American women's efforts to win the vote were significantly influenced by both the Civil War and World War I. The organized suffrage movement was in its beginning stages in 1861 when the pressures of the Civil War forced activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to choose between concentrating their energies on such activities as organizing fundraisers to support Union troops or focusing on suffrage laws and property rights for married women. In World War I the choice was the same, although the context and the response were different. In August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Partly as a result of the war, all American women finally received the right to vote.

Nineteenth-Century Efforts

Before the Civil War, the idea of women voting was a radical concept that threatened the traditional male role as head of the household...