Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton [Library of Congress, n.d.]
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"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
-Susan B. Anthony |
Susan B. Anthony [Library of Congress, n.d.]
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Stanton and Anthony are two of the most prominent American suffragists, often credited with starting the suffrage movement.
"For much of the 1850s [Stanton and Anthony] agitated against the denial of basic economic freedoms to women. Later, they unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to include women in the provisions of the 14th and 15th Amendments (extending citizenship rights and granting voting rights to freedmen, respectively)"
-"The Women's Rights Movement, 1848-1920"
[Library of Congress, 1880]
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Anthony pioneered the idea of an amendment giving women the right to vote.
"In 1877, [Susan B. Anthony} gathered petitions from 26 states with 10,000 signatures, but Congress laughed at them. She appeared before every Congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for passage of a suffrage amendment" |
"I do pray, and that most earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of the nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the absolute degradation of their present position; which will compel them to break their yoke of bondage and give them faith in themselves; which will make them proclaim their allegiance to women first"
-Susan B. Anthony
-Susan B. Anthony
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
The NAWSA was a huge suffragist organization from 1890-1951.
"Led initially by Stanton and then by Anthony, the NAWSA began to draw on the support of women activists in organizations as diverse as the Women’s Trade Union League, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the National Consumer’s League, For the next two decades, the NAWSA worked as a nonpartisan organization focused on gaining the vote in states, though managerial problems and a lack of coordination initially limited its success"
-"The Women's Rights Movement, 1848-1920"
State Presidents and Officers of the NAWSA [Bryn Mawr College, 1892]
The NAWSA ultimately only campaigned for suffrage on a state level, which was their shortcoming.
The suffragists who had protested before Alice, and the movements that were already occurring, set the stage for the protests that Alice would organize. They showed Alice what she should fight for (an amendment), but she had to figure out how to fight.