A timeline of the suffrage movement
The American suffrage movement timeline runs seventy two years, from the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848 to the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment on 26 August 1920, with a prologue in 1840 and a long sequel that reaches into the 1960s.
The entries below are the fixed points: the conventions that produced the documents, the two constitutional amendments that broke the movement apart in 1869, the criminal trial of 1872 and 1873, the demonstrations of the last decade, and the ratification votes. Every date here is a documented date, and each one belongs to the American campaign. Several entries are speeches, and what was actually said in them survives in print.
1840 to 1851: the conventions that started it
The conventions that started the American campaign were called in the 1840s by people who had come out of the antislavery movement, and the first of them was not held in the United States at all.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1840 | The World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refuses to seat the women delegates. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton meet there. |
| 19 and 20 July 1848 | The Woman's Rights Convention meets at the Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier. |
| 19 and 20 July 1848 | The convention adopts the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, with one hundred signatures: sixty eight women and thirty two men. |
| 19 and 20 July 1848 | Eleven resolutions are put. All pass unanimously except the ninth, which demands the vote. Frederick Douglass speaks for it and it carries by a narrow margin. |
| 1850 | The first National Woman's Rights Convention meets at Worcester, Massachusetts. |
| 29 May 1851 | Sojourner Truth speaks at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. |
1866 to 1890: the split and the two associations
The split of 1869 is the part of the timeline most often left out, and without it the rest does not make sense. Two constitutional amendments passed in these years, neither of them for women, and the movement divided over what to do about that.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1866 | The American Equal Rights Association is formed. |
| 1868 | The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified. It introduces the word male into the Constitution for the first time. |
| May 1869 | The National Woman Suffrage Association is founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. |
| 1869 | Wyoming Territory grants women the vote, the first in the United States. |
| November 1869 | The American Woman Suffrage Association is founded by Lucy Stone and others. |
| 1870 | The Fifteenth Amendment is ratified. |
| 1890 | The two associations merge as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. |
1872 to 1873: the vote, the arrest and the trial
The vote that led to the arrest was cast deliberately, as a test of the Constitution, and it produced the only criminal trial in the movement's history that most readers can name.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 5 November 1872 | Susan B. Anthony votes in Rochester, New York. |
| 18 November 1872 | She is arrested. |
| Between the arrest and the trial | She delivers one speech repeatedly across the county, titled Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? |
| June 1873 | The trial is held at Canandaigua before Justice Ward Hunt, who directs a verdict of guilty and does not let the jury decide. He fines her one hundred dollars. She never pays it and he does not commit her, which removes her route of appeal. |
1903 to 1920: the last stretch
The last stretch of the campaign brought in labor organizations, public processions and a picket line, and it ended in the ratification votes of 1919 and 1920.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1903 | The National Women's Trade Union League is founded. |
| 22 July 1905 | Florence Kelley speaks in Philadelphia on child labor and woman suffrage. |
| 1906 | Mary Church Terrell delivers What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States in Washington. |
| 3 March 1913 | The Woman Suffrage Procession is held in Washington, organized by Alice Paul, the day before Wilson's inauguration. |
| 1913 | The Congressional Union is formed. |
| 1915 | Anna Howard Shaw delivers The Fundamental Principle of a Republic at Ogdensburg, New York. |
| 1916 | The Congressional Union becomes the National Woman's Party. Carrie Chapman Catt presents the Winning Plan. |
| January 1917 | The Silent Sentinels begin picketing the White House. The picketing runs for about two and a half years. Pickets are arrested, imprisoned and force fed during hunger strikes. |
| 4 June 1919 | Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment. |
| 18 August 1920 | Tennessee ratifies, the thirty sixth state, completing ratification. |
| 26 August 1920 | The amendment is certified. |
1924 to 1965: the exclusions that outlasted the amendment
The exclusions that outlasted 1920 belong on the same timeline, because the Nineteenth Amendment removed one bar to the ballot and left several others in place. These dates are the ones that removed the others.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1924 | The Indian Citizenship Act. |
| 1943 | The Magnuson Act repeals Chinese exclusion. |
| 1952 | The McCarran-Walter Act removes the racial bar to naturalization. |
| 1964 | The Twenty Fourth Amendment abolishes the poll tax in federal elections. |
| 1965 | The Voting Rights Act. |
What this timeline is not
This timeline covers the American women's rights movement and no other. The British campaign has its own chronology, its own organizations and its own vocabulary, and it appears on this site only where it explains something American, chiefly the word suffragette and the demonstration tactics Alice Paul brought back from London before the Washington procession of 3 March 1913.
The women's movement of the 1960s is also a separate chronology, though the two touch at the end: the last rows above, 1964 and 1965, fall inside its decade. Its subjects were employment, pay, education and legal status rather than the franchise. The franchise was not finished in 1920 either. The Nineteenth Amendment settled one ground of exclusion, sex, and the other grounds stood until the dates in the table above removed them, in 1924, 1943, 1952, 1964 and 1965. Readers looking for a suffrage timeline and readers looking for a 1960s timeline are looking for two different campaigns that share a name.