Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended. It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America.

The first episode of that campaign happened in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and about 300 others (40 of them men) met in Seneca Falls, New York, and drew up the first public protest in America against the political, economic, and social inequality of women. The delegates based their program directly on the Declaration of Independence, a document that 72 years earlier, in 1776, had failed to include them. Their new version, dubbed the Declaration of Sentiments, proclaimed that the signers held "these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."

Indeed, it might just as easily be argued that the struggle for women’s rights in America really began with the Revolution itself. Certainly, women were fired by the revolutionary rhetoric of human rights and political liberties. And the war profoundly affected women’s lives, changing forever their sense of themselves as citizens of the republic. A review of women’s status in the new world, and the changes wrought and hopes unrealized by the Revolution, render the expressed frustration of the women at Seneca Falls understandable.

Early American culture prescribed specific tasks and subordinate status to women. Women managed the domestic sphere of rearing the children and laboring on the family farm, duties which included cooking, cleaning, washing, spinning, weaving, gardening, raising poultry, tending cattle, and trading in the local market. Under English common law a married woman was "covered" by her husband. The name given to her legal status was femme covert, which meant that she had virtually no rights at all. Everything she owned and everything she earned belonged to her husband. She did not even have legal claim to her own children.

For more than 200 years, women complained about their lot — about their exclusion from participation in public affairs, about being denied education, about religious rules that oppressed them, about their subordinate status in the community, and their dependence upon undependable men. Such protests, though, were likely to be infrequent, private, and voiced only when some particular humiliation compelled a woman to violate the stricture that she remain silent and subservient.

Within the confines of their circumscribed lives, women often found solace in religion, particularly that which arrived on a great wave of religious enthusiasm in the mid-18th century, known as the Great Awakening. This new religion exalted the individual’s ability to "choose God" and take control of his or her spiritual destiny. Evangelicals’ emphasis on the inner experience of God’s grace and the rejection of established religious authority particularly appealed to women who found in it divine sanction for their spirituality and validation of their own religious experiences. Some women seized this liberating potential, claiming they had been called by God to pray for others, to preach, to lead. Many more found a rationale for public activity.

A great moment of opportunity for women’s equality seemed to arrive with the determination to break with Great Britain. The American Revolution transformed the lives of many women, through the experience of wartime itself and the movement’s expressed ideals of liberty and equality. Women assumed control of farms and businesses while husbands, fathers and sons fought at the front. They were called upon to make crucial decisions about matters from which they had been excluded. After some initial trepidation about their abilities, many women experienced growing pride and self-confidence as they learned to act autonomously as "deputy husbands." And, in acting with other women in support of the war, they gained a new appreciation for the capacity of their sex to handle the demands of public life. As the war developed, women participated in crowd actions, signed pledges, raised funds, joined and, in some cases, led boycotts of British goods, fed and clothed armies. Their humble household tasks and home manufactures became imbued with patriotic spirit and assumed political importance. In the process, women acquired organizational skills, self-respect, and an interest in political developments previously considered of consequence only to men. What’s more, revolutionary ideals of equality and liberty fired women’s imaginations. "All power is derived from the people," said one federalist. "Liberty is everyone’s birthright."

The distinction between the public sphere of men and the private sphere of women collapsed during the war, as women increasingly participated in public events. When the Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed duties on many British imports, including tea, women organized themselves with the express purpose of boycotting these products and substituting home-manufactured ones. Three hundred "Mistresses of Families" of Boston signed a petition agreeing "totally to abstain from the Use of Tea," a move they made in support of "the true Friends of Liberty in all Measures they have taken to save this abused Country from Ruin and Slavery." Others agreed to substitute homespun for imported brocades and not to consider any suitors who wore British apparel.

Eventually whole communities became involved in the women’s activities; hundreds of spectators came to watch spinning bees. Ministers who supported them and newspaper editors who described them recognized their vital symbolic importance. The Reverend John Cleaveland of Ipswich speculated that with such efforts "the women might recover to this country the full and free enjoyment of all our rights, properties and privileges (which is more than the men have been able to do)." In reporting on a spinning bee in Long Island, the Boston Evening Post expressed that hope that "the ladies, while they vie with each other in skill and industry in their profitable employment, may vie with the men in contributing to the preservation and prosperity of their country and equally share in the honor of it."

Unfortunately, women were not to "equally share in the honor of it." They experienced few gains in terms of status, work, and public roles. As men returned to take control again of family business, women, despite demonstrations of competence, were ejected. One notable example was that of Mary Katherine Goddard, who had so successfully managed the family newspaper and printing business that the Continental Congress made her the official printer of the Declaration of Independence. But when the war was over and the paper running well, her brother returned and assumed control.

