Get The Movement Toward Woman Suffrage Answers

The women's suffrage movement made the question of women's voting rights into an important political issue in the 19th century. The struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and in the United States, but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis.

Essential Questions: What were the motives of the women's suffrage movement? What was the impact? What strategies did women use to win their right to vote? Why did so many states deny women the right to vote and why was women's suffrage legal in some states?

The women's suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once.

A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835.

Their broad goals included equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage, and a married woman's right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body.

The Suffragettes were part of the 'Votes for Women' campaign that had long fought for the right of women to vote in the UK. They used art, debate, propaganda, and attack on property including window smashing and arson to fight for female suffrage. Suffrage means the right to vote in parliamentary and general elections.

In 1920, after more than a century of activism, women won the right the to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The House, led by Jeannette Rankin on Montana, had first passed the suffrage amendment in 1918. That bill died in the Senate, but in 1919 Congress quickly secured its passage.