It’s been 96 years since women were given the right to vote. Jone Johnson Lewis is a Women’s History Expert, and she provides the following summary of the women’s suffrage victory.
Votes for women were first seriously proposed in the United States in July, 1848, at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. One woman who attended that convention was Charlotte Woodward. She was nineteen at the time.
In 1920, when women finally won the vote throughout the nation, Charlotte Woodward was the only participant in the 1848 Convention who was still alive to be able to vote, though she was apparently too ill to actually cast a ballot.
Some battles for woman suffrage were won state-by-state by the early 20th century. Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party began using more radical tactics to work for a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution: picketing the White House, staging large suffrage marches and demonstrations, going to jail.
Thousands of ordinary women took part in these – a family legend is that my grandmother was one of a number of women who chained themselves to a courthouse door in Minneapolis during this period.
In 1913, Paul led a march of eight thousand participants on President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration day. (Half a million spectators watched; two hundred were injured in the violence that broke out.) During Wilson’s second inaugural in 1917, Paul led a march around the White House.
Opposed by a well-organized and well-funded anti-suffrage movement which argued most women really didn’t want the vote, and they were probably not qualified to exercise it anyway, women also used humor as a tactic.
Why We Don’t Want Men to Vote
Because a man’s place is in the army.
Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
Because if men should adopt peaceable methods, women will no longer look up to them.
Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms, and drums.
READ MORE ON WOMEN’S VOICES MAGAZINE
