What amendment gave women the right to vote?
History of the United States (1865–1918)
Finally, the suffragettes were ordered released from prison, and Wilson urged Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women. The old anti-suffragist argument that only men could fight a war, and therefore only men deserved the franchise, was refuted by the enthusiastic participation of tens of thousands of American women on the home front in World War I. Across the world, grateful nations gave women the right to vote. Furthermore, most of the Western states had already given women the right to vote in state and national elections, and the representatives from those states, including the first voting woman Jeannette Rankin of Montana, demonstrated that Women's Suffrage was a success. The main resistance came from the south, where white leaders were worried about the threat of black women voting. Nevertheless, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. It became constitutional law on August 26, 1920, after ratification by the 36th required state.
Wayne Wheeler
As the prohibition movement's power continued to grow, Wheeler adroitly expanded the influence of the ASL through timely alliances with the advocates of other causes. One his primary successes was supporting the women's suffrage movement in the belief that women would support ASL candidates at the ballot box. Because Wheeler supported the suffragists in their quest for a Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, they supported his efforts to obtain passage of a prohibition amendment. After decades of trying, in 1919 the ASL was able to obtain passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the production, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages. The Nineteenth Amendment, adopted in 1920, provided women the right to vote.
Jeannette Rankin
By 1917, women had been granted some form of voting rights in about forty states. Rankin continued to lead the movement for unrestricted universal enfranchisement. She was instrumental in the creation of the Committee on Woman Suffrage, and became one of its founding members. In January 1918, the committee delivered its report to Congress, and Rankin opened congressional debate on a Constitutional amendment granting universal suffrage to women. The resolution passed in the House but was defeated by the Senate; in 1919 a similar resolution passed both chambers. After ratification by three-fourths of the states, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
United States Constitution and worldwide influence
One commemorative of the 19th Amendment (permitting women the right to vote) was celebrated in a commemorative in 1950 and again in 1970. The woman is voting in a curtained mechanical voting booth. She chooses levers to punch or mark her votes on a paper roll. The Model T has a male driver with a banner "Votes for women" on the car, women riders and marchers as though in a parade.
D. L. Lansden
In 1920, Lansden issued a judicial order that set aside an injunction anti-suffragists had secured from a trial judge to prohibit Tennessee's Governor from certifying the state's ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Justice Lansden's order broke a parliamentary logjam created by a lack of a legislative quorum (on a motion for reconsideration of the previous vote approving the amendment) and removed the final legal obstacle to Tennessee becoming the 36th and final state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.
Women's suffrage in states of the United States
After Wyoming gained statehood, Colorado and Idaho were the next two states to give women the vote. In 1893, a referendum in Colorado made that state the second state to give women suffrage and the first state where the men voted to give women the right to vote. Later, Idaho approved a constitutional amendment in 1896 with a statewide vote giving women the right to vote.
Women's suffrage in states of the United States
Due to the work by suffragists, in 1919 the Tennessee legislature passed an amendment to the state constitution granting only presidential and municipal suffrage for women. When the Susan B. Anthony amendment came to the Tennessee legislature, thirty-five other states had already ratified it. There was some controversy about the legitimacy of a state constitutional stipulation that a federal amendment could only be voted upon by a legislature that was in place before the amendment was submitted. It took a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to cause the legislature to reconsider this issue. In addition, Governor Roberts was getting pressure - even from President Woodrow Wilson - to call a special legislative session to consider ratification of the 19th Amendment. Finally, the legislature was called on August 7, 1920. Pro- and anti-suffragist forces came to lobby for their cause. After several days of hearings and debate, the Tennessee State Senate voted for ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment on August 13. On August 17, the house committee on constitutional convention and amendments urged ratification. Debate followed and eventually the house adopted ratification by a majority of fifty to forty-six. With Tennessee as the thirty-sixth state to ratify, the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment was over.
Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
1874: In the case of "Minor v. Happersett", the Supreme Court rules that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not grant women the right to vote.
History of women in the United States
From 1870 to 1875 several women, including Virginia Louisa Minor, Victoria Woodhull, and Myra Bradwell, attempted to use the Fourteenth Amendment in the courts to secure the vote (Minor and Woodhull) or the right to practice law (Bradwell), but they were all unsuccessful. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and brought to trial in Rochester, New York, for attempting to vote for Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election; she was convicted and fined $100 and the costs of her prosecution but refused to pay. At the same time, Sojourner Truth appeared at a polling booth in Battle Creek, Michigan, demanding a ballot; she was turned away. Also in 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for President, although she could not vote and only received a few votes, losing to Ulysses S. Grant. She was nominated to run by the Equal Rights Party, and advocated the 8-hour work day, graduated income tax, social welfare programs, and profit sharing, among other positions. In 1874, The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded by Annie Wittenmyer to work for the prohibition of alcohol; with Frances Willard at its head (starting in 1876), the WCTU also became an important force in the fight for women's suffrage. In 1878, a woman suffrage amendment was first introduced in the United States Congress, but it did not pass.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
After the American Civil War, both Stanton and Anthony broke with their abolitionist backgrounds and lobbied strongly against ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which granted African American men the right to vote. Believing that African American men, by virtue of the Thirteenth Amendment, already had the legal protections, except for suffrage, offered to white male citizens and that so largely expanding the male franchise in the country would only increase the number of voters prepared to deny women the right to vote, both Stanton and Anthony were angry that the abolitionists, their former partners in working for both African American and women's rights, refused to demand that the language of the amendments be changed to include women.
Frederick Douglass
Later, after the Civil War when the 15th Amendment to give freedmen and free blacks the right to vote was being debated, Douglass split with the Stanton-led faction of the women's rights movement. Douglass supported the amendment, which would grant suffrage to black men. Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it limited expansion of suffrage to black men; she predicted its passage would delay for decades the cause for women's right to vote. Stanton argued that American women and black men should band together to fight for universal suffrage, and opposed any bill that split the issues. Douglass and Stanton both knew that there was not yet enough male support for women's right to vote, but that an amendment giving black men the vote could pass in the late 1860s. Stanton wanted to attach women's suffrage to that of black men so that her cause would be carried to success.
Susan B. Anthony
In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicized trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Introduced by Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA), it later became known colloquially as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.
History of South Australia
Propertied women in the colony of South Australia were granted the vote in 1861. In the "Constitutional Amendment Act 1894", all women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia when they won the same voting rights as men, and they did so in South Australia's 1895 elections.
Women's suffrage
In 1862, tax-paying women of legal majority (unmarried, divorced and widowed women) were again allowed to vote in municipal elections, making Sweden the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote. This was after the introduction of a new political system, where a new local authority was introduced: the communal municipal council. The right to vote in municipal elections applied only to people of legal majority, which excluded married women, as they were juridically under the guardianship of their husbands. In 1884 the suggestion to grant women the right to vote in national elections was initially voted down in Parliament. During the 1880s, the Married Woman's Property Rights Association had a campaign to encourage the female voters, qualified to vote in accordance with the 1862 law, to use their vote and increase the participation of women voters in the elections, but there was yet no public demand to women suffrage among women. In 1888, the temperance activist Emilie Rathou became the first woman in Sweden to demand the right for women suffrage in a public speech. In 1899, a delegation from the Fredrika Bremer Association presented a suggestion of woman suffrage to prime minister Erik Gustaf Boström. The delegation was headed by Agda Montelius, accompanied by Gertrud Adelborg, who had written the demand. This was the first time the Swedish women's movement themselves had officially presented a demand for suffrage.
Alice Paul
Once suffrage was achieved in 1920 Paul and her party shifted attention to constitutional guarantees of equality through the Equal Rights Amendment, which was written by Paul and Crystal Eastman. The original text of the Equal Rights Amendment, drafted in 1923, read, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." In 1943, the amendment was renamed the "Alice Paul Amendment." Its wording was changed to the version that still exists today: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex." From the start, the ERA had its detractors, including women's groups. The larger rival the League of Women Voters (LWV) opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. The LWV also supported workplace legislation for women, whereas the NWP thought that workplace legislation restricted women's natural ability to work.
Feminism in Greece
Shortly after feminist ideology started gaining popularity in the mid-19th and early 20th century in the UK and US and slowly the rest of the world, the movement begun affecting changes to the social and political life of Greece, and in 1952, Greek women gained the right to vote. However, other changes did not come until a few decades later, as with, for example, the introduction of sweeping changes in family law in 1983 (see below). Greece signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and ratified it in 1983.
Susan B. Anthony
The Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the right of American women to vote, was colloquially known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. After it was ratified in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, whose character and policies were strongly influenced by Anthony, was transformed into the League of Women Voters, which is still an active force in U.S. politics.
Mary Kenney O'Sullivan
O'Sullivan's work for women included not only union organization but voting rights as well. In 1906 she spoke to a voting committee in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Constitutional amendment giving women the vote. She argued that women were producers in American society, and that every producer retains the right to vote. Similarly the WTUL was considered the "industrial branch" of the suffrage movement. When the AFL renewed its support of a Constitutional Amendment for suffrage every year O'Sullivan often announced its support. She wrote a circular (circa 1913-1915) for the National American Woman Suffrage Association entitled 'Why the Working Woman Needs the Vote' arguing that obtaining the vote would help women get equal pay for equal work.
Anne Dallas Dudley
In 1917, Dudley became the Third Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she contributed significantly to advancing legislation on the issue of women's suffrage. In 1920, Dudley, along with Catherine Talty Kenny and Abby Crawford Milton, led the campaign in Tennessee to approve ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. On August 18, Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the amendment, thereby giving women the right to vote throughout the country.
Lombard, Illinois
On April 6, 1891, Ellen A. Martin led a group of women to the voting place at the general store. She demanded that the three male election judges allow the women to vote. The judges were so surprised that one of them had a "spasm," one leaned against the wall for support, and the other fell backwards into a barrel of flour! They did not want to let the women vote, so a county judge was asked to decide. He agreed that the women were right. Ellen Martin then became the first woman in Illinois to vote. In 1916 Illinois women could vote in national elections, but the 19th Amendment (the Women's Suffrage Amendment) was not passed until 1920. In 2008, the city of Lombard, Illinois declared April 6 to be "Ellen Martin Day" in commemoration of Ms. Martin's historic victory for women's suffrage.
United States House Committee on Woman Suffrage
The Committee on Woman Suffrage, was a committee of the United States House of Representatives between 1917 and 1927. The committee was influential in shepherding through the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution giving women the right to vote.
Women's suffrage
In the years before World War I, women in Norway (1913) also won the right to vote, as did women in the remaining Australian states. Denmark granted women's suffrage in 1915. Near the end of the war, Canada, Russia, Germany, and Poland also recognized women's right to vote. The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote, Dutch women in 1919, and American women won the vote on 26 August 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment (the Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured voting rights for racial minorities). Irish women won the same voting rights as men in the Irish Free State constitution, 1922. In 1928, British women won suffrage on the same terms as men, that is, for persons 21 years old and older. Suffrage of Turkish women introduced in 1930 for local elections and in 1934 for national elections.
United States Constitution
The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) prohibits the government from denying women the right to vote on the same terms as men. Prior to the amendment's adoption, only a few states permitted women to vote and to hold office.
May Wright Sewall
Sewall became involved in the state fight for women's right to vote in 1880, when the Indianapolis suffragists lobbied the Indiana General Assembly to pass a bill that would give Indiana women the right to vote on an equal basis with men. The suffrage supporters, including Sewall, were successful in getting the Indiana Senate and the Indiana House of Representatives to adopt a suffrage amendment to the state constitution in 1881, but state law required amendments to the state constitution to be passage at two consecutive legislative sessions. Indiana's suffrage groups worked statewide to secure passage of the amendment in the 1883 legislative session. The House resolution passed on February 20, 1883, but the Senate refused to act on it. Frustrated with the Indiana legislature's failure to amend the state constitution, Sewall turned her efforts to securing voting rights for women at the national level.
Legal rights of women in history
England was one of the first places in the world to grant voting rights to women citizens universally and regardless of marital status, which it did by passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act that gave voting rights to women aged 30 years and over who met a property qualification (equal voting rights with men was achieved a decade later under the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which permitted all women aged 21 and over to vote). Several centuries earlier, some of its colonies in North America, including New Jersey Colony by its constitution, had granted voting rights to women who could meet the same property requirements men had to meet; common laws of Coverture requiring a married woman's property to be held by her husband meant married women typically could not qualify.
Politics of the United States
Women's suffrage became an important issue after the American Civil War of 1861-65. After the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1870, giving African-American men the right to vote, various women's groups wanted the right to vote as well. Two major interest groups formed. The first group was the National Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that wanted to work for suffrage on the federal level and to push for more governmental changes, such as the granting of property rights to married women. The second group, the American Woman Suffrage Association formed by Lucy Stone, aimed to give women the right to vote. In 1890, the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NAWSA then mobilized to obtain support state-by-state, and by 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote.
