On May 18, 1915, crowds streamed into the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to watch the New York Giants take on the Chicago Cubs. But beyond the diamond, a bigger contest was brewing.
The state of New York was gearing up to hold a referendum, putting the question of women’s suffrage to its (all-male) electorate. Supporters of the cause organized a “suffrage day” game, luring potential voters with the offer of a piece of chocolate cake with every ticket purchased at their headquarters. They festooned the stadium with yellow banners and printed baseball-themed fliers, with exhortations like “Fans, Fair Play” and “Make a Home Run for Suffrage.”
Everybody, The New York Times noted, “had a ‘lovely’ time.” But the festive mood would fizzle out come November: The men of New York rejected the suffrage measure, and its women would have to work another two years for the right to vote.
Votes for women was a demand that was both radical and all-American. And the nearly century-long history of how women won that right is as colorful and kaleidoscopic as it is complicated and almost impossible to sum up.
Those who fought for it were heroes, but not always moral paragons. The suffrage movement, like other social movements before and after, often reflected the racism, nativism and other prejudices that pervaded America as a whole.
At the heart of the suffrage battle was a conundrum: Women gaining the vote required persuading men to share it with them. And there were many who dismissed the cause as ridiculous, if not downright dangerous.
“The benefits of woman suffrage are almost wholly imaginary,” The Times declared in 1913, in one of a long string of anti-suffrage editorials. “Its penalties will be real and hard to bear.”
To combat such attitudes, suffragists used every weapon in the arsenal, from petitions and speeches to pins, parades and attention-grabbing stunts. The rise of the movement coincided with the birth of photography, and the suffragists deployed the medium to put human faces on their struggle. “They knew how to build a visual identity,” the historian Susan Ware said, “and use it for a political purpose.”
The fight for the vote was the fight for democracy. No history can sum it all up. But these images help bring into focus how the largest enfranchisement in American history came to pass, and the generations of women who made it happen.
The story of the suffrage movement usually starts like this: In July 1848, a group of people got together in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and set forth a series of demands for women’s rights, including the right to vote. But the history of women and voting in the United States extends well before, and beyond, Seneca Falls. In the years after the American Revolution, there were women who voted — in New Jersey. The state’s original constitution assigned voting rights to all free, property-owning residents — regardless of gender or race — and some women, and African-Americans, there voted until 1807, when the state passed a law limiting the franchise to white men. And while the campaign for women’s suffrage may have formally kicked off in Seneca Falls, it quickly expanded across the country.
Many of the movement’s leaders were based in the East, where organizations such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (N.W.P.) were headquartered, but its earliest victories came in the West. Women including Susan B. Anthony and the NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt traveled to states such as Washington and Colorado in the late 1800s, giving speeches and helping them wage successful campaigns for the right to vote, but they continued to be excluded from the franchise themselves back home. As momentum grew in the West, women in the rest of the country asked, “Why not us?”
The Wyoming Territory was the first place in the United States to pass a women’s suffrage measure, in 1869. Officials there stood firm in their commitment to suffrage, even when it later threatened their petition for statehood. “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women,” they told Congress, which relented and admitted them in 1890 (as shown on this postcard, circa 1910).
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Not all of the western states were early adopters of suffrage: While Nevada attempted to amend its Constitution as early as 1869, it would not succeed until 1914. Mabel Vernon, an organizer from Delaware and leader in the N.W.P., traveled the state with Anne Martin, a Reno, Nev., suffragist, that year to rally support for the measure, which passed largely thanks to support in rural counties.
Special Collections and University Archives Department, University of Nevada, Reno
In 1896, Idaho became the fourth state where women could vote, joining Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Organizers used buttons, pins, sashes and other memorabilia, such as this umbrella, circa 1910, to celebrate their victories, show state pride and spread the word about their cause.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Suffragists distributed more than 90,000 Votes for Women buttons in Southern California alone as part of the campaign for a suffrage referendum in the state in 1911. The measure passed by just 3,587 votes.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
By the time this photo was taken, circa 1915, women in 12 states and the Alaska Territory could vote — although in some places they were limited to municipal or presidential elections. Slowly, progress began to spread to the East. In 1917, the movement achieved a major victory when New York, at the time the nation’s most populous state, passed a suffrage referendum.
