Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Attitude to women characterizes the level of the social development. In the contemporary society, women can enjoy rights and freedoms, which make them the equal part of the social community. Unfortunately, in the recent past women had to fight for their basic rights. The right to vote, the right to work, the right to have control over their own bodies and many other basic rights, contemporary women believe to be basic rights, were achieved through persistent struggle. Women have made significant input into becoming of the contemporary society. Through the centuries they have had to fight for their right and liberties and their natural right to take an active part in the social and cultural life.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

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Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Staar opened the first Hull House in 1889. This house became a unique opportunity for women with low income. It gave support and assistance to different categories of women. It gave classes of English literacy, art and other subjects. It also provided services of daycare for children, community kitchen and nurses. The center was founded in the troubling region of Chicago. A lot of immigrants found their new home in this region. Women with children had little chances to find jobs and give material support to their families. The Hull House became that center of support, which helped them go through the most difficult periods of their lives.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Jane Addams possessed this idea in London, where centers of social care were organized in order to support the poorest categories of women.  What is notable, the Hull House became the source of support and inspiration not only for women, who came there for help. It also became the means of self-expression for educated women from middle class who worked there. They had finally got an opportunity to show their skills and become active members of the society. Addams became an influential figure in the contemporary society. She attracted public attention to different problems the women of her time came through. She took active social and political position. “Addams believed in an individual’s obligation to help his or her community, but she also thought the government could help make Americans’ lives safer and healthier. In this way, Addams and many other Americans in the 1890s and 1900s were part of the Progressive movement” (Activists&Reformers: Jane Addams).  For a lot of women she has become the symbol of change and transformation. She has become an example of how one woman can change other people’s lives.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

During the WWI and the WWII women got the chance to perform new social roles and functions. During the WWI men took active part in the warship.  Need for workforce and problems caused by the wars made the government and private owners friendlier in their employment policy. Women took part in the war as medical workers. Some of them even took part in the military actions. “When the United States government entered a war, it offered work opportunities to women in significantly higher numbers than had been seen previously» (Moore, 2016).   Women also got opportunities to get jobs in the cities and towns. Men, who left for war, created job openings and a lot of women got the chance to get the job during the WWI.  The need in weapon and growing military potential also created demand for the workforce.  A lot of factories produced weapons and these factories hired women during the war period. “For centuries women have followed armies, many of them soldiers’ wives, providing indispensable services such as cooking, nursing, and laundry—in fact, armies could not have functioned as well, perhaps could not have functioned at all, without the service of women.” (Hacker, 1981).  Women got lower wages. Finally, this became the subject of concern for men, who felt they could lost their dominant position on the job market. Unfortunately, after the end of the WWI women lost their positions, which were taken by men, who returned from the war. Major part of women lost their jobs and were left without the chance to earn their living. The situation was repeated during the WWII. There emerged need in working hands and women got an opportunity to get job position in the different spheres, which were previously closed for them.   Women had made significant contribution to the military success. The WWII helped the US enhance its position on the world political stage and women had become the part of this success.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Margaret Sanger is another outstanding historical personality, who made significant contribution to the protection of women’s rights and freedoms. Birth control pills have become the break-through in the sphere of the birth control. Since ancient times people have been looking for the ways to control babies’ birth.  Illegal abortions and attempts to stop pregnancy took away hundreds of thousands of women’s lives all over the world.  Margaret Sanger is an outstanding personality in the sphere of birth control. This woman dedicated her life to the problem of the birth control and her achievements made the great contribution to this sphere. In 1916 she opened the first birth control clinics in the US. She was put to prison for breaking some regulations and spent 30 days in prison. After leaving the prison she continued working in the sphere of birth control and, finally, in the 1950s she introduced the project aiming to create an oral birth-control pill. This project required $150,000. Margaret Sanger was in her 80s when this project started.  Finally, in the 1960s the first oral contraceptive was introduced and approved by FDA. The name of the contraceptive was Envoid.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

