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In 1866, women petitioned the Missouri legislature to remove the word “male” from the state Constitution’s section on voting rights. They were ignored. On May 8 of the next year, five women met in the director’s room of the St. Louis Mercantile Library to establish the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri.
The source of this map is unknown. Originally printed around 1914, it was altered over a period of five years to reflect the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in various states through mid 1919. Each state is marked in patterns representing the status of women’s suffrage. White represents full suffrage. Stripes represent partial suffrage.
- Women’s Rights Movement Begins
- Seneca Falls Convention
- Civil Rights and Women's Rights During The Civil War
- Gallery: The Progressive Campaign For Suffrage
- Winning The Vote at Last
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 movement...
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 Conventionagreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved thei...
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 Constitutionraised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citiz...
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 “cre...
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 Cattunveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last...
One study found that as American women gained the right to vote in different parts of the country, child mortality rates decreased by up to 15 percent. Another study found a link between women’s suffrage in the United States with increased spending on schools and an uptick in school enrollment. Women increasingly have won elections in the ...
The 19th Amendment was not easily won. From the 1830s to 1920, a diverse group of activists used a multitude of strategies to win voting rights for women. Some focused on amending the U.S. Constitution. Others appealed to the states for women’s admission to the polls. They lobbied privately in their parlors and publicly in the halls of Congress.
In the early 20th century, woman suffrage became a mass movement that effectively utilized modern publicity and outreach methods. Woman suffrage was never a “gift.”. Skillful organization, mobilization, and activism were required to build a powerful social movement and achieve the long-sought goal.
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Across the country, women from minority groups mobilized for suffrage; they believed that the ballot would lead to economic empowerment and community reform. In the final decade leading to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, confrontational tactics came to define the movement.
