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Timeline and Quotes (Appendix B)

Directions:

Use Appendix B: Timeline and Quotes and Appendix A: Amending the Constitution as you study the struggle for women’s suffrage. Beginning with Lesson 2, write a question or two for each lesson that asks the reader to connect one or more events that are described in different lessons. (For example, you might connect Lessons 3, 4, and 5 in this way: The Seneca Falls Convention is often considered the event that kicked off an organized program for the women’s equality and suffrage movement in the United States. How many years elapsed from this beginning until the achievement of the nation-wide right for women to vote? Identify the person whom you believe was the most important leader in the movement and explain your choice.)

LESSONS 1 & 2

 

Lessons 1 & 2 Events Quotes
1648 – Margaret Brent appealed to Maryland’s colonial assembly, unsuccessfully demanding a voice and two votes in the assembly’s proceedings.

1690 – John Locke published Two Treatises on Civil Government.
1768 – Hannah Griffitts published “The Female Patriots.”
1772 – Samuel Adams published “The Rights of the Colonists,” which was part of the Boston Pamphlet, also called The Report of the Committee of Correspondence in Boston.
1773 – Mercy Otis Warren began publishing dramas advocating American independence
1773 – Phyllis Wheatley was the first enslaved person to publish a book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

 “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” –JAMES OTIS, 1764
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” –ABIGAIL ADAMS, 1776
1776 – Abigail Adams wrote to her husband
on the hypocrisy of slavery, and asked him to
“remember the ladies” in the new government.
1776 – Continental Congress adopted the
Declaration of Independence.
1776 – New Jersey constitution provided for “all inhabitants” to vote if they were at least 21 years of age, property owners, and county residents for at least one year. Therefore, single women with property could vote. In 1807 the state’s legislature clarified that only free white men who met the property requirement were eligible to
vote.
1777 – Vermont constitution became the first to provide for universal male suffrage.
1779 – Judith Sargent Murray published On the Equality of the Sexes.
1781 – The Articles of Confederation was adopted.
1789 – The United States Constitution was adopted, leaving the power to set voting qualifications to the states.		 “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” –DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE,1776
“The one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limited. As their years increase, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowery paths of science.”–JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY: WRITTEN 1779, PUBLISHED 1790“We the people…ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…” –PREAMBLE TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, 1789
1791 – U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified.
1792 – Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
1807 – New Jersey revoked the right of women to vote.
1807 – United States Congress banned the international slave trade.		 “Are [women] deficient in reason? We can only reason from what we know, and if opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex cannot fairly be deduced from thence … I would calmly ask, is it reasonable, that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend an eternity in contemplating the works of Deity, should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas, than those suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing [of] the seams of a garment?” –JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY, 1790
“I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.” –MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, 1792
“To me it is perfectly clear that whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do.” –SARAH GRIMKÉ 1838

 

 

LESSON 3

 

Lessons 3 Events Quotes
1836 – Angelina Grimké wrote “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.”

1840—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were refused admittance at World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
1848 – Seneca Falls Convention was held in New York.
1849 – Amelia Bloomer published the first female-run newspaper, The Lily.
1851 – Anthony met Stanton at a Syracuse, New York anti-slavery convention.

1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
1852 – Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the New York State Women’s Temperance Society.
1860 – Stanton and Anthony worked successfully to amend Married Woman’s Property Law in New York, allowing women to own property, bring suits in court, share child custody, and keep their own earnings and inheritance.
1861 – U.S. Civil War began.

 “I do not wish by any means to intimate that the condition of free women can be compared to that of slaves in suffering, or in degradation; still, I believe the laws which deprive married women of their rights and privileges, have a tendency to lessen them in their own estimation as moral and responsible beings, and that their being made by civil law inferior to their husbands, had a debasing and mischievous effect upon them, teaching them practically the fatal lesson to look unto man for protection and indulgence.” –SARAH GRIMKÉ, 1838

“We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free.” –ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, 1848
“When a sincere republican is asked to say in sober earnest what adequate reason he can give, for refusing the demand of women to an equal participation with men in political rights, he must answer, None at all. However unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right, and such must be conceded.” –HORACE GREELEY, 1848
“If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?” –SOJOURNER TRUTH, 1850
“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences,” –SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 1860

 

LESSON 4

 

Lesson 4 Events Quotes
1863 – Anthony and Stanton founded the Women’s Loyal National League, and collected nearly 400,000 signatures in a petition to abolish slavery

1865 – U.S. Civil War ended
1865 – Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery
1868 – Fourteenth Amendment defined citizenship and prohibited states from denying due process and equal protection of the law to any person.
1869 – Territory of Wyoming granted suffrage to women

1869 – First transcontinental railroad opened.
1870 – Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, barring states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
1870 – Utah territory granted suffrage to women.

1872 – Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting
1874 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause does not protect a right to vote in Minor v. Happersett.
1874: Annie Wittenmyer founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to work for the prohibition of alcohol.
1879 — Frances Willard became President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
1883 – Washington territory granted suffrage to women.

