Module Four

As the United States moved into the 20th century, many of the early leaders of the suffrage movement including Susan Brownell Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarina Irene Howard Nichols had died, never having voted legally in an election.

Many women, frustrated with the lack of movement towards a universal suffrage amendment, looked at other means to draw attention to their cause. New leaders such as Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett refused to be silenced and began using new tactics to gain national attention. Street-speaking, parades, demonstrations, picketing, arrests and imprisonment were used to demand the right to vote.

Lucy Joslyn Cutler Daniels from Grafton was one of the new "radical" suffragists who refused to pay her taxes, citing "taxation without representation" as the reason. She was a "Silent Sentinel" in D.C. and Boston where she and others used President Woodrow Wilson's words against him to illustrate the hypocrisy in supporting democracy abroad, but denying American women the same right. Arrested four times, Daniels used both, her voice and her will, to push for the suffrage amendment.

What role did Vermont play in the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 and what was the legacy of suffragists like Lucy Daniels in securing the right to vote?