This paper traces the history of the women's suffrage movement in the United States from its earliest roots in colonial America to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Beginning with Margaret Brent's 1647 request for a vote in the Maryland colonial assembly, the paper examines the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the founding and eventual merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, and the militant tactics of Alice Paul's Congressional Union. It concludes with the hard-won passage of the constitutional amendment that gave American women the right to vote.
Women in the United States made the fight for suffrage their most fundamental demand because they saw it as the defining feature of full citizenship. The philosophy underlying women's suffrage was the belief in "natural rights" — the right to govern themselves and choose their own representatives. Women's suffrage asserted that women should enjoy individual rights of self-government, rather than relying on indirect civic participation as the mothers, sisters, or daughters of male voters.
However, most men and even some women believed that women were not suited by circumstance or temperament for the vote. Because women were by nature believed to be dependent on and subordinate to men, many thought women could not be trusted to exercise the independence of thought necessary for choosing political leaders responsibly. Others feared that entry of women into political life challenged the traditional assignment of women to the home and might lead to disruption of the family. For all of these reasons, women's enfranchisement did not come easily. American women toiled long and hard for many decades to secure a voice in the United States government, and through much effort, women and women's groups worked to gain the same freedoms as men. This paper recounts these struggles, beginning in 1647 and ending in 1920 when women finally obtained a constitutional amendment granting them the right to vote.
The first woman in the North American colonies to demand the vote was Margaret Brent, the owner of extensive lands in Maryland. In 1647, Brent requested two votes in the colonial assembly — one for herself and one for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose power of attorney she held. The governor denied her request, which led to Brent's boycott of the assembly. Although her original bid for voting rights failed, widowed property owners did vote in several eighteenth-century colonial elections.
New Jersey women voted as early as 1790 when they discovered a loophole in the state's constitution that gave the vote to anyone who satisfied certain property and residential requirements. Unfortunately, their ability to exploit this loophole did not last long. A state legislator who had nearly been defeated by women voters helped pass a bill to disenfranchise the state's women and Black men in 1807. Thereafter, with only few and minor exceptions until 1869, American women were barred from voting in all federal, state, and local elections.
American women were the first in the world to voice organized demands for the vote. Abolitionist activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with several other women, organized a women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 and 20, 1848. The catalyst for the event was discontent with the limitations placed on women even after the American Revolution had been fought to end tyranny — benefits that had largely eluded women. The organizers called for "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the group's leader, used the Declaration of Independence as the basis for what she called a Declaration of Sentiments. In doing so, she connected the campaign for women's rights directly to a powerful American symbol of liberty. The grievances elaborated in the Declaration of Sentiments included:
The convention unanimously endorsed the Declaration of Sentiments and all its resolutions with the exception of the resolution on women's right to vote, which was the most controversial of all. A heated debate about the right to vote ensued. Surprisingly, it was a Black male abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who swayed the convention to pass the resolution — but only by a narrow majority. The women also agreed to the following statement: "It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise."
The 1848 convention was followed by the first national women's rights convention in 1850, which attracted more than 1,000 participants to Worcester, Massachusetts, from as far away as California. Paulina Wright Davis was the organizer and president of the convention. Her opening speech outlined its purpose: "It is one thing to issue a declaration of rights...but quite another thing...to commend the subject to the world's acceptance...to secure the desired reformation." National conventions continued to be held yearly (except for 1857) through 1860.
The early feminists in the United States demanded a wide range of changes in women's social, moral, legal, educational, and economic status, but initially shied away from emphasizing the right to vote as a major area of reform. After the Civil War, however, women's rights leaders came to see enfranchisement as one of their most important goals. This shift was driven by their disappointment when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution did not provide universal suffrage for all Americans but extended the franchise only to Black men. In response, two women's suffrage organizations were founded in 1869, each with different positions on those amendments and different ideas about how best to promote women's suffrage. Regrettably, the existence of two separate groups diluted the efforts of the suffrage cause for more than twenty years.
The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and instead called for a Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise women. Led exclusively by women, the New York-based NWSA focused on enfranchisement through federal action and adopted a radical tone in promoting a wide variety of feminist reforms. The efforts of the NWSA yielded poor results: between 1869 and 1888, members of Congress submitted eighteen constitutional amendments designed to extend voting rights to women, but none won legislative approval in either the House or the Senate.
Outside of Congress, the NWSA resorted to other tactics, including civil disobedience. In 1872, Anthony and others were arrested for attempting to vote in state elections. Their trials attracted considerable attention to the suffrage movement and prompted a United States Supreme Court decision, Minor v. Happersett (1875). In that case, the Court decisively rejected the claim that the term "citizens" in the Fourteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote. The decision was a major setback for the NWSA, and it also signaled the Court's subsequent and similarly narrow reading of the individual rights protected by the Fifteenth Amendment.
The competing American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was led by Lucy Stone, with the aid of her husband Henry Blackwell, Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Ward Beecher, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others. This group endorsed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments while simultaneously working for women's suffrage by developing state-level grassroots support. The AWSA's strategy was to make women's suffrage and other feminist reforms appear less radical and more consistent with widely shared American values. However, its strategy fared no better than that of the NWSA; the group did not achieve any state-level voting rights for women.
"NAWSA merger, western suffrage states, Anthony and Shaw"
"Catt's strategy, Alice Paul's militancy, Wilson's support"
"State ratification battle and Tennessee's decisive vote"
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.