State by State Wins Some battles for woman suffrage were won state-by-state by the early 20th century. This victory prompted other states to eliminate their legal barriers to voting as well. For many people sheltering in place, mask-making is a constructive diversion: sewing groups are issuing challenges, drawing from patterns and instructions that abound...Read More, New-York Historical Society The story of women’s voting rights has not been one of linear progress. Ultimately, the suffrage movement provided political training for some of the early women pioneers in Congress, but its internal divisions foreshadowed the persistent disagreements among women in Congress and among women’s rights activists after the passage of the 19th Amendment. That reform effort evolved during the 19th century, initially emphasizing a broad spectrum of goals before focusing solely on securing the franchise for women. The Puerto Rican legislature granted literate women the right to vote in 1931, and all women the vote in 1935. United States House of Representatives: History, Art, & Archives, Origins & Development: From the Constitution to the Modern House, Joint Meetings, Joint Sessions, & Inaugurations, Presidents, Vice Presidents, & Coinciding Sessions of Congress, Foreign Leaders and Dignitaries Who Have Addressed the U.S. Congress, Individuals Who Have Lain in State or Honor, Calendars of the House of Representatives, Search Historical Highlights of the House, Chief Administrative Officers of the House, John W. McCormack Annual Award of Excellence to Congressional Employees, House Members Who Became U.S. Supreme Court Justices, House Members Who Received Electoral College Votes, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress, Jeannette Rankin’s Historic Election: A Century of Women in Congress, Joseph H. Rainey: 150 Years of Black Americans Elected to Congress, Campaign Collectibles: Running for Congress, Electronic Technology in the House of Representatives, The People’s House: A Guide to Its History, Spaces, and Traditions, An Annual Outing: The Congressional Baseball Game, Florence Kahn: Congressional Widow to Trailblazing Lawmaker, Mace of the U.S. House of Represen- tatives, The Long Struggle for Representation: Oral Histories of African Americans in Congress, National History Day 2021: Communication in History, Time for a Tour: Visiting the People’s House, Researching the House: Other Primary Sources, Meet the Women Members of the 65th–73rd Congresses (1917–1934), https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/. States could, in fact, use other factors to keep certain segments of the population from voting—and they did. Half a million spectators watched; two hundred were injured in the violence that broke out. However, the 19th Amendment technically did not “give” women the right to vote: it prohibited states from using sex as a barrier to the franchise: “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.”. Chinese Americans were not extended citizenship and the right to vote until the 1943 Magnuson Act was passed, and other Asian Americans born outside the U.S. were not eligible for naturalization until 1952 when the McCarran-Walter Act overturned the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. New York...Read More, A drab broadside in the collection of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society has enjoyed pride of place in two exhibitions: Women March, on view when we reopen the Museum on Sept. 11, and the 2017–2018 show Hotbed. Wilson responded by beginning to support woman suffrage. In 1948, this balance changed with a legal case in New Mexico. During World War I, women took up jobs in factories to support the war, as well as taking more active roles in the war than in previous wars. Some battles for woman suffrage were won state-by-state by the early 20th century. But progress was slow and many states, especially east of the Mississippi, did not grant women the vote. And in 1965, the landmark Voting Rights Act banned these discriminatory voting laws. Still, the anti-suffrage forces used parliamentary maneuvers to delay, trying to convert some of the pro-suffrage votes to their side. Embracing a more confrontational style, Paul drew a younger generation of women to her movement, helped resuscitate the push for a federal equal rights amendment, and relentlessly attacked the Democratic administration of President Woodrow Wilson for obstructing the extension of the vote to women. Read more from our suffrage centennial series: Written by Anna Danziger Halperin, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History and Public History, Center for Women’s History, Posted in Current Events, Exhibitions, Women's History Tagged suffrage, Voting Rights, Women March, women's history, women's suffrage, Your email address will not be published. at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) Like many other women reformers of the era, they both had been active in the abolitionist movement. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a Massachusetts teacher, met in 1850 and forged a lifetime alliance as women’s rights activists. 8For more on Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, see Inez Haynes Gillmore, Up Hill with Banners Flying (Penobscott, ME: Traversity Press, 1964). The Civil Rights Act of 1960 criminalized voter suppression by establishing federal penalties for obstructing someone from registering to vote. The anti-suffrage forces, which included both men and women, were well-organized, and passage of the amendment was not easy. 2For more on the convention at Seneca Falls, its participants, and the larger movement it spawned, see Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in the U.S., 1848-1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). The U.S. Capitol is in background. August 13, 2020 by Women at the Center Leave a Comment. The Act was amended in 1975 to prohibit English-only ballots in areas where a single-language minority group comprised more than five percent of the voting-age population. Indigenous women on reservations were not, in 1920, able yet to vote. Jim Crow laws and mob violence prevented Black Americans from voting in much of the country. Votes for women were first seriously proposed in the United States in July 1848, at the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Although the right to vote was not agreed upon by all the attendees, it ultimately became a cornerstone of the movement. Alice Paul and the National Women's Party began using more radical tactics to work for a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution: picketing the White House, staging large suffrage marches and demonstrations, going to jail.