The womenâs 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.
Womenâs Rights Movement Begins
The campaign for womenâs 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 Statesâ temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizationsâand in many of these, women played a prominent role.
Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the âCult of True Womanhoodâ: that is, the idea that the only âtrueâ 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 activistsâmostly women, but some menâgathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of womenâs 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.
âWe hold these truths to be self-evident,â proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, âthat 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.â
What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.
Civil War and Civil Rights
During the 1850s, the womenâs 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 Constitutionâs protection to all citizensâand defines âcitizensâ as âmaleâ; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.
Some womenâs 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 womenâs 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.