Elective rights
A recent example of how the "right to vote" changed over history is New Zealand, which was the first country to give women the right to vote (September 19, 1893), though not the right to be elected. The participation in politics "via" both candidacy and suffrage in Europe and the Americas is, largely, a 20th-century phenomenon.
Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
1868: The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, introducing the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time, in Section 2 of the amendment.
Viola Ross Napier
After the approval of the 19th Amendment in 1922, which allowed women to vote, Napier was convinced by the editor of the "Macon News" to run for General Assembly and hence became one of the first two women to be welcomed into the House of Representatives in Georgia. During her time in the Georgia General Assembly, she introduced several bills that were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, an organization that encouraged women to use their new power to participate in shaping public policy. The bills included compulsory education legislation, child labor legislation, and the legislative recommendations of the Children's Code Commission. She secured adoption of laws requiring better fire protection in orphanages, schools and children's hospitals. She also sponsored a bill to improve education for the blind, the handicapped, and the underprivileged, and introduced a bill to prevent child labor.
Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
1919: In January, the National Women's Party lights and guards a "Watchfire for Freedom." It is maintained until the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passes the U.S. Senate on June 4.
1920: The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, stating, "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.
Women's Equality Day
Women's Equality Day is celebrated in the United States on August 26 to commemorate the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. It was first celebrated in 1973 and is proclaimed each year by the United States President.
The date was chosen to commemorate the day in 1920 when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the proclamation granting American women the constitutional right to vote. In 1971, following the 1970 nationwide Women's Strike for Equality, and again in 1973, as the battles over the Equal Rights Amendment continued, Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York introduced a resolution to designate August 26 as Women’s Equality Day.
Marie Ruoff Byrum
The poll book from that day, which includes Byrum's signature on the first line, is housed in the Missouri State Archives in Jefferson City, Missouri.
While Mrs. Byrum does hold significance as being the first woman to vote after the passage of the Constitutional Amendment, she was not the first woman to vote in the United States. Some states had granted women the right to vote prior to 1920 (e.g. Wyoming allowed women to vote as early as 1869). However, Byrum was the first woman in the United States to vote after the national law was passed.
Liberal feminism
Three years after women won the right to vote, the Equal Right Amendment (ERA) was introduced in Congress by Senator Curtis and Representative Anthony, both Republicans. This amendment stated that civil rights cannot be denied on the basis of one's sex. It was authored by Alice Paul, head of the National Women's Party, who led the suffrage campaign. Through the efforts of Alice Paul, the Amendment was introduced into each session of the United States Congress. But it was buried in committee in both Houses of Congress. In 1946, it was narrowly defeated by the full Senate, 38–35. In February 1970 twenty NOW leaders disrupted the hearings of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, demanding the ERA be heard by the full Congress. In May of that year, the Senate Subcommittee began hearings on the ERA under Senator Birch Bayh. In June, the ERA finally left the House Judiciary Committee due to a discharge petition filed by Representative Martha Griffiths. In March 1972, the ERA was approved by the full Senate without changes, 84–8. Senator Sam Ervin and Representative Emanuel Celler succeeded in setting an arbitrary time limit of seven years for ratification. The ERA went to individual states to be ratified by the state legislatures. The ERA first attempted to be passed after the passing of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 by the feminists in the National Woman's Party, but it got little attention at the time.
Voting gender gap in the United States
Very little was written about gender differences in vote choice for the 60 years following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Although the Amendment gave women the right to vote in national elections, many women were still reluctant participants in the electoral process. However, post-hoc analyses of American National Election Studies data indicate that majorities of women supported different candidates than majorities of men at least since the organization began to collect data on American elections. Through 1960, these preferences skewed Republican, with women more likely to support Thomas Dewey in 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and Richard M. Nixon in 1960. However, men were more likely to support Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican candidacy, as well as Nixon's 1968 and 1972 campaigns. There was little evidence of a difference in male and female vote choice in the post-Watergate 1976 election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Feminism
In Britain the Suffragettes and the Suffragists campaigned for the women's vote, and in 1918 the Representation of the People Act was passed granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who owned property. In 1928 this was extended to all women over 21. Emmeline Pankhurst was the most notable activist in England, with "Time" naming her one of the stating: "she shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back." In the U.S., notable leaders of this movement included Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, who each campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to championing women's right to vote. These women were influenced by the Quaker theology of spiritual equality, which asserts that men and women are equal under God. In the United States, first-wave feminism is considered to have ended with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1919), granting women the right to vote in all states. The term "first wave" was coined retroactively to categorize these western movements after the term "second-wave feminism" began to be used to describe a newer feminist movement that focused on fighting social and cultural inequalities, as well political inequalities.
Crystal Eastman
When she returned east in 1913, she joined Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others in founding the militant Congressional Union, which became the National Woman's Party. After the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, Eastman and Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1923. One of the few socialists to endorse the ERA, Eastman warned that protective legislation for women would mean only discrimination against women. Eastman claimed that one could assess the importance of the ERA by the intensity of the opposition to it, but she felt that it was still a struggle worth fighting. She also delivered the speech, "Now We Can Begin", following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, outlining the work that needed to be done in the political and economic spheres to achieve gender equality.
Women in Japan
The Japanese Constitution, drafted by the US and adopted in the post-war era, provided a legal framework favorable to the advancement of women’s equality in Japan. Women were given the right to vote in 1946. This allowed them greater freedom, equality to men, and a higher status within Japanese society. Other postwar reforms opened education institutions to women and required that women receive equal pay for equal work. In 1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law took effect. Legally, few barriers to women's equal participation in the life of society remain. However, socially they lack opportunities in the workforce due to the long work hours and dominance in the workplace by men.
Minnesota Woman Suffrage Memorial
The MWSA led the campaign for the state legislature to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, to give women the right to vote. Minnesota was the 15th state to ratify the amendment, doing so in 1919.
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. It effectively overruled "Minor v. Happersett" (1875), in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give women the right to vote. Since the 1860s, an increasing number of states had given women the right to vote, but several states still denied women the right to vote at the time the amendment was ratified.
Susan B. Anthony Day
After the Civil War, Anthony worked primarily for women's suffrage, the legal right of women to vote. This right was established over the course of several decades, first in various states and localities, sometimes on a limited basis. It was established nationally in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had been introduced in Congress in 1878 by Senator Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Anthony's. The amendment was popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in recognition of her leadership in achieving its passage. She died in 1906, fourteen years before it became the law of the land.
Octavius Catto
Catto's crusade for equal rights was capped in March 1869, when Pennsylvania voted to ratify the 15th Amendment, which prohibited discrimination against citizens in registration and voting based on race, color or prior condition; effectively, it provided suffrage to black men. (No women then had the vote.) It was fully ratified in 1870.
