essay about women's right to vote

Background Essay: Gaining the Right to Vote

Directions:

Keep these discussion questions in mind as you read the background essay, making marginal notes as desired. Respond to the reflection and analysis questions at the end of the essay.

Discussion Questions

• How had the work of women to end slavery helped them develop skills that would ultimately be useful in the women’s suffrage struggle?
• What might be meant by the term, “the conscience of the nation,” and how did the fight against slavery help demonstrate that concept?
• What arguments might have been made against women’s suffrage?
• Why were Western states the first to grant suffrage to women?

Introduction

After the Civil War, the nation was finally poised to extend the promise of liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence to newly emancipated African Americans. But the women’s suffrage movement was split: Should women push to be included in the Fifteenth Amendment? Should they wait for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be adopted before turning to women’s suffrage, or should they seize the moment and demand the vote now? Not content to wait, Susan B. Anthony and other workers in the movement engaged in civil disobedience to wake the conscience of a nation. Meanwhile, railroads opened the West to settlement, and Western territories tried to boost population by offering votes for women.

Life for women in the mid-nineteenth century was as diverse as it is now. What was considered socially appropriate behavior for women varied widely across the country, based on region, social class, and other factors. Branches of the women’s suffrage movement disagreed regarding tactics, and some women (and many men) did not even believe women’s suffrage was appropriate or necessary. Ideals of the Cult of Domesticity, in which women were believed to possess the natural virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, were still a powerful influence on culture. An important debate and split in the women’s suffrage movement between a state and national strategy emerged during this period.

The Cult of True Womanhood

The Cult of Domesticity, also known as the Cult of True Womanhood, affirmed the idea that natural differences between the sexes meant women, especially those of the upper and middle classes, were too delicate for work outside the home. According to this view, such women were more naturally suited to parenting, teaching, and making homes, which were their natural “sphere,” happy and peaceful for their families. In other words, it was unnatural and unladylike for women to work outside the home.

Educator and political activist Catharine Beecher wrote in 1871, “Woman’s great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures [children] to obey the laws of God . . . first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world.” For Beecher and other writers, the role of homemaker was held up as an honored and dignified position for women, worthy of high esteem. Their contribution to public life would include managing the home in a manner that would support their husbands. According to this conception of the roles of men and women, men were considered to be exhausted, soiled, and corrupted by their participation in work and politics, and needed a peaceful, pure home life to enable them to recover their virtue.

Increasingly, women found their political voice through their work in social reform movements. Jane Addams, co-founder with Helen Gates Starr of Hull House and pioneer of social work in America, wrote in 1902, “The sphere of morals is the sphere of action . . . It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that ‘Ethics’ is but another word for ‘righteousness . . . ’” She noted that, to solve problems related to the needs of children, public health, and other social concerns that affected the home, women needed the vote.

In keeping with the feminine ideals of piety and purity, many women continued work within the temperance movement to campaign against the excesses of drunkenness. This cause was considered a socially permissible moral effort through which women could participate in public life, because of the damaging effects of alcohol abuse on the family. Annie Wittenmyer, a social reformer and war widow from Ohio who had reported on terrible hospital conditions during the Civil War, founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 to build support for the idea of abstaining from alcohol use.

According to the tradition of Republican Motherhood, education should prepare girls to become mothers who raised educated citizens for the republic. In a challenge to the Cult of Domesticity, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of broader academic opportunities for upper class females of college age in the United States. In the Northeast, liberal arts schools modeled after Wesleyan College (1836) in Macon, Georgia, opened. In 1844, Hillsdale College opened in Michigan, one of the first American colleges whose charter prohibited any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded in 1861, and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, founded in 1875, also expanded educational opportunities for women. Teaching was among the first professions women entered in large numbers. During and after the Civil War, new opportunities also developed for women to become nurses.

New York City — The sewing-room at A.T. Stewart’s, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, Broadway and Fourth Avenue / Hyde, 1875. Library of Congress.

The Changing Roles of Women

While these career options did not radically challenge the cultural ideal of traditional womanhood, the work landscape of America was changing. As the United States economy grew to provide more options, people began to see themselves as consumers as well as producers. Indeed, mass consumerism drove new manufacturing methods. During the second industrial revolution, the United States started moving from an agricultural economy toward incorporating new modes of production, manufacturing, and consumer behavior.

Young working-class women worked in the same laundries, factories, and textile mills as poor and immigrant men, often spending twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in hot, dangerous conditions. Also, women found work as store clerks in the many new department stores that opened to sell factory-made clothing and other mass-produced items.

The Suffrage Movement Grows

Women continued to work to secure their right to vote. The Civil War ended in April of 1865 and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified eight months later, banning slavery throughout the United States. A burning question remained: How would the rights of former slaves be protected? As the nation’s attention turned to civil rights and voting with the debates surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, many women hoped to seize the opportunity to gain the vote alongside African American men.

The Civil War had forced women’s suffrage advocates to pause their efforts toward winning the vote, but in 1866 they came together at the eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York. The group voted to call itself the American Equal Rights Association and work for the rights of all Americans. Appealing to the Cult of Domesticity, they argued that giving women the vote would improve government by bringing women’s virtues of piety and purity into politics, resulting in a more civilized, “maternal commonwealth.”

The Movement Splits

The American Equal Rights Association seemed poised for success with such well-known leaders as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass. But internal divisions soon became clear. Whose rights should be secured first? Some, especially former abolitionist leaders, wanted to wait until newly emancipated African American men had been given the vote before working to win it for women. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley urged, “This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation . . . I conjure you to remember that this is ‘the negro’s hour,’ and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims.” Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe agreed.

But for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the time for women also was now. Along with many others, they saw the move to put the cause of women’s suffrage on hold as a betrayal of both the principles of equality and republicanism. Frederick Douglass, who saw suffrage for African American men as a matter of life or death, challenged Anthony on this question, asking whether she believed granting women the vote would truly do anything to change the inequality under law between the sexes. Without missing a beat, Anthony responded:

“ It will change the nature of one thing very much, and that is the dependent condition of woman. It will place her where she can earn her own bread, so that she may go out into the world an equal competitor in the struggle for life.”

In the wake of this bitter debate, not one but two national organizations for women’s suffrage were established in 1869. Stone and Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Worried that the Fifteenth Amendment would not pass if it included votes for women, the AWSA put their energy into convincing the individual states to give women the vote in their state constitutions. Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). They worked to win votes for women via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution at the same time as it would protect the right of former slaves to vote. Anthony and Stanton started the NWSA’s newspaper, The Revolution, in 1868. Its motto was, “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

The NWSA was a broad coalition that included some progressives who questioned the fitness of African Americans and immigrants to vote because of the prevailing views of Social Darwinism. The racism against black males voting was especially prevalent in the South where white women supported women’s suffrage as a means of preserving white supremacy. In addition, throughout the country strong sentiment reflected the view that any non-white or immigrant individual was racially inferior and too ignorant to vote. In this vein, Anthony and Stanton used racially charged language in advocating for an educational requirement to vote. Unfortunately for many, universal suffrage challenged too many of their assumptions about the prevailing social structure.

Photograph of Lucy Stone between 1840 and 1860. Library of Congress.

The New Departure: Testing the Fourteenth Amendment

But there was another amendment which interested NWSA: the Fourteenth. In keeping with NWSA’s more confrontational approach, Anthony decided to test the meaning of the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment. The Amendment stated in part, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” Anthony thought it was clear that this language protected the right of women to vote. After all, wasn’t voting a privilege of citizens?

The Fourteenth Amendment went on to state that representation in Congress would be reduced for states which denied the vote to male inhabitants over 21. In other words, states could choose to deny men over 21 the vote, but they would be punished with proportionally less representation (and therefore less power) in Congress. So in the end, the Fourteenth Amendment encouraged states to give all men over 21 the vote, but did not require it. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, banned states from denying the vote based on race, color, or having been enslaved in the past.

Susan B. Anthony on Trial

It was the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “privileges or immunities” that Anthony decided to test. On November 5, 1872, she and two dozen other women walked into the local polling place in Rochester, New York, and cast a vote in the presidential election. (Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant.) She was arrested and charged with voting in a federal election “without having a lawful right to vote.”

Before her trial, 52-year-old Anthony traveled all over her home county giving a speech entitled “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” In it, she called on all her fellow citizens, from judges to potential jurors, to support equal rights for women.

At her trial, Anthony’s lawyer pointed out the unequal treatment under the law:

“ If this same act [voting] had been done by her brother, it would have been honorable. But having been done by a woman, it is said to be a crime . . . I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned [accused] in a criminal court merely on account of her sex.”

The judge refused to let Anthony testify in her own defense, found her guilty of voting without the right to do so, and ordered her to pay a $100 fine. Anthony responded:

“ In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored . . . I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women.” She concluded by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Anthony’s case did not make it all the way to the Supreme Court. However, the Court did rule three years later in a different case, Minor v. Happersett (1875), that voting was not among the privileges or immunities of citizens and the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect a woman’s right to vote.

A caricature of Susan B. Anthony that appeared in a New York newspaper right before her trial. Thomas Wust, June 5, 1873. Library of Congress.

Suffrage in the West

While Anthony and other suffragists were agitating in the Northeast, railroads had helped open up the Great Plains and the American West to settlement. The Gold Rush of 1849 had enticed many thousands of settlers to the rugged West, and homesteading pioneers continued to push the frontier. These territories (and later states), were among the first to give women the right to vote: Wyoming Territory in 1869, followed by Utah Territory (1870), and Washington Territory (1883).

These territories had many reasons for extending suffrage to women, most related to the need to increase population. They would need to meet minimum population requirements to apply for statehood, and the free publicity they would get for giving women the vote might bring more people. And they did not just need more people—they needed women: There were six males for every female in some places. Some were motivated to give white women the vote to offset the influence of African American votes. And finally, there were, of course, those who genuinely believed that giving women the vote was the right thing to do.

Though several western legislatures had considered proposals to give women the vote since the 1850s, in 1869 Wyoming became the first territory to give women full political rights, including voting and eligibility to hold public office. In 1870, Louisa Garner Swain was the first woman in Wyoming to cast a ballot, and a life-sized statue honors her memory in Laramie.

Under territorial government, Wyoming’s population had grown slowly and most people lived on ranches or in small towns. Territorial leaders believed Wyoming would be more attractive to newcomers once statehood was achieved, as had been the case in other western states. The territory came close to reaching the threshold of 60,000 people for statehood, but many doubted whether that number had actually been reached.

Territorial Governor Francis E. Warren refused to wait for more people to move there. He set in motion the plans for a constitutional convention. Though they had the right to do so, no women ran for seats at the Wyoming constitutional convention. Borrowing passages from other state constitutions, delegates quickly drafted the constitution in September 1889. The new element of this constitution is that it enshrined the protections of women’s political rights by simply stating that equality would exist without reference to gender. Only one delegate, Louis J. Palmer, objected to women’s suffrage. Wyoming voters approved the document in November, and the territory applied for statehood.

In the House of Representatives there was some opposition, mostly from Democrats, because the territory was known to lean Republican. Debate did not openly center on party affiliation, but on a combination of doubts about whether Wyoming had truly achieved the required population and on reluctance to admit a state where women had political rights. In response, Wyoming’s legislature sent a telegram: “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women!” Wyoming officially joined the union in 1890, becoming the 44th state. Anthony praised Wyoming for its adherence to the nation’s Founding principles: “Wyoming is the first place on God’s green earth which could consistently claim to be the land of the free!”

Representative Women, seven prominent figures of the suffrage and women’s rights movement. Clockwise from the top: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Marie Child, Susan B. Anthony, Grace Greenwood, and Anna E. Dickinson (center). L. Schamer; L. Prang & Co. publisher, 1870. Library of Congress.

REFLECTION AND ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

• What was the Cult of True Womanhood, or Cult of Domesticity?
• How did the Industrial Revolution challenge the notion that upper- and middle-class women’s bodies were too delicate for work outside the home?
• Describe the events leading to the split in the women’s movement in 1869.
• What are some actions in which Susan B. Anthony worked for the cause of women’s suffrage in a very personal way?
• The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified
• Susan B. Anthony is jailed for voting
• Western territories give women the vote
• Other (explain)
• Principles: equality, republican/representative government, popular sovereignty, federalism, inalienable rights, freedom of speech/press/assembly
• Virtues: perseverance, contribution, moderation, resourcefulness, courage, respect, justice

Leaving all to younger hands

The campaign to win passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote stands as one of the most significant and wide-ranging moments of political mobilization in all of American history. Among other outcomes, it produced the largest one-time increase in voters ever. As important as the goal of suffrage was, the struggle was always far broader than just the franchise, and it spoke to fundamental questions about women’s roles in politics and modern life: Who does the government permit to vote? What is the relationship between citizenship and suffrage? The suffragists challenged the political status quo at the time and in many ways can be thought of as the voting rights activists of their day. That observation is still true today as women approach their second century of full voting rights and leads us to explore why does the history of women’s suffrage matter?

The women’s suffrage movement always had a deep sense of its own history. In many ways, suffragists were our first women’s historians, none more so than Susan B. Anthony. When the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage appeared in 1902, the 82-year-old Anthony looked back with pride at what the movement had accomplished, but she also looked forward to what still needed to be done, penning this inscription in her friend Caroline Healey Dall’s personal copy:

This closes the records of the 19th century of work done by and for women— what the 20th century will show—no one can foresee—but that it will be vastly more and better—we cannot fail to believe. But you & I have done the best we knew—and so must rest content—leaving all to younger hands. Your sincere friend and coworker, Susan B. Anthony. 1

When she wrote those words, Anthony had devoted more than 50 years to the women’s suffrage movement and victory was nowhere in sight. Yet she remained proud of what she and her co-workers had done for the cause, and confident that the future would bring even more progress. I suspect that the suffrage leaders who guided the movement to its successful conclusion on August 26, 1920, felt the same way.

Once the 19th Amendment passed, suffragists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens.

“Shall Not Be Denied”

The 19th Amendment states that “the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment was originally introduced in Congress in 1878 but it took until 1919 before it enjoyed sufficient bipartisan support to pass the House of Representatives and the Senate. Then it needed to be ratified by the legislatures in three-fourths of the states. By March 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but that left suffragists one short. In August, Tennessee put the amendment over the top, paving the way for women to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Suffragists-turned-women-citizens

Once the 19th Amendment passed, suffragists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens. In many ways the suffrage movement was an anomaly, the rare time when a broad coalition of women came together under one banner. In the post-suffrage era, politically engaged women embraced a wide variety of causes rather than remaining united around a single goal. Their political ideologies ran the gamut from progressive to moderate to conservative, but when it came to politics and public life, their message was clear: “We have come to stay.”

In this enlarged perspective, the suffrage victory is not a hard stop but part of a continuum of women’s political mobilization stretching not just between the iconic Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 but across all of American history. It is still appropriate, indeed welcome, to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment as an important marker in American women’s history. But, rather than positioning 1920 as the end of the story, it is far more fruitful to see it as initiating the next stage in the history of women’s political activism—a story that is still unfolding.

Throughout American history, women have been dedicated political actors even without the vote. Women’s political history is far broader than the ratification of a single constitutional amendment.

Passage of the 19th Amendment: An incomplete victory

When thinking about the larger implications of the suffrage victory, we also need to remember that many women, especially those in Western states, were already voting in the years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. In addition, many women across the country enjoyed the right to vote on the local level in municipal elections and for school committees. Focusing too much on the 1920 milestone downplays the political clout that enfranchised women already exercised, as well as tends to overshadow women’s earlier roles as community builders, organization founders, and influence wielders. Throughout American history, women have been dedicated political actors even without the vote. Women’s political history is far broader than the ratification of a single constitutional amendment.

Celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment also slights the plight of African American voters, for whom the 19th Amendment was at most a hollow victory. In 1920, the vast majority of African Americans still lived in the South, where their voting rights were effectively eliminated by devices such as whites-only primaries, poll taxes, and literacy tests. For Black Americans, it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, not the 14th, 15th, or 19th Amendments, that finally removed the structural barriers to voting.

In a parallel disfranchisement, few Native American women gained the vote through the 19th Amendment. Not until 1924 did Congress pass legislation declaring that all Native Americans born in the United States were citizens, which cleared the way for tribal women to vote. But Native American women still faced ongoing barriers to voting on the state and local levels, especially in the West, as did Mexican Americans. Puerto Rican women did not gain the vote until 1935 and Chinese American women not until 1943. When assessing who can exercise the right to vote, it is always essential to ask who cannot.

Suffrage and feminism

Women’s demand for fair and equitable treatment in the political realm emerges as an integral part of the history of feminism. To protest women’s exclusion from voting demanded an assault on attitudes and ideologies that treated women as second-class citizens; to formulate that challenge involved conceptualizing women as a group whose collective situation needed to be addressed. Unfortunately, white suffragists often failed to realize they were speaking primarily from their own privileged class and race positions. The fact that certain groups of women, especially women of color, were often excluded from this supposedly universal vision demonstrates how racism intersected with feminism throughout the suffrage movement and its aftermath. Contemporary feminists have significantly broadened their commitment to recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences and worked hard to include multiple perspectives within the broader feminist framework, but it is still a struggle. The suffrage movement is part of that story, warts and all.

A global struggle

The history of women’s suffrage also reminds us that the struggle for the vote was a global phenomenon. Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, American and British abolitionists forged connections that influenced the early history of the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first met at an antislavery conference in London in 1840. Women’s international networks were especially vibrant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1888, the International Council of Women was founded to bring together existing women’s groups, primarily from North America and western Europe, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as its prime instigators. Its offshoot, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, founded in Berlin in 1904 “to secure the enfranchisement of the women of all nations,” fed the growth of the women’s suffrage movement worldwide. Women today enjoy nearly universal access to the franchise, but it is a misnomer to say that women were “given” the vote. Just as in the United States, women around the globe had to fight for that right.

Empowered through solidarity

Participating in the suffrage campaign provided women with the kind of exhilaration and camaraderie often described by men in periods of war or political upheaval. Women were proud to be part of this great crusade, and they cherished the solidarity it engendered for the rest of their lives. Frances Perkins, a veteran of the New York suffrage campaign and the first woman to serve in the cabinet as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, remembered it this way: “The friendships that were formed among women who were in the suffrage movement have been the most lasting and enduring friendships—solid, substantial, loyal—that I have ever seen anywhere. The women learned to like each other in that suffrage movement.” 2

Factions within the movement

The history of women’s suffrage also confirms the difficulty of maintaining unity in social movements. Women’s rights and abolition were closely allied before the Civil War, but that old coalition linking race and gender split irrevocably in the 1860s. The dispute was about who had priority: newly freed African American men or white women, who also wanted to be included in the post-Civil War expansion of political liberties represented by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Suffragists such as Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe had hoped for universal suffrage, but once the amendments were drafted, they supported ratification despite the exclusion of women. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton adamantly refused to support the amendments, often employing racist language to imply that white women were just as deserving of the vote as African American men, if not more so. By 1869 the suffrage movement had split in two over this question, not to reunite until 1890.

That split was both strategic and philosophical, as was the one in the 1910s between Carrie Chapman Catt’s mainstream National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and Alice Paul’s upstart National Woman’s Party (NWP). Catt’s much larger group tended to favor a state-by-state approach, while Paul and her supporters focused on winning a federal amendment. In addition, NAWSA was committed to working within the system while the NWP took to the streets, silently picketing the White House to express their outrage at women’s voteless status. In the end both sides were necessary to win ratification, just as the 19th century split had allowed competing personalities with different approaches to advance the movement in their own ways.

It is a misnomer to say that women were “given” the vote. Just as in the United States, women around the globe had to fight for that right.

Toward the future of equality in practice as well as in law

By the early 20th century, women had already moved far beyond the domestic sphere and boldly entered public life, yet a fundamental responsibility and privilege of citizenship—the right to vote—was arbitrarily denied to half the population. The 19th Amendment changed that increasingly untenable situation, representing a breakthrough for American women as well as a major step forward for American democracy. The wave of female candidates in the 2018 midterm elections and the unprecedented number of women who ran for president in 2020 built directly on the demands for fair and equitable access to the political realm articulated by the women’s suffrage movement.

Historian Anne Firor Scott provides an especially evocative image of how winning the vote was part of larger changes in women’s lives and in American society more broadly: “Suffrage was a tributary flowing into the rich and turbulent river of American social development. That river is enriched by the waters of each tributary, but with the passage of time it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the special contributions of any one of the tributaries.” 3 Think of the contributions of the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file women who participated in the fight to win the vote as the tributaries that make up suffrage history. And then think of suffrage history as a powerful strand in the larger stream of American history, which is richer and stronger because it heeded Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s prescient statement at Seneca Falls that all men and women are created equal. While the United States still lacks truly universal suffrage and gender equity remains a widely debated issue, the 19th Amendment represented a giant step toward both goals and left a firm constitutional foundation for future progress. When Susan B. Anthony talked about “leaving all to younger hands,” I like to think this is what she had in mind.

• This inscribed volume is found in the collections of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
• Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2019), p. 280.
• Anne Firor Scott, “Epilogue,” in Jean H. Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 194.

About the Author

As is the case of all Brookings publications, the conclusions and recommendations presented in this article are solely those of its authors and do not reflect the views of the Brookings Institution, its management, or its scholars.

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What did the women's suffrage movement fight for?