Another was Abigail Adams, married to a prominent member of the Continental Congress, who ran the family farm and produced the entire family income while her husband, John, engaged in politics. Yet when she wrote to him in Philadelphia and expressed her desire that he "Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than [his] ancestors" in constructing the new nation’s laws, he treated her request as a joke. "As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh," he replied, chiding her for being "so saucy." "Depend upon it," he continued, "We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems…[and submit to] the Despotism of the Peticoat [sic]." Refusing to concede the justice in her request, he facetiously blamed the clergy for "stirring up Tories, Landjobbers, Trimmers, Bigots, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverisans, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholicks [sic], Scotch Renegadoes, at last they have stimulated the ladies to demand new Priviledges [sic] and threaten to rebell."

The equality and natural rights extolled in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did not apply to women. The founding fathers believed the dependence of women, like that of slaves and propertyless men, disqualified them from a voice in the polity. Moreover, the common law tradition of femme covert stood in the new nation. Power and authority rested in the public realm of men, and women resumed their well-established roles as wives and mothers, but with an interesting new twist.

Although the Revolution did not change women’s legal status, it did encourage people of both sexes to re-evaluate the contributions of women to the family and society. The problem of female citizenship was solved by giving motherhood a political purpose. Mothers had the particularly important task of instructing their children in the virtues that a republican citizenry needed, so "Republican motherhood" assumed a patriotic mission.

Such moral and civic responsibilities in turn stimulated a debate about how mothers could raise their children to be enlightened if the mothers themselves were uneducated. Before the Revolution, little thought had been paid to women’s education. Such instruction as was available was limited to the daughters of the well-to-do and, at best, provided a rudimentary literacy with more ornamental accomplishments like music and embroidery.

To properly rear virtuous sons and future citizens, women needed suitable training, argued Benjamin Rush, a trustee of the Young Ladies’ Academy in Philadelphia: "The equal share that every citizen has in liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government." Despite abundant arguments that "unnatural stimulation" of the female brain would render her unwomanly and would "damp that vivacity and destroy that disengaged ease and softness, which are the very essence of [her] graces," the needs of future male citizens of the republic took precedence. Such concerns encouraged the creation of female academies and, eventually, public schools to include girls.

Little did those who advocated women’s education anticipate the consequences. Schools produced a new generation of literate women with self-esteem, strong identification with other women, and a sense of themselves as having a special mission to go beyond the assigned role of wife and mother. Many of the graduates became self-supporting teachers, and these early female academies produced the first generation of women’s rights leaders, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary; Lucy Stone, a student of Oberlin College, founded by abolitionists and the only college in the nation to admit women and blacks; and Susan B. Anthony, a product of Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a private Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia.

Women’s particular sense of mission was further shaped by another wave of religious revivals around the turn of the century and the increasing importance of women in traditional churches. The withdrawal of state support in the 1780s left churches dependent upon the active involvement of their members, and those active members, by and large, were predominantly women.

As the new century developed, increasingly centralized commerce and industrial growth encouraged a greater separation between the public and private worlds, between the workplace and the home. Men engaged in commerce and political affairs, women in domesticity and the church. During the early 1800s, countless women organized charitable and reform societies at the same time that Victorian ideals of "true womanhood" elevated women’s special virtues of piety and purity. These very distinctions, in turn, justified expanding women’s domain within church-sanctioned ladies’ societies. As women extended their distinctly feminine qualities of tenderness, benevolence and succor to the dependent and needy in the community, they quite literally moved out of the home and into avenues of social responsibility. One concern inevitably led to others: prayer groups, missionary societies, mothers’ clubs, relief of poor widows and children, the rescue of "fallen women," orphan asylums, hospitals, moral reform, and temperance.

With the impetus of the Second Great Awakening, a movement that stressed the moral imperative to end sinful practices and emphasized each person’s responsibility to uphold God’s will in society, many women who had served apprenticeships in church societies began challenging that great national sin: slavery. And before long, abolitionism became intertwined with attacks against the traditional subordination of women.

Women were central to antislavery agitation, acknowledged African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass:

When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause. Her heart and her conscience have supplied in large measure its motive and mainspring. Her skill, industry, patience and perseverance have been wonderfully manifest in every trial hour…her deep moral convictions, and her tender human sensibilities found convincing and persuasive expression in her pen and her voice.

Those very same skills would later be used by women in their fight for their own rights. In abolition, they learned to lecture and petition, how to organize and raise funds. They also gained valuable experience in resisting male objections and attacks. This was perfectly illustrated by the experiences of Lucretia Mott, founder of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society in 1833. When she assumed such a heady assignment, she said,

I had no idea of the meaning of preambles and resolutions and votings. Women had never been in any assemblies of the kind…that was the first time in my life I had ever heard a vote taken…. There was not a woman capable of taking the chair, and organizing that meeting in due order, and we had to call on James McCrummell, a colored man, to give us aid in the work….

