Read on for our guide to the history of women’s suffrage in every one of our (then) 48 United States!
100 years ago, the 19th amendment, allowing women the right to vote, was passed. But although the amendment was written to give women of all races the right to vote, in practice, it was mostly white women who secured the right; Black women would have to wait nearly 5 decades more to actually exercise that right.
Vermont Vermont was a cradle of suffragist activism from the beginning. Fueled largely by the Vermont Equal Suffrage Association , founded in the early 1880s, the movement sent representatives to the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage to push for suffrage action at the federal level. From 1885-1920, Vermont held annual statewide suffrage conventions for which they decorated their towns with banners and flags and engaged in festivities.
Rhode Island Rhode Island has had a long history of resistance from its disenfranchised citizens, beginning with Dorr’s Rebellion in 1842 when rebels fought to expand suffrage beyond male property owners and their eldest sons. In the twentieth century, Rhode Island women adopted the cause of suffrage and built their own movement, helping to finance national suffrage campaigns and lobby U.S. Senators.
Annie Arniel was one of the first suffragists jailed in June 1917 for picketing the White House. She was recruited by Mable Vernon and Alice Paul to work for the NWP. She served a total of eight jail terms for suffrage protesting and a total of 103 days.
Nevertheless,while no organized women’s suffrage organization ever came together in Arkansas, in 1888 three women started a small magazine called “The Woman’s Chronicle” which quickly became the central literature for women’s suffrage in Arkansas and its surrounding Southern states. For the next decade, women began gathering in loosely formed women’s suffrage society meetings, and by 1911 they began to lobby their state representatives, hard.
North Carolina Women’s suffrage had a lot of support in North Carolina. But many of the state representatives could not agree on whether or not to recognize women's suffrage rights and after Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, they postponed ratifying till the 70s. Only recently did North Carolina reform their sexist laws about assault like the idea that sexual consent cannot be withdrawn during sex and more safety protections for children. North Caroline ratified May 6, 1971.
West Virginia On March 10, 1920, West Virginia voted to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. And while this is, surprisingly, progressive for West Virginia, this state has still never had a female governor. Texas Surprisingly, Texas was the first southern state to ratify the 19th amendment on June 28, 1919. The Texas Suffrage movement waxed and waned for many years in the late 1800s. White Texan women’s suffrage mostly involved the campaign for prohibition and temperance with the Texas Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Mexican suffragist, Jovita Idar wrote pro-suffrage articles for her family's Spanish-language newspaper, La Cronica in 1919.
Indiana Indiana was a bit later to the ratification game than other states, ratifying the 19th amendment on January 16, 1920. Susan B. Anthony visited many times to advocate amending the state constitution and, in 1897, she told the General Assembly “I want the politicians of Indiana to see that there are women as well as men in this State, and they will never see it until they give them the right to vote. Make the brain under the bonnet count for as much as the brain under the hat.
North Dakota White women in North Dakota almost had the right to vote decades before the rest of the country but were shot down multiple times. Before the territory was made into two states, the “Dakota Territory”—comprising what is now North and South Dakota—was considered a territory. North and South Dakotas were made states in 1889. Legislation that would have given white women full suffrage rights failed by one vote in 1875 in the state legislature.
In SD, activism for women’s suffrage often was grouped in with the fight for prohibition. That was until Mary Shields Pyle, organizer of the South Dakota Universal Franchise League, advised that suffragists separate themselves from the prohibition movement because it was hurting the fight for voting rights. Suffrage amendments were defeated in both 1914 and 1916, although public support was growing.
Missouri Missouri women began forming organizations for the suffrage movement in 1867. Before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, suffragists in Missouri tried to petition for the state to add a constitutional amendment enfranchising women eighteen times. Of those eighteen times, only eight of them ever made it to the state legislature, where it was voted against each time. Francis and Virginia Minor were Missourians who spoke at the St.
In 1908, the Washington Equal Suffrage Association published the Washington Women's CookBook. The book contained recipes, housewifery, beauty secrets, and mountaineering with pro-suffrage quotations from Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony. This book was meant to win the support of male voters putting domesticity as the priority, argungu voting would not deter women from their “duties”. The cookbooks title pages read “Give us the vote and we will cook, the better for a wide outlook.
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