The leaders of the campaign for women's suffrage
The leaders of the American campaign for women's suffrage were organizers, editors and platform speakers who worked in public between 1848 and 1920, and everyone profiled on this site is here for one reason: something they said, wrote or organized survives.
They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it took seventy two years to get. The campaign was a lobbying operation with conventions, petitions, state referendum fights and congressional committees, and the people below are sorted by what each argued for rather than by how famous they became.
What the suffrage leaders were asking for, and who they were asking
Suffrage leaders were asking for the ballot, and they asked two different bodies for it at once. One route ran through the states, where a legislature or a male electorate could extend the vote to women inside its own borders, as Wyoming Territory did in 1869, the first place in the United States to do it. The other ran through Congress and required a federal amendment. The two routes competed for money and staff for decades, and that choice explains the campaign length better than any speech does.
Most of the leaders came into the work through the antislavery and temperance societies, the only organizations of the period in which women held meetings, kept minutes and spoke to mixed audiences. That is also where they met the rule that made the campaign necessary: at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the women delegates were refused their seats, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met there.
The leaders, sorted by what each one argued for
| Speaker | Years | What they argued for | What survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lucretia Mott | 1793 to 1880 | Women speaking and voting in the antislavery societies | The Seneca Falls convention, 1848 |
| Elizabeth Cady Stanton | 1815 to 1902 | Full legal equality: property, wages, divorce, custody, the ballot | The Declaration of Sentiments, 1848 |
| Frederick Douglass | around 1818 to 1895 | The vote for women and for Black Americans alike | His speech for the ninth resolution |
| Sojourner Truth | around 1797 to 1883 | Abolition and women's rights as one case | The Akron speech, 29 May 1851, in two texts |
| Susan B. Anthony | 1820 to 1906 | That women were citizens already, so the vote was theirs | Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? |
| Mary Church Terrell | 1863 to 1954 | That segregation and disfranchisement were one system | What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States, 1906 |
| Florence Kelley | 1859 to 1932 | That votes were how women would protect factory children | Her Philadelphia speech, 22 July 1905 |
| Anna Howard Shaw | 1847 to 1919 | That government without consent is not a republic | The Fundamental Principle of a Republic, 1915 |
| Carrie Chapman Catt | 1859 to 1947 | State and federal campaigns run as one operation | The Winning Plan, 1916 |
| Alice Paul | 1885 to 1977 | Holding the party in power answerable for the amendment | The 1913 procession; the Silent Sentinels, January 1917 |
The founders who put the demand in writing: Mott, Stanton and Douglass
Mott, Stanton and Douglass put the demand into a document, which is why the campaign counts from 1848. The Woman's Rights Convention met at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848, called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier. It adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and one hundred people signed: sixty eight women and thirty two men.
Eleven resolutions were put to the convention. Ten passed unanimously. The ninth, which demanded the vote, did not, and it carried only by a narrow margin after Frederick Douglass spoke for it. The movement's central demand was the least popular thing in the room.
The speakers who widened the argument: Truth, Terrell and Kelley
Truth, Terrell and Kelley widened the argument from the ballot to the conditions that made the ballot matter. Sojourner Truth, born enslaved in New York and freed under state law in 1827, spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on 29 May 1851, and argued abolition and women's rights as one case. Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women from 1896, delivered What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States in Washington in 1906, and was still picketing segregated restaurants in that city in the early 1950s, in her eighties. Florence Kelley, Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois from 1893 and head of the National Consumers League from 1899, spoke in Philadelphia on 22 July 1905 on child labor and woman suffrage as one subject.
The organizers who ran the machine: Anthony, Shaw, Catt and Paul
Anthony, Shaw, Catt and Paul ran the machine that turned the argument into legislation. Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872, was arrested on 18 November, and was convicted in June 1873 at Canandaigua before Justice Ward Hunt, who directed the verdict and did not let the jury decide. Anna Howard Shaw, ordained in 1880 and qualified in medicine in 1886, led the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1904 to 1915. Carrie Chapman Catt presented the Winning Plan in 1916, running state and federal campaigns together instead of choosing. Alice Paul organized the Woman Suffrage Procession of 3 March 1913, formed the Congressional Union that year, turned it into the National Woman's Party in 1916, and put the Silent Sentinels outside the White House from January 1917.
What the leaders argued about among themselves
The leaders argued hardest with each other, and the worst of it is on the record. The American Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866 to campaign for the vote for Black men and for women together. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and put the word male into the Constitution for the first time. Stanton and Anthony then campaigned against the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, and Stanton made that case in print in explicitly racist terms, arguing that the vote should not go to Black men and immigrant men ahead of educated white women. The movement split in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association in May, run by Stanton and Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association in November, run by Lucy Stone and others who backed the amendment. They merged in 1890.
What the campaign accomplished, and what it left open
What the campaign accomplished was the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on 4 June 1919, ratified when Tennessee became the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and certified on 26 August 1920. Its text forbids the denial of the vote on account of sex and gives Congress power to enforce it. It says nothing about race, literacy, residence or tax, and those were the instruments that kept many American women, Black women in the South above all, away from the polls. The Indian Citizenship Act followed in 1924, the Magnuson Act repealed Chinese exclusion in 1943, the McCarran-Walter Act removed the racial bar to naturalization in 1952, the Twenty Fourth Amendment abolished the poll tax in federal elections in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.