Four years later, when Mott stood before The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, she exuded a self-confidence born of hard experience and a critique of woman’s restricted sphere. "The time has come," she said, "for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her." On the contrary, she told the assembled women, "it is the duty of women, and the province of women, to plead the cause of the oppressed in our land, and to do all that she can by her voice, and her pen, and her purse, and the influence of her example, to overthrow the horrible system of American slavery."

The first woman in America to speak in public to a large audience of both men and women did so to oppose slavery and to argue that women were men’s equals. In 1828, Scotswoman Frances Wright broke all rules of decorum by violating the rigid sexual boundary that separated woman from the public podium. Dressed in white and carrying the Declaration of Independence, Wright spoke for abolition, women’s rights, sexual emancipation, and "mental independence." Her message was a radical one, and one not necessarily intended to mobilize women as a group to join her crusade, except those who were willing to eschew traditional society for her utopian community in the wilds of western Tennessee. Three years earlier, on 320 swampy acres some 15 miles from the trading post of Memphis, Wright used part of her inheritance to establish a commune called Nashoba for the express purpose of training slaves for freedom. Wright’s ambitious plan for gradual emancipation involved the purchase of slaves who would earn their freedom with five years work, learn a trade to support themselves, and then be freed and colonized in Haiti.

Nashoba also became a place for experimentation with sexual emancipation. Wright embraced the benefits of free love, denounced "the tyranny of matrimonial law," and favored racial amalgamation as the solution to racism. Although she was repeatedly denounced as a dangerous infidel, "a bold blasphemer and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness," ultimately it was Wright’s financial difficulties, as much as her unnerving ideas, that doomed Nashoba.

It was a clergyman’s call that inspired large numbers of women to take up the cause of antislavery. When William Lloyd Garrison launched his radical crusade for immediate emancipation in the 1830s and organized the American Anti-Slavery Association, he called upon women to join him, on the assumption that "the cause of bleeding humanity is always legitimately the cause of women. Without her powerful assistance, its progress must be slow, difficult, imperfect." In attempting to arouse women to sympathy for the cause, Garrison did so with reference to members of their sex in bondage who were "held as property — or used for the gratification of the lust or avarice or convenience of unprincipled speculators…."

The sexual tyranny of slavery and the plight of the slave woman was a consistent trope in some of the most powerful abolitionist writings, used by white women and men, and the handful of free black women abolitionists active in the movement. Black women were present in the abolition movement from its beginning, working alongside whites wherever they were welcomed. In Philadelphia, Boston, Rochester, New York, and Salem and Lynn, Massachusetts, female antislavery societies were integrated. Of the 18 women who signed the constitution of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, at least seven were black, as were nearly one in ten of those present at The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837. Still, many abolition societies remained all white.

Relationships between black and white women took strength and perseverance to sustain; the battle against racism called for moral, and sometimes physical, courage. Yet many women believed true Christianity required it. African-American Sarah L. Forten’s poem speaks to the effort:

One of the most remarkable black women abolitionists was a former slave named Isabella Baumfree who addressed antislavery gatherings as Sojourner Truth. She described her name and her mission this way:

Supported by the Reverend Garrison, who made women’s equality in the movement a priority, women moved into the public arena in increasing numbers to lecture and petition against the evils of slavery. Although they were moved by the same moral indignation against slavery as men, their public activism violated gender conventions and provoked sometimes violent reactions. In city after city, women abolitionists were harassed and sometimes physically attacked for speaking before "promiscuous" or mixed-sex audiences and for traveling in racially mixed company. In the face of such reactions, abolitionist women inevitably began to see similarities between their own confined status and that of slaves. "We have good cause to be grateful to the slave," said abolitionist Abby Kelley. "In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves."

There were three fundamental convictions of abolitionists regarding slavery, all with important consequences for women’s equality as well: 1) that men and women had an ability to do what was right and therefore were morally accountable for their actions; 2) that the intolerable social evils were those that degraded the image of God in human beings, corrupting people’s capacities for self-control and self-respect; 3) the goal of all reform was to free individuals from being manipulated like physical objects. These beliefs, in combination with the obstacles women faced in their efforts for the cause, animated a new feminist consciousness that would result in the women’s rights movement.

The pivotal moment came in 1840 when the American delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention arrived in London to find that the women delegates among them were excluded from participation. The women were forced to sit in a curtained balcony while the men debated. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose new husband Henry B. Stanton was a prominent abolitionist, was furious at how effortlessly her male associates could undertake "the crucifixion [of woman’s] pride and self-respect, the humiliation of [her] spirit." With Mott, she decided that it was time to fight back. Said Stanton, "As Mrs. Mott and I walked home, arm in arm, commenting on the incidents of the day, we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advance the rights of women."

