Women's suffrage in the United States

Women in the United States won the vote piece by piece, first in western territories and states from 1869, then nationally with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The campaign grew out of the women's rights and anti-slavery movements of the 1840s, survived decades of division and defeat, and finally succeeded through a mix of state campaigns, national lobbying and militant protest during the First World War.

The first women's rights convention met at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848, called by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and three other women. Some 300 people attended. Stanton's resolution demanding the vote was the only one not passed unanimously, and it carried only after Frederick Douglass spoke strongly in its favour. The Seneca Falls Convention was followed by others, including the first national convention in 1850, and from 1851 Stanton worked closely with Susan B. Anthony.

The Reconstruction amendments split the movement. The Fourteenth Amendment introduced the word "male" into the Constitution, and the proposed Fifteenth barred racial, but not sexual, discrimination in voting. In May 1869 Anthony and Stanton, who opposed it without a matching guarantee for women, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association; that November Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Julia Ward Howe and others, who supported it, formed the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. Their feud lasted two decades. That same year the Wyoming Territory gave women the vote, followed by Utah in 1870.

In the early 1870s suffragists tried to vote, hoping the courts would find the right already in the Constitution. Anthony did cast a ballot in 1872, was arrested, convicted and fined $100, which she never paid. In 1875, in Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution conferred the vote on no one, and campaigners turned to an amendment. Senator Aaron Sargent introduced one in 1878; its wording was later adopted unchanged. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and the largest women's organisation of the day, also backed the vote.

In 1890 the rival groups joined to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. For years it concentrated on state campaigns: Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896) were followed after a long pause by Washington in 1910, California in 1911 and several more states by 1914. Alice Paul, who had been jailed and force-fed while working with militant suffragettes in Britain, revived the push for a federal amendment, organising a large parade in Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in 1913 and founding the National Woman's Party in 1916. Under Carrie Chapman Catt, NAWSA, with some two million members, adopted her "Winning Plan" that year, putting the national amendment first.

From January 1917 National Woman's Party pickets stood outside the White House; more than 200 were arrested, and hunger strikers were force-fed. Meanwhile NAWSA supported the war effort after the United States joined the First World War in April 1917. New York voters approved women's suffrage in November 1917, and in September 1918 Wilson urged the Senate to pass the amendment as a war measure. After defeats in the Senate, Congress approved it in May and June 1919. Tennessee became the decisive 36th state to ratify on 18 August 1920, in time for women to vote across the country in that year's presidential election.

The amendment did not bring the vote to all women. Poll taxes and literacy tests still kept large numbers of Black women and men in the South from voting, and many Native American women were not citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Full protection came only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a goal of the civil rights movement. NAWSA became the League of Women Voters.

Our 1900 and 1920 maps show the United States before and after the Nineteenth Amendment took effect.