✓ INTRODUCTION

✓ BACKGROUND
✓ THE GREAT BRITAIN
✓ THE UNITED STATES
✓ INDIAN MOVEMENT
✓ RESULTS AND THE AMENDMENT
✓ TIMELINE OF EVENTS
✓ CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION:
Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the
few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened,
as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of
women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense
in Great Britain and the United States. Social stratification based on gender worked in an intricate fashion to
make women sexually available to men and to facilitate their appropriation as resources for reproduction and
unpaid labour within the confines of the family. No aspect of the voting right more clearly reflects the social
hierarchy of American culture than the historical limitations on access to it that were selectively applied to
various groups. These limitations played a critical role in creating the social systems by which the poor,
persons of colour, and women were subjected to an inferior status. Moreover, the way gender subordination
has operated in the context of the franchise is particularly complicated. This is the case because, as MacKinnon
has described it, "Men's forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as
economically, prior to the operation of law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday
life." Thus dominance has involved forces of breadth, depth, and sophistication by which the political power
of half the population has been blocked, blunted, and manipulated in a system allegedly committed to majority
rule.

WHAT IS WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT? :

The women’s suffrage movement was the struggle for the right of women to vote and run for office
and is part of the overall women’s rights movement. In the mid-19th century, women in several countries most
notably, The U.S. and The Great Britain formed organizations to fight for suffrage.

BACKGROUND:
As the new American nation faced the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, it presented the irony of a
political regime committed to the norm of representative government under which most adults were not
allowed to vote. After the Revolution, states enacted constitutions that imposed a variety of restrictions on
eligibility for the suffrage right. Property and religious qualifications were imposed, women were excluded
from the franchise regardless of their wealth or other characteristics, slaves had no civil or political rights, and
Native Americans were not considered a part of the citizenry. With the beginning of the new century however,
demands by disenfranchised white males for participation in government arose. These men argued that their
exclusion from the electorate violated principles of autonomy and self-rule upon which the American polity
had been founded. Their agitation together with evolving conceptions of personal independence and changing
social conditions combined to bring about the almost complete enfranchisement of white men by the middle
of the 1800s.In this way, these new voters attained an official relationship with their government - that of
citizen which was reinforced with each trip to the ballot box.

In contrast, the condition of women was conceived of so differently from that of men that it was unclear
whether they were citizens in their own right or had any political relationship with the state. The women also
had certain limitations. Firstly they were economically dependent on men. Second, women did not have
freedom of speech or association. They were verbally and physically intimidated from appearing in public
without appropriate escort. Third, women bore the brunt of housework, and married women were subjected
to a lifetime of reproduction and child care. Females were expected to marry and they were subjected to the
physical and mental authority of their husbands and confined to the private sphere of home and family. Thus,
the domination of women by men through the operation of law and custom was quite explicit in the last
century, and women were largely invisible in the political realms of the American society. The founders of
the women's rights movement sought to change this reality. They needed a symbol of autonomy and
independence to use as a tool to escape their dominated status. That symbol was the voting right.

CIVIL WAR AND SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT:

The Civil War made women's activities outside the home not only respectable, but also patriotic. While
men served away from home, women were needed to write to soldiers in the field, to form hospital and sanitary
units, to act as nurses, to make and send bandages and other supplies to the front, and to work in traditional
male occupations. The federal government's need for women's work created a window of opportunity that
suffrage leaders were determined to exploit. They hoped to take advantage of the opportunity by interesting
women newly experimenting with activities outside the home in suffrage as an issue and by enlarging public
acceptance of a less traditional role for women. However, the contributions that Northern women could make
to the war effort were not just material but also they were also political. The victorious Republican party and
abolitionists used women suffragists to promote key features of their own political agendas. For the first time,
women's involvement in public affairs was welcomed by the party in power. To capitalize on all these
conditions, Stanton and Anthony organized the Women's National Loyal League in 1863. At the same time
that the exigencies of war were creating new opportunities for women. By the end of the Civil War, what
began as a general women's rights movement, of which claims to suffrage were but one part, became a suffrage
movement, where the enfranchisement of women became the key to beginning the process of eroding the
whole complex of gender domination.
 In Great Britain woman suffrage was first advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her book, “A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) and was demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The
demand for woman suffrage was increasingly taken up by prominent liberal intellectuals in England from the
1850s on, notably by John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet. The first woman suffrage committee was formed
in Manchester in 1865, and in 1867 Mill presented to Parliament this society’s petition, which demanded the
vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. The succeeding years saw the defeat of every major
suffrage bill brought before Parliament. This was chiefly because neither of the leading politicians of the
day, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, cared to affront Queen Victoria’s implacable opposition to
the women’s movement. In 1869, however, Parliament did grant
women taxpayers the right to vote in municipal elections, and in the
ensuing decades women became eligible to sit on county and city
councils. The right to vote in parliamentary elections was still denied
to women, however, despite the considerable support that existed in
Parliament for legislation to that effect. In 1897 the various suffragist
societies united into one National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies, thus bringing a greater degree of coherence and organization to the movement. Out of frustration at
the lack of governmental action, however, a segment of the woman suffrage movement became more militant
under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel.