Eight years were to pass, however, before Stanton and Mott were able to call the convention into session. Despite their resolve, both women hesitated on the brink of such bold public activity. No woman was willing to chair the meeting, so they recruited Lucretia Mott’s husband, James. Faced with the task of delineating their grievances, Stanton confessed that they felt "as helpless and hopeless as if [we] had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine."

Nonetheless, The Declaration of Sentiments issued by this first national gathering of feminists was a remarkable document. Besides claiming their inalienable rights, women held men responsible for a host of grievances. They complained that men monopolized law-making, taxed women without representation, denied them an education, barred them from most "profitable employments," and excluded them from "all avenues to wealth and distinction." Indeed,

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her…. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God. He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

The meeting in Seneca Falls passed a dozen resolutions demanding equal rights for women in marriage, education, religion, and employment. Stanton shocked the convention with one additional resolution — that women "secure for themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." She was particularly incensed by the fact that not only men of quality but all men had the vote. Had it been reserved for men of stature like Webster, Clay, or Van Buren, she indicated, women might not complain,

But to have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman to be longer quietly submitted to. The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will.

The right of suffrage was acknowledged to be "the cornerstone of this enterprise, since we do not seek to protect woman, but to place her in a position to protect herself."

The women had few illusions about the difficult road ahead. Elizabeth Cady Stanton told the assembly:

We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banners will beat the dark storm-clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undaunted we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it, "Equality of Rights."

Throughout the 1850s, national women’s rights conventions were held annually, as were numerous local and regional meetings. By the 1860s, efforts for women’s rights had become a movement.

Three women played vital leadership roles in the women’s rights movement for more than half a century. Stanton was an inventive thinker and a forceful writer, Lucy Stone was the movement’s greatest orator, and Susan B. Anthony was the consummate organizer.

With oratorical skills honed in the cause of abolition, Lucy Stone moved listeners with her eloquence and passion for women’s liberty. An independent spirit, she held out for a promise of matrimonial equality before she consented to marry abolitionist and feminist Henry Blackwell. The word "obey" was omitted from their marriage vows, and Stone kept her own last name after the marriage.

Susan B. Anthony joined the cause in 1851. A member of a Massachusetts Quaker family, Anthony participated in moral reform and abolition. She had resigned a teaching position in a bitter protest over discrimination against women and joined the temperance movement, an experience that taught her "the great evil of woman’s utter dependence on man for the necessary means to aid reform movements." Anthony forged an enduring friendship with Stanton and the two leaders had a remarkable working relationship, each supplying abilities the other lacked. Henry Stanton once described it this way to his wife: "You stir up Susan, and she stirs the world."

In many ways, the two women were polar opposites. Anthony never married, while Stanton was the mother of seven. While she was tied down with domestic duties, she counted on her friend to represent her in meetings she could not attend. The press of household obligations and the endless pressures of child rearing did not rest lightly. Stanton asked Anthony to "Imagine me, day in and day out, watching, bathing, dressing, nursing…. I pace up and down these two chambers of mine like a caged lioness, longing to bring to a close nursing and housekeeping cares." Stanton also railed against the opposition of men, particularly her father and husband, upon whom she was dependent. To her friend, Susan, she wrote:

I wish that I were as free as you and I would stump the state in a twinkling. But I am not, and what is more, I passed through a terrible scourging when last at my father’s. I cannot tell you how deep the iron entered my soul. I never felt more keenly the degradation of my sex. To think that all in me of which my father would have felt a proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman. That thought has stung me to a fierce decision — to speak as soon as I can do myself credit. But the pressure on me just now is too great. Henry [her husband] sides with my friends, who oppose me in all that is dearest to my heart. They are not willing that I should write even on the woman question. But I will both write and speak.

For Stanton, silence was never an option. At one point she wrote, "If I do not find some day the use of my tongue on this question, I shall die of an intellectual repression, a woman’s rights convulsion!"

It took a long time for women’s rights to win any popular support, even among women. Most people, male and female, approved separate spheres for men and women. Susan B. Anthony was convinced that women did not support suffrage because they did not realize what its absence cost them. In frustration, she wrote,

I do pray, and that most earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of the nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the absolute degradation of their present position; which will compel them to break their yoke of bondage and give them faith in themselves; which will make them proclaim their allegiance to women first…. The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. Oh to compel them to see and feel and to give them courage and the conscience to speak and act for their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of all the world for doing it!

