The Seneca Falls Convention: The Spark That Ignited a Movement
What would happen if you told a group of women in 1848 that they couldn’t speak at their own convention? You’d probably get a revolution. That’s exactly what happened when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were barred from attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London. This shocking experience planted the seeds for something much bigger.
Seneca Falls, New York is the location for the first Women’s Rights Convention, and it drew over 300 people, mostly women who were tired of being treated as second-class citizens. Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes “The Declaration of Sentiments” creating the agenda of women’s activism for decades to come. The document was revolutionary because it directly challenged the notion that women were inferior to men.
Early Pioneers and the Foundation of Organized Resistance
The movement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Worcester, Massachusetts, is the site of the first National Women’s Rights Convention. Frederick Douglass, Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth are in attendance. This alliance with the abolitionist movement was crucial, even though it would later cause significant fractures.
But in 1851, Black women, such as Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved person who became a women’s and civil rights advocate, attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech became a rallying cry that highlighted the intersection of gender and racial oppression. The early suffrage movement was more diverse than many people realize today.
The Civil War Interruption and Strategic Divisions
When the Civil War broke out, the suffrage movement faced a difficult choice. During the Civil War, efforts for the suffrage movement come to a halt. Women put their energies toward the war effort. However, suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton weren’t content to sit on the sidelines.
In 1863, Anthony and Stanton organized the Women’s Loyal National League, the first national women’s political organization in the U.S. It collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery in the largest petition drive in the nation’s history up to that time. This massive organizing effort proved that women could mobilize on a national scale when they put their minds to it.
The Fifteenth Amendment Controversy and Movement Split
The aftermath of the Civil War created a bitter division that would haunt the women’s suffrage movement for decades. The immediate cause for the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a Reconstruction amendment that would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. The original language of the amendment included a clause banning voting discrimination on the basis of sex, but was later removed.
In May 1869, two days after the final AERA annual meeting, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Meanwhile, In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Blackwell and others, many of whom had helped to create the New England Woman Suffrage Association a year earlier, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The hostile rivalry between these two organizations created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades, affecting even professional historians of the women’s movement.
Susan B. Anthony’s Bold Act of Civil Disobedience
Sometimes the most effective way to challenge an unjust law is to break it deliberately. In a case that generated national controversy, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for violating the Enforcement Act of 1870 by casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election. This wasn’t just a spontaneous act of defiance – it was a carefully planned legal strategy.
At the trial, the judge directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict, and She never pays the $100 fine for voting. Anthony’s trial became a media sensation and helped bring national attention to the suffrage cause. Her refusal to pay the fine was a form of continued civil disobedience that kept the issue in the public eye.
The Supreme Court Setback and New Strategies
The suffrage movement faced a crushing blow in 1875 when legal challenges failed. The Supreme Court, in 1875, put an end to the New Departure strategy by ruling in Minor v. Happersett that “the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone”. This decision forced suffragists to completely rethink their approach.
The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee voting rights for women. In 1878, Senator Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, introduced into Congress a women’s suffrage amendment. More than forty years later it would become the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution with no changes to its wording.
Western States Lead the Way
While the federal amendment stalled, something interesting was happening in the West. The first women to vote under a dedicated women’s suffrage law takes place in Utah on February 14, 1870 by Seraph Young. This marked a significant milestone – the first woman to vote legally in the United States under a law specifically granting women’s suffrage.
By 1896, women had gained the right to vote in four states (Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah). Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state—nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. The West was proving that women’s suffrage could work in practice, not just in theory.
The Rise of New Leadership and Militant Tactics
The early 1900s brought new energy and new approaches to the suffrage movement. In 1916, the National Women’s Party (NWP) was formed by the merging of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and the Women’s Party. With prominent leaders, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the NWP’s tactics were more attention-grabbing and militant than the more moderate approach of the NASWA.
Following a January 1917 meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, the NWP launched what became a two and a half year protest outside the White House involving a total of more than 2,000 women who picketed and went on hunger strikes. Alice Paul endured imprisonment and force-feeding, showing the extreme lengths to which suffragists were willing to go.
World War I Changes Everything
The Great War created an unexpected opportunity for the suffrage movement. The United States’ entry into WWI, in 1917, helped to shift public opinion about women’s suffrage and role in the country. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, supported the war effort, making the case that women should be rewarded with enfranchisement for their patriotic wartime service.