The women’s suffrage movement fought for the right of women by law to  vote  in national or local elections .

The women’s suffrage movement made the question of women’s voting rights into an important political issue in the 19th century. The struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain  and in the  United States , but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis.

By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in  New Zealand  (1893),  Australia  (1902),  Finland  (1906), and  Norway  (1913). World War I  and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections.

In the 21st century most countries allow women to vote . In Saudi Arabia women were allowed to vote in municipal elections for the first time in 2015. The  United Nations  Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.”

women’s suffrage , the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections.

Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights . The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States , but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913). In Sweden and the United States they had voting rights in some local elections.

World War I and its aftermath speeded up the enfranchisement of women in the countries of Europe and elsewhere. In the period 1914–39, women in 28 additional countries acquired either equal voting rights with men or the right to vote in national elections. Those countries included Soviet Russia (1917); Canada , Germany , Austria , and Poland (1918); Czechoslovakia (1919); the United States and Hungary (1920); Great Britain (1918 and 1928); Burma ( Myanmar ; 1922); Ecuador (1929); South Africa (1930); Brazil , Uruguay , and Thailand (1932); Turkey and Cuba (1934); and the Philippines (1937). In a number of those countries, women were initially granted the right to vote in municipal or other local elections or perhaps in provincial elections; only later were they granted the right to vote in national elections.

Immediately after World War II , France , Italy , Romania , Yugoslavia , and China were added to the group. Full suffrage for women was introduced in India by the constitution in 1949; in Pakistan women received full voting rights in national elections in 1956. In another decade the total number of countries that had given women the right to vote reached more than 100, partly because nearly all countries that gained independence after World War II guaranteed equal voting rights to men and women in their constitutions. By 1971 Switzerland allowed women to vote in federal and most cantonal elections, and in 1973 women were granted full voting rights in Syria . The United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women, adopted in 1952, provides that “women shall be entitled to vote in all elections on equal terms with men, without any discrimination.”

Historically, the United Kingdom and the United States provide characteristic examples of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In Great Britain woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the 1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet. The first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865, and in 1867 Mill presented to Parliament this society’s petition , which demanded the vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. The Reform Bill of 1867 contained no provision for woman suffrage, but meanwhile woman suffrage societies were forming in most of the major cities of Britain, and in the 1870s these organizations submitted to Parliament petitions demanding the franchise for women and containing a total of almost three million signatures.

The succeeding years saw the defeat of every major suffrage bill brought before Parliament. This was chiefly because neither of the leading politicians of the day, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli , cared to affront Queen Victoria ’s implacable opposition to the women’s movement. In 1869, however, Parliament did grant women taxpayers the right to vote in municipal elections, and in the ensuing decades women became eligible to sit on county and city councils. The right to vote in parliamentary elections was still denied to women, however, despite the considerable support that existed in Parliament for legislation to that effect. In 1897 the various suffragist societies united into one National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, thus bringing a greater degree of coherence and organization to the movement. Out of frustration at the lack of governmental action, however, a segment of the woman suffrage movement became more militant under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel . After the return to power of the Liberal Party in 1906, the succeeding years saw the defeat of seven suffrage bills in Parliament. As a consequence, many suffragists became involved in increasingly violent actions as time went on. These women militants, or suffragettes, as they were known, were sent to prison and continued their protests there by engaging in hunger strikes.

Meanwhile, public support of the woman suffrage movement grew in volume, and public demonstrations, exhibitions, and processions were organized in support of women’s right to vote. When World War I began, the woman suffrage organizations shifted their energies to aiding the war effort, and their effectiveness did much to win the public wholeheartedly to the cause of woman suffrage. The need for the enfranchisement of women was finally recognized by most members of Parliament from all three major parties, and the resulting Representation of the People Act was passed by the House of Commons in June 1917 and by the House of Lords in February 1918. Under this act, all women age 30 or over received the complete franchise. An act to enable women to sit in the House of Commons was enacted shortly afterward. In 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21 to place women voters on an equal footing with male voters.

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Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 23, 2024 | Original: October 14, 2009

Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. But for almost 100 years, women (and men) had been fighting for women’s suffrage: They had made speeches, signed petitions, marched in parades and argued over and over again that women, like men, deserved all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The leaders of this campaign—women like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells—did not always agree with one another, but each was committed to the enfranchisement of all American women.

Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906

Perhaps the most well-known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in Massachusetts . Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers , believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.

Did you know? Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in a part of upstate New York that would become known as the “Burnt District” or the “Burned-Over District” because it was home to so many religious revivals, utopian crusades and reform movements: They swept through the region, people said, as unstoppably as a forest fire.

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York , where she was a teacher at a girls’ school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused.

However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a “women’s issue.” Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women’s interests in mind.

How Suffragists Pioneered Aggressive New Tactics to Push for the Vote

Women infused their protests with creativity, PR savvy and in‑your‑face urgency.

5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More

Obtaining the vote was just one item on a long civil rights agenda.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement Started with a Tea Party

It was at this small gathering where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others let the discontent of their lives boil over—and decided to do something about it.

In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women’s property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society , delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that Black men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.

This led to a dramatic schism in the women’s rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to Black Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association).

Opposing them were those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former enslaved persons , even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new women’s suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association—Anthony was its second president. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.

Alice Paul, 1885-1977

Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the woman suffrage movement. Born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey , Paul was well-educated—she earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania —and was determined to win the vote by any means necessary.

While she was in graduate school, Paul spent time in London , where she joined the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s radical, confrontational Women’s Social and Political Union and learned how to use civil disobedience and other “unladylike” tactics to draw attention to her cause.

When she returned to the United States in 1910, Paul brought those militant tactics to the well-established National American Woman Suffrage Association. There, as the chair of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, she began to agitate for the passage of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution like the one her hero Susan B. Anthony had wanted so badly to see.

On March 3, 1913, Paul and her colleagues coordinated an enormous suffrage parade to coincide with—and distract from—the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson . More marches and protests followed.

The more conservative women at NAWSA soon grew frustrated with publicity stunts like these, and in 1914 Paul left the organization and started her own, the Congressional Union (which soon became the National Woman’s Party). Even after the U.S. entered World War I , the NWP kept up its flamboyant protests, even staging a seven-month picket in front of the White House .

For this “unpatriotic” act, Paul and the rest of the NWP suffragists were arrested and imprisoned. Along with some of the other activists, Paul was placed in solitary confinement; then, when they went on a hunger strike to protest this unfair treatment, the women were force-fed for as long as three weeks. These abuses did not have their intended effect: Once news of the mistreatment got out, public sympathy swung to the side of the imprisoned activists and they soon were released.

In January 1918, President Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would give all female citizens the right to vote. In August, ratification came down to a vote in the conservative Southern state of Tennessee . The battle over ratification in Tennessee was known as the “War of the Roses” because suffragists and their supporters wore yellow roses and “Antis” wore red.

While the resolution passed easily in the Tennessee Senate, the House was bitterly divided. It passed by one vote, a tie-breaking reversal by Harry Burn, a young red-rose wearing representative who had received a pro-suffrage plea from his mother . On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.

In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. (“Men and women,” it read, “shall have equal rights throughout the United States.”) The ERA has never been ratified.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the foremost women’s-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815, to a prominent family in upstate New York, she was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: Female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.

This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she—along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott and a handful of other reformers—organized the first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.”

One hundred of the delegates—68 women and 32 men—signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence , declaring that women were citizens equal to men with “an inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.

Like Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was a committed abolitionist; however, she too refused to compromise on the principle of universal suffrage. As a result, she campaigned against the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote but denied it to women.

After the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton continued to push for women’s political equality, but she believed in a much broader vision of women’s rights. She advocated for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, the expansion of educational opportunities for girls and even the adoption of less confining clothing (such as the pants-and-tunic ensemble popularized by the activist Amelia Bloomer) so that women could be more active. She also campaigned against the oppression of women in the name of religion: “From the inauguration of the movement for woman’s emancipation,” she wrote, “ the Bible has been used to hold her in the ‘divinely ordained sphere.’” In 1895 she published the first volume of a more egalitarian Woman’s Bible.

Stanton died in 1902. Today, a statue of Stanton, with fellow women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Lucy Stone, 1818-1893

Lucy Stone, born in Massachusetts in 1818, was a pioneering abolitionist and women’s-rights activist, but she is perhaps best known for refusing to change her last name when she married the abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. (This tradition, the couple declared, “refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being” and “confer[red] on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.”)

After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society–advocating, she said, “not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” She continued her activism on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights until 1857, when she retired from the anti-slavery lecture circuit to care for her baby daughter.

After the Civil War, advocates of woman suffrage faced a dilemma: Should they hold firm to their demand for universal suffrage or should they endorse—even celebrate—the 15th Amendment while they kept up their own campaign for the franchise? Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the 15th Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment.

Stone, on the other hand, supported the 15th Amendment; at the same time, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which fought for woman suffrage on a state-by-state basis.

In 1871, Stone and Blackwell began to publish the weekly feminist newspaper The Woman’ s Journal . Stone died in 1893, 27 years before American women won the right to vote. The Woman’ s Journal survived until 1931.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931

Ida B. Wells, born in Mississippi in 1862, is perhaps best known for her work as a crusading journalist and anti-lynching activist. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells wrote for the city’s Black newspaper, The Free Speech .

Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their Black neighbors.

Wells’s insistence on publicizing the evils of lynching, in particular, won her many enemies in the South, and in 1892 she left Memphis for good when an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and warned that they would kill her if she ever came back.

Wells moved north but kept writing about racist violence in the former Confederate states , campaigning for federal anti-lynching laws (which were never passed until 2022) and organizing on behalf of many civil rights causes, including woman suffrage.

In March 1913, as Wells prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural celebration, organizers asked her to stay out of the procession: Some of the white suffragists refused to march alongside Black people .

Early suffrage activists had generally supported racial equality—in fact, most had been abolitionists before they were feminists—but by the beginning of the 20th century, that was rarely the case. In fact, many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists’ cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of “their” women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the Black vote.

Wells joined the march anyway, but her experience showed that to many white suffragists, “equality” did not apply to everyone. Wells continued to fight for civil rights for all until she died in 1931.

Frances E.W. Harper (1825–1911)

Born to free Black parents in Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was orphaned while she was still very young. She was raised by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins, an abolitionist who set up his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper attended the academy, began writing poetry as a teenager and later became a teacher at schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Barred from returning to Maryland by an 1854 law mandating that free Blacks who entered the South would be forced into slavery, she moved in with her uncles’ friends, whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad .

Through her poetry, which dealt with issues of slavery and abolition, Harper became a leading voice of the abolitionist cause. She began traveling the country, lecturing on behalf of anti-slavery groups, and advocating for women’s rights and temperance causes. She also continued to write fiction and poetry, including short stories and a novel, Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the United States.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Harper was one of only a few Black women included in the growing women’s rights movement. In 1866, she delivered a famous speech at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York, in which she urged white suffragists to include Black women in their fight for the vote.

During the debate over the 15th Amendment (which Harper supported), she and other abolitionists split with white suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped form the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA). In 1896, Harper and others founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), which advocated for a number of rights and advancements for Black women, including the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Terrell grew up in an affluent family in Tennessee; her formerly enslaved parents both owned successful businesses, and her father, Robert Reed Church, was one of the South’s first Black millionaires. After graduating from Oberlin College , she began working as a teacher in Washington D.C. , and became involved in the women’s rights movement.

Terrell joined Ida B. Wells in her anti-lynching campaign in the early 1890s, and later co-founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) with Wells and other activists. Terrell served as the organization’s first president until 1901, writing and speaking extensively on women’s suffrage as well as issues such as equal pay and educational opportunities for African Americans.

Terrell joined Alice Paul and other members of the National Women’s Party in picketing for women’s voting rights outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House. In her view , Black women should be dedicated to the suffrage cause, as “the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount...both sex and race.”

As a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples ( NAACP ), Terrell remained an outspoken fighter on behalf of civil rights after passage of the 19th Amendment. In her 80s, she and several other activists sued a D.C. restaurant after being refused service, a legal battle that led to the court-ordered desegregation of the capital’s restaurants in 1953.

Life Story: Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931). New-York Historical Society Museum & Library . Mary Church Terrell. National Park Service . Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. National Women’s History Museum . Lucy Stone. Iowa State University: Archives of Women’s Political Communication . For Stanton, All Women Were Not Created Equal. NPR . Who Was Alice Paul? Alice Paul Institute . Her Life. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House .

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• A Century After Women Gained the Right To Vote, Majority of Americans See Work To Do on Gender Equality

About three-in-ten men say women’s gains have come at the expense of men

Table of contents.

• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ views of the current state of gender equality and the advancement of women around the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. For this analysis, we surveyed 3,143 U.S. adults in March and April 2020, including an oversample of Black and Hispanic respondents. The adults surveyed are members of the Ipsos Public Affairs KnowledgePanel, an online survey panel that is recruited through national random sampling of residential addresses and landline and cellphone numbers. KnowledgePanel provides internet access for those who do not have it and, if needed, a device to access the internet when they join the panel. To ensure that the results of this survey reflect a balanced cross section of the nation, the data are weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.

Here are the  questions used for this report , along with responses, and the report’s methodology .

References to white and Black adults include only those who are non-Hispanic and identify as only one race. Hispanics are of any race.

All references to party affiliation include those who lean toward that party. Republicans include those who identify as Republicans and independents who say they lean toward the Republican Party. Democrats include those who identify as Democrats and independents who say they lean toward the Democratic Party.

References to college graduates or people with a college degree comprise those with a bachelor’s degree or more. “Some college” includes those with an associate degree and those who attended college but did not obtain a degree.

A hundred years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, about half of Americans say granting women the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the country. Still, a majority of U.S. adults say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, even as a large share thinks there has been progress in the last decade, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Among those who think the country still has work to do in achieving gender equality, 77% point to sexual harassment as a major obstacle to women having equal rights with men. Fewer, but still majorities, point to women not having the same legal rights as men (67%), different societal expectations for men and women (66%) and not enough women in positions of power (64%) as major obstacles to gender equality. Women are more likely than men to see each of these as a major obstacle.

Many of those who say it is important for men and women to have equal rights point to aspects of the workplace when asked about what gender equality would look like. Fully 45% volunteer that a society where women have equal rights with men would include equal pay. An additional 19% say there would be no discrimination in hiring, promotion or educational opportunities. About one-in-ten say women would be more equally represented in business or political leadership.

In terms of the groups and institutions that have done the most to advance the rights of women in the U.S., 70% say the feminist movement has done at least a fair amount in this regard. The Democratic Party is viewed as having contributed more to the cause of women’s rights than the Republican Party: 59% say the Democratic Party has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights, while 37% say the same about the GOP. About three-in-ten (29%) say President Donald Trump has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights, while 69% say Trump has not done much or has done nothing at all. These views vary considerably by party, with Republicans and Republican leaners at least five times as likely as Democrats and those who lean Democratic to say the GOP and Trump have done at least a fair amount and Democrats far more likely than Republicans to say the same about the Democratic Party.

Views of the role the feminist movement has played in advancing gender equality are positive overall, though fewer than half of women say the movement has been beneficial to them personally. About four-in-ten (41%) say feminism has helped them at least a little, while half say it has neither helped nor hurt them. Relatively few (7%) say feminism has hurt them personally. Democratic women, those with a bachelor’s degree or more education and women younger than 50 are among the most likely to say they’ve benefitted personally from feminism.

Views about how much progress the country has made on gender equality differ widely along partisan lines. About three-quarters of Democrats (76%) say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, while 19% say it’s been about right and 4% say the country has gone too far. Among Republicans, a third say the country hasn’t made enough progress, while 48% say it’s been about right and 17% say the country has gone too far in giving women equal rights with men.

There is also a gender gap in these views, with 64% of women – compared with 49% of men – saying the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men. Democratic and Republican women are about ten percentage points more likely than their male counterparts to say this (82% of Democratic women vs. 70% of Democratic men and 38% of Republican women vs. 28% of Republican men).

The nationally representative survey of 3,143 U.S. adults was conducted online from March 18-April 1, 2020. 1 Among the other key findings:

More cite women’s suffrage than other milestones as the most important in advancing the position of women in the U.S. About half of Americans (49%) say women gaining the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the U.S.; 29% cite the passage of the Equal Pay Act, while smaller shares point to the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (12%) or the availability of the birth control pill (8%) as the most important milestone.

A majority of Americans say feminism has had a positive impact on the lives of white, Black and Hispanic women. About six-in-ten or more U.S. adults say feminism has helped the lives of white (64%), Black (61%) and Hispanic (58%) women at least a little. But more say feminism helped white women a lot (32%) than say it’s done the same for Black (21%) or Hispanic (15%) women. About a quarter (24%) say feminism has helped wealthy women a lot; just 10% say it’s been equally helpful to poor women.

About four-in-ten Republican men think women’s gains have come at the expense of men. Most Americans (76%) say the gains women have made in society have not come at the expense of men, but 22% think these gains have come at the expense of men. That view is more common among men (28%) than women (17%). Republican and Democratic men are more likely than their female counterparts to say the gains women have made in society have come at the expense of men. About four-in-ten Republican men (38%) say women’s gains have come at the expense of men, compared with 25% of Republican women, 19% of Democratic men and 12% of Democratic women.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say that, when it comes to gender discrimination, the bigger problem is discrimination being overlooked. Two-thirds of U.S. adults say the bigger problem for our country today is people not seeing gender discrimination where it really does exist; 31% say people seeing gender discrimination where it really does not exist is the bigger problem. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (85%) point to people overlooking gender discrimination as the bigger problem; 46% of Republicans say the same.

Most Americans favor adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution, even as many don’t think this would make much difference for women’s rights. About eight-in-ten U.S. adults (78%), including majorities of men and women and Republicans and Democrats alike, say they at least somewhat favor adding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. When asked about the impact they think adopting the ERA would have on women’s rights in the U.S., 44% say it would advance women’s rights, while 5% say this would be a setback for women’s rights and 49% say it would not make much of a difference. Even among those who favor adopting the amendment, 44% say doing so wouldn’t have much of an impact on women’s rights (54% say it would advance women’s rights).

A majority of Americans say the country has not gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men

The vast majority of Americans across demographic and partisan groups agree that women should have equal rights with men. More than nine-in-ten U.S. adults say it is very important (79%) or somewhat important (18%) for women to have equal rights with men in this country. Just 3% of Americans say gender equality is not too or not at all important.

Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party (86%) are more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners (71%) to say it is very important for women to have equal rights with men. Still, majorities of Republicans and Democrats, including at least two-thirds of men and women in each party, say this is very important.

When it comes to giving women equal rights with men, a majority of adults (57%) think our country has not gone far enough, while 32% say things have been about right; 10% of Americans say the country has gone too far in giving women equal rights with men.

Women (64%) are more likely than men (49%) to say the country hasn’t made enough progress on gender equality. However, there is also a sizable party gap. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats (76%) say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, compared with 33% of Republicans. Instead, 48% of Republicans – compared with 19% of Democrats – say things are about right when it comes to gender equality and 17% say the country has gone too far; just 4% of Democrats say things have gone too far.

Across parties, women are more likely than men to say the U.S. has not gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men. About four-in-ten Republican women (38%) say that gender equality has not come far enough, compared with 28% of Republican men. Still, about half of Republican men (51%) and 45% of Republican women say things are about right in the country when it comes to gender equality.

Among Democrats, 82% of women, compared with 70% of men, say the country still has work to do on gender equality. About a quarter of Democratic men (24%) say things are about right in the country when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, compared with 14% of Democratic women who say the same.

Among Democrats, those with at least some college education are more likely than those with no college experience to express dissatisfaction with the current state of gender equality. About eight-in-ten Democrats with a bachelor’s degree or more education (82%) and 77% of those with some college education say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, compared with 71% of Democrats with a high school diploma or less education. Among Republicans, there is generally more agreement across levels of educational attainment.

Overall, Americans express more dissatisfaction with the state of gender equality now than they did in 2017, when this question was last asked. Then, half said the country hadn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men, while 39% said things were about right and 10% said the country had gone too far. Attitudes have shifted among men and women and Republicans and Democrats alike.

Most Democrats and Republicans say the country has made progress in giving women and men equal rights over the last 10 years

While many Americans say there’s still work to be done to achieve gender equality, most say there’s been progress over the past decade. Majorities of men and women say the U.S. has made progress in the last 10 years when it comes to giving women equal rights with men. Still, 25% of Americans say things are the same as they were 10 years ago, and one-in-ten say the country has lost ground when it comes to equal rights for women.

Majorities of Democrats (60%) and Republicans (71%) say that, in the last 10 years, the country has made progress on gender equality. However, Democratic women are the least likely to say this: 58% of Democratic women say this, compared with 63% of Democratic men and 71% of both Republican men and Republican women. Instead, 28% of Democratic women say things are about the same as they were 10 years ago (21% of Republican women say the same).

About three-in-ten U.S. men think women’s gains have come at the expense of men

When it comes to the gains that women have made in society, most Americans (76%) say the gains have not come at the expense of men, but 22% – including 28% of men – think these gains have come at the expense of men.

Republican men (38%) are twice as likely as Democratic men (19%) to say the gains women have made have come at the expense of men. A quarter of Republican women also say this, less than the share of their male counterparts but higher than the shares of Democratic men and women (12%) that hold this view.

