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The History of the Journey To the Election of the First Female President of America.First Woman to Vote Under the 19th AmendmentFrom Jone Johnson Lewis,
Your Guide to Women's History.
Which Woman Cast the First Ballot?An often-asked question: who was the first woman in the United States to vote -- the first woman to cast a ballot -- the first female voter?
Because women in New Jersey had the right to vote from 1776-1807, and there were no records kept of what time each voted in the first election there, the name of the first woman in the United States to vote is lost in the mists of history.
Later, other jurisdictions granted women the vote, sometimes for limited purpose (such as Kentucky allowing women to vote in school board elections beginning in 1838).
But we do know the name of the first woman to vote under the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.*
On August 31, 1920, five days after the 19th amendment was signed into law, Hannibal, Missouri, held a special election to fill the seat of an alderman who had resigned.
At 7 a.m., despite pouring rain, Mrs. Marie Ruoff Byrum, wife of Morris Byrum and daughter-in-law of Democratic committeeman Lacy Byrum, cast her ballot in the first ward. She thus became the first woman to vote in the state of Missouri and the first woman to vote in the United States under the 19th, or Suffrage, Amendment.
The Long Road to Suffrage From Seneca Falls to the 1920s: an overview of the woman suffrage movement An article from your Guide, Jone Johnson Lewis.
The first women's rights meeting in the United States, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, itself followed several decades of a quietly-emerging egalitarian spirit among women. What a long road it would be to winning the vote for women! Before the Nineteenth Amendment secured women's right to vote in the US, more than 70 years would pass.
The Woman Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 with that pivotal meeting, weakened during and after the Civil War.
For practical political reasons, the issue of black suffrage collided with woman suffrage, and tactical differences divided the leadership. Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which accepted men as members, worked for black suffrage and the 15th Amendment, and worked for woman suffrage state-by-state. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, with Lucretia Mott, called the 1848 gathering at Seneca Falls, founded with Susan B. Anthony the National Woman Suffrage Association, which included only women, opposed the 15th Amendment because for the first time citizens were explicitly defined as male, and worked for a national Constitutional Amendment for woman suffrage. Frances Willard's Women's Christian Temperance Union, the growing Women's Club movement after 1868, and many other social reform groups drew women into other organizations and activities, though many worked for suffrage, too. These women often applied their organizational skills learned in the other groups to the suffrage battles -- but by the turn on the century, those suffrage battles had been going on for fifty years already.
Stanton and Anthony and Mathilda Jocelyn Gage published the first three volumes of their history of the suffrage movement in 1887, after winning women's vote in only a few states. In 1890, the two rival organizations, the NWSA and the AWSA, merged, under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After fifty years, a leadership transition had to take place. Lucretia Mott died in 1880. Lucy Stone died in 1893. Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902, and her lifelong friend and coworker Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. Women continued to provide active leadership in other movements, too: the National Consumer's League, the Women's Trade Union League, movements for health reform, prison reform, and child labor law reform, to name a few. Their work in these groups helped build and demonstrate women's competence in the political realm, but also drew women's efforts away from the direct battles to win the vote. By 1913, there was another split in the Suffrage movement.
Alice Paul, who had been part of more radical tactics when she visited the suffragists of England, founded the Congressional Union (later the National Women's party), and she and the other militants who joined her were expelled by the NAWSA. Large suffrage marches and parades in 1913 and 1915 helped bring the cause of woman suffrage back to the center. The NAWSA also shifted tactics, and in 1916 unified its chapters around efforts to push a suffrage Amendment in Congress. In 1915, Mabel Vernon and Sarah Bard Field and others traveled across the nation by automobile, carrying half a million signatures on a petition to Congress. The press took more notice of the "suffragettes." Montana, in 1917, three years after establishing woman suffrage in the state, elected Jeannette Rankin to Congress, the first woman with that honor.
Finally, in 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, sending it to the states. On August 26, 1920, after Tennessee ratified the Amendment by one vote, the 19th Amendment was adopted. Now move forward in time more than another fifty years, to the 1970s. A new women's rights movement is active, and the surviving women who led the struggles before 1920 are elderly. A group of scholars undertakes to capture the voices of leaders like Alice Paul and Jeannette Rankin. They ask questions about how suffrage was won -- about the practical aspects of political organizing -- about the education and background and lives of these leaders -- about the peace movement and other reforms for which these women battled after 1920. And now, another twenty years later, these voices come to the internet.
An incredible volume of pages of interviews are now online, thanks to efforts at the University of California Berkeley. Next: more on what's in some of those interviews.
If you want to read them for yourself, here's the link:
Suffragists Oral History Project New! From the University of California, Berkeley: interviews with 12 suffragists including Alice Paul, Jeannette Rankin.
From Women's HistoryWomen's Suffrage Events
From Jone Johnson Lewis.Timeline of Woman Suffrage:Key events in the struggle for women's suffrage in America. Also see the state-by-state timeline and the international timeline.
1837: Young teacher Susan B. Anthony asked for equal pay for women teachers.
July 14, 1848: call to a woman's rights convention appeared in a Seneca County, New York, newspaper.
July 19-20, 1848: Woman's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York.
October, 1850: first National Woman's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts.
1851: Sojourner Truth defends woman's rights and "Negroes' rights" at a women's convention in Akron, Ohio.
1855: Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell married in a ceremony renouncing the legal authority of a husband over a wife, and Stone kept her last name.
January 8, 1868: first issue of The Revolution appeared.
1868: New England Woman Suffrage Association founded to focus on woman suffrage; dissolves in a split in just another year.
1869: National Woman Suffrage Association founded primarily by Susan B.
November 1869: American Woman Suffrage Association founded in Cleveland, created primarily by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe.
December 10, 1869: Wyoming territory passed a law permitting women to vote.
1872: Republican Party platform included a reference to woman suffrage.
1872: Campaign was initiated by Susan B. Anthony to encourage women to register to vote and then vote, using the Fourteenth Amendment as justification.
November 5, 1872: Susan B. Anthony and others attempted to vote; some, including Anthony, are arrested.
June 1873: Susan B. Anthony was tried for "illegally" voting.
January 10, 1878: The "