially granted the right to vote in municipal or other local elections or perhaps in provincial elections; only later were they granted the right to vote in national elections.

Immediately after World War II , France , Italy , Romania , Yugoslavia , and China were added to the group. Full suffrage for women was introduced in India by the constitution in 1949; in Pakistan women received full voting rights in national elections in 1956. In another decade the total number of countries that had given women the right to vote reached more than 100, partly because nearly all countries that gained independence after World War II guaranteed equal voting rights to men and women in their constitutions. By 1971 Switzerland allowed women to vote in federal and most cantonal elections, and in 1973 women were granted full voting rights in Syria . The United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.”

Historically, the United Kingdom and the United States provide characteristic examples of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In Great Britain woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the 1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet. The first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865, and in 1867 Mill presented to Parliament this society’s petition , which demanded the vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. The Reform Bill of 1867 contained no provision for woman suffrage, but meanwhile woman suffrage societies were forming in most of the major cities of Britain, and in the 1870s these organizations submitted to Parliament petitions demanding the franchise for women and containing a total of almost three million signatures.

The succeeding years saw the defeat of every major suffrage bill brought before Parliament. This was chiefly because neither of the leading politicians of the day, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli , cared to affront Queen Victoria ’s implacable opposition to the women’s movement. In 1869, however, Parliament did grant women taxpayers the right to vote in municipal elections, and in the ensuing decades women became eligible to sit on county and city councils. The right to vote in parliamentary elections was still denied to women, however, despite the considerable support that existed in Parliament for legislation to that effect. In 1897 the various suffragist societies united into one National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, thus bringing a greater degree of coherence and organization to the movement. Out of frustration at the lack of governmental action, however, a segment of the woman suffrage movement became more militant under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel . After the return to power of the Liberal Party in 1906, the succeeding years saw the defeat of seven suffrage bills in Parliament. As a consequence, many suffragists became involved in increasingly violent actions as time went on. These women militants, or suffragettes, as they were known, were sent to prison and continued their protests there by engaging in hunger strikes.

Meanwhile, public support of the woman suffrage movement grew in volume, and public demonstrations, exhibitions, and processions were organized in support of women’s right to vote. When World War I began, the woman suffrage organizations shifted their energies to aiding the war effort, and their effectiveness did much to win the public wholeheartedly to the cause of woman suffrage. The need for the enfranchisement of women was finally recognized by most members of Parliament from all three major parties, and the resulting Representation of the People Act was passed by the House of Commons in June 1917 and by the House of Lords in February 1918. Under this act, all women age 30 or over received the complete franchise. An act to enable women to sit in the House of Commons was enacted shortly afterward. In 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21 to place women voters on an equal footing with male voters.

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Feminism — Women's Suffrage

Essays on Women's Suffrage

What makes a good women's suffrage essay topic.

When it comes to writing a Women's Suffrage essay, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be thought-provoking, engaging, and relevant to the subject matter. Here are some recommendations on how to brainstorm and choose an essay topic:

• Brainstorm: Start by brainstorming ideas related to women's suffrage, such as historical events, key figures, and societal impacts. Consider the different aspects of women's suffrage, such as political, social, and cultural factors.
• Consider the audience: Think about who will be reading your essay and what topics would resonate with them. Consider the interests and perspectives of your audience when choosing a topic.
• Relevance: Choose a topic that is relevant to the current social and political climate. Look for topics that address ongoing issues related to gender equality and women's rights.
• Uniqueness: Avoid common and overused topics. Instead, look for unique and lesser-known aspects of women's suffrage that will set your essay apart.

Best Women's Suffrage Essay Topics

When it comes to Women's Suffrage essay topics, there are plenty of options to choose from. Here are some creative and stand-out essay topics to consider:

• The role of women's suffrage in shaping modern democracy
• Intersectionality and the fight for women's suffrage
• The impact of women's suffrage on the feminist movement
• Women of color in the suffrage movement
• The global impact of women's suffrage movements
• The portrayal of women's suffrage in literature and media
• Women's suffrage and the labor movement
• Suffragettes and their role in the fight for women's rights
• The legacy of women's suffrage in contemporary politics
• Women's suffrage and the LGBTQ+ rights movement
• The role of men in the women's suffrage movement
• Women's suffrage and the fight for reproductive rights
• Indigenous women in the suffrage movement
• The impact of women's suffrage on education and academia
• Women's suffrage and the impact on family dynamics
• The role of religious institutions in the women's suffrage movement
• Women's suffrage and the fight for economic equality
• The role of grassroots activism in the women's suffrage movement
• Women's suffrage and the fight for disability rights
• The impact of women's suffrage on the global stage

Women's Suffrage essay topics Prompts

Looking for some creative prompts to inspire your Women's Suffrage essay? Here are five engaging prompts to get you started:

• Imagine you are a suffragette in the early 20th century. Write a first-person account of your experiences and motivations for fighting for women's right to vote.
• Research and write about a lesser-known figure in the women's suffrage movement and their contributions to the cause.
• How has the fight for women's suffrage influenced other social justice movements? Explore the interconnectedness of women's rights with other movements for equality.
• Choose a specific region or country and examine the unique challenges and triumphs of the women's suffrage movement in that area.
• Create a multimedia presentation that showcases the visual and material culture of the women's suffrage movement, including posters, banners, and other artifacts.

When it comes to choosing a Women's Suffrage essay topic, the possibilities are endless. By considering relevance, uniqueness, and audience perspective, you can choose a topic that will engage readers and shed new light on this important historical movement.

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Women’s suffrage is the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections.

Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913).

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Emmeline Pankhurst, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Lucy Burns.

