Women's Suffrage Movement

Movement to gain women the right to vote in the United States. During the nineteenth century, the women's suffrage movement, intent on winning the right for women to vote, emerged and gradually spread throughout Europe and the United States. Participants in the movement were intent on achieving their aim of political participation and the right to vote for all women.

Women's suffrage was such a radical idea at the time that the first women “suffragettes,” as they were known, were subjected to all forms of humiliation, social rejection, violence, and even imprisonment. To imagine how completely women were excluded from public life, consider that it was not until 1928 that Englishwoman Frances Wright became the first woman to address an American audience composed of both men and women.

It was not until 1870 that the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to all American males, regardless of race. Previously, only white males enjoyed the right to vote. Women finally received the right to vote with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Many black women were still denied this right, however, due to intimidations imposed by such measures as poll taxes, literacy tests, and other educational and character requirements.

The National Women's Party, which was one of the major women's groups working toward the vote for all women before the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, had in fact often worked against the interests of black women. For one thing, they were reluctant to campaign in the South for the right for black women to vote because they felt that this would harm their interests as a whole and reduce support for their movement.

The president of the National Women's Party, Alice Paul, did not actively support the right to vote for black women. This was revealed through some of her [Page 893]actions, such as refusing to say that she supported the Nineteenth Amendment and refusing to allow black women to speak at conventions. Indeed, many in the women's suffrage movement were angered that black men had received the right to vote ahead of them, and they tended not to support suffrage for their black sisters.

Meanwhile, however, African women themselves took up the cause for suffrage. Among the most prominent African American suffragettes were Sojourner Truth, Harriet Forten Purvis, Margaretta Forten, Caroline Remond Putman, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Ida Wells-Barnett, Adella Hunt Logan, and Mary Church Terrell. These women struggled against both racist and gender discrimination in an effort to gain the same rights as white women.