“The Final Rush for Suffrage” in the United States Through the Experience and Contributions of Working-Class Women from the Late 19th Century thro...

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it,” as stated by Helen Keller in her essay Optimism. With the start of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century abolition was a prominent theme in many suffrage activities as the Civil War approached. With the country reunited and slavery conquered, suffrage for African American’s became a new goal alongside achieving the vote for all women. Racial tensions and anti-Semitism paired with discrimination towards the working-class made relations difficult, but it was obvious to all that cooperation was the only means of achieving the vote. As the fight for suffrage concluded, the country’s women contended against the patriarchal system and internal conflict of the movement until they won the battle with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During the late 19th and early 20th century, working-class women in the United States fought for their rights as humans during the fight for suffrage as they persevered against injustices of sex, class, and ethnicity, despite their overshadowed contributions.

In 1848, the convention in Seneca Falls, New York produced the “Declaration of Sentiments” in the name of American women, which was brought about by Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Across the nation, groups came together holding conventions in direct reaction to the convention held at Seneca Falls, in addition to the consequential birth of women’s rights organizations. In 1851 at a convention in Ohio, Sojourner Truth, former slave and activist, gave her famous speech requesting that “if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.” Just as Truth labored for women’s su...

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...edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron de Hart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton, 269-271. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Quoted in Klapper, Melissa R., Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940.New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Klapper, Melissa R., Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940.New York: New York University Press, 2013.

“Equal Suffrage (Nineteenth) Amendment, 1920.” In Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron de Hart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton, 429-431. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Minor v. Happersett, 1874.” In Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron de Hart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton, 315-316. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.