Saudi Arabia gave women the right to vote in 2015, leaving Vatican City as the only place where women’s suffrage is still denied today. The U.N. first explicitly named women’s suffrage as a human right in 1979. Not all suffragists were women, and not all anti-suffragists were men. Susan B. Anthony (and 15 other women) voted illegally in the presidential election of 1872

1. Ramirez, F. O., Soysal, Y., & Shanahan, S. (1997). The changing logic of political citizenship: Cross-national acquisition of women's suffrage rights, 1890 to 1990. American sociological review, 735-745. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2657357) 2. Miller, G. (2008). Women's suffrage, political responsiveness, and child survival in American history. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(3), 1287-1327. (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/123/3/1287/1928181) 3. Smith, H. L. (2014). The British Women's Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928: Revised 2nd Edition. Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315833569/british-women-suffrage-campaign-1866-1928-harold-smith) 4. Abrams, B. A., & Settle, R. F. (1999). Women's suffrage and the growth of the welfare state. Public Choice, 100(3-4), 289-300. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018312829025) 5. Rover, C. (2019). Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914. In Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914. University of Toronto Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.3138/9781487575250/html?lang=de) 6. McCammon, H. J., & Campbell, K. E. (2001). Winning the vote in the West: The political successes of the women's suffrage movements, 1866-1919. Gender & Society, 15(1), 55-82. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/089124301015001004?journalCode=gasa) 7. Cockroft, I., & Croft, S. (2010). Art, Theatre and Women's Suffrage. Twickenham: Aurora Metro. (https://www.thesuffragettes.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/PR-Art-Theatre.pdf) 8. Towns, A. (2010). The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women's Suffrage, 1920–1945. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/interamerican-commission-of-women-and-womens-suffrage-19201945/D6536EB4143959408AEEEF48380A29BD Journal of Latin American Studies, 42(4), 779-807.

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Educator Resources

Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment

Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution – guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources

Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

In the second decade of the 20th century, woman suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. In 1913, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment.

The National Woman’s Party (NWP) organized the first White House picket in U.S. history in January of 1917. It lasted nearly three years.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, sent this 1871 petition to Congress requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be heard on the floor of Congress.

The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, sent this 1872 petition to Congress asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office.

This indictment charged Susan B. Anthony with "wrongfully and unlawfully" voting in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY, "being...a person of the female sex." She was one of several women arrested for illegally voting.

Frederick Douglass's son, daughter, and son-in-law signed this 1878 petition to Congress in favor of woman suffrage, along with other residents of the District of Columbia .

In this 1916 resolution, "Rhode Island Union Colored Women's Clubs" asked Congress to secure a federal woman suffrage amendment. African American women organized women’s clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms.

Some women fought for decades for the right to vote. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, a former Civil War nurse, sent this letter to Rep. Edwin Webb, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on women's suffrage. 

There was strong opposition to enfranchising women. This 1917 petition from the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party of New York urged the Senate not to pass a federal suffrage amendment giving women the right to vote .

This Congressional resolution, passed in 1919, proposed extending the right to vote to women and became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

This 1920 statement verified that Tennessee had ratified the 19th Amendment. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify, crossing the three-fourths-of-states threshold needed to clinch passage of the amendment.

Teaching Activities

The Women's Rights page on DocsTeach includes document-based teaching activities and primary sources related to women's rights and changing roles in American history – including women's suffrage, political involvement, citizenship rights, roles during the world wars, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and more.

Failure is Impossible  is a play that brings to life the facts and emotions of the momentous struggle for voting rights for women. It was first performed in 1995, as part of commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the 19th amendment at the National Archives. The story is told through the voices of Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Frances Gage, Clara Barton, and Carrie Chapman Catt, among others .  The script is available for educational uses.

Image: Suffrage Parade in New York City, ca. 1912

Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women’s voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women’s rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage – the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 – they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women’s access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star , the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women’s clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis , a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women – victims of racism as well as sexism – needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement’s leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners – comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment – the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.

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Collection National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection

Articles and essays.

• The National American Woman Suffrage Association Formed in 1890, NAWSA was the result of a merger between two rival factions--the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe. These opposing groups were organized in the late 1860s, partly as the result of a disagreement over strategy. NWSA...

• Scrapbook Essay: The Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller Scrapbooks The Historical Setting By 1896 there were four "stars" on the woman suffrage flag. Women could vote in four western states--Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The fifth "star," Washington, was not secured until 1910.

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American Women: Topical Essays

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• American Women: An Overview
• Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913
• Sentiments of an American Woman
• The House That Marian Built: The MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire
• Women On The Move: Overland Journeys to California
• “With Peace and Freedom Blest!”: Woman as Symbol in America, 1590-1800
• The Long Road to Equality: What Women Won from the ERA Ratification Effort

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The original print version of the "American Women" research guide contained five topical essays, each exploring an aspect of women's history by analyzing resources held in different Library divisions. The purpose of these essays was to demonstrate for researchers how to identify collections relevant to a topic that are physically separated across the Library's twelve major reference centers.

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Series: Essays: Overview of Women's Suffrage

Women in America collectively organized in 1848 at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY to fight for suffrage (or voting rights). Over the next seventy years, not everyone followed the same path in fighting for women's equal access to the vote. The history of the suffrage movement is one of disagreements as well as cooperation. Explore this essay series to learn more about the women's suffrage movement and the legacy of the 19th Amendment.

Article 1: Introduction: Women's Suffrage

In 1848 women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York to advance the cause for women’s rights. Learn more about convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony and how they started the women's suffrage movement. Read more

Article 2: Ratification: Women's Suffrage

Discover the story behind the ratification of the 19th Amendment and how it empowered women in America. Read more

Article 3: In the Press: Women's Suffrage

Explore how the debate for women's suffrage played out in newspapers across America. Read more

Article 4: Anti-Suffragists: Women's Suffrage

Find out why some women and men were against women's suffrage. Read more

Article 5: Who was excluded?: Women's Suffrage

Not all women shared the same freedom to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Find out why. Read more

Article 6: What happened after?: Women's History

Find out what happened after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Read more

Women’s Suffrage (Critical thinking, analysis and writing)

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1920: Women Get the Vote

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Women’s Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment Essay

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The US Civil War is known today as an event that changed the lives of the general population greatly. Still, many people do not pay enough attention to those progressive alterations that happened before it. There were two closely related to each other movements that helped to form our present. The abolition movement, which dealt with the attempt to stop slavery, and the women’s rights movement, which was meant to allow females to enter the political life of the country.

