what two strategies did womens rights activists simultaneously use to try to get the right to vote

The fight for women's suffrage in the The states began with the women's rights move in the mid-nineteenth century. This reform attempt encompassed a broad spectrum of goals earlier its leaders decided to focus showtime on securing the vote for women. Women'south suffrage leaders, withal, disagreed over strategy and tactics: whether to seek the vote at the federal or state level, whether to offer petitions or pursue litigation, and whether to persuade lawmakers individually or to take to the streets. Both the women's rights and suffrage movements provided political feel for many of the early women pioneers in Congress, just their internal divisions foreshadowed the persistent disagreements among women in Congress that emerged afterwards the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

/tiles/non-collection/East/Essay1_2_votes_for_women_button_2019_096_000-i.xml Collection of the U.Southward. House of Representatives
Almost this object Manufactured by the Whitehead & Hoag Visitor in Newark, New Jersey, this dime-sized push announces support for women'southward voting rights. The phrase "Votes for Women" was one of the suffrage movement's main rallying cries.

The first try to organize a national movement for women'south rights occurred in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, about 300 people—almost of whom were women—attended the Seneca Falls Convention to outline a management for the women's rights motility.^two Stanton'due south call to arms, her "Declaration of Sentiments," echoed the Announcement of Independence: "Nosotros hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." In a listing of resolutions, Stanton cataloged economical and educational inequities, restrictive laws on matrimony 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 correct to the constituent franchise"—despite objections from Mott and others who considered this provision too radical. The convention eventually approved the voting rights resolution after abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in support of it.^iv

Like many other women reformers of the era, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a Massachusetts instructor, had both been agile in the abolitionist crusade to end slavery. Afterwards first meeting in 1850, Stanton and Anthony forged a lifetime brotherhood every bit women's rights activists. Following the Ceremonious War, they helped build a motion dedicated to women's suffrage and pushed lawmakers to guarantee their rights during Reconstruction.⁵

Afterward the emancipation of iv meg enslaved African Americans, Radical Republicans in Congress proposed a constitutional amendment extending citizenship rights and equal protection nether the law to all "persons born or naturalized in the U.s.a.." Whether those rights would include women was unclear, and debates in both houses of Congress focused on defining citizenship. Many Members praised the virtues of "manhood suffrage" and expressed concern virtually the inclusive language in early drafts of the proposed amendment. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Subpoena went equally far every bit to ascertain voting rights as the exclusive privilege of "male citizens"—explicitly calculation gender to the Constitution for the first time.^half-dozen

During the argue over the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton objected to the utilise of "that word, 'male,'" and sent to Congress the first of many petitions supporting women's suffrage.⁷ On Jan 23, 1866, Representative James Brooks of New York read into the official record Stanton'due south petition forth with an accompanying letter by Anthony. Some Members, including George Washington Julian of Indiana, welcomed the opportunity to enfranchise women. In December 1868, he proposed a constitutional subpoena to guarantee citizens the right to vote "without any distinction or bigotry whatever founded on race, colour, or sex." Julian's resolution never came to a vote, and even Congressmen who favored expanding the electorate were not willing to support women's suffrage.^eight

/tiles/non-drove/E/Essay1_3_Petition_for_Woman_Suffrage_1878_NARA-1.xml Epitome courtesy of the National Athenaeum and Records Assistants
About this tape Signed by Frederick Douglass Jr., son of the famous abolitionist, and his married woman, Virginia Hewlett Douglass, this 1878 petition for woman suffrage asks the Business firm and Senate to amend the Constitution and allow women to vote. The Douglasses topped the petition signed by many other African-American residents of the Uniontown neighborhood of Washington, DC, in what is today Anacostia.

In 1869 Congress ignored renewed calls to enshrine women's suffrage in the Constitution while working to pass an amendment guaranteeing the voting rights of African-American men. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified by the states in 1870, declared that the correct to vote "shall non exist denied or abridged by the United States or by whatever State on account of race, color, or previous status of servitude." That year, Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi was elected to the Senate and Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina won election to the House. They were the first African-American lawmakers to serve in Congress.

During the congressional boxing over the Fifteenth Subpoena, Stanton and Anthony had led a lobbying effort to ensure that voting rights for women were included in the legislation. With increasing frequency, Stanton denounced the extension of voting rights to African-American men while restrictions on women remained. She praised the virtues of "educated white women," and warned that new immigrants and African Americans were not prepared to exercise the rights of citizens. Stanton's rhetoric alienated African-American women involved in the fight for women's rights, and similar ideas about race and gender persisted in the women'southward suffrage movement well into the twentieth century.⁹

In the wake of these setbacks in Congress, women's rights reformers responded past focusing their message exclusively on the right to vote.^ten But the women'due south move fragmented over tactics and broke into two distinct organizations in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Stanton and Anthony created the NWSA and directed its efforts toward changing federal police. Eventually, the NWSA began a parallel effort to secure the right to vote among the individual states with the promise of starting a ripple effect to win the franchise at the federal level. The NWSA, based in New York, largely relied on its own statewide network. But with Stanton and Anthony giving speeches across the country, the NWSA as well drew recruits from all over. Although California Senator Aaron Sargent introduced a women's suffrage amendment in 1878, the NWSA campaign stalled. Meanwhile, Lucy Stone, a 1-time Massachusetts antislavery abet and a prominent lobbyist for women'due south rights, formed the AWSA.^xi As old abolitionists, the leaders of the AWSA had mobilized state and local efforts to flood Washington with anti-slavery petitions, and they practical that same tactic later the Ceremonious War to advance women's rights, mostly at the state level. During the 1880s, the AWSA was better funded and the larger of the two groups, but it had but a regional reach.

