What was actually said
The women's rights speeches of the American campaign are the surviving public arguments for giving women the vote, made between the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848 and the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment on 26 August 1920.
They survive because a newspaper reporter or a convention committee printed them, usually within weeks. Six have a page each on this site, giving the occasion, the audience, the argument in the order the speaker made it and, where the printed text is disputed, what the dispute is. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it took seventy two years to get it.
The six speeches this site takes one at a time
The six speeches below cover the whole span of the campaign: a founding statement, a convention floor answer, a criminal defense, two Progressive Era arguments and a lecture on the theory of representation. Two are not speeches in the ordinary sense: the Declaration of Sentiments is a drafted text put to a vote, and Anthony's defense was one address repeated across a county to the men who would form her jury.
| Document | Speaker | When | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Declaration of Sentiments | Adopted by the convention, drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton | 19 and 20 July 1848 | Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York |
| The Akron speech, known as Ain't I a Woman | Sojourner Truth | 29 May 1851 | Woman's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio |
| Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? | Susan B. Anthony | Between her arrest on 18 November 1872 and her trial in June 1873 | Delivered repeatedly across the county |
| Child labor and woman suffrage | Florence Kelley | 22 July 1905 | Philadelphia |
| What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States | Mary Church Terrell | 1906 | Washington |
| The Fundamental Principle of a Republic | Anna Howard Shaw | 1915 | Ogdensburg, New York |
Why the campaign needed speeches in the first place
The campaign needed speeches because women had no other lever. They could not vote, so they could not threaten a legislator with the loss of a seat; they could not sit on juries; married women in most states could not hold their own wages. What was left was the platform, the petition and the printed report. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, which refused to seat the women delegates, and that refusal produced the meeting they called eight years later. The Declaration of Sentiments is the result, and it lists the disabilities rather than arguing around them.
The legal position hardened before it softened. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 it put the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the clause that counts a state's voters for apportionment:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
That wording made the constitutional argument harder, and it is the hinge of Anthony's defense four years later.
How the movement organized, and the split of 1869
The movement organized itself in conventions before associations. The first National Woman's Rights Convention met at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, and annual meetings followed. In 1866 the American Equal Rights Association was formed to press for the vote for Black men and for women together. It did not hold. In 1869 the movement split into two national bodies: the National Woman Suffrage Association under Stanton and Anthony in May, and the American Woman Suffrage Association under Lucy Stone and others in November.
The split is usually described as a disagreement over priorities. It was also conducted in explicitly racist terms. Stanton and Anthony argued against the Fifteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, on the ground that educated white women should not be enfranchised after Black men, and several of the people making that argument put it in print in exactly those terms. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, the first in the United States, and state campaigns became the practical route. The two associations merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
National American Woman Suffrage Association vs National Woman's Party
The National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party differed on method, not on goal, and after 1913 they worked the same Congress from opposite ends. NAWSA was the older and larger body; the National Woman's Party grew out of the Congressional Union Alice Paul formed in 1913.
| Question | National American Woman Suffrage Association | National Woman's Party |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1890, by merger of the bodies split in 1869 | 1913 as the Congressional Union, renamed 1916 |
| Led by | Anna Howard Shaw, 1904 to 1915, then Carrie Chapman Catt | Alice Paul |
| Method | State by state work under the Winning Plan of 1916 | Pressure on the party in power in Washington |
| Signature action | Legislative and referendum campaigns | The procession of 3 March 1913, the Silent Sentinels from January 1917 |
| Tone | Respectable, peaceful, slow | Peaceful, confrontational, willing to be arrested |
Neither body was violent. The Silent Sentinels stood at the White House gates with banners for about two and a half years from January 1917, and the violence in that episode was done to them: pickets were arrested, imprisoned and force fed during hunger strikes. Alice Paul had learned the tactic in London, which is why the British word suffragette attaches to it in American memory, though the American campaigners called themselves suffragists.
Was the American women's rights movement successful?
Yes, and the success has a date and a limit. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919, Tennessee ratified as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920, and the amendment was certified on 26 August 1920. Its text is short:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
It bars a denial on account of sex and nothing else, so barriers not written as sex barriers stayed standing. Native American women and men were not uniformly citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Chinese exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, and the racial bar to naturalization removed by the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952. The poll tax in federal elections went with the Twenty Fourth Amendment in 1964, and enforcement machinery arrived with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The campaign that ran from 1848 to 1920 won what it asked for, and a reader is entitled to know how much that left standing.
How to read one of these speeches without misquoting it
Read the earliest printed report first, and check who printed it and when. Several of these documents are not stable texts, and the Akron speech of 1851 is the clearest case: what a reporter who was present published three weeks later and what appeared under another editor's hand in 1863 differ substantially, including in dialect, and the line everyone knows comes from the later one. Naming the source, its date and its reporter is not pedantry here; it is the difference between citing a speech and citing a rewrite of it.