A Woman in the House (and Senate)

A Woman in the House (and Senate) — page 7 — MEN THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING MORE Suffragists standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol 1914 THE

A Woman in the House (and Senate) — page 8 — WOMEN THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING LESS

A Woman in the House (and Senate) — page 9 — SERVANT TEACHER Imagine that you are a woman living in the United States in the early 1800s You probably don't work outside the home but if you do and you are married your husband has the right to take your pay Did your parents or relatives leave you an inheritance Sorry that automatically becomes your husband's property Not married Well you might get to keep your own money but you'll have a hard time earning any There are only a few jobs open to women You can be a teacher perhaps or a seamstress And with no husband and no children to take care of many people will look down on you You'll be called an old maid Oh and one more thing You will not be able to vote That's right Until 1920 there was no national law that guaranteed all women in the United States the right to vote Who decided women couldn't vote It's easy to blame it on the men From the pulpit preachers taught that females were inferior to males Not many fathers wanted to see their daughters educated or worse hold jobs It wasn't considered ladylike But the idea of voting seemed strange to women too And it wasn't just in the United States that women couldn't vote Until the 1860s there was hardly any place in the world where a woman could cast a vote It took a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of effort to get women in the United States the right to vote It took women with big ideas buckets of courage and plenty of patience The U.S. suffrage movement suffrage means the right to vote started in SEAMSTRESS

A Woman in the House (and Senate) — page 10 — MEN THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING MORE WOMEN THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING LESS 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton Lucretia Mott and some three hundred others came together at a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls New York The conference ended with a declaration that men and women are equal with equal rights And one of those was the right to vote Stanton and Mott were soon joined by Amelia Bloomer she shockingly wore pant outfits that came to be called bloomers and the tireless Susan B. Anthony who would fight for decades for woman suffrage and provide the quotation used as the title of this section Thousands of other women across the country also marched lobbied and even went to jail for the vote It seemed foolish for women to run for office if they didn't have the right to vote Who would vote for them But in the late 1800s some women in the United States ran anyway Victoria Woodhull the first female stockbroker on Wall Street and a very successful one at that ran for the presidency of the United States in 1872 as a candidate from the Equal Rights Party Many people questioned whether it was even legal for her to run because she was a woman because she couldn't vote because she was not thirty five years old the minimum age the Constitution says one must be to be president But the colorful Woodhull who believed in otherworldly spirits advocated shorter skirts at a time when dresses swept the floor and refused to be reined in by society's conventions was determined to make a statement about inequality She wanted people to think about women's rights Her candidacy attracted so much attention that she tried again in 1884 and 1892 Belva Lockwood an attorney who had to fight for her right to be educated and practice law made a more serious run for the presidency in 1884. She got about 4,000 votes nationwide but many of those were simply thrown out by vote counters who didn't think her candidacy was legal She ran again in 1888 In 1920 all the hard work paid off The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed

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