New York Public Library
By early 1919, as this flier shows, women had some form of suffrage in 24 states; Maine, Minnesota, Missouri and Tennessee would join their ranks later that year. Organizations such as NAWSA had shifted their focus from state-level battles to a national suffrage amendment, which could finally establish that American women had a right to the ballot.
Missouri Historical Society
The suffrage movement spread to all corners of the country, reaching big cities and small towns in every region and pulling in women from all walks of life. But at a time when large swaths of the nation were segregated, the suffrage movement was no exception. While there were interracial suffrage organizations, for much of the movement’s history they were the exception rather than the rule. Many white groups, particularly in the South, refused to accept Black members, and leaders of NAWSA and other national organizations, fearful of losing support in the region, kowtowed to racist demands to exclude women of color. Black women formed their own groups to fight not only for the right to vote but also for greater equality and justice for their communities.
Suffragists marching in a parade in Mount Ayr, Iowa — population around 1,700 — in 1915. The following year, the state’s all-male electorate rejected an amendment to Iowa’s Constitution expanding the franchise to women, who would have to wait to vote until the 19th Amendment.
Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
A suffrage parade in Chicago in 1916. The movement in Illinois was spearheaded by organizations such as the Alpha Suffrage Club, a Black women’s group founded in 1913 by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, with the help of her white friends and allies Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks. When Illinois women won limited voting rights that year, the club helped get hundreds of Black women to the polls.
The refrain “lifting as we climb,” famously used by the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell, became the motto of organizations such as the Arizona Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, pictured circa 1909.
Los Angeles Public Library
Delegates of the City Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs of Jacksonville at a meeting in Palatka, Fla., in 1915. Eartha M. M. White, an opera singer and businesswoman who became a leading advocate for social reform in Jacksonville, is seated front center.
Eartha M. M. White Collection/University of North Florida
In 1872, a woman named Virginia Minor attempted to register to vote in Missouri. When she was turned away, she sued. Her case advanced to the Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected her claim, declaring that “the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone.” This decision helped confirm for many suffragists the need for a constitutional amendment declaring that access to the ballot could not be denied on the basis of sex. A national amendment would require national support in order to pass the House and Senate and be ratified by legislatures in three-fourths of the states. The suffragists roamed far and wide to spread awareness of their cause. And after Congress passed the 19th Amendment in the summer of 1919, the battle came down to the states, with all eyes eventually on Tennessee.
A group of suffragists who called themselves the Army of the Hudson prepared to march from New York to Washington, D.C., in February 1913. Led by “General” Rosalie Jones, the Army hiked more than 200 miles in 17 days, through mud and slush, to deliver a letter to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support women’s fight for the vote. “Remember, we are going through,” Jones said. “Let those who fall out return, but remember, our motto is, ‘On to Washington.’”
George Eastman Museum
The suffragists Nell Richardson, left, and Alice Burke set off from New York in April 1916 on a five-month cross-country road trip to rally support for the vote. Along with their cat, Saxon — a gift from a supporter in Mobile, Ala. — they traveled some 10,000 miles in a yellow Saxon roadster they called the Golden Flier, stopping in more than 100 cities, from New Orleans to San Francisco to Detroit, before returning to New York in September.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
A sheet of pro-suffrage stamps from 1914. Missouri women did not win the right to vote until 1920, with the 19th Amendment. Virginia Minor, who died in 1894, would not live to see it.
Missouri Historical Society
After Congress passed the 19th Amendment, the fight for ratification moved to the states. By the summer of 1920, 35 states had approved the law, and Tennessee became the leading candidate to push the amendment over the finish line. While the suffrage cause had been largely stymied in the South, a biracial coalition of Nashville women’s groups successfully lobbied legislators to ratify the measure. It passed, 50-46, on Aug. 18.