Among women, those without a bachelor’s degree are about twice as likely as college graduates to say gains have come at the expense of men (21% vs. 10%); educational differences are less pronounced, though still significant, among men: 30% of men with some college or less education say the gains women have made in society have come at the expense of men, compared with 24% of men with at least a bachelor’s degree.

Most who say the country still has work to do on gender equality say equality is likely in the future

On the whole, the majority of Americans who say that the country has not gone far enough to give women equal rights with men think it is very or somewhat likely that women in our country will eventually have equal rights with men. More than eight-in-ten Americans who say the country hasn’t made enough progress say this is very likely (31%) or somewhat likely (53%); just 16% say they think it is not too likely or not at all likely.

Large majorities of men and women and Republicans and Democrats who say the country has not yet achieved gender equality say it is at least somewhat likely that men and women will eventually have equal rights, but men (37%) are considerably more likely than women (26%)  to say it is very likely.

Among Republicans who say the U.S. has work to do to achieve gender equality, 36% say gender equality is very likely, compared with 29% of Democrats. This difference is driven in part by Democratic women, who are among the least likely to say they expect men and women to eventually have equal rights. Among Democratic women who say the country hasn’t gone far enough to achieve gender equality, 23% say they think it is very likely that there will eventually be gender equality; 38% of Democratic men say the same.

Even among the small share of Americans who say the country has lost ground on gender equality in the last 10 years, 76% say it is very or somewhat likely that women will eventually have equal rights with men.

More cite equality in the workplace than any other example as a sign of a society where men and women are equal

When those who say it is important for women to have equal rights with men are asked what a society with gender equality might look like, about half give examples that focus on equality in the workplace: 45% specifically say equal pay, 19% cite no discrimination in hiring and promotion, 5% say men and women getting equal respect in the workplace, and 2% say better paid leave and paternity and maternity support are things they would expect to see in a society where women have equal rights with men.

About one-in-ten cite more or equal representation of women in leadership, with 6% specifically mentioning political leadership and 5% mentioning business leadership. Relatively few point to reproductive rights (4%) and less traditional gender norms (4%) as markers of a society where women have equal rights with men. (Respondents were asked to answer this question in their own words; for respondents who gave multiple examples, up to three responses were coded.)

For the most part, men and women who say equal rights are important have a similar picture of what a society with gender equality would look like, but a larger share of women than men cite equal pay (51% vs. 40%). Still, the gender pay gap tops the list for both men and women who say gender equality is important.

Among women, references to equal pay differ by age. Women ages 50 and older (56%) are more likely than women under 50 (45%) to mention equal pay when describing a society where men and women have equal rights.

Democrats who say gender equality is important are more likely than their Republican counterparts to cite equal pay when asked about a society with gender equality: 50% of Democrats say this, compared with 41% of Republicans. Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say that more or equal representation in business and politics is a marker of equality (12% vs. 5%).

Wide party and gender gaps in views of the obstacles women face in achieving gender equality

When Americans who say the country has not gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men are asked about the obstacles to achieving equal rights, sexual harassment tops the list: 77% say this is a major obstacle for women. Roughly two-thirds say women not having the same legal rights as men (67%) and the different expectations that society has for men and women (66%) are major obstacles, and 64% say the same about not enough women in positions of power. Some 43% point to family responsibilities as a major obstacle, while fewer cite men and women having different physical abilities (19%) and women not working as hard as men (13%) as major obstacles. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of those who say the country has work to do on gender equality say women not working as hard as men is not an obstacle to gender equality.

Perceptions of the obstacles to gender equality vary across genders. For example, while 71% of women who say the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men cite not enough women in positions of power as a major obstacle to gender equality, 55% of men say the same.

A majority of women who say the country hasn’t made enough progress on gender equality also point to women not having the same legal rights as men (73%) and different societal expectations for men and women (72%) as major obstacles to women having equal rights with men. Fewer men who say this see each of these as major obstacles to gender equality (59% and 58%, respectively).

When it comes to the role sexual harassment plays in men and women having equal rights, women who say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to gender equality (82%) are more likely than men who say the same (72%) to cite this as a major obstacle, though large majorities of both groups say this.

Among women who say the country hasn’t made enough progress on gender equality, those with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely than those who have attended some college or less to say different societal expectations (81% vs. 67%) and not enough women in positions of power (80% vs. 66%) are major obstacles.

Among those who say there’s work to be done on gender equality, a majority of Democrats, but fewer than half of Republicans, see not enough women in power as a major obstacle

Among those who say there’s more work to be done in giving women equal rights with men, Democrats and Republicans differ on the extent to which certain factors are holding women back. A higher share of Democrats than Republicans point to not enough women in positions of power (72% vs. 41%), women not having the same legal rights as men (73% vs. 51%), sexual harassment (81 % vs. 66%) and different societal expectations (69% vs. 57%) as major obstacles to women having equal rights with men.

Republicans who say the country has not gone far enough to give women equal rights (27%) are more likely than similarly minded Democrats (17%) to say differences in the physical abilities of men and women are a major obstacle to women having equal rights with men, although relatively small shares of each group say this is the case. Meanwhile, there are no significant partisan gaps when it comes to views of family responsibilities (44% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans see it as a major obstacle) or women not working as hard as men (13% and 15%, respectively).

Democratic women are particularly likely to see some of these as major obstacles, while Republican men tend to be the least likely to do so. For example, 78% of Democratic women say women not having the same legal rights as men is a major obstacle to equal rights, as do 65% of Democratic men and 58% of Republican women. In contrast, 42% of Republican men say this is a major obstacle.

And while 77% of Democratic women, 65% of Democratic men and 50% of Republican women say not enough women in positions of power is a major obstacle to gender equality, just 31% of Republican men say the same.

Democrats are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to say there are problems with gender discrimination being overlooked

When it comes to gender discrimination, by more than a two-to-one margin Americans say the bigger problem for the country is people not seeing discrimination where it really does exist, rather than people seeing gender discrimination where it really does not exist (67% vs. 31%).

The vast majority of Democrats (85%) say the bigger problem is people not seeing gender discrimination where it really exists. In contrast, more Republicans say the bigger problem is people seeing discrimination where it doesn’t exist (53%) than say the people overlooking discrimination is the bigger problem (46%).

There is a wide gender gap among Republicans. While a majority of Republican men (61%) say the bigger problem is people seeing gender discrimination where it doesn’t exist, fewer than half of Republican women (44%) say the same. Democratic men are also more likely than their female counterparts to say this (19% vs. 11%), but 80% of Democratic men and 89% of Democratic women agree that the bigger problem is people overlooking gender discrimination.

More cite women gaining the right to vote than other milestones as the most important in advancing the position of women

When asked about milestones they see as important in advancing the position of women in the U.S., about half of Americans (49%) point to women gaining the right to vote as the most important milestone, a view that is more common among men (52%) than women (46%). Roughly three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) cite the passage of the Equal Pay Act, while smaller shares say passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the availability of the birth control pill are the most important milestones in advancing the position of women (12% and 8%, respectively).

White adults, as well as those with at least a bachelor’s degree, are more likely than Black and Hispanic adults and those with less education to see women’s suffrage as the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the U.S. Some 53% of white adults say women getting the right to vote has been a more important milestone than the passage of the Equal Pay Act, passage of the FMLA or the availability of the birth control pill. Black and Hispanic adults are about as likely to cite the passage of the Equal Pay Act as they are to cite women gaining the right to vote.

Among those with at least a bachelor’s degree, 59% see women’s suffrage as the most important milestone, compared with 48% of those with some college education and 41% of those with less education. Even so, across educational attainment, more point to women getting the right to vote than to the other milestones as the most important in advancing women’s rights in the U.S.

These differences by race and ethnicity and educational attainment are also evident when looking separately at the views of men and women. A majority of white men (57%) cite women gaining the right to vote as the most important milestone, compared with 39% of Black men and 43% of Hispanic men. And while white women are less likely than their male counterparts to say this (49% do so), even smaller shares of Black (36%) and Hispanic (38%) women point to women’s suffrage as the most important milestone.

Similarly, men with at least a bachelor’s degree (64%) are more likely than women with the same level of educational attainment (54%) to say women gaining the right to vote was the most important milestone. Both are more likely than their less educated counterparts to say this.

Views on this vary little, if at all, by age or partisanship, but Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party are about twice as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to say the availability of the birth control pill has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the U.S. (11% vs. 5%). Similar shares of Democratic women (12%) and men (11%) say this, compared with 6% of Republican women and an even smaller share of Republican men (3%).

A third of Americans know what year women in the U.S. gained the right to vote

When asked in an open-ended format what year women in the U.S. gained the right to vote, 47% offer a year between 1915 and 1925 (within five years of the correct answer), including 33% who correctly identify 1920 as the year women gained the right to vote. About three-in-ten Americans (31%) say women gained the right to vote in 1926 or later, while just 7% say this happened before 1915. (Some 14% didn’t provide an answer.) Men and women give similar answers.

Those who say women gaining the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing women’s rights in the U.S. are not necessarily more knowledgeable about the timing of this milestone. An identical share of those who cite women’s suffrage or the availability of the birth control pill as the most important milestones correctly identify 1920 as the year women gained the right to vote (38% each). Similar shares in these groups offer a year between 1915 and 1925.

Educational attainment is related to knowledge of the year women in the U.S. gained the right to vote. About six-in-ten adults with at least a bachelor’s degree (61%) give a year between 1915 and 1925, with 41% correctly identifying 1920 as the year women gained the right to vote. Smaller shares of those with some college (47%) or with a high school diploma or less education (36%) give an answer within five years of the correct year, and a third and quarter, respectively, give the correct answer.

Adults ages 65 and older are more likely than those who are younger to give an answer within five years of the correct year. More than half of those ages 65 and older (55%) say U.S. women gained the right to vote between 1915 and 1925, compared with 49% of those ages 50 to 64, 42% of those ages 30 to 49 and 47% of adults younger than 30.

Majorities say the feminist movement and the Democratic Party have done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights in the U.S.

Seven-in-ten Americans say the feminist movement has done a great deal (22%) or a fair amount (48%) to advance women’s rights in the U.S.; 59% say the same about the Democratic Party, including 12% who say it has done a great deal. In contrast, most Americans say the Republican Party (61%) and Donald Trump (69%) have not done much or have done nothing at all to advance women’s rights.

Women (73%) are more likely than men (67%) to say the feminist movement has done at least a fair amount to advance the rights of women in the U.S., but large majorities of each group say this. Meanwhile, a larger share of men (40%) than women (34%) say the GOP has done at least a fair amount in this area.

There are far wider partisan gaps than gender gaps when it comes to these views. About three-quarters of Democrats and those who lean Democratic (73%) say the Democratic Party has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights in the U.S.; fewer than half of Republicans and those who lean to the Republican Party (42%) say the same. Conversely, two-thirds of Republicans – but only 13% of Democrats – say the GOP has done a great deal or a fair amount in this area. Similarly, a majority of Republicans (59%) say Donald Trump has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights, while just 6% of Democrats say the same.

When it comes to the feminist movement’s impact, majorities of Democrats and Republicans say it has done at least a fair amount. Still, Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say this (80% vs. 58%).

For the most part, views on this don’t vary considerably by gender within each party. Republican women (62%) are more likely than Republican men (55%) to say the feminist movement has done a great deal or a fair amount to advance women’s rights, but more than half of both say this. And while Democratic men are more likely than their female counterparts to say their party has done at least a fair amount, about seven-in-ten or more of each group share this view (76% of Democratic men and 71% of Democratic women). Republican men and women give similar views when it comes to how much each of the political parties and Donald Trump have done, and there are no significant differences between Democratic men and women in views of the feminist movement, the Republican Party or Trump.

Majorities say feminism has helped white, Black and Hispanic women

In addition to saying the feminist movement has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights in the U.S., a majority of Americans think feminism has had a positive impact on the lives of specific groups of women. For example, about six-in-ten or more say feminism has helped the lives of white (64%), Black (61%) and Hispanic (58%) women at least a little, although there are more pronounced differences in the shares saying feminism has helped each of these groups a lot (32% vs. 21% and 15%, respectively). 2  Notably, just 41% of women say the movement has helped them personally.

A majority of Americans (57%) also think feminism has helped lesbian and bisexual women at least a little, including 23% who say it’s helped this group a lot. By comparison, 41% say feminism has helped transgender women, with just 11% saying this group has been helped a lot. About one-in-five (21%) say feminism has hurt transgender women, and 17% say the same about its impact on lesbian and bisexual women.

When asked about the impact of feminism on the lives of wealthy and poor women, 49% say it has helped each of these groups at least a little, but while 24% say feminism has helped wealthy women a lot , just one-in-ten say the same about the impact it’s had on the lives of poor women.

Opinions about how feminism has impacted each of these groups of women don’t differ significantly between men and women. In fact, the shares of men and women saying feminism has helped each of these groups at least a little vary only by 3 percentage points or less.

Majorities of white and Hispanic adults say feminism has helped white, Black and Hispanic women at least a little. Some 64% of Black adults also say feminism has helped white women, more than the shares who say it’s helped Black (49%) or Hispanic (48%) women. Black adults are the most likely to say feminism has helped white women a lot: 42% say this, compared with 34% of Hispanics and an even smaller share of white adults (29%).

Consistent with the difference in the shares of Republicans and Democrats who say the feminist movement has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights, Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say feminism has helped each of these groups of women.

About four-in-ten women say feminism has helped them personally

When asked about the impact of feminism on their own lives, 41% of women say it has helped them at least a little, with one-in-ten saying feminism has helped them a lot; 7% say feminism has hurt them, while half say it has neither helped nor hurt. 3

Some 55% of women with at least a bachelor’s degree say feminism has helped them personally, compared with 41% of women with some college education and an even smaller share of those with a high school diploma or less education (30%). In turn, six-in-ten of those with no college experience and half of those with some college say feminism has neither helped nor hurt them; 36% of women with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the same.

Hispanic women (46%) are more likely than Black women (36%) to say feminism has helped them personally; white women fall somewhere in the middle (41% say feminism has helped them). There are also differences by age, with 47% of women younger than 50 saying feminism has helped at least a little, compared with 35% of those ages 50 and older.

Among Democratic women, half say feminism has helped them personally, while just 5% say it has hurt them and 43% say it has neither helped nor hurt. By comparison, 28% of Republican women say feminism has helped them, while a majority (60%) say it’s neither helped nor hurt; 9% of Republican women say feminism has hurt them.

Most Americans favor adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution

In January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) , nearly half a century after it passed the Senate in 1972. While the ERA has now been ratified by three-fourths of the states, the number required for amending the U.S. Constitution, it is likely to face legal challenges as the deadline for ratification has passed.

The survey finds widespread support for adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution: About eight-in-ten Americans (78%) say they favor it, including 35% who strongly favor it being added to the Constitution. Women are more likely than men to say they strongly favor adding the ERA to the Constitution (39% vs. 31%), but about three-quarters or more in each group say they favor it at least somewhat.

Democrats overwhelmingly favor adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution, with roughly nine-in-ten saying they favor it strongly (51%) or somewhat (37%). There’s less support among Republicans: 66% say they favor adopting the ERA, with 16% expressing strong support for this. Republican women (75%) are far more likely than Republican men (58%) to say they favor adding the ERA to the Constitution. Views on this do not differ by gender among Democrats, but they do vary across other dimensions, including educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and age.

Large majorities of Democrats across levels of educational attainment say they favor adding the ERA to the Constitution, but those with at least a bachelor’s degree are the most likely to express strong support: 62% say they strongly favor adopting the ERA, compared with 55% of Democrats with some college and a smaller share of those of those with a high school diploma or less education (37%).

Among white Democrats, 58% say they strongly favor adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution. About four-in-ten Black and Hispanic Democrats say the same (42% each). These gaps remain when taking differences in educational attainment into account.

And while more than eight-in-ten Democrats across age groups support adopting the ERA, those ages 65 and older are more likely than those who are younger to express strong support. About six-in-ten Democrats ages 65 and older (63%) say they strongly favor adding the ERA to the Constitution, compared with 46% of Democrats ages 18 to 29 and ages 30 to 49 and 52% of those 50 to 64.

These differences by age, educational attainment and race and ethnicity are present among Democratic men and women. Among Republicans, the only notable demographic split on views of adopting the ERA is along gender lines.

Many say adding the ERA to the Constitution wouldn’t make much difference for women’s rights

Despite widespread support for adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution, 49% of Americans say this would not make much of a difference when it comes to women’s rights in the country; 44% say this would advance women’s rights and 5% think this would be a setback for women’s rights.

Even among those who favor adding the ERA to the Constitution, a sizable share (44%) is skeptical that this would have much of an impact, while 54% say it would advance women’s rights and just 2% see it as a potential setback. Democratic supporters of the ERA are far more likely than their Republican counterparts to say this would advance women’s rights in our country (63% vs. 38%). A majority of Republican ERA supporters (59%) say adding it to the Constitution wouldn’t make much difference.

Overall, male and female supporters of the ERA offer similar assessments of the impact adding the amendment to the Constitution would have on women’s rights; 54% of women and 53% of men who favor adopting the ERA say this would advance women’s rights in the U.S. Women ages 18 to 29 are more optimistic than women in older age groups to say adding the ERA to the Constitution would advance women’s rights. About six-in-ten women younger than 30 who support the ERA (63%) say adopting the amendment would advance women’s rights, compared with about half of older women who favor the ERA.

For the most part, adults who oppose adding the ERA to the U.S. Constitution say doing so wouldn’t make much difference for women’s rights (69% say this), while 20% think this would be a setback for women’s rights and 10% say it would advance women’s rights.

• For more details, see the Methodology section of the report. ↩
• The shares who say feminism has helped each group of women at least a little may not add to the shares who say “a lot” and “a little” as shown in the chart due to rounding. ↩
• The shares of women who say feminism has helped them personally at least a little may not add to the shares who say “a lot” and “a little” as shown in the chart due to rounding. ↩

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote, Journal of American History , Volume 106, Issue 3, December 2019, Pages 662–694, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz506

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Soon after the U.S. Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in early June 1919, state legislatures began to deliberate the question of women's suffrage. Ratification proceedings, which persisted for more than a year, unfolded against a backdrop of extraordinary rage, fear, and uncertainty in the United States. After World War I the decline of manufacturing and the demobilization of soldiers contributed to a painful recession. Across the long red summer, mobs of angry whites terrorized African American communities, lynching dozens of persons and burning homes and churches. Emboldened by union activism and the specter of Bolshevist revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of brutal raids, arresting and attempting to deport thousands of immigrant workers. In Congress, the dry majority overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, heralding a new era of prohibition. Amid this social and political tumult, the Nineteenth Amendment wound its way toward ratification.

What did the amendment, a milestone of American democracy, mean to a nation so deeply committed to white supremacy and immigration restriction? What were its implications for an aspiring empire then exerting military power overseas? How, if at all, did it affect politics and law in the United States?

To promote critical reflection about the Nineteenth Amendment and its many complex legacies, the Journal of American History announces a new series, Sex, Suffrage, Solidarities: Centennial Reappraisals. This series, which will run throughout the coming year, will consist of research articles, special features, and reviews published across the JAH , the JAH Podcast , and Process: a blog for American history . Our theme for the project—sex, suffrage, solidarities—is intended to provoke new questions about the Nineteenth Amendment and the political, economic, and cultural transformations of which it has been a part. Our ambition is to foster creative thinking about suffrage, its discursive and material frameworks, and its often-unanticipated consequences. We intend to examine the intricate linkages among suffrage, citizenship, identities, and differences. We aim to facilitate global, transnational, and/or comparative perspectives, particularly those that compel us to reperiodize or otherwise reassess conventional ways of thinking about campaigns for women's rights and adult citizenship.

To inaugurate this series, we invited a panel of distinguished historians—Ellen Carol DuBois, Liette Gidlow, Martha S. Jones, Katherine M. Marino, Leila J. Rupp, Lisa Tetrault, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu—to join in conversation about the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage, and women's political activism more broadly. The Interchange that follows reads by turns as essential historiography, compelling critique, and honest personal reflection. It offers invaluable context for, and analysis of, the study of women's rights in the United States. We are grateful to the participants and to our associate editor Judith Allen for her creative direction of this project.

Ellen Carol Dubois is Distinguished Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981; 3rd ed., forthcoming, 2020), Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997), and Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights: Essays (1998). Her next work, Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote , will be published in 2020. Readers may contact Dubois at [email protected] .

Liette Gidlow is the 2019–2020 Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s (2004) and editor of Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (2012). She is now preparing a book manuscript entitled The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970 . Readers may contact Gidlow at [email protected] .

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015). Her next book, Vanguard: A History of African American Women's Politics , will appear in 2020. Readers may contact Jones at [email protected] .

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Stanford University dissertation won the Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history from the Organization of American Historians; she has since revised and published it as Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019). Readers may contact Marino at [email protected] .

L Eila J. Rupp is Distinguished Professor of feminist studies and associate dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published nine books and more than two dozen articles, among them Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), co-authored with Verta Taylor, and Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997). She is now researching queer college students in the contemporary United States. Readers may contact Rupp at [email protected] .

Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of the Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), which won the inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's and gender history book prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians. She is working on a book about where and how women's suffrage fit into the political landscape after the American Civil War and another project tracing the genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment. Readers may contact Tetrault at [email protected] .

