The American Women’s

Suffrage Movement

right to vote = suffrage = enfranchisement

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Seneca Falls, New York 1848

• In the early 1800s, many women were involved in the abolition (anti-slavery) and temperance (no alcohol) movements

• A group of women and men gathered at a conference in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848

• This conference was led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott

• Conference attendees wrote the Declaration of Sentiments

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Fifteenth Amendment, 1871

• Granted African-American men the right to vote

• Disappointed many women who thought African-American men and women would be enfranchised together

• African Americans were split over whether men should get vote before women

Sojourner Truth, 1869

“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women … And if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

Sojourner Truth, 1864

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Before 1910

• National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

• Big leaders: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Two big strategies:• Try to win suffrage state by state• Try to pass a Constitutional

Amendment (but this would need to be ratified by 36 states – or three-fourths)

Susan B. Anthony

In the late 1800s, Susan B. Anthony tried several times to introduce an Amendment bill for women’s suffrage, but it was always killed in the Senate.Susan B. Anthony

Anti-suffragists

Those who opposed extending the right to vote to

women were called anti-suffragists.

Many anti’s were women.

Political cartoon mocking anti’s: “O Save Us, Senators, from Ourselves!”

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Beliefs of Anti-Suffragists

• Women were high-strung, irrational, and emotional

• Women were not smart or educated enough

• Women should stay at home• Women were too physically frail; they

would get tired just walking to the polling station

• Women would become masculine if they voted

Map of Women’s Suffrage Before 1920

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The Next Generation

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902• Susan B. Anthony died in 1906• But in the early 1900s many young,

middle-class women were going to college and joining the suffrage movement

• Many working-class women also joined the cause, hoping the right to vote would help improve working conditions

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Safe or Sorry?

Carrie Chapman Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She believed in:

• Careful state-by-state strategy• Supporting President Wilson even

though he didn’t outright support suffrage because Democrats were a safer bet than Republicans

• Acting ladylike so as not to embarrass the movement

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National Woman’s Party

Alice Paul led the NWP and believed in more aggressive strategies:

• Focused on passing a Constitutional Amendment

• Adopted un-ladylike strategies from British suffragettes (e.g. heckling politicians, picketing)

• Refused to support President Wilson if he wouldn’t support woman suffrage

• NWP members were arrested for picketing in front of the White House. They were put in jail, went on a hunger strike, and were force-fed.

1. Is the cartoon for or against women’s suffrage? 2. Who would be the target audience of this cartoon? 3. What is the message?

1. Is the poster for or against women’s suffrage?

2. Who would be the target audience of this cartoon?

3. What is the message?

Where are they?

Presidents

Inez Milholland Boissevain, wearing white cape, seated on white horse at the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade, March 3, 1913, Washington, D.C., 1913. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Women's suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, New York, October 1917, carrying the signatures of a million women

"Kaiser Wilson" banner held by Alice Paul who led the picketing of the White House, circa 1917-18

The sign reads: “President Wilson is deceiving the world when he appears as the prophet of democracy. President Wilson has opposed those who demand democracy for this country. He is responsible for the disfranchisement of million of Americans. We in American know this. The World will find him out.”

Parody from Puck of the anti-World War I protest song "I Did Not Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier" with the context altered to women's suffrage. Arguments in favor of granting women the right to vote included the contention that female voters would support laws that reduced prostitution, labor abuses, and other social evils.

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19th Amendment, 1920

Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify, and it passed by only 1 vote.

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.

Use the following address from President Woodrow Wilson to the U.S. Senate, January 10, 1918, to answer the following questions:

I regard the concurrence [agreement] of the Senate in the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged. . . .

Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that our women can give, -- service and sacrifice of every kind,-- and still say we do not see what title that gives them to stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and ours? We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

And not to the winning of the war only. It is vital to the right solution of the great problems which we must settle, and settle immediately, when the war is over. . . . We shall need their moral sense to preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life as well as to discover just what it is that ought to be purified and reformed. Without their counsellings we shall be only half wise.

1. What did President Wilson want the Senate to do?2. How did the role of women during World War I affect the arguments that

President Wilson was using to try to persuade the Senate?3. President Wilson believed that the change he wanted would benefit the United

States after the war in what way?