Gado Images/Alamy
Women’s quest for political power involved Americans of every race, class and walk of life — and it did not start, or end, with the vote. As early as the 1810s, Black women preachers such as Jarena Lee were fighting for more equitable roles in their churches, and inspiring others to do the same. “The Black church is not just a place of spiritual refuge or contemplation but a major political organization,” the historian Martha S. Jones said in a phone interview. “In May 1848, you have a group of Black church women in Philadelphia, from the same community as Lee, who organize and petition for preaching licenses — and win them. And then two months later, in July, another group of women gets together in a little village called Seneca Falls. And among their demands, along with the right to vote, is a demand for equality for women in religion. All of it stems from a critique of the notion that race and sex should determine political power, and a new visioning of what American political culture should look like”
In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, a coalition including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass formed the American Equal Rights Association, with the goal of securing the right to vote for all American citizens, “irrespective of race, color or sex.” That same year, the first petition for universal suffrage was presented to Congress. But when the government moved to enfranchise Black men with the 14th and 15th Amendments, while continuing to exclude women, many suffragists were indignant. The racism exposed by the debates over these laws festered for decades, and Black suffragists found themselves fighting a difficult battle for equal treatment on two fronts, as women and as African-Americans.
Stanton, the main author of the Declaration of Sentiments — the list of demands for women’s equality crafted at Seneca Falls — was among the early suffragist leaders outraged that the 14th Amendment protected the voting rights of “male citizens” — the first reference to gender introduced into the Constitution. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” she warned, “it will take us a century at least to get it out.”
Library of Congress
Black women such as Mary Church Terrell — eighth from left in the back row, at a conference for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919 — often found themselves alone in rooms of white suffragists. Terrell implored organizations such as NAWSA to include more women of color. “Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance,” she said at their 1898 convention.
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
In 1896, Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and others formed the National Association of Colored Women to spearhead their fight for equal rights, including the right to vote. The refrain “lifting as we climb,” which Terrell used in her 1898 NAWSA convention speech, was the organization’s motto.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
In the nation’s capital, a network of Black women banded together to campaign for women’s rights and civil rights. Their ranks included Terrell, the poet Angelina Weld Grimké, the author Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, a leader of the National Baptist Convention, seen at left with an unidentified woman circa 1900.
Library of Congress
For Black suffragists, the fight did not end with the 19th Amendment. On the night before Election Day in 1920, members of the Ku Klux Klan came to a Black girls’ school in Daytona, Fla., to intimidate its founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other Black women in the community from voting. Bethune, pictured circa 1905, was undeterred and cast her vote the next day. Still, many Black women — and Black men — across the South would effectively be barred from the ballot by Jim Crow policies, violence and other forms of suppression for decades to come.
State Archives of Florida
Latinas, Asian-Americans, Indigenous women and immigrants were all part of the multigenerational struggle for the vote. They led marches, gave speeches and organized for their right to a voice in the political system. But when victory did come with the 19th Amendment, some of them would not be included.
Many of America’s newest residents joined the battle for voting rights in the early 20th century. Immigrants such as the Polish-born organizer Rose Schneiderman — third from right in the front row, with members of the New York Women’s Trade Union League in 1909 — became powerful advocates not only for suffrage but also for workers’ rights and child-labor protections.
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Women who came to the United States from nations such as Norway, where they had enjoyed some voting rights since 1907, found themselves disenfranchised in their new home. Many of these immigrants banded together to form organizations like the Scandinavian Suffrage Association of Minnesota — pictured in Washington, circa 1917 — that helped lead the campaign for the vote in the Midwest.
Harris & Ewing/Buyenlarge/Getty Images
In parts of the country with large Spanish-speaking communities, the fight for the right to vote was bilingual. This flier, distributed by the Los Angeles Political Equality League, urged voters to support California’s suffrage referendum in 1911. Suffragists like Maria de Lopez traveled the state making the case for women’s rights. A language instructor at a Los Angeles high school, de Lopez worked as a translator during the campaign and stumped for suffrage herself in Spanish.
Women's Suffrage and Equal Rights Collection, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College
Adelina Otero-Warren, pictured in 1923, was an organizer for the N.W.P. who rallied support for the ratification of the 19th Amendment in New Mexico. In 1922, she became the first Latina to run for Congress, vying to represent the state as a Republican in the House of Representatives.
The New York Times
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, pictured in 1937, joined the suffrage movement as a teenager, leading thousands of women in a 1912 parade in New York while riding a white horse. But as a Chinese immigrant, she would be barred from American citizenship, and the vote, until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.
Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service/National Archives
Many Native American women, such as those in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, had wielded political power since well before the founding of the United States. And later, Native women like the Yankton Sioux activist Zitkala-Sa — also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, pictured circa 1898 — joined the fight for women’s suffrage, even though many Native women would not be considered citizens until the passage of the Snyder Act in 1924.
National Museum of American History
Suffrage was a generational fight spanning nearly a century. Girls like this one, pictured in 1915 — five years before the 19th Amendment was ratified — would enjoy the fruits of their foremothers’ labors, and continue their work.
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Suffragists fought for their rights not only at the ballot box but also in their daily lives. For some of them, that included whom they loved and how they chose to express their identities. The terms “gay” and “lesbian” were not used much at the time, but many women who might identify as part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community today were integral to the campaign for the vote. Several of the most prominent leaders of the suffrage movement were involved in so-called “romantic friendships” or “Boston marriages” that many historians now regard as same-sex relationships: the one-time NAWSA president Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and Lucy Anthony, niece of Susan B. Anthony (who was also believed to have had relationships with women); Mary Burrill and Lucy Diggs Slowe, both prominent members of the same circle of Black suffragists in Washington as Terrell; and Carrie Chapman Catt, another president of NAWSA, and Mary Garrett Hay — just to name a few.
The writer and suffrage organizer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, pictured circa 1915, documented her relationships with both men and women in her diaries and described a queer subculture within Black women’s clubs and the suffragist community.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers, University of Delaware
Catt and her partner, Hay — shown casting their first ballots in New York in 1918 — traveled the country implementing Catt’s “Winning Plan” to rally support for the 19th Amendment. Catt had been married twice, but when she died she insisted on being buried not with either of her husbands but with Hay. “Here lie two,” their headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery reads, “united in friendship for 38 years through constant service to a great cause.”
Library of Congress
Not all suffragists were women. (And not all women were suffragists.) Male allies were part of women’s campaign for the vote from the beginning. Many of them had collaborated with the suffragists in the movement to end slavery in the United States, and they saw the enfranchisement of women as a natural extension of their work to achieve liberty for all Americans. Among them was Frederick Douglass, who published the abolitionist newspaper The North Star. Its motto was: “Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.”
“When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people,” said Douglass, who was among the 32 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls. “But when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”
Library of Congress
A scrapbook documenting the activities of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, founded in New York in 1909 by Max Eastman, who later edited the socialist magazine The Masses.
Library of Congress
Counterintuitive though it may seem, there were women who actively opposed the suffrage movement. Some argued that having the vote would make women masculine, disrupt their traditional roles as wives and mothers and destroy American society. Their fears were illustrated in this cartoon by Laura Foster, published by an anti-suffrage group in 1915.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
The first several decades of the suffrage movement largely revolved around meetings, speeches and petitions. But in the 1910s, things began to shift. “You still have mainstream organizations like NAWSA doing the traditional political grunt work within the system, with their index cards keeping track of votes and which representatives support it and who needs to be swayed,” the historian Susan Ware said in a phone interview. “But that on its own isn’t enough. And so you start to see public spectacles like the marches and parades that really put it in your face.”
Inspired in part by the British suffrage movement — led by Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose motto was “Deeds not words” — new leaders including Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and groups such as the N.W.P. emerged that took a more radical tack. While they never adopted their British counterparts’ most violent tactics, which included bombings and arson, they did take to heart the sentiment that, if the vote was finally to be won, they would have to take their fight to the streets, and to the very doorstep of power itself. Many tools of protest that activists use today were honed by the suffragists, from mass marches and picketing outside the White House to wearing badges and pins to express support for a cause. “What these women were so good at was making sure suffrage was a topic on everyone’s mind,” Dr. Ware said. “It was everywhere. And you had to take a stand.”
Organized protest did not become a main tool of the movement until the 1900s, but some suffragists were performing acts of civil disobedience well before Paul or Burns entered the picture. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony, pictured circa 1850, was arrested in Rochester, N.Y., for voting. She channeled her indignation into a speech the following year: “It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government.”
