Carol Rust Nash - Women Winning the Right to Vote in United States History

Fighting for Their Rights

In March 1919, two hundred policemen brutally put down a protest march in New York City, clubbing, beating, and trampling the marchers. The protest was not a violent uprising. The marchers were women, and it was just one incident in a long battle American women had fought to gain the right to vote.

In Women Winning the Right to Vote in United States History, author Carol Rust Nash explores the lives of the extraordinary people and the events involved in the seventy-two-year-long struggle to achieve women's political equality in the United States of America.

"a great title to showcase each March for Women's History month."

"volumes that ably place the events in the context of their times."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Rust Nash is also the author of Sexual Harassment: What Teens Should Know and AIDS: Choices for Life for Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.... If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies [sic] we are determined to foment a Rebellion.

Abigail Adams

The rebellion began as Abigail Adams predicted in the letter above. The battle for womens right to vote officially began at the Seneca Falls Womens Rights Convention in 1848over seventy years after Adamss 1776 letter to her husbandand continued for seventy-two years before victory was achieved. It would become one of the longest-lasting reform movements in American history.

Elizabeth Cady was born into a prominent New York family in 1815. She received the best education available to women at that time, attending Emma Willards Troy Seminary. But she was not happy about it. She was furious that she could not attend Union College, which was for boys only. Though Troy offered a serious education, it did not emphasize the classics the way boys-only schools did.

Unlike many other women who believed that government and politics were activities suitable for men only, Cady read the law in her fathers office after her graduation. She became a student of legal and constitutional history.

Cady met Henry B. Stanton, a brilliant abolitionist organizer, through her activities in the abolition movement, an organized attempt to end slavery in the United States. Stanton was in the process of forming a new antislavery party, the Liberty Party. Both Cady and Stanton believed that political organization was necessary for reform.

After a brief engagement, they were married in 1840, between the founding convention of the Liberty Party and a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was at this meeting that the Anti-Slavery Societys membership split over the question of womens rights. Some thought women should be voting members; others disagreed.

The first stop on the Stantons honeymoon was the home of leaders of the antislavery movement: Angelina Grimk Weld, Theodore Weld, and Sarah Grimk. From there, Elizabeth Cady Stantonwho kept her birth name as well as her husbands name after the marriage, which was an unusual practice at that timeand her new husband set out for the Worlds Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

Due to the recent split in the United States abolition movement over the role of women, a bitter controversy developed at the convention over womens rights in general. The women delegates from the United States were not allowed into the convention.

Lucretia Mott, an abolitionist and feminist, was one of the delegates refused admittance. A Quaker housewife, Mott had persuaded her husband to give up a business that was dependent on African-American slaves, and she exposed ministers who were slaveholders. She had indeed done her part to abolish slavery, so it was unfair that she was not allowed in the convention. She decided that in order for women to have a voice in society, they first needed the vote.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was also banned from the convention. She and Mott spent a great deal of time together in London and began a correspondence when they returned to the United States.

In 1848, Stanton organized the first womens rights convention. She was aided by Mott and her sister, Martha Wright, as well as another Quaker woman, Mary Ann McClintock. Stanton suggested adapting the Declaration of Independence as a statement of womens rights. She put together a list of complaints designed to prove that history was a record of mens injustices toward women. This document, the first public protest in the United States against womens political, economic, and social inferiority, was called the Declaration of Sentiments.

Men made the laws that gave them control over womens wages and property, that gave husbands authority over their wives, and that deprived women of their children in divorce. Stanton believed that for these conditions to change, women had to take a role in society in addition to wife and mother. They needed political equality. They needed the vote.

When the Declaration of Sentiments was adopted at Seneca Falls, the womens rights movement, which would focus on womens right to vote, was launched. In 1850, two years after the Seneca Falls convention, another convention was held in Akron, Ohio, to put pressure on the state constitutional convention to address the issue of womens political equality. Later that year, a meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts, attracted feminists from eight states. They set up a coordinating committee, a plan for womens right-to-vote (suffrage) campaigns in their states, and committees to report on the educational, industrial, legal, and social status of women. Women organized a convention in Indiana in 1851 and in Pennsylvania in 1852.

Because of her duties as a mother of young children and the demands of running a household, Stanton was unable to attend most of these early conventions. She sent letters of support to them and began planning a book on womens history. She also wrote articles for the New-YorkTribune.

Amelia Bloomer, also of Seneca Falls, started publishing a monthly womens temperance newspaper called The Lily. (Temperance means abstinence from alcoholic beverages. The temperance movement advocated making it illegal to sell or possess liquor.) Stanton saw The Lily as a way to spread information about womens rights and sold Bloomer on the idea. The Lily became the only publication in the country to spread accurate news about the womens rights movement.

Bloomer was also instrumental in changing the style of womens clothing. Women wore corsets so constricting that they cut the amount of air that could be taken into the lungs, which often caused women to faint. Over their corsets, they wore yards of hot, heavy fabric and layers of petticoats that also restricted movement.

Elizabeth Smith Miller, Stantons cousin and an advocate for dress reform, proposed the Turkish trouser, a full-cut pantaloon worn under a short skirt to reduce the weight and allow more natural movement. Bloomer promoted the new style in her newspaper, and the pantaloons came to be called bloomers.

Bloomers were originally adopted by women for outdoor work. Bloomer and Miller wore them in public for the first time in Seneca Falls in 1851. The costume never really caught on, in part, because it was considered radicalthe new, militant womens rights fashion.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820 in a small town in western Massachusetts, the second child of Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Her father was a Quaker, and her mother was loving and committed. Her family, with eight children altogether, was filled with devotion and love.