Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Women’s Suffrage

 

As we think about women’s history this month, let us not take for granted the great strides our fore-mothers made. Today, let us look more closely into the history of women’s suffrage and the fight to gain the right to vote. Though the movement may be most famous for the ground it gained in the 1920s, the women’s suffrage movement actually began almost a century before winning the right to vote:

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had. At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States--temperance clubs, religious movements and moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations--and in many of these, women played a prominent role. Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the "Cult of True Womanhood": that is, the idea that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists--mostly women, but some men--gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women's rights. (They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.) Most of the delegates agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, "that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Learn more by reading the whole article courtesy of History.com here: http://www.history.com/topics/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage