Glossary

Women’s suffrage means the right of women to vote in public elections, and in United States history it names the campaign that won that right, which ran from 1848 to 1920 and ended with the Nineteenth Amendment. Every other term this subject uses is defined below, in one line each.

Two of these are worth reading before the rest. Suffragist and suffragette are not synonyms, and using the second for an American campaigner is an error rather than a stylistic choice. And the four organizations whose initials all begin with N are genuinely confusing, because two of them were rivals for twenty one years before merging into the third, and the fourth split away from that merger.

The two words that are not synonyms

A suffragist wanted the vote. A suffragette was a member of the British campaign, and the word began as a belittling coinage in a British newspaper: the diminutive ending was the insult. British campaigners took the name up deliberately, which is what usually happens to an insult that lands on people who are not embarrassed by it. American campaigners did not. They called themselves suffragists and so did their organizations, their newspapers and their opponents.

This is why calling Susan B. Anthony a suffragette is an error rather than a matter of taste. She died in 1906, before the British campaign had made the word current, and the movement she ran never used it about itself. The mistake reaches American readers because most of the popular material about votes for women, the films especially, is British.

The four organizations, and why they are confusing

Four sets of initials, three of them beginning with N, and the confusion is not the fault of the reader. Two of them were rivals for twenty one years: the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, both founded in 1869, months apart, by people who had just stopped being colleagues. In 1890 they merged into a third, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose name is simply the two old ones run together. In 1916 a fourth broke away from that merger over tactics: the National Woman’s Party.

So the sequence is a split, a merger and another split, across forty seven years, and the initials record it. NWSA and AWSA are the two halves of 1869. NAWSA is the 1890 merger. The National Woman’s Party is the wing that left in 1916 to picket.

Words that mean something narrower than they look

Three terms on this list are routinely read too broadly. Ratification is not the passage of an amendment in Congress; it is the separate approval afterward by the states, and it is the step that took from June 1919 to August 1920. The ninth resolution is not the Declaration of Sentiments but one clause put to a vote alongside ten others, and the only one that was in doubt. Suffrage itself is simply the right to vote, from the Latin for a supporting voice, and has nothing to do with suffering, which is the folk etymology almost everybody arrives with.

Two names for the same decade of argument

Readers meet the campaign under two labels and reasonably assume they are separate things. The women’s rights movement is the broader nineteenth century effort, which began with property, education, entry to the professions and the legal standing of married women, and treated the vote as one demand among several. Woman suffrage is the narrower campaign the movement became once it decided the vote was the demand that would carry the rest. The narrowing was a strategic choice, not a change of subject, and it is why a timeline of one is largely a timeline of the other.

One more term belongs here because it is the source of a common misreading. The women’s movement of the 1960s is a later and separate campaign. It shares vocabulary with this one and almost nothing else, and this site does not cover it beyond saying where the earlier campaign stopped.