Women's suffrage in the United States

1890–1919

Merger of rival suffrage organizations

The AWSA, which was especially strong in New England, was initially the larger of the two rival suffrage organizations, but it declined in strength during the 1880s. Stanton and Anthony, the leading figures in the competing NWSA, were more widely known as leaders of the women's suffrage movement during this period and were more influential in setting its direction. They sometimes used daring tactics. Anthony, for example, interrupted the official ceremonies of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to present the NWSA's Declaration of Rights for Women. The AWSA declined any involvement in the action.

Over time, the NWSA moved into closer alignment with the AWSA, placing less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on respectability, and no longer promoting a wide range of reforms. The NWSA's hopes for a federal suffrage amendment were frustrated when the Senate voted against it in 1887, after which the NWSA put more energy into campaigning at the state level, as the AWSA was already doing. Work at the state level, however, also had its frustrations. Between 1870 and 1910, the suffrage movement conducted 480 campaigns in 33 states just to have the issue of women's suffrage brought before the voters, and those campaigns resulted in only 17 instances of the issue actually being placed on the ballot. These efforts led to women's suffrage in two states, Colorado and Idaho.

Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of AWSA leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, was a major influence in bringing the rival suffrage leaders together, proposing a joint meeting in 1887 to discuss a merger. Anthony and Stone favored the idea, but opposition from several NWSA veterans delayed the move. In 1890, the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Stanton was president of the new organization, and Stone was chair of its executive committee, but Anthony, who had the title of vice president, was its leader in practice, becoming president herself in 1892 when Stanton retired.

National American Woman Suffrage Association

Although Anthony was the leading force in the newly merged organization, it did not always follow her lead. In 1893, the NAWSA voted over Anthony's objection to alternate the site of its annual conventions between Washington and various other parts of the country. Anthony's pre-merger NWSA had always held its conventions in Washington to help maintain focus on a national suffrage amendment. Arguing against this decision, she said she feared, accurately as it turned out, that the NAWSA would engage in suffrage work at the state level at the expense of national work.

Stanton, elderly but still very much a radical, did not fit comfortably into the new organization, which was becoming more conservative. In 1895 she published The Woman's Bible, a controversial best-seller that attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with the book despite Anthony's objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful. Stanton afterwards grew increasingly alienated from the suffrage movement.

The suffrage movement declined in vigor during the years immediately after the 1890 merger. When Carrie Chapman Catt became head of the NAWSA's Organization Committee in 1895, the number of local chapters and the identities of their officers were largely unknown. Moreover, ten states had no known suffrage organization. Catt began revitalizing the organization, establishing a plan of work with clear goals for every state every year. Anthony was impressed and arranged for Catt to succeed her when she retired from the presidency of the NAWSA in 1900. In her new post, Catt continued to transform the unwieldy organization into one that would be better prepared to lead a major suffrage campaign.

Catt noted the rapidly growing women's club movement, which was taking up some of the slack left by the decline of the temperance movement. Local women's clubs at first were mostly reading groups focused on literature, but they increasingly evolved into civic improvement organizations of middle-class women meeting in each other's homes weekly. Their national organization was the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1890. The clubs avoided controversial issues that would divide the membership, especially religion and prohibition. In the South and East, suffrage was also highly divisive, while there was little resistance to it among clubwomen in the West. In the Midwest, club women had first avoided the suffrage issue out of caution, but after 1900 increasingly came to support it. Catt implemented what was known as the "society plan," a successful effort to recruit wealthy members of the women's club movement whose time, money and experience could help build the suffrage movement. By 1914, women's suffrage was endorsed by the national General Federation of Women's Clubs.

Catt resigned her position after four years, partly because of her husband's declining health and partly to help organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was created in Germany, Berlin in 1904 with Catt as president. In 1904, Anna Howard Shaw was elected president of the NAWSA. Shaw was an energetic worker and a talented orator but not an effective administrator. Between 1910 and 1916, the NAWSA's national board experienced a constant turmoil that endangered the existence of the organization.

Although its membership and finances were at all-time highs, the NAWSA decided to replace Shaw by bringing Catt back once again as president in 1915. Authorized by the NAWSA to name her own executive board, which previously had been elected by the organization's annual convention, Catt quickly converted the loosely structured organization into one that was highly centralized.

MacKenzie v. Hare

Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 provided for loss of citizenship by American women who married aliens. The U.S. Supreme Court first considered the Expatriation Act of 1907 in the 1915 case MacKenzie v. Hare. The plaintiff, a suffragist named Ethel MacKenzie, was living in California, which since 1911 had extended the franchise to women. However, she had been denied voter registration by the respondent in his capacity as a Commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Election on the grounds of her marriage to a Scottish man. MacKenzie contended that the Expatriation Act of 1907 "if intended to apply to her, is beyond the authority of Congress", as neither the 14th Amendment nor any other part of the Constitution gave Congress the power to "denationalize a citizen without his concurrence". However, Justice Joseph McKenna, writing the majority opinion, stated that while "[i]t may be conceded that a change of citizenship cannot be arbitrarily imposed, that is, imposed without the concurrence of the citizen", but "[t]he law in controversy does not have that feature. It deals with a condition voluntarily entered into, with notice of the consequences." Justice James Clark McReynolds, in a concurring opinion, stated that the case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.