The National Woman’s Party staged marches, demonstrations, and hunger strikes while pointing out the contradictions of fighting abroad for democracy while limiting it at home by denying women the right to vote. The war, and the major role that women played in it in various capacities, breaks down most of the remaining opposition to women’s suffrage in the United States. By 1918 both major political parties are committed to women’s suffrage.
The Final Push: Congressional Approval
By 1919, the political stars were finally aligning. The work of both organizations swayed public opinion, prompting President Woodrow Wilson to announce his support of the suffrage amendment in 1918. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.
On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification.
The Tennessee Ratification Drama
The ratification process was nail-biting. By March 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but that year, it was rejected by another 6: South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Delaware, and Louisiana. After that series of demoralizing losses, the amendment appeared to be seriously in doubt. The 36th ratifying state remained elusive until the ratification process landed in Tennessee.
The Tennessee vote came down to a single legislator. A young state representative, Harry Burn, wore an anti-suffragist pin and voted against the amendment in what would be a tie vote. Harry had been internally conflicted so when a letter from his mom was delivered to him in the chambers before the revote, he took her advice. His mother urged him to “be a good boy” and vote for the amendment. In the revote, Burn cast the tie-breaking vote making Tennessee the 36th state to ratify the amendment allowing it to be adopted.
The Impact of the 19th Amendment
Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. election. However, the immediate impact was mixed. Few women turned out to vote in the first national elections after the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to do so. In 1920, 36 percent of eligible women voted (compared with 68 percent of men).
Within a year of suffrage law enactment, patterns of legislative roll call voting shifted, and local public health spending rose by roughly 35%. These findings are consistent with historical accounts: describing the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 (a landmark federal public health appropriation immediately following the 19th Amendment in 1920), Richard Meckel (1990) observes that “fear of being punished at the polls by American women, not conviction of the bill’s necessity, seems to have motivated Congress to vote for it”.
The Incomplete Promise: Women of Color Excluded
The 19th Amendment didn’t deliver on its promise for all women. On paper, the Amendment protected discrimination against all women, but in practice, it only gave white women the right to vote. Black women, Native American women, Asian American women, and women from other racial and ethnic minority groups were discriminated against for 45 more years until the passage of The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).
As Catt said, “To get the word ‘male’ out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign.” But for millions of women of color, once the amendment was adopted into the Constitution, the fight for equal voting rights was far from over. Even with a constitutional right to vote, women of color were not protected against the voter suppression tactics that took hold in the South.
The Continuing Legacy and Modern Relevance
The suffrage movement’s legacy extends far beyond the vote itself. Women’s progress is intertwined, still, with the suffrage movement. Access to the vote is a powerful tool to drive change and transform communities. Yet, despite their exclusion from the promise of the 19th Amendment, women of color have emerged as a growing electoral powerhouse. It is precisely because of this growing power that the rights of women of color are increasingly under attack today, just as they’ve have always been, by those in power who are seeking to preserve a status quo and maintain their privilege at the expense of justice for all.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the need for a more inclusive understanding of the suffrage movement. Therefore, Women’s Suffrage Centennial should not and cannot be a single-issue gender celebration, nor a one-size-fits-all symphony, but a landmark occasion for an intimate and nuanced dialog between gender and race. The article suggests that the Centennial should not only celebrate white American suffragists, but should be an opportunity to make a historic step to cross the color line that has cutoff African American women, as well as women of color from other races, ethnicities, and heritages from the power center.
Conclusion: An Unfinished Revolution
The women’s suffrage movement achieved something remarkable – it fundamentally altered American democracy by doubling the electorate. Yet its legacy remains complex and contested. The legacy of the 19th Amendment makes clear the urgent importance of an inclusive vision of equality that encompasses the diversity of women’s experiences, and this vision must be a priority in the years ahead. The commemoration of women’s suffrage must not be solely a celebration—it must be a call to action.
From the brave women who gathered in Seneca Falls in 1848 to the ongoing fights for voting rights today, the suffrage movement reminds us that democracy is not a destination but a journey. The question isn’t whether we should celebrate the 19th Amendment, but how we can build on its foundation to create a more inclusive and equitable society for all women.
Have you ever wondered what those early suffragists would think of how far we’ve come – and how far we still need to go?
