The Women's rights movement, also known as the Women's suffrage movement or first-wave feminism, was a progressive and feminist political movement in the United States which traditionally began with the Seneca Falls Convention of 19-20 July 1848 and ended with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution on 18 August 1920, although the ideas behind women's rights had spread to the United States during the early republic, and the women's rights movement continued to fight for the empowerment of women even after their enfranchisement. During the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of feminism and the abortion debate led to the demise of the unified women's rights movement, as many progressive women (especially sex-positive feminists and those supporting the right to choose) became affiliated with the New Left and the Democratic Party while many socially conservative women (especially Catholics and evangelicals opposed to abortion and the sexual revolution) became affiliated with the Christian right and the Republican Party, setting the stage for the feminist and anti-feminist debates of the 1970s onwards.
History[]
Early history[]
When the United States declared independence from Great Britain on 4 July 1776, the Declaration of Independence left out women's rights and the rights of African-Americans and Native Americans, although there were some limited efforts to have the United States grant equality to women and blacks upon independence. The US state of New Jersey briefly allowed women to vote from 1776 to 1807, when New Jersey revoked their suffrage rights. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, initiating the women's rights movement in Britain. At the same time in the United States, American republican society endorsed female education to make women into better wives and mothers, and there was little talk of women's rights for decades.
Great Awakening[]
By the mid-1820s, however, the total annual enrollment at the female academies and seminaries equaled enrollment at the near six dozen male colleges, although advanced education was limited to a privileged few. Many female graduates became authors, essayists, and poets, and, in New England, a women's rights movement began to emerge alongside the growing abolitionist movement. In 1837, the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke gave several speeches n Massachusetts in favor of abolitionism, having already urged southern women to take political action against slavery with An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.
In 1838, Sarah Grimke published The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, challenging the prevailing idea of "separate spheres" (the feminine home and the masculine workplace) and challenging whether "virtue" and "duty" had separate masculine and feminine manifestations. The 1830s also saw the Second Great Awakening and the rise of the temperance movement, and more women than men joined hte growing evangelical movement, recruiting husbands and sons to join them. Millions of Americans took the temperance pledge to abstain from strong drink, and thousands became involved in efforts to end prostitution; saloons had become popular among workers, while many elite homes served whiskey or sherry after dinner. In 1833, a group of Charles Grandison Finney's female followers founded the New York Female Moral Reform Society to condemn men who visited brothels or seduced innocent women, and, within five years, more than 4,000 auxiliary groups of women sprung up in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
Seneca Falls[]
Women participated in the many reform activities that grew out of evangelical churches, outnumbering men two to one at their churches and putting their religious ideas into practice by joining peace, temperance, anti-slavery, and other societies. In 1848, 300 reformers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first national woman's rights convention in the United States. The Declaration of Sentiments set an ambitious agenda to demand civil liberties for women and to right the wrongs of society, and it declared that women had immediate admission to all the right and privileges which belonged to them as US citizens, such as the inalienable right to the elective franchise. Two dozen other woman's rights conventions assembled before 1860, calling for suffrage and an end to discrimination against women. However, the women had difficulty receiving a respectful hearing, much less achieving legislative action. Stanton and other activists sought fair pay and expanded employment opportunities for women, appealing to free labor ideology. While the movement succeeded in protecting married women's rights to their own wages and property in New York in 1860, discrimination persisted, as most men believed that free-labor and male supremacy were not incompatible.
Civil War era[]
In 1863, amid the American Civil War, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony co-founded the Women's Loyal National League, the first national women's political organization in the USA. It collected 400,000 signatures to abolish slavery, making it the largest petition drive yet in US history. The universal suffrage movement was resisted by some abolitionists and Republicans, who wanted women to postpone their campaign for suffrage until it had been extended to the African-Americans. In 1868, the New England Women's Suffrage Association (NEWSA), the first women's suffrage movement in the USA, was formed, advocating for the GOP to cease its use of the "manhood suffrage" phrase and to support universal suffrage instead; the movement overwhelmingly backed the Fifteenth Amendment. However, Stanton and many other women's rights activists believed that the "lower orders" of freed slaves and immigrants had to undergo extensive education before being allowed to vote, and many women's rights activists opposed increasing black rights. Following the Civil War, Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) criticized the GOP for emancipating 2 million blacks while "casting (15 million white women) under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood", and they attempted to recruit liberal Democrats to convince their party to embrace universal suffrage. In 1872, corruption in President Ulysses S. Grant's Republican administration led to most abolitionists and social reformers defecting to the short-lived Liberal Republican Party; Anthony was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election. In 1875, the US Supreme Court declared that the Constitution did not confer suffrage upon anyone, but, in 1878, Anthony's friend US Senator Aaron A. Sargent introduced a women's suffrage amendment which would be enacted in its original form more than 40 years later.
Gradual enfranchisement[]
A WCTU rally, 1919
The frontier of the American West, which had long been a bastion of American democratic experiments, was more supportive of women's suffrage than the East. Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869 and Utah in 1870, and the Populist Party oversaw the enfranchisement of women in Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896. In the late 1870s, the growth of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) aided the women's rights movement, as it argued that women's suffrage would protect their families from alcohol and other vices. In 1890, the AFL labor union endorsed women's suffrage. From 1870 to 1910, the suffrage movement conducted 480 campaigns in 33 states, but only 17 states placed women's suffrage on their ballots, and only Idaho and Colorado voted in favor.