Opposition to women's suffrage

On November 5, 1895, Massachusetts held a referendum on allowing women to vote in municipal elections. The referendum failed 36.76% to 63.24%. Women were allowed to vote on the measure, however, only 4% of them did so.

Brewers and distillers were particularly opposed to women's suffrage, fearing that women voters would favor the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. During the 1896 election, woman suffrage and prohibition stood together, and this was brought to the attention of those who opposed both woman suffrage and prohibition. In order to disrupt the campaign's success, a day before the election, the Liquor Dealers' League gathered some businessmen to help undermine the effort. Rumors said that these businessmen were going to make sure all the "bad women" in Oakland, California acted rowdy in order to hurt their reputation and in turn, this would lessen the women's chances of getting the woman's suffrage amendment passed. German Lutherans and German Catholics typically opposed prohibition and woman suffrage; they favored paternalistic families with the husband deciding the family position on public affairs. Their opposition to women's suffrage was subsequently used as an argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I.

Defeat could lead to allegations of fraud. After the defeat of the referendum for women's suffrage in Michigan in 1912, the governor accused the brewers of complicity in widespread electoral fraud that resulted in its defeat. Evidence of vote stealing was also strong during referendums in Nebraska and Iowa.

Some other businesses, such as Southern cotton mills, opposed suffrage because they feared that women voters would support the drive to eliminate child labor. Political machines, such as Tammany Hall in New York City, opposed it because they feared that the addition of female voters would dilute the control they had established over groups of male voters. By the time of the New York State referendum on women's suffrage in 1917, however, some wives and daughters of Tammany Hall leaders were working for suffrage, leading it to take a neutral position that was crucial to the referendum's passage. Although the Catholic Church did not take an official position on suffrage, very few of its leaders supported it, and some of its leaders, such as Cardinal Gibbons, made their opposition clear.

The New York Times after first supporting suffrage reversed itself and issued stern warnings. A 1912 editorial predicted that with suffrage women would make impossible demands, such as, "serving as soldiers and sailors, police patrolmen or firemen...and would serve on juries and elect themselves to executive offices and judgeships." It blamed a lack of masculinity for the failure of men to fight back, warning women would get the vote "if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.".

Women against suffrage

Anti-suffrage forces, initially called the "remonstrants", organized as early as 1870 when the Woman's Anti-Suffrage Association of Washington was formed. Widely known as the "antis", they eventually created organizations in some twenty states. In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage was created. It claimed 350,000 members and opposed women's suffrage, feminism, and socialism. It argued that woman suffrage "would reduce the special protections and routes of influence available to women, destroy the family, and increase the number of socialist-leaning voters."

Middle and upper class anti-suffrage women were conservatives with several motivations. Society women in particular had personal access to powerful politicians, and were reluctant to surrender that advantage. Most often the antis believed that politics was dirty and that women's involvement would surrender the moral high ground that women had claimed, and that partisanship would disrupt local club work for civic betterment, as represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs. The best organized movement was the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS). Its credo, as set down by its president Josephine Jewell Dodge, was:

We believe in every possible advancement to women. We believe that this advancement should be along those legitimate lines of work and endeavor for which she is best fitted and for which she has now unlimited opportunities. We believe this advancement will be better achieved through strictly non-partisan effort and without the limitations of the ballot. We believe in Progress, not in Politics for women.

The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS) used grass roots mobilization techniques they had learned from watching the suffragists to defeat the 1915 referendum. They were very similar to the suffragists themselves, but used a counter-crusading style warning of the evils that suffrage would bring to women. They rejected leadership by men and stressed the importance of independent women in philanthropy and social betterment. NYSAOWS was narrowly defeated in New York in 1916 and the state voted to give women the vote. The organization moved to Washington to oppose the federal constitutional amendment for suffrage, becoming the "National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage" (NAOWS), where it was taken over by men, and assumed a much harsher rhetorical tone, especially in attacking "red radicalism". After 1919, the antis adjusted smoothly to enfranchisement and became active in party affairs, especially in the Republican Party.

Southern strategy

The Constitution required 34 states (three-fourths of the 45 states in 1900) to ratify an amendment, and unless the rest of the country was unanimous there had to be support from at least some of the 11 ex-Confederate states for the Amendment to succeed. The South was the most conservative region and always gave the least support for suffrage. There was little or no suffrage activity in the region until the late nineteenth century. Aileen S. Kraditor identifies four distinctly Southern characteristics that contributed to the South's reticence. First, Southern white men held to traditional values regarding women's public roles. Second, the Solid South was tightly controlled by the Democratic Party, so playing the two parties against each other was not a feasible strategy. Third, strong support for states' rights meant there was automatic opposition to a federal constitutional amendment. Fourth, Jim Crow attitudes meant that expansion of the vote to women, which would have included black women, was strongly opposed. Three more Western territories became states by 1912, helping the pro-Amendment numbers, that now required 36 states out of 48. In the end, Tennessee was the critical 36th state to ratify on August 18, 1920.

