In 1914, a Massachusetts woman named Claiborne Catlin decided to ride across the state on horseback to rally support for women’s suffrage. All of her personal belongings, including a khaki jacket and divided skirt donated by Filene’s department store plus a parcel of leaflets, a horse blanket, and a white, green, and gold “Votes for Women” sash, had to fit in a pair of brown canvas saddlebags. Relying entirely on donations along the way to cover her expenses, she organized fifty-nine meetings, visited thirty-seven cities and towns, and covered 530 miles over the course of four...

As we mark the centennial of women’s constitutional right to vote, we should remember that the Nineteenth Amendment, like the suffrage movement itself, was forced to navigate an arduous path. Even at the endgame, even at the dawn of the second decade of the twentieth century, the idea of women holding the ballot was still controversial and contested, the final skirmishes were grueling and bitter, and the success of the amendment was in grave doubt until the very last moment. When Congress finally passed the amendment in June 1919—after stalling for forty years, and after voting...

The League of Women Voters (LWV) was founded in 1920 by American suffragists, just months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the constitutional right to vote after more than seventy years of struggle. Over the past one hundred years the League, following in the progressive politics of its mother organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), has been an influential and powerful women’s coalition. An activist, grassroots organization, the League believes that citizens should play a critical role in civic advocacy. Its founders...

Most histories of women gaining the right to vote in the United States begin in July of 1848, when hundreds of activists gathered in Seneca Falls to hold the first women’s rights convention and sign the Declaration of Sentiments. The Museum of the American Revolution’s upcoming exhibition, When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776–1807, however, suggests that the timeline of women’s suffrage in America did not begin in 1848. Rather, it can be traced back to the eighteenth century, during the years of the Revolutionary War and the decades after independence, when the...

Although it may be hard to believe today, not everyone wanted women to have the right to vote. In fact, during the early nineteenth century, very few people thought women capable of political engagement of any kind. As the century progressed the women’s suffrage movement steadily increased its membership. By the 1890s, in response to the growing attention suffragists garnered, some women established organizations with the goal of preventing themselves from gaining the right to vote. They had many reasons for doing this, and their arguments changed over time. Perhaps their...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. On August 26, 1920, American women were at last given that most fundamental of rights in a democratic society: the right to vote. But “given” is the wrong verb; for just as African American men played a major role in both demanding and achieving their citizenship in the post–Civil War era, so too American women organized, lobbied, and protested their exclusion until they achieved their goal. Their persistence as much their success calls for our admiration. As historian Barbara Winslow reminds...

Sharon Harley is Associate Professor and former Chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited the pioneer anthology The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), to which they contributed essays about Black women suffragists. Harley recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and “‘I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All’: Audley E. Moore (‘Queen Mother’ Moore)—Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist” in Women and Migration:...

For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes the British had imposed upon them for over a hundred years. During the long war that followed, citizen soldiers shivered in the cold, shared the hardships together, admired George Washington, and won the war singlehandedly against the most powerful army in the world. Then they created a democracy and everyone lived happily ever after. Except for the...

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court. In his research and writing Kennedy addresses complex and controversial issues surrounding race in America. His most recent books include For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013) and The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011). Frederick Douglass’s restless efforts on behalf of...

Quandra Prettyman, senior associate in the English and Africana Studies departments at Barnard College, was one of the first Black faculty members at the college. She taught the first courses in African American literature there in the 1970s and is the editor of Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction (1975). An accomplished poet, she has been published in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1970) and The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973), both edited by Arnold Adoff. In a letter written on...