Carrie Chapman Catt House
Shortly before she bought it, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. This earned her a congratulatory telegram from President Woodrow Wilson. It still needed to be ratified by three-quarters of the states, and accordingly she traveled the country making speeches and appearing at rallies to that end. During that time, she realized that it was not enough for women to have the vote—many would be voting for the first time, and would need to be supplied with information on which to base their vote but how to play a role in the shaping of public policy. Accordingly, she founded the League of Women Voters (LWV).
Elections in Florida
In the first half of the 19th century, the right to vote was held only by white males aged 21 and over. After 1920, women were able to vote with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1937, the requirement to pay a poll tax was repealed by the state legislature, allowing poorer Floridians to vote, and in 1944 the United States Supreme Court invalidated a system of white-only primary elections.
Woman's Journal
In 1917, "Woman's Journal" was purchased by Carrie Chapman Catt's Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission for $50,000, and merged with "The Woman Voter", the official journal of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York City, and NAWSA's "National Suffrage News" to become known as The Woman Citizen. It served as NAWSA's official organ until 1920, when NAWSA was reformed as the League of Women Voters, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed granting women the right to vote.
National Woman's Party
The Nineteenth amendment, which prohibits the denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex, became the law of the land when it was ratified by a sufficient number of states in 1920. Many African American women and men in the Jim Crow South, however, remained disenfranchised after the ratification of this amendment until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Women's suffrage in states of the United States
The Mormon issue made the fight for women's suffrage in Utah unique. In 1869 the Utah Territory, controlled by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave women the right to vote. Sarah Young, the niece of Brigham Young, was the first woman to legally vote in the United States, due to a municipal election held on February 14, 1869 (Wyoming had recognized women's right to vote earlier that year, but had not yet held an election). However, in 1887, Congress disenfranchised Utah women with the Edmunds–Tucker Act, which was designed to weaken the Mormons politically and punish them for polygamy. At the same time, however, certain activists, particularly Presbyterians and other Protestants convinced that Mormonism was a non-Christian cult that grossly mistreated women, promoted women's suffrage in Utah as an experiment, and as a way to eliminate polygamy. The LDS Church officially ended its endorsement of polygamy in 1890 and in 1895 Utah adopted a constitution restoring the right of woman suffrage. Congress admitted Utah as a state with that constitution in 1896.
Feminism in the United States
From 1870 to 1875 several women, including Virginia Louisa Minor, Victoria Woodhull, and Myra Bradwell, attempted to use the Fourteenth Amendment in the courts to secure the vote (Minor and Woodhull) or the right to practice law (Bradwell), and they were all unsuccessful. In 1872 Susan B. Anthony was arrested and brought to trial in Rochester, New York, for attempting to vote for Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election; she was convicted and fined $100 and the costs of her prosecution but refused to pay. At the same time, Sojourner Truth appeared at a polling booth in Battle Creek, Michigan, demanding a ballot; she was turned away. Also in 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president, although she could not vote and only received a few votes, losing to Ulysses S. Grant. She was nominated to run by the Equal Rights Party, and advocated the 8-hour work day, graduated income tax, social welfare programs, and profit sharing, among other positions. In 1874 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded by Annie Wittenmyer to work for the prohibition of alcohol; with Frances Willard at its head (starting in 1876), the WCTU also became an important force in the fight for women's suffrage. In 1878 a woman suffrage amendment was first introduced in the United States Congress, but it did not pass. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, giving white women the right to vote; the first wave of feminism is considered to have ended with that victory.
Women's suffrage
In Turkey, Atatürk, the founding president of the republic, led a secularist cultural and legal transformation supporting women's rights including voting and being elected. Women won the right to vote in municipal elections on March 20, 1930. Women's suffrage was achieved for parliamentary elections on December 5, 1934, through a constitutional amendment. Turkish women, who participated in parliamentary elections for the first time on February 8, 1935, obtained 18 seats.
Women's Strike for Equality
The Women's Strike for Equality was a strike which took place in the United States on August 26, 1970. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave American women the right to vote. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). About 50,000 women gathered for the protest in New York City and even more throughout the country. At this time, the gathering was the largest on behalf of women in the United States. The strike, spearheaded by Betty Friedan, self-stated three primary goals: free abortion on demand, equal opportunity in the workforce, and free childcare. The strike also advocated for other second wave feminist goals more generally, such as political rights for women, and social equality in relationships such as marriage.
Jennings Randolph
On August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution giving women the right to vote, Randolph attracted widespread media coverage for negative comments he made concerning the Women's Liberation Movement. Feminists had organized a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality that day, and presented the sympathetic Senate leadership with a petition for the Equal Rights Amendment. Randolph derided the protesters as "braless bubbleheads" and that the equal rights activists claimed they did not speak for women, citing those more radical feminists that supported, as he put it, the "right to unabridged abortions". Randolph would later admit that his bubblehead comment was "perhaps ill-chosen" and went on to support the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1972, when the amendment passed the Senate, Randolph was a co-sponsor.
Minor v. Happersett
Virginia Minor, a leader of the women's suffrage movement in Missouri, attempted to register to vote on October 15, 1872, in St. Louis County, Missouri, but was refused on the grounds that she was a woman. With the assistance of her husband, Francis Minor (a lawyer), she brought an action in state courts against Reese Happersett, the registrar who had rejected her application to register to vote, alleging that the provisions of the Missouri state constitution which allowed only men to vote were in violation of the United States Constitution, and specifically the Fourteenth Amendment. The key to the Minors' argument was that citizenship entailed voting rights—an assertion with enough rhetoric on both sides to make it an open question.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the registrar and against Minor. The state court observed that the "almost universal practice of all of the States ... from the adoption of the Constitution to the present time" was to restrict voting rights to men only; and, additionally, that the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to give the rights of citizenship to the former slaves, and not to force other changes in state laws. The court noted, in particular, that the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment (penalizing states which denied the right to vote to any of its citizens) referred specifically to male citizens, and concluded that "this clearly recognizes the right, and seems to anticipate the exercise of the right, on the part of the States to restrict the right of suffrage to the male inhabitants."
Betty Friedan
In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Friedan organized the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50,000 people. In 1971, Friedan joined other leading feminists to establish the National Women's Political Caucus. Friedan was also a strong supporter of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution that passed the United States House of Representatives (by a vote of 354–24) and Senate (84–8) following intense pressure by women's groups led by NOW in the early 1970s. Following Congressional passage of the amendment, Friedan advocated for ratification of the amendment in the states and supported other women's rights reforms: she founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered positions of many liberal feminists.