Mildred Rutherford, president of the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy and leader of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, made clear the opposition of elite white women to suffrage in a 1914 speech to the Georgia state legislature:

The women who are working for this measure are striking at the principle for which their fathers fought during the Civil War. Woman's suffrage comes from the North and the West and from women who do not believe in state's rights and who wish to see negro women using the ballot. I do not believe the state of Georgia has sunk so low that her good men can not legislate for women. If this time ever comes then it will be time for women to claim the ballot.

Elna Green points out that, "Suffrage rhetoric claimed that enfranchised women would outlaw child labor, pass minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws for women workers, and establish health and safety standards for factory workers." The threat of these reforms united planters, textile mill owners, railroad magnates, city machine bosses, and the liquor interest in a formidable combine against suffrage.

Henry Browne Blackwell, an officer of the AWSA before the merger and a prominent figure in the movement afterwards, urged the suffrage movement to follow a strategy of convincing southern political leaders that they could ensure white supremacy in their region without violating the Fifteenth Amendment by enfranchising educated women, who would predominantly be white. Shortly after Blackwell presented his proposal to the Mississippi delegation to the U.S. Congress, his plan was given serious consideration by the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, whose main purpose was to find legal ways of further curtailing the political power of African Americans. Although the convention adopted other measures instead, the fact that Blackwell's ideas were taken seriously drew the interest of many suffragists.

Blackwell's ally in this effort was Laura Clay, who convinced the NAWSA to launch a state-by-state campaign in the South based on Blackwell's strategy. Clay was one of several Southern NAWSA members who opposed the idea of a national women's suffrage amendment on the grounds that it would impinge on states' rights. (A generation later Clay campaigned against the pending national amendment during the final battle for its ratification.) Amid predictions by some proponents of this strategy that the South would lead the way in the enfranchisement of women, suffrage organizations were established throughout the region. Anthony, Catt and Blackwell campaigned for suffrage in the South in 1895, with the latter two calling for suffrage only for educated women. With Anthony's reluctant cooperation, the NAWSA maneuvered to accommodate the politics of white supremacy in that region. Anthony asked her old friend Frederick Douglass, a former slave, not to attend the NAWSA convention in Atlanta in 1895, the first to be held in a Southern city. Black NAWSA members were excluded from 1903 convention in the Southern city of New Orleans, which marked the peak of this strategy's influence.

The leaders of the Southern movement were privileged upper-class belles with a strong position in high society and in church affairs. They tried to use their upscale connections to convince powerful men that suffrage was a good idea to purify society. They also argued that giving white women the vote would more than counterbalance giving the vote to the smaller number of black women. No Southern state enfranchised women as a result of this strategy, however, and most Southern suffrage societies that were established during this period lapsed into inactivity. The NAWSA leadership afterwards said it would not adopt policies that "advocated the exclusion of any race or class from the right of suffrage." Nonetheless, NAWSA reflected its white membership's viewpoint by minimizing the role of black suffragists.

Anti-black racism

The woman's suffrage movement, led in the nineteenth century by stalwart women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had its genesis in the abolitionist movement, but by the dawn of the twentieth century, Anthony's goal of universal suffrage was eclipsed by a near-universal racism in the United States. While earlier suffragists had believed the two issues could be linked, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment forced a division between African-American rights and suffrage for women by prioritizing voting rights for black men over universal suffrage for all men and women. In 1903, the NAWSA officially adopted a platform of states' rights that was intended to mollify and bring Southern U.S. suffrage groups into the fold. The statement's signers included Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Anna Howard Shaw.

With the prevalence of "racial" segregation throughout the country, and within organizations such as the NAWSA, black people had formed their own activist groups to fight for their equal rights. Many were college educated and resented their exclusion from political power. The fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 also fell in 1913, giving them even further incentive to march in the suffrage parade. Nellie Quander of Alpha Kappa Alpha – the nation's oldest black sorority – asked for a place in the college women's section for the women of Howard University. While there were two letters discussing the matter, the letter on February 17, 1913, discusses the desire for the women of Howard to be given a desirable place in the march as well as mentioning correspondence and requests from an AKA sorority member, leader of the suffrage parade, vice president of the NAWSA, and appointer of both Paul & Burns as the organizer of the parade, Jane Addams. These letters were follow-up discussions to the one begun by Paul and initiated by Elise Hill when Hill went down to Howard University at the request of Paul to recruit the Howard women. The Howard University group included "Artist, one – Mrs. May Howard Jackson; college women, six – Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, Mrs. Daniel Murray, Miss Georgia Simpson, Miss Charlotte Steward, Miss Harriet Shadd, Miss Bertha McNiel; teacher, one – Miss Caddie Park; musician, one – Mrs. Harriett G. Marshall; professional women, two – Dr. Amanda V. Gray, Dr. Eva Ross; Illinois delegation – Mrs. Ida Wells Barnett; Michigan – Mrs. McCoy, of Detroit, who carried the banner; Howard University, group of twenty-five girls in caps and gowns; home makers – Mrs. Duffield, who carried New York banner, Mrs. M. D. Butler, Mrs. Carrie W. Clifford." One trained nurse, whose name could not be ascertained, marched, and an old mammy was brought down by the Delaware delegation.

