Women's right to vote

 But it still needed to be ratified!

On this day in 1919, Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote. One could say that the American women's suffrage movement began in 1776, when Abigail Adams asked her husband John to "remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors" when approving the Constitution. The movement grew hand in hand with the abolitionist movement; many women were active in both causes, and Frederick Douglass often spoke at women's rights rallies. The proposed Fifteenth Amendment, granting voting rights to black men, caused a division in the suffrage movement's leaders: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to support it because it didn't grant the same rights to women; Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone argued that it would eventually lead to voting rights for all.

Some states began extending limited voting rights to women in the latter half of the 19th century, and in 1869 two organizations — the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association — began campaigning for constitutional amendments on the national and state levels, respectively. 

The United States Congress first introduced an amendment in 1878, and would continue to introduce it with every new Congress, but it took more than 40 years to gain the needed two-thirds majority to pass.

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her "Declaration of Sentiments," which wisely adopted the language of the Declaration of Independence in calling for voting rights for women:

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

She concludes, "Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation — in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

Writer's Almanac 2014