Women's Suffrage In America

The Impact of Women's Suffrage on the U.S. The right to vote is perhaps the most coveted of American liberties. Without the right to vote, populations of people in the United States would cease to have key representation in this representative democratic government. But with the enormous societal emphasis that America puts on voting and elections in the modern status quo, little focus is placed on the incredibly surprising fact that, for much of American history, the right to vote was not one bestowed to all citizens.
Instead, hundreds of years persisted in the United States in which the majority of the population did not have any say in the inner workings of their government—at least so far

Australia and Great Britain), and that these movements could in fact be linked to the United States movement in political ideology, the focus here is on the
United States movement and its impact in the US. And at the time in the United States, the concept of women being included in the political process was a crazy idea. Due to the genius female minds pioneering the movement, however, the women’s suffrage movement was met with begrudging success on the part of the establishment. Even more shocking is that the movement happened entirely without violence. Cooney elaborates on the nonviolent nature of the movement, saying that women involved “didn’t take a single life,” despite facing
“dead ends, discouragements, and immobility.” (Cooney) Cooney attributes much of this nonviolent success to the brilliant minds behind the movement, who were unsurprisingly all women. (Cooney) Names like Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Jane Addams, Lucy stone, and
Alice Paul stand the test of time as some of the brightest political leaders—and they did it as women in a time when women weren’t even allowed to cast a ballot. Eventually, several forms of protest worked in unison to guarantee the protesters

Apathy of the general political population is often the biggest enemy of a social movement. If any movement, regardless of how powerful the subject matter may be, fails to gain the attention of the masses, it is likely to fail. In fact, the woman’s suffrage movement was particularly susceptible to failure for a whole host of reasons. One of these reasons was the growing number of women who stood in vocal opposition of the right to vote. In 1915, a New York protest for suffrage yielded 100,000 supporters of a woman’s right to vote. In opposition of suffrage, organizers pulled together 200,000 women who protested the movement. (Miller) These numbers continued to grow, too, reaching a peak of 500,000 protesters in 1919. (Miller) However, there is a significant jump in protester involvement in favor of suffrage from 1915 to 1917: the numbers climb from 100,000 to 2,000,000 women. (Miller) These statistics are no coincidence; the jump in numbers coincides perfectly with the year that the NAWSA unveiled the winning plan, and the year that the National Women’s Party amped up its “more militant” efforts. (History.com) This unique combination of social methods of