J Udy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). She is now researching the career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Readers may contact her at [email protected] .

JAH: U.S. historians have closely studied women's suffrage. In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners of the new women's history wrote extensively about women's enfranchisement and citizenship, as well as the nineteenth-century reform movements that inspired support for—but also opposition to—them. These aspects of political history remained a core priority for women's historians in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The publication of numerous authoritative biographies, organizational studies, and documentary collections enriched our knowledge of these subjects.

As you think back over this field, what are your impressions? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What works, methodologies, or interventions do you find most crucial?

Leila J. Rupp : When I began my graduate work in 1972, it was pretty much possible to read all the existing scholarship on women's history. My introduction to women's suffrage began with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), Aileen S. Kraditor's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965), Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967), and the less well-remembered The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage by Alan P. Grimes (1967). As an undergraduate in Herbert Aptheker's class on African American history, I wrote a paper on the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, relying heavily on Lerner's work to guide me to the sources. Then in 1978 came Barbara J. Berg's The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism and the now-classic Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 , by Ellen Carol DuBois. 1

When I think about this early literature and the subsequent development of the scholarship on suffrage, citizenship, and the women's movement over time, three themes come to mind. The first is the increasing attention to the importance of race, ethnicity, and class. Both Flexner and Lerner, embedded in the progressive Left, attended to issues of race and class, but the racial complexities of the suffrage movement that grew out of the abolitionist struggle did not take center stage, as they would in later literature. DuBois, also coming out of a left feminist context, detailed the failure of a joint struggle for black suffrage and woman suffrage during Reconstruction, the inability of suffragists to forge an alliance with organized labor, and the racism and class bias that underlay and were exacerbated by these failures. Yet, the point of her book is that these developments led to the emergence of an independent women's movement, a positive development in the long run. Since 1978 we have, of course, learned much more about the role that black women, with a foot in both race and gender politics, played in achieving suffrage, from works such as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998). 2

A second theme that characterizes the direction of scholarship over the decades is the continuity of the struggle for women's rights in the aftermath of suffrage victory in 1920. For a time, the Nineteenth Amendment seemed to mark the end of organized efforts to win women full citizenship until the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s. Then a flood of studies addressed the intervening decades. What happened to the women's movement? Did it die out after suffrage was won? Scholarship on the 1920s and beyond—Susan D. Becker's The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (1981), Nancy F. Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2004), on labor activism, Cynthia Harrison's On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (1988), and my work with Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), to name just a few—argued persuasively that it did not die out, and that it took a variety of forms. We came to think of “waves” of the women's movement—the first suffrage wave giving way to the second wave in the 1960s, with third and fourth waves to follow—only to back off from that metaphor to emphasize greater continuity than the rise and fall of waves seems to suggest. 3

This brings me to a third theme in the scholarship: placing the U.S. suffrage movement and subsequent activism in the context of transnational developments. In my Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997), I argued that a history of what I called an international women's movement, which picked up steam in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that rather than “waves” of activism we should think of “choppy seas.” Increasingly, as in other fields of U.S. history, women's historians are paying attention to the global context. Bonnie S. Anderson's Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000) makes it impossible to think about the Seneca Falls Convention as a purely American event. To give just a couple of other examples, Allison L. Sneider, in Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (2008), connects women's suffrage to U.S. imperialism, and Katherine M. Marino's Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019) details the ways that Latin American feminists in the 1920s and 1930s took the lead in fighting for economic, social, and legal equality on the global stage. 4

Ellen Carol Dubois : I begin by challenging the premise of the question itself. In the revival of women's history inspired by the women's liberation insurgence of the late 1960s into the 1970s, the American woman suffrage movement was not a topic of great interest. I believe that when I published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, I was alone in reexamining the subject within a full-fledged scholarly monograph. 5

Other suffrage scholars—notably Eleanor Flexner and Aileen Kraditor—though highly influential, were not infused with the energies and the concerns of those women's liberation years. Others of my sister scholars in that pioneering women's generation addressed related subjects—I think particularly of Nancy Cott, Mari Jo Buhle, and Linda Gordon—and I was much influenced by them. But for the most part that entire generation of radical and social historians were not much interested in electoral politics. In our experience, established parties were indistinguishable and ineffective; many of us didn't even vote. Women's liberationists tended to dismiss the suffrage movement for leaving untouched the issues of women's oppression with which we were concerned. My challenge to that dismissal was reflected in the title of my first article on the subject, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement” (1975), published in an early issue of Feminist Studies . In it, I elaborated what I saw as the underlying premise of the suffrage movement, that women were full-fledged and rational individuals, not subservient to family. 6

Following the concerns of my late 1960s political generation, in Feminism and Suffrage I examined the emergence of the suffrage demand in the context of race and class politics. I considered at great length the terrible 1867–1869 schism between black suffrage and woman suffrage advocates. While lamenting the conflict, my conclusion, reflected in the book's title, was that the break freed suffrage leaders—Stanton and Anthony the boldest and most radically feminist of those—to pursue their own political path, no longer deferential to the concerns of racial equality dictated by the Republican party. Again, this argument reflected the experience of my own women's liberation generation as it separated itself from the influence of the male-dominated black power movement.

In my later JAH article, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878” (1987), I came to a different conclusion, emphasizing what was lost in 1869, the solidarity of these two movements. By then I was influenced by the first works of black suffrage scholars. Paula Giddings's brilliant When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) was particularly important for me; I thought of it as the Century of Struggle for black women's history in its scope and bold interpretive stance. Of course, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (1977) was very important, but it should be remembered that it was available only as a difficult-to-access dissertation until it was published as a book in 1998. I still believe it necessary, in reconsidering suffrage history, to return to this tragic foundational conflict, especially as what we learn about the traditions of African American suffragism continues to grow. 7

While the racial dimension of the history of woman suffrage has received ever more attention, its class aspects have not, and this is unfortunate. Two of the six chapters of Feminism and Suffrage focused on Anthony's efforts to reach out to wage-earning women and forge a bond with the labor movement of the era. Mari Jo Buhle and Christine Stansell laid the basis for further exploration of these concerns and Diane Balser, Carole Turbin, and Susan Levine pursued the subject, but it has dropped off of suffrage scholars' radar in the current century. As we look over suffragism's seventy-five-year history and its impact on women's political activism after 1920, we should surely be struck by the prominence of women, many of whom began as suffragists, in the twentieth-century labor movement. As suffrage scholars, we should make it our business to dig into the deep, complex, and crucial interactions of race and class in American feminist politics. 8

Martha S. Jones : I came to women's history in the mid-1990s and am a beneficiary of so much work that predated my own. I also came to the field as a historian of African American women. Thus, my starting place was not with, for example, Flexner's Century of Struggle , though I would eventually get to that. Ellen DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage would soon join my list of essential reads. But the work of Terborg-Penn first shaped my thinking. Her 1977 Howard University Ph.D. dissertation, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” defined the field long before being published as African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . 9

Terborg-Penn's study conveyed three enduring insights for historians of black women—indeed, for historians of all women—and the vote. The first was that the work demanded painstaking recovery across an archival terrain not built to preserve black women as political thinkers or activists. Her sheer doggedness in the combing of sources was both an instruction about method and a cautionary tale. The second lesson was that we should not defer to, or trust, the often-cited sources that had long informed histories of women's suffrage. I remember locking horns with fellow graduate students in the 1990s about how to use the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage (a project initiated by Stanton and Anthony in the 1870s, with the last volume published in 1922). A nod here to Lisa Tetrault's important contribution to this point with The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014). It was from Terborg-Penn that I learned the politics that animated those volumes and then how to set them aside and avoid being misled. Finally, Terborg-Penn taught me to be unflinching about how racism had infected the minds of some of the best-remembered white women's suffrage activists. I learned that racism had been woven into the fabric of the movement's strategies and tactics. Today, thirty years later, some historians still struggle with how to write about this dimension of the movement. Terborg-Penn put that dilemma squarely in front of us. 10

I also read Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter in the mid-1990s. It opens with the often-quoted words of the African American scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper from 1892: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood … then and there the whole … race enters with me.’” This quotation told us much that we need to know about African American women's politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Cooper and others like her were charting their own way forward as women by the 1890s. Giddings anticipated, if not called into being, the field of African American women's history, which blossomed by the early 1990s. 11

Giddings begins her study with Ida B. Wells's antilynching campaign. This choice is a lesson in the history of women's suffrage. Black activist women such as Wells did not focus on a single issue in their view of women's rights, including the vote. Women's rights were in the service of human rights—rights that extended to women and to men. Giddings recognizes that black women's striving for the vote was interwoven with concerns about antilynching, temperance, the club movement, and Jim Crow. Challenging the periodization of the women's suffrage movement, Giddings's section on Fannie Lou Hamer sent a clear signal: for black women, the movement for suffrage extended to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (not unlike ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment) was only one stop along a hard-won route to political power. 12

Neither Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) nor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993) was expressly about women suffrage. Still, I read them as essential studies of how, where, and when black women built political power. Rather than in parlors or conventions, the roots of black women's politics lay in labor, loss, and survival on plantations. There, cruel myths about black women were crafted; the battle against such ideas animated black women's suffrage politics. Higginbotham's study of black Baptist women runs parallel to the histories of the American Woman Suffrage Association ( Awsa ), the National Woman Suffrage Association ( Nwsa ), and the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( Nawsa ), as well as the so-called women's suffrage movement. But we see the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification from a new perspective when we take the point of view of hundreds of thousands of black Baptist women. They did their political work within religious communities. Locating black women's politics on the plantation and in the church changed forever the way we would tell the history of black women and the vote. 13

These threads and more run through my 2007 book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 . What I had learned from the earliest works in African American women's history was how the politics of suffrage, for black women, was always “bound up” with broad concerns, diverse institutions, and differences among and between women, black and white. 14

Lisa Tetrault : When I began reading in this field in the late 1990s, there was little published about post–Civil War women's suffrage. As a result, after I finished Ellen DuBois's necessary Feminism and Suffrage , and several of her seminal articles, I turned to History of Woman Suffrage simply to learn basic historical outlines. I was struck not only by the majesty of Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage's recovery and preservation work, but also by their enormous silences and unmistakable emphases. 15

Also in the 1990s, Nell Painter published Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996), which bore heavily on themes of narrativity and power. In her articles as well as her book, she emphasized how Truth had been mythologized rather than remembered as a fully rendered human being and complex historical actor. The origin of the oft-cited “ain't I a woman speech” in primary-document readers (and increasingly online) was often the History of Woman Suffrage , which reprinted that problematic formulation from Frances Dana Gage. Painter's work on narrative and its present-day legacies were deeply influential for me. 16

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published her highly respected dissertation in that decade as well, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . That book strove to unmask and rebuild a basic narrative around women and voting. It too underscored how Stanton and Anthony helped create many of the outlines around something bounded (if still vast) called women's suffrage that nevertheless left out many women and political projects. 17

Over the 1990s and into the early 2000s, scores of new works broke down the idea that women existed in a separate sphere removed from politics. Women need not be domestic and women need not be enfranchised to exercise political power, and women engaged in politics in plenty of places we hadn't thought to look. 18

At the same time, my reading of the rapidly transforming field of Reconstruction-era scholarship signaled the end to a debate that bled from the 1980s into the 1990s: Was women's suffrage radical or conservative? Consequential or inconsequential? The nuanced, fine-grained analyses of power, race, citizenship, gender, freedom, and voting in Reconstruction scholarship, combined with women's political history, underscored that there was no one fixed issue to assess. Whether women's suffrage was radical or conservative, consequential or inconsequential, now seemed beside the point.

Finally, historians such as Elsa Barkley Brown, Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and the political scientist Victoria Hattam all questioned whether the franchise was even a stable category. Did it too need to be contextualized, interrogated, and historically understood? They clearly answered, “yes.” 19

Liette Gidlow : I have always seen histories of women's suffrage as part of broad histories of political institutions, political culture, women, and gender. Perhaps this is because I came to the study of women's/gendered politics through a different door. When I arrived at my Ph.D. program in history I came with an undergraduate background in political science; work experience in the D.C. Public Defender's office, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the Ohio legislature; and a feminist consciousness sharpened on issues of campus sexual assault and workplace harassment. My first exposure to women's studies came as an undergrad through feminist literary criticism, and my early interest in race and public policy was cultivated by working with Gary Orfield on issues of racial equity in education and by serving as a staffer to Rep. Julian Dixon in the 1980s. Representative Dixon at the time was the only African American subcommittee chair on the House Appropriations Committee, meaning that all manner of policy issues related to African American constituencies found their way to his desk, and thus mine.

All of these pieces, and a few others, came together in graduate school in the 1990s in a historically grounded way when I started investigating the League of Women Voters' Get Out the Vote ( Gotv ) campaigns of the 1920s. “Politics” clearly extended beyond electoral politics to the full range of ways power was being deployed, and yet “officialness” still mattered. I was especially interested in the nexus of the politics of representation and discourse, on the one hand, and the politics of formal governmental institutions, on the other. How has civic legitimacy historically been constructed, institutionalized, and contested, and what do race, gender, class, sexual preference, religion, and other sources of identity have to do with it? In an era of ostensibly universal suffrage, why did the members of the League of Women Voters feel they needed Gotv campaigns? Why were they trying to get out the votes of middle-class whites, who had the highest turnout, and not those of the working class and/or people of color, who were much less likely to vote? And what did it mean for anyone to be a good citizen in an era in which a majority of eligible voters did not cast ballots, as was the case in 1920 and 1924? Clearly gender, class, and race had a great deal to do with the answers to these questions.

Scholarship on suffrage and Progressive Era women reformers laid crucial foundations for my explorations, and I was especially indebted to work by Paula Baker, Jean Baker, Sarah Hunter Graham, and Robyn Muncy. More theoretical works, in particular Joan W. Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” (1992), helped me think about meaning-making, because I was interested in not only what the vote accomplished but also what enfranchisement signified and how that changed over time. Scholarship outside the conventional categories of “women's history” and “suffrage history” helped me explore the interplay between formal political institutions and processes and the politics of meaning-making. Nancy Fraser's essay on counterpublics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1992), was essential in helping me think about discourse and resistance. Joseph R. Gusfield's The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (1981) made me think about the framing of public issues. James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980) made me think about resistance in new ways. Works by Warren Sussman, Louis Althusser, Clifford Geertz, and Antonio Gramsci made me think about power dynamics embedded in everyday processes of meaning-making. 20

It was really after graduate school that I immersed myself more deeply in historical treatments of women's politics, broadly defined—in part because I was beginning to teach women's history surveys, and in part out of a growing appreciation for the power of narrative and the richness of stories focused on people rather than political institutions. Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), Katherine Mellen Charron's Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009), Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent , and Lisa G. Materson's study of black women's electoral activism in the context of the Great Migration ( For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 [2009]) stand out among many books that helped open the way to my current book project, “The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970.” 21

JAH: Professor Gidlow mentioned biographies of Ella Baker and Septima Clark. Are there other biographies that have particularly influenced your thinking about women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, or women's political activism more broadly?

Jones : I'd like to focus on the role of biography in writing and rewriting the history of women's suffrage. Let me digress just long enough to say that I think nomenclature is important here, so I will use the phrase “women and the vote” rather than “women's suffrage.” With this, I am signaling that my discussions are generally about the broader question of women and the vote, and not about the Nineteenth Amendment in particular. A discussion too narrowly framed by the Nineteenth Amendment relegates many American women to the margins.

African American women's history has produced a robust body of book-length, scholarly biographical works. This genre makes plain that African American women have approached voting rights through campaigns directly organized around suffrage, but they also did so through many other collectives, from clubs and churches to political parties and antislavery societies. Black women's biographies inform my understanding of how to write black women's political history, including their concern with voting rights.

For example, I've come back to Jane Rhodes's biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary ( Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century , 1998). Rhodes was most interested in Cary's fascinating work as a journalist, but she takes us through a life that includes affiliation with the Nwsa and a role in suffrage campaigns in Washington, D.C. Melba Joyce Boyd's Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994) is at its heart a literary biography. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only African American woman to speak on the record during the fraught American Equal Rights Association meetings of the 1860s. Her interventions are essential to any telling of mid-nineteenth-century suffrage politics. When Harper told those gathered that they were “all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she asserted a human rights vision that remained at the core of black women's thinking about the vote and perhaps remains there today. 22

Nell Painter's magnificent Sojourner Truth refuses to let Truth's memory merely serve the interests of others. We must grapple with Truth's complex, multifaceted life if we are to write about her at all. Painter's insight into racism—both as animus and as paternalism—is an essential lesson. Those who patronized Truth should not be understood as having wholly respected or made space for the entirety of Truth's humanity, even if they incorporated her into women's conventions, the History of Woman Suffrage , and more. 23

Add to these Jean Fagan Yellin's Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004), which introduces sexual violence as a women's rights issue; two biographies of Harriet Tubman (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [2004] and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero [2004]), which remind us that in the last years of her life Tubman stumped for women's suffrage; and Marilyn Richardson's pathbreaking Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (1987), which wholly resets our periodization of women's rights in the United States with 1832 Boston as a point of origin. Together these biographies are a rich portrait of how black women thought about and worked toward their political rights, while also laboring for human rights. 24

Biographical works often take the point of view of insurgent activists. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the important work on Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is foundational to my thinking about suffrage versus the vote versus politics versus power. Wells-Barnett was frustrated by Congress and political parties in her antilynching campaign, leading her to adapt an old internationalist vision for her own times. Here, Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009) and Paula J. Giddings's Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (2008) are must-reads. 25

But when I invoke insurgent politics, I am suggesting that the history of black women's politics and power cannot be understood without appreciating those who rejected the politics of the vote for other visions. Again, biographies let us see this clearly. Consider works from Barbara Ransby— Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (2013)—and Ula Yvette Taylor— The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) and The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). I'd also place Sherie M. Randolph's Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (2015) on a shelf of histories that call into question whether frameworks such as “suffrage” and the “vote” are even central to understanding African American women's history. These insurgent histories are counternarratives that ask hard questions about whether and to what degree women who worked for inclusion and equity in parties and at the polls might have been misled, misguided, or just plain mistaken in their objectives. 26

A few works hit a sweet spot where both the mainstream and the insurgent come together in illuminating ways. First, Barbara Winslow's Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (2013), gives us a figure who both leveled a radical challenge and worked within U.S. politics, and fought her way in with integrity. And there is Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999), which also manages to hold on to both the critique of and the striving to gain state power. For yet another figure who just might thread that needle, I'd add Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming (2018). I can't say that Mrs. Obama is at the end of the day an insurgent, but she tells a story about how a black woman strikes a precarious balance when she engages with the mainstream. In this respect, her autobiography reaches all the way back to figures such as Sojourner Truth, black women who tried to make themselves legible to the nation by way of an intersectional analysis of their lives and of American political culture. 27

I'll pitch some biographies still to be written (better yet if they are being written at this very moment): Sarah Mapps Douglass, Jarena Lee, Sarah Parker Remond, Anna Julia Cooper, Julia A. J. Foote, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Eliza Ann Gardner all come immediately to mind as women whose lives we know a good deal about and, still, whose biographies would further our understanding of how black women came to politics. There is little room left, it's safe to say, for the old view that black women were not engaged with women's issues or that they somehow placed the interests of black men above their own.

Dubois : A few crucial figures have recently received their first scholarly biographies: Alva Belmont (Sylvia Hoffert's Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights [2011]) and Anna Howard Shaw (Trisha Franzen's Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage [2014]). Franzen makes a strong case that much of what we thought we knew about Shaw comes to us through the unflattering lens of Carrie Chapman Catt's evaluation. The biographies and political studies of Ida B. Wells continue to accumulate (Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely , Patricia A. Schechter's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 [2001], and the very interesting work of Crystal N. Feimster in Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching [2011]). Among other leading African American suffragists, Fannie Barrier Williams (in Wanda A. Hendricks's Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race [2013]) and Mary McLeod Bethune (in Joyce A. Hanson's Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism [2013]) now have their first biographies. Importantly, Alison Park is forthcoming with a new biography of Mary Church Terrell. Other especially compelling twentieth-century figures are also the subject of new biographies: Jeannette Rankin (Norma Smith's Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience [2002]) and Inez Milholland (Linda J. Lumsden's Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland [2004]). 28

Ernestine Rose has a new and interesting biography (Bonnie S. Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer [2017]). I've also dug a little into biographies of lesser-known figures such as Lillie Devereux Blake (Grace Farrell's Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased [2002]), Belva Lockwood (Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President [2007]), and Emma Devoe (Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal's Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe [2011]). There are several new studies of Alice Paul (Mary Walton's A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot [2010], Christine Lunardini's Alice Paul: Equality for Women [2013], and Jill Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry's Alice Paul: Claiming Power [2014]), and one of Lucy Stone (Sally G. McMillan's Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life [2015]). I particularly note the absence from this list of books on working-class suffragists such as Leonora O'Reilly and Rose Schneiderman. There is now, however, a much-needed study of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (Kathleen Nutter's The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 [2000]). 29

Two recent biographies have appeared (Lori D. Ginzberg's Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life [2009], and Vivian Gornick's The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton [2005]). With the publication of Ann D. Gordon's scrupulously edited and annotated six-volume Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997–2013), hopefully more should be forthcoming. Also in the category of important biographical resources, Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar's incredible Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 has done spectacular work in using crowd sourcing to build biographical dictionaries of relatively unknown African American suffragists, Congressional Union/National Woman's party militants, and the moderates of Nawsa . 30

JAH: How have historians' approaches to women's suffrage and women and the vote evolved since this first effusion of scholarship? What, if anything, has changed in the early twenty-first century?

