Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

In the years before the Civil War, American women began a campaign for the vote that lasted nearly seventy-five years. Their battle finally ended in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment prohibiting the denial of the right to vote “on account of sex” was adopted. Initially, suffrage was one of several reforms intended to end the significant legal, political, religious, and cultural discriminations against nineteenth-century women. In the 1840s and 1850s, activists targeted injustices ranging from child custody laws that favored fathers to prohibitions against women speaking in public, the denial of equal education, and the existence of a double sex standard. In language and vocabulary familiar to a generation whose parents had lived during the American Revolution and who remembered the Declaration of Independence, women at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention resolved, among other injustices, that “all laws which … place her in a position inferior to that of man are contrary to the great precept of nature and therefore of no force or authority.”

A necessary transaction in any democracy between the people and those to whom they delegate authority, suffrage emerged in the 1860s as both a powerful symbol of equality with men as well as an instrument of reform. Voting became the essential political utility by which women could achieve other improvements in their status. If women could vote, went the argument of this first generation of suffragists, they would end barriers at the state level that prevented married women from controlling their wages and attending state universities. If women could vote, given their acknowledged position as moral guardians of their homes, they would

-3-