Fighting for Voting Rights.

Among women's rights activists, the most hotly debated topic of the day was suffrage —the right to vote. The suffrage movement was a quarter of a century old by the end of Reconstruction, and women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were having a difficult time understanding how African American men could be extended the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1870) and yet women could be regarded as unfit to vote. The increase in college programs to educate women and their success in such social and political efforts as the settlement-house movement only exaggerated the outrage of activist women that they lacked the basic rights of an American citizen. In 1869 two national organizations were formed to attack the problem: Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to work for a...