Gidlow : I see the last twenty-five-years or so of scholarship as having replaced a single dominant narrative that was constrained and bounded with a profusion of perspectives that transcend many of those limits. In its purest form, the classic interpretation treated the suffrage struggle as a self-contained American story that began in 1848 in Seneca Falls and, after many trials and tribulations, was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1920 by heroic middle-class and elite white women with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Scholarship, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, chipped away at the temporal, geographical, racial, and class boundaries of the prevailing narrative through key works such as Ginzberg's Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (2005), Cott's “Across the Great Divide” (1990), Anderson's Joyous Greetings (2000), Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote (1998), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996), and DuBois's Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997). By the mid-2000s, the classic narrative gave way to bold new interpretations that borrowed insights from scholarship on historical memory, borders, and other fields. It was hardly possible to privilege 1848 after Tetrault's The Myth of Seneca Falls , or to see suffrage as a purely domestic political issue after Sneider's Suffragists in an Imperial Age . As the centennial of ratification approaches, more work is connecting woman suffrage to, or integrating it into, accounts of other key figures and issues in U.S. and global history, such as Charles Darwin and evolution (Kimberly A. Hamlin's From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America [2014]), and, in my own work, the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. These deep connections to other issues are powerful evidence, if any was needed, that “the” history of woman suffrage is not peripheral to national or transnational histories, but central and essential. 31

Katherine M. Marino : Numerous women's groups have pushed for the right to vote as one goal in multipronged and often-global platforms for birth control, labor rights, socialism, world peace, temperance, child welfare, freedom from sexual violence, antilynching legislation, and racial justice. Works that shine a light on the vital political work of African American women's rights activists that included and expanded beyond suffrage include Jones's All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (2013); Feimster's Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017); and Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race , in addition to already-named works by Terborg-Penn, Painter, and Giddings, and many others. 32

Vicki L. Ruiz's American Historical Review article on Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno (“Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930”), Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011), Gabriela González's Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), and Emma Pérez's The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) have explored the political work of turn-of-the-century Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Latinx women who took up “the woman question” alongside other goals for the health, education, and safety of their communities. Works that demonstrate the interrelationship between suffrage organizing and international peace, labor, and socialist movements include Rupp's Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois's 1991 New Left Review essay “Woman Suffrage and the Left”; Julia L. Mickenberg's American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (2017) and her 2014 JAH article, “Suffragettes and Soviets”; Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (1995); and Melissa R. Klapper's Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (2013), to name just a few. 33

These histories show us that suffrage was not one movement, but multiple movements. They also challenge the wave metaphor, showing us that U.S. feminism in the early twentieth century was not defined by a quest for the Nineteenth Amendment. At the same time, demands for political rights and equality have been an integral and ongoing part of U.S. feminisms.

These readings have also been useful for my own work on Pan-American feminism in the interwar years. On the heels of the Nineteenth Amendment, Anglo-American women, believing they were the global leaders of feminism because of their recent suffrage victory, sought to dictate the terms of feminism to their Latin American counterparts. U.S. leaders often instructed Latin American feminists to make a single-minded push for suffrage. However, Latin American feminists exerted their own broader meanings of feminismo , defined not only by equality under the law but also by social and economic rights, and anti-imperialism, among other goals. Anti-imperialism was a driver of suffrage activism in Latin America, especially in Central America, in the 1910s and 1920s. In the mid-1930s–1950s period, when suffrage passed in most Latin American countries, antifascism and Popular Front coalitions of socialist and labor groups vitally energized women's suffrage campaigns. This Popular Front Pan-American feminist movement was critical to developing frameworks for international human rights. It advocated a broad meaning of international human rights—for political, civil, social, and economic rights for men and women, and antidiscrimination based on race, sex, class, or religion—that it pushed into inter-American venues and eventually into the founding of the United Nations. In the Un , a group of Latin American feminists were critical to inserting women's rights in the founding 1945 Un Charter and to promoting the inclusion of both women's and human rights. This is just one example of how it can be useful to de-center the United States, while also keeping in mind the relationship between U.S. suffrage and imperial histories. 34

Dubois : I have been impressed with several clusters of recent scholarship. Political scientists are delving into the theoretical foundations of suffrage thought and the impact of enfranchisement on voting rates. Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (2016), by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, uses sophisticated new techniques to assess how women voted in their first presidential elections. They break the vote down by state and region and thus offer an alternative to the oversimplified, long-standing, and unsubstantiated claim that women did not make use of their new voting rights. They and others have suggested that we pay attention to the role played in the political realignment of 1932 by the massive expansion of the electorate that the Nineteenth Amendment effected. Republicans had long claimed to be the party that supported woman suffrage, but that claim had grown very thin by the late 1920s. It is not without significance that while Herbert Hoover promised the first woman cabinet member, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who appointed her. 35

I noted in my first answer that working-class suffragism could use more research. By contrast, there is much fine scholarship on upper-class suffragism. In addition to Sylvia Hoffert's Belmont biography already noted, Johanna Neuman has written about “Gilded Age socialites” ( Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote , 2017), and Joan Marie Johnson has done very good work on suffrage philanthropy ( Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 , 2017). Somewhat related is Brooke Kroeger's work on male suffrage supporters ( The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote , 2017). Note that these last three books focus on New York suffragism, as does the work of Susan Goodier ( No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement [2017] and, coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State [2017]). Almost every other state has yet to receive its own study, which will be of great help in understanding the grassroots of suffragism. 36

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu : I will focus on the value of citizenship, both for those excluded from eligibility and political rights due to race and immigration status as well as for those who had citizenship forced upon them by the U.S. Empire. These perspectives illuminate how whiteness and settler colonialism underlie so-called women's suffrage. I focus my comments primarily on Asian American and Pacific Islander women, although forms of racialized exclusion and forced colonization resonate more broadly.

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 happened just four years before the 1924 Immigration Act, which systematically codified earlier laws and court cases that denied Asian immigrants entry into the United States and deemed them “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This designation, a legal status that influenced social and cultural representations of Asian people in the United States, held implications not only for the right to vote but also for the right to serve on juries, own property, marry interracially, and so on. For Asian women, whose status was “covered” by that of their husbands or fathers, their alienness by association not only translated to distinctly gendered barriers at the border (where they were monitored for gender-inappropriate behavior and suspected of prostitution) but also affected their legal rights (U.S.-born women would lose their citizenship if they married men who were aliens ineligible for citizenship). The scholarship of Sucheng Chan, Martha Gardner, Judy Yung, and others reveal how U.S. citizenship fundamentally represented racialized and gendered privileges, which were out of grasp for those deemed forever foreign. This issue continues to be relevant, given the substantial undocumented population in the United States, including Asian Americans, the fastest growing segment of this community. 37

It is also important to note instances of forced incorporation into the U.S. Empire, which conferred the unwanted gift of unequal legal rights. As Allison Sneider, Kristin Hoganson, and others argue, the U.S. women's suffrage campaign blossomed in the contexts of U.S. westward expansion and overseas empire. White suffragists insisted on their political rights in response to U.S. colonial endeavors. As Susan B. Anthony stated in her 1902 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage, “I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered people, who know nothing about our institutions.” As the U.S. expanded into the Caribbean and across the Pacific, Filipinos became “nationals,” neither citizens nor aliens. The last Native Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was forcibly deposed by a coalition of white businessmen, U.S. military forces, and Christian missionary interests. Given this history of U.S. Empire, coerced inclusion, and racialized arguments for white women's suffrage, what is the value of attaining “equal” rights within an inherently unjust nation? 38

To help address these legacies of racial exclusion and imperial incorporation, I especially appreciate the work of Cathleen Cahill, whose forthcoming book focuses on women of color, particularly indigenous, Latina, and Asian/American women who advocated for suffrage. I'm also in awe of the substantial black women's suffrage project that Dublin and Sklar have launched as part of the Women and Social Movements in the United States journal. 39

I explore the ramifications of race and empire in a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. Mink was elected from Hawaii and lived through the islands' transition from “territory” to “state.” She also articulated what I describe as a Pacific feminism. Mink's denizenship from islands in the middle of the Pacific framed how she understood political issues, ranging from Cold War militarism, race relations, environmentalism, and women's politics. The racial, the colonial, and the international were intertwined for Mink, a third-generation Japanese American, as they are for other racialized individuals who arrived on U.S. shores or whose homelands were crossed by U.S. borders. 40

Tetrault : I appreciate Judy Wu's reminder that extension of suffrage “rights” also implied colonization in the lives of many. In my reading about native and indigenous peoples voting “rights,” gaining citizenship and the vote meant the loss or diminishment of tribal sovereignty. We need to be careful not to reify the whiteness of the standard narrative by cheerfully adding additional dates—when native women “got” the vote, for example—or by treating voting as if it is always, on the face of it, desirable. The latter idea betrays a kind of triumphant American exceptionalism that often runs through discussions about voting “rights.” More work is needed here. Certainly, once enfranchised, colonized people creatively figure out how to leverage the ballot in their lives, for resistance and survival. And this too is an important part of the story. 41

Leila J. Rupp posed this question: Liette Gidlow's comments about the breakdown of a dominant narrative of suffrage as a self-contained and American story, along with Judy Wu's focus on the history of both systematic exclusion and imperialist incorporation of Asian and other women of color, raises for me these questions: Do we have anything to celebrate about the suffrage victory? Given the complicated history of suffrage that has emerged, are there positive developments we can point to regarding women's enfranchisement? What did women's votes bring to politics?

Gidlow : There is a sense that somehow the Nineteenth Amendment was rather a disappointment, that it doubled the electorate but didn't really change anything, in part because many women did not vote, and because those who did vote did not vote as a bloc. That is, that the Nineteenth Amendment did not produce a “women's vote.”

I argue, however, that over time a women's voting bloc did emerge, one that is cross-class and stable, with high voter turnout and a sharp preference for one party. That bloc emerged not among white women, but rather among African American women. It took the better part of a century, but by the early twenty-first century “the” black women's vote had become transformative in U.S. politics, just as southern white supremacists who had feared woman suffrage a century ago had feared.

The fear that the Anthony Amendment would enfranchise southern black women and open the door to the return of southern African American men to the polls was central to the debate over the Anthony Amendment in the late 1910s in Congress and in 1920 in Tennessee. In 1915 the Richmond ( Va ) Evening Journal editorialized that if the Anthony Amendment became law, “twenty-nine counties will go under negro rule,” a development that would force “the men of Virginia to return to defending white supremacy through fraud and violence” and “return to the slimepit from which we dug ourselves.” As I pointed out in a 2018 article in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , southern members of Congress routinely cited these concerns when they explained their opposition to sending the amendment to the states for ratification (“The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote”). Kimberley Hamlin develops evidence along these lines beautifully in her forthcoming book, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener . And Elaine Weiss's account of the ratification battle in Tennessee ( The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote , 2018) shows frequent recourse to the fear of black women's—and men's—votes. When black women showed up in the fall of 1920 to register and vote—and they did show up—local papers reported near panic at their surging interest. 42

In some locations, the sheer number of registrants suggests that the mobilization of black women voters was cross-class. A letter writer to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( Naacp ) noted that six hundred African American women tried to register in Caddo Parish, Louisiana—a breadth that suggests working-class mobilization—but that fewer than five succeeded, most of those, as the letter-writer states, “on account of “thair propity.” In Jacksonville, Florida, thanks to painstaking data collection by Paul Ortiz, we have direct evidence of cross-class mobilization ( Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 , 2005). There, the occupations with the most female registered voters were laundry workers, maids, and cooks, but the list of registrants also included dressmakers, clerks, and teachers. 43

Voter registrars employed a variety of strategies to disfranchise middle- and upper-class African American women. They had the discretion to decide how to test applicants and whether they had done well enough to pass. Class status alone did not secure voting rights for African American women in the South after ratification. Some black women turned then to gender-based strategies, trying to enlist the help of white women who had worked and sacrificed to enact woman suffrage. They quickly learned that there was little gender solidarity across racial lines. The two major suffrage groups ( Nawsa , reconstituted in the summer of 1920 as the League of Women Voters, and the National Woman's party) both declined to get involved. 44

Class-based strategies did not work, and gender-based strategies did not work, so African American women redoubled their efforts to push forward race-based strategies, working with African American men through the Naacp , churches, institutions of higher education, and other organizations. They attacked the white primary and made for themselves a place in the “Roosevelt” Democratic party. Women such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark developed educational programs that helped community members pass literacy tests. After the Voting Rights Act, despite ongoing resistance, they registered and mobilized en masse. Their votes made a difference; sometimes they made the difference. 45

It took the better part of a century, but the Nineteenth Amendment did produce a “women's vote.” Since at least the 1990s, African American women have displayed the most intense partisan preference of any demographic group. In 2008 and 2012, they had the highest voter turnout of any group and made crucial contribution to Barack Obama's historic presidential wins. When southern white supremacists opposed the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, they feared the power of black women's votes. A century later we can see that their fears were well-founded.

Marino : When I teach U.S. women's and gender history, I trouble the assumption that the Nineteenth Amendment was the major turning point that students sometimes assume it was. I ask my students to consider a question my adviser Estelle Freedman instilled in us: “Which women?”—Which women benefitted from the Nineteenth Amendment? As Judy Wu has pointed out, immigration restrictions meant that most Asian and Asian American women did not. Polling taxes, literacy requirements, and violence constricted citizenship rights for many African Americans in the South. The deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s further eroded men's and women's citizenship rights. Relatedly, the racism of white suffrage organizations, their use of U.S. imperial expansion as justification for a federal suffrage amendment, and their failure to organize intersectionally in the wake of suffrage, challenge the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment was a major turning point. 46

At the same time, I also emphasize that movements for suffrage were extremely important in chipping away at the legal exclusion of women from political citizenship, and that suffrage demands were a key part of broader movements that upheld multiple goals. To understand the stakes of women's suffrage it helps to realize that figures as diverse and as radical as Sojourner Truth, Clara Zetkin, Ida B. Wells, and Jovita Idár were demanding it and to great effect. One example: In 1913, the same year she rejected white suffragists' instructions to march at the end of the Washington, D.C., parade, Wells founded the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club. That club registered over seven thousand new African American women voters who helped elect the city's first black alderman. It is important to understand that Wells's suffrage and electoral activism was connected to her activism against lynching and sexual violence. 47

Tetrault : I appreciate Liette Gidlow's deft summary of the field: from a dominant, contained narrative to a profusion of narratives that can no longer be contained and now spill over into so many other stories. At the same time, this centennial is causing quite a bit of confusion, as the old, contained narrative of the Nineteenth Amendment extending the “right to vote” to women keeps intruding onto how we now brand the amendment. I think the conventional story has contributed negatively in unseen ways to understandings of American history, by lulling (often white) Americans into believing that a “right to vote” exists. Historians constantly refer to suffrage activism as women pursuing and then winning “the right to vote.” That framing enshrines this right as something that has been realized, when it has not. It's no surprise, then, that a majority of white Americans today think that voter suppression is not currently underway, even as it is sharply on the rise. 48

Bringing the text of the Nineteenth Amendment into anniversary discussions helps us see a place where we are still getting tripped up by older, inherited—and triumphant—narratives. When the amendment was drafted in 1878 it might have been worded affirmatively, as a directive: the federal government shall protect the right of women to the elective franchise. But it wasn't, owing to complicated factors. Instead, the Nineteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment upon which it was modeled, is negatively worded. The Fifteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “race,” while the Nineteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “sex.” The Nineteenth Amendment doesn't enfranchise anyone directly. It works indirectly, by removing the word “male” from state constitutions, where voting qualifications were defined. That's it. It's true that the opening of the short, thirty-nine-word amendment (like the Fifteenth Amendment) references a “right to vote,” but that right did not, in fact, exist. It's an illusory referent point, something the amendment leaves imagined rather than demanded. The Constitution leaves the appointment of voters up to individual states. It does not contain the right to vote.

Leading white suffragists could have seen how flaccid the Fifteenth Amendment turned out to be in protecting black men's votes, as southern states legally disfranchised them on other grounds—something permitted by the very narrow and negative wording of that amendment. Yet, even as the shortcomings of the Fifteenth Amendment became clear over the 1880s and 1890s, neither Stanton nor Anthony, nor any other suffragists, sought to revise the text of the proposed federal amendment. They left it modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, even as that amendment crumbled before them.

This wording is, I think, a concession to American racism. Historians talk about the amendment's effect but rarely about its creation. Stanton, in particular, had always believed that voting should be extended to the “educated” and kept from the “ignorant” (read, immigrants and many folks of color). Stanton supported discrimination in voting, and the amendment ultimately made allowances for that (explored in my current work). Future, mainstream white suffragists made these same allowances by not revising the amendment's text.

Removing “male” from state-defined voter qualifications, by declaring that requirement unconstitutional, was a huge victory, particularly in an era when discrimination on the grounds of sex was thought not only permissible but also necessary given that women and men were understood to be vastly different biological entities. But how can we tell a story today that doesn't falsely enshrine a “right to vote” and still honor this amendment? There, I think, we still have work to do.

Finally, that we still narrate the mainstream suffrage story as a story of the federal amendment is, I think, another legacy of the earlier dominant narrative that centers Stanton and Anthony. The federal amendment was their baby, but many other suffragists—especially in the forgotten American Woman Suffrage Association—thought it was unconstitutional, because the Constitution clearly gave authority over voting to the states, something not discussed in references to their promotion of a state strategy.

When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, women were already voting, in some form, in all but eight states. We have very little history of how women on the ground, including women of color, were trying to create and safeguard a “right” to a ballot. What we do know is that we can't talk about women's first election as if it happened after 1920; millions of women were already voting before then.

If we broaden our focus beyond the federal amendment, we see that there is no single date when women gained ballot access. This is a more accurate, if a much less satisfying, story.

Dubois : It bears emphasis that the wording of the amendment that Lisa critiques was offered by senators, not by Stanton and Anthony. Through much of the 1870s, Stanton and Anthony advocated affirmative wording linking women's voting to universal national suffrage, but that phrasing received no support in Congress.

Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment? I must say that I honestly don't understand how this question can be asked and so how to answer it. Perhaps it is intended as a productive provocation. Nonetheless, my strong position is that any significant political goal that women wished to achieve, any effort to effect social change for women or for the larger society, could not be secured without the fundamental tool of democratic society, the franchise. Would we want to envision a counterfactual history in which American women would wait, like the women of France, Italy, Mexico, Belgium, and many other countries, until after the Second World War to vote? Nor can we reasonably claim that these, or our, or virtually any other national enfranchisements of women could have occurred without the often-long-running, organized demands by women themselves.

The Fifteenth Amendment certainly did not secure African American men's right to vote against attack and required another century of struggle to fully reinstate it. Nonetheless, I doubt any of us would think it a better outcome if de jure suffrage rights had not been won during Reconstruction. In the modern world, where even autocratic leaders must make use of the popular vote, no one except an occasional far-right pundit seeking attention seriously asks whether women's enfranchisement should have happened. Women's votes are such a rich prize that all sides fight furiously to claim them.

Gidlow : Voting is hardly the whole story of American democracy and political participation. But there is a singular quality to enfranchisement because it certifies the enfranchised person's status as a legitimate decision maker in civic affairs. (Judith Shklar's classic 1991 work, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion , is so valuable here.) The imprimatur of official status matters, even if the act of voting does not achieve all we might wish. This is not to say that the import of enfranchisement is merely symbolic. When women cast votes, they are helping make decisions that everyone, including men, must abide. This power remains deeply contested, in politics and well beyond, even a century after ratification. 49

Jones : Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment anniversary? I don't think “celebration” is a historian's approach to the past—it leans too far in the direction of hagiography for my tastes. I don't even think, as I've written elsewhere, that commemoration is the work of historians. On this point I am indebted to Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his devastating analysis of the 1992 “celebration” of Christopher Columbus in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). Anniversary dates are an opportunity to teach history to a broader public. Some of what we teach may encourage or fuel commemoration or celebration. But if we give in to the tug of mythmaking and sanitization that these sort of rituals require, we are doing something else. 50

JAH: In what ways have histories of women and the vote contributed to our broader understanding of U.S. history? What difference has this work made to the field at large?

Dubois : Regarding the beginning and end of the suffrage period, historians of the United States have done a modestly good job of paying attention to suffrage historiography. By beginning, I mean from the period of antislavery activism to the Reconstruction era, 1836–1876. The abolitionist origins of women's rights and the controversy surrounding woman suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment have both drawn historians' attention. I recently noticed a very good law review article by Adam Winkler on the suffrage New Departure, which made an innovative constitutional argument for women's enfranchisement largely based on the Fourteenth Amendment, as an early and underappreciated episode in the reenvisioning of the Constitution as a “living document,” an approach not recognized by virtually any jurists at the time (“A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” 2001). By end, I mean the Progressive Era, 1900–1920. Women's political activism in those years is so central to the social welfare dimension of state and national policies, it is hard to ignore. 51

The middle period of suffrage activism has not been integrated into general U.S. history for two reasons. First, suffrage historiography is weak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, perhaps because there is little suffrage radicalism to inspire modern students of the movement. Second, U.S. history overall is weak in this period, with no consensus on how to narrate the era, or even what to call it: the age of class division, the age of industrialization, the woman's era, the Gilded Age, the racial nadir, post-Reconstruction reaction?

