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Suffrage Struggle: pre-Abolition 1840 through (nonwhite womanhood excluded) 1920
Nineteenth Amendment
Woman Suffrage Timeline (1840-1920)
- 1840: World Anti-Slavery Convention (London, England) bars Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton from attendance
- 1848: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton convene the first United States Woman’s Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, New York). Stanton writes “The Declaration of Sentiments,” setting out the agenda for decades of woman’s activism.
- 1849: California’s state constitution becomes the first to extend property rights to women. [Women were denied property rights and making legal contracts in their own right]
- 1850, 1851: Worcester, Massachusetts, is the site of the first and second National Woman’s Rights Convention, allies with the US Abolitionist Movement; the latter year, at the Woman’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, former slave and suffragette Sojourner Truth delivers her “Ain’t I a woman?” speech.
- 1852: Clara Howard Nichols presents to the Vermont Senate a major Woman Suffragist issue, women’s property rights. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (aka Life among the Lowly) is published.
- 1861-1865: Woman Suffragists turn efforts to Civil War effort.
- 1866: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony form the American Equal Rights Association “dedicated to achieving suffrage for all, regardless of gender or race.”
- 1868: Woman’s club movement begins in New England; in Vineland, New Jersey, 172 women cast ballots in a separate box during the presidential election. US Senator Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (former New Englander and New Yorker, mayor of Atchison 1858-1859; member of the free State convention at Lawrence 1859, president of relief committee during Kansas famine in 1860 and 1861; after Kansas is admitted into the Union, US April 4, 1861-March 3, 1873) introduces the federal woman’s suffrage amendment in Congress. Under the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified) “citizens” and “voters” are defined, exclusively, as (white) man.
- 1869: American Equal Rights Association thrown into conflict over the Fourteenth Amendment and proposed Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise Negro males, and avoid question of Woman Suffrage; ♦Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony establish separate New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to achieve the vote via US Constitutional Amendment and to push for other woman’s rights issues; ♦Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, et.al establish Boston, Massachusetts-based American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) to press for Woman Suffrage via individual state’s constitutional amendments; ♦Wyoming territory organizes with a Woman Suffrage provision.
- 1870: Fifteenth Amendment gives Negro men the right to vote, and NWSA refuses to work for its ratification, advocating a Sixteenth Amendment dictating universal suffrage, resulting in Frederick Douglass’s break with Stanton and Anthony.
- 1871: Victoria Woodhull argues, in a speech before the US House Judiciary Committee, for Woman’s right to vote under the fourteenth amendment. Anti-Suffrage Party founded. Congressional debates were held over national woman suffrage; “women ‘remonstrants’ organized in opposition” to Woman Suffrage using “traditional rights of petition and remonstrance to influence legislators;” Almira Lincoln Phelps’s open letter to the New York Times positing that “the feminine ‘silent masses’ opposed woman suffrage, a measure agitated in the regrettably revolutionary tradition of ‘female Thomas Paines.’” “Anti-Suffragism in the United States” by Rebecca A. Rix April 10, 2019 Woman Suffrage series post at National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/anti-suffragism-in-the-united-states.htm
- 1872: Various women are arrested for illegally voting; Sojourner Truth appears at a polling booth in Battle Creek, Michigan, demanding a ballot to vote, and was denied. ♦ Abigail Scott Duniway convinces Oregon lawmakers to pass laws granting a married woman’s rights, such as starting and operating her own business, controlling the money she earns, and the right to protect her property if her husband leaves.
- 1874: Annie Wittenmyer founds Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) that becomes an important proponent in the fight for Woman Suffrage [one of the strongest opponents to woman’s enfranchisement: the liquor lobby].
- 1876: Frances Willard assumes leadership of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
- 1878: Woman Suffrage Amendment is proposed in the US Congress [the 19th Amendment passed 41 years later is worded exactly as this 1878 Amendment.
- 1887: The first vote on Woman Suffrage is taken in the Senate, and defeated.
- 1888: National Council of Women in the United States is established to promote advancement of women in society.
- 1890: Formerly separated NWSA and AWSA merge to form the National American Woman Suffrage; its first president, Cady Stanton, in a movement that focuses on “securing suffrage at the state level.” ♦Wyoming enters the Union with a state constitution granting Woman Suffrage, but the South Dakota campaign loses. ♦American Federation of Labor declares support for woman suffrage.
- 1890-1925 pre- and post-war, Panic of 1893 economic depression, pre-1929-1930s Great Depression aka “The Progressive Era”: Various classes and backgrounds of women enter public life; roles expand, political women increase; Woman Suffrage enters mainstream politics.
