The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States pioneered throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempting to gain equal rights, particularly the right to vote, eventually contributing to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The amendment was passed due to the female measures taken to gain small steps towards gender equality. These female measures were mainly taken by the National Women’s Party, who encouraged citizens to vote against anti-suffragist Senators. This encouragement allowed most of the elected Congress to be pro-suffrage, contributing to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. The amendment was passed without any restrictions regarding property ownership, tax payments,
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For over 80 years, American women fought for the right to vote, and they eventually gained it due to women’s rights activists that struggled to create equal rights for all citizens. Feminist columnist Rosemany Radford Ruether refers to the previous rights of women before the Nineteenth Amendment was granted, or more specifically to their lack of rights: The laws that Americans inherited from English common law denied women the vote because they denied that women were autonomous persons and citizens in their own right. They therefore could not represent themselves before the law in any civil or legal transactions. These, included voting, buying or selling property, serving as jurors of running for political office …show more content…
Citizens against the Women’s Movement complained that this was violating the “sacred rights of private medical practice,” but many women stood up to this, encouraging the invoking of women’s collective political power (Burek 3). The Shepard-Towner Act shows the increasing role of women in society and in politics by demonstrating that they are “a public to which elected officials responded” (Burek 7). Linda K. Kerber states in her work, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies : Women and the Obligations of Citizenship that the Women’s Movement after the Nineteenth Amendment involved “capacious understanding of the possible ingredients of politics that includes petitioning, testifying, and mobilization of themselves and others” (15). Another feminist historian Kristin Anderson, argues that “by their very presence, as well as the distinct interests and political style they brought to politics, women entering politics in the 1920’s began to change the way American’s thought about politics and politicians”(20). Anderson explains that women were changing the political world with their newly granted rights, their intelligence, and ruthless fervor, but none of these pioneering qualities could gain equality with men, even in the present
For over 80 years, American women fought for the right to vote, and they eventually gained it due to women’s rights activists that struggled to create equal rights for all citizens. Feminist columnist Rosemany Radford Ruether refers to the previous rights of women before the Nineteenth Amendment was granted, or more specifically to their lack of rights: The laws that Americans inherited from English common law denied women the vote because they denied that women were autonomous persons and citizens in their own right. They therefore could not represent themselves before the law in any civil or legal transactions. These, included voting, buying or selling property, serving as jurors of running for political office …show more content…
Citizens against the Women’s Movement complained that this was violating the “sacred rights of private medical practice,” but many women stood up to this, encouraging the invoking of women’s collective political power (Burek 3). The Shepard-Towner Act shows the increasing role of women in society and in politics by demonstrating that they are “a public to which elected officials responded” (Burek 7). Linda K. Kerber states in her work, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies : Women and the Obligations of Citizenship that the Women’s Movement after the Nineteenth Amendment involved “capacious understanding of the possible ingredients of politics that includes petitioning, testifying, and mobilization of themselves and others” (15). Another feminist historian Kristin Anderson, argues that “by their very presence, as well as the distinct interests and political style they brought to politics, women entering politics in the 1920’s began to change the way American’s thought about politics and politicians”(20). Anderson explains that women were changing the political world with their newly granted rights, their intelligence, and ruthless fervor, but none of these pioneering qualities could gain equality with men, even in the present