Woman’s Suffrage Movement

Women were considered sub-sets of their husbands, and after marriage they did not have the right to own property, maintain their wages, or sign a contract, much less vote. It was expected that women be obedient wives, never to hold a thought or opinion independent of their husbands. It was considered improper for women to travel alone or to speak in public. In this paper the author will present the trace of the rise, the key players, the division within the movement, and what the overall effect was. Trace the Rise Timelines are often a dull list of events in chronological order found on walls or in appendices of books.The come in variety of forms and can be used for many different purposes.

The Women’s suffrage movement was formally set into motion in 1848 with the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Women won the vote in the United States through a constitutional amendment, finally ratified in 1920. But along the road to winning the vote, states and localities gave the right to vote to women within their jurisdictions. This list documents many of those milestones in winning the vote for American women. “1776: New Jersey gives the vote to women owning more than $250.Later the state reconsidered and women were no longer allowed to vote. 1837: Kentucky gives some women suffrage in school elections.

1861: Kansas enters the Union; the new state gives its women the right to vote in local school elections. 1869: Wyoming territory constitution grants women the right to vote and to hold public office. 1870: Utah territory gives full suffrage to women. 1893: The male electorate in Colorado votes “yes” on woman suffrage. 1894: Some cities in Kentucky and Ohio give women the vote in school board elections. 1895: Utah amends its constitution to grant women suffrage. 896: Idaho adopts a constitutional amendment granting suffrage to women.

1902: Kentucky repeals limited school board election voting rights for women. 1910: Washington State votes for woman suffrage. 1911: California gives women the vote. 1912: Male electorates in Michigan, Kansas, Oregon and Arizona approve state constitutional amendments for woman suffrage. Wisconsin defeats a proposed suffrage amendment. 1912: Kentucky restores limited voting rights for women in school board elections. 1920: On August 26, a constitutional amendment is adopted when Tennessee ratifies it, granting full woman suffrage in all states of the United States.

971: The United States lowers the voting age for both men and women to eighteen (Lewis, 1999). ” Key Players From what one has found there were at least 75 key players in the woman’s suffrage. It would be hard to write about the all at once, so one will pick the top twenty five that he or she believes that had a key impact on the suffrage. Twenty-five Minnesota women who contributed their efforts to the campaign during those years are commemorated in the Woman Suffrage Memorial Garden on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol in St.Paul: Harriet Bishop, Fanny Fligelman Brin, Myrtle Cain, Mary Jackman Colburn, Sarah Tarleton Colvin, Gratia Countryman, Nellie Griswold Francis, Elizabeth Hunt Harrison, Ethel Edgerton Hurd, Nanny Mattson Jaeger, Bertha Berglin Moller, Julia Bullard Nelson, Emily Gilman Noyes, Anna Dickie Olesen, Mabeth Hurd Paige, Martha Rogers Ripley, Maria Sanford, Josephine Schain, Josephine Sarles Simpson, Sarah Burger Stearns, Maud Conkey Stockwell, Jane Grey Swisshelm, Clara Hampson Ueland, Marguerite Wells, and Alice Ames Winter.Division within the Movement One found that in April 1913, she formed the Congressional Union (CU) to aid the Congressional Committee’s work. During this time, Alice Paul and the NAWSA leaders, including President Anna Howard Shaw, disagreed about the CU’s semi-militant strategies.

During this disagreement caused the NAWSA to appoint a new Congressional Committee to replace Alice Paul’s committee. Now in early 1914, one saw that the CU officially resigned from the NAWSA.After the division, NAWSA continued to work for woman suffrage using more moderate strategies than the CU. The CU attempted to unify enfranchised women behind the suffrage cause, and created the Woman’s Party in order to do so. The CU and Woman’s Party merged to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1916. For the next three years, both organizations worked for woman suffrage, until the Senate approved the Susan B. Anthony Amendment on June 4, 1919 (Callahan, 2000).

During the next year, both the NAWSA and NWP worked to get the amendment ratified.Overall Effect Until recently women rarely appeared in political history of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. Although some women received the vote through state suffrage laws, women could not vote in all states, in all types of elections, until the Federal Suffrage Amendment of 1920 granted universal female suffrage (Flanagan, 1999). Since much political history examined politicians, presidents, and parties, women could not fit into the general framework used to study politics and political history.Early work on women and politics for the GA/PE concentrated on the woman suffrage movement, and, rather than having a primary political focus, it saw the movement as part of the overall women’s rights movement in the U. S. Standard earlier works in this vein include The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, relevant chapters in Flexner, Century of Struggle and Scott, The Southern Lady.

These works, as well as much of the new bibliography on women and politics expose how much of our historical period has been shaped by male experience.Many of the works cited here consider more than the GA/PE, because women’s politics of that time period was clearly connected to those eras which preceded and followed and cannot be severed from them. I have, however, in this bibliography included only works that give sufficient detail on the GA/PE. As historians of women expanded the realm of historical inquiry to include women generally, they rejected the set agenda of political history and argued for a re-conceptualization of politics to break down the distinction between the public world of male politics and the private world of the largely female home.Seeing the supposedly “private” social/cultural concerns of women as political and public, using gender theory, public sphere theory, and responding to the idea that the personal is the political, scholars have focused on exploring a gendered women’s political culture. Conclusion Today women’s suffrage is considered a right The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is an international convention adopted in 1979 by the United Nations United Nations General Assembly, although a few countries, mainly in the Middle East, continue to deny voting rights to women.The celebration of the suffrage movement victory holds a particular relevance now, as it has helped lead us as a country and a people to where we are today.

It celebrates a substantial milestone on the road to equal rights for women, and it honors those who helped win the day. It puts women back into our national history as active participants. It reminds us of the necessity of progressive leaders, organizers, and visionaries in every local community.References Callahan, Emily. Conflict in the United States Woman Suffrage Movement. Copyright 2000. Retrieved on April 6, 2009.

http://www. ask. com/bar? q=was+there+any+division+ within+the +Woman%E2%80%99s+Suffrage+Movement;page =1;qsrc=2417;ab= 6;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww. geocities. com%2Femilyc_25%2F Flanagan, Maureen. Women and Politics. Copyright ©1999.

Retrieved on April 3, 2009. http://www. ask. com/bar? q=What+has+been+the+overall+effect+of+the+Woman%27s+Suffrage+Movement+in+today%27s+society%3F++;page=1;qsrc=2417;ab=1;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww. h-net. org%2F%7Eshgape%2Fbibessays%2Fwomenpol. tml Lewis, Jone.

American Woman Suffrage Timeline. Copyright 1999. Retrieved on April 4, 2009 http://www. ask. com/bar? q=outline+of+the+Woman%E2%80%99s+Suffrage+Movement;page=1;qsrc=0;ab=4;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwomenshistory. about. com%2Fod%2Fsuffrageoverview%2Fa%2Ftimeline_us.

htm No Author. Who Were the Women who made up the Suffrage Movement? Copyright 2008. Retrieved on April 3, 2009 http://www. ask. com/bar? q=Who+were+the+key+players +in+the+Women%27s+Suffrage+Movement;page=1;qsrc=2417;ab=9;u=h