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Left: Gertrude Weil is on the left in this photo taken inside the Equal Suffrage Association headquarters office in Raleigh in 1920. Photo courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina
Right: A National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage circular containing “Household Hints” along with anti-suffrage propaganda. Photo courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina
Above left: The Jan. 26, 1939, issue of Watauga Democrat published a photo of suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Above right: A portrait of Sojourner Truth is taken in Detroit in 1864. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress
The Work of Their Hands, Hearts and Minds 100 Years Ago, American Women Won the Right to Vote
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he road to Nashville, Tennessee — where the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” cleared its final hurdle on Aug. 18, 1920 — began in Seneca Falls, New York, seven decades earlier. At the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments was signed by 68 women and 32 men, concluding, “Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country … and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist 18 | July-August 2020
that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” National women’s rights conventions followed in 1850 and were held annually through 1860, and leaders like Stanton were initially allied with the abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, spoke to a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, delivering a speech known as “Ain’t I a Woman?” “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women to-
gether ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them,” she is quoted as saying. The movement was halted temporarily by the Civil War. A setback came in 1868, when the states ratified the 14th Amendment, which defined “citizens” and “voters” exclusively as male. In 1869 Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association to secure a nationwide right to vote via a Constitutional amendment. In the same year, Lucy Stone and other “more conservaaawmag.com