Still, to its critics, suffrage was a very radical demand, threatening the very foundations of society. Ministers, journalists, and social commentators of every stripe dismissed women’s rights advocates as "old maids whose personal charms were never very attractive" and "women who have been badly married." Through their organizations, newspapers, and political crusades, anti-suffragists associated suffrage with divorce, promiscuity, and neglect of children:

Women’s participation in political life…would involve the domestic calamity of a deserted home and the loss of the woman’s qualities for which refined men adore women and marry them…. Doctors tell us, too, that thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effect of the untimely political excitement of their mothers.

One of the most prominent churchmen of the time, the Reverend Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut, was horrified at the idea of women voting. His tract, Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature, is a tour de force of the anti’s argument: a woman’s power lay in her beauty and her dependence. Any attempt to assert authority violates her nature so it must inevitably fail. Engaging in the rough and tumble world of politics, Bushnell warned, would damage "the delicate organization, and the fearfully excitable susceptibilities of women." She would be risking the very source of her "honor and power [in her] subject state…which she can little afford to lose by a sally to gain the noisier, coarser kind that does not belong to her — which also she will as certainly fail of, as the governing of men she is after, is both against their nature and her own." More to the point, she would lose her looks: "…the very look and temperament of women will be altered…and we shall have…a race of forward, selfish, politician-women coming out in their resulting type, thin, hungry-looking…touched with blight and fallen out of luster."

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, women suspended their activities on their own behalf to devote all their energies to the "noble purpose" of freeing the slaves. Stanton and Anthony formed the Women’s Loyal League in May, 1863, launching a massive petition drive that delivered some 400,000 signatures to the Congress the following year in support of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting slavery. Once its ratification in 1865 was accomplished, Stanton, Anthony, Stone, Mott, and others formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to press for universal adult suffrage, combining demands for black and woman suffrage into a single campaign. From the beginning of the movement, abolitionists encouraged the equality of women, but they did not think the public was ready for the idea and that the association of the two could doom the franchise for blacks. As abolitionist Wendell Phillips told the feminists, "One question at a time. This hour belongs to the Negro."

The Fourteenth Amendment, introduced to the Congress in the summer of 1866 and ratified in 1868, represented a serious setback to the cause of women’s rights. The amendment included the first use of the word "male" in the Constitution, thereby explicitly repudiating woman suffrage. Stanton and Anthony felt intense betrayal, renounced their male collaborators, and argued for the development of an independent political position. The issue split the AERA apart. One group, determined to press for the Fifteenth Amendment (prohibiting federal and state governments from denying the vote to anyone "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"), believed the cause of the newly freed blacks came first and that the women could wait. Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) to continue that work. While Stone expressed her disappointment with the Fourteenth Amendment, she added wearily, "I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of this terrible pit." Stanton and Anthony disagreed, believing the cause of women’s rights was paramount. Anthony threatened to "cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for Negroes and not the women." Their group, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), committed itself to a platform of sweeping social change in women’s status and a constitutional amendment on their own behalf. Their motto: "Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less."

The two groups competed for leadership of the women’s movement for 21 years. Both engaged in organizing and educational efforts, traveled and lectured, distributed leaflets and pamphlets, petitioned state legislatures to support suffrage referenda, secured thousands of signatures on petitions, and lobbied the Congress. Despite all their efforts, congressional hearings were rarely held; the question of suffrage was sent to the floor only once and failed. In the states, they faced defeat after defeat. After the first state referendum in Kansas in 1867, which failed, 55 more such popular votes on state woman suffrage amendments took place over the next 50 years.

Success came first in Wyoming territory, where the tiny legislature enfranchised women in hopes of improving the territory’s rowdy reputation by attracting females, then outnumbered six to one. When Wyoming applied for statehood in 1890, they faced objections to their enfranchised women in the U.S. House of Representatives. In response, the Wyoming legislature sent a message to Congress stating, "We may stay out of the Union for 100 years, but we will come in with our women." Wyoming became the first woman suffrage state. Colorado joined it in 1893, then Utah and Idaho became states with enfranchised women in 1896.

By the 1890s, the fierce animosity between the two suffrage groups had abated, a new generation had joined the ranks, and the AWSA and NWSA combined into the NAWSA — The National American Woman Suffrage Association — and became a truly national organization. Before long, Susan B. Anthony’s protégé, Carrie Chapman Catt, took the helm and molded the organization into a tightly controlled lobbying machine. Other changes at the turn of the century, outside the suffrage movement, also were aiding the cause.

