Imagine if only half of the students in your school got to make all the decisions for everybody: what school clubs you could belong to, which sports teams were allowed to play, who could attend dances, who could write for the school newspaper. What if half of your friend group got to decide which kinds of things you could do—which parties you could attend, what clothes you were allowed to wear, what music you could listen to—while the other half just had to go along with those decisions?
What if only half of the whole country could have a say in how things worked, and made all the important decisions, while the other half could only watch?
Until 1920, that was the case in the United States of America. It wasn’t until a century ago that women—half of the nation’s population!—were given the right to have a voice in our government. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave American women the most important tool of democracy: the vote. Until then, men had been making decisions for the entire country. Only men had the right to vote. Only they could choose the nation’s lawmakers and elected officials; only they could decide the laws and policies everyone had to follow. Women were excluded from making those choices.
The woman’s suffrage movement changed all of that.
The suffrage movement was a long campaign to win the vote for women, but its goals went deeper than just achieving voting rights: it wanted to change society’s attitudes about women.
Suffragist women weren’t satisfied with being told they were less smart than men, less important, less capable. So they challenged those assumptions and worked to overturn traditional gender roles and the laws that upheld them.
Women and girls of all ages—daughters and mothers, friends and strangers—came together. They emboldened one another to speak out, to march in the streets, and to protest for the first time. Suffragists were willing to take serious risks to secure a better future for themselves and for generations to come.
It didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t easy. Winning the vote for women took seventy-two years of nonstop work. Three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists—women and men, white and black—rolled up their sleeves to force change.
Through the decades, the fight to achieve woman’s suffrage—“the Cause”—changed the way that society viewed women, and how women saw themselves. It unleashed a power and a potential that had always existed inside them but had previously been forced to stay hidden and quiet.
The women who campaigned for the vote faced anger and danger. They were criticized and insulted. They were pelted with rotten eggs and attacked on the street. Many were even imprisoned. Women of color in the suffrage movement faced additional problems: living in a segregated nation, they were too often kept at a distance by white suffragists.
Bravery and sisterhood motivated them all to keep fighting. They believed in a sense of justice, in democracy and equality. They believed in the intelligence and power of womankind. The suffrage movement developed talented women speakers and writers, organizers and politicians. And it opened up a world of possibility for the next generation of young women and girls.
Voting is a form of power, so this book is—as suffrage leader Alice Paul once described her main goal—about women and girls claiming their rightful powers. And it is also about the forces that fought intensely against them. Winning the vote was a breakthrough in American women’s struggle for basic equality and respect. That struggle continues. It’s up to us all to keep fighting.
And voting is just one way to do it. Even before turning eighteen and earning the right to vote, you have plenty of ways to get involved: join a campaign; write letters to your local and state representatives; become knowledgeable about a cause you care about. Stand up for equal rights for all Americans.
While reading about the events described in this book, you’re going to encounter some disturbing language and attitudes. These expressions of racism and sexism were unfortunately commonplace in the United States a hundred years ago. Although they are, thankfully, less acceptable in today’s society, the attitudes do persist. And our story’s themes—power and politics, race and gender equality, citizenship rights and voting rights—remain urgent concerns. There is a heartening, even thrilling, lesson to be found here, too: ordinary women and girls banding together as activists, challenging an oppressive system, changing an entire country.
The summer of 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was coming close to approval by the states and woman’s suffrage was on the verge of becoming national law, was a moment of reckoning for the entire country. Both sides—the suffragists and the anti-suffragists—were determined to prevail. The outcome remained in doubt until the very last moment.
And it all began in July, with three women on their way to Nashville, Tennessee.