Feminism
By the mid 20th century, in some European countries, women still lacked some significant rights. Feminists in these countries continued to fight for voting rights. In Switzerland, women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971; but in the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden women obtained the right to vote on local issues only in 1991, when the canton was forced to do so by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. In Liechtenstein, women were given the right to vote by the women's suffrage referendum of 1984. Three prior referendums held in 1968, 1971 and 1973 had failed to secure women's right to vote.
Feminists continued to campaign for the reform of family laws which gave husbands control over their wives. Although by the 20th century coverture had been abolished in the UK and the US, in many continental European countries married women still had very few rights. For instance, in France married women did not receive the right to work without their husband's permission until 1965. Feminists have also worked to abolish the "marital exemption" in rape laws which precluded the prosecution of husbands for the rape of their wives. Earlier efforts by first-wave feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre, Victoria Woodhull and Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy to criminalize marital rape in the late 19th century had failed; this was only achieved a century later in most Western countries, but is still not achieved in many other parts of the world.
Women's suffrage in the United States
The suffrage organization NAWSA became the League of Women Voters and Alice Paul's National Woman's Party began lobbying for full equality and the Equal Rights Amendment which would pass Congress during the second wave of the women's movement in 1972 (but it was not ratified and never took effect). The main surge of women voting came in 1928, when the big-city machines realized they needed the support of women to elect Al Smith, while rural drys mobilized women to support Prohibition and vote for Republican Herbert Hoover. Catholic women were reluctant to vote in the early 1920s, but they registered in very large numbers for the 1928 election—the first in which Catholicism was a major issue. A few women were elected to office, but none became especially prominent during this time period. Overall, the women's rights movement declined noticeably during the 1920s.
Margaret Mitchell
May Belle Mitchell was "hissing blood-curdling threats" to her daughter to make her behave the evening she took her to a women's suffrage rally led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Margaret sat on a platform wearing a Votes-for-Women banner, blowing kisses to the gentlemen, while her mother gave an impassioned speech. She was nineteen years old when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, which gave women the right to vote.
Women's suffrage
Women obtained the legal right to vote in parliamentary and presidential elections in 1949. Women's share among voters increased steadily after 1949, reaching the same levels of participation as men in 1970.
Women's suffrage in the United States
In 1916 Alice Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP), a militant group focused on the passage of a national suffrage amendment. Over 200 NWP supporters, the Silent Sentinels, were arrested in 1917 while picketing the White House, some of whom went on hunger strike and endured forced feeding after being sent to prison. Under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, the two-million-member NAWSA also made a national suffrage amendment its top priority. After a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920. It states, "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."
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The women's suffrage movement took hold after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). During this period, women's rights leaders advocated for inclusion of universal suffrage as a civil right in the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments). Despite their efforts, these amendments did nothing to promote women's suffrage. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly discriminated between men and women by penalizing states who deprived adult male citizens of the vote, but not for denying the vote to adult female citizens. In "Minor v. Happersett", , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not provide or protect a right to vote to women.
Suffrage
Women's suffrage is, by definition, the right of women to vote. This was the goal of the suffragists, who believed in using legal means and the suffragettes, who used extremist measures. Short-lived suffrage equity was drafted into provisions of the State of New Jersey's first, 1776 Constitution, which extended the Right to Vote to unwed female landholders & black land owners.
However, the document did not specify an Amendment procedure, and the provision was subsequently replaced in 1844 by the adoption of the succeeding constitution, which reverted to "all white male" suffrage restrictions.
National Woman's Party
The NWP played a critical role in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which granted U.S. women the right to vote. Alice Paul then turned her attention to securing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which she felt was vital for women to secure gender equality. The NWP regrouped in1923 and published the magazine "Equal Rights". The publication was directed towards women but also intended to educate men about the benefits of women's suffrage, women's rights and other issues concerning American women.
Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial
The Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial is located at Market Square in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. It honors the women who campaigned for the state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to give women the right to vote. Tennessee was the final state to ratify the amendment and have it added to the Constitution, and thus was the focus of considerable effort both from local women and women who travelled from other states to assist them. The ratification vote was passed on August 18, 1920.
Women's suffrage in states of the United States
Women's suffrage finally came to South Carolina through the Nineteenth Amendment after the amendment was passed by Congress in 1919. South Carolina accepted the implications of the Nineteenth Amendment, but at the same time passed a law excluding women from jury duty within the state. South Carolina finally ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1969.
Tennessee
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state necessary to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provided women the right to vote. Disfranchising voter registration requirements continued to keep most African Americans and many poor whites, both men and women, off the voter rolls.
History of women in Puerto Rico
In 1929, Puerto Rico's legislature granted women the right to vote, pushed by the United States Congress to do so. Only women who could read and write were enfranchised; however, in 1935, all adult women were enfranchised regardless of their level of literacy. Puerto Rico was the second Latin American country to recognize a woman's right to vote. Both Dr. Maria Cadilla de Martinez and Ana María O'Neill were early advocates of women's rights. Cadilla de Martinez was also one of the first women in Puerto Rico to earn a doctoral (PhD) college degree.
United States Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage
The Senate established the select committee on January 9, 1882, when it approved a resolution offered by Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts. The committee was directed to consider "all petitions, bills, and resolves asking for the extension of suffrage to women or the removal of their legal disabilities." The first constitutional amendment granting woman suffrage was proposed January 10, 1878, by Senator Aaron Sargent of California. Similar amendments were introduced and referred to the select committee each successive Congress until 1919, when a resolution that was to become the 19th Amendment to the Constitution passed both houses of Congress.
African-American women in politics
Though women obtained the right to vote in the United States in 1920, many women of color still ran into obstacles. Some faced tests that required them to interpret the Constitution in order to vote. Others were threatened with physical violence, false charges, and other extreme danger to prevent voting. Due to these tactics and others that marginalized people of color, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was put into place. It outlawed any discriminatory acts to prevent people from voting.
Women's suffrage
Women were granted the right to vote in the Netherlands on August 9, 1919. In 1917, a constitutional reform already allowed women to be electable. However, even though women's right to vote was approved in 1919, this only took effect from January 1, 1920. The women's suffrage movement in the Netherlands was led by three women: Aletta Jacobs, Wilhelmina Drucker and Annette Versluys-Poelman. In 1889, Wilhelmina Drucker founded a women's movement called Vrije Vrouwen Vereeniging (Free Women’s Union) and it was from this movement that the campaign for women's suffrage in the Netherlands emerged. This movement got a lot of support from other countries, especially from the women's suffrage movement in England. In 1906 the movement wrote an open letter to the Queen pleading for women's suffrage. When this letter was rejected, in spite of popular support, the movement organised several demonstrations and protests in favor of women's suffrage. This movement was of great significance for women's suffrage in the Netherlands.