But the Virginia-born Gardener tried to persuade Paul that including black people would be a bad idea because the Southern delegations were threatening to pull out of the march. Paul had attempted to keep news about black marchers out of the press, but when the Howard group announced they intended to participate, the public became aware of the conflict. A newspaper account indicated that Paul told some black suffragists that the NAWSA believed in equal rights for "colored women", but that some Southern women were likely to object to their presence. A source in the organization insisted that the official stance was to "permit negroes to march if they cared to". In a 1974 oral history interview, Paul recalled the "hurdle" of Terrell's plan to march, which upset the Southern delegations. She said the situation was resolved when a Quaker leading the men's section proposed the men march between the Southern groups and the Howard University group.

While in Paul's memory, a compromise was reached to order the parade with Southern women, then the men's section, and finally the Negro women's section, reports in the NAACP paper, The Crisis, depict events unfolding quite differently, with black women protesting the plan to segregate them. What is clear is that some groups attempted, on the day of the parade, to segregate their delegations. For example, a last-minute instruction by the chair of the state delegation section, Genevieve Stone, caused additional uproar when she asked the Illinois delegation's sole black member, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to march with the segregated black group at the back of the parade. Some historians claim Paul made the request, though this seems unlikely after the official NAWSA decision. Wells-Barnett eventually rejoined the Illinois delegation as the procession moved down the avenue. In the end, black women marched in several state delegations, including New York and Michigan. Some joined in with their co-workers in the professional groups. There were also black men driving many of the floats. The spectators did not treat the black participants any differently.

New Woman

The concept of the New Woman emerged in the late nineteenth century to characterize the increasingly independent activity of women, especially the younger generation. According to one scholar, "The New Woman became associated with the rise of feminism and the campaign for women's suffrage, as well as with the rise of consumerism, mass culture, and freer expressions of sexuality that defined the first decades of the 20th century."

The move of women into public spaces was expressed in many ways. In the late 1890s, riding bicycles was a newly popular activity that increased women's mobility even as it signaled rejection of traditional teachings about women's weakness and fragility. Susan B. Anthony said bicycles had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world". Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that "Woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle.

Activists campaigned for suffrage in ways that were still considered by many to be "unladylike," such as marching in parades and giving street corner speeches on soap boxes. In New York in 1912, suffragists organized a twelve-day, 170-mile "Hike to Albany" to deliver suffrage petitions to the new governor. In 1913 the suffragist "Army of the Hudson" marched 250 miles from New York to Washington in sixteen days, gaining national publicity.

New suffrage organizations

College Equal Suffrage League

When Maud Wood Park attended the NAWSA convention in 1900, she found herself to be virtually the only young person there. After returning to Boston, she formed the College Equal Suffrage League with the assistance of fellow Radcliffe alumnae Inez Haynes Irwin and affiliated it with the NAWSA. Largely through Park's efforts, similar groups were organized on campuses in 30 states, leading to the formation of the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1908.

Equality League of Self-Supporting Women

The dramatic tactics of the militant wing of the British suffrage movement began to influence the movement in the U.S. Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, returned to the U.S. after several years in England, where she had associated with suffrage groups still in the early phases of militancy. In 1907, she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women's Political Union, whose membership was based on working women, both professional and industrial. The Equality League initiated the practice of holding suffrage parades and organized the first open air suffrage rallies in thirty years. As many as 25,000 people marched in these parades

National Council of Women Voters

The National Council of Women Voters (NCWV) was founded in 1911 to represent women in states where women's suffrage had been achieved. Initially those states were Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Washington. Some other states, including California, followed soon after. Emma Smith Devoe served as the NCWV's president throughout its nine-year life. She had been president of the Washington Equal Suffrage Association during the successful suffrage campaign in that state in 1910. Operating as a political pressure group, the NCWV worked for laws of interest to women in the states where women could vote. As suffrage was achieved in additional states, the NCWV was increasingly able to use its political power to promote passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. After its passage, the NCWV and the NAWSA combined to form the League of Women Voters.

National Woman's Party

Work toward a national suffrage amendment had been sharply curtailed in favor of state suffrage campaigns after the two rival suffrage organizations merged in 1890 to form the NAWSA. Interest in a national suffrage amendment was revived primarily by Alice Paul. In 1910, she returned to the U.S. from England, where she had been part of the militant wing of the suffrage movement. Paul had been jailed there and had endured forced feedings after going on a hunger strike. In January 1913, she arrived in Washington as chair of the Congressional Committee of the NAWSA, charged with reviving the drive for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women. She and her coworker Lucy Burns organized a suffrage parade in Washington on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as president. Opponents of the march turned the event into a near riot, which ended only when a cavalry unit of the army was brought in to restore order. Public outrage over the incident, which cost the chief of police his job, brought publicity to the movement and gave it fresh momentum. In 1914, Paul and her followers began referring to the proposed suffrage amendment as the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment," a name that was widely adopted.

