Elected officials now had women as their constituents, women they had to answer to. The time was ripe to push for an amendment to the U. Mary McLeod Bethune Educator and civil rights activist Born to former slaves in , she became the most politically powerful Black American woman of her time.
After the 19th Amendment passed, she organized Black voter registration drives, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan. President what will you do for woman suffrage? Rather than protecting the protesters, police arrested them for blocking traffic or, in the case of Alice Paul, just for walking toward the demonstration. Most of the women were jailed at the Occoquan Workhouse prison in Lorton, Virginia, but Paul was put in solitary confinement at the D. She was tied down and force-fed by a tube thrust up her nose.
Conditions were no better at Occoquan. Some 15 women went on hunger strikes, and a few of them were force-fed. One woman had a heart attack and was refused medical care. They were released from jail; soon all charges were dropped, and the Senate and the House took up the proposed amendment.
Even Wilson started to thaw two of his daughters supported the suffragists. None of the 12 states fully enfranchising women by then were in the South. Yet ratifying the amendment would require support from at least some of the southern states, where white supremacy ruled and Black men had been effectively disenfranchised by local regulations. The language of the 19th Amendment echoed that of the 15th:.
Ratification of the amendment took more than a year, but on August 18, , Tennessee pushed it over the finish line. It was, at best, a qualified victory. Women had worked for more than 70 years to gain access to the ballot, and now they finally had it. But Black women still faced nearly insurmountable hurdles to voting in the south. Ninety-eight years later, in , the first majority-female legislature in the United States was elected, in Nevada.
The parties were looking for the best candidates. Such an achievement was a long time coming. Instead, once the 19th Amendment was ratified, voting activists dispersed into other causes: the NAACP, labor unions, and peace organizations, to name a few.
A lot of women—their energy spent from the movement and the war—dropped out of politics. The amendment was finally approved by the Senate in but was ratified by the required 38th state, Virginia, only this year, well past the deadline. The election saw the biggest increase in female representation since Senate, and women are of the voting members of the House. One governor in five is female and, of course, there has not yet been a woman president or vice president. They needed to create their own organizations.
Eventually the organization also began training candidates and staffers. Clinton, also a Democrat, would not have won nearly 66 million votes in without such backing. Republicans have some catching up to do. In the House, where Republicans have seats, there are 13 women, while Democrats have 88 women. Among the 26 women senators, nine are Republicans and 17 are Democrats. Representation matters. Shortly after the 19th Amendment was passed, when women were just beginning to vote, Congress passed a law providing federal funds for maternal and child health care.
Suffragists had led the way in lobbying for the bill, the first of its kind. The suffragists wanted to break free from the subordinate role society had assigned them. But Susan W. Brenda Lawrence, a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who is co-chair of the caucus, runs through a litany of issues that she believes are being addressed only because women are at the table: sexual harassment and abuse, maternal mortality, raising the minimum wage, training women in skilled trades and engineering, and ensuring that clinical trials include women and their specific medical needs.
It seems that each generation of women finds ways to exercise its collective voice. Their signature pink hats may be gathering dust, but for many women the political awakening continues. Michelle Duster, a great-granddaughter of Ida B. All rights reserved. Magazine Women of Impact. To explore this collage and learn more about who is pictured above, click here. This story appears in the August issue of National Geographic magazine. Rachel Hartigan is a National Geographic staff writer. Johanna Goodman is a New York—based illustrator.
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The 19th Amendment to the U. More than 20 nations around the world had granted women the In the fight for women's suffrage, most of the earliest activists found their way to the cause through the abolition movement of the s. Abolitionist groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Society Women gained the right to vote in with the passage of the 19 Amendment.
On Election Day in , millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. The year was highly consequential for the suffrage movement. Having lost the chance to defeat the reelection of President Woodrow Wilson, who had initially been lukewarm toward suffrage, activists set their sights on securing voting rights for women by the presidential Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton But the fate of the 19th Amendment all came down to Tennessee. In the summer of , Feminism, a belief in the political, economic and cultural equality of women, has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization.
It is typically separated into three waves: first wave feminism, dealing with property rights and the right to vote; second wave feminism, focusing He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in In an editorial published that year in The North Star , the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, " His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.
Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage " A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B.
In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5, suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U. Capitol to the Treasury Building. Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the s and s continued their involvement over 50 years later.
Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right.
I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest.
It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them. When New York adopted woman suffrage in and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in , the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women.
There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups. Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down.
It finally passed Congress in and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to
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