Women’s suffrage is the right for women to vote and run ...



Women’s suffrage is the right for women to vote and run for office and for the economic and political reform movement for these rights to women and without any limits or qualifications like property ownership, paying tax, or marriage status. The movement’s origins are credited to the 1700s France. In 1906, Finland was the first nation in the world to give full suffrage to all people, including women. New Zealand was the first country in the world to give all the right to vote in 1893, but women didn’t get the right to run in the New Zealand government until 1939.

1851: Prussian law forbids women from joining political parties or attending meetings where politics is discussed.

1869: Britain grants unmarried women who are householders the right to vote in local elections.

1862/3: Some Swedish women gain voting rights in local elections.

1881: Some Scottish women get the right to vote in local elections.

1893: New Zealand grants equal voting rights to women.

1894: The United Kingdom expands women's voting rights to married women in local but not national elections.

1895: South Australian women gain voting rights.

1899: Western Australian women granted voting rights.

1901: Women in Australia get the vote, with some restrictions.

1902: Women in New South Wales get the vote.

1902: Australia grants more voting rights to women.

1906: Finland adopts woman suffrage.

1907: Women in Norway are permitted to stand for election.

1908: Women in Denmark some women granted local voting rights.

1908: Victoria, Australia, grants women voting rights.

1909: Sweden grants vote in municipal elections to all women.

1913: Norway adopts full woman suffrage.

1915: Women get the vote in Denmark and Iceland.

1916: Canadian women in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan get the vote.

1917: When the Russian Czar is toppled, the Provisional Government grants universal suffrage with equality for women; later the new Soviet Russian constitution includes full suffrage to women.

1917: Women in the Netherlands are granted the right to stand for election.

1918: The United Kingdom gives a full vote to women of age 30 and older and men age 21 and older.

1918: Canada gives women the vote in most provinces by federal law. Quebec is not included.

1918: Germany grants women the vote.

1918: Austria adopts woman suffrage.

1918: Women given full suffrage in Latvia, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia.

1918: Russian Federation gives women the right to vote.

1918: Women granted limited voting rights in Ireland.

1919: Netherlands gives women the vote.

1919: Woman suffrage is granted in Belarus, Luxemburg and Ukraine.

1919: Women in Belgium granted right to vote.

1919: New Zealand allows women to stand for election.

1919: Sweden grants suffrage with some restrictions.

1920: On August 26, a constitutional amendment is adopted when the state of Tennessee ratifies it, granting full woman suffrage in all states of the United States. (For more on woman suffrage state-by-state, see the American Woman Suffrage Timeline.)

1920: Woman suffrage is granted in Albania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

1920: Canadian women get the right to stand for election.

1921: Sweden gives women voting rights with some restrictions.

1921: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania grant woman suffrage.

1921: Belgium grants women the right to stand for election.

1922: Burma grants women voting rights.

1924: Mongolia, Saint Lucia and Tajikistan give suffrage to women.

1924: Kazakstan gives limited voting rights to women.

1925: Italy grants limited voting rights to women.

1927: Turkmenistan grants woman suffrage.

1928: The United Kingdom grants equal voting rights to women.

1928: Guyana grants woman suffrage.

1928: Ireland expands women's suffrage rights.

1929: Ecuador grants suffrage, Romania grants limited suffrage.

1929: Women found to be "persons" in Canada and therefore able to become members of the Senate.

The first women's rights meeting in the United States, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, itself followed several decades of a quietly emerging egalitarian spirit among women.

What a long road it would be to winning the vote for women! Before the Nineteenth Amendment secured women's right to vote in the US, more than 70 years would pass.

The Woman Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 with that pivotal meeting, weakened during and after the Civil War. For practical political reasons, the issue of black suffrage collided with woman suffrage, and tactical differences divided the leadership.

Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which accepted men as members, worked for black suffrage and the 15th Amendment, and worked for woman suffrage state-by-state. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, with Lucretia Mott, called the 1848 gathering at Seneca Falls, founded with Susan B. Anthony the National Woman Suffrage Association, which included only women, opposed the 15th Amendment because for the first time citizens were explicitly defined as male, and worked for a national Constitutional Amendment for woman suffrage.

Frances Willard's Women's Christian Temperance Union, the growing Women's Club movement after 1868, and many other social reform groups drew women into other organizations and activities, though many worked for suffrage, too. These women often applied their organizational skills learned in the other groups to the suffrage battles -- but by the turn on the century; those suffrage battles had been going on for fifty years already.