Paul argued that because the Democrats would not act to enfranchise women even though they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, the suffrage movement should work for the defeat of all Democratic candidates regardless of an individual candidate's position on suffrage. She and Burns formed a separate lobbying group called the Congressional Union to act on this approach. Strongly disagreeing, the NAWSA in 1913 withdrew support from Paul's group and continued its practice of supporting any candidate who supported suffrage, regardless of political party. In 1916 Blatch merged her Women's Political Union into Paul's Congressional Union.

In 1916 Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP). Once again the women's movement had split, but the result this time was something like a division of labor. The NAWSA burnished its image of respectability and engaged in highly organized lobbying at both the national and state levels. The smaller NWP also engaged in lobbying but became increasingly known for activities that were dramatic and confrontational, most often in the national capital. One form of protest was the watchfires, which involved burning copies of President Wilson's speeches, often outside the White House or in the nearby Lafayette Park. The NWP continued to hold watchfires even as the war began, drawing criticism from the public and even other suffrage groups for being unpatriotic.

Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference

The leaders of the NAWSA's Southern Strategy began to find their own voice by 1913 when Kate Gordon of Louisiana and Laura Clay of Kentucky formed the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference (SSWSC). The suffragists of the SSWSC chose to work within the Jim Crow customs of their states and spoke openly about how the enfranchisement of white women would enhance the socio-economic and political work inherent to white supremacy. To clarify how their political ideology fit within the increasingly rigid status quo of segregation, they published a newspaper, New Southern Citizen, with the motto: "Make the Southern States White." The SSWSC became increasingly at odds with NAWSA and its primary focus on achieving a federal amendment. Most southern suffragists however disagreed and continued to work in affiliation with the NAWSA. Gordon actively campaigned against the Nineteenth Amendment since, in theory, it would also enfranchise African-American women. This would, as Laura Clay stated in a debate with Kentucky Equal Rights Association president Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, raise the spectre of Reconstruction Era interventions and bring increased federal scrutiny of elections in the South.

Alpha Suffrage Club

This organization was created by Ida B. Wells in 1913, with the hope of furthering women's right in the United States. Coming out of Chicago, Illinois, with the help of activist like Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks. The group worked to advocate for the overall African American women's suffrage movement. The club encouraged Black women's political participation and addressed their marginalization from standard suffrage organizations. One group being the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and individuals such as Alice Paul. Its main goals were to support the election of candidates who would reflect the interests of Black communities, educate African American women about civic engagement, and promote voter participation in elections. Wells's leadership as the National Afro-American Council's Anti-Lynching Bureau Director is highlighted in The Appeal (Minneapolis, July 19, 1902). These documents also demonstrate Wells's enduring dedication to racial justice and support for Black communities, which influenced her suffrage work. The clubs efforts to educate and mobilize African American women voters is shown in the organizations official publication, The Alpha Suffrage Record (Vol. 1, No. 1 March 18, 1914).

Suffrage periodicals

Stanton and Anthony launched a sixteen-page weekly newspaper called The Revolution in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage, but it also covered politics, the labor movement, and other topics. Its energetic and broad-ranging style gave it a lasting influence, but its debts mounted when it did not receive the funding they had expected, and they had to transfer the paper to other hands after only twenty-nine months. Their organization, the NWSA, afterwards depended on other periodicals, such as The National Citizen and Ballot Box, edited by Matilda Joslyn Gage, and The Woman's Tribune, edited by Clara Bewick Colby, to represent its viewpoint.

In 1870, shortly after the formation of the AWSA, Lucy Stone launched an eight-page weekly newspaper called the Woman's Journal to advocate for women's rights, especially suffrage. Better financed and less radical than The Revolution, it had a much longer life. By the 1880s it had become an unofficial voice of the suffrage movement as a whole. In 1916 the NAWSA purchased the Woman's Journal and spent a significant amount of money to enhance it. It was renamed Woman Citizen and declared to be the official organ of the NAWSA.

Alice Paul began publishing a newspaper called The Suffragist in 1913 when she was still part of the NAWSA. Editor of the eight-page weekly was Rheta Childe Dorr, an experienced journalist.

Turn of the tide

New Zealand enfranchised women in 1893, the first country to do so on a nationwide basis. In the U.S., women gained the franchise in the states of Washington in 1910; in California in 1911; in Oregon, Kansas and Arizona in 1912; and in Illinois in 1913. Some states allowed women to vote in school elections, municipal elections, or for members of the Electoral College. Some territories, like Washington, Utah, and Wyoming, allowed women to vote before they became states. As women voted in an increasing number of states, Congressmen from those states swung to support a national suffrage amendment, and paid more attention to issues such as child labor.