Initially, all women were not allowed to hold any positions that would have at least something to do with decision-making so that they could not lead others and affect the situation, in which the general public existed. Still, with the beginning of the abolition movement, many of them considered that it could be an opportunity for them to implement changes in society. Thus, they decided to take part in it.

A great example, which shows the way the women’s rights movement emerged out of the abolition movement, can be described when speaking about women who were present at the Agents’ Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1836, two females decided to streamline the anti-slavery process, participated in the convention, and then started to create their own abolition groups. In order to attract more people and become more influential, they held the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in the next year.

As a result, 200 females gathered in New York City. Still, at that time they only demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. The attention was paid to the adverse conditions of slavery and violation of “Christian principals and basic human right to equality” (Boundless par. 3). With the emphasis that females were treated unfairly, just like slaves, the activists continued fighting for their rights. However, it turned out that in order to implement such changes, women need to become more influential.

Thus, those who participated in these movements also started to speak about equal rights for both genders, which included such topics as education, employment, and politics. In this framework, women’s suffrage was also underlined. The government considered that females should not interfere in the process and tried to silence them. However, it would not happen this way. Such change led to the beginning of the independent coexistence of women’s rights and abolition movements.

The first convention that affected this situation critically was the 1848 Seneca Falls. It organized by a group of females who gathered under the leadership of Lucretia Mott (Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture par.1). Soon they became known as Quaker women, who are treated as prominent representatives of the movement today. During this event, 300 individuals of both genders gathered to advocate women’s equality, including suffrage, which was a great step forward. As a consequence of this gathering, “Declaration of Principles” was published.

Actually, it was the Declaration of Independence revised to meet the purposes of the women’s rights movement. It framed a range of demands the females had. It was meant to urge “the fair and equal treatment of women as United States citizens, including the resolution that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise” (Thorpe par. 2). Even though women’s suffrage was not achieved at that time, the next several generations of activists were greatly inspired to fight further and stand their ground.

Prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the women’s rights movement had to deal with several complications. Internal ideological and tactical struggles prevented it from streamlining and reaching positive consequences as soon as possible (Women in Congress par. 1). Women had different views on the way they saw themselves free. Some were willing to focus on individualistic characteristics and make sure that being equal with men they would have an opportunity to control their decision-making activities. Women were willing to be paid just as men and to receive the same employment opportunities.

Others were more aggressive and believed that females are the ones to have political power. Some also believed that their roles in the society were determined by males that is why they needed to be reconsidered so that women could not only take care of the children but also support the men when receiving their assistance. In this way, ones wanted just to adapt the existing system and others stated that the whole society is to be reconstructed (The Gale Group Inc. par. 25).

Women also had different tactics, to which they referred when trying to bring a change. Some had more militant ideas than others. They were gathering to start marches and inform the rest of the population and obtain more support. The rest, at the same time, would focus on less invasive methods, such as attending conventions (Women’s Suffrage Movement par. 2).

Thus, it cannot be denied that the women’s suffrage movement appeared on the basis of the abolitionist movement that started before that emphasized people’s equality. Utilizing their experience obtained while advocating for the rights of slaves, women received an opportunity to attract attention to themselves and their role in the society. If there was no abolition movement, females would not be likely to achieve success as they did regardless of the fact that this process took several decades.

Works Cited

Boundless. Abolitionism and the Women’s Rights Movement . 2016.

The Gale Group Inc. Women’s Rights Movement . 2003.

Thorpe, Aaron. What Was the Connection Between Abolition and the Women’s Suffrage Movement? 2016.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture. The Woman’s Rights Movement . 2016.

Women in Congress. The Women’s Rights Movement , 1848–1920. 2016.

Women’s Suffrage Movement. Tactics / Strategies . 2016.

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IvyPanda. (2020, August 26). Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment. https://ivypanda.com/essays/womens-suffrage-the-nineteenth-amendment/

"Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment." IvyPanda , 26 Aug. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/womens-suffrage-the-nineteenth-amendment/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment'. 26 August.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment." August 26, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/womens-suffrage-the-nineteenth-amendment/.

1. IvyPanda . "Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment." August 26, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/womens-suffrage-the-nineteenth-amendment/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Women's Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment." August 26, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/womens-suffrage-the-nineteenth-amendment/.

“The woman question”—the problem specifically of women’s suffrage, and more broadly of changing political, economic, and professional roles for women and of social and sexual liberation—gained increasing urgency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as activists grew more militant and the government responded with ever more oppressive measures. The question was further complicated by the onset of the First World War and the participation of women in a wide range of war work both at home and on the battlefield.

Suffrage was granted to women over thirty on 6 February 1918, more than fifty years after John Stuart Mill brought a petition for the reform before Parliament. It might be worth beginning with those Victorian origins in order to understand and contextualize “the woman question” that so gripped society at the turn of the century up to the Great War.

Victorian Roots

Victorian attitudes towards women’s power and place in society were complex, governed by an ideology of “separate spheres.” Men functioned in the public sphere, working in a world driven by ambition and grasping, a world where perhaps they had to sacrifice a certain moral rectitude to maintain economic and social position and power. Women, on the other hand, governed the realm of the home; it was their job to create and ensure an oasis for men, a regenerative space to which men could return after a grueling day out in the world. Within the framework of “separate spheres,” a woman’s clearly delineated position was that of moral beacon and source of peace and comfort for a man who every day was forced to fall in order to gain. Within their constrained and clearly defined roles, women were believed to have transformative power. While these roles granted power, however, they simultaneously limited and restricted that power.