Elizabeth Pugsley Hayward
Elizabeth Hayward introduced the bill into the Utah State Senate ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted women the right to vote in national elections.
Equal Suffrage League (St. Louis)
In the spring of 1919, the 50th Missouri General Assembly passed the Presidential Suffrage bill, which gave women the right to vote in presidential elections. St. Louis League President Christine Fordyce appealed to the legislature in a speech saying, "fifty years ago my grandmother came before the Missouri legislature and asked for the enfranchisement of women; twenty-five years ago, my mother came to make the same request; tonight I am asking for the ballot for women. Are you going to make it necessary for my daughter to appear in her turn?" Ms. Fordyce's daughter would not have to make the same appeal, as soon suffrage was supported at the federal level. The Missouri legislature ratified the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the U.S. Constitution during a special session in July of that year. Governor Gardner called a special session and then amendment passed by a vote of 125 to 4 in the House and 29 to 3 in the Senate. Missouri became the eleventh state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. The first eleven states ratified the amendment within a month. It would take another year for the thirty-sixth state ratified the amendment and made it a binding part of the United States constitution.
Women's suffrage in the United States
There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so the President called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 304 to 89, (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, Prohibitionist 1-0 for), 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays (Republicans 36-8 for, Democrats 20-17 for). Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. After Washington on March 22, 1920, ratification languished for months. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it the law throughout the United States. Thus the 1920 election became the first United States presidential election in which women were permitted to vote in every state.
Women's rights in Bahrain
Women's rights have been a cornerstone of the political reforms initiated by King Hamad, with women gaining the right to vote and stand as candidates in national elections for the first time after the constitution was amended in 2002. The extension of equal political rights has been accompanied by a conscious drive to promote women to positions of authority within government.
Oregon Equal Suffrage Amendment
The Oregon Equal Suffrage Amendment was an amendment to the constitution of the U.S. state of Oregon, establishing women's suffrage, which was passed by ballot initiative in 1912. It had previously been placed on the ballot, initially by referral from the Oregon Legislative Assembly and later by popular initiative, in 1884, 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1910. When the initiative was ratified in 1912, Oregon became the seventh state to extend the right to vote to women.
Ballot measure #2 on the state's 1906 ballot was the "first attempt in American political history to amend the constitution of a state by the direct initiative of the people, and without any intervention by the legislature." The initiative failed, with 36,902 votes in favor and 47,075 against.
Personhood
In 1920, with the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, women became protected against discrimination in their right to vote in the United States. In 1971, the US Supreme Court ruled in "Reed v. Reed" that the 14th amendment applies to women, as they are "persons" according to the US Constitution. In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that women do not have equal protection under the 14th amendment as "persons"
saying that the Constitution's use of the gender-neutral term "Person" means that the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex, but also does not prohibit such discrimination; he said "Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. Many others, including law professor Jack Balkin disagree with this assertion. Balkin states that, at a minimum "the fourteenth amendment was intended to prohibit some forms of sex discrimination-- discrimination in basic civil rights against single women." Many local marriage laws at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified (as well as when the original Constitution was ratified) had concepts of coverture and "head-and-master", which meant that women legally lost rights, including rights to ownership of property and other rights of adult participation in the political economy upon marriage; single women retained these rights, however, and voted in some jurisdictions. Also, other commentators have noted that some people who ratified the Constitution in 1787 in other contemporaneous contexts ratified state level Constitutions that saw women as Persons, required to be treated as such, including in rights such as voting. The 17th and 18th Century Quaker concept of Personhood most certainly applied to women and the prevalence of Quakers in the population of several colonies, such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania at the time the original Constitution was drafted and ratified likely influenced the use of the term "Person" in the Constitution rather than the term "Man" used in the Declaration of Independence and in the contemporaneously drafted French Constitution of 1791. The concept of personhood beginning at conception gives issues to women. Daniel Fincke states "Applying the logic to abortion she argues that an involuntarily pregnant woman has the right to refuse to let her body be used by the fetus even were we to reason that the fetus has a right to life." The personhood movement may cause many more issues that just a women's right to choose. Some fetal homicide laws have caused women to be sentenced to jail time for suspected drug use during her pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, like the Alabama women who was sentenced to ten years for her suspected drug use.
Antoinette Dakin Leach
Leach's landmark victory set a legal precedent that was used in 1897 as a test case to give Indiana women the right to vote; however, this challenge to the state constitution proved to be unsuccessful when Lafayette, Indiana, lawyer Helen M. Gougar brought suit against the Tippecanoe County, Indiana, elections board after it refused to allow her to vote in the November 1894 elections. In "Gougar v Timberlake" (1897) Gougar appealed the Tippecanoe County Superior Court's decision in favor of the election board to the Indiana Supreme Court. Gougar argued on her own behalf that voting was natural right for men and women, asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution assured her that right, regardless of the text in Article 2, section 2, of Indiana's state constitution, which limited the franchise to males aged twenty-one and older. Justice Hackney, again writing on behalf of the Indiana Supreme Court, denied Gougar's appeal. He explained that the Court considered voting a political right, not a natural right, as was the ruling in Leach’s case, and stated that the state constitution specifically provided voting rights to its male citizens.
Albert G. Porter
After several months of debate, the General Assembly finally agreed to a compromise to grant women the right to vote by agreeing to also enact prohibition legislation. They proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would both grant women the right to vote, and enact statewide prohibition. The two issues were to much for the electorate to consider at once, and in the mid-term election of 1882, the amendment was overwhelming defeated, and so were the Republicans as a large Democratic majority came to power.
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
There were several attempts to amend the Constitution, prior to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, to grant universal and limited suffrage to women. One of the attempts, the "Petition for Universal Suffrage", signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, among others, called for a Constitutional amendment to "prohibit the several states from disenfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex" in 1865. In another attempt, an amendment proposed in the House of Representatives called for limited suffrage for women who were spinsters or widows and owned property in 1888.
