Women Get the Right to Vote
93 Years Ago This Week, August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote after a 70-year struggle led by the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
The groundwork for the movement was laid in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the birthplace of the women’s movement. Here Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which demanded voting rights, property rights, educational opportunities, and economic equity for women.
Susan B. Anthony, called the Little General, traveled from state to state throughout her long life speaking for the emancipation of women, enduring storms, primitive transportation and frequent ridicule.
One drunken heckler prompted this powerful reply, ‘This man can vote but your own mother can not!’
In 1867 the western territories of Wyoming and Utah were the first to sign the amendment. The last to sign was Tennessee in August 1920, thus providing the minimum number of states required to bring the amendment to the Congress for ratification.
by Sena Havasy, 2013, drawing on many sources.