Yet it was within these roles, and their investment in the power they conferred, that Victorian women’s activism—including the feminist movement—was located. Victorian women entered the public sphere through their work for social change. In the 1850s and 1860s, early women’s movements were cause-driven and reform-based, focusing primarily on issues of particular material concern to women: marriage, property, employment, education. The movements were led mainly by middle-class, liberal women, and their work in philanthropy, public works, and organizing showed many that women could participate in the public sphere. The mid-Victorian period saw greater roles for women outside the home, roles still governed by an ideal of womanhood and the notion that women could improve the moral character of society. Barbara Caine writes that Victorian feminism was characterized by a “celebration of women’s self-sacrifice, which is seen as having the capacity to bring social and moral transformation, alongside a protest against the prevailing sexual hierarchy and an endorsement of rather conservative familial and moral values” (80-81). Activists sought to effect what change they could within the ideological framework of the time, questioning the ways women enacted their roles in society while maintaining the values underlying those roles.

Victorian feminism and the drive for suffrage had its origins in these early reform movements and provided the roots for later activism. The shift out of the home and into the street gave women a sense of their own importance as citizens and the vital role they could play in the workings of their nation. If they were to bring about the kind of serious social change they worked for out of duty and commitment to uplift, the vote was a necessity. In 1865, the Kensington Society, a woman’s discussion group, took up the question of women’s suffrage. In 1866, Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Elizabeth Garrett drafted a petition calling on Parliament to consider the question. They got 1499 signatures and presented their document to John Stuart Mill (whose stepdaughter was a member of the group). Mill brought the petition before Parliament and called for an amendment to the Reform Bill before the body which would grant suffrage to women. This proposal was defeated 196 to 73. Mill’s participation in this debate in part led him to write  The Subjection of Women  (1869) . In response to this defeat, the women of the Kensington Society founded the London Society for Women’s Suffrage; this organization would, in 1897, join with seventeen other organizations to become the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). By the early twentieth century, the NUWSS would be a powerful—though by no means the only—voice in the debates surrounding “the woman question.” The end of the nineteenth century brought reforms for women, but the battles surrounding suffrage would be played out in the public square and the home, in political, literary, and cultural arenas, calling into question the very nature of women’s subjectivity and the ways they are represented by themselves and others.

The New Woman and “the Woman Question”

These questions of subjecthood and representation surrounding the conception of “womanliness” were at the crux of the idea of the New Woman. The late Victorian period saw a number of developments that advanced the cause of women: the founding of Girton and Newnham Colleges (1873 and 1876), the Contagious Diseases Act (1883), the Married Women’s Property Acts (1882 and 1891), and the organization of the NUWSS (1897). These developments arose out of what Christina Crosby calls “the ceaseless posing of “the woman question”” (1); however, the idea of the New Woman was just as much part of a literary debate as it was part of the social debates that surrounded “the woman question.”

The New Woman emerged at the end of the century as a type, a symbol, a social force. To her supporters, she was liberated from the domestic ideology that governed women’s place in the Victorian era. To her detractors, she was a symptom of the decadence and decline of social values in the  fin de siècle . The New Woman chose independence over marriage and childrearing, rejecting monogamy and bourgeois conventions for sexual freedom, political consciousness, and professional identity. In the 1880s and 1890s, she was implicated in a wide range of social problems and upheavals. She was viewed as a threat to middle-class hegemony, to the ideology of domestic space. In a gendered world governed by a strict dichotomy—angel in the house or fallen woman—the New Woman was a site of slippage, a figure that served to interrogate the nature of sexual identity and the ways it dictated public roles and representations.

In many ways, the New Woman was more of a literary construction. The term was first used by Sarah Grand in 1894 in an article in the  North American Review . It referred to a wave of novels centered around a “modern” woman, raising issues of women’s subjectivity and their place in both the public and private spheres. Novelists such as Grand herself, Olive Schreiner, Grant Allen, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing explored the woman who occupied a space outside social convention, who chose to exist on the margins, and who would often be punished for doing so. Unlike much of late Victorian society, however, these novelists saw the New Woman not as a pathology but with a sympathetic eye; as Teresa Mangum writes, the New Woman and those who wrote about her “expanded the nineteenth-century imagination by introducing what we would now call feminist issues and feminist characters into the realm of popular fiction” (1). Other critics and literary historians, such as Ann Ardis, note the importance of New Woman fiction to the development and concerns not only of the feminist movement but to modernism as a whole. The questions of subjectivity and representation were key to the modernist project, even if feminist literature was seen (at the time) as outside that project. The negotiations between modernist aesthetics and activism, particularly for writers like Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, give lie to the supposed opposition between modernism and politics. Ultimately, the New Woman allowed for a transition from Victorian ideals of “womanliness” to modern(ist) ideas of womanhood.

The Suffrage Movement

The period between 1905 and 1914 saw a rise in activism and may be considered the height of the suffrage movement, a time of great energy only brought to an end by Britain’s entrance into the First World War. This rise in activism created some opposition to the suffrage movement, particularly among those who did not advocate the more militant activity of the suffragettes, the members of the movement who pursued radical means of activism in contrast to suffragists, who pursued more moderate means of advancing the cause. However, the period did also see increase in support for female suffrage. The declaration of war led to an cessation of militancy; this concession, coupled with women’s participation in the war effort, the directing of their public energies to the cause of ensuring the safety of the state, led many to call for legal recognition of their citizenship through enfranchisement.

Several trends are worth noting here: the rise of militancy and the split between constitutional and militant organizations; the growth of the anti-suffrage movement; the role played by politicians, parties, and the Government; and the shutting down of the militant suffrage movement at the start of the war.

Even as historians and critics speak of “the woman question” and all its aspects—suffrage, equality, and professional, economic, domestic, and sexual issues—one must be wary of thinking of the “women’s movement” as monolithic. The movement as a whole, and the suffrage movement in particular, was throughout its history roiled by tensions not simply of faction but of philosophy. There were tensions among women seeking only the vote and women seeking full emancipation, radical liberation from the sexual and economic enslavement that had been their lot for centuries. There were tensions between those who sought greater representation and rights for the working class (whose franchise was still limited at this time) and those whose concerns were primarily feminist. These tensions, in many respects, go back to the Victorian roots of British feminism. As Sophia van Wingerden has noted, “Since the nineteenth century, two types of feminism had existed, which may be described as liberal feminism, which sought acceptance for women in the world as it was, and cultural feminism, which believed that women’s influence could be used to change the world” (101). The different elements of the women’s movement during the Edwardian period could be cast in this light. The direction of the movement, the true nature to a certain extent of “the woman question,” is the question of the public and private roles of women, how those roles should be defined, and whether women should be liberated from them.