Jones : One approach to this question is to ask more directly: How have histories of women's suffrage contributed to our understanding of women's politics and power? Once we do, at least two important things happen. First, our attention is drawn away from so-called women's suffrage associations, and we focus on sites where black women were struggling over their political rights and power. This is why, for example, the Ann D. Gordon's edited collection African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (1997) ranges from the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women to the Voting Rights Act. That volume examines black women not only in suffrage associations but also throughout African American public culture: in the colored convention movement, antislavery societies, churches, the antilynching movement, the club movement, and more. To answer the question directly, the history of women's suffrage (and its shortcomings) encouraged historians of black women to rewrite the histories of black public culture as histories of women and to better understand the full range of how and where women's politics unfolded. 52

Today, in the field of African American women's history, a great deal of important work is being done on women's politics and power, but not very much of this work focuses on the history of suffrage or of voting more generally. This stands in contrast to the great interest in contemporary voter suppression, treated in Carol Anderson's excellent One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Still, we don't think of the era before the Nineteenth Amendment as one of “voter suppression” even as many black women were barred from the polls as women after the Civil War. The histories that stick closest to black women and the vote are those that are most concerned with black women's intellectual history, such as Cooper's Beyond Respectability and Treva Lindsey's Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (2017). 53

African American women's history opens up onto of a set of questions, we might even say a skepticism, about political histories that center too firmly on the vote, political parties, and the state. The vast, ubiquitous, and enduring ways racism and white supremacy have been woven into people, ideas, and institutions have required that the field always understand how black Americans critiqued and then worked against racism and white supremacy. That is to say that an essential counterpoint to histories of the vote are histories of how voting was not enough.

I see the exciting new work on black women's internationalism as the cutting edge of new histories of politics and power. Examples include Keisha N. Blain's Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and the volume edited by Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019). These histories defy conventional frameworks such as that of the nation-state or of electoral politics. As Grace V. Leslie's essay in that collection (“‘United, We Build a Free World,’”) illustrates, even a figure such as Mary McLeod Bethune, whom I associate with the National Association of Colored Women and Fdr 's “black cabinet,” must be remembered for her broad political vision, which included a critique of racism and colonialism and was aimed at linking women across the black diaspora. The vantage point of this work dovetails importantly with that of Marino's new Feminism for the Americas . 54

Has the history of black women and the vote remade U.S. political history? The answer is yes and no, and perhaps that is just right. Certainly we have made the case for black women in mainstream politics—from suffrage to the vote, parties, and the state. We've helped expand the notion of political history by making the case for insurgent politics as part of the American story. And we've even pressed on the geographies of political history, insisting on a politics rooted in the United States but transnational in its vision and its aims.

Marino : Histories of women's politics have, on a fundamental level, contributed to a recognition that to understand politics or political citizenship, we need to understand gender, race, class, and ethnicity, among other hierarchies of power. Decades of scholarship have shown that these areas of focus are not separate. (Women's and gender histories, however, too often still get tokenized.)

To point to a few useful contributions, Paula Baker's 1984 AHR essay, “The Domestication of Politics,” demonstrated that a changing understanding of what counted as “politics” in the United States was wrought by women's Progressive Era civil and social engagement and by a burgeoning welfare state. This “domestication” of politics abetted the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. More recently, Dawn Langan Teele's book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (2018), provides a fine-grained comparative analysis of how women's suffrage was accomplished in England, France, and the United States. It underscores the importance of strategic maneuverings and alliances between suffragists and political parties seeking to gain power. Blain's Set the World on Fire not only explores the range of black nationalist women's engagements in the United States and transnationally around a range of goals but it also places women at the center of black nationalism. 55

These histories have also increasingly demonstrated that the “personal” is indeed “political.” Freedman's Redefining Rape argues that the definition of rape—including the race-, class-, and gender-specific notions of who can perpetuate it and who be a victim of it—is fundamental to political citizenship. Her book underscores the connections between sexual violence, gender, race, the vote, and broad meanings of political citizenship. “Suffrage” is in the subtitle, and she examines a diverse group of female and male activists, black and white, including suffragists from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century who sought to expand the definition of “rape” beyond the typical one of this period: a forcible attack on a chaste white woman by a nonwhite male perpetrator. The book explores the importance of women's voting power at the state and national levels to the passage of statutory rape laws. It also explains how the right to serve on a jury for white women and African American men and women was critical both to addressing sexual violence and to changing this narrow definition. 56

As Freedman's work indicates, race and class often divided women's efforts. Although some white women sought to curb white male patriarchy, many more white suffragists sought to, in Freedman's words “empower white women.” Some, such as the southern temperance activist and suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton, allied with forces that encouraged lynching black men to “protect white womanhood.” Feimster explores Felton in great depth in her excellent book Southern Horrors , which also centrally explores Ida B. Wells's antilynching activism and work for the protection of African American women. Feimster's book illuminates the history of women's engagement around sexual violence, lynching, and political power, while also shedding light more broadly on the history of race and politics of the postbellum United States. 57

Another bourgeoning body of scholarship has underscored the centrality of white women's political power to the rise of the New Right, modern conservatism, and modern white supremacist and antifeminist politics. These works include Catherine E. Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (2006); Michelle M. Nickerson's Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012); and Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018). Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017) highlights women's feminist and antifeminist activism around the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, a key moment when debates over the body, sexuality, reproduction, and “the family” fostered schisms that continue to shape our political landscape today. 58

Gidlow : Women's enfranchisement has not shaped the development of broad narratives in and beyond U.S. history nearly as much as it could. Historians searching for short-term results of women's new power to vote have generally been disappointed. The Nineteenth Amendment did not usher in a new and powerful wave of progressive reform. Former suffragists in the 1920s remained as divided as they were before ratification, now over questions of the equal rights amendment and labor protections. Lots of women failed to cast ballots. In short, the Nineteenth Amendment seems to have landed with a thud.

Looking for the effects of women's enfranchisement over a longer time frame, however, may suggest other questions historians might fruitfully pursue. How did various political institutions respond to the fact of women's enfranchisement, whether or not women actually could or did vote? For example, did women's enfranchisement contribute to the trend that Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter once called “politics by other means”—that is, the twentieth-century shift of decision making out of bodies that were directly accountable to voters to bureaucracies that are more insulated from the electorate ( Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America , 1990)? Or, here's another: Once women had the vote, what happened to white men's privileged status as civic actors? If they lost some of that status, did they shore up their civic privilege in other ways? If they retained it, how did they do that? 59

In my own work on southern African American women's efforts to vote in the 1920s and beyond, I argue that the successes and the failures of aspiring southern African American voters in the 1920s, women but also men, resonated through the decades and helped change the American political landscape in important ways. Their surge to the polls after ratification triggered violent reprisals and helped fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan. Their interest in voting forced a feeble southern Republican party to affirm its identity as a white party, laying the groundwork for the late twentieth-century realignment of southern white voters that made the Republican party dominant in the region by the 1980s. The failures of white former suffragists in the National Woman's party and the League of Women Voters to stand up for southern black women's voting rights cast a shadow long enough to darken the prospects for a truly collaborative women's liberation movement across the color line five decades later. 60

Wu : These questions are particularly relevant for my current work, a biography of a woman of color political advocate who very much believed in the promise and potential of political liberalism. I envision Patsy Mink trying to dismantle or at least significantly renovate the master's house with the master's tools. Mink's strategy of full inclusion and transformation, however, also exists in tension with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander efforts to critique U.S. empire and Asian American settler colonialism. Full inclusion in the U.S. state meant continued occupation. For example, the campaign for statehood in Hawaii, which Mink advocated, foreclosed the possibility of independence for Hawaii. Asian Americans, although discriminated against in the plantation economy and the political state, nevertheless gained economic and political power that contributed to the dispossession of Native Hawaiians. Their status led Haunani-Kay Trask to describe Asian Americans as settlers who came to steal and take. Jodi Byrd distinguishes between “arrivants,” those who arrived as racialized subjects, and settlers. However, Dean Saranillio reminds us that being an “arrivant” does not absolve one of the responsibilities of challenging the settler state. 61

The tensions between racial/gender inclusion and settler colonialism remind me of two sets of conversations related to women's political rights. First, the political scientists Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes have identified three different formulations of women's citizenship: formal, descriptive, and substantive citizenship ( Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective , 2017). Formal representation asks: Do women have the same rights as men to participate in politics? Descriptive representation asks: Does access to equal rights result in equal representation in terms of numbers? And substantive representation asks: Are women's interests being advocated in the political arena? Formal representation (the right to vote) clearly does not result in descriptive representation. The year 2018 marked record numbers of women in Congress: 102 women in the House and 25 in the Senate. Nearly one hundred years after the passage of suffrage, women constitute not quite 25 percent of the elected representatives in Congress and still have not cracked the glass ceiling of the White House. Despite these numbers, women and their allies have been able to secure legislation that addresses issues fundamentally important to women. Formal representation, coupled with a range of political strategies, could lead to substantive representation, despite the lack of descriptive representation. However, I look forward to the day when women might obtain proportionate representation to their demographics in the country. 62

Second, another way to consider why voting matters is to focus on the gendered and racialized process by which subjects of empire become subjects of republics. The works of Carole Pateman ( The Sexual Contract , 1988), Christine Keating ( Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India , 2011), and others emphasize the gendered dimensions of racialized state formation. Pateman argues that men who engage in political contracts to form democratic states also tended to reinforce a “hidden sexual contract” that affirms patriarchy. Keating argues that decolonizing states that transition political power from a white colonial elite to a nonwhite “native” male population may nevertheless reinforce gender, religious, and ethnic/racial hierarchies as a form of “compensatory domination.” Various postcolonial feminist scholars have pointed out how “native” women are overdetermined as symbols of the purity of home, nation, and culture as the political economies of developing nations “modernize.” These “hidden sexual contracts,” “compensatory [forms of] democracy,” and the privatization and valorization of womanhood create historical patterns of gendered political exclusion for decolonizing nations. 63

Scholars who focus on women's political exclusions and engagements have made multiple contributions to U.S. and global histories. I am struck by the continued resistance of those who persist in ignoring or tokenizing this scholarship. I'd like to quote Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, advocating for federal funding for the 1977 National Women's Conference ( Nwc ). The supporters of the Nwc battled to receive $5 million, approximately 4 cents for every woman in the United States at the time. Female legislators constituted 4 percent of the House and 0 percent of the Senate in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial year. As Chisholm reminded her legislative colleagues, “I really do sincerely hope that the gentlemen will, for once in their lives, as this country approaches its 200th anniversary, realize that 51 percent or 52 percent of the population is a very important segment of the population.” I hope our historian colleagues will also keep these demographics in mind as they write lectures, assign readings, as well as make hiring and promotion decisions. 64

JAH: In this Interchange, we have looked back over the field of women's suffrage activism and enfranchisement. Before we close, let's look ahead. What gaps or holes remain to be filled in the history and historiographies of women and the vote? What do we have left to learn?

Rupp : There is still more to learn about how many and which women voted, how they voted, and why they voted the way they did, although I understand the difficulties of researching these questions. What might a systematic history of women's voting behavior tell us? Did antisuffrage women vote? Were those who thought women would vote the same way as their husbands, if they had them, right? When thinking of women and voting, it is difficult not to think of the contemporary question—Why did 53 percent of white women vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election?

We also need to know much more about the impact of the final years of the suffrage movement on subsequent rounds of mobilization of all kinds of women's movements. We know that, among transnationally organized women, the winning of the vote in some places divided the movement into suffrage “haves” and “have-nots,” with consequences for debate about what were the most important issues for organizations to target. Should the movement move on to what the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance called “Equal Citizenship?” The International Woman's Suffrage Alliance in the 1920s took up the issue of women losing their citizenship if they married a noncitizen and the double standard of morality, and divided over the question of whether protective labor legislation for women was discriminatory. Increasingly, however, its focus turned to peace. 65

What did the winning of suffrage mean nationally, especially regarding social movement realignment? We know about the transformation of suffrage organizations into the League of Women Voters and the National Woman's party, but how did the Nineteenth Amendment affect the organized black women Martha Jones discusses, women in the labor movement, women in the peace movement, women in right-wing movements, and so many others?

Tetrault : We need to jettison the 1848–1920 framework and begin to tie this history to other dates and other developments. Only then can this rich and complicated history begin to grow into itself.

As just a few examples, Martha Jones has shown how important it was for churchwomen to be advocating for the vote inside their churches, as early as the 1870s, yet this is still not a conventional piece of suffrage history (“Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” 2005). Lori Ginzberg ( Untidy Origins ) and now Dawn Winters (“‘The Ladies Are Coming!’: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism,” 2018) have shown that women were petitioning for the vote in 1846. In Winters's work that demand was coming out of temperance, not abolition, upending the standard narrative. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, when most women became enfranchised, was legislation that women fought for, alongside men. Vast expanses before and after 1920 are begging to be connected to this story, which will surely reposition 1920 as important, but not definitive. Meanwhile, without a positive assertion of the right to vote in our Constitution, voter disfranchisement proceeds apace, especially since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This story is, in fact, multiple stories, with multiple antecedents, and it is far from over. 66

Marino : I would like to make a special plug for U.S. historians to do more research outside the United States. Engaging seriously with histories of women's voting rights outside the United States promises not only to shed light on post-1920 activism, including that of women of color and women in the labor and peace movements, but also to stretch our understandings of what is politically possible. Exploring these histories would de-center the idea that the United States or Western Europe “invented” feminism and challenge U.S.-exceptionalist understandings of voting activism and feminism globally.

In my research on Latin American histories of suffrage, I have investigated frente popular (popular front groups) in Latin America, which were social movements, often electoral coalitions of political parties. Many of them believed that including women in the electorate would enhance frente popular political power nationally. In the 1930s and 1940s, these groups aligned with multiple causes: a new inter-American labor movement, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, Puerto Rican independence, solidarity with Ethiopia after Italy's invasion, antiracism, and, because of the power of inter-American feminism, women's rights, including women's voting rights. Popular front groups in Latin America had strong ties to labor activists and peace activists in the United States, and to women of color. These groups were aware of the antifeminism of right-wing dictatorships throughout the world. 67

Women's suffrage legislation passed throughout Latin America in the years after World War II, many times after new governments had overthrown dictatorships, often thanks to antifascist women's long-standing activism and international decrees such as the 1945 United Nations Charter and 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm currently researching Felicia Santizo, an Afro-Panamanian feminist and educator. A leading suffragist from the 1920s through 1930s, Santizo called for universal suffrage without race, class, or sex restrictions, which was adopted in Panama's 1946 constitution. She also organized an important new antifascist women's group that focused on school lunches for impoverished children and child and adult literacy programs. She later became a leader of the Partido del Pueblo (the communist party of Panama), which had vital transnational connections, including with the Women's International Democratic Federation.

Relatedly, it's important to continue interrogating how U.S. international suffrage debates mapped onto global empire. U.S. occupations in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines utilized the idea that U.S. political culture was superior because of the supposed “freedoms” given to U.S. women. More research could be done in diplomatic and foreign relations archives to complement existing works on this topic. We still know more about British and French imperial feminism than about U.S. imperial feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Doing this work continues the project Leila Rupp laid out for us in Worlds of Women , of interrogating “who's in” and “who's out” of these international networks and how language, class, race, nation, among other categories, shaped these boundaries. 68

Language provides a particularly rich lens through which we can analyze transnational and imperial feminisms. I recently found that the Spanish feminist María Espinosa expressed outrage, in her 1920 book, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation), that the International Alliance of Women had asked Spanish suffragists to host a conference in Spain but refused to include Spanish as an official language. Espinosa invoked a Pan-Hispanism that expressed solidarity with Latin America. At the same time, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-speaking feminists were often imperialist in their own ways. They often excluded women who spoke indigenous languages. 69

From Tetrault's book The Myth of Seneca Falls I learned more about the founding of the International Council of Women by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1888. These large Euro-American-led organizations (the International Alliance of Women and International Council of Women) inspired feminists around the world, but they also forwarded the idea that Anglo-American leaders invented feminism. It would be useful to explore the reverberations of that idea. U.S. and Western European feminists' pretentions to superiority often encouraged women's groups in various parts of the world to ally with each other more strongly in opposition to empire. 70

These insights connect to points made in Tetrault's book and by Martha Jones when she invoked Trouillot's Silencing the Past . We need to continue thinking critically about who had the power and the resources to create the archives and to tell the story. We should consider how inequalities in historical preservation along lines of class and race, and between the “global North” and “global South,” have deeply shaped our historical understandings. Exploring transnational movements and non-U.S. histories sheds light on the vital work of activists and groups that did not always have the ability to create archives (or whose archives are not as easily accessible to U.S. researchers). They also help us de-center a history of feminism that places the United States, and Anglo-American players specifically, at the forefront, and avoid what the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story.” 71

Dubois : I would identify three areas of future research. The most obvious is to dig into local records (starting with the History of Woman Suffrage ) to examine activism at the rank-and-file level. How will the interests and arguments of those involved, and the political activities at these levels, challenge or enlarge what we claim about the movement when we study national leaders and major state and city environments? Just as historians of the women's liberation movement have shown that New York City and Boston feminism is in no way representative of the national range of activism, so too can we do similar work for suffrage activism.

The second direction that I would like to see explored more closely are the devices used by national, state, and even local politicians to oppose woman suffrage demands. Suffrage historians have tended to look at factors internal to the suffrage movement to explain slow progress and repeated defeats. But the more I look, in virtually every period, suffragists confronted the deliberate mobilization of good old-fashioned political opposition. Doing this work will deepen historians' sense of suffrage as a genuinely political movement, using political tools.

Finally, I look forward to increasing scholarship on the post-1920 years and on the impact (or lack thereof) of the Nineteenth Amendment. Recently political scientists have begun the important work of digging into voting activity in the first two or three postsuffrage elections, with excellent results. We know southern African American women faced powerful tools of disfranchisement. What else can we learn? I would especially like to see more work done on the impact of women's enfranchisement on the dramatic political shift, four presidential elections later, from which emerged the modern Democratic party and the Roosevelt New Deal. Surely the doubling of the electorate had an impact.

Wu : As a scholar invested in analyzing immigration, race, and empire, I am interested in what histories of the long suffrage movement (before and after 1920, in and beyond U.S. national boundaries) might reveal about the meaning and practice of democracy. How is the political right to vote linked to or distinct from cultural and economic forms of citizenship? How does women's suffrage reinforce U.S. exceptionalism and justify settler colonialism and militarism? And, how do various women who occupy a range of marginal and privileged statuses simultaneously, due to intersecting forms of social hierarchy, position themselves to claim political power? I look forward to new scholarship to help us understand the complex relationship between suffrage, citizenship, and the nation-state.

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston, 1967); Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967); Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism—The Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York, 1978); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978).

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's dissertation had wide impact for years before the book appeared. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998).

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Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, 1997), 48; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York, 2008); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019).

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Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009); Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 2005); Ann D. Gordon, ed., Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (6 vols., New Brunswick, 1997–2013); Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 , http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/ .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, 2005); Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics before and after 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change , ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), 153–76; Anderson, Joyous Greetings ; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote ; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997); Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls ; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014).

Jones, All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Feimster, Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, 2017); Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review , 121 (Feb. 2016), 1–16; Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin, 2011); Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York, 2018); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, 1999); Rupp, Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review (no. 186, March–April, 1991), 20–45; Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago, 2017); Julia L. Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of American History , 100 (March 2014), 1021–51; Anderson, Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (New York, 2013).

Katherine M. Marino, “Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944,” Journal of Women's History , 26 (Summer 2014), 63–87; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (New York, 2016).

Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont ; Johanna Neuman, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote (New York, 2017); Joan Marie Johnson, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 (Chapel Hill, 2017); Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Albany, N.Y., 2017); Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana, 2017); Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, 2017).

Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia, 1991); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of Citizens: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, 2005); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995).

Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Susan B. Anthony quoted in Kristin Hoganson, “‘As Badly off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women's Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History , 13 (Summer 2001), 17.

Cathleen D. Cahill, Raising Our Banners: Women of Color Challenge the Mainstream Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, forthcoming, 2020); Dublin and Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States .

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, The First Woman of Color in Congress: Patsy Takemoto Mink's Politics of Peace, Justice, and Feminism (New York, forthcoming).

Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review , 16 (no. 1, 1991), 167–202; Jennifer L. Robinson, “The Right to Vote: A History of Voting Rights and American Indians,” in Minority Voting in the United States , ed. Kyle Kreider and Thomas Baldino (Santa Barbara, 2015); Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Eng., 2007).

Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), 128; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 17 (July 2018), 433–49. Kimberly Hamlin, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (New York, forthcoming, 2020); Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York, 2018). “Disfranchisement in Congress,” Crisis , 4 (Feb. 1921), 165.

T. G. Garrett to “The N.A.A.C.P.,” Oct. 30, 1920, Records of the Naacp (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 150; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis to the Editor, Nation , March 26, 1921.

Charron, Freedom's Teacher ; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976).

On the connections between U.S. empire, race, and suffrage, see, for instance, Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Enfranchasing Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race , ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, 1998), 41–56; Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy (London, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, 1888 to 1902,” in Women's Suffrage in Asia , ed. Edwards and Roces, 220–39; Rumi Yamusake, “Re-franchising Women of Hawai'i, 1912–1920: The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World , ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden, 2017), 114–39; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourse: Links between the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe , 5 (Spring 1993), 9–34; and Laura Prieto, “A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 12 (April 2013), 199–233.