The 1890s up to the beginning of the first world war witnessed the first modern American reform movement called Progressivism. What prompted the progressive era was, simply put, a combination of severe social problems and a growing and concerned middle-class that wanted to solve them. Most importantly, they thought they could do something to solve these problems. Progressives were mostly urban and highly educated, many of them women. They tried to restore (what they saw as) the proper balance among Protestant moral values, capitalistic competition, and democratic processes to an increasingly disorderly society wracked with poverty, social violence, and corruption. Progressive reform seemed a natural to women. In the newly industrialized society, women found that in order to protect their traditional women’s sphere of home, household, and children, they needed to move out of that sphere into the public world and extend their women’s concerns and women’s points of view to become involved in community service.

Central to the Progressive movement were college-educated women. By the turn of the century, women made up more than one-third of the total college student population. When they emerged with a diploma and a commitment to independence and self-sufficiency, they found they had graduated into a society that had no use for them. Some, like Jane Addams, invented their own professions. When she founded Hull House, a settlement house located in the slums of Chicago, with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, Addams trained women much like herself, offered them an alternative to marriage, and they in turn provided crucial services to slum dwellers.

Many married middle-class women, bored with unchallenging domestic routines and concerned about a disordered society’s impact on their homes and families, joined the new female white-collar workers and college grads in progressive reform. Their vehicles for activism were the women’s clubs. Clubs that had begun largely as cultural outlets, by the turn of the century had shifted to more socially responsible work. Women’s clubs were tremendously important in establishing libraries, funding hospitals, supporting schools and settlement houses, visiting nurse services, lobbying for child labor laws — extending, in other words, their traditional roles into the public world. As Jane Addams observed, "Politics is housekeeping on a grand scale." Similarly, journalist Rheta Childe Dorr defined an expansive women’s sphere in 1910: "Woman’s place is Home…. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and Family need their Mother."

American women had long been regarded as the guardians of virtue and morality, and now, in the Progressive era, they began exercising their influence to clean up the messes men made in society. As the social justice movement expanded, club women supported such measures as workmen’s compensation, pure food and drug legislation, prison reform, welfare work, prohibition, labor arbitration, public health, tenement reform, occupational safety, child labor reform, sweatshop regulation, day nurseries, adult education, and, ultimately, woman suffrage.

Women furnished the agenda of humanitarian social welfare programs. But women worked outside political institutions, at least in part, because they could not vote. As they confronted the scope of the problems and the inadequacies of private solutions, they began to advocate a larger role for government to balance contending interests and ameliorate social distress. And they realized that the social policies they supported could only be realized if women had the vote. In the context of all this reform, the idea of woman suffrage no longer seemed outlandish or bizarre, but a perfectly logical step. Or so it would seem.

About this time, huge national organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union also became politicized. The WCTU, for example, concentrated on anti-liquor laws and municipal reform. Under the leadership of suffragist Frances Willard, the WCTU emphasized the necessity for political action to achieve their goals. That meant the vote. Adding the moral weight of women to the electorate would, the argument went, ensure prohibition, purify politics, and make war a thing of the past.

Also in the early 1900s, hundreds of small local women’s groups consolidated into large federations like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Association of Colored Women, and so forth, providing yet another base of support for the enfranchisement of women.

Black women occasionally joined clubs dominated by whites, but by and large most were unwelcome. Besides, as victims of both racial and gender prejudice, their reform agendas were different; they included a strong emphasis on racial uplift, as well as gender equality. Black women started clubs around the country to address their communities’ most pressing needs — establishing settlement houses for blacks migrating to urban areas, funding libraries and schools, pushing legislation against lynching, protesting aspects of Jim Crow segregation, strengthening black women’s moral reputation, and working to win the vote. Soon they became aware, as white women had, of the importance of a national network. To this end, they organized themselves into the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a coalition of affiliated clubs that would eventually record over 50,000 members.

Among the leadership in the black women’s suffrage movement were three with Tennessee connections: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Margaret Murray Washington. Wells-Barnett, a native of Mississippi, launched her journalism career in Memphis by attacking lynching and was exiled. After settling in Chicago, she continued to campaign for federal legislation against lynching, was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a prominent suffragist. Wells-Barnett founded the interracial Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago and worked closely with Susan B. Anthony.

Mary Church Terrell was from a prominent Memphis family, attended Oberlin College, and married attorney Robert Terrell, one of the first blacks to be graduated from Harvard and the first black federal judge. Terrell, like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was a charter member of the NAACP (she and Wells-Barnett were the only two women invited to its organizational meeting), and the first president of the NACW. Margaret Murray Washington attended Fisk University in Nashville, then took a job as an administrator at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, eventually marrying its founder and arguably the nation’s most influential black man, Booker T. Washington.

