TOEFL Reading Practice

Passage 2

Women’s Suffrage

1 The women’s suffrage movement in the United States was not, as many may believe, a twentieth-century phenomenon. There are records dating back as far as colonial America that show attempts by women to have a voice in government. Those efforts continued in an ebb-and-flow fashion for more than two hundred years until American women were finally given the right to vote in 1920, and the struggle for equal rights for women continues today.

2 While some men in colonial America supported women’s rights—most notably, founding father Thomas Paine—the commonly held view of women in the 1600s was that they were “interior beings” who were not allowed to own anything, whether property, their earnings, or even their own children. Legally speaking, women were no different from slaves, criminals, and the insane.

3 In 1648, a woman named Margaret Brent attempted to change this. Brent was the first female landowner in the colonies as well as the first female lawyer. She was also the first woman to try to obtain the right to vote. Her business successes led her to become executor of Maryíand Governor Leonard Caívert’s estáte. It was after Caívert’s death in January 1648 that Brent demanded two votes in the State assembly: one for herself as a landowner, and one representing Calvert because she held his power of attorney. Brent’s request was denied by reason of her gender. There is no further evidence to suggest that Brent continued her crusade. It would be another 200 years before the next documented women’s suffrage movement took place at the Seneca Falls Convention.

4 The idea for the convention held in Seneca Falls, New York was sparked by events at the World Anti-Síavery Convention in London in 1840. B (A) It was there that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady S tan ton met as American delegates to the convention. B (B) Eight years later, they met again in Seneca Falls, where Stanton lived. B (C) They discussed the recent passage of the New York Married Women’s Property Act, iegislation that granted married women the right to own their own property. B (D) Believing the law did not go far enough, the women dedded to hold a convention “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women”. Drawing ideas from the Declaration of Independence, Stanton wrote a Declararon ofSentiments, the document that became the foundation of the convention.

5 The convention drew about 300 people, including 40 men, one of whom was Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had become a powerful and outspoken newspaper editor. During the five-day convention, all the Declaration’s resolutions were passed except for the one calling for women’s suffrage. Days later, newspapers such as the New York Herald derided the meeting, but in so doing, they printed the Declaration in its entirety. Stanton was ecstatic over the publicity, asserting that it would start womcn thinking and men, too. She felt that the first step toward progress had been taken.

6 While their cause was largely sidelined during the Civil War (1861-1865), it regained momentum in the late 1860s, when feminists found themselves split over the proposed 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave voting rights to black men. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were incensed that the amendment did not address women’s right to vote. Others supported the amendment, theorizing that once black men were enfranchised, women’s enfranchisement would soon follow.

7 In 1872, two years after black men were given the right to vote, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for casting a ballot in a presidential election. During her trial, Anthony made one of the most legendary speeches of her time. “[I] simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed . . . by the National Constitution. The preamble of the Federal Constitution says . . . we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; not yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people . . . women as well as men.” Despite her eloquent defense, Anthony was fined $100, which she refused to pay.

8 In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), headed by Anthony, began seeing the results of their state voting rights campaigns. Colorado became the first state to grant women the right to vote, and over the next decade a dozen other States followed suit. By 1919, Congress had enough votes to pass a federal law giving all women the right to vote. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified August 18, 1920, states that “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”. That same year NAWSA became the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization still in existence today.