Women's Right to Vote!

Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or marital status.
Women's suffrage has been granted at various times in various countries throughout the world, and in many countries it was granted before universal suffrage.


The modern movement for women's suffrage originated in France in the 1780s and 1790s, where Antoine Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges advocated women's suffrage in national elections. In medieval France and several other European countries, voting for city and town assemblies and meetings was open to the heads of households. In Sweden, during the age of liberty between 1718 and 1771, women were permitted to vote if they were tax paying guild-members. Women were entitled to vote in the Corsican Republic in 1755 whose Constitution stipulated a national representative assembly elected by all inhabitants over the age of 25, both women (if unmarried or widowed) and men. Women's suffrage was ended when France annexed the island in 1769.


In the years before World War I, Norway (1913) and Denmark (1915) also gave women the right to vote, and it was extended throughout the remaining Australian states. Near the end of the war, various states gave women the right to vote, including Canada, Soviet Russia, Germany and Poland. British women over 30 had the vote in 1918, Dutch women in 1919, and American women in states that had previously denied them suffrage were allowed the vote in 1920. Women in Turkey were granted voting rights in 1926. In 1928, suffrage was extended to all British women on the same terms as men, that is, for persons 21 years old and older.

In the United States, the beginning of the fight for women suffrage is usually traced to the Declaration of Sentiments produced at the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. in 1848. Four years later, at the Woman's Rights Convention in Syracuse in 1852, Susan B. Anthony joined the fight, arguing that «the right women needed above every other...was the right of suffrage».


During debates on the Reconstruction Amendments which extended the vote to ex-slaves (through the 15th Amendment), suffragists pushed hard for universal suffrage, but they never had a chance.


In 1872, a suffragist brought a series of court challenges designed to test whether voting was a "privilege" of "US citizenship" now belonging to women by virtue of the recently adopted 14th Amendment. One such challenge grew out of a criminal prosecution of Susan B. Anthony for illegally voting in the 1872 election. The first case to make its way to the Supreme Court, however, was Minor vs Happersett (1875). In Minor, a unanimous Court rejected the argument that either the privileges and immunities clause or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment extended the vote to women. Following Minor, suffragists turned their attention from the courts to the states and to Congress.


In 1878, a constitutional amendment was proposed that provided «The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex». This same amendment would be introduced in every session of Congress for the next 41 years.


In July 1890, the Territory of Wyoming, which allowed women to vote, was admitted as a state. Wyoming became the first state with women suffrage. By 1900, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho joined Wyoming in allowing women to vote.
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party became the first national political party to have a plank supporting women suffrage. The tide was beginning to turn.


In May, 1919, the necessary two-thirds vote in favour of the women suffrage amendment was finally mustered in Congress, and the proposed amendment was sent to the states for ratification. By July 1920, with a number of primarily southern states adamantly opposed to the amendment, it all came down to Tennessee. It appeared that the amendment might fail by one vote in the Tennessee house, but twenty-four-year-old Harry Burns surprised observers by casting the deciding vote for ratification. At the time of his vote, Burns had in his pocket a letter he had received from his mother urging him, «Don't forget to be a good boy» and «vote for suffrage». Women had finally won the vote in the United States of America.


Sources: Wikipedia; www.history.vt.edu; www.historyteacher.net; http://pennamite.wordpress.com; www.law.umkc.edu