A Saint Denis Times Tribune article on the woman suffrage debate, 1899
During the 1890s, opposition to women's suffrage grew in response to its growing momentum. Brewers and distillers (traditionally German-Americans, both Catholics and Lutherans) opposed women's suffrage due to fears that women voters would support the prohibition of alcoholic beverages; German Lutherans and Catholics also believed in patriarchal families. Southern cotton mills also opposed women's suffrage lest they fight against child labor, political machines such as Tammany Hall believed that extending the vote to women would endanger their control over groups of male voters, and Cardinal James Gibbons of the Catholic Church and many other leading Catholics opposed women's suffrage on the grounds that Saint Paul decreed that women should remain silent and subservient to their husbands. In 1912, the New York Times reversed its support for suffrage, claiming that empowered women would demand to be soldiers, sailors, policemen, firemen, jury members, executives, and judges, and blaming their success on declining masculinity among men. Many middle and upper-class women opposed suffrage on the grounds that women should maintain their moral superiority over men by not getting involved in the dirty world of politics, and several Anti-Suffrage Associations were founded starting in 1911. They counter-crusaded against the suffragist movement and defeated suffrage amendments, such as a 1915 proposed amendment in New York.
Progressive Era[]
By 1915, however, Washington (1910), Oregon (1912), California (1911), Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona (1912), Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas (1912), and Illinois (1913) had enfranchised women, and the Constitution required a total of 36 states (three-fourths of the 48 US states at the time) to pass the Nineteenth Amendment. Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party endorsed women's suffrage during the 1912 presidential election, while the socialist movement supported women's suffrage in some areas. The conservative "Solid South" was steadfastly opposed to women's suffrage, as southern white men often held to traditionalist values about women's public roles, regional support for states' rights led to Southerners opposing a federal amendment, and supporters of Jim Crow opposed the enfranchisement of black women. New women's rights leaders such as Harriet Stanton Blatch and Alice Paul emerged in the North, while, in 1913, Kate Gordon of Louisiana and Laura Clay of Kentucky founded the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference (SSWSC). The SSWSC played on Southern support for Jim Crow by claiming that the enfranchisement of white women would enhance white supremacism, but Gordon later opposed the Nineteenth Amendment due to her fear that black women would be enfranchised as well.
Nineteenth Amendment[]
During World War I, Paul and her National Woman's Party continued to demonstrate against the US government, leading to Paul's arrest. However, the absence of men serving in the military led to women filling in for them as members of the workforce (including in male-dominated workplaces such as steel mills and oil refineries), demonstrating that they could contribute to the war effort. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin (R-MT) became the first woman elected to the US Congress. In November 1917, New York voted to enfranchise women, and President Woodrow Wilson came out in support of the movement in September 1918, arguing that women had already been made partners in the war, and that they should share the privileges and rights of men as well. In 1918, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Michigan enfranchised women. On 21 May 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by the House 304-89 (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, and Prohibitionists 1-0 for), and, on 4 June, it was passed by the US Senate 56-25 (backed by 36 Republicans and 20 Democrats and opposed by 8 Republicans and 17 Democrats). Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan ratified the amendment, and the 1920 presidential election became the first presidential women in which every American woman was able to vote. Connecticut, Vermont, and Delaware passed the amendment in 1923, followed by Maryland in 1941, Virginia in 1952, Alabama in 1953, Florida and South Carolina in 1969, and Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina in 1971.
Women's participation[]
The women's rights movement declined once women's suffrage was achieved in 1920. Catholic women were reluctant to vote until the 1928 election, when they supported the Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith of the Democratic Party; that same year, big-city political machines began mobilizing women to vote for Smith, while rural Prohibitionists were mobilized to vote for the Dry Republican Herbert Hoover. In 1929, Puerto Rico enfranchised literate women, but it was not until 1935 that the Puerto Rican Socialist Party proposed a bill which went on to enfranchise all women a year later. That same year, women were enfranchised in the US Virgin Islands.
African-Americans as a whole were prevented from voting by Jim Crow segregation laws until the Civil Rights movement led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dismantling segregation and enfranchising blacks once again. Women did not take to the polls in the same numbers as men until 1980, and, from 1981 onwards, the presence of women in the US Congress steadily increased. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination for President; in 1984, the Democrat Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman vice-presidential candidate from a major party; and, in 2016, the Democrat Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major party. Women voters were typically more liberal than their male counterparts, as they favored candidates who supported wealth transfer, social insurance, progressive taxation, and larger government.
Feminist waves[]
The feminist symbol
During the 1960s and 1970s, the women's rights movement was redefined as the "Feminist" movement, which divided the women's rights camp. The women's rights movement of the 1840s-1920s was seen as the "first wave" of feminism, which was followed by a "second wave" in the 1960s, seeking to dismantle gender discrimination. Many progressive women advocated for the right to choose to have an abortion, for liberalized divorce laws, and for an Equal Rights Amendment and became affiliated with the Democrats (who were increasingly becoming a social liberal party), while many socially conservative women (especially Catholics and evangelicals) became affiliated with the anti-abortion Christian right and the increasingly conservative Republicans. From the 1990s to the 2010s, a "third wave" of feminists who embraced individualism, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and diversity and fought against intersectional discrimination (the persecution of women because of both gender and other factors such as race or sexuality). A "fourth wave" began in 2013 and demanded equal pay for equal work, greater representation of women in politics and business, the overcoming of gender norms, the improvement of women's representation in pop culture and the challenging of misogynistic tropes and stereotypes, speaking against abusers of power, seeking justice against assault and harassment, and for bodily autonomy.