Redefining ‘true womanhood’

Support for voting rights for women had existed since the country’s founding, and suffrage organizations, though heartened to see individual states grant women the right to vote, wanted to focus on a national amendment. The movement was led by women who rejected that notion of what most people believed to be “true womanhood” – “the idea that the only ‘true’ woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family,” according to an article on History.com. Many events prior to the failed 1878 amendment had displayed the urgency with which women advocated for the right to go to the polls, as well as women’s rights in general. An 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, drew both male and female abolitionist activists from across the country (Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would found the National Woman Suffrage Association 20 years later).

Though their efforts stalled during the Civil War, many women’s rights advocates viewed the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment, giving Black men the right to vote, as a logical precursor to extending he same right to women. And by the last decade of the 19th century, Stanton ascended to the presidency of a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association. At the same time, African-American women such as Sojourner Truth led advocacy efforts for Black women as well, laying the foundation for organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896. Though Sojourner Truth had died more than a decade before that group’s founding by Mary Church Terrell, it stood as an example of her life’s work coming to fruition.

Redefining ‘true womanhood’

Support for voting rights for women had existed since the country’s founding, and suffrage organizations, though heartened to see individual states grant women the right to vote, wanted to focus on a national amendment. The movement was led by women who rejected that notion of what most people believed to be “true womanhood” – “the idea that the only ‘true’ woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family,” according to an article on History.com. Many events prior to the failed 1878 amendment had displayed the urgency with which women advocated for the right to go to the polls, as well as women’s rights in general. An 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, drew both male and female abolitionist activists from across the country (Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would found the National Woman Suffrage Association 20 years later).

Though their efforts stalled during the Civil War, many women’s rights advocates viewed the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment, giving Black men the right to vote, as a logical precursor to extending he same right to women. And by the last decade of the 19th century, Stanton ascended to the presidency of a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association. At the same time, African-American women such as Sojourner Truth led advocacy efforts for Black women as well, laying the foundation for organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896. Though Sojourner Truth had died more than a decade before that group’s founding by Mary Church Terrell, it stood as an example of her life’s work coming to fruition.

Put down the beer, pick up a ballot

At the turn of the century, advocates linked the domesticity of women – seen for far too long as a disadvantage for their cause – to a more moral and just society. Those involved with the Temper-ance Movement naturally saw the rise of women’s rights as a proverbial feather in their cap.

The progress made by these organizations once again slowed with World War I, but, as would also happen in World War II, women worked for their country, doing their part to support soldiers on the front lines and elsewhere.

“Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men,” the History.com article notes.

In 1916, the year before the United States entered the war, women’s rights took a more hardline turn with the founding of the National Women’s Party. Founded by Alice Paul, this organization used more aggressive advocacy tactics, such as parades in major U.S. cities and the formation of picket lines outside the White House. Participants were often arrested and imprisoned, and many of the imprisoned women participated in hunger strikes in protest of their treatment.