The means employed by the suffragists and the suffragettes, and the nature of militancy itself, get to the crux of this question. The NUWSS was the largest organization devoted to suffrage. Nonmilitant and constitutional, rooted in the social reform movements of the nineteenth century, it saw the suffrage movement as part of a greater project promoting liberal, democratic civilization. Its manifesto says, “We claim that women are also citizens, and that it will be a gross insult and injustice to give the suffrage to every man in virtue of his manhood while denying it to every woman in virtue of her womanhood. We take our stand on the citizenship of women and demand the representation of women as citizens” (qtd. in van Wingerden 129). The NUWSS sought recognition of the citizenship of women and the role they could play in national life, while not really calling for a radical rethinking of the nature of women’s lives either private or public. As this organization conceived of the movement, women’s private, domestic concerns could be broadened into an agenda for social reform; they worked traditional social networks, founded in nineteenth-century activism.

In contrast, the WSPU called for a revisioning of women’s roles. The WSPU broke away from the NUWSS in 1903 and was run with autocratic control by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. The WSPU originally had connections to the Labour movement, but once the Pankhursts decided that Labour was not willing to devote its full support to the suffrage cause, they severed ties. Sylvia Pankhurst, another daughter, maintained ties to Labour, however, and broke away from her mother’s organization to form the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Christabel, in the later years of the movement, also redirected her attention to include crusades for moral reform, speaking against male vice and the sexual double standard. In these cases, one can see both the many public and private concerns that formed the women’s movement, and the call to redefine women’s roles.

The WSPU, and the Pankhursts, have received a great deal of attention in histories of “the woman question,” some have argued unduly so. While the organization and its founders remain controversial, one cannot deny the importance of the years 1905 to 1914 and the significance of the rise of militant action. In that time span, 1000 women were imprisoned for arson, window-smashing, vandalism of postboxes, demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience. Thousands of pounds’ worth of property were destroyed. The issue was debated regularly in the pages of  The New Age during these years. Volume 5, for example, is full of such discussions–especially the issues for October 14 and 21, 1908 (see 5.25:438, and 5.26:458-460). (A search of the first 10 volumes will turn up over a hundred issues that discuss suffrage.) Militancy reached its height in 1913 with the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who threw herself in front of the King’s horse at Derby; she quickly became a martyr for the cause, and her death gained sympathy for the movement. However, this might also be regarded as the tipping point in “the woman question,” as people began to turn against the more violent manifestations of female activism.

The death of Davison raises an important point about the tactics of those who participated actively in the movement, and about how they were represented, both by themselves and by others. Both the suffragists and suffragettes used their womanliness to their advantage as they pursued their agenda. Historians such as Lisa Tickner and Barbara Green have shown that Edwardians didn’t quite know what to make of crowds of beautiful, tastefully dressed and well-educated middle and upper class women taking to the streets. The kinds of public demonstrations held by respectable ladies that characterized the suffrage movement—the “Women’s Parliaments,” the marches on Parliament, Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace, the Coronation Procession of 1911 upon George V’s taking of the throne—these spectacles forced those who held to a particular ideology about the place of women in public life to question that ideology. Sophia van Wingerden writes, “On the one hand . . . suffragettes were ordinary criminals because their vigorous and violent protest clearly contradicted what was expected of them as women. On the other hand, however, the suffragettes equally clearly fulfilled their expected roles in all other respects” (79). These were not mannish, threatening New Women. They seemed to represent ideals of womanliness and womanhood, yet their radical shifting into the public sphere, into the streets themselves, subverted those ideals and forced the spectators—those in power—to acknowledge that the roles were not as stable as believed.

These demonstrations reached a key moment on 18 November 1910, also known as “Black Friday.” In 1910, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who with Bonar Law and Ramsey MacDonald, came to support limited suffrage, proposed the Conciliation Bill. This bill, supported by the Earl of Lytton and H. N. Brailsford, bringing together Liberals and Conservatives, militants and constitutionalists, would have granted limited suffrage to women, but was defeated. A contingent of women went to Parliament to meet with Asquith and were met with unprecedented police brutality. Women—young and old, mothers and grandmothers—were beaten, spit at, and cursed. There were reports of sexual assault, and the women were imprisoned.

The images of respectable ladies suffering such indignities increased support for suffrage, as did hunger strikes, which became a popular tactic around the same time. Women who undertook hunger strikes in prison would be forcibly fed; many would get physically sick from the introduction of liquid food into their lungs and rectums, and many reported sexual assault. The passage of the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act, also known as the “Cat and Mouse” Act, further turned public support against the government and police. Women who went on hunger strike in prison would be kept until they were sick enough to be released. Once they recovered, they would be summoned back to prison. These events, along with the death of Emily Davison, did much to cast the suffragettes as martyrs and gain sympathy for the cause.

However, the increased and sustained militancy, the vandalism and the violence, probably did more to hurt the movement than these images of suffering martyrs did to help. The anti-suffrage movement had always had significant numbers. A petition circulated in 1908 by the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage gathered over 300,000 names. As Brian Harrison has noted, what impelled the anti-suffragists was their “central belief that a separation of the spheres between the sexes had been ordained by God and/or by Nature” (56). This separation had to be maintained and preserved in the home and by the state. More moderate organizations like the NUWSS sought to effect political change through constitutional measures, pursuing allies in the political process. Yet after the failure of the Conciliation Bill, even the NUWSS vowed to work only with politicians who would explicitly support suffrage; this rejection of political compromise marked a turn in the constitutionalists’ policy. It also, however, marked the beginning of a loss of public and political support, a loss that would only grow more pronounced with the approach of war.