The invention of the oral contraception has become the great achievement in the sphere of birth control and this has given more opportunities for women and helped to protect their rights. This invention can be definitely called one of the greatest medical achievements of the contemporary medicine. Margaret Sanger became an outstanding personality and it is hard to overestimate her role in projecting medical advances, which protected women’s health and gave them control over their lives and bodies.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Rosa Parks became another outstanding woman, who made her significant input into the civil right movement. On December 1, 1955 she was arrested because she dared to seat on the bus sit, which was reserved only for white passengers. Rosa consciously refused to live the seat and her arrest provoked social   protests. Finally, her arrest resulted in the bus boycott. Martin Luther King Jr. became famous during these events.  “Her arrest became a rallying point around which the African American community organized a bus boycott in protest of the discrimination they had endured for years. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, emerged as a leader during the well-coordinated, peaceful boycott that lasted 381 days and captured the world’s attention» (Bredhoff,   Wynell   and   Potter, 1999). As the result, Park’s arrest played an important role in the Browder v.Gayle case. Court decision in the case officially prohibited segregation.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Through the centuries the outstanding women have made a significant impact on the process of social development and becoming of women the equal members of the social community. Despite the fact that women have been historically deprived of the possibility to express themselves actively in the society, they still found their own ways to make serious impact on the social processes and become the instrument of the social change. Women have made significant contribution to different spheres of social, cultural and political life. In contrast to men, they have had to fight for their right to take an active part in the life of the state and society

nyone know what the Women’s Suffrage is about? The Women’s Suffrage Movement is about the struggle for women to have equal rights as men such as vote, and run for office.What about the leaders of the suffrage? The most well known women’s rights activists were Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth C. Stanton. Does anyone know what amendment gave women the right to vote? The nineteenth amendment. The nineteenth amendment to the United States forbids any US citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. Who knows one of the first bills Obama signed once elected? The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows women to have equal pay for equal work, and to protect women from pay discrimination. I would like to inform everyone from the book I read such as, “Women of the Suffrage Movement” by Janice E, Ruth and Evelyn Sinclair about actions took, important leaders of the suffrage, and when women had equal rights.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

It was Theodore Roosevelt, who stated that, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care”, conveying the idea that with no voice comes no change. In the morning of August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified, which centralized mainly on the enfranchisement of women. Today, they have the legal right to vote, and the ability to speak openly for themselves, but most of all they are now free and equal citizens. However this victorious triumph in American history would not have been achieved without the strong voices of determined women, risking their lives to show the world how much they truly cared. Women suffragists in the 19th century had a strong passion to change their lifestyle, their jobs around the…show more content…
It also used attention-grabbing tactics in order to show that they truly care by going out of their comfort zone. National Women’s Party (NWP’s) contributions to the suffrage movement were most effective due to their drastic approaches such as different forms of campaigning, picketing during wartime, and their maltreatment in jail to their advantage. Women Suffrage Movement Essay
In order for women to be taken seriously the NWP’s leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who were the party’s main leaders, produced many creative forms of campaigning for the public. The first idea that they developed was on March 3, 1913, and was an organized parade in Washington D.C, purposely the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Washington was filled with visitors due to this occasion so it was a perfect opportunity. The parade consisted of about eight thousand willing women marching onto Pennsylvania Avenue convincing bystanders to take consideration. They wore sashes and banners, one of the banners in the march said, “WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ENFRANCHISING WOMEN” (Behring)Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Today the world is enthralled with images of women lining up to vote for the first time, or for the first time in a long while. Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and South Africa, in recent decades have all held elections allowing women to vote.
In spite of this recognition of the fundamental importance of women achieving the vote, attention paid to the history of its long struggle has been marginalized. And, the reasons for the depth of its opposition ignored. Why, for example, did it take until May, 2005, for women in Kuwait to finally achieve their full voting rights in their national elections?