When neither grouping attracted broad public back up, suffrage leaders recognized their sectionalization had become an impediment to progress. Historian Nancy Woloch described early on suffragists' efforts as "a crusade in political education by women and for women, and for most of its beingness, a crusade in search of a constituency."¹² The turning point came in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the nation experienced a surge of volunteerism amidst middle-course women—activists in progressive causes, members of women's clubs and professional societies, temperance advocates, and participants in local civic and charity organizations. The determination of these women to aggrandize their sphere of activities farther outside the dwelling helped the suffrage movement go mainstream and provided new momentum for its supporters.

By 1890, seeking to capitalize on their newfound constituency but withal without powerful allies in Congress, the two groups united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Clan (NAWSA). Led initially by Stanton and then by Anthony, the NAWSA drew upon the support of women activists in organizations such every bit the Women's Merchandise Union League, the Woman'southward Christian Temperance Union, and the National Consumers League. For the next 20 years, the NAWSA worked equally a nonpartisan organisation focused on gaining the vote in u.s.a. as a precursor to a federal suffrage subpoena.¹³

/tiles/non-collection/w/wic_cont1_6_statue_mott_anthony_stanton_aoc.xml Epitome courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol Carved by Adelaide Johnson and on display in the Usa Capitol Rotunda, this monument was given to Congress in 1921. It commemorates iii founders of America's women's suffrage motion: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.

Merely the suffrage movement was only so welcoming. In the final ii decades of the nineteenth century, civil rights and voting rights came under constant set on in large sections of the state as state policies and court decisions finer nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Equally the system of segregation known equally Jim Crow crystallized in the South, African Americans saw protections for their civil and political rights disappear, and few Members of Congress or suffrage advocates were willing to fight for any additional federal safeguards. In an 1898 accost to the NAWSA, African-American activist Mary Church Terrell decried these injustices, while remaining hopeful "not simply in the prospective enfranchisement of my sex but in the emancipation of my race." African-American suffragists like Terrell connected to struggle to expand access to the ballot. Their voices, nonetheless, could merely exist heard outside of Congress. In the Firm and Senate, those voices had fallen silent: from 1901 to 1929 no African-American legislator served in Congress. The promise of the Reconstruction Era—that American democracy could be more just and more representative—was undermined by an organized political move working to restrict voting rights and exclude millions of Americans from the political procedure.^xiv

West of the Mississippi River, the new activist climate and the creation of the NAWSA bore fruit. Women had won complete voting rights in Wyoming in 1869, simply almost 25 years had elapsed without another victory. After launching the NAWSA in 1890, withal, women secured the right to vote in three other western states—Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896).

"Why the West showtime?" remains an enduring puzzle. Some scholars propose that the West proved to exist more progressive in extending the vote to women, in part, in guild to attract women westward and to boost the population. Others suggest that women played nontraditional roles on the hardscrabble frontier and were accorded a more equal condition by men. Still others find that political expediency by territorial officials played a role. All agree, though, that western women organized themselves effectively to win the vote.¹⁵

Betwixt 1910 and 1914, the NAWSA's intensified advancement atomic number 82 to successes at the country level in Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon. In Illinois, future Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick assisted equally a lobbyist in Springfield where the state legislature adopted women's suffrage in 1913, the beginning such victory in a land east of the Mississippi. Women won the correct to vote the next year in Montana, thank you in function to the efforts of another future Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin.

Despite this momentum, some reformers pushed to quicken the pace of change. In 1913 Alice Paul, a immature Quaker activist who participated in the militant British suffrage movement, formed the Congressional Spousal relationship, later named the National Woman's Political party (NWP), as a rival to the NAWSA. Paul'south group adopted the British tactics of picketing, mass rallies, marches, and ceremonious disobedience to enhance sensation and support. The NWP's more than confrontational style attracted a new generation of women to the movement and kept it in the public eye. Equally function of their campaign, the NWP relentlessly attacked the Democratic administration of President Woodrow Wilson for refusing to support a women's suffrage amendment.¹⁶

In 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, the veteran suffragist and sometime NAWSA president, returned to lead the organization. An adept administrator and organizer, Catt authored the "Winning Programme" that called for disciplined and relentless efforts to achieve state referenda on women's suffrage, especially in nonwestern states.¹⁷ Key victories followed in 1917 in Arkansas and New York—the offset in the South and Eastward. The 1916 election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to serve in the 65th Congress (1917–1919) crowned the "Winning Programme" campaign.

Catt'south "Winning Plan" and Paul's protest campaign coincided with the Usa' entry into Globe War I.^xviii Catt and the NAWSA eagerly embraced the state of war, assertive that women would rapidly bear witness themselves in their support for the cause overseas and that extending the franchise at home would be an important step for national readiness and morale. Moreover, leading suffrage advocates insisted the failure to extend the vote to women might impede their participation in the war try simply when they were most needed equally workers and volunteers outside the domicile.

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Source: https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/

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