Black women as well as white recognized the vote as essential to improving their lives and communities. Terrell, like her foremother Sojourner Truth, reminded white women of black women’s double oppression by sex and race. Truth had arrested an 1851 women’s rights meeting with her retort to a clergyman who asserted woman’s weakness disqualified her from equal rights. Truth asked,

A’n’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear de lash as well! And a’n’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, not but Jesus heard me! And a’n’t I a woman?

Terrell asked white suffragists nearly 50 years later to recognize that "not only are colored women handicapped on account of their sex, but they are everywhere mocked on account of their race. We are asking that our sisters of the dominant race do all in their power to find solutions to the injustices to which colored people are victims."

The suffrage message was gaining momentum as the century turned, partly because supporters were better organized and more politically sophisticated, but also because suffrage leaders had narrowed their goals and found ways to justify the enfranchisement of women in less threatening ways. Gone were the radical messages of Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, who had called for a major overhaul of gender roles and full equality for women. Women’s rights had become submerged in the ballot. Additionally, suffrage would not challenge the separate sphere in which women resided. Instead, it would allow women to bring their special and distinct virtues, developed and nurtured in that sphere, to bear upon society. It was precisely because women possessed these virtues, they claimed, that woman suffrage could make such important and positive contributions to politics.

Despite this apparent logical and reassuring message, powerful forces were mobilizing against the cause. Their arguments echoed those used a half century before: women’s weak minds and delicate temperaments could not survive the hurly-burly of public life; the complexity of politics and the rough election-day crowds would either frighten women into simpering fools or transform them into unnatural amazons; gone would be the charm and serenity of the tender sex and with it woman’s capacity to create havens of domestic tranquility in a tumultuous world. Voting would overtax women’s inferior intellects; women would be exposed to the corrupt influences of dissolute men. Worse, by choosing their own political candidate, they might become independent of their husbands and lose their traditional feelings of subservience. In short, the pillars of civilization would come crashing down.

In 1911, Josephine Dodge, widow of one of New York’s richest capitalists, formed the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage based in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Women already had vast behind-the-scenes influence, Dodge argued, and to invade the male realm of politics could only tarnish their moral and spiritual role. Her associate, Mrs. A.J. George, told Congress: "The woman suffrage movement is an imitation-of-man movement and, as such, merits the condemnation of every normal man and woman." The vote, she warned, would condemn women to jury duty and, quite possibly, military service.

More sinister forces also strenuously opposed woman suffrage. Political machines that ran many state and local governments were reluctant to introduce a new set of voters into the electoral system; women were an unknown force that might threaten their power. Businessmen feared the influence of women’s votes on working conditions in their factories. Liquor interests felt threatened because the prohibition crusade drew so much of its strength from women. Anti-suffrage in the South included the additional arguments that a federal amendment would usurp state sovereignty and bring suffrage to black women. The struggle was far from over.

Susan B. Anthony, who had fought the hard fight for over 50 years, retired from the presidency of NAWSA in 1901, passing the mantle to Carrie Chapman Catt. Sadly, none of the original suffrage mothers lived to see their dream fulfilled. Lucy Stone died in 1893; Stanton died in 1902 at age 87; Anthony died four years later at age 86. At her last public appearance, Anthony supplied the movement with its rallying cry: "Failure is impossible!"

Catt assumed command of a disorganized and discouraged association. With the support of her second husband, a wealthy mining engineer who signed a prenuptial agreement allowing her to spend two months in the spring and two months in the fall devoted entirely to the suffrage movement, Catt set about rebuilding and reorienting NAWSA. Only four years after she began, Catt left the post to care for her dying husband, turning it over to Anna Howard Shaw. A veteran suffragist, medical doctor, and Methodist minister, Shaw embodied the essence of emancipated woman. While her compelling oratory championed suffrage in every state in the Union, Shaw lacked Catt’s vision and organizational skills, and she struggled to steer NAWSA for eleven years until Catt resumed the presidency in 1914.

Two years later, Catt unveiled her "Winning Plan" for suffrage: a tightly centralized, coordinated state-by-state effort aimed at the ultimate achievement of a constitutional amendment. Suffrage groups in the states were organized to mirror political boundaries and legislative districts, in order to concentrate efforts on legislative momentum. Catt was certain that as states passed woman suffrage and the number of suffrage supporters in the House and Senate increased, the passage of a constitutional amendment would follow.

Another significant suffrage leader, Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Stanton, returned to New York after many years in London, where she had witnessed the radical and innovative British suffrage movement. Blatch organized working women, believing they needed the vote to improve their economic status and the suffrage movement needed working-class support. She excelled at pulling together political alliances between middle-class reformers and working-class women to rally for suffrage, infusing the campaign with new life and broadening its constituency.