It is commonly believed that female suffrage was desired and fought for only in England and the United States. Yet dynamic struggles for women’s basic democratic right appeared in many countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though these movements differed in their reasons and tactics, the fight for female suffrage, along with other women’s rights concerns, cut across many national boundaries. By exploring the following topics, this essay attempts to help rectify the narrow and unexamined view of female suffrage.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Worldwide Alliances and Influences:
By the turn of the twentieth century women’s reform was truly an international movement, one in which ideas and tactics used in one country served as models for use in another.

The strength of the 19th/early 20th century struggle for women’s suffrage was its transnational nature. Cooperation between women of various nations gave each the resources they needed to overcome their marginalisation in the politics of their own nations. In the later decades of the 19th century, the expansion of the telegraph and growth of women’s press allowed the discussion about women’s status and roles to be communicated from country to country. Improvements in transportation facilitated like-minded women and men to attend international gathering where they met and organized. The momentum of women’s suffrage was bolstered by such international movements as:Women Suffrage Movement Essay

The International Woman Suffrage Association: The International Woman Suffrage Association, established between 1899 and 1902, held its first meeting in Berlin in 1904. A series of Congresses followed, each with the aim of improving women’s rights, and each providing a stimulus for similar transforming movements throughout the world. At the Alliances’ seventh meeting in Budapest in 1913, euphoria about success was in the air, causing American Carrie Chapman Catt to claim: “Our movement has reached the last stage….Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge!”

World-Wide Temperance Movement: Perhaps no other cause helped the women suffrage movement as much as temperance. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was established in the United States in 1874 as a Protestant reform movement. In 1884, its powerful, influential leader, Frances Willard, formed the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was spearheaded mostly by missionaries working in non-western and southern countries. When Willard saw the link between women voting and temperance, and encouraged her membership to work for the vote, the WCTU leadership skills and organizational resources everywhere provided an enormous boast to sometimes flagging suffrage causes.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

International Socialism: In 1907 international socialism decided to support women’s suffrage. Socialists were bent on organizing working class women. Since bans against female party membership existed within most traditional political parties, Socialists, having to organize women separately from men, managed to create successful female oriented movements in some countries.

Most Socialists went beyond civic issues to link suffrage to a fundamental challenge to gender relations. German Socialists, for example, demanded sexual emancipation and more control for women within their families as well as the vote. Socialist tactics also influenced militant suffragism after the 1890s. Most effective was a section within the British movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which used aggressive tactics of political confrontation to bring attention to the suffrage cause. Groups in other nations imitated the British, such as the suffragettes in Argentina and the United States. And, in 1912 in Nanking, the Chinese Woman Suffrage Alliance broke windows and stormed the parliament building demanding equality of the sexes and women’s right to vote.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

The League of Nations and United Nations: The establishment of these international bodies significantly forwarded the goal of universal female suffrage. In 1946 a Commission on Women was established, and the Convention of the Political Rights for Women was adopted in 1952.

Inter-regional and Pan-national Organizations: Region specific coalitions also strengthened individual movements. Although Latin American women participated in several inter-American and European conferences, they had more success when they formed supportive alliances within the South American continent. The first South American International Feminine Congress took place in Buenos Aires in 1910. And, although the 1928 founded Inter-American Commission of Women at first was driven by North American issues, it increasingly geared itself to the needs of Latin American women. By the 1940s, the Commission had become an almost exclusively Latin American organization.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Pan-Pacific women’s networks also became effective advocates of women’s political equality, as did those within countries with great regional diversity. As an example, women in India by the end of the nineteenth century were forming their own organizations. The first all-India organization, the Women’s Indian Association was established in 1917, and by 1918 was holding gatherings all over India in support of women’s franchise.