 “We represent fifteen million people—one-half the entire population of the country—the Constitution classes us as “free people,” yet we are governed without our consent, compelled to pay taxes without appeal, and punished for violations of law without choice of judge or juror. You are now amending the Constitution, and … placing new safeguards around the individual rights of four million emancipated slaves. We ask that you extend the right of suffrage to women—the only remaining class of disfranchised citizens—and thus fulfill your constitutional obligation.” –SUSAN B. ANTHONY TO CONGRESS, 1865

 

 

LESSON 5

 

Lesson 5 Events Quotes
1887 – U.S. Senate voted to reject proposed women’s suffrage amendment.

1890 – Wyoming was admitted to the Union.
1890 – National Woman Suffrage Association and American Woman Suffrage Association merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
1900 – Carrie Chapman Catt was elected president of
NAWSA.
1902 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton died.
1906 – Susan B. Anthony died.
1912 – Arizona, Kansas, and Alaska Territory granted
suffrage to women.
1912 – Theodore Roosevelt ran for President as nominee
of the Progressive Party, whose platform included equal
suffrage for men and women. Jane Addams seconded his
nomination at the party’s convention.
1913 – Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, giving national
government the power to tax incomes.
1913 – Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, providing for
direct election of U.S. senators.
1913 – Alice Paul organized a suffrage procession in
Washington, DC, the day before Wilson’s Inauguration.
1914 – Nevada and Montana granted suffrage to women.
1914 – U.S. Senate voted to reject the proposed
amendment that would later become the Nineteenth
Amendment.
1916 – Alice Paul broke away from NAWSA to form the
National Woman’s Party.
1916 – Alice Paul and other suffrage demonstrators were
arrested for obstructing traffic, and began a hunger strike.
1916 – Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first
woman elected to Congress.
1917 – New York granted suffrage to women.
1917 – The U.S. entered World War I. Women’s vital
contribution to the war effort boosted support for a suffrage
amendment.
1919 – Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was
ratified, banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of
alcohol in the U.S.
1919 – Oklahoma and South Dakota granted suffrage to
women.
1919 – U.S. Congress approved Nineteenth Amendment,
sending it to states for ratification.
1920 – Carrie Chapman Catt founded League of Women
Voters to provide education for political participation.
1920 – Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

 “We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women!” –WYOMING LEGISLATURE TELEGRAM TO CONGRESS, 1890
“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” –SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 1897
“It is better, as far as getting the vote is concerned I believe, to have a small, united group than an immense debating society.” –ALICE PAUL, 1914

 

LESSON 6

 

Lesson 6 Events Quotes
1923 – Alice Paul proposed an equal rights amendment.
1942 – Large numbers of women entered the workforce during
World War II; Representative Winifred C. Stanley proposed a
bill banning wage discrimination based on sex.
1944 – Republican Party platform included support for an
equal rights amendment.
1960s-1970s – Second Wave Feminism
1961 – President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order
10925 directing federal contractors to “take affirmative action
to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are
treated during employment without regard to their race, creed,
color, or national origin.”
1961 – Twenty-third Amendment provided for the appointment
of presidential electors for citizens of Washington, D.C.
1963 – Kennedy convened the Commission on the Status of
Women; their report called for a number of reforms.
1963 – Congress passed the Equal Pay Act.
1963 – Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.
1964 – Congress passed a Civil Rights Act.
1964 – Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibited the poll tax as a
requirement for voting for federal office-holders.
1965 – Congress passed a Voting Rights Act.
1967 – President Lyndon Johnson expanded on Kennedy’s 1961
affirmative action order to include women.
1968 – Shirley Chisholm won her bid to represent her district
of New York in the United States Congress, becoming the first
African American Congresswoman. She served in that position
for seven terms, leaving Washington, D.C. in 1983 to teach at
the all-women Mount Holyoke College.
1971 – Women accounted for three percent of people elected to
U.S. Congress, seven percent of statewide elective offices, and 0
in state legislatures.
1971 – Twenty-sixth Amendment protected the right of people
ages 18 and older to vote.
1972 – Congress approved Equal Rights Amendment, which
was ratified by only 35 states, rather than the required 38
states.
1972 – Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments,
banning sex discrimination in higher education.
1973 – Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that states must
not restrict access to abortion during the first trimester of
pregnancy.
1974 – In Taylor v. Louisiana the Supreme Court ruled that
defendants had a Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury
made up of a cross-section of the community, which necessarily
included women.
1980 – For the first time, women turned out to vote in a
presidential election at a higher rate than that of men.
1981 – Women began earning more bachelor’s degrees than
men.
1990s – Third Wave Feminism
2016 – Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, became the first female
presidential nominee of a major party.
2018 – In November 2018, women comprised 20% in U.S.
Congress, 23.4 % in statewide elective offices, and 25.5 % in
state legislatures. In the November 6 midterm elections,
voter turnout across the nation was the highest in any
midterm election in 100 years, with 50.1% of the voting-eligible
population casting their ballots.
2019 – As of January 2019, a record 121 women served in
the 116th United States Congress, 102 years after Jeannette
Rankin, the first female member of Congress, was elected in
1916. Following the midterm election, women comprised 23.6 %
in U.S. Congress, 27.6 % in statewide elective offices, 28.6 % in
state legislatures.		 “[To recommend] services which will enable women to continue their role as wives and mothers while making a maximum contribution to the world around them.” – TASK OF THE PRESIDENT’S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN, 1961
“’We, the people.’ It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when [the Constitution] was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’” -BARBARA JORDAN, 1974
“I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.” -SHIRLEY CHISHOLM, 1983