The American women’s suffrage movement is a centuries-long story with countless inspiring chapters. These curated resources will spark curiosity for women’s history and, above all, foster a deeper understanding of the women who shaped American democracy.
On March 31, 1776, three months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, urging him and his colleagues at the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies” in the “new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make.” She went on to add: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Pictured: A portion of Abigail Adams’ letter to John Adams, dated March 31, 1776 (Source: Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Although the American Revolution had just been fought and won over the principles of liberty, freedom, and political representation, women continued to be denied full personhood. In most states, African women remained enslaved. In addition, the laws of coverture: white women, free Black women, and women of color could not own property, control their own money, sign legal documents, speak in public, hold political office, or vote.
Coverture laws from colonial and post-Revolutionary War America stated that by law, girls were considered property of their fathers, and once married, property of their husbands. Women and girls had no legal identity.
Pictured: Phillis Wheatley, c. 1773 (Source: Library of Congress)
Women citizens of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of tribes founded in what is now Upstate New York, had full and equal participation in their government for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. Many of the most influential suffragists of the 19th century, including Matilda Josyln Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – frequently cited the Haudenosuanee’s matrilineal culture and example of true democracy as inspiration for their own pursuit of women’s rights.
Laura Cornelius Kellogg, 1880-1949, was a member of the Oneida Nation, one of the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee, an activist, author, suffrage supporter, and founder of the Society of American Indians.
Pictured: Laura Cornelius Kellogg, 1880-1947
In July 1848, more than 300 women and men gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, NY for the first Women’s Rights Convention. For two days, the delegates codified their demands for women’s equality – including the right to vote – into a document they would call the Declaration of Sentiments. Authored primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Declaration of Sentiments mirrored the Declaration of Independence, and included the radical declaration: “we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Although the gathering was not the first call for women’s equality in the newly formed United States, the Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 is considered the beginning of the organized movement for women’s suffrage.
Attendees of the Women’s Rights Convention included Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Jane Hunt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary M’Clintock. Susan B. Anthony did not attend the convention.
Pictured: Signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments, July 19-20, 1848 (Source: Library of Congress)
On November 5, 1872, in a small barber shop turned voting booth in Rochester, NY, Susan B. Anthony cast her vote for Ulysses S. Grant in that year’s presidential election. She argued that as a U.S. citizen, the right to vote was inherent and guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Anthony was then arrested for voting illegally, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of $100 plus court costs. Anthony never paid the fine, and would later describe her two-day trial in June 1873 as “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
Susan B. Anthony was pardoned for the conviction of voting illegally by President Trump in August 2020.
Pictured: Susan B. Anthony, c. 1855, originally published in “The History of Woman Suffrage” by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Volume 1, 1881
On March 3, 1913, the day before the inaugural parade for incoming President Woodrow Wilson, nearly 5,000 suffragists, including Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Inez Millholland, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in a wildly successful bid to draw attention to the need for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s right to vote. The parade, organized by suffrage leader Alice Paul, drew nearly 500,000 onlookers; galvanized and catalyzed the suffrage movement towards victory; and set precedents in protest and civil organizing that continue to inspire today.
Twenty-five women from Delta Sigma Theta Sorority founded in January 1913 at Howard University, marched in the 1913 suffrage parade as the sorority’s first public action.
Pictured: Cover of the official program from the 1913 suffrage parade (Source: Library of Congress)
From January 1917 to June 1918, the Silent Sentinels – a faction of the National Woman’s Party – peacefully and silently picketed in front of the White House as part of their political strategy to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to support women’s suffrage. The Silent Sentinels stood at their posts six days a week, eight hours a day, no matter the weather, and in the face of increasing violence and harassment from both onlookers and police. More than 150 women were arrested on charges of “obstructing the sidewalk,” serving sentences in jails and prison workhouses that ranged from a few days to a few months. Those arrested went on hunger strikes, and experienced violent force-feeding and torture. But the strategy worked – nationwide outrage at the treatment of the imprisoned suffragists forced President Wilson to declare his support for the 19th Amendment in a speech to Congress on September 30, 1918.
Suffragists staged the nation’s first-ever peaceful pickets at the White House gates. Although, protests in front of the White House are commonplace now, the suffragists were imprisoned for exercising what today is considered a protected and essential First Amendment right.
Pictured: Suffragists picketing at the White House, 1917 (Source: Library of Congress)
The 19th Amendment was introduced in Congress every year from 1878 to 1919 (41 years in a row). Finally on May 21, 1919, the amendment passed the House of Representatives. The Senate would follow just two weeks later and pass the amendment on June 4, 1919. The 19th Amendment then went to the states, where it had to be ratified by 3/4ths of the-then-48 states to be added to the U.S. Constitution. The Race to Ratification had begun, yet victory was anything but certain: on June 10, 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment. On July 24, 1919, Georgia became the first state to vote against ratification. Tennessee became the 36th and final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920.
The 19th Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, states that “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.”
Pictured: Governor Edwin P. Morrow of Kentucky signing the 19th Amendment, January 6, 1920 (Source: Library of Congress)
On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified into the U.S. Constitution. Overnight, 26 million women had been enfranchised. Maud Wood Park, who was in the room when suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt received a phone call from the Secretary of State’s office alerting her that the 19th Amendment had just been signed, would later write about the historic moment: “So quietly as that, we learned that the last step in the enfranchisement of women had been taken, and the struggle of more than seventy years brought to a successful end. We were all too stunned to make any comment.”
Enfranchisement is the giving of a right by a government to a person or group. In most cases, enfranchisement refers to the right to vote.
Pictured: Life Magazine, October 28, 1920 (Source: Maine State Museum Collection)
Through the early 20th Century, laws remained in place that limited women’s access to the ballot even after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Because women in the U.S. had almost no legal identity outside of the identity of her husband or father, an American woman who married a non-U.S. citizen immediately lost her citizenship and took on the citizenship of her husband (even if that couple resided in the United States). When a woman lost her citizenship, she lost with it her right to vote. Women did not have equal nationality and citizenship rights in the United States until 1940.
American men who married non-U.S. citizens in the early 20th Century did not lose their citizenship status.
Pictured: Unknown subjects waiting in line at the Marriage Bureau, photographed between c. 1915-c.1920 (Source: Library of Congress)
The story of women’s fight for the vote did not end in 1920 with the certification of the 19th Amendment. Racism, discriminatory laws, prejudicial citizenship practices, and systems designed to oppress continued to prevent many women in the United States from exercising the full promises of the 19th Amendment: Native American women were not fully enfranchised until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924; Asian American women were not fully enfranchised until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1952; and Black and Hispanic women were not fully enfranchised until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“We have fought for America with all her imperfections, not so much for what she is, but for what we know she can be.” – Mary McLeod Bethune, 1939
Pictured: Mary McLeod Bethune standing in front of the United States Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C., 1949. This photograph was originally published as the cover photo of the April 1949 issue of Ebony Magazine. (Source: National Park Service)
By Johanna Neuman
By Sally Roesch Wagner
By Cathleen D. Cahill
By Paula J. Giddings
By Winifred Conkling
By Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
By Ida E. Jones
“I am honored to join the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation and my fellow First Ladies in this effort to finally give due recognition to these brave women in the core of the commemorative heart of our Nation’s Capital.”