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International Council of Women, Berlin, 1904
When and Where:
Women’s struggle for suffrage was long and sometimes bitter. In most cases women won the right to vote in uneven stages.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Full suffrage occurs when all groups of women are included in national voting and can run for any political office. In most cases women won the right to vote in uneven stages. New Zealand in 1893 was first. Liberalism was a strong force in this pioneering land which increasingly rejected what it viewed as archaic attitudes from the “Old World.” The support of social reform issues, including temperance, gave New Zealand suffragists the edge they needed. The now famous “Women’s Suffrage Petition” is credited with being a major force for this success. Signed by close to one quarter of the female adult population, the petition was the largest of its kind in New Zealand and other western countries. It is comprised of 546 sheets of paper, all glued together to form one continuous roll 274 metres long, with the signatures of over 10,000 adult women. A few Maori women signed, but at this time they mainly were concerned with achieving political participation rights for the whole tribe.

The New Zealand breakthrough sent ripples throughout the world. New Zealand women suffrage supporters were invited to many countries to visit, lecture, and even join in demonstrations.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Contingent of New Zealanders
Supporting British Suffragists in a Parade
London, 1910

In Europe, Finland, Norway and Iceland were among the first to grant female suffrage. Most other western governments only extended suffrage to women during or just after WWI, even though women’s rights had been widely debated in their societies for many decades.

Even though suffrage movements in the United States were large and vigorous in the early twentieth century, it took women there seventy-two years from first claiming the franchise in 1848 to achieving it in 1920. It was an equally long process in Britain where women’s important work in WWI provided an opportunity for the government to act on suffrage without seeming to capitulate to the tactics of the more militant arm of England’s “suffragette” movement. France was one of the last in Europe to enfranchise women, even though the demand for women’s rights was first voiced by Olympe de Gouge during the French Revolution, and it was in France that the most radical critique of women’s subordination was developed. French suffragists, however, throughout the early part of the 20th century faced opposition from politicians, many of whom were Socialists who feared women would support Catholicism and right-wing political conservatism. French women won the vote as late as 1944.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

French women, nonetheless, fared better than the Swiss. It took efforts of the Swiss Federation for Women’s Suffrage from 1909 to 1971 before women in Switzerland were allowed to vote in national elections, and not until 1989 could women in the Appenzell Interiour Rhodes canton vote in their local elections.

In colonized countries, women demanded the right to vote not just from stable republics, but from colonial powers. Anti-colonial nationalist movements in some cases encompassed women’s suffrage. For example, in India in 1919, poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu headed a small deputation of women to England to present the case for female suffrage before a select committee set up to create a proposal for constitution reforms aimed at the inclusion of some Indians in government. Although the British committee found the proposition preposterous, they allowed future Indian provincial legislatures to grant or refuse the franchise to women. To the British surprise, many did, making it possible within a short span of time for women to be represented, however limited, on a par with men. Universal suffrage for all adults over 21 was not achieved, however, until it became part of India’s 1950 Constitution.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Women in newly independent states in Africa typically won the vote around the year 1960. On winning national independence, most of the ex-colonized countries created constitutions which guaranteed the franchise to both men and women. In other countries, like South Africa where only whites were allowed to vote for members of the central government, white women gained the right to vote for central government in 1930, while black and colored women voted for the first time in 1994.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Today only a few countries do not extend suffrage to women, or extend only limited suffrage. In Bhutan there is only one vote per family in village-level elections. In Lebanon women have to have proof of education before they vote. In Oman, only 175 people chosen by the government, mostly male, vote, and Kuwait only in 2005 granted women the right to vote in the 2007 elections. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, which have denied the vote to men as well as women, recently opened the vote in provisional elections to men.

Women in Bahrain Voting for the First Time
May 22, 2003

The Case for Suffrage:
Reasons for granting female suffrage have varied. Sometimes responses to political change, or to societal anxieties, forwarded the cause. In Sweden, for example, women’s suffrage seems to have been an attempt to ward off more radical changes. In Germany, the ending of imperial rule in 1918 opened the door for women to push for the vote. In Canada, the federal government used female suffrage as a political tool, enfranchising army nurses and female relatives of soldiers serving overseas in order to secure an election victory.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

A “nativist” argument also influenced the opinion of some in Canada, and in other parts of the world with large non-Northern European immigrant ethnic and racial minorities. One pro-suffrage argument in Canada was that white British Canadian women deserved the vote because the franchise had already been entrusted to naturalized male immigrants from Central Europe. In the United States the same argument was used, as was the fact that African American males had already won the vote before white women. The same reasoning was used by some white settlers in New Zealand, anxious about indigenous peoples’ access to political rights when it was denied to white women.

