The American Woman Suffrage Movement

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, for three-quarters of a century, beginning in 1848, American women focused their hopes for liberation and power on the woman suffrage movement's demand for the right to vote. The author points out that despite evidence of male domination in every aspect of American life, women underestimated the strength of patriarchy and genuinely expected enfranchisement to lead to total equality between the sexes. The paper relates that the feminists came to recognize that only the force of the organized power of women themselves was capable of bringing about radical change in the condition of women's lives. The paper concludes that the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote marks the end of the woman suffrage movement; however, the quest for gender equality in America may never be over.

From the Paper:

"In the first half of the 19th century, women worked in more than a hundred industrial occupations (Earnest). There was a steady demand for female workers in textile mills, yet women found themselves in constant and desperate competition for positions. The concept of the inferiority of women barred them from training for more skilled work, and therefore from entering more profitable occupations; it also prevented them from receiving the same pay as a man for similar work. In 1833, one newspaper estimated that women earned only one fourth of men's wages..."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Amundsen, K. (1971). The Silenced Majority: Women and American Diversity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hill Inc.
• Bruce, H.A. (1928). Women and the Making of America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
• Dubois, E.C. (1978). Feminism and Suffrage. New York: Cornell University Press.
• Earnest, E. (1974). The American Eve in Fact and Fiction, 1775-1914. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
• Flexner, E. (1974). Century of Struggle: The Woman's Movement in the United States. New York: Atheneum.

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