Women's Suffrage Dbq

The subject of women’s suffrage in the 20th century was a highly debated, and highly controversial topic, with groups of men and women on both sides of the argument. After a long battle, women in the United States eventually won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in June 1919. The 19th Amendment was passed only through endless years of convincing the men in power that women deserved to have political rights, as they were full citizens of the United States. Persuading men that women needed political rights was a struggle in itself, and countless key advocates for women’s suffrage spent their whole lives trying to coax people to support their movement. The focal point of this essay, Mr. B, is one such person who was compelled

B’s life would have convinced him to support women’s suffrage. Starting with Mr. B’s wife, she was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of women who organized to honor Confederate veterans of the Civil War. The various women in the group would raise money to erect monuments, promote the Southern narrative of the war, and give aid to families who lost men in the war. As a Southern woman, his wife wanted to keep the South in control of the Anglo-Saxons, and would tell her husband to do so, white women needed to have the vote. Mr. B’s wife would have wanted to give suffrage to white women only so they could continue to disenfranchise the African Americans living in the South, by continuing practices such as poll taxes, and literacy tests. Mr. B is a Russian immigrant, so he would have been relying on his American wife to inform him of what was going on, and he would have trusted her opinion on this matter. Along with her misplaced passion for continued white supremacy in the South, Mr. B’s wife might have also tried to convince her husband to support women’s suffrage by making him think about their

Mr. B and his wife had a daughter, who was studying at the all-girls college of Smith College, but they also had a son, perhaps younger than his sister, whom Mr. B would have wanted the best for, and would have wanted his wife to be able to vote on matters pertaining to their children. Having the right to vote would have enabled Mr. B’s wife to cast her ballot for issues mothers were concerned about, such as food safety, common diseases, and unclean conditions in neighborhoods. Speaking of being a good father, Mr. B’s daughter was allowed to go off on her own to college, and that depicts how Mr. B wanted his daughter to be fully, and highly educated. To support his daughter in her wishes to go to college, during a time when it was still expected of women to just be homemakers, demonstrates Mr. B’s tolerance for more “radical” notions, such as giving the vote to women. His daughter, while at college, would have heard all about the suffrage movement, and might have even been a part of