Women's Suffrage Movement

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.

Before the Civil War, the idea of women voting was a radical concept that threatened the traditional male role as head of the household. In 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, activists from the Northeast began a seventy-year struggle for what seemed to them a natural right of all Americans. In the document written for this meeting by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments," women laid claim to the need for judicial, religious, and civil equality with men. The most controversial of the resolutions held that men had denied them their "inalienable" right to the franchise and that women had a duty to seek the right to vote. By the 1850s, suffragists, sometimes affiliated with antislavery and temperance groups, were actively lobbying at the state level for constitutional changes at the same time that they traveled throughout the United States giving speeches to raise the women's consciousness of the importance of the vote. Connecting freedom for slaves with their own civic emancipation, women had great hopes for the postwar period.

These hopes were not realized. Instead, women were not included in the postwar settlement that included the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The courts continued to deny that citizenship included the right to vote, although as women activists such as Stanton and Anthony noted that their conditional citizenship included the obligation to pay taxes. Another argument used by opponents was that women did not serve in the military and hence did not merit the vote.

By the end of the nineteenth century, four Western states—Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—had enfranchised women, in most cases after elaborate, expensive campaigns by the suffrage associations at the state level.

In the twentieth century, the focus turned to a crusade by the National American Woman's Suffrage Association to pass a national amendment, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment authorizing suffrage, which had been presented to Congress annually from 1870 on, but until 1914 the resolution never had sufficient support for an affirmative vote, much less the requisite two-thirds majority.

Inspired by the radical tactics used by women in Great Britain, a group of younger American women led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed the National Woman's Party in 1915. They emphasized attention-getting parades and other forms of publicity as well as pressure tactics that made women's suffrage an unavoidable topic even for those who opposed it. When World War I began in April 1917, the more conservative National American Woman's Suffrage Association for a time submerged its suffrage activities in war work. The association supported war work and efforts to inspire female patriotism even at the cost of suffrage efforts. Women who had little to do with the suffrage campaign were drawn into wartime work outside the home, and their contributions became an important part of the suffragists' argument that women deserved the vote.

Meanwhile, Paul and her activists challenged Woodrow Wilson's government. Beginning in 1917, these women made the case, often using President Wilson's own words on their banners, that the war was being fought for democracy. Quoting Wilson, a favorite banner read, "We shall fight for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments." The National Woman's Party stationed pickets outside the White House until embarrassed officials began arresting and imprisoning them on frivolous charges such as impeding access to sidewalks. In prison, Alice Paul insisted that they were political prisoners. When privileges such as writing letters and not wearing prison uniforms were denied, the Paul and other women in jail began hunger strikes, which, in an overreaction by the government, led to their being force-fed. Still, Wilson—who believed that suffrage was a state and not a federal issue—withheld his support from a national amendment. Finally, in early 1918, under pressure from both of the suffrage associations, he urged a compliant Congress to pass what became, when it was ratified in the summer of 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment.

World War I provided a necessary boost to the organized suffrage movement. Not only had the wartime activities of women in factories and businesses, on farms and in stores, made the denial of the franchise an absurdity given women's patriotic service and the purpose of the war to make the world safe for democracy, but the connection between the international goal of democracy that Wilson articulated and the organized crusade of women's suffrage changed the opinions of both lawmakers and ordinary Americans.

Anthony, Susan B.; Catt, Carrie Chapman; Feminism; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Wilson, Woodrow; Women and World War I.

Baker, Jean H., ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, et al., eds. History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. Rochester, NY: Source Book Press 1881–1922.

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