The campaign
The women's suffrage movement was the organized American campaign to win women the vote, and it was never a single organization.
It ran for seventy two years, from the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848 to the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment on 26 August 1920. Across those decades it took the form of a sequence of associations that formed, split, merged and split again, and that argued with each other about race, method and timing at least as sharply as they argued with the men who opposed them.
The names most readers know belong to different stages of that sequence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815 to 1902, and Susan B. Anthony, 1820 to 1906, led one wing from 1869; Lucy Stone led the other. Anna Howard Shaw, 1847 to 1919, was president of the merged association from 1904 to 1915, and Carrie Chapman Catt, 1859 to 1947, presented its Winning Plan in 1916. Alice Paul, 1885 to 1977, organized the Washington procession of 3 March 1913 and the Congressional Union that became the National Woman's Party in 1916. Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell and Florence Kelley spoke for the cause from outside all of them. What the campaign left behind is a documentary record of convention minutes, printed resolutions, a criminal trial and printed speeches, and what was actually said in them is a better guide than any later summary.
Where the campaign started, and why it started in 1848
The campaign started as a direct consequence of the antislavery movement refusing to seat women. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the women delegates were refused their seats, and it was there that Lucretia Mott, 1793 to 1880, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met. The Woman's Rights Convention that followed was called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier and held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848.
The convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled line for line on the Declaration of Independence and carrying one hundred signatures, sixty eight women and thirty two men. Eleven resolutions were put to the room. Ten passed unanimously. The ninth, the one demanding the vote, did not:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Frederick Douglass, around 1818 to 1895, spoke for that resolution and it carried by a narrow margin. The demand that gives the movement its name was the one thing the founding convention almost declined to ask for. The first National Woman's Rights Convention met at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, and on 29 May 1851 Sojourner Truth spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
The organizations, and the argument that split them in 1869
The organizations of the campaign divided in 1869 over a constitutional amendment, and the division lasted twenty one years. The American Equal Rights Association had been formed in 1866 to press for the vote for Black Americans and for women together. That alliance broke under the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time, and then under the Fifteenth, ratified in 1870.
Stanton and Anthony opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it enfranchised Black men and not women, and several of the arguments they made against it, in speeches and in print, were explicitly racist. In May 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. In November 1869 Lucy Stone and others founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and worked state by state. The two merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
How the campaign was actually run, from conventions to picket lines
The campaign was run through five working methods, used in different proportions by each association:
- Holding conventions that printed their proceedings, from Seneca Falls in 1848 and Worcester in 1850 onward, so that the arguments existed on paper.
- Winning territories and states one at a time, beginning with Wyoming Territory in 1869, the first jurisdiction in the United States to grant women the vote.
- Testing the Constitution in court: Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872, was arrested on 18 November 1872, and was tried at Canandaigua in June 1873 before Justice Ward Hunt, who directed a verdict of guilty rather than letting the jury decide and fined her one hundred dollars. She never paid it and he never committed her, which removed her route of appeal.
- Building alliances with labor and reform organizations, such as the National Women's Trade Union League founded in 1903: Florence Kelley spoke in Philadelphia on child labor and woman suffrage on 22 July 1905, and Mary Church Terrell spoke in Washington in 1906 on what segregation in the capital actually meant.
- Demonstrating in public: the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March 1913, organized by Alice Paul the day before Wilson's inauguration, and the Silent Sentinels who began picketing the White House in January 1917 and continued for about two and a half years. Pickets were arrested, imprisoned and force fed during hunger strikes.
Those methods converged after Catt presented the Winning Plan in 1916. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919, Tennessee ratified on 18 August 1920 as the thirty sixth state, and the amendment was certified on 26 August 1920.
Was the campaign peaceful, and was it successful
The campaign was peaceful in the sense that matters most: the American associations did not destroy property, and the violence in the record was done to the campaigners, in the arrests, imprisonments and forced feeding of the White House pickets. Alice Paul brought back from London the public procession and the standing picket, not the property destruction the British campaign also used.
It succeeded in the narrow and exact sense that it obtained what it asked for in 1848: the Nineteenth Amendment forbids the denial or abridgment of the vote on account of sex. It did not forbid the poll tax, the literacy test or the registration practices that kept many women from voting long after 1920, so it ended one exclusion and left others standing.
Facts about the campaign that are commonly got wrong
- The 1848 convention did not agree unanimously to demand the vote. The ninth resolution was the only one of eleven that met opposition.
- The movement was not one organization with one leadership. Two rival national associations ran in parallel from 1869 to 1890, and the National Woman's Party split from the merged body in 1916.
- The American campaigners were suffragists, not suffragettes. The second word belongs to the British movement and was rejected in the United States.
- The women's movement of the 1960s is a separate campaign. It began decades after ratification and concerned employment, pay and legal equality rather than the franchise.
- Sojourner Truth's Akron speech of 29 May 1851 survives in two very different texts, one published within weeks by a witness and one published twelve years later, and they do not agree.