Women’s Work: More than Seneca Falls — The Long Fight for Women’s Suffrage, Part 1

The story of women winning the right to vote often begins in a little town near the shores of Cayuga Lake, in the Finger Lakes District of upstate New York. In 1848, the town of Seneca Falls had 4,300 residents. People might have expected to see a push for women’s rights start in a larger city, but instead, Seneca Falls has become synonymous with the birth of women’s suffrage.

Just as the use of the word suffrage to talk about voting goes back further than the United States itself, the idea of women’s voting rights developed long before Seneca Falls. Women could vote in New Jersey between 1790 and 1807, as documented by the Museum of the American Revolution. (In 1807, the state legislature removed women’s right to vote.)

Those early voters included widows and single women, married women and their daughters. One of those New Jersey voters was Mary Garrison, who voted in 1800 when she was 22 years old. By the time Mary died in 1863, women’s suffrage had transformed from a temporary right in her home state to the subject of a national movement for women’s rights.

Thirty years after New Jersey revised its laws to exclude women from voting, Kentucky added limited voting opportunities for some women in 1838, a full decade before the gathering at Seneca Falls. The law developed as the state legislature created a state-wide common school system for white children. Under this plan, cities and towns could create their own districts, but they would also need to generate some of the funds for the schools in order to get matching funds from the state.

The new law authorized that “any widow or feme sole [unmarried woman who could legally own property], over 21 years of age, residing and owning property subject to taxation for school purposes…shall have the right to vote.” Additionally, the parents of minor children — including mothers — also had the right to vote. Women could vote in Kentucky specifically for the purposes of creating school boards and addressing tax issues related to schools. Unlike New Jersey, however, no poll lists have yet been found, nor any sources discussing Kentucky women’s voting experiences or viewpoints.

These earlier stories were largely forgotten as Seneca Falls came to symbolize the start of the movement. It was certainly a pivotal moment: A call to action that became known as the Declaration of Sentiments, argued that women should be able to vote. For the first time, women articulated why there needed to be a movement for women’s rights. Voting was just one of their concerns, but women at Seneca Falls explained why it mattered. Without the vote, women had no direct say in creating the laws that bound their lives. The solution, then, was to give women the right to vote so they could have a say in changing the law as well.

Of the 300 Seneca Falls Convention attendees, only a third signed the Declaration of Sentiments calling for women’s suffrage. Two weeks later, however, women’s rights advocates persisted: The Rochester Women’s Rights Convention approved the Seneca Falls Declaration, with support from Frederick Douglass, the only Black attendee at Seneca Falls, and Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman whose speeches would soon electrify audiences. In 1850 the First National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, brought together nearly a thousand people, including the self-emancipated Sojourner Truth. Her presence reminded activists that the fight for equality was never just about one identity alone. Over the next decade, the movement continued to expand, with annual women’s rights conventions across the Midwest and Northeast.

When the Civil War started, there were no more conventions. The movement’s momentum paused as the nation fractured. Women’s rights activists focused on supporting the war. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a key figure at Seneca Falls, had begun working with Susan B. Anthony in the early 1850s. In 1863, the two women created the Women’s Loyal National League after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The League gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures for a petition calling for the end of slavery entirely; they thought the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t go far enough, since it only ended slavery in the Confederate states. Like many others in the women’s rights movement at the time, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Stanton and Anthony had long fought for the abolition of slavery as well as for women’s rights.

Now, they appealed to women directly:

While slavery exists anywhere there can be freedom nowhere. THERE MUST BE A LAW ABOLISHING SLAVERY. We have undertaken to canvass the Nation for freedom. Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the Government is through the exercise of this, one, sacred, Constitutional ‘RIGHT OF PETITION;’ and we ask you to use it now to the utmost.

Their efforts arguably helped lead to the creation of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. This amendment was ratified in December 1865, emancipating approximately four million women and men nationwide.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified in July 1868, establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection of all Americans, women’s rights activists thought suffrage would be theirs. When the 15th Amendment was ratified in early 1870, their hopes were crushed as the government preserved voting as an act for men alone: “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 race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The 15th Amendment was hugely important in the history of voting rights, but not for women of any race in the United States. After the passage of the 15^th Amendment, women’s rights activists divided into two camps. Some women, like Lucy Stone, who had organized the 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention, and Julia Ward Howe, swallowed any disappointment about the 15th Amendment and instead saw it as a measure of progress. They formed the American Woman Suffrage Association and began efforts to secure women’s suffrage within individual states. But Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton chose a different path. They directly opposed the 15th Amendment because it did not include women’s suffrage. With their new National Woman Suffrage Association, they continued to argue for a constitutional amendment. Their opposition revealed tensions in the movement, including troubling racial hierarchies that would shape its future.

The fight for women’s suffrage entered a new phase. Western territories, which needed to reach certain population numbers in order to gain statehood, began to allow women to vote. In 1869, Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote, and in 1870 Utah Territory did the same. Washington and Montana Territories extended the vote to women in the 1880s, and as some of these western territories became states, they solidified suffrage for white women in particular, including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, all before 1900.

Meanwhile, Black women continued building organizations of their own. In 1880, Mary Ann Shadd Cary created the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association to support Black women’s suffrage. Some Black women also joined both the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Seneca Falls looked like a unified call for equality, but in truth, the fight for women’s suffrage was a more complex, contested movement. What had started as a rather small, radical idea had become impossible to ignore. By 1900, some American women could vote in some elections and in some parts of the country. It would take another two decades before the 19th Amendment solidified women’s suffrage — and decades more for every American woman to get access to the ballot.

Part 2 of this 2-part series that will continue in August.