Under the NAWSA umbrella, a small band of women, led by Alice Paul and including Tennessean Sue Shelton White, organized a delegation, known as the Congressional Union, to directly lobby Congress for a woman-suffrage amendment. Paul had participated in Britain’s woman’s suffrage campaign, and she adopted their aggressive, confrontational techniques. Britain suffragists stormed the Houses of Parliament, planted bombs, destroyed mail, burned men’s clubs and social pavilions, damaged golf courses, and even attempted to take the crown jewels from the Tower of London. It was necessary, Paul believed, to get people’s attention — and she did that very well.

Since Alice Paul believed that women had to hold the party in power accountable for its stand on suffrage, she chose a dramatic public action to make her point. She organized some 8000 women to march in protest at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, a not inconsiderable achievement. Among them were several black women’s suffrage clubs, including Ida Wells-Barnett’s Alpha Suffrage Club and Mary Church Terrell’s contingent from Washington. In deference to Southern suffragists, Paul asked the black women to march at the end of the parade. Terrell’s group agreed to do so, but Wells-Barnett angrily refused. She insisted she would march with the club she had established or not at all. She disappeared as the parade began; then, as the Chicago delegation rounded a corner, she slipped into line between two white women and completed the parade. The incident was indicative of black women’s position in the suffrage movement. A close alliance with black women came at too high a price for most white suffragists, many of whom shared the racism and nativism of turn-of-the-century America. Moreover, passage of suffrage in Congress depended upon Southern Democrats, and ratification would also require Southern cooperation. Hence two principal arguments involving race characterized the movement: that white women ought not be the political inferiors of black men and that woman suffrage would not threaten white supremacy.

The massive suffrage parade was led by a tall stunning young woman in flowing white robes on horseback. Thousands of women assembled in costumed marching units — each with its own colorful banners — marched toward the White House, accompanied by bands and suffrage floats. Suffrage yellow glittered in the sunlight. First used in the Kansas state campaign where it was adapted from the state flower, the sunflower, splashes of yellow, coupled with depictions of the sun’s rays, symbolized the "dawn of a new day" for women. Also prominent were the British colors of purple, representing loyalty, and white, for purity. Washington had never seen anything like it. One Baltimore newspaper described the scene:

Eight thousand women, marching in the woman suffrage pageant today, practically fought their way foot by foot up Pennsylvania Avenue, through a surging throng that completely defied Washington police, swamped the marchers, and broke their procession into little companies. The women, trudging stoutly along under great difficulties, were able to complete their march only when troops of cavalry from Fort Myers were rushed into Washington to take charge of Pennsylvania Avenue. No inauguration has ever produced such scenes, which in many instances amounted to nothing less than riots.

The mistreatment of many socially prominent women in the parade was embarrassing to the new Wilson administration. The Congress held hearings into police failure to protect them, and the police chief was fired. Alice Paul got exactly what she wanted: the issue of suffrage squarely on the front pages.

On March 3, 1913, four days after the parade, Paul organized the first deputation of women ever to appear before a president. They had come to enlist his support for the passage of a national suffrage amendment. President Wilson told Paul and her four companions that he had no opinion on the subject of woman suffrage and that his task was to see that the Congress concentrated on the issues of currency and tariff reform. Paul responded: "But Mr. President, do you not understand that the Administration has no right to legislate for currency, tariff, and any other reforms without first getting the consent of women to these reforms?" Somewhat taken aback, Wilson promised to give the subject his "most careful consideration." Paul sent a second deputation, and a third. Wilson flatly stated that he had no time to consider suffrage for women, despite Paul’s insistence that this involved the liberty of half the American people.

The Congressional Union staged a second mass demonstration on April 7, the opening day of the Congress. Women delegates representing every one of the 435 congressional districts in the country carried petitions signed by the people back home asking for passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. She had drafted it in 1875. It read:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall ?not be denied or abridged by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.

All spring, suffragists held large gatherings throughout the country. The publicity and pressure resulted in a favorable report by the Senate Committee on Suffrage for the first time in 21 years. The measure was on the calendar for action in July. Suffragists from around the country converged on Washington, parading through the streets in gaily decorated automobiles and bearing "a monster petition" signed by hundreds of thousands of citizens. Many took their seats in the Senate gallery, where the day was given over to suffrage discussion. In the first Senate vote on the matter since 1887, the tally was 36 - 34, eleven short of the two-thirds majority needed. In the House, the Rules Committee split 4 - 4 over creating a suffrage committee, and no action was taken. The Democratic Party caucus voted on the issue and decided 123 - 57 that suffrage was a state matter.

At the end of 1913, Paul and her Congressional Union left NAWSA to become an independent body. She wanted her Union to concentrate all suffrage work on pressuring Congress and the president for a federal amendment. She also wanted to follow a more vigorously militant policy than the more conservative leaders of NAWSA would tolerate.