They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it took seventy two years
The demand, as written
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
In August 1920 the Constitution of the United States was amended to forbid denying anyone the vote on account of sex, seventy two years after a convention in a chapel in upstate New York first demanded it in writing.
That is narrower than being given the vote, and the difference is most of this site.
The American campaign for women's suffrage ran from 1848 to 1920. It was not a mood and it was not a moment: it was a lobbying operation that outlived almost everybody who started it, argued with itself for twenty one years, and had to be won state by state and in Congress at the same time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were both dead before it succeeded.
What survives of it is mostly words. The campaigners argued in public, at length, in convention halls and courtrooms and from the back of trains, and a great deal of what they said was written down at the time. This site goes to those documents, says who was speaking and to whom, and is careful about the places where the record is not as certain as it looks.
Seventy two years
Where to start
- What was actually said
The speeches of the American women's rights movement
- The Nineteenth Amendment
What it says and what it changed
- Seneca Falls, July 1848
The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848
- The leaders of the campaign for women's suffrage
Who argued for votes for women
- The campaign
How the campaign was actually run
- The words, and which side chose them
Suffragette or suffragist? The words of the campaign
What people ask first
Did the Nineteenth Amendment give women the vote?
Not quite, and the difference matters. It forbids denying the vote on account of sex. It left every other bar standing, which is why many Black women in the South could not vote for another forty five years.
Suffragette or suffragist?
The American campaigners were suffragists. Suffragette began as a British newspaper's insult, was taken up in Britain and refused in America.
Did Sojourner Truth really say the line everybody quotes?
Probably not in those words. The report published at the time does not contain it in that form, and the famous version was printed twelve years later by somebody else, in a dialect she is unlikely to have spoken.
Why did it take seventy two years?
Because the vote had to be won twice over, in the states and in Congress, against organized opposition and through a civil war.
Resolved is an independent reference. It is a new project with no connection to any previous owner of this domain, it is not affiliated with any organization named on it, and it sells nothing.