Woman
Women are underrepresented in government in most countries. In October 2013, the global average of women in national assemblies was 22%. [[Suffrage]] is the civil right to [[vote]]. [[Women's suffrage in the United States]] was achieved gradually, first at state and local levels, starting in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and in 1920 women in the US received universal suffrage, with the passage of the [[Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution]]. Some Western countries were slow to allow women to vote; notably [[Switzerland]], where women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971, and in the canton of [[Appenzell Innerrhoden]] women were granted the right to vote on local issues only in 1991, when the canton was forced to do so by the [[Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland]]; and [[Liechtenstein]], in 1984, through [[Liechtenstein women's suffrage referendum, 1984|a women's suffrage referendum]].
American Equal Rights Association
Women's suffrage, a key goal of the AERA, was achieved in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Despite the passage of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the AERA's goal of securing equal rights for all citizens, especially suffrage, still had not yet been fully achieved. Although Puerto Ricans were by law citizens of the United States, Puerto Rican women were prevented from voting until 1929, and African Americans in southern states were for the most part prevented from voting until 1965, nearly a hundred years after the AERA was formed.
African-American women's suffrage movement
After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, African-American women, particularly those inhabiting Southern states, still faced a number of issues. At first, African-American women in the North were easily able to register to vote, and quite a few became actively involved in politics. One such woman was Annie Simms Banks who was chosen to serve as a delegate to Kentucky’s Republican Party in March 1920. White southerners took notice of African-American female activists organizing themselves for suffrage, and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, African-American women's voter registration in Florida was higher than white women's. Because of white people's fears about them wielding political power, African-American women found themselves targeted by a number of disenfranchisement methods. These included having to wait in line for up to twelve hours to register to vote, pay head taxes, and undergo new tests. One of the new tests required that African-American women read and interpret the Constitution before being deemed eligible to vote. In the South, African-American women faced even more severe obstacles to voting. These obstacles included bodily harm and fabricated charges designed to land them in jail if they attempted to vote. This treatment of African-American women in the South continued up until the 1960s.
Women's rights
In Latin America some countries gave women the right to vote in the first half of the 20th century – Ecuador (1929), Brazil (1932), El Salvador (1939), Dominican Republic (1942), Guatemala (1956) and Argentina (1946). In India, under colonial rule, universal suffrage was granted in 1935. Other Asian countries gave women the right to vote in the mid 20th century – Japan (1945), China (1947) and Indonesia (1955). In Africa, women generally got the right to vote along with men through universal suffrage – Liberia (1947), Uganda (1958) and Nigeria (1960). In many countries in the Middle East universal suffrage was acquired after World War II, although in others, such as Kuwait, suffrage is very limited. On 16 May 2005, the Parliament of Kuwait extended suffrage to women by a 35–23 vote.
Women's suffrage
The United States gave women equal voting rights in all states with the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in 1920. Brazil implemented full voting rights for women in 1932. Canada and some Latin American nations passed women's suffrage before World War II while the vast majority of Latin American nations established women's suffrage in the 1940s, with the exception of Uruguay in 1917 (see table in Summary below). The last Latin American country to give women the right to vote was Paraguay in 1961. In December 2015, women were first allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia (municipal elections).
1911 California Proposition 4
Proposition 4 of 1911 (or Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 8) was an amendment of the Constitution of California that granted women the right to vote in the state for the first time. Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 8 was sponsored by Republican State Senator Charles W. Bell from Pasadena, California. It was adopted by the California State Legislature and approved by voters in a referendum held as part of a special election on October 10, 1911.
Women's suffrage in states of the United States
New Jersey, on confederation of the United States following the Revolutionary War, placed only one restriction on the general suffrage—the possession of at least £50 (about $ adjusted for inflation) in cash or property. In 1790, the law was revised to include women specifically, and in 1797 the election laws referred to a voter as "he or she". Female voters became so objectionable to professional politicians, that in 1807 the law was revised to exclude them. Later, when New Jersey rewrote its constitution, the 1844 constitution limited a guaranteed right to vote to men. By 1947, all state constitutional provisions that barred women from voting had been rendered ineffective by the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. The updated constitution of 1947, reflecting this, once again included women as eligible voters—as they had been in New Jersey in 1776.
History of California 1900–present
California women had the right to own property in their own name since the first California Constitution in 1850. In 1911 California voters, in a special election, narrowly granted women the right to vote, nine years before the 19th Amendment enfranchised women nationally in 1920, but over 41 years later than the women of Wyoming had been granted the right to vote. Women's clubs flourished and turned a spotlight on issues such as public schools, dirt and pollution, and public health. California women were leaders in the temperance movement, moral reform, conservation, public schools, recreation, and other issues. They helped pass the 18th amendment, which established Prohibition in 1920. Initially, women did not often run for public office.
Minor v. Happersett
The court then asked whether the right to vote was one of the "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's adoption in 1868. Citing a variety of historical sources, it found that it was not. The court reasoned that the Constitution of the United States did not explicitly give citizens an affirmative right to vote and that, throughout the history of the nation from the adoption of the Constitution, a wide variety of persons—including women—were recognized as citizens but denied the right to vote. For example, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, none of the original Thirteen Colonies gave all citizens the right to vote, all attaching restrictions based on factors such as sex, race, age, and ownership of land. The opinion continues that "it cannot for a moment be doubted that if it had been intended to make all citizens of the United States voters, the framers of the Constitution would not have left it to implication. So important a change in the condition of citizenship as it actually existed, if intended, would have been expressly declared."
Albert H. Roberts
On August 9, following his victory in the primaries, Roberts called a special session of the General Assembly to consider ratification of the 19th Amendment, which would give women the right to vote. The amendment required ratification in 36 states to become law, and by August 1920, 35 had ratified it, while eight had rejected it, and five (including Tennessee) had yet to vote. The state senate approved the amendment by a 25 to 4 margin, and it narrowly passed in the state house by a 50 to 46 vote. Angry anti-suffragists tried to file an injunction preventing Roberts from certifying the legislature's vote, but the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against them. Roberts certified the state's ratification of the amendment on August 24, 1920.
First-wave feminism
The end of the first wave is often linked with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1920), granting women the right to vote. This was the major victory of the movement, which also included reforms in higher education, in the workplace and professions, and in health care.
Women started serving on school boards and local bodies, and numbers kept increasing. This period also saw more women gaining access to higher education. In 1910, "women were attending many leading medical schools, and in 1915 the American Medical Association began to admit women members." A "Matrimonial Causes Act 1923" gave women the right to the same grounds for divorce as men.
Anne Dallas Dudley
Anne Dallas Dudley ("née" Annie Willis Dallas; November 13, 1876 – September 13, 1955) was a prominent activist in the women's suffrage movement in the United States. After founding the Nashville Equal Suffrage League and serving as its president, she moved up through the ranks of the movement, serving as President of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association and then as Third Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she helped lead efforts to get the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ratified, giving women the right to vote nationwide. She is especially noted for her successful efforts to get the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in her home state of Tennessee, the final state necessary to bring the amendment into force.
Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
1870: The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is adopted. The amendment holds that neither the United States nor any State can deny the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," leaving open the right of States to deny the right to vote on account of sex. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton oppose the amendment. Many of their former allies in the abolitionist movement, including Lucy Stone, support the amendment.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Believing that men should not be given the right to vote without women also being granted the franchise, Sojourner Truth, a former slave and feminist, affiliated herself with Stanton and Anthony's organization. Stanton, Anthony, and Truth were joined by Matilda Joslyn Gage, who later worked on "The Woman's Bible" with Stanton. Despite Stanton's position and the efforts of her and others to expand the Fifteenth Amendment to include voting rights for all women, this amendment also passed, as it was originally written, in 1870.
Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918
The Parliament (Qualification of Women Act) 1918 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It gave women over 21 the right to stand for election as an MP. It did not alter the minimum age for a woman to vote in an election, which had been 30 since the Representation of the People Act 1918. It was not until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 that women were given the vote on equal terms with men, at the age of 21.
Women in government
In 1902, Australia became the first country to give some women the vote and allow them to stand for Parliament. This did not apply to Aboriginal Australians, including women, until the amendment of the Electoral Act in 1962. It wasn't until 1983 that Indigenous people had voting rights entirely equal to white Australians when another amendment made enrollment to vote compulsory, rather than voluntary. 19 years after the Commonwealth Franchise Act was passed, Edith Cowan was elected to Legislative Assembly and became the first woman ever elected in any Australian Parliament. Dorothy Tangney was the first woman elected to the Australian senate in 1946, a seat she held for twenty-five years. In the same year, Dame Enid Lyons became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. In 1986, Joan Child becomes the first female elected to Speaker of the House of Representatives and held the position for over three years. Of the two major political parties in Australia, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) introduced a 35% quota in 1994 and increased this to 40% in 2002 whereas the Liberal National Party (LNP) currently has no gender-based quotas.
Minor v. Happersett
The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, prohibited sex-based denial or abridgment of any United States citizen's right to vote—thus effectively overruling the key holding in "Minor v. Happersett". In some later voting rights cases, however, "Minor" was cited in opposition to the claim that the federal Constitution conferred a general right to vote, and in support of restrictive election laws involving poll taxes, literacy tests, and the role of political parties in special elections.
Timeline of women's suffrage
The Australian Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 enabled women to vote at federal elections and also permitted women to stand for election to the Australian Parliament, making the newly-federated country of Australia the first in the modern world to do so. In 1906, the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, which became the republic of Finland, was the second country in the world to implement both the right to vote and the right to run for office. Finland was also the first country in Europe to give women the right to vote. The world's first female members of parliament were elected in Finland the following year. In Europe, the last jurisdiction to grant women the right to vote was the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI), in 1991; AI is the smallest Swiss canton with 14,100 inhabitants in 1990. Women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990, see Women's suffrage in Switzerland. In Saudi Arabia women were first allowed to vote in December 2015 in the municipal elections.
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
According to political scientists J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, few women turned out to vote in the first elections after they got the right to do so. In 1920, just 36% of eligible women turned out to vote (compared with 68% of men). The low turnout was partly due to other barriers to voting, such as literacy tests, long residency requirements and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept turnout low. The gap was lowest between men and women in states that were swing states at the time, such as Missouri and Kentucky, and where barriers to voting were lower.
Kate M. Gordon
Although an outspoken advocate of women's right to vote, Gordon did not believe that this right should be created by constitutional amendment, instead favoring the establishment of voting rights on a state by state basis. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was submitted in June 1919, Gordon — somewhat astonishingly — stood in opposition to ratification of the proposal. Such a dissonant states' rights perspective generated controversy. During her life Gordon also drew criticism from many of her peers for expressing barely concealed racist views.
Ida Husted Harper
In 1916 Harper moved to Washington, D.C., to take charge of editorial correspondence at the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education (a part of the NAWSA's Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission) in and effort to improve public understanding of the women's suffrage movement and influence public opinion. Her department was responsible for responding to a steady stream of newspaper editorials about women's suffrage from all over the country, praising the editors when they supported suffrage and trying to answer their objections when they opposed it. The bureau's publicity contributed to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919 that guarantees the right of women to vote. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Harper completed writing the fifth and sixth volumes, published in 1922, of the "History of Woman Suffrage".
141st New York State Legislature
Also, a constitutional amendment was adopted by the voters, which gave women the right to vote.
Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections
The graph of voter turnout percentages shows a dramatic decline in turnout over the first two decades of the twentieth century, ending in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the right to vote across the United States. But in the preceding decades, several states had passed laws supporting women's suffrage. Women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869, before the territory had become a full state in the union. In 1889, when the Wyoming constitution was drafted in preparation for statehood, it included women's suffrage. Thus Wyoming was also the first full state to grant women the right to vote. In 1893, Colorado was the first state to amend an existing constitution in order to grant women the right to vote, and several other states followed, including Utah and Idaho in 1896, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, Alaska and Illinois in 1913, Montana and Nevada in 1914, New York in 1917; Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma in 1918. Each of these suffrage laws expanded the body of eligible voters, and because women were less likely to vote than men, each of these expansions created a decline in voter turnout rates, culminating with the extremely low turnouts in the 1920 and 1924 elections after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
This voting gender gap waned throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, and in recent decades has completely reversed, with a higher proportion of women voting than men in each of the last nine presidential elections. The Center for American Women and Politics summarizes how this trend can be measured differently both in terms of proportion of voters to non-voters, and in terms of the bulk number of votes cast. 
"In every presidential election since 1980, the "proportion" of eligible female adults who voted has exceeded the "proportion" of eligible male adults who voted [...]. In all presidential elections prior to 1980, the voter turnout rate for women was lower than the rate for men. The "number" of female voters has exceeded the "number" of male voters in every presidential election since 1964..." This gender gap has been a determining factor in several recent presidential elections, as women have been consistently about 15% more likely to support the candidate of the Democratic Party than the Republican candidate in each election since 1996.
Constitution of Alabama
Section 177 denied women the right to vote by confining voting rights to "male citizens". This was rendered unenforceable by the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provided suffrage to women effective in 1920. But, the amendment remained as part of the state constitution until Amendment 579 was substituted, which contained no reference to gender.
Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
1871: Victoria Woodhull speaks to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, arguing that women have the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but the committee does not agree.