- 1892: Olympia Brown founds the Federal Suffrage Association to campaign for woman’s suffrage.
- 1893: Colorado adopts woman suffrage.
- 1894: 600,000 signatures are presented to the New York State Constitutional Convention to bring a Woman Suffrage amendment to the voters, lost
- 1895: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s publication of The Woman’s Bible drives another wedge among Woman Suffragettes.
- 1896: Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Frances E.W. Harper among others found the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.♦ Utah joins the Union with full Woman’s Suffrage. ♦Idaho adopts Woman Suffrage.
- 1903: Women’s Trade Union League of New York, an organization of middle- and working-class women dedicated to working women’s unionization and Woman Suffrage is formed by Mary Dreier, Rheta Childe Dorr, Leonora O'Reilly, and others.
- 1910: Washington State adopts Woman Suffrage. ♦First Suffrage parade is held in New York City organized by rhe Women’s Political Union.
- 1911: Wealthy, influential women, Catholic clergymen, distillers and brewers, urban political machines, Southern congressmen, and corporate capitalists form the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), its leader Mrs. Arthur Dodge.
- 1912: Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party supports Woman Suffrage, the first time support comes from major political party at the national level. ♦ Twenty thousand suffrage supporters join a New York City suffrage parade. ♦ Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona adopt Woman Suffrage.
- 1913: Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC is the site of the first major suffrage spectacle organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
- 1914: Nevada and Montana adopt Woman Suffrage. ♦National Federation of Women’s Clubs (membership of more than two million women throughout the United States) formally endorses the suffrage campaign.
- 1915: NYC suffrage parade sees a march of 40,000 women dressed in white carrying placards with names of states they represent.
- 1916: Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. ♦ Congressional Union (later known as the National Women’s Party) forms, borrowing strategies from the radical Women’s Social and Political Union of England
- 1917: Woman Suffrage passes in New York; in Arkansas women are permitted to vote in primary elections. ♦ Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, is formally seated in the U.S. House of Representatives
Also in 1917: National Woman’s Party leader is jailed in a
mental ward’s solitary confinement “as a way to ‘break’ her will and to
undermine her credibility with the public.”
National Woman’s Party picketers are charged with
obstructing sidewalk traffic and sentenced to up to six months in jail; later
released unconditionally in response to public outcry and an inability to stop
National Woman’s Party picketers’ hunger strike.
- 1918: Representative Rankin opens debate on a Suffrage Amendment in the US House of Representatives. The amendment passes but fails to secure two thirds majority in the Senate. ♦ Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma adopt Woman Suffrage.
- 1919: The Senate passes the Nineteenth Amendment and the ratification process begins.
- 1920 (August 26): Three quarters of state legislatures ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Woman (except Negro woman) in America gains full voting rights.
Women under the Nineteenth Amendment are guaranteed the right to vote in all states of the United States; however, in practice the same restrictions prohibiting “poor or non-white men” from voting; prohibited “poor or non-white women” from voting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States
National Women’s History Museum 205
S. Whiting Street, Suite 254, Alexandria, Virginia 22304 womenshistory.org
http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/woman-suffrage-timeline-18401920
OBSERVABLE AGE-old
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ontempt for Woman
Man pretends the honoring of mothers by means of selling pushing
marketable greeting cards and flowers. But what is required to become mother is
the subjection of woman to man and the further demand that she produce a man
child to further the tradition of contempt for woman.
When the woman made mother fails to emit a male child or no child; or
when she doesn’t raise perfect children (with or without a husband, rarely a
house helper in the house), she is further castigated and demeaned.
In further denigrating and disempowering woman, man demands not only
that she subject herself to him; but having so splayed, he forces her to bring
his seed (fit or not, assured a future or not) to fruition.
Except perhaps in worlds of indigenous women (even there where oilmen and other predators plunder), woman (as also mother) is
degraded at every level in virtually every sector of the world, east, west,
north, south.
Not every woman becomes or chooses to subject herself to the hood of “MOTHER.”
Even when woman climbs that steep hill to what is, or seems like,
success, she is required to make allowances for man (boys will be boys), often
subjecting herself in hiding, often suffering unending acts of disrespect by
men, and by compromised women, women
who are unsteady, for whatever the reasons—insufficient images, education,
knowledge, experience, training, innate courage, sound principled character—in
their position, and fearful of losing place or position.
Over the years since that momentous revolution of woman, mass media
controlled by man have clamped onto labeling Woman Suffrage “women’s” suffrage,
which is a deliberate inaccuracy.
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oman, often misrepresented
by men and women, says something entirely different from women.
“WOMAN”
asserts an essential, innate, empowered agency of WOMANHOOD.