Women and the Great War

Reading the impact of the war on suffrage is complicated. Some claim that it created a new space for women to work within the public sphere. It forced men to account for female citizenship and forced women to define what they meant by such a concept. Others, like Jane Marcus, argue that it destroyed the feminist movement. Women replaced feminism with patriotism and tensions between the sexes were brought to the fore. Furthermore, differing notions over the role women play during wartime make resolving the impact the war had on “the woman question” difficult. Pacifist feminists, such as those who started the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, believed that women were meant for peace, and that women all over the world should be united in their pursuit of emancipation. Yet women were also cast in much wartime rhetoric and propaganda as the reason to fight: the home was to be protected. Still others, those more radical in their thinking, saw the home itself as a site of war—the war between the sexes.

The question as to whether militancy would have succeeded is almost impossible to answer, as militant action was suspended almost immediately after the declaration of war. War was declared on 4 August 1914. On 10 August, suffragettes were granted amnesty. On 13 August, Emmeline Pankhurst called for a cessation of militant activity and suspended publication of the WSPU’s periodical,  The Suffragette . A little more than a year later, the periodical was issued with the new title  Britannia ; its subtitle was “For King, For Country, For Freedom.”

Initially, the WSPU planned to maintain its agenda of militant activism. In the early years of the war, the Pankhursts called for the destruction of “man-made” society; only after it was clear that the war, which quickly stalemated, would be unprecedented in its destruction did they shift their focus away from enfranchisement and towards war work. The Pankhursts forged an alliance with David Lloyd George and worked to campaign for a greater place for women in the war industries. In 1915, during a munitions shortage, they called for the opening of industries previously closed to women; this culminated in The Right to Serve March. Once Lloyd George was appointed Minister of Munitions, he continued to work with the Pankhursts to prevent strikes and reduce the influence of the trade unions (which some saw as a betrayal of the alliance between feminism and labor, although Emmeline Pankhurst had long ago disavowed any connection with Labour).

Women’s commitment to war work, to the preservation of the state, did more than prewar militancy to convince political leaders and the public of the need to grant female suffrage. The role women played during the war affirmed their value as citizens and their right to fully participate in public life. Emmeline Pankhurst’s speeches during the war illustrate this shift in the feminist agenda and the commitment to the allied cause. In a speech titled “What Is Our Duty?,” given in April 1915 in opposition to the Peace Conference at the Hague, she said, “And so it is a duty, a supreme duty, of women, first of all as human beings and as lovers of their country, to co-operate with men in this terrible crisis in which we find ourselves” (qtd. in  Speeches  361). Other organizations, such as the NUWSS, kept the suffrage agenda in play. Still others, such as the ELFS, criticized the war effort and those who would profit from it, including women, at the expense of the poor; this group maintained a feminist, pacifist, socialist agenda. Ultimately, though, it was the attention of feminists redirected towards the war effort that proved their value as citizens. The vote became secondary, and part of the overall cause for allied victory and democracy. As Emmeline Pankhurst said in her speech “Woman Suffrage a Necessary War Measure,”“We want the vote so that we may serve our country better. We want the vote so that we shall be more faithful and true to our Allies. We want the vote so that we may help to maintain the cause of Christian civilization for which we entered on this war. We want the vote so that in future such wars is possible may be averted” (qtd. in  Speeches  368).

The contribution of women to the war effort was noted, as was their willingness to cease agitation. In a speech on 28 March 1917, Asquith said, “Since the war began . . . we have had no recurrence of that detestable campaign which disfigured the annals of political agitation in this country, and no one can now contend that we are yielding to violence what we refused to concede to argument” (qtd. in Harrison 205). In April 1917, Lloyd George, who had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister the previous winter, agreed to meet with a group of suffragists. On 15 May 1917, the Representation of the People bill was introduced to the House of Commons, passed the House of Lords on 10 January 1918, and received royal assent on 6 February 1918. The WSPU reformed as the Women’s Party, with a platform of war until victory and harsh peace terms, as well as equality in marriage and work. Still, the achievement of women’s suffrage did not decide the question of women’s roles in public life; for example, Volume 22 of  The New Age  (see 22:5:88 and 22.22:425) reveals a continuing skepticism towards the public role of women as fully enfranchised citizens, and particularly towards the creation of the Women’s Party.

“The woman question” was one of the most divisive and urgently contested issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the Great War and the passage of women’s suffrage came some resolution of that question, although, as James Longenbach argues in his essay “The Women and Men of 1914,” the debates surrounding the relationships, both public and private, between men and women in the modernist period were far from over.

— Janine Utell

Appendix 1: Chronology of the “Woman Question” in the 20th Century

• National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) founded
• Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded
• Liberals come to power.
• First use of the term “suffragette” in the  Daily Mail  (10 January).
• First march and demonstration by WSPU at Parliament in February.
• WSPU moves to break away from Labour.
• First march by NUWSS.
• WSPU “Women’s Parliament,” followed by march on Parliament and 51 arrests.
• WSPU breaks away from Labour.
• Women’s Freedom League (WFL) formed.
• Women’s Suffrage Bill defeated.
• Herbert Asquith becomes Prime Minister; opposes votes for women.
• WSPU “Women’s Parliament,” huge meeting in Albert Hall and demonstration in Hyde Park.
• First window-breaking.
• Largest march on Parliament.
• First hunger strike by Marion Wallace Dunlop; forcible feeding introduced.
• Large demonstrations outside London.
• Liberals returned to power in General Election.
• Conciliation Bill for limited franchise introduced by Asquith, killed.
• Black Friday (18 November): WSPU deputation to meet with Asquith met with police brutality.
• Coronation Procession: 40,000 women march.
• Asquith announces the introduction of a manhood suffrage bill and says an amendment for women might be possible.
• Resumed militancy on the part of the WSPU.
• Window-smashing, arson, post attacks, arrests.
• Height of militant activity, destruction of public and private property.
• Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act (“Cat and Mouse” Act) introduced in April: hunger-striking prisoners released until they recover, and are then rearrested.
• Emily Wilding Davison throws herself in front of the King’s horse in Derby and dies.
• First World War. Militancy suspended. Suffrage workers, militant and nonmilitant, come out in support of the war effort.
• David Lloyd George replaces Asquith as Prime Minister.
• Lloyd George meets with suffragists.
• Representation of the People Bill clause to give women the vote passes the House of Commons 387-57.
• Representation of the People Act enfranchises women of 30 years of age and older who are householders, wives of householders, property owners (worth £5), or university graduates. Mrs. Humphry Ward weeps.

Appendix 2: Names and Organizations to Know

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS):

• Founded in 1897. Democratic, constitutional, nonmilitant. Led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Pursued equal franchise for men and women. Highest number of members: 53,000+ (1914).

Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU):

• Founded in 1903. Militant. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst with her daughter Christabel. Originally affiliated with Labour, the WSPU broke with the organization in 1905. Supported by Margaret Haig (Lady Rhondda), who wrote for the organization’s newspaper  Votes for Women  (later  The Suffragette  [1912], and then  Britannia  [1915] ); and by Lady Constance Lytton, who was sent to prison and went on hunger strike (Lady Constance’s husband, the Earl of Lytton, sponsored the Conciliation Bill). Highest number of members: 4459 (1909). Became the Women’s Party after the passage of the Representation of the People Act.

Women’s Freedom League (WFL):

• Founded by  Teresa Billington-Greig  in 1907 as a breakaway group from the WSPU. More democratic. Highest number of members: 4000 (1914). “Truculent Teresa,” as some journalists called her, wrote some columns in the first volume of  The New Age . But the magazine printed pieces on both sides of this debate, which makes it a good place to study the history of suffrage before the War.

Votes for Women Fellowship (VWF):

• Founded in 1912 by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence as a breakaway group from the WSPU.

The Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL):

• Founded in 1908. Maintained neutrality regarding tactics. Members included Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, Sarah Grand, Evelyn Sharp, May Sinclair, and Edith Zangwill.
• Another important outlet for writers committed to suffrage was  The Freewoman ; Dora Marsden was the editor, and one of its main writers was Rebecca West.  The Freewoman  later became  The Egoist , when it was taken over by Ezra Pound and transformed into one of the more important “little magazines” of the modernist period. West stopped writing for the magazine after this shift and became a regular contributor to  Time and Tide .

National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage:

• Founded in 1908 as the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Collected 337,018 signatures for an anti-suffrage position that same year. Aristocratic, opposed to women’s public activity. Prominent members included Mrs. Humphry Ward, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, Lady Jersey. Membership reached 10,000 in 1909, and by 1913 there were 255 branches.

Works Cited and Consulted

• Ardis, Ann.  New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990.
• Caine, Barbara.  English Feminism, 1780-1980 . New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
• Cooper, Helen M., Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, ed.  Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
• Crosby, Christina.  The Ends of History: Victorians and the “Woman Question” . New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Green, Barbara.  Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938 . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
• Harrison, Brian.  Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Woman Suffrage in Britain . New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978.
• Longenbach, James. “The Women and Men of 1914.” In Cooper et al. 97-128.
• Mangum, Teresa.  Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.
• Marcus, Jane. “Corpus-Corps-Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War.” In Cooper et al. 129-150.
• Purvis, June.  Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography . New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes: The Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1918 . Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999.
• Tickner, Lisa.  The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• van Wingerden, Sophia.  The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866-1928 . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
• Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign . New York: St. Martins’s Press, 1995.

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Women’s Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment

Use this Lesson with

• Students will review events and people who contributed to the eventual ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
• Students will analyze images reflecting some of the people and events that contributed to achieving women’s suffrage.
• Students will develop captions for those images and present them in an image timeline.
• Students will recognize the number and variety of people who contributed to the cause of women’s suffrage over an extended period.

Expand Materials Materials

• Handout A: Warm-up and Background Essay: Achieving Women’s Suffrage
• Handout B: Women’s Suffrage Image Timeline

Additional Resources

• Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick.  Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States . Third ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996)
• Buhle, Mari Jo and Paul. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Expand More Information More Information

Depending on your students’ background, you might choose to allow students to use the background essay or other resources for reference for the entire image analysis activity, for a limited time, or not at all. Also, accept reasoned explanations regarding relative significance of the people and events, the captions that students create, and the chronology that the images represent.

Expand Prework Prework

Before the lesson, the teacher should print in color and laminate the images shown in  Handout B: Women’s Suffrage Image Timeline , first making sure there are no page numbers on the image pages. Students will also need 4 × 6-inch sticky notes or notecards.

Expand Warmup Warmup

Distribute  Handout A  and allow students approximately five minutes to interpret the two political cartoons to determine if they are in favor of or opposed to women’s suffrage. Note that with its higher concentration of visual symbolism and smaller amount of text,  The Age of Brass: Or the Triumphs of Woman’s Rights  may be more challenging than  I Wonder if It’s Really Becoming?  Students should note that  The Age of Brass  was (probably) the earlier of the two cartoons.  I Wonder if It’s Really Becoming?  is listed in some sources as having been published in 1891, but the Library of Congress does not include that information, showing “n.d.” for “no date.” Discuss answers and transition students to the background essay, which will provide more detailed information about the suffrage movement in this period.

Expand Activities Activities

a. Assign the background essay to students, instructing them to annotate the essay’s main ideas and to answer the questions at the end. Assign the readings as best fits your teaching situation (small groups, jigsaw, and so forth). After students have read the essay, use a few of the questions to check for understanding.

b. Have students work in groups of two or three and distribute one of the laminated images to each group with these instructions written on the board: Without referring to  Handout A , work with your small group to identify the subject and approximate date of your image. Evaluate the significance of the person or event in the women’s suffrage movement. (At this point, depending on your discretion and student background, you might allow students to use the essay to check their accuracy.)

c. Have each group write a caption for their image on their sticky note or notecard, capturing the subject, their estimate of the date, and the significance of the person or event.