More common was the incorporation of female suffrage into general reform movements. The push for female political power sometimes occurred when it was clear that without political power little would change for women, even with the passage of substantive reforms. Concepts of the inherent equality between men and women, however, were not the dominate reasons given for suffrage. Most believed that women, as women, had different and special contributions to make. Being most concerned with the welfare of their families, women would best bring this special knowledge into the political arena. A principle temperance argument was that women were more likely to vote for prohibition as a way to safeguard the family.

Economic reasons for female suffrage were utilized as well. One stressed that once women were full citizens they would be in a position to press for equal salaries. Also, women’s economic independence depended on their ability to have a say in laws regarding their right to work and improvement in their working conditions.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

In the colonized states, the colonizers used the “woman question” to justify their dominance, claiming that women in their subject nations were “backward” and in need of “uplifting.” Ignoring the demands of women in their own countries, they were sometimes more willing to push for women’s reforms abroad. On the other hand, nationalistic movements in colonized and other non-western nations began to link attempts at modernization with an improvement in the status of women. In many instances, liberal nationalists, many of them male, needed the active support of women to help fulfill their dream of an independent, modern state.

Kimura Komako in New York City studying
methods of American women suffragists.
1917-1918

Obstacles to Overcome:
The question of why female suffrage was so difficult to achieve has been answered in different ways.

• Suffrage Challenged the Existing Order: Custom and laws in many countries had placed men as supreme in public sphere and within the family. Deep cultural beliefs in male/female differences in altitudes and abilities supported this situation, and giving the women the vote posed a direct threat to male powers and privileges. Changes in women’s reforms, such as access to education or property rights, were justified because they were viewed as an improvement in women’s social position. Suffrage, on the other hand, challenged the existing order by threatening the basis of women’s subordination in society. Granting suffrage was a revolutionary act.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Conservative Kuwait lawmakers recently blocked women’s vote by arguing that giving women would essentially double women’s power. Citing claims that Islam and Kuwaiti custom bar women from holding office, the head of the Parliament’s human rights committee in May, 2005, said that men “are technically the head of the nation here.”

• Many Women didn’t Want it. This rationale swayed many a male legislator. It is true that at times even well educated women in countries with high percentages of female illiteracy joined men who claimed that as long as the majority of women were still illiterate and ignorant, it would be dangerous to extend them the vote. The anti-suffrage groups in the U.S., for example, were mainly led by women.

New York City, 1920

• Fear of a Lose of Female rights. Some women and men worried that if the concept of male “protection” of women were broken, women would be forced to compete with men in areas which they were not prepared to. Giving women political independence would even change male/female roles in the family structure, severely damaging it.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

• Women’s Essential Femininity would be Sacrificed. Most women did not want to give up what they saw as essential characteristics of their female nature if voting meant that they would have to enter the rough and disorderly realm of politics. There were fears that when women entered the public arena their “natural” roles of wife and mother would be undermined. In South America, feminists were most successful when they developed ideas for improving women’s condition that did not challenge some basic social values. Suffrage became only one part of the process of social change which recognized the need first to address women’s problems associated with their health and work.