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
In 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, thousands of suffragists descended on Washington for the Woman Suffrage Procession, organized by Paul and Burns for NAWSA. Inez Milholland, a 26-year-old suffragist, led the parade on horseback. Three years later, she would collapse while giving a speech in Los Angeles and die shortly thereafter. Her last public words were reportedly, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”
Library of Congress
Bowing to pressure from segregationist factions in the South, NAWSA’s white leaders told Black suffragists including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, pictured with her daughters in 1914, that they had to walk at the back of the parade. Wells-Barnett refused and marched with the rest of the Illinois delegation.
Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
In January 1917, members of the N.W.P. who called themselves the Silent Sentinels began picketing outside the White House. It was the first demonstration of its kind. They would remain there for over two years: Their goal, The Washington Post reported in 1917, was to make it “impossible for the President to enter or leave the White House without encountering a sentinel bearing some device pleading the suffrage cause.”
National Archives
The Silent Sentinels were arrested multiple times and frequently mistreated by law enforcement. In one particularly brutal incident in November 1917, 33 of them (including Burns) were taken to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where they were violently abused. The Sentinel Minnie Quay described her experience in an affidavit about the episode, which became known as the Night of Terror.
Library of Congress
The N.W.P. issued pins in the shape of a prison door to protesters who had been jailed; the women wore these “Jailed for Freedom” pins as a badge of honor. Survivors of the Night of Terror capitalized on the public’s horror at their treatment to sway more supporters to their cause. In 1919, a group of them went on a 16-city tour — the “Prison Special” — wearing their jailhouse garb and sharing their stories. They called the train they traveled on the Democracy Limited.
National Museum of American History
From the earliest days of the movement, the suffragists creatively and relentlessly spread the word about their cause. Renowned orators such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw gave speeches. Leaflets and posters made the suffragists’ case in print. And when the mainstream (male-run) press refused to cover the movement for women’s rights, or did so in disparaging terms and with grotesque caricatures, women created their own. Several of the continent’s first publications written by and for women emerged with the suffrage movement, including Amelia Bloomer’s The Lily, which covered issues from suffrage to temperance to dress reform, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s The Woman’s Era, the first newspaper published by a Black woman in the United States.
Terrell, a prominent Black suffragist and the first woman appointed to the Washington D.C. Board of Education, used her gift for languages — she spoke at least three — to fight for the suffrage movement and for Black women’s inclusion in it.
Oberlin College Archives
In a pamphlet published in 1903 by the Rochester Political Equality Club in New York, suffragists rebutted some of the most common arguments against women’s right to vote.
Women's Suffrage and Equal Rights Collection, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College
The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage — which would become the N.W.P. — put out a weekly journal, The Suffragist, to advertise its activities and recruit people to the cause. The publication ran from 1913 to 1921 and was staffed by women such as Frances Pepper, left, and Elizabeth Smith, pictured in the newsroom in 1916. During the Silent Sentinel pickets, The Suffragist exposed the ill treatment of imprisoned protesters.
Library of Congress
The Texas suffragist Jovita Idár, second from right, came from a family of journalists and activists, and she used the pages of their newspapers La Crónica and Evolución to advocate women’s rights and the rights of Mexican-Americans.
General Photograph Collection/UTSA Libraries Special Collections
The organizers who fought for women’s right to vote were skilled in the relatively new art of public relations, and they found innovative ways to get their message out — from flashy stunts to all manner of memorabilia. The “suffrage day” baseball game on May 18, 1915, for example, drew plenty of attention to the suffragists’ cause — even if the referendum it promoted failed that fall.
The suffrage cartoonist Lou Rogers, far left; the labor organizer Margaret Hinchey, fourth from left; and others advertising the “suffrage day” game.
FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images
This cookbook, sold as a fund-raiser at an 1886 suffrage festival in Boston, contained “thoroughly tested and reliable recipes for cooking, directions for the care of the sick and practical suggestions.” In the preface, its editor, Hattie A. Burr, wrote that she hoped it would “go forth a blessing to housekeepers, and an advocate for the elevation and enfranchisement of woman.”
Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
A 1900 Valentine’s Day card, spreading love and women’s equality.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Some suffragists went to great heights to get the word out: Dr. Cora Smith Eaton — a Washington State physician and mountaineer, pictured in Yellowstone National Park in 1902 — climbed with a group of 68 other people to the top of Mount Rainier in 1909 with a Votes for Women banner, which she planted at the summit.
Barnes Albums (MSC31), Yellowstone National Park Archives
And Margaret Foley took to the skies in August 1910 to distribute pro-suffrage literature to the citizens of Lawrence, Mass.
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Women’s struggle for the right to vote intersected with many other social movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, from abolition to temperance to labor. It collided with wars and grappled with changing social norms. It even had to contend with a pandemic. “Suffragists were never single-issue people,” the historian Ellen Carol DuBois said in a phone interview. “They understood that getting the right to vote was the crucial tool for every important political change in American society — and they had a long list of changes they wanted to be a part of.”
Many of the early suffragists — including organizers of the Seneca Falls convention such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott — were ardent abolitionists, and their experiences in that movement informed how they waged their campaigns for women’s rights. “The early suffragists were schooled in antislavery,” Dr. DuBois said. “They’re sibling movements.” But after the Civil War, the fight over the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised Black men but did nothing to address women’s demand for the vote, divided some white suffragists from their former allies. “Stanton in particular repeatedly used very disturbing racial rhetoric when objecting to what she called the closing of the constitutional door” on women’s suffrage, Dr. DuBois explained. The effects of this schism would continue to ripple through the movement for decades.
An advertisement for a lecture by the abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth, circa 1878. Among the testimonials to Truth’s skill as an orator was one from Mott, who called her “a valued friend and co-laborer.”
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
In the late 19th century, as the suffrage movement — and the country — became increasingly segregated, a thriving Black women’s club movement developed, made up of organizations like the Women’s Newport League in Rhode Island. Members of these clubs worked for a range of social and political reforms, including better health care, child care and education, as well as women’s suffrage.
Library of Congress
At its heart, the suffrage movement was a fundamental reimagining of the roles of women in American society, not as the dependents of men but as full citizens. Women such as the newspaper publisher Amelia Bloomer and other advocates of dress reform sought liberation, in the first instance, from the corsets and petticoats that constricted their everyday lives. (Bloomer would lend her name to the cohort’s preferred attire: pantaloons worn under a short skirt, also known as bloomers.) For others, it meant fighting for control over one’s body. And for many suffragists, voting meant having a chance to combat the abuse of alcohol, which they saw a main cause of domestic violence: The campaign for the vote became interwoven with the movements for temperance and prohibition.
A self-portrait by the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, posing as an independent, modern woman in 1896. The suffrage movement was part of a transformative time when women were pushing back against the bounds of what was considered acceptable, “ladylike” behavior.
Library of Congress
A 1918 cartoon by Lou Rogers. She was part of a contingent of the suffragist movement, including her fellow cartoonist Blanche Ames Ames, who campaigned for access to contraception. Birth control would not become fully legal in the United States until 1972.
Lou Rogers
Organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) saw laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol as key to protecting women and children from abuse. Prohibition would go into effect in January 1920 — a year after the ratification of the 18th Amendment, and eight months before that of the 19th.
Montana Historical Society
The W.C.T.U. did not just advocate suffrage and temperance. Like many other turn-of-the-century women’s groups in the newly industrialized nation, they also pushed for legal protections for the millions of women and children working in factories and mills. Immigrants, who made up a large portion of the work force, would prove instrumental to this campaign. Organizers such as Rose Schneiderman and Margaret Hinchey helped bring many of them into the fight, not just for stronger workplace safety measures but also for a voice in the system that was responsible for such laws.
Lewis Hine, an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, used his camera to expose the living and working conditions that affected children like this one, a worker at a cotton mill in Lancaster, S.C., in 1908.
Library of Congress
Hine captured the everyday details of working people’s lives, from coal mines and meatpacking warehouses to tenement apartments. In this 1912 portrait, a mother and her three children sew dresses for Campbell’s Soup Kids dolls.
Library of Congress
In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York killed 146 people, most of them women and girls. Organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, pictured circa 1900, recruited many working-class and immigrant women to the suffrage movement by arguing that, if they wanted to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again, they needed a voice in the political system.
