Discuss the women's suffrage movement in the United States to attain voting rights for women.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary.The movement for political rights gained momentum in 1869, with the founding of two organizations devoted to gaining suffrage-the right to vote-for women. The National Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw suffrage as only one step on the road toward greater social and political rights for women. In contrast, the American Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Lucy Stone and others, believed that the right to vote should be the only goal. By 1890, the two organizations had joined forces, and the resulting National American Woman Suffrage Association had indeed only one goal-enfranchisement (being given the right to vote). When little progress was made, small, radical splinter groups took to the streets. Parades, hunger strikes, arrests, and jailings soon followed. World War I (1914-1918) marked a turning point in the battle for women's rights. The war offered many opportunities for women. Several thousand women served in the U.S. Navy, and about a million women joined the workforce, holding jobs vacated by men who had entered military service. President Woodrow Wilson wrote to Carrie Chapman Catt, one of the leaders of the women's movement: "It is high time that [that] part of our debt should be acknowledged." Two years later, in 1920, seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls convention, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified: "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."