While talk of women's suffrage starting picking up speed in the 1820s and 30s, the movement didn't officially begin until the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Women were starting to go against the “true” woman ideal, which was to be a submissive wife and mother dedicated to her home and family. The group of abolitionists were invited to the convention by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The meeting wasn't the first to talk about women's rights, but suffragists consider it to be the start of the movement. They agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities, which basically meant they thought women should have the right to vote.
Unfortunately, the movement lost momentum when the civil war began. However, after the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed, the movement started back up again. The newly passed amendments were only applied to men and were meant to benefit specifically African American men, so there became two main schools of thought among suffragists. One group refused to support the 15th amendment, and allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans. This group became the National Woman Suffrage Association, lead by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, in 1869. The second group was comprised of the women who wanted the right to vote and also supported the 15th Amendment. This became the American Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1890, the two groups merged and became the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NWSA, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became its first president. By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that they deserved the right to vote because men and women were created equal, they argued they deserved suffrage because they were different from men. They made their domesticity into a political virtue and used the franchise to create purer more moral “maternal commonwealth”. And their methods worked. By 1910, some western states had begun to give women the right to vote. However, southern and eastern states still resisted.
To combat this, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled a “Winning Plan”: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with special focus on those resistant regions. The National Women’s Party, a splinter group, used more radical tactics such as hunger strikes and White House pickets, which won major publicity for the movement.
WWI slowed down the campaign, but the women’s work on behalf of the war effort proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.
Finally on August 18th, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified. After 72 years of campaigning and protesting and fighting, women had finally won the right to vote.
Nowadays, many women take the right to vote for granted, even though it has only been 100 years since women could vote. It can be frustrating to see that many women don't exercise their right to vote. It is important that we know how hard the women who came before us fought for us to be able to vote. So honor these brave women by casting a ballot. And remember to be grateful that you don't have to fight for this seemlingly fundamental human right.