On the Alpha Suffrage Club work and voter registration, see Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1970), 346; Giddings, Ida , 523–46; Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Mass., 2019), 99–110; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote , 139–40; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression Is Warping American Democracy,” Atlantic , July 17, 2018.

Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Michel-Roph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).

Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review , 76 (Nov. 2001), 1456–1526.

Ann D. Gordon, ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst, Mass., 1997).

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York, 2018); Cooper, Beyond Respectability ; Treva Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (Urbana, 2017).

Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018); Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana, 2019); Grace V. Leslie, “‘United, We Build a Free World’: The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” ibid. , 192–218; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

Baker, “Domestication of Politics”; Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (Princeton, 2018); Blain, Set the World on Fire .

Freedman, Redefining Rape .

Feimster, Southern Horrors .

Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, 2012); Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York, 2018); Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York, 2017).

Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (New York, 1990).

Liette Gidlow, “More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women's Vote,’ Journal of Women's History , 32 (Spring 2020).

Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1999); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood (Durham, N.C., 2018).

Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective (2007; Los Angeles, 2017).

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988); Christine Keating, Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India (University Park, 2011). See also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1999). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, 1991); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C., 2003).

Shirley Chisholm, “Providing for a National Women's Conference,” Congressional Record—House , Dec. 10, 1975, H12201-2, folder 7, box 562, Patsy T. Mink Papers (Manuscript Division). These remarks are also available at Congressional Record , 94 Cong., 1 sess., Dec. 10, 1975, p. 39719.

On the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance and “equal citizenship,” see Rupp, Worlds of Women .

Martha S. Jones, “Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, 2010), 121–43; Ginzberg, Untidy Origins ; Dawn Winters, “The Ladies Are Coming!”: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2018); Anderson, One Person, No Vote .

Numerous works have illuminated different national iterations of popular-front feminism in Latin America, including Yolanda Marco Serra, “Ser ciudadana en Panamá en la década de 1930” (Being a citizen in Panama in the 1930s), in Un siglo de luchas femeninas en América Latina (A century of female struggles in Latin America), ed. Asunción Lavrin and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz (San José, 2002), 71–86; Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente único pro derechos de la mujer, 1935–1938 (Women who organize: The single front for women's rights, 1935–1938) (Mexico City, 1992); Enriqueta Tuñón, ¡Por fin … ya podemos elegir y ser electas! El sufragio femenino en México, 1935–1953 (At last … we can now choose and be elected! Female suffrage in Mexico, 1935–1953) (Mexico City, 2002); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2005); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Corinne A. Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era: Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh), 1935–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996); Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Argentine Women against Fascism: The Junta de la Victoria, 1941–1947,” Politics, Religion, and Ideology 13 (no. 2, 2012), 221–36; Sandra McGee Deutsch, “The New School Lecture—‘An Army of Women’: Communist-Linked Solidarity Movements, Maternalism, and Political Consciousness in 1930s and 1940s Argentina,” Americas , 75 (Jan. 2018), 95–125; and Adriana María Valobra, “Formación de cuadros y frentes populares: Relaciones de clase y género en el Partido Comunista de Argentina, 1935–1951” (Formation of cadres and popular fronts: Class and gender in the Communist party of Argentina, 1935–1951), Revista Izquierdas (no. 23, April 2015), 127–56. On suffrage activism in Latin America, see Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, 1995); Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, 1991); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque, 2005); K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1991); Rina Villars, Para la casa más que para el mundo: Sufragismo y feminismo en la historia de Honduras (For the house more than the world: Suffragism and feminism in the history of Honduras) (Tegucigalpa, 2001); June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1990); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Victoria González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park, 2011); Elizabeth S. Manley, The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, 2017); Charity Coker Gonzalez, “Agitating for Their Rights: The Colombian Women's Movement, 1930–1957,” Pacific Historical Review , 69 (Nov. 2000), 689–706; Patricia Faith Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves: The Social and Political Roles of Guatemalan Women, 1871–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2007); Takkara Keosha Brunson, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); and Grace Louise Sanders, “La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2013).

Rupp, Worlds of Women .

María Espinosa, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation) (Madrid, 1920).

Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls .

Trouillot, Silencing the Past ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story .

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Amdt19.2.2 The Reconstruction Amendments and Women’s Suffrage

Nineteenth Amendment:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Shortly after the Civil War, Congress proposed three amendments to the Constitution known as the Reconstruction Amendments that aimed to safeguard African-AmericansR 1 7; civil rights. These are the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1 865, which abolished slavery; 1 " href="#ALDF_00029949"> 1 Footnote See Amdt 1 3. 1 Overview of Thirteenth Amendment, Abolition of Slavery . the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1 868, defining the concept of national citizenship and guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all persons; 2 Footnote See Amdt 1 4. 1 Overview of Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Protection and Rights of Citizens . and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1 870, prohibiting the federal and state governments from restricting a U.S. citizenR 1 7;s eligibility to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 3 Footnote 1 "> See Fifteenth Amendment: Right of Citizens to Vote . The statesR 1 7; ratification of amendments that aimed to protect African-AmericansR 1 7; civil rights brought new attention to issues of womenR 1 7;s rights and suffrage. 4 Footnote Sandra Day O’Connor , article ">The History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement , 49 Vand. L. Rev. 657 , 660–6 1 ( 1 996) .

Debates over the Reconstruction Amendments led to disagreements within the womenR 1 7;s suffrage movement. In particular, during congressional debates over the Fifteenth Amendment, the movementR 1 7;s leaders divided over whether to support an amendment that granted African-American men the right to vote but did not address womenR 1 7;s suffrage. 5 Footnote Sharon Harley , article ">African-American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment , Nat’l Park Serv. (Apr. 1 0, 20 1 9), https://www.nps.gov/ article s/african-american-women-and-the-nineteenth-amendment.htm . Congressional debates over the Fourteenth Amendment also touched upon issues of women’s suffrage. As ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment did not specifically address women’s suffrage, but Section 2 generally penalized states that restricted the voting rights of male inhabitants who were citizens at least twenty-one years of age by reducing the states’ congressional representation. See U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 2 , superseded in part by id. amend. XIX . Believing that the Constitution should not grant voting rights to African-American men unless it also recognized womenR 1 7;s suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony split from the American Equal Rights Association they had founded in 1 866 and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1 869. 6 Footnote article ">The Women’s Rights Movement, 1 848– 1 9 1 7 , U.S. House of Rep. , https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/ (last visited Feb. 1 0, 2023) . NWSA focused its efforts on obtaining federal legislation or a constitutional amendment recognizing womenR 1 7;s suffrage. 7 Footnote Id. Later in 1 869, womenR 1 7;s rights activists who supported the Fifteenth AmendmentR 1 7;s adoption, including Lucy Stone, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). 8 Footnote Id. AWSA generally adopted a state-by-state approach to seeking voting rights. 9 Footnote Id.

Although NWSA and AWSA would later merge in 1 890, some womenR 1 7;s rights leaders increasingly excluded African-Americans from participation in suffrage events in an effort to gain southern White votersR 1 7; support. 1 0" href="#ALDF_00029958"> 1 0 Footnote Harley , supra note 5 . In 1 896, African-American women formed a national organization, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. 1 1 " href="#ALDF_00029959"> 1 1 Footnote Id . NACW advocated for womenR 1 7;s voting rights and other issues important to African-American women. 1 2" href="#ALDF_00029960"> 1 2 Footnote Id .

• 1 "> &# 1 60; Jump to essay- 1 See Amdt 1 3. 1 Overview of Thirteenth Amendment, Abolition of Slavery .
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-2 See Amdt 1 4. 1 Overview of Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Protection and Rights of Citizens .
• 1 "> 1 "> &# 1 60; Jump to essay-3 See Fifteenth Amendment: Right of Citizens to Vote .
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-4 Sandra Day OR 1 7;Connor , article ">The History of the WomenR 1 7;s Suffrage Movement , 49 Vand. L. Rev. 657 , 660R 1 1 ;6 1 ( 1 996) .
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-5 Sharon Harley , article ">African-American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment , NatR 1 7;l Park Serv. (Apr. 1 0, 20 1 9), https://www.nps.gov/ article s/african-american-women-and-the-nineteenth-amendment.htm . Congressional debates over the Fourteenth Amendment also touched upon issues of womenR 1 7;s suffrage. As ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment did not specifically address womenR 1 7;s suffrage, but Section 2 generally penalized states that restricted the voting rights of male inhabitants who were citizens at least twenty-one years of age by reducing the statesR 1 7; congressional representation. See U.S. Const. amend. XIV, &# 1 67; 2 , superseded in part by id. amend. XIX .
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-6 article ">The WomenR 1 7;s Rights Movement, 1 848R 1 1 ; 1 9 1 7 , U.S. House of Rep. , https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/ (last visited Feb. 1 0, 2023) .
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-7 Id.
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-8 Id.
• &# 1 60; Jump to essay-9 Id.
• 1 0"> &# 1 60; Jump to essay- 1 0 Harley , supra note 5 .
• 1 1 "> &# 1 60; Jump to essay- 1 1 Id .
• 1 2"> &# 1 60; Jump to essay- 1 2 Id .

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In the 19th century when women had few legal rights, some galvanized thousands to demand “The Vote” on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE – Aug. 8 at 9 pm

Posted on: Friday, August 2, 2024

American Experience: The Vote  

Documentary Explores the Arduous Battle That Finally Led to the Passage of the 19th Amendment

  Narrated by Kate Burton, The Vote Features the Voices of Mae Whitman, Audra McDonald, Laura Linney and Patricia Clarkson

Part One Airs Thursday, August 8 at 9:00 pm

American Experience The Vote , a four-hour, two-part documentary series, tells the dramatic story of the epic — and surprisingly unfamiliar — crusade waged by American women for the right to vote. Focusing primarily on the movement’s final decade, the film charts American women’s determined march to the ballot box, and illuminates the myriad social, political and cultural obstacles that stood in their path. The Vote delves into the  controversies that divided the nation in the early 20th century –– gender, race, state’s rights, and political power — and reveals the fractious dynamics of social change. Written, directed and produced by Emmy Award-winner Michelle Ferrari and executive produced by Susan Bellows and Mark Samels . 

The series is narrated by Kate Burton and features the voices of the unsung warriors of the movement: Mae Whitman (Alice Paul), Audra McDonald (Ida B. Wells), Laura Linney (Carrie Chapman Catt) and Patricia Clarkson (Harriot Stanton Blatch).

“The hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote was a truly transformative cultural and political movement, resulting in the largest expansion of voting rights in American history,” said executive producer Susan Bellows. “It’s also a story that has usually been reduced to a single page in the history books. The Vote restores this complex story to its rightful place in our history, providing a rich and clear-eyed look at a movement that resonates as much now as ever.”

“CPB is proud to support American Experience which always gives us the story behind the stories that shaped our nation,” said Pat Harrison, president and CEO of CPB. “ The Vote is storytelling at its finest, affirming that to achieve justice for all requires personal sacrifice, courage and persistence.”

“In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote.” It is an axiom of American history; yet seldom has an axiom more thoroughly obscured reality. Although rightly regarded as a milestone for both American women and American democracy, the 19th Amendment was not quite the simple turning point it is generally perceived to be. Millions of women voted before the amendment and millions more were prohibited from voting after it, particularly African American women in the South. Nor was the ballot a favor bestowed upon women by an enlightened, progressive society. The right to vote was, in fact, fought for and won –– by three generations of American women who, over the course of more than seven decades, not only carried out one of the most sustained and successful political movements in all of American history, but were also the first to employ the techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience that later would become the hallmark of American political protest.

From the moment the clamor for woman suffrage first was raised in the United States, in the 1840s, the question was how the vote would ever be won. Resistance to women’s participation in the political sphere came from every quarter of American society –– from political machines eager to maintain their power, industrial interests fearful for their profits, even many women, who were convinced that wielding the ballot would somehow diminish their influence in society. Compounding the opposition, from the late 19th century on, was the poisonous legacy of Reconstruction and the determination of the former Confederate states to preserve white supremacy, in large part by barring African Americans from the polls.

As of 1909, despite six decades of relentless struggle, suffragists could point to little in the way of progress. Just four states had extended the franchise to women; the federal woman suffrage amendment –– introduced in the Senate in 1878 –– had virtually no support on Capitol Hill; and most in the first generation of activists had gone to their graves without casting a ballot. What had begun as a crusade of the few, however, had become a mass movement –– and their collective impatience was mounting.

As suffragists attempted to navigate the treacherous shoals of the national political scene, time and again principle was sacrificed in the name of pragmatism. Unfolding after the Civil War, when racism was both “a political fact and a political strategy,” said historian Martha Jones, the crusade for woman’s suffrage mirrored its historical moment. When expedient, white suffragists proved willing to accommodate its pervasive and deeply pernicious politics of exclusion. The Vote engages this troubled history directly ­­–– underscoring the contributions of women of color to the struggle, the challenges of coalition-building in a fundamentally unequal society, and most importantly, the significant limitations of the 19th Amendment.

“The lengths to which women had to go in their pursuit of the ballot will likely come as a surprise to most viewers,” said writer, director and producer Michelle Ferrari. “How many people are aware that suffragists were the first Americans to picket the White House? That those women were jailed, went on hunger strikes and were force-fed by authorities? And that the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience, which we usually associate with the Civil Rights Movement, were employed first by women fighting for the right to vote?”

Dramatic and thought-provoking, The Vote is, at its core, a story about power –– “who has it and who doesn’t want to give it up,” said constitutional lawyer and writer Michael Waldman. “We’re still fighting over who has that power.”

In addition to the documentary series, American Experience will be launching She Resisted, an immersive, interactive website that explores the suffrage movement’s strategies through its most powerful images, brought to life through the striking dimension of color. By meticulously restoring color to archival stills and the upscaling and colorization of historical footage, She Resisted will offer a heightened immersive experience of the vision, perseverance and radicality of the women who won the vote.

Part One traces the rise of suffrage militancy, a direct-action approach to politics inspired by Britain’s notoriously militant suffragettes. First introduced in New York by Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and later championed by Alice Paul, a well-educated, singularly-driven Quaker of the movement’s third generation, the new, “unladylike” tactics heightened the movement’s visibility, as thousands of American women took to the streets to boldly demand their right to full and equal citizenship. During this time, the question of suffrage for African American women, already active in the movement, was seen as a liability in securing the full support of women and men in the former Confederacy. By 1911, “votes for women” had become, as one journalist noted, “the three small words which constitute the biggest question in the world today.” While galvanizing to many, such radical action was also divisive, stiffening the opposition and threatening to undermine the movement’s credibility.

Part Two examines the mounting dispute over strategy and tactics, and reveals how the pervasive racism of the time, particularly in the South, impacted women’s fight for the vote. Stung by a string of bitter state-level defeats in the fall of 1915, the suffragists decided to concentrate their energies on the passage of a federal amendment. One faction, under the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s President Carrie Chapman Catt, was determined to pursue a moderate course and work within the political system, while another, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, deployed ever-more confrontational and controversial methods of protest. The two efforts nevertheless pushed the movement to its crescendo in tandem, and forever transformed the politics of social change in America.

03 Nov 2001 Susan B. Anthony on a Woman’s Right to Vote – 1873

Woman’s Rights to the Suffrage

by Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

This speech was delivered in 1873, after Anthony was arrested, tried and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 presidential election. 

Friends and Fellow Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people–women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government–the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household–which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century. Learn More About Us Subscribe to Our Updates

Peter Thiel Once Wrote That Women Getting The Vote Was Bad For Democracy

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

The secretive tech billionaire who recently admitted to funding a lawsuit meant to crush the media company Gawker is known for having some radical opinions. But in an essay published in 2009 , he surprised many when he wrote that giving women the right to vote -- by constitutional amendment in 1920 -- was a blow to democracy.

Here's Thiel, writing on Cato Unbound , a blog affiliated with the libertarian think tank:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Thiel is well known in the tech world: he was an early funder of Facebook and sits on its board. His remarks on women earned the billionaire a lot of criticism at the time. That he also seemed to blame Social Security and other New Deal-era benefits for the decline of democracy -- a fairly common conservative and libertarian view -- got less attention.

Cato later updated the essay and Thiel clarified that he does not want to disenfranchise women:

It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.

Yet he didn't walk back what he wrote, instead lamenting how much attention the comment on women received.

He had hoped the essay would get folks talking about cyberspace, he wrote, or "seasteading," which is when a lot of people live on the ocean (another theme in his tome).

Thiel, it was revealed Wednesday, is backing wrestler Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, which published a video of him having sex. Thiel told The New York Times he is seeking justice for a piece Gawker wrote in 2007 titled " Peter Thiel is totally gay, people " and for other Gawker articles over the years.

“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he told the Times. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”

Apparently, Thiel does not see any kind of contradiction in attempting to shutter Gawker -- which some are calling an assault on press freedom -- and his drive to support freedom. Even more intriguing, Thiel has in the past actually funded a press organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists . The author of the Gawker piece about Thiel's sexuality said the billionaire was out to his friends at the time.

"It was known to a wide circle who felt that it was not fit for discussion beyond that circle," Owen Thomas told the Times. "I thought that attitude was retrograde and homophobic, and that informed my reporting. I believe that he was out and not in the closet.”

Thiel is also a delegate for Donald Trump , the Republican presidential candidate who has proposed building a wall to keep Mexican people out of the United States as well as a total ban on Muslims coming to the U.S..

In the 2009 essay, Thiel wrote that democracy and freedom are not compatible. Like many libertarians, he lamented laws prohibiting drug use and taxes. He also decried the financial meltdown and subsequent Wall Street bailouts.

He also noted that he doesn't believe in the "ideology of the inevitability of death."

Thiel could not immediately be reached for comment.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Women's Suffrage — Rhetorical Analysis of the Speech by Susan B. Anthony “Women’s Right to Vote”

Rhetorical Analysis of The Speech by Susan B. Anthony "Women's Right to Vote"

• Categories: Susan B Anthony Women's Suffrage

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Rhetorical Analysis of Women’s Right to Vote

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• Project 2025
• Kamala Harris
• Supreme Court
• Abortion Bans
• Women in Politics
• Masculinity

More Than A Magazine, A Movement

• Justice & Law

‘My Community Wants to See Their Concerns Addressed in Order to Vote’: Latina Women and the 2024 Election

Latina voters have become a dynamic force and a major voting bloc in recent elections, prioritizing grassroots organizing and building online communities in support of candidates such as Kamala Harris . Additionally, Latinas are the largest group of women of color affected by state abortion bans. Groups such as the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and Voto Latino are galvanizing support for reproductive rights, workers’ rights and immigration reform—but candidates must recognize the importance of the Latina vote. Whoever captures this voting bloc will exponentially increase their chances of winning the presidency and down-ballot races this November.

Ms. spoke with Lupe M. Rodríguez , the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, to discuss what’s motivating Latina voters in this year’s election.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

Alia Yee Noll: Intersections of Our Lives (a collaboration between NAPAWF, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda) conducted a survey to find out what women of color are prioritizing in the upcoming election. Based on the data, what are some of the main factors that are motivating Latina voters in the upcoming election?

Lupe M. Rodríguez: Many in the community are somewhat motivated or very motivated to vote—87 percent of the Latine respondents said that. Seventy-five percent of the Latine folks who responded are supportive of abortion access, and 75 percent specifically agree that it isn’t enough to make abortion just legal, but they also stated that they want to make sure that people can access abortion care.  This means that folks want abortion care to be affordable; they want there to be the possibility of coverage through healthcare insurance plans. They want it to be considered and connected to regular healthcare. Seventy-three percent of the Latine folks that we spoke with said abortion would be an important voting issue in the November election.  As a result of some of the changes that have happened in the last couple of years, such as the Dobbs decision around abortion, 57 percent said that things have gotten worse in the country over the past year, and 52 percent said that they also think things have gotten worse in their communities over the past year. 

We found that consistently, women of color are supportive of abortion, and not only of the legal right to abortion, but of access to it. Lupe M. Rodríguez

Overall, though, the top issues that will determine votes in this year’s election for Latine folks appear to be women’s rights, abortion, rising costs and concerns about the economy. A lot of this data points to the fact that folks understand the connection between their ability to pay for rent, their ability to put food on the table, and access to health care like abortion and the ability to make choices for their families and their communities. We think that this is connected to reproductive justice, which we talk about a lot in the context of folks’ economic realities, like the way that they’re living in their communities.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lupe M. Rodríguez (@lupemrodriguez)

Noll: How does this data compare to Intersections of Our Lives’ older polls from 2019 and 2021 ?

Rodríguez: The patterns are similar. We found that consistently, women of color are supportive of abortion, and not only of the legal right to abortion, but of access to it. We found that in this year’s poll, there is an increase in respondents who see cost of living and concerns about the economy as central, whereas in the previous polls, that wasn’t one of the things that rose to the top. It makes sense with what we’re seeing anecdotally with folks being able to make ends meet right now.  I think many in our communities are often thought of as low propensity voters, but what our data shows is that we are high priority voters. We are voters that folks can actually move with the right investment and with the right attention to the issues that matter to us. Our community sees voting as a really important part of change, and there are lots of factors that might keep us from doing it or might dissuade us from doing it, but we are voters who should be invested in, who should be looked at and can be moved. So I’d say we are high potential voters.

