Connor Osborne
Professor Demarco
History 107
7 October 2014

Women’s Suffrage: The Fight for Equality

The Women’s Suffrage Movement was a time where women fought for equal rights including the right to vote. Before the movement women were looked down upon. Even at the start of early civilizations women have always come second rate under men. They are looked at weak, uneducated and almost like they were put on this earth only to serve then men and have children. In the mid nineteenth century women’s rights were going to be pushed and the suffrage movement will begin. In the year following the ratification of the fifteenth amendment, which granted voting rights to black men1, a voting rights petition sent to the Senate and House of Representatives requested that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragists signed it.2 Anthony and Stanton, well known in the United States suffrage movement, organized the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. Another women suffrage committee rose up; formed by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, it was dubbed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The AWSA was closer knit towards the Republican Party and protested the challenging tactics of the NWSA. In 1890 the two suffrage organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Stanton became its president, Anthony became its vice president, and Stone became chairman of the executive committee.3
The tactics of the suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Trying to push the limits a little bit, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. She was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully voting for a representative to the Congress of the United States," convicted by the State of New York, and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay a penny of. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned the Congress of the United States requesting, "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."4
The women’s suffrage movement gained followers and supporters that were well known in the country. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and in an editorial published that year in The North Star, wrote, "In respect to political rights, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise."5 Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr., and daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague, and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to the U.S. Congress for woman suffrage "to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."6
There were a countless number of pamphlets and flyers handed out for the cause of Women’s Suffrage. There was a flyer that was handed out in 1910 outside the National American women’s suffrage association on Fifth Avenue, New York. The flyer had a list of the jobs that a women carried out all throughout America and the reasons that they should have the right vote; it gave perspective of how much influence the American women has and that their opinions could help the country.7
Women’s suffrage groups used petitions quite frequently, in 1917 New York adopted women’s suffrage do to a petition from the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Party of