The reform campaigns of the Progressive Era strengthened the suffrage movement. Beginning around 1900, this broad movement began at the grassroots level with such goals as combating corruption in government, eliminating child labor, and protecting workers and consumers. Many of its participants saw women's suffrage as yet another progressive goal, and they believed that the addition of women to the electorate would help their movement achieve its other goals. In 1912, the Progressive Party, formed by Theodore Roosevelt, endorsed women's suffrage. The socialist movement supported women's suffrage in some areas.

By 1916, suffrage for women had become a major national issue, and the NAWSA had become the nation's largest voluntary organization, with two million members. In 1916, the conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties endorsed women's suffrage, but only on a state-by-state basis, with the implication that the various states might implement suffrage in different ways or (in some cases) not at all. Having expected more, Catt called an emergency NAWSA convention and proposed what became known as the "Winning Plan". For several years, the NAWSA had focused on achieving suffrage on a state-by-state basis, partly to accommodate members from Southern states who opposed the idea of a national suffrage amendment, considering it an infringement on states' rights. In a strategic shift, the 1916 convention approved Catt's proposal to make a national amendment the priority for the entire organization. It authorized the executive board to specify a plan of work toward this goal for each state and to take over that work if the state organization refused to comply.

In 1917, Catt received a bequest of $900,000 from Mrs. Frank (Miriam) Leslie to be used for the women's suffrage movement. Catt formed the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission to dispense the funds, most of which supported the activities of the NAWSA at a crucial time for the suffrage movement.

In January 1917, the NWP stationed pickets at the White House, which had never before been picketed, with banners demanding women's suffrage. Tension escalated in June as a Russian delegation drove up to the White House and NPW members unfurled a banner that read, "We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement". In August, another banner referred to "Kaiser Wilson" and compared the plight of the German people with that of American women.

Some of the onlookers, including crowds of drunken men in town for the second inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, reacted violently, tearing the banners from the picketers' hands. The police, whose actions had previously been restrained, began arresting the picketers for blocking the sidewalk. Eventually over 200 were arrested, about half of whom were sent to prison. In October Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. When she and other suffragist prisoners began a hunger strike, prison authorities force-fed them. The negative publicity created by this harsh practice increased the pressure on the administration, which capitulated and released all the prisoners.

The entry of the U.S. into World War I in April 1917, had a significant impact on the suffrage movement. To replace men who had gone into the military, women moved into workplaces that did not traditionally hire women, such as steel mills and oil refineries. The NAWSA cooperated with the war effort, with Catt and Shaw serving on the Women's Committee for the Council of National Defense. The NWP, by contrast, took no steps to cooperate with the war effort. Jeannette Rankin, elected in 1916 by Montana as the first woman in Congress, was one of fifty members of Congress to vote against the declaration of war.

In November 1917, a referendum to enfranchise women in New York – at that time the most populous state in the country – passed by a substantial margin. In September 1918, President Wilson spoke before the Senate, calling for approval of the suffrage amendment as a war measure, saying "We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?" In the 1918 elections, despite the threat of Spanish flu, three additional states (Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Michigan) passed ballot initiatives to enfranchise women, and two incumbent senators (John W. Weeks of Massachusetts and Willard Saulsbury Jr. of Delaware) lost re-election campaigns due to their opposition to suffrage. By the end of 1919, women effectively could vote for president in states with 326 electoral votes out of a total of 531. Political leaders who became convinced of the inevitability of women's suffrage began to pressure local and national legislators to support it so that their respective party could claim credit for it in future elections.

The war served as a catalyst for suffrage extension in several countries, with women gaining the vote after years of campaigning partly in recognition of their support for the war effort, which further increased the pressure for suffrage in the U.S. About half of the women in Britain had become enfranchised by January 1918, as had women in most Canadian provinces, with Quebec the major exception.

Nineteenth Amendment

World War I had a profound impact on woman suffrage across the belligerents. Women played a major role on the home fronts and many countries recognized their sacrifices with the vote during or shortly after the war, including the U.S., Britain, Canada (except Quebec), Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Sweden; and Ireland introduced universal suffrage with independence. France almost did so but stopped short. Despite their eventual success, groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic.

On January 12, 1915, a suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but was defeated by a vote of 204 to 174, (Democrats 170–85 against, Republicans 81–34 for, Progressives 6–0 for). President Woodrow Wilson held off until he was sure the Democratic Party was supportive; the 1917 referendum in New York State in favor of suffrage proved decisive for him. When another bill was brought before the House in January 1918, Wilson made a strong and widely published appeal to the House to pass the bill. Behn argues that:

The National American Woman Suffrage Association, not the National Woman's Party, was decisive in Wilson's conversion to the cause of the federal amendment because its approach mirrored his own conservative vision of the appropriate method of reform: win a broad consensus, develop a legitimate rationale, and make the issue politically valuable. Additionally, I contend that Wilson did have a significant role to play in the successful congressional passage and national ratification of the 19th Amendment.

