Roaring Twenties

Leading Suffragists: The Women Who Won the Vote

The women’s suffrage movement was led by a remarkable group of women who, over 72 years, built the largest and most sustained political movement in American history prior to the civil rights era. They argued, organized, marched, picketed, were arrested, went on hunger strikes, and finally won. The history of the amendment is in The History of the 19th Amendment: A 72-Year Fight; the impact of their victory is in The Impact of the Women’s Vote in the 1920 Election. The parallel rise of the second KKK is a reminder that the 1920s were contested in more ways than one.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the founder of the American women’s rights movement. She was born in Johnstown, New York, in 1815. She attended the Troy Female Seminary and was deeply shaped by the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and 1840s.

In 1840, she married Henry Brewster Stanton, an abolitionist journalist, with whom she had seven children. She helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and authored its Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. She ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from New York in 1866 — losing badly, but becoming one of the first women to seek a seat in Congress (the first woman to run for President was Victoria Woodhull, in 1872; the first woman elected to Congress was Jeannette Rankin of Montana in 1916). She was the first president of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) from 1869 to 1890, and of the merged NAWSA from 1890 to 1892 and again in 1893.

Stanton was a brilliant writer and a controversial figure. Her 1895 book The Woman’s Bible was a critical analysis of biblical passages about women. It cost her the NAWSA presidency. She died in 1902, eighteen years before the amendment became law.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

Susan Brownell Anthony was Stanton’s closest collaborator. Born in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1820, she moved to Rochester, New York, in 1845. She met Stanton in 1851, and the two formed a partnership that would last half a century.

In 1872, Anthony voted in the presidential election in Rochester — explicitly to test whether the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. She was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined $100, which she refused to pay.

Anthony was the principal lobbyist for the women’s suffrage amendment that was first introduced in Congress in 1878 and that would eventually become the Nineteenth Amendment. The amendment was widely known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment”. The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin was introduced in 1979. She died in 1906.

Lucy Stone (1818–1893)

Lucy Stone was the leader of the moderate wing. Born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, in 1818, she was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree (from Oberlin College in 1847). She was a passionate abolitionist and a brilliant orator.

In 1855, she married the journalist Henry Blackwell. The two made a famous pact: Lucy would keep her own name, and any daughters they had would also take her name. Women who followed this practice became known as “Lucy Stoners.”

Stone led the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) from 1869 to 1890. She was a champion of the Fifteenth Amendment and of the Republican Party, which she believed was more likely to support suffrage than the Democrats. She founded the Woman’s Journal, the suffrage movement’s most important newspaper. She died in 1893.

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)

Carrie Chapman Catt was the tactician who won the final victory. Born Carrie Clinton Lane in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1859, she graduated from Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1880. She married Leo Chapman in 1885; he died in 1886. She married George Catt, a wealthy engineer, in 1890.

Catt served as president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 until the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920. Her “Winning Plan” of 1915–17 was a careful, state-by-state strategy: pick the states most likely to ratify, push them first, and add their votes to the federal amendment’s eventual total. The plan worked.

Catt founded the League of Women Voters in 1920. She founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904. She died in 1947.

Alice Paul (1885–1977)

Alice Paul was the militant who forced the issue. Born in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, in 1885, she was a Quaker. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics, where she became involved with the British suffragettes.

Paul returned to the United States in 1910 and joined NAWSA, where she organized the 1913 Washington parade. In 1916, she and Lucy Burns founded the more militant National Woman’s Party (NWP). From 1917 to 1919, the NWP organized the Silent Sentinels pickets at the White House. Paul was arrested, jailed, and force-fed during a hunger strike in October 1917. The 1920 election impact is told in the third long-tail.

In 1923, Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The amendment was approved by Congress in 1972 but failed to be ratified. Paul died in 1977.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931)

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was the African American journalist who insisted that the suffrage movement address the rights of Black women as well as white women. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, she became a teacher, a journalist, and a founder of the NAACP.

Wells-Barnett co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago in 1913, the first Black women’s suffrage organization. She was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She was at the 1913 Washington parade — and was asked by the white organizers to march at the back with the Black delegation. She refused, and cut into the parade with the Illinois delegation instead.

Wells-Barnett wrote The Red Record (1895), a careful tabulation of lynching, and Southern Horrors (1892). She insisted throughout her career that the women’s suffrage movement and the anti-lynching movement were inseparable. She died in 1931.

Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)

Mary Church Terrell was another of the leading African American suffragists. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, she was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and a founder of the NAACP. She was the first African American woman appointed to a major city school board (in Washington, D.C., in 1895).

Frances Willard (1839–1898)

Frances Willard was the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) from 1879 to 1898. She was not primarily a suffragist, but she linked the WCTU’s temperance work to the demand for women’s vote. The WCTU’s slogan — the “Home Protection” ballot — framed the vote as a way for women to defend their families from the effects of alcohol. The linkage of suffrage to temperance was critical to the 1917–20 push. Willard died in 1898.

Inez Milholland and the Suffragist Martyrs

Inez Milholland (1886–1916) was the suffragist martyr of the movement. A lawyer and a brilliant orator, she led the 1913 Washington parade on a white horse. In 1916, she collapsed during a speaking tour; she died weeks later. The Inez Milholland Memorial — a pageant of 5,000 suffragists at the 1920 Republican and Democratic conventions — was organized in her honor. The broader 1920 context is in the 1920 history timeline.

The Movement’s Long Reach

The suffrage movement’s leaders — Stanton, Anthony, Stone, Catt, Paul, Wells-Barnett, Terrell, Willard — built the most important single expansion of American democracy since the abolition of slavery. Their work was the foundation for the Equal Rights Amendment of the 1970s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and contemporary reproductive rights movements.

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