With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, women gained the right to vote. The amendment proclaims, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The campaign for female enfranchisement, however, began decades earlier in 1848 at Seneca Falls with the Declaration of Sentiments (p. 393) and developed into a national, often heated, conversation during the next decades. The question of both the rights and the role of women in a rapidly changing social and political environment was a complex one. Some claimed that the Constitution already granted the vote to women, who need only seize their legal right; others took up economic and psychological issues related to gender identity; others looked to women’s impact on the growing labor force, and that of their children as well. In this Conversation, you will explore all of these issues and investigate the changing roles of women in America through the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day.

Sources

Susan B. Anthony, Sentencing Statement (1872)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Women and Economics (1898)

Thorstein Veblen, from The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Edith Wharton, from The House of Mirth (1905)

Florence Kelley, Speech on Child Labor (1905)

Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company, Suffragette Madonna and Uncle Sam, Suffragee (1909)

Bertha M. Boye, Votes for Women (1911)

Marie Jenney Howe, An Anti-Suffrage Monologue (1913)

Gail Collins, from When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1950 to the Present (2009)

Madeleine M. Kunin, from The New Feminist Agenda (2012)