![]() Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment went as far as to define voting rights as the exclusive privilege of “male citizens”-explicitly adding gender to the Constitution for the first time. Many Members praised the virtues of “manhood suffrage” and expressed concern about the inclusive language in early drafts of the proposed amendment. 5Īfter the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans, Radical Republicans in Congress proposed a constitutional amendment extending citizenship rights and equal protection under the law to all “persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Whether those rights would include women was unclear, and debates in both houses of Congress focused on defining citizenship. Following the Civil War, they helped build a movement dedicated to women’s suffrage and pushed lawmakers to guarantee their rights during Reconstruction. After first meeting in 1850, Stanton and Anthony forged a lifetime alliance as women’s rights activists. Anthony, a Massachusetts teacher, had both been active in the abolitionist cause to end slavery. Like many other women reformers of the era, Stanton and Susan B. The convention eventually approved the voting rights resolution after abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in support of it. 2 Stanton’s call to arms, her “Declaration of Sentiments,” echoed the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” In a list of resolutions, Stanton cataloged economic and educational inequities, restrictive laws on marriage and property rights, and social and cultural norms that prevented women from enjoying “all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” 3 Stanton also demanded for women the “sacred right to the elective franchise”-despite objections from Mott and others who considered this provision too radical. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, about 300 people-most of whom were women-attended the Seneca Falls Convention to outline a direction for the women’s rights movement. The first attempt to organize a national movement for women’s rights occurred in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. The phrase “Votes for Women” was one of the suffrage movement's main rallying cries. House of RepresentativesĪbout this object Manufactured by the Whitehead & Hoag Company in Newark, New Jersey, this dime-sized button announces support for women’s voting rights. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to request that include additional links to this collection./tiles/non-collection/E/Essay1_2_votes_for_women_button_2019_096_000-1.xml Collection of the U.S. Specifically, the Commission has been hard at work to re-imagine the role we play as a support system for the women and girls of California and the ways in which we celebrate our history.Īs a companion to our effort to encourage voting through the Your Vote is Your Voice campaign, we are proud to celebrate the contributions of women of color specifically to the struggle that made votes for women possible.īelow you will find links to exhibits, articles, videos, and timelines as well as a small snapshot of some of the suffragist heroines we don’t always get to see or celebrate. The Commission on the Status of Women and Girls enters this centennial with a new commitment to be intentionally inclusive of all women, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous women, members of the LGBTQ community, young women, and those most vulnerable among us. We have come a long way, but we still have miles to go to achieve equality for all and especially for women of color. They faced racial and ethnic discrimination and were often discouraged from voting via violence.Īs we celebrate the 100 th anniversary of women’s suffrage this year we celebrate the hard won achievements of the women who made possible the modern right to vote! After the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women of color were often kept from the polls through a variety of tactics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |