Ingeniero

THE RIGHT TO VOTE

During the nineteenth century, women in the United States, organized and participated in a large number of reform movements, including movements to recognize the prison system,improve education, ban the sale of alcohol, grant rights to people who were denied them, and most importantly, free slaves.

Some women saw similarities in the social status of women and slaves.Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone were not only feminists who fought for the rights of women but also fervent abolitionists who fought to do away with Slavery. These brave people weresocial leaders who supported the rights of both, women and blacks. They were fighting against a belief that voting should be tied to land ownership, and because land was owned by men, and in some cases bytheir widows, only those who held the greatest stake in government, that is the male landowners, were considered worthy of the vote. Women did not conform to the requirements.

A number of maleabolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Philips, also supported the right of women to speak and to participate equally with men in antislavery activities.

Probably more that anyother movement, abolitionism, offered women a previously denied entry into politics. They became involved primarily in order to better their living conditions and improve the conditions of others.However, they gained the respect of those they convinced and also earned the right to be considered equal citizens.

When the civil war between the North and the South ended in 1865, the Fourteenth andFifteenth Amendments to the Constitution adopted in 1868 and 1870 granted citizenship and suffrage to blacks but no to women. Discouraged but resolved, feminists worked tirelessly to influence more andmore women to demand the right to vote. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory had yielded to demands by feminists, but the states on the east coast resisted more stubbornly than before.

A woman’s...