Women first organized and collectively fought for suffrage at the national level in July of 1848. Suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened a meeting of over 300 people in Seneca Falls, New York. In the following decades, women marched, protested, lobbied, and even went to jail in pursuit of securing their constitutional right to vote. By the 1870s, women pressured Congress to vote on an amendment that would recognize their suffrage rights. This amendment was sometimes known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment and later became the 19th Amendment.

The amendment reads: “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 sex.”

Document B

Susan B. Anthony was a strong proponent for women’s rights. Seething at the injustice of her arrest on charges of voting illegally in the 1872 presidential election, Susan B. Anthony embarked on an exhaustive speaking tour. This is an excerpt from her 1873 lecture titled “Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”

“The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“‘We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’

“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government — the ballot.

“For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disenfranchisement of one entire half of the people…is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.”