National Archives
The Irish-born labor organizer Margaret Hinchey met with President Wilson in 1914 to press him on working women’s need for the ballot. “We’ve got to push every man of them to the very pin of his collar,” she said in a speech recounting the meeting and advocating women’s suffrage in New York. “No one has a right to go up to Albany and make a pill for me to swallow whether I want to or not.”
From 1914 to 1918, everyday life was brought to a halt by World War I. Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of NAWSA, believed that being seen as patriotic would help the suffrage cause and threw the group’s support behind President Wilson when the United States entered the conflict in 1917. NAWSA would pour considerable resources into the war effort. But the N.W.P. took a different tack: The Silent Sentinels continued to picket the While House six days a week, demanding the very liberty that the country professed to be defending abroad. Ultimately, women’s highly visible roles in the war effort may have helped. In January 1918, nine months before the war’s end, the House of Representatives approved a suffrage amendment 274-136, and, as it moved through the Senate, Wilson gave it his full support. “We have made partners of the women in this war,” he said on Sept. 30. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not a partnership of privilege and right?” (The Senate rejected the amendment the next day, but would ultimately approve it in June 1919.)
A pair of “suffrage farmerettes” at work in East Patchogue, N.Y., as part of the effort on the home front to keep the country fed during the war.
National Archives
NAWSA sponsored all-female medical units during the war, sending dozens of doctors and nurses to serve at field hospitals on the front in France. When these women returned home, they found themselves waging another war: against the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918.
National Archives
The 19th Amendment — ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, and added to the constitution eight days later — was the single largest act of enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Millions of women cast their first ballots that fall. But the amendment’s promise was incomplete. Many American women, including some who had fought fiercely for suffrage, were still excluded from the ballot box. Many Native Americans were not able to vote until 1924, when the Snyder Act made them U.S. citizens. Chinese immigrants were similarly barred until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. And many Black and Latinx people who, on paper, had an unequivocal right to vote, were functionally disenfranchised for decades by poll taxes, literacy tests, “white primary” laws and other forms of voter suppression. It is for this reason that many scholars point to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which barred racial discrimination in voting, as another milestone in suffrage history.
And the fight for suffrage was not just about the right to vote. It was about equality for women in all areas of life. From pay equity to educational resources and access to credit, women have continued to fight for their rights, and for equal representation in the bodies of power that regulate them. The Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: All are descended from the suffragists and their work. “The suffrage movement is not this finite, discrete thing: It’s part of a much broader story about women’s roles in American society,” the historian Susan Ware said in a phone interview. “This isn’t about one issue from 100 years in the past that a bunch of women in long dresses and big hats cared about. These are issues we’re still fighting for today. And getting the vote was an absolutely necessary step in everything that came afterward.”
Black suffragists at a Head-Quarters for Colored Women Voters in Georgia, circa 1910s. Their struggle for the vote would continue well after 1920, with ramifications on nearly every aspect of their daily lives. “If the right to vote was a minor issue, then there wouldn’t be so much energy put into suppressing it,” the historian Nikki Brown said in a phone interview. “Your vote is how you determine if there’s a school in your neighborhood, whether you can buy a house, if you have access to clean water. It is a building block of full citizenship.”
New York Public Library
In the 1950s and ’60s, civil rights activists took to the streets to demand fuller enfranchisement for all Black Americans. “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
Bob Adelman Estate
Organizers such as Fannie Lou Hamer, speaking outside the U.S. Capitol in 1965, were instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Their struggle to make the nation fulfill the promises of the 15th and 19th Amendments for all citizens continues to this day, from battles over voter ID laws to the push for better access to polling places, early voting and voting by mail.
William J. Smith/Associated Press
After the ratification of the 19th Amendment, many suffragists shifted their attention to ensuring that women knew how to use their new right, and to establishing further protections for them under the law. In 1923, Alice Paul and her fellow suffragist Crystal Eastman, a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, sat down to write what became the Equal Rights Amendment, which built on the promises of the 19th to ensure equality for women in all aspects of the law. The measure was first introduced to Congress that same year. Paul rewrote it in 1943, with the text that stands to this day: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The E.R.A. was passed by Congress in 1972. It moved to the state legislatures but failed to reach the three-fourths threshold for ratification before a congressional deadline. On Jan. 15, 2020, Virginia finally became the 38th state to ratify the E.R.A. The law’s fate is still uncertain.
