Women's Suffrage Movement

Women’s rights are human rights, yet the laws of our country have been very slow to recognize the rights of women to be treated equally with men. 300 years after the Pilgrims landed in the United States women continued to be denied the right to vote in our nation. Even 50 years after the vote was granted to black men women were still denied this basic right. At that time women were considered mentally and emotionally inferior and so unfit to vote. For most of our country’s early history, women were also not allowed to own property, they were treated as men’s property under U.S. marriage laws. They also struggled to gain access to colleges and universities, and women were denied access to the top professions such as business, law, and medicine. While U.S. women have made great progress, today women still struggle to earn equal pay for the exact same work done by men.

Although women are still gaining more access to elected political office, women are still not equally represented in our government. Our culture still resists the idea that a woman can handle the highest office in the land, as President of the United States. Although some people might claim that women have already achieved equal rights with men due to the obvious gains women have made since the women’s suffrage movement- this contributes to the false idea that women have an equal opportunity to men in today's society.

In the 19th Century a strong "anti-suffragist" movement took hold in such countries as the U.S., England, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. The movement against allowing women the right to vote includes some of the same ideas that we saw in the eugenics movement, namely that some people are genetically inferior to others. The anti-suffragists believed that women were genetically intellectually inferior to men and therefore could not "handle" the right to vote. They felt women were designed by God to fulfill the traditional gender roles of taking care of the house and children.

Sources:
1. https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/woman-suffrage-movement
2. https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage
3. http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/woman-suffrage-timeline-18401920
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/design/womens-suffrage-movement.html