Expand Wrap Up Wrap Up

a. Instruct each small group to affix their caption to the image they analyzed. Then, have them use their images with captions to form an image timeline along the classroom wall(s). (A “U”-shaped timeline will enable everyone to see all the images.) Have each small group explain the significance of their person or event to the class in chronological order.

b. Ask students to decide who or what was the most significant person or event in achieving the vote for women. The Nineteenth Amendment is sometimes described as a progressive achievement. To what extent do students believe that characterization is accurate, given the number and variety of people who contributed to that achievement over an extended time?

c. Ask students to answer the central question of the lesson: How did women use the principle of equality and their free speech rights over many years to achieve a constitutional amendment protecting the right of women to vote?

Expand Extensions Extensions

Related resources.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Historical Records

• By Historical Era
• By Repository

Learning Activities

• Interpreting the Evidence Single Document Historical Analysis. Choose a primary source from the website or upload your own. Add captions to the primary source. Create analysis questions. Students analyze the document and answer questions based on the analysis.
• Comparison and Contextualization Two Document Compare and Contrast. Choose primary sources from the website or upload your own. Create analysis questions. Students analyze both documents and answer questions based on the analysis.
• Chronological Reasoning and Causation Multiple document analysis and synthesizing of historical information. Choose primary sources from the website or upload your own and create narratives and questions for each document to help your students draw conclusions and synthesize the information.
• Evaluating the Evidence Multiple document analysis and evaluation. Choose primary sources from the website or upload your own. Label each side of the scale with a different perspective. Create analysis questions. Students analyze the documents and place each document on one of side the scale based on the author’s perspective.
• Geographic Reasoning Multiple document analysis and geographic reasoning. Choose a map. Choose primary sources from the website or upload your own. Create analysis questions. Students analyze each document and place the document in the correct location on the map.

Compare and Contrast: Women’s Suffrage

One of the key analytical skills reflected in state and national learning standards is the ability to compare and contrast information.  Historical documents can be used to give students practice with this skill because there are many opposing viewpoints in history and documents can easily be found.  The following lesson uses two documents from the women’s suffrage era that were found at the Library of Congress American Memory website.  

Learning Objective:  Students will be able to read and analyze two historical documents on the issue of women’s suffrage and compare and contrast the arguments presented in each document.  They will be able to state arguments for and against women’s suffrage. 

NYS Social Studies Learning Standards:

Standard 1:  Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.

Standard 5:  Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the necessity for establishing governments; the governmental system of the U.S. and other nations; the U.S. Constitution; the basic civic values of American constitutional democracy; and the roles, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship, including avenues of participation.

Materials Needed:  Access the two documents at the American Memory website that is provided, as well as the graphic organizer, and save to media drive or hard disk for projection on screen or interactive whiteboard.  Copy the graphic organizer for all students.

Lesson Plan:  The following lesson assumes that students need assistance in learning how to analyze and compare/contrast historical documents.  If your students have previously used these skill sets, you may prefer to separate the class into cooperative groups, giving each group a laminated copy of one of the documents as they fill in the graphic organizer. 

1.  Share the following historical background and essential questions with students, giving them a preset for the historical era and task that they will be accomplishing.  Explain that the skill of comparing and contrasting is one that is important to learn, because it is often needed to be successful in state assessment tests or essay assignments in Social Studies or Language Arts.

General Historical Background:  Women in the United States achieved the vote only after a very gradual and protracted political battle that began in the mid-19th century.  Though some states passed suffrage laws earlier, (NY women achieved suffrage in 1917) nationally women did not achieve the vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.  

Essential Questions:  What arguments did opposing parties put forth on the subject of women’s suffrage?  How are these arguments alike, and how are they different?  

2.  Present the first document on screen.  On an interactive whiteboard, you may wish to highlight or underline parts of the document as students give answers to the following questions:

• What do you first notice about this document?
• Who is the author of the document?  When was it created? (Students will have to look at bibliographic information to ascertain this).
• What is the intended purpose of the document? 
• Who was the intended audience for the document? (Citizens, men, women, government, general public because reading level required is not too difficult).
• What terms need to be defined to understand this document? (Suffrage, wage, remedied, legislation, women of leisure, social and civic responsibility, consumers).  [Note:  it may be helpful to “chunk” the document for students by revealing one reason at a time for discussion on terms.]  
• What would you do if you did not know the meaning of a term?  (Look it up in a dictionary or online).  
• What would you do if you did not have access to a definition?  (Try to make sense of the term by using the context of surrounding information).  Example:  The term “wage” is followed by “workers,” so even if you did not understand the word wage, you could make sense of the statement.
• Which argument do you think is the strongest argument, and why?
• Is the document written in a logical, or an emotional, manner?
• Is there an argument that seems biased or untrue?

3.  The second document is at a more difficult reading level.  You may need to “chunk” the document for students and greatly assist them with understanding the vocabulary.  Present the second document on screen and ask:

• What is the first thing about this document that stands out?
• Who is the author of the document?  
• When was it created? (Students will have to look at bibliographic information to ascertain this).
• What is the intended purpose of the document? Who was the intended audience for the document? (Men and educated persons, government – not general public because reading level is difficult).
• What terms need to be defined to fully understand this document?  (stability, inexpedient, immunity, executing, suffrage, corrupt, effectual, efface, differentiation, division of labor, infringe, obligations, ballot-box, deprive, hitherto, impartial).  Can you understand the document without knowing each of those terms?  Which terms are absolutely necessary to understand?
• Which argument has more factual support?  How do you know this?  Which argument uses persuasive techniques more effectively, and why? Which argument do you think people of the era found more sympathetic?  Is the same argument more sympathetic today; if so, why?
• Is the document written in a logical or an emotional, manner?
• Is there an argument that seems biased or untrue? (For example, the statement that the majority of women are against it – how was that determined, or is it just the writer’s opinion?)

4.  Hand out the graphic organizer.  Project the two documents side-by-side, if possible.  Give students time (approximately 10 minutes) to write down their analysis of the documents.  Share the results of their findings and conduct a short class discussion.  As a follow-up assignment, you may want students to write a short reflection or homework assignment on the question, What arguments did people of this era offer in support of and in opposition to suffrage?

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