Women’s Lasting Battle Towards Suffrage

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Women’s Lasting Battle towards Suffrage
On August 18, 1920, the Constitutional Amendment that guarantees all American women the right to vote was ratified. The ratification of the 19th amendment was the beginning of political equality in the United States. However, the battle for women’s rights began in 1848 and continued for over seventy-two years; becoming one of the longest-lasting reform movements in American history . The real question is: why did it take so long for women to achieve the right to vote? Many anti-suffragettes stated that the wording in the 14th Amendment did not give women their right to vote. However, it is also genuine to say that many people in America were still in favor of the patriarchal system. Therefore, the battle for women’s right to vote took so long not only because not only because the text of the 14th Amendment itself was an obstacle, but also because so many Americans believed that a separate domestic world was essential for the nation.
One of the most important figures of the women’s rights movement was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was the principal writer of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document signed in 1848 by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. This Declaration of Sentiments was prepared in the first women’s rights conference, named the Seneca Falls Convention. The document stated reasons why men had absolute power over women. Some of the reasons were that women’s right to property and wages that they had earned were taken, all colleges had denied their right to an education, and lastly, “having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.” In ad...

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...Supreme Court in the Minor v. Happersett case argued that the 14th Amendment did not include women in the definition of citizenship. However, it is possible that the patriarchal norms about women’s rights affected this Supreme Court decision. Like stated before, the 14th Amendment says that all people born in the United States are citizens, but section two only includes the word “male.” Therefore, it is possible that the Supreme Court had interpreted this Amendment based on what seemed convenient at the time, which was obeying these traditional roles between men and women. To conclude, there are many women today in Congress who are leaders and obviously, the prediction that the nation would end if women had a political voice was in fact, false. Although it took more than seven decades for women to achieve suffrage, the battle pushed America closer to equal rights.

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