Our May 13th meeting began with member Robert Wilder introducing our guest speaker, Sharon Zonker. Her presentation included period costume clothing and an array of quilts depicting this era.
“Women’s Suffrage – Right to Vote.”
On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised their right to vote for the first time. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right. Women did not have rights to hold public office; serve on a jury; own property; keep their work wages (was given to husbands) and if divorced they lost all inheritance and their children to the husband. American women were declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
The campaign for women’s suffrage began decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had. All sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States. In religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations, women played a prominent role.
In 1848, a group of mostly women abolitionist activists gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights around the world. Susan B. Anthony, a great orator and Elizabeth Stanton, the speech writer, pooled their talents along with Frances Willard to promote American women who deserved their own political identities & have the right to vote.
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement lost momentum when the Civil War began. After the war ended, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment. This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men they argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.
Starting in 1910, some Western states began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Still, the more established Southern and Eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last.
World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign. Women’s work on behalf of the war effort proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified.
(Source in part: http://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage).
June 10th a social meeting will be held in the Antwerp Riverside Park pavilion at 6:30 p.m., including a picnic style meal with the Society providing the chicken. A Riverside Cemetery walk will follow, with any member wanting to give a short report the person/family buried there. There will not be meetings in the months of July and August.
Information: Contact Ray Keck 419-399-4415 or Karen15806@gmail.com