The Amendment passed by two-thirds of the House, with only one vote to spare. The vote was then carried into the Senate. Again President Wilson made an appeal, but on September 30, 1918, the amendment fell two votes short of the two-thirds necessary for passage, 53–31 (Republicans 27–10 for, Democrats 26–21 for). On February 10, 1919, it was again voted upon, and then it was lost by only one vote, 54–30 (Republicans 30–12 for, Democrats 24–18 for).

There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so the President called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 304 to 89, (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, Prohibitionist 1-0 for), 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays (Republicans 36-8 for, Democrats 20-17 for). Within a few days, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. After Washington on March 22, 1920, ratification languished for months. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it the law throughout the United States. Thus the 1920 election became the first United States presidential election in which women were permitted to vote in every state.

Three other states, Connecticut, Vermont and Delaware, passed the amendment by 1923. They were eventually followed by others in the south. Nearly twenty years later, Maryland ratified the amendment in 1941. After another ten years, in 1952, Virginia ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, followed by Alabama in 1953. After another 16 years, Florida and South Carolina passed the necessary votes to ratify in 1969, followed two years later by Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina.

Mississippi did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1984, sixty four years after the law was enacted nationally. Coincidentally, Mississippi was the last state to elect a woman to congress, with the first female in the Mississippi congressional delegation being Cindy Hyde-Smith, elected in 2018.

Effects of the Nineteenth Amendment

In the United States

Politicians responded to the newly enlarged electorate by emphasizing issues of special interest to women, especially prohibition, child health, public schools, and world peace. Women did respond to these issues, but in terms of general voting they had the same outlook and the same voting behavior as men.

The suffrage organization NAWSA became the League of Women Voters and Alice Paul's National Woman's Party began lobbying for full equality and the Equal Rights Amendment which would pass Congress during the second wave of the women's movement in 1972 (but it was not ratified and never took effect). The main surge of women voting came in 1928, when the big-city machines realized they needed the support of women to elect Al Smith, while rural drys mobilized women to support Prohibition and vote for Republican Herbert Hoover. Catholic women were reluctant to vote in the early 1920s, but they registered in very large numbers for the 1928 election – the first in which Catholicism was a major issue. A few women were elected to office, but none became especially prominent during this time period. Overall, the women's rights movement declined noticeably during the 1920s.

Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did not in actual practice provide suffrage to all women in the United States. Women's rights to a public identity were restricted by the common law practice of coverture. As women were not citizens in their own right and married women were required to assume the citizenship and residency requirements of their spouses, many women upon marriage had no voting rights. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted any free white, who met character and residency policies, the right to become a citizen and the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to those born in the United States, including African-Americans. Rulings by the Supreme Court allowed racial limitations to naturalization of people who were neither black nor white. This meant that Latinos, Asians, and Eastern Europeans, among other groups, were at various times barred from becoming citizens. Exclusions based on race also applied to Native American women living on reservations, until the passage in 1924 of the Indian Citizenship Act. As a result, if an American woman married someone who was ineligible for naturalization, until passage of the Cable Act of 1922 and various amendments, she lost her citizenship.

As the US Constitution grants states the ability to determine who is eligible to vote in elections, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislative variations among the states, led to extremely different civil rights for women within the federal system depending upon their residency. Restrictions on literacy, moral character, and ability to pay poll taxes were used to legally exclude women from voting. Large numbers of African American women, as well as men, continued to be denied suffrage in the southern states. Latinos and non-English speaking women were routinely excluded by literacy requirements in the northern states, and many poor women, regardless of race, had no ability to pay poll taxes. As married women's wages and legal access to money were controlled by their husbands, many married women had no ability to pay poll taxes. In 1940, US women were granted their own legal status as citizens and provisions were made for women who had previously lost their citizenship through marriage to regain it.

Native American women

The early women's suffrage movement had drawn inspiration from the political egalitarianism of Iroquois society. Native American women and men were nominally granted the right to vote in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act. Even so, until the 1950s, some states barred Native Americans from voting unless they had adopted the culture and language of American society, relinquished their tribal memberships, or moved to urban areas. Universal suffrage was not guaranteed in practice until the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voters in Indian country continue to face certain barriers to political participation.

In U.S. territories

At the time the 19th Amendment was passed, both Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were unincorporated territories of the United States. Suffragists believed that women in the Virgin Islands had been enfranchised when the Danish extended suffrage in 1915, as at that time the Danish West Indies were their possession. Similarly, as Puerto Ricans were confirmed to be U. S. citizens in 1917, it was assumed that suffrage had been extended there as well with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Upon questioning its applicability in Puerto Rico, Governor Arthur Yager received clarification from the Bureau of Insular Affairs that passage or ratification in the states would not grant women's suffrage in Puerto Rico, because of the island's unincorporated status. In 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified that constitutional rights did not extend to residents in the two territories as they were defined in Puerto Rico by the Organic Act of 1900 and in the Virgin Islands by the Danish Colonial Law of 1906.

Suffragists and their supporters unsuccessfully introduced enfranchisement bills to the insular legislature in Puerto Rico in 1919, 1921, and 1923. In 1924, Milagros Benet de Mewton sued the electoral board for refusing to allow her to register. Her case argued that as a U.S. citizen, she should be allowed to vote in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, because territorial law was not allowed to contravene U.S. law. The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that the electoral law was not discriminatory because Puerto Ricans were not allowed to vote for federal electors, and that the territory, like U.S. states, retained the right to define who was eligible to vote. Another failed bill, in 1927, led Benet and women involved in the Pan-American Women's Association to press the US Congress to enfranchise Puerto Rican women. When in 1928, the bill passed out of committee and was scheduled for a vote the U. S. House of Representatives, the Puerto Rican legislature realized that if they did not extend suffrage the federal government would. They passed a limited suffrage bill on April 16, 1929, limiting voting rights to literate women. Universal suffrage was finally achieved in Puerto Rico in 1936, when a bill submitted by the Socialist Party the previous year, gained approval in the insular legislature.

In the US Virgin Islands, voting was restricted to men who were literate and owned property. Teachers like Edith L. Williams and Mildred V. Anduze pressed for women to gain the vote. In 1935, the Saint Thomas Teachers' Association filed a lawsuit challenging the applicability of the 19th amendment to Virgin Islanders. In November 1935, the court ruled that the Danish Colonial Law was unconstitutional as it conflicted with the 19th Amendment and that it had not been the intent to limit the franchise to men. To test the law, Williams attempted to register to vote and encouraged other teachers to do so, but their applications were refused. Williams, Eulalie Stevens and Anna M. Vessup, all literate, property owners, petitioned the court to open elections to qualified women. Judge Albert Levitt ruled in favor of the women on December 27, which led to mobilization to register to vote in Saint Croix and Saint John.

Though Guam was acquired by the United States at the same time as Puerto Rico, the 19th Amendment was not extended by the US Congress to Guamanians until 1968. Congress also extended it to the Northern Mariana Islands in 1976 under the Marianas Covenant. Though the US Congress has not verified the applicability of the Nineteenth Amendment to American Samoa the territorial constitution implies its applicability in the jurisdiction.

Changes in the voting population

Although restricting access to the polls because of sex was made unconstitutional in 1920, women did not turn out to the polls in the same numbers as men until 1980. A term commonly used that represents the push for equal representation in government is known as Mirror Representation. The amount of representation of sex in government should match the portion of that specific sex in the population. From 1980 until the present, women have voted in elections in at least the same percentage as have men, and often more. This difference in voting turnout and preferences between men and women is known as the voting gender gap. The voting gender gap has impacted political elections and, consequently, the way candidates campaign for office.

Changes in representation and government programs

After women gained the right to vote, the presence of women in Congress has gradually increased since 1920, with an especially steady increase from 1981. Today, women increasingly pursue politics as a career. At the state and national level, women have brought attention to gender-sensitive topics, gender equality, and children's rights. Women's participation rate is higher at local levels of government.

In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman vice presidential candidate to be nominated by a major party.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential candidate to be nominated by a major party.

In 2019, 25 out of 100 senators were women, and 102 out of 435 representatives were women. This resembled the global average; around the world, in 2018, just under a quarter of national-level parliament representatives were women.

In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris became the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history after assuming office alongside President Joe Biden.

Notable legislation

Immediately following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, many legislators feared a powerful women's bloc would emerge as a result of female enfranchisement. The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s, was one of the first laws passed appealing to the female vote.

Title IX is a federal civil rights law that was passed in 1972 as part (Title IX) of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal money.

Socio-economic effects

A paper by John R. Lott and Lawrence W. Kenny, published by the Journal of Political Economy, found that women generally voted along more liberal political philosophies than men. The paper concluded that women's voting appeared to be more risk-averse than men and favored candidates or policies that supported wealth transfer, social insurance, progressive taxation, and larger government.

A 2020 study found that "exposure to suffrage during childhood led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially black people and Southern white people. We also find that suffrage led to higher earnings alongside education gains, although not for Southern black people." These improvements are largely driven by suffrage-induced growth in education spending.

Anti-suffragism after the nineteenth amendment

Modern era

In the 2020s, many American far-right figures began to call for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, often connected with the Christian nationalist movement. This viewpoint came to more attention in August 2025, when U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reposted a video on Twitter featuring Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, in which video participants discussed repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. In response, Hegseth's press secretary clarified that he supports women's suffrage. Hegseth's pastor, however, along with other senior figures in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, advocate repealing the Nineteenth Amendment in favor of "household voting," where households would receive a singular vote and the husband would get the final say in the event of disagreement.

Other notable political figures connected with this view include Paul Ingrassia, who appeared to endorse this viewpoint in a 2023 podcast interview, Paul Ray Ramsey, Dale Partridge, John Gibbs, and Andrew Tate. Anti-abortion advocate Abby Johnson has advocated replacing the current voting system with one of household voting.

In 2022, American political commentator and a far-right white nationalist, activist, Nick Fuentes told the British journalist Louis Theroux that he believes it would be better if women did not have the right to vote. In November 2025, Fuentes said that if he was elected president, he would "just take away the right to vote for tons of people. Women for sure."