Women couldn't own property, and they had to give any money they made over to their husbands. They also weren't allowed to vote. By the mid-1800s, women started to fight back, demanding suffrage, or the right to vote. These women were called suffragists.

The first independent country to introduce women's suffrage was arguably Sweden. In Sweden, conditional women's suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty (1718–1772). In 1756, Lydia Taft became the first legal woman voter in colonial America.

The suffrage movement seemed stalled by the first decade of the 20th century. But World War I changed the dynamic and ultimately strengthened the suffrage movement. The industrial demands of modern war meant that women moved into the labor force and contributed to the war effort on the home front.

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 in the Constitution – guaranteeing women the right to vote.

During the debates on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, women's rights advocates lobbied—unsuccessfully—to enshrine woman suffrage in the Constitution. As attention then turned to the states, many supporters saw the West, with its young governments, as fertile territory for experiments with political reforms.

California Suffrage Centennial Poster On October 10, 1911, California became the sixth state where women could vote equally with men, nine years before the 19th Amendment enfranchised women nationally.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, women and women's organizations not only worked to gain the right to vote, they also worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms. Between 1880 and 1910, the number of women employed in the United States increased from 2.6 million to 7.8 million.