what party voted for womens roght to vote

April 09, 2022 Post a Comment

The women's suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the U.s.. It took activists and reformers virtually 100 years to win that correct, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the motility more than than once. Simply on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the offset time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

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Women's Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women's suffrage began in earnest in the decades earlier the Civil War. During the 1820s and '30s, nigh states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating beyond the U.s.—temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations—and in many of these, women played a prominent office.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to abrasion against what historians have called the "Cult of True Womanhood": that is, the thought that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with dwelling house and family unit.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to exist a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, only some men—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to talk over the problem of women's rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

"We hold these truths to exist self-evident," proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, "that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed past their creator with certain inalienable rights, that amidst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

READ MORE: Women Who Fought for the Vote

Civil Rights and Women'due south Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women's rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution'southward protection to all citizens—and defines "citizens" as "male"; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the correct to vote.

Some women's suffrage advocates believed that this was their hazard to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women'south votes could be used to neutralize those cast past African Americans.

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In 1869, a new group chosen the National Adult female Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage subpoena to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Blackness enfranchisement past tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Subpoena faction formed a grouping called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-land basis.

READ More: Early Women'south Rights Activists Wanted Much More than Suffrage

The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity somewhen faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to class the National American Adult female Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organisation's first president.

By then, the suffragists' arroyo had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were "created equal," the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote considering they were unlike from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral "maternal republic."

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for example, wanted women to have the vote considering they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-course white people were swayed once once more by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would "ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained."

READ MORE: Why the Fight Over the Equal Rights Amendment Has Lasted Nearly a Century

Winning the Vote at Final

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the starting time time in nigh xx years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a "Winning Program" to get the vote at last: a rush campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group chosen the National Woman's Political party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their crusade.

World War I slowed the suffragists' campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women's work on behalf of the war endeavour, activists pointed out, proved that they were simply as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Subpoena to the Constitution was ratified. And on Nov 2 of that year, more than eight meg women beyond the United States voted in elections for the first fourth dimension.