While worldwide advancement was formulating and evolving, the women’s suffrage movement took hold and began to coalesce in United States in the late 1840s. In actuality, however, it had had its initial groundings in the 1820s and 1830s. Affronted during this time by masculine centric political groups and societal expectations, women began their initial quest – which at as of yet had not completely been articulated or defined – to become an integral part of the United States’ moral, political, religious, and social environments (“The Fight for Women’s Suffrage,” n.d.).
However, issues surrounding slavery, animosities between the Northern and Southern states, and finally, disagreements between the women’s suffrage movements’ activists themselves, overshadowed the women’s suffrage movement. Ultimately, the women’s suffrage movement was surpassed on the national front by the Civil War. Slavery and the Civil War would dominate regional, state, and national social and political environs for the next coming decades (“42c Women’s Suffrage at Last,” n.d). In the United States, it would not be until 1920, with the passage of the nineteenth Amendment, that women were granted the right to vote.
Prominent activists during the 1860s included such figures as Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony, amongst others. This group of leaders, however, held very distinct views as to how to attain the women’s suffrage goals.
Douglass, Blackwell, and Stone believed that the time to end slavery and its’ associated biases against blacks was a more prominent ideal than that of women’s suffrage and that it was to be pursued at once. Women’s suffrage, they argued could wait until after the slavery issue was resolved, and, prominently espoused that attaching it to the issue of slavery, would only dilute their cause of emancipating slaves and granting them the same human rights whites held at that time in the United States.
Another group of activists, consisting of Truth, Sojourner, and Anthony firmly held onto their resistant stance. Women’s rights, they argued, could not wait any longer, and asked for nothing less than for women be granted the right to vote at all levels of government and within all political spectrums. In 1869 the friction between these factions were cemented.
The American Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Blackwell and Stone. This group’s goal was that of petitioning to the States directly in order to address the rights of women in the United States. Alternatively, Stanton and Anthony established the National Women Suffrage Association, with its more forceful platform focused on securing a constitutional amendment to firmly, and definitely ensure women’s voting rights.
Choosing differing paths of communicating and with their own agendas publically articulated, the American Woman Suffrage Association elected a more discrete road of lobbying governmental and societal leaders; while the National Women Suffrage Association, tended to use incendiary and radically enticing protesting activities that attracted newsworthy headlines. With neither group achieving their individually stated objectives, and ultimately finding that they were only diluting each other’s efforts, the two groups chose to unite their forces.
In 1890, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association was founded. As the original activists passed away, a new generation took it upon themselves to continue the struggle (“The Fight for Women’s Suffrage,” n.d.).
Northern and the Southern states, however, during this same timeframe, continued their animosities and fractious contentiousness with respect to not just women right’s themselves, but as to which each of these geographical entities’ deemed were, or would be, women’s representation and status within existing political and societal norms.
Even as post-Civil War animosities permeated between the Northern and Southern states, limited successes were being attained in the more territorially removed new Western states. In 1869, Wyoming approved full suffrage rights for women, Utah followed closely within in the next year. Despite these achievements, after the Civil War, reconstruction and the unification of the Northern and Southern states took precedence on the national political stage and the women’s movement was relegated to an almost unsustainable political force (“Reconstruction 1866 – 1877,” n.d.).
In the first decades of the 1900s, new women’s activist leaders took the helm with their continued goal of sustaining a workable and nationally accepted solution to the issue of women’s rights. Among them was Carrie Chapman Catt. During this era, new Western states again chose the most progressive path, providing a more united force to uphold a sustainable women’s suffrage rights movement. Whilst, Mid-western states focused on providing women with a more radically, and politically challenging initiative: granting women full voting rights.
Understanding the complexing intricacies of what was required to amend the United States Constitution, Catt articulated a plan to specifically focus on individually reaching political leadership in each of the opposing States (“The Women’s Rights Movements 1848 – 1920,” n.d.). Catt contended - much like dominoes - one by one each states’ general populace and governmental institutions would be influenced by their neighboring state government’s legal actions. Neighboring states support of women’s right to vote, Catt contended, would have the holdout States to ultimately cede to the rising tide of popular sentiment, and it would be a movement those States would no longer be able to ignore and/or fight.
While making some forward momentum and additional progress during the pre-World War I Era, the women’s suffrage movement also simultaneously took on the goal of achieving nationwide full voting rights. Again, the Western states took the leadership role on this front with Oregon, Washington, California, Utah, and Idaho – amongst others - taking the helm and adopting amendments to grant women full voting rights (Imbornoni, Ann-Marie. “Women's Rights Movement in the U.S. History of the American Women's Rights Movement 1848–1920,” n.d.).
Finally, with the previous fractions, and frictions of the United States’ individual State’s political conceptions– and wars – past them, women were granted the right to vote in 1920, proclaimed by the 19th Constitutional Amendment.
It was not an easy battle to not only to attain, but to sustain. Women were legally granted with the right to vote in political elections; however, within the overall economical and sociological hemispheres – the standing perception within the United States, as to what a women’s role should be and how it would be defined - was a much longer road to travel and endeavor for this particular gender.
During World War II, while men went to battle in the European and Asian arenas, women were tasked, and called upon, to work in factories to manufacture everything and anything needed on the war front, or, within conventional U.S. societal arenas.
With War World II ending, women, once gain found themselves in a submissive role. Having proven their technical abilities while working in factories, while their husbands’ went to war, women were once again, pressured back into the roles of the good wife, homemaker, and mother.
For the most part, this societal norm existed for women during the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States. However, the advent of the 1960s within the United States brought a confluence of events, which no one could have possibly predicted. John F. Kennedy’s ascension to the U.S. Presidency, his ultimate assassination; Martin Luther King’s abilities to fight – finally in reality – for blacks’ rights, and the understanding by many who grew up during that era, that traditional societal and political norms, could and should be challenged.
Having attained the right to vote, the Women’s liberation movement now took on a new dimension. The stage was set. New activists took the helm. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and many others, pinpointed the women’s movement course, coalescing along with those of other civil protesters. The world’s social-economic environments were rapidly changing and the role of women in general, as an integral part of an established pattern of society, was being challenged in a way it never had been before.
No longer considered as a stigmatized, small group of radicals known as the women’s suffrage movement, women post War War II, during the Korean War, and finally the Vietnam War, would no longer accept to linger in the background of social inequities. Within the United States, and insisting on equality in the workplace, in the home-place, and on local, state, national, and international political socio-economic stages - women’s voices were once again asserted in a way they never had before.
Works Cited
American’s Historical Documents. 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's Right to Vote. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/document.html?doc=13
U.S. History. 42c Women’s Suffrage at Last. Retrieved February 23, 2016 from http://www.ushistory.org/us/42c.asp
America’s Library. Reconstruction 1866 – 1877. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_subj.html
History. The Fight for Women’s Suffrage. Retrieved February 23, 2016 from http://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage
History, Arts & Archives. The United States House of Representatives. The Women’s Rights Movements 1848 – 1920. Retrieved February 24, 2016 from http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights
Imbornoni, Ann-Marie. Infoplease. Women's Rights Movement in the U.S. History of the American Women's Rights Movement 1848–1920. Retrieved February 24, 2016 from http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womenstimeline1.html
