The Eventual Success of Women's Suffrage Rhetoric

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The Eventual Success of Women's Suffrage Rhetoric In One Half the People and Women and the American Experience, we learn that women were outraged upon finding that the 15th amendment constitutionally enfranchised men of every race and ethnicity, but still excluded women. According to Susan B. Anthony, one-time president of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, this occurrence brought women “to the lowest depths of political degradation” (Woloch 329). Women quickly realized that the governing body of white men would more quickly give freedom to uneducated and poor foreigners than to their own mothers and wives, whom were steadily beginning to make financial contributions at home, as a result of industrialization. The analysis, herein, is meant to illustrate how the frequent lack of unity in the rhetoric of the various women’s suffrage organizations postponed and often stifled women’s attainment of full constitutional enfranchisement, but eventually forced the government to give into the women’s plight. Women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, of the NWSA, preached that “women must lead the way to their own enfranchisement and work out her own salvation” (Woloch 330). Women’s suffrage groups like this one sought to give women a political voice of representation, such that they might eventually be recognized as full-fledged citizens, thereby earning the right to vote. Each group had their own reasons for wanting such rights, but basically, they all wanted to give women the legal ability to defend their own best interests. Lower and middle class women, for instance, sought the ability to vote on regulations reg... ... middle of paper ... ...y a sympathizer to the cause—and congress, to get nervous and side with the seemingly more reasonable NAWSA, which had been patriotically supportive throughout the war effort. So, with the NAWSA’s aims in mind, legislation was finally endorsed, but only as a result of the NWP’s more militant tactics. In conclusion, the general disunity in rhetoric of the various women’s suffrage organizations postponed and often stifled women’s attainment of full constitutional enfranchisement, but eventually, this same disunity forced the government to give into the women’s plight. Works Cited Scott, Anne F. and Scott, Andrew M. One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage. NY: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1975. Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience, Volume Two: From 1860. NY: McGrawHill, Inc.,1994

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