The Story of Women’s Suffrage Movement

On Election Day in 1920, lead by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Ida B. Wells, millions of American women exercised their right to vote for the first time. In 1848 a group of abolition activists gathered at the Women’s Rights Convention in New York (which was most commonly known as the Seneca Falls Convention) to talk about the problems of Women’s right. The Seneca Falls Convention marked the start of the Women’s rights movement. It was followed in 1850 by the first national convention of the Women’s Rights Movement, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Lucy Stone and a group of prominent Eastern suffragists. Most of the delegates agreed that women were self-governing individuals, who deserved their own political identities because they believed men and women were equal.

In 1890 the two groups gathered to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, by then the suffragists approach had changed, because now instead of saying they were the same they said women were different than men. By then the women started to say they could make their home lifestyle into a political virtue and help the country. But the campaign was not always easy, the women had always kept the campaign movement very peaceful. Yet, some women were arrested just for picketing the white house fence. Once imprisoned, some of the women were transferred to an abandoned workhouses located in Occoquan, Virginia, where some of the suffragists refused to eat and went into hunger strikes that usually resulted in the very brutal force-feeding methods, and were otherwise treated very violently. Disagreements over the suffragists’ strategies threatened to weaken the movement more than once.

It took many activists and reformers nearly one century to achieve the right to vote. Starting in 1910 a few states in the West began to extend the votes for women for the first time in twenty years. But, the Southern and Eastern states still resisted. But, not long after this accomplishment, World War One came around and slowed the suffragists’ campaign. But at the same time, the War helped an enormous amount by advancing their argument because of the shortage of men, women were recruited into the jobs of the men who had gone to war. Many women became army nurse and doctors on behalf of the war, and other women created organizations also on behalf of the war. The mother’s raised their children to be very patriotic. The women soon gained a lot of respect and women activists proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving as men. So as a result on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment (which enables the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of gender, skin color, or race) to the Constitution was finally ratified, freeing all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement has had a deep impact on the United States of America. The Prohibition Movement has been called “The first mass Women’s movement in U.S. history” and prohibition was triggered by women getting the vote in many states before the national amendment took effect in 1920. Women today might not have had the right to vote and other rights that men have.The women’s suffrage movement made a noticeable change to American history and our heritage because had it not had been for the movement.