Noll: Can you define low propensity voters?

Rodríguez: We have seen some data that suggests that some Latine folks and other folks of color don’t vote in every election, but our case is that the reasons why are more complex than folks just not wanting to vote or not being interested in voting. We know that folks are motivated and see voting as a way to make change, but we think that there are barriers for folks to vote often that may be systemic issues like getting time off work or having accessible polling. Our data also found very specifically that women of color specifically want to see folks address issues that are important to them in order to feel more motivated or more activated to vote. There are functional things, there are barriers and systemic inequities, and then also there’s motivation. And so the case here is that folks aren’t low propensity voters. It’s unfair to cast that assertion on our voter base, because of what we know about motivation and activation to vote. 

Many in our communities are thought of as low propensity voters, but what our data shows is that we are high priority voters. We are voters that folks can actually move with the right investment and with the right attention to the issues that matter to us. Rodríguez

Noll: We’ve seen politicians fail to engage Latina and Latino voters. Have you seen any changes over time, positive or negative?

Rodríguez: There’s still a long way to go for politicians, legislators and policymakers responding to the needs of our communities. We’ve definitely seen changes in the time that we’ve been organizing—Latina Institute, for example, has been around for 30 years now, so we have seen some change. It’s slow going, and I think we still absolutely need to see more investment around voter engagement and actually talking to our communities. Part of why we do this research is to demonstrate the power and veracity of women of color voters and the necessity for policymakers and politicians to speak to our community and invest in us.  We have seen progress in terms of recognition about reproductive justice as a distinct movement strategy for addressing the concerns of people of color. Reproductive justice is not just changing laws to protect legal rights—it goes even further than that. We know that so many of the people that we serve or work with are folks of color or folks who are making ends meet. Even if they have the legal right to abortion, they may not be able to exercise that right as a result of systemic barriers that exist—inequities in terms of access to health care, geographic issues, issues of being able to take time off from work or issues of being able to pay for transportation.  We know that it’s not enough to just say, ‘Okay, you have the legal right to something.’ We know that we have made some inroads because of the work that we’ve done to change perspectives, and to bring these perspectives and voices to policymakers so they understand that, at the very least, there has to be a fight to create coverage for care in addition to the legal right. What we’ve made the most headway is around removing the Hyde Amendment and really attacking some of the existing restrictions that exist around folks being able to access care because of coverage issues. 

Noll: You disaggregated the data in terms of ethnicity, religiosity, age, etc. What were some differences between these groups? 

Rodríguez: Part of the reason why we do this disaggregation of the data is so that we can tell those more complex stories of who our communities are and what distinctions are within the communities as well. Our data suggests and supports that many women of color, in general, support reproductive justice and have similar concerns about the state of their communities.  Particularly in the Latine community, despite connections to faith and specifically Catholic faith, the majority of Latine folks support access to abortion care. There was a poll recently that found that 73 percent of Catholic Latine folks are against abortion bans. We also know that nine in 10 Latine voters would support a loved one seeking abortion care. So the numbers are really high in terms of folks believing that there should be access to this care, regardless of their religious connection.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Latina Institute (@latinainstitute)

Noll: What is the significance of disaggregating the data in these ways?

Rodríguez: We want to make sure that we’re clarifying for policymakers and for the public in general, that Latine people—depending on their country of origin, if they’re immigrants, their socioeconomic status or their language access—may have different experiences in this country. I think it is true that underlying a lot of those differences, there are some connections and commonalities, but we definitely see that there are different experiences and therefore different opinions in the community about the issues that we’re mobilizing around and that we care about.  I will say again that we’ve found that a majority of community members, regardless of that, are connected to abortion access. It’s been interesting to see that across the different experiences that we’ve seen through disaggregated data, there is still strong support. But again, I think it’s also incredibly important to be able to show distinctions.  When we’re asking policymakers to invest in the community, it’s important for us to have this information so that we can ask for the kinds of investments that make sense for each individual community. Not every intervention approach or message is going to resonate with everyone. So we want to be able to be as focused and as targeted so that we can have the most impact with the community.

Part of why we do this research is to demonstrate the power and veracity of women of color voters and the necessity for policymakers and politicians to speak to our community and invest in us.  Rodríguez

Noll: What do you wish elected officials or candidates understood about Latine voters?

Rodríguez: The majority of Latine folks in this country support abortion access, regardless of their background or connection to faith. I think that’s a very central thing that we have to combat as mis- and disinformation that has existed for a long time about the community, and that unfortunately a lot of policymakers still hold as true.  With the data around voters, we want to impart on policy makers and politicians and folks running for office that the Latine community is a very highly motivated voter community. We see voting as really important for making change and we’re really activated and motivated to vote, but also the community wants to see their concerns addressed in order to vote. They want to see that there is investment and attention in them.  I think the trends in the past have been that politicians and candidates ignore the community and cast us off as low propensity voters, and that’s not proven by the data, and it’s not the case in practice either. We really want to dispel that so that there’s adequate, equal and in some cases, over-the-top investment in our community. We know that, especially now, where elections are won by very low margins, every vote counts. And Latine votes are especially important, and women of color votes also are very important. So candidates and politicians need to be paying attention.

We know that politicians, they’re not going to save us. We know that the court is not going to save us in our community. However, voting to create the conditions that will allow us to do the liberation work that we need to do is really critical. Rodríguez

Noll: We definitely need to view having spare time as a privilege.

Rodríguez: Particularly in the Latina community, a large proportion of our community work jobs that don’t provide paid time off, that have very restrictive policies around being able to have free time and time off in general, but also access to health care. And so for that same reason, a lot of these barriers and these systemic inequities are connected for that same reason. We’re some of the most impacted by abortion bans because we live in the states that have banned abortion in large majority, and we also don’t have access to the kinds of jobs and opportunities that allow us to take the time off to be able to get the care we need. So yes, that question of having time off is such a luxury.

Noll: What would you tell young Latine voters or people who want to get involved in voting activism?

Rodríguez: I would love to say that it’s been a long time coming, the sort of changes that we’ve had on abortion access. I think the Dobbs decision, many of us saw it coming. And I think we have been activating with many communities of color to fight against inequities that we already face and that existed before the Dobbs decision. We’ve been building to this moment, and are really prepared to welcome new activists and advocates into our operations. I think I’d have an invitation for folks who are motivated and activated by this moment, who might not have been able to or felt as connected to these issues in the past, to join in.  The time is now. Or, the time has long passed, I should say, but, but it’s never too late to get involved. This election this year is incredibly important, and we’re always encouraging folks to vote and to exert their power in that one way. We know that voting is not going to save us, ultimately. We know that politicians, they’re not going to save us, we know that the court is not going to save us in our community. However, voting to create the conditions that will allow us to do the liberation work that we need to do is really critical. So we’re also encouraging folks to vote for that purpose and then get involved to activate for building power for longer term change.  

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U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

About Alia Yee Noll

You may also like:, harris chooses gov. tim walz—an abortion rights and public education advocate—as running mate, weekend reading on women’s representation: u.s. politics is halfway to gender parity; feminists’ presidential dream team.

What Kamala Harris has said so far on key issues in her campaign

As she ramps up her nascent presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is revealing how she will address the key issues facing the nation.

In speeches and rallies, she has voiced support for continuing many of President Joe Biden’s measures, such as lowering drug costs , forgiving student loan debt and eliminating so-called junk fees. But Harris has made it clear that she has her own views on some key matters, particularly Israel’s treatment of Gazans in its war with Hamas.

In a departure from her presidential run in 2020, the Harris campaign has confirmed that she’s moved away from many of her more progressive stances, such as her interest in a single-payer health insurance system and a ban on fracking.

Harris is also expected to put her own stamp and style on matters ranging from abortion to the economy to immigration, as she aims to walk a fine line of taking credit for the administration’s accomplishments while not being jointly blamed by voters for its shortcomings.

Her early presidential campaign speeches have offered insights into her priorities, though she’s mainly voiced general talking points and has yet to release more nuanced plans. Like Biden, she intends to contrast her vision for America with that of former President Donald Trump. ( See Trump’s campaign promises here .)

“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” she told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta at an event in Indianapolis in late July. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

Here’s what we know about Harris’ views:

Harris took on the lead role of championing abortion rights for the administration after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. This past January, she started a “ reproductive freedoms tour ” to multiple states, including a stop in Minnesota thought to be the first by a sitting US president or vice president at an abortion clinic .

On abortion access, Harris embraced more progressive policies than Biden in the 2020 campaign, as a candidate criticizing his previous support for the Hyde Amendment , a measure that blocks federal funds from being used for most abortions.

Policy experts suggested that although Harris’ current policies on abortion and reproductive rights may not differ significantly from Biden’s, as a result of her national tour and her own focus on maternal health , she may be a stronger messenger.

High prices are a top concern for many Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of living after a spell of steep inflation. Many voters give Biden poor marks for his handling of the economy, and Harris may also face their wrath.

In her early campaign speeches, Harris has echoed many of the same themes as Biden, saying she wants to give Americans more opportunities to get ahead. She’s particularly concerned about making care – health care, child care, elder care and family leave – more affordable and available.

Harris promised at a late July rally to continue the Biden administration’s drive to eliminate so-called “junk fees” and to fully disclose all charges, such as for events, lodging and car rentals. In early August, the administration proposed a rule that would ban airlines from charging parents extra fees to have their kids sit next to them.

On day one, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs. We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits.”

Since becoming vice president, Harris has taken more moderate positions, but a look at her 2020 campaign promises reveals a more progressive bent than Biden.

As a senator and 2020 presidential candidate, Harris proposed providing middle-class and working families with a refundable tax credit of up to $6,000 a year (per couple) to help keep up with living expenses. Titled the LIFT the Middle Class Act, or Livable Incomes for Families Today, the measure would have cost at the time an estimated $3 trillion over 10 years.

Unlike a typical tax credit, the bill would allow taxpayers to receive the benefit – up to $500 – on a monthly basis so families don’t have to turn to payday loans with very high interest rates.

As a presidential candidate, Harris also advocated for raising the corporate income tax rate to 35%, where it was before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through Congress reduced the rate to 21%. That’s higher than the 28% Biden has proposed.

Affordable housing was also on Harris’ radar. As a senator, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would establish a refundable tax credit for renters who annually spend more than 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities. The amount of the credit would range from 25% to 100% of the excess rent, depending on the renter’s income.

Harris called housing a human right and said in a 2019 news release on the bill that every American deserves to have basic security and dignity in their own home.

Consumer debt

Hefty debt loads, which weigh on people’s finances and hurt their ability to buy homes, get car loans or start small businesses, are also an area of interest to Harris.

As vice president, she has promoted the Biden administration’s initiatives on student debt, which have so far forgiven more than $168 billion for nearly 4.8 million borrowers . In mid-July, Harris said in a post on X that “nearly 950,000 public servants have benefitted” from student debt forgiveness, compared with only 7,000 when Biden was inaugurated.

A potential Harris administration could keep that momentum going – though some of Biden’s efforts have gotten tangled up in litigation, such as a program aimed at cutting monthly student loan payments for roughly 3 million borrowers enrolled in a repayment plan the administration implemented last year.

The vice president has also been a leader in the White House efforts to ban medical debt from credit reports, noting that those with medical debt are no less likely to repay a loan than those who don’t have unpaid medical bills.

In a late July statement praising North Carolina’s move to relieve the medical debt of about 2 million residents, Harris said that she is “committed to continuing to relieve the burden of medical debt and creating a future where every person has the opportunity to build wealth and thrive.”

Health care

Harris, who has had shifting stances on health care in the past, confirmed in late July through her campaign that she no longer supports a single-payer health care system .

During her 2020 campaign, Harris advocated for shifting the US to a government-backed health insurance system but stopped short of wanting to completely eliminate private insurance.

The measure called for transitioning to a Medicare-for-All-type system over 10 years but continuing to allow private insurance companies to offer Medicare plans.

The proposal would not have raised taxes on the middle class to pay for the coverage expansion. Instead, it would raise the needed funds by taxing Wall Street trades and transactions and changing the taxation of offshore corporate income.

When it comes to reducing drug costs, Harris previously proposed allowing the federal government to set “a fair price” for any drug sold at a cheaper price in any economically comparable country, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan or Australia. If manufacturers were found to be price gouging, the government could import their drugs from abroad or, in egregious cases, use its existing but never-used “march-in” authority to license a drug company’s patent to a rival that would produce the medication at a lower cost.

Harris has been a champion on climate and environmental justice for decades. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued big oil companies like BP and ConocoPhillips, and investigated Exxon Mobil for its role in climate change disinformation. While in the Senate, she sponsored the Green New Deal resolution.

During her 2020 campaign, she enthusiastically supported a ban on fracking — but a Harris campaign official said in late July that she no longer supports such a ban.

Fracking is the process of using liquid to free natural gas from rock formations – and the primary mode for extracting gas for energy in battleground Pennsylvania. During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, she said she would start “with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands.” She walked that back later when she became Biden’s running mate.

Biden has been the most pro-climate president in history, and climate advocates find Harris to be an exciting candidate in her own right. Democrats and climate activists are planning to campaign on the stark contrasts between Harris and Trump , who vowed to push America decisively back to fossil fuels, promising to unwind Biden’s climate and clean energy legacy and pull America out of its global climate commitments.

If elected, one of the biggest climate goals Harris would have to craft early in her administration is how much the US would reduce its climate pollution by 2035 – a requirement of the Paris climate agreement .

Immigration

Harris has quickly started trying to counter Trump’s attacks on her immigration record.

Her campaign released a video in late July citing Harris’ support for increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and Trump’s successful push to scuttle a bipartisan immigration deal that included some of the toughest border security measures in recent memory.

The vice president has changed her position on border control since her 2020 campaign, when she suggested that Democrats needed to “critically examine” the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, after being asked whether she sided with those in the party arguing to abolish the department.

In June of this year, the White House announced a crackdown on asylum claims meant to continue reducing crossings at the US-Mexico border – a policy that Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, indicated in late July to CBS News would continue under a Harris administration.

Trump’s attacks stem from Biden having tasked Harris with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America in March 2021. While Harris focused on long-term fixes, the Department of Homeland Security remained responsible for overseeing border security.

She has only occasionally talked about her efforts as the situation along the US-Mexico border became a political vulnerability for Biden. But she put her own stamp on the administration’s efforts, engaging the private sector.

Harris pulled together the Partnership for Central America, which has acted as a liaison between companies and the US government. Her team and the partnership are closely coordinating on initiatives that have led to job creation in the region. Harris has also engaged directly with foreign leaders in the region.

Experts credit Harris’ ability to secure private-sector investments as her most visible action in the region to date but have cautioned about the long-term durability of those investments.

Israel-Hamas

The Israel-Hamas war is the most fraught foreign policy issue facing the country and has spurred a multitude of protests around the US since it began in October.

After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris gave a forceful and notable speech about the situation in Gaza.

We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Harris echoed Biden’s repeated comments about the “ironclad support” and “unwavering commitment” to Israel. The country has a right to defend itself, she said, while noting, “how it does so, matters.”

However, the empathy she expressed regarding the Palestinian plight and suffering was far more forceful than what Biden has said on the matter in recent months. Harris mentioned twice the “serious concern” she expressed to Netanyahu about the civilian deaths in Gaza, the humanitarian situation and destruction she called “catastrophic” and “devastating.”

She went on to describe “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”

Harris emphasized the need to get the Israeli hostages back from Hamas captivity, naming the eight Israeli-American hostages – three of whom have been killed.

But when describing the ceasefire deal in the works, she didn’t highlight the hostage for prisoner exchange or aid to be let into Gaza. Instead, she singled out the fact that the deal stipulates the withdrawal by the Israeli military from populated areas in the first phase before withdrawing “entirely” from Gaza before “a permanent end to the hostilities.”

Harris didn’t preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in late July, instead choosing to stick with a prescheduled trip to a sorority event in Indiana.

Harris is committed to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, having met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at least six times and announcing last month $1.5 billion for energy assistance, humanitarian needs and other aid for the war-torn country.

At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Harris said: “I will make clear President Joe Biden and I stand with Ukraine. In partnership with supportive, bipartisan majorities in both houses of the United States Congress, we will work to secure critical weapons and resources that Ukraine so badly needs. And let me be clear: The failure to do so would be a gift to Vladimir Putin.”

More broadly, NATO is central to our approach to global security. For President Biden and me, our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad. And I do believe, as I have said before, NATO is the greatest military alliance the world has ever known.”

Police funding

The Harris campaign has also walked back the “defund the police” sentiment that Harris voiced in 2020. What she meant is she supports being “tough and smart on crime,” Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair for the Harris campaign and former mayor of New Orleans, told CNN’s Pamela Brown in late July.

In the midst of nationwide 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Harris voiced support for the “defund the police” movement, which argues for redirecting funds from law enforcement to social services. Throughout that summer, Harris supported the movement and called for demilitarizing police departments.

Democrats largely backed away from calls to defund the police after Republicans attempted to tie the movement to increases in crime during the 2022 midterm elections.

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Trump Campaign Criticizes Walz for State Law Providing Tampons in Schools

The law, which was passed in Minnesota last year, includes language requiring menstrual products to be available in bathrooms of all schools for grades 4 to 12 as a way to accommodate transgender students.

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By Chris Cameron

• Published Aug. 6, 2024 Updated Aug. 8, 2024, 8:27 a.m. ET

Follow live updates on the 2024 election .

As part of their effort to portray Tim Walz, the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate, as a far-left liberal, the Trump campaign attacked the Minnesota governor on Tuesday for signing a bill last year that provides access to menstrual products for transgender students.

At issue is broadly inclusive language in the law, which states that products like pads, tampons and other products used for menstruation “must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12.” Republican state lawmakers in Minnesota had tried — and failed — to amend that bill so that it would apply only to “female restrooms,” though some Republicans went on to vote for the final version of the bill .

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in an interview on Tuesday on Fox News that the law, among other policies seen as supportive of transgender rights, was “a threat to women’s health.”

“As a woman, I think there is no greater threat to our health than leaders who support gender-transition surgeries for young minors , who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools,” Ms. Leavitt said. “Those are radical policies that Tim Walz supports. He actually signed a bill to do that.”

State Representative Sandra Feist , a Democrat and the chief author of the bill, said in an interview that it was important for her and the student activists who pushed for the change that transgender students were able to access menstrual products without having to ask for them.

“I actually received emails,” Ms. Feist said. “From trans students, parents, teachers, librarians, custodians from across the country, talking about how they were — or that they knew — trans students who faced these barriers and needed these products, and how much it meant to them that they would have that access, and also that we were standing up for them.”

Mr. Walz made significant efforts to protect the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Minnesota as governor, and was an early supporter of gay rights going as far back as his time as a high school teacher in the 1990s. Mr. Walz signed a bill last year designating Minnesota as a legal refuge for transgender people.

Chris Cameron covers politics for The Times, focusing on breaking news and the 2024 campaign. More about Chris Cameron

Letters to the Editor | When you vote, vote for women’s rights |…

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Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor | when you vote, vote for women’s rights | letters to the editor.

It’s true whether it’s the Disney series called “Renegade Nell,” a character from the 1700s without any property rights, or nurses who served in the Vietnam War and never got the respect they deserved.

Here we are in 2024, and women’s rights are still being attacked. What’s wrong with this picture?

Why can’t we trust women? Is it our patriarchal culture or is it that women are “not ready”? Spare me. It’s past time to give women a leading role in governing our lives.

Men surely have made a mess of this world. Women just might be able to do better.

Imagine a place where women have the freedom to make their own health care decisions and where women are respected and given the same opportunities as men.

When you vote, vote for women’s rights.

Diane Johnson, Boca Raton

A contrasting viewpoint

Regarding letter to the editor on July 27 by Steven Weintraub, yes, there is inflation. It’s still a product of high consumer demand after the Covid pandemic. Inflation is not rampant and it has been declining this year.

There is no ban on drilling. The U.S. is currently producing more oil than any time in U.S. history.

As for President Joe Biden stepping aside, he was under pressure, but it was his decision, which he made for the greater good of his party and his country.

As for military members killed in combat in the Biden administration, yes, there were casualties. But 65 service members died in combat under Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2021. Also of note, more than a half million American civilians are dead because of his mismanagement of Covid.

Our strongest ally in the Middle East is Israel. It is not Benjamin Netanyahu, who, like Trump, seeks to remain in power to stay out of prison. He does not seek to end the war in Gaza, nor to bring home the hostages.

In his letter, Mr. Weintraub asks if the world has gone crazy. I admit that some of this world has gone crazy, but there are still people, politicians and parties who know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Lew Dawg Cloninger, Plantation

Too costly to dine out

Regarding all the area restaurants that have been closing lately, this situation can be summed up as follows: You pay $100 for a meal at a restaurant, and the food is average.

Dining out has become too expensive and the food is simply not worth it anymore.

Anthony Billera , Fort Lauderdale

Marlins fans deserve better

As a 74-year-old lifelong baseball fan, I was encouraged by the Miami Marlins’ 2023 season and participation in a National League wild-card playoff game.

But this season has been a disaster from both their dismal win-loss record and their shameful selloff of what talent was left on the team’s roster.

If I were a season-ticket holder, I would be wild. Such loyal baseball fans deserve to be compensated for the Marlins’ front-office ineptitude.

Bob Mennealy, Lake Worth Beach

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