Stanton and Anthony and Mathilda Jocelyn Gage published the first three volumes of their history of the suffrage movement in 1887, after winning women's vote in only a few states. In 1890, the two rival organizations, the NWSA and the AWSA, merged, under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt in the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

After fifty years, a leadership transition had to take place. Lucretia Mott died in 1880. Lucy Stone died in 1893. Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902, and her lifelong friend and coworker Susan B. Anthony died in 1906.

Women continued to provide active leadership in other movements, too: the National Consumer's League, the Women's Trade Union League, movements for health reform, prison reform, and child labor law reform, to name a few. Their work in these groups helped build and demonstrate women's competence in the political realm, but also drew women's efforts away from the direct battles to win the vote.

By 1913, there was another split in the Suffrage movement. Alice Paul, who had been part of more radical tactics when she visited the suffragists of England, founded the Congressional Union (later the National Women's party), and she and the other militants who joined her were expelled by the NAWSA.

Large suffrage marches and parades in 1913 and 1915 helped bring the cause of woman suffrage back to the center. The NAWSA also shifted tactics, and in 1916 unified its chapters around efforts to push a suffrage Amendment in Congress.

In 1915, Mabel Vernon and Sarah Bard Field and others traveled across the nation by automobile, carrying half a million signatures on a petition to Congress. The press took more notice of the "suffragettes."

Montana, in 1917, three years after establishing woman suffrage in the state, elected Jeannette Rankin to Congress, the first woman with that honor.

Finally, in 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, sending it to the states. On August 26, 1920, after Tennessee ratified the Amendment by one vote, the 19th Amendment was adopted.

Alice Paul led the more radical wing of those who were working for women's suffrage in 1917. Paul had taken part in more militant suffrage activity in England, including hunger strikes that were met with imprisonment and brutal force-feeding methods. She believed that by bringing such militant tactics to America, the public's sympathy would be turned towards those who protested for woman suffrage, and the vote for women would be won, finally, after seven decades of activism.

And so, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others separated in America from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, and formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), which in 1917 transformed itself into the National Woman's Party (NWP).

While many of the activists in the NAWSA turned during World War I either to pacifism or to support of America's war effort, the National Woman's Party continued to focus on winning the vote for women. During wartime, they planned and carried out a campaign to picket the White House in Washington, DC. The reaction was, as in Britain, strong and swift: arrest of the picketers and their imprisonment. Some were transferred to an abandoned workhouse located at Occoquan, Virginia. There, the women staged hunger strikes, and, as in Britain, were force-fed brutally and otherwise treated violently.

I’ve referred to this part of woman suffrage history in other articles, notably when describing the history of the suffragist split over strategy in the last decade of activism before the vote was finally won.

Feminist Sonia Pressman Fuentes documents this history in her article on Alice Paul. She includes this re-telling of the story of Occoquan Workhouse's "Night of Terror," November 15, 1917:

Under orders from W.H Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.

(Source was from Barbara Leaming, Katherine Hepburn (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 182.)

Votes for women were first seriously proposed in the United States in July, 1848, at the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. One woman who attended that convention was Charlotte Woodward. She was nineteen at the time. In 1920, when women finally won the vote throughout the nation, Charlotte Woodward was the only participant in the 1848 Convention who was still alive to be able to vote, though she was apparently too ill to actually cast a ballot.

Some battles for woman suffrage were won state-by-state by the early 20th century. Alice Paul and the National Women's Party began using more radical tactics to work for a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution: picketing the White House, staging large suffrage marches and demonstrations, going to jail. Thousands of ordinary women took part in these -- a family legend is that my grandmother was one of a number of women who chained themselves to a courthouse door in Minneapolis during this period.

In 1913, Paul led a march of eight thousand participants on President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration day. (Half a million spectators watched; two hundred were injured in the violence that broke out.) During Wilson's second inaugural in 1917, Paul led a march around the White House.

Opposed by a well-organized and well-funded anti-suffrage movement which argued that most women really didn’t want the vote, and they were probably not qualified to exercise it anyway, women also used humor as a tactic. In 1915, writer Alice Duer Miller wrote:

Why We Don’t Want Men to Vote

• Because man’s place is in the army.

• Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than fighting about it.

• Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.

• Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arm, uniforms, and drums.

• Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions show this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government.

During Wolrd War I, women took up jobs in factories to support the war, as well as taking more active roles in the war than in previous wars. After the war, even the more restrained National American Woman Suffrage Association, headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, took many opportunities to remind the President, and Congress, that women’s war work should b rewarded with recognition of their political equality. Wilson responded by beginning to support woman suffrage. In a speech on September 18, 1918, he said, “We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?”

Less tan a year later, the House of Representatives passed, in a 304 to 90 vote, a proposed Amendment to the Constitutuion: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any States on Account of gender. The Congress shall have the power by appropriate legistation to enforce the provisions of this article.

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