Anita Pollitzer — a South Carolina suffragist who helped lead the final campaign for the 19th Amendment in Tennessee, left — and Paul visiting Susan B. Anthony’s grave in 1920.
Library of Congress
The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago in 1920 to help millions of women exercise their new right to the ballot. Today, there are more than 700 local chapters of the league, in all 50 states.
Library of Virginia
Mary Church Terrell — pictured in 1901 with her daughter, Phyllis — was among the suffrage leaders who campaigned for the E.R.A. “It is hard to believe that the men in this country who have it in their power to deal justly in this particular will refuse any longer to enact this legislation which will redress a wrong and lighten the burdens which thousands of women now unnecessarily bear,” she testified before Congress in 1948.
A supporter at a rally for the E.R.A. in New York on March 12, 1977, a few months before Paul died. Indiana became the 35th state to ratify the measure — which is also known as the Alice Paul Amendment, in her honor — that year. It would be the last to do so until Nevada in 2017.
Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times
Hazel Hunkins Hallinan marching at the front of a suffrage protest in Washington in 1917 and at an E.R.A. rally in the capital, 60 years later.
Library of Congress; Teresa Zabala/The New York Times
American women’s struggle for equality wasn’t just about what laws said: It was about making sure women’s voices were part of the conversation when those laws were made. The first woman elected to Congress — Jeannette Rankin, Republican of Montana — won her seat in the House of Representatives in 1916. But for a long time, she was in a very small club. Ten years, and five elections, after the 19th Amendment became law, there were nine women in the 531-member Congress, all in the House. The first woman elected to the Senate — Hattie Caraway, Democrat of Arkansas — would not win her seat until 1932. By 1970, 50 years after the enfranchisement of America’s women, there were still only 11 of them in Congress; one was Shirley Chisholm, the legislature’s first Black female member.
Cora Reynolds Anderson, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, was the first Native woman elected to a state legislature. She served one term as a Republican in the Michigan House of Representatives, from 1925 to 1926. The first Native women elected to the national legislature — Deb Haaland of New Mexico, a member of Laguna Pueblo, and Sharice Davids of Kansas, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, both Democrats — would not win their seats in the House until 2018.
Michigan Tech Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
Patsy Takemoto Mink, a Democrat from Hawaii, was the first woman of color elected to Congress, in 1964. As a member of the House of Representatives, she was the lead author of Title IX, the landmark 1972 law that bars schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex.
Bettmann/Getty Images
On the day in 1968 when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress, Chisholm wore white in a tribute to the suffragists. Four years later, she declared her candidacy for the presidency, making the New York Democrat — pictured at her announcement in January 1972 — the first African-American from either major political party to mount a campaign for the White House.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, was the first woman elected to both chambers of Congress, serving eight years in the House and 24 in the Senate. In 1964, she declared her candidacy for the presidency, becoming the first woman to seek the nomination from either major political party. (Only one woman, Hillary Clinton, has won a major party’s nomination for president.)
David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis, via Getty Images
On Aug. 11, 2020, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, tapped Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. She will join Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin as only the third woman nominated for vice president by a major political party — and the first Black woman or person of Indian descent on a major party’s presidential ticket.
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
One hundred years after millions of American women cast their first ballots, Harris is one of 26 women serving in the Senate. Another 101 are Representatives in the House. Women are governors of nine states, as well as the territories of Puerto Rico and Guam. Four serve as Congressional delegates for American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. There is still progress to be made. But all this would be unimaginable if women had not won the vote.
A project by Veronica Chambers, with Jennifer Harlan, Jennifer Schuessler, Christoph Fuhrmans and Nick Donofrio. Photo edited by Anika Burgess. Designed and produced by Danny DeBelius. Additional support from Abby Wood, Laura Bullard, Arlene Schneider, Jim Schembari, Sarah Borell, Amanda Cordero and Dave Braun.