After the return to power of the Liberal Party in 1906, the succeeding years saw the defeat of seven
suffrage bills in Parliament. As a consequence, many suffragists became involved in increasingly violent
actions as time went on. These women militants, or suffragettes, as they were known, were sent to prison and
continued their protests there by engaging in hunger strikes. Meanwhile, public support of the woman suffrage
movement grew in volume, and public demonstrations, exhibitions, and processions were organized in support
of women’s right to vote. When World War I began, the woman suffrage organizations shifted their energies
to aiding the war effort, and their effectiveness did much to win the public wholeheartedly to the cause of
woman suffrage. The need for the enfranchisement of women was finally recognized by most members of
Parliament from all three major parties, and the resulting Representation of the People Act was passed by
the House of Commons in June 1917 and by the House of Lords in February 1918. Under this act, all women
age 30 or over received the complete franchise. An act to enable women to sit in the House of Commons was
enacted shortly afterward. In 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21 to place women voters on an
equal footing with male voters.
 The Women's suffrage movement in India fought for Indian women's right to political enfranchisement
in Colonial India under British rule. Beyond suffrage, the movement was fighting for women's right to stand
for and hold office during the colonial era. In 1918, when Britain granted limited suffrage to women property
holders, the law did not apply to British citizens in other parts of the Empire. Despite petitions presented by
women and men to the British commissions sent to evaluate Indian voting regulations, women's demands were
ignored in the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. In 1919, impassioned pleas and reports indicating support for
women to have the vote were presented by suffragists to the India Office. Though they were not granted voting
rights, nor the right to stand in elections, the Government of India Act 1919 allowed Provincial Councils to
determine if women could vote, provided they met stringent property, income, or educational levels.

Between 1919 and 1929, all of the British Provinces, as well as most of the Princely states granted women
the right to vote and in some cases, allowed them to stand in local elections. The first victory was in the City
of Madras in 1919, followed by the Kingdom of Travancore and the Jhalawar State in 1920, and in the British
Provinces, the Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency in 1921. The Rajkot State granted full universal
suffrage in 1923 and in that year elected the first two women to serve on a Legislative Council in India. In
1924, the Muddiman Committee conducted a further study and recommended that the British Parliament allow
women to stand in elections, which generated a reform on voting rights in 1926. In 1927, the Simon
Commission was appointed to develop a new India Act.

The Commission recommended holding Round Table Conferences to discuss extending the franchise.
With limited input from women, the report from the three Round Tables was sent to the Joint Committee of
the British Parliament recommending lowering the voting age to 21, but retaining property and literacy
restrictions, as well as basing women's eligibility on their marital status. It also provided special quotas for
women and ethnic groups in provincial legislatures. These provisions were incorporated into the Government
of India Act 1935. Though it extended electoral eligibility, the Act still allowed only 2.5% of the women in
India to vote. All further action to expand suffrage was tied to the nationalist movement, which considered
independence a higher priority than women's issues. In 1946, when the Constituent Assembly of India was
elected, 15 seats went to women. They helped draft the new constitution and in April 1947 the Assembly
agreed to the principal of universal suffrage. Provisions for elections were adopted in July, India gained its
independence from Britain in August, and voting rolls began being prepared in early 1948. The final provisions
for franchise and elections were incorporated into the draft constitution in June 1949 and became effective on
26 January 1950, the enforcement date of the Constitution of India.
The 19th amendment legally guarantees American women the right to
vote. Beginning in the 1800s, women organized, petitioned, and picketed
to win the right to vote, but it took them decades to accomplish their
purpose. Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in
Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of
voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving
their goal varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in
each state—nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only
voting laws in the courts. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils,
and hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes
physically abused them.

By 1916, almost all of the major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional
amendment. When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Wilson changed his position to
support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift. On May 21, 1919, the House of
Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the
36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment passed its final hurdle of obtaining the
agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on
August 26, 1920, changing the face of the American electorate forever.

Ratification Of The Nineteenth Amendment:

Tennessee became the last battleground state for ratification. There, as in other Southern states, the
woman’s suffrage movement was inextricably linked in the minds of
many with the abolition movement, and old animosities still simmered. In
Dixie, even more than in other parts of the country, feminism ran counter
to a culture in which conservative religion, tradition, and respect for the
law was deeply engrained. Too, powerful lobbying groups including
liquor distilleries—the temperance movement and women’s rights
movement had long been comrades in arms—textile manufacturers and
railroads opposed expanding women’s rights. Additional opposition came
from state’s rights advocates, some of whom wanted to see women get the
right to vote but felt that should be dealt with at the state level, not the
national. On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature narrowly
approved the 19th Amendment. On August 31, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to rescind their
previous vote, but the U.S. Secretary of State had already proclaimed the amendment ratified on August 26.

Women’s right to vote was achieved through the national and local efforts the NAWSA. The labour
shortage caused by World War I that allowed women to move into roles traditionally held by men also made
it increasingly difficult for opponents to argue that women were unworthy of the vote on the grounds of
physical and mental inferiority. With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in sight, Chapman Catt
formed the League of Women Voters during NAWSA’s last meeting on February 14, 1920, to help newly
enfranchised women exercise their right to vote.

Although women's attainment of the voting right did not end gender discrimination overnight, it is
important not to forget what the movement did achieve. The history of the woman's suffrage movement
provides a broader context within which to determine whether and how gender classifications can be
appropriate in governmental legislation. Finally, to the extent that the historic exclusion of women from
political participation resulted in the unjust enrichment of dominant groups. Seventy-five years on, women
have the vote, we hold positions of power, we enjoy at least some opportunities in all sectors of the
economy, and we have the respect that citizens in a democracy deserve. No doubt the redoubtable women of
the suffrage movement would tell us not to rest until full equality is achieved, and quite rightly so. But it is
fitting, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of women's right to vote, that we pause to "remember the ladies"
who secured our rights, and to celebrate the remarkable progress that the past seventy-five years have
brought.