Women Get the Vote

"Hurrah! And Vote for Suffrage."

So shouted Harry Burn, at twenty-four the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, on 18 August 1920, when he heeded his mother's admonition and cast the final vote for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Twenty-six million women were enfranchised, and a battle for women's suffrage that began at the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention in 1848 finally was won.

No Panacea.

Initially elated, activist women quickly discovered that the vote was not the panacea for women they hoped. First, women did not vote in blocs or uniformly support women's issues; they voted according to race, social class, religious background, and geographic location. Furthermore, women's groups did not agree on the best strategy for further reform, and some women did not believe additional reform was necessary at all. As suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw lamented...

[The entire page is 493 words long]

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