The fight for civil rights for women and in general, equality for all started since the early nineteenth century. Ida B. Wells was a famous activist back in the 1800’s and co-founded the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People”. Ida B. Wells including many other selfless women contributed to improve conditions which women have to their advantage in the United States today. They founded the movements like “The National Association of Colored Women”, Women’s Suffrage movement etc. The women’s suffrage was a decade’s– long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. Men had the rights to vote, including black men who were granted the right in the year 1870, though most were unable to exercise this right due to taxes, etc. During this time, there was an adapted norm which was later termed as “The Cult of Domesticity”, this was when people believed there were “specific” roles for women and men in society.
The suffrage movement involved organizing campaigns, conventions, petitions. The founders and its members spread awareness to many other women, whether or not they knew of their rights. Many acts were put in place with the purpose of achieving the set goal (which was to gain the voting rights of women). In the year 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, alongside Lucretia Mott invited a group of abolitionist activists and reformers (both men and mostly women). They met at Senaca Falls to discuss the problems associated with the rights of women. “All sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States- temperance leagues, religious movements, moral reform societies, anti-slavery organizations – and in many of these, women played prominent roles”. When the civil war began, the momentum which was infused in the suffrage movement was indefinitely halted. Nevertheless, the movement gathered its steam once again, after the civil war, and were determined to have the 15th Amendment ratified. “They even allied with racist Southerners who argued that while women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans”. Two different groups by the name “The National Woman Suffrage Association” and “The American Woman Suffrage Association” merged and created “The National American Woman Suffrage Association”, of which its first president was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With this, the movement’s standard approach also differed. They argued that they deserved the rights to vote not because they had equal rights as men, but because they were different from men.
The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment took activists and reformers nearly a century (100 years) to win. Some expeditions and tribulations that issued within the years of the suffrage movement includes, “Emma Hart Willard founding the Troy Female Seminary in New York – the first endowed school for girls. Sarah Grimke who begins her speaking career as an abolitionist and a women’s right advocate. Though she was eventually silenced by male abolitionist, who considered her public speaking a liability. Harriet Tubman escaping from slavery and leading many slaves to freedom. Abigail Scott Duniway publishing a weekly newspaper, dedicated to women’s right and suffrage”. After struggling through bolts and thorns, the 19th Amendments was ratified, on August 18, 1920. And as result, over 8 million women across the States voted in the elections on November 2nd of that same year.
REFERENCES.
https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage
