Militancy To The Women's Movement

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In 1910, Alice Paul introduced the idea of militancy to the women’s movement. She was exasperated by the conservative methods being used and decided to take matters into her own hands. Paul organized a march of 5,000 women on Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. The crowds were outraged by the women’s public display of defiance and showered the marchers with burning cigarette butts and harsh comments. This upset the NAWSA, National American Women Suffrage Association, but the result only encouraged Alice Paul. She continued with militancy tactic through protests against the Wilson Association. Months after she began protesting, she was thrown in jail. Her rough treatment behind bars strengthened her and made it clear that women needed the right to vote to ever receive proper treatment in society. When Susan B. Anthony passed her leadership on to Carrie Catt at the age of eighty, Catt changed the approach of the movement from Paul’s militancy tactics to passive aggressive protests in order to conserve resources and be more welcoming to future supporters. (CITE!!) After realizing the state-by-state approach was not working, Carrie Catt created the Winning Plan. The winning plan was a secret strategy to mobilize suffrage activists to act quickly and at the same time to surprise the country and push for a federal amendment. Less than two years after the Winning plan was adopted, the 19th amendment was ratified on August 18th, 1920. Although the 19th amendment was approved by congress, the work was not done. After the amendment was ratified, it was sent to the states for their individual approval. On March of the 1920, thirty-five states had approved the amendment, one state short of the two-thirds required for ratification. It was up to Tennessee, where the women won by just one vote. It took over 60 years for all the states to accept the ratification, the last state to accept was Mississippi on March 22,1984. (CITE!!) The next major battle women fought for was the use of birth control. Women of the suffrage movement classified the husband’s control of a women 's body as 'legal prostitution ' and set out to change it. The Comstock law of 1873 left women with no access to information of how to prevent pregnancy or how to terminate a pregnancy, no matter how the health condition of the mother or child. Margret Higgins Sanger believed women should be the absolute mistress’ of their own body and have the option of voluntary motherhood. So on October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a two-room birth control clinic in a Brooklyn neighborhood. (CITE!!) Eventually the police caught on to the clinic 's actions and sent a police officer in as disguised patient. Sanger was arrested and jailed for a short time but the ensuing publicity rallied support for her cause. The United States entering World War II in 1941 was the next major event in the women’s movement. It was previously understood that the women would take the men’s job in their absence but women had never ventured outside of the domestic atmosphere. The loss of the majority of the eligible male workers encouraged women to learn new job skills in preparation for the work force. As more men went to war, there was an increase of women attending college and working in professional careers such as banking, law and medicine. World War II gave women access to fields …show more content…
Kennedy who had won his election with numerous votes from the female electorate. When Kennedy only appointed 9 women candidates to his 240-seated presidential appointments, Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, decided it was time to step in. Roosevelt sent the White house a list of women capable of holding high administrative positions and Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau, approached Kennedy about creating a commission to address women’s issues. In response, Kennedy created the President’s commission on the status of women in 1961. The commission issued a sixty-page report in 1963 titled American Women. It called for equal pay, better educational opportunities and social services for women. It sparked the fire of the Women’s suffrage movement that had been left mainly dormant for the 20 years

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