Feminist and suffrage supporters in non-western regions tended to be accused of blindly imitating Western women, who were perceived as aggressive and shameless. Japanese women’s internationalism was attacked using this very argument. In the years leading up to World War II, members of the Japanese Diet increasingly portrayed women’s suffrage as immoral and as running counter to Japanese customs.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

• National Needs Come First: In countries fighting for their independence from colonial rule there was pressure on women to wait their turn. Even Gandhi, who had brought women into the public struggle for self sufficiency from Great Britain, stated that although he wanted women to take their proper place by the side of men, the timing was wrong for a “votes for women” campaign; women instead should use their energies “helping their men against the common foe.” Women suffrage supporters, too, tended to be more nationalistic than feminist, arguing that votes for women were necessary so that they could imbue their children with ideas of nationalism.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

• Resistance of Liberal/Left Politicians: Some supporters of progressive legislation worried that acts by women’s militant suffrage would harm the “larger” cause of progressive politics. There further was concern that once given the vote, women might all vote for conservative parties. Women in Mexico sadly missed the chance to gain suffrage in 1930s because of these fears. In 1934, General Lázaro Cárdenas drafted a bill to implement female suffrage, which was passed by both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, was ratified by the states, and only needed formal declaration to be made into law. That declaration never came. The presence of a number of street demonstrations, a threatened hunger strikes by feminists, and fears that women would be unduly influenced by the clerical vote, unnerved Cárdenas at the last moment. Since the suffrage campaign was not a mass movement, it was easy to let the needed declaration slip away. Mexican women did not receive federal vote until 1958.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

• Suffrage Granted and the Denied: Suffrage, or its promise, has been granted and then retracted at various times. During the liberalization phase of Japan’s Meiji government in the 1880s, it seemed that Japan’s “first feminists” were going to achieve their goal of political participation. But all was ended in 1889 with the passing of laws which not only denied women voting rights, but even the right to join political parties. In the 1920s, Japanese feminists campaigned again, but the growing imperialism of the Meiji state and rising tide of Japanese militarism in the early 1930s turned Japanese suffragists back. When the Japanese military took control of the country in the 1930s, all democratizing movements were suppressed. It took people like Ichikawa Fusae decades of arguing that women’s suffrage was a fundamental human right before it was enshrined in the new Japanese constitution of 1945.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

In 1956 in Egypt, thirty-three years after feminists had first demanded suffrage, the revolutionary government granted women the right to vote. But from the start, the state and official Islam obstructed women’s political rights by banning feminist organizations and suppressing the public expression of their views. Thus the same year that the state granted women the right to vote, women were suppressed as independent political actors.

Similarly Iran, which had granted women suffrage in 1963 and passed numerous women’s equal rights legislation in the 70s, repealed all these gains when the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. Women were eliminated from all decision-making positions within the government, dress requirements were enforced, and women’s organizations were declared corrupt and disbanded. The future looks brighter today. A growing urban, middle class is making some progress by situating women’s rights within the cultural framework of Iran, and noting that in order to modernize, Iran must improve the status of women.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

Irish Cartoon, 1913

Beyond Suffrage:
Suffrage has not been an automatic stepping stone to full equality for women. One problem was that once suffrage was achieved, the common ground among women fighting for it was lost. Fears that participation in politics was “unladylike” remained, as did the old resistance and hostile attitudes against it.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

This means that major changes in women’s political activities, other than exercising their right to vote, have been long in coming. Today, women are struggling to gain equal participation in political office alongside men. Of interest is the use in over 41 countries of parity quotas and quota laws to achieve political gender balance. Responding to strong pressure by women’s organizations, gender quotas have appeared in many new constitutions, like the one of Rwanda, and recently in the constitution of Iraq. This means that a certain number of parliamentary seats are reserved for women. The seats are distributed among the political parties in proportion to the number of seats awarded in parliament. In South Africa, a municipal law stipulates that 50 percent of all candidates for the local office have to be women. India in 1992 enacted a 33 percent policy to reserve seats for women in Parliament and throughout the State Government. The final effectiveness of this policy is unknown, but so far, as many as one million women have gotten an opportunity to enter institutions as members and office bearers; many more have participated in elections and as campaigners for state legislatures. Most dramatic has been the change in the landscape of local politics. In some cases, women for the first time have sat with village leaders, and sometimes even had a turn heading village affairs.Women Suffrage Movement Essay

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