Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery. This project received support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
"The Women Who Fought Against the Vote." New York Times. Photograph.
To understand the suffragists, and why their battle took so long, you also have to understand the anti-suffragists.
The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 inspired a flood of articles on seemingly every aspect of the disaster. One of the oddest appeared in The Woman's Protest, a journal dedicated to opposing women's suffrage.
In ''The Lesson that Came from the Sea,'' Josephine Jewell Dodge, a leading anti-suffragist, noted that when the ship started going down, the cry that went up was not ''Voters first!'' but ''Women first!''
''In acquiescing to that cry the women admitted that they were not fitted for men's tasks,'' Dodge wrote. ''They did not think of the boasted 'equality' in all things.''
Women's suffrage. Photograph. New Zealand. Government of New Zealand
New Zealand’s achievement gave ‘new hope and life to all women struggling for emancipation’. In most other democracies – notably Britain and the United States – women did not win the right to vote until after the First World War.
19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's Right to Vote (1920). Document.
Happy 100th Birthday! August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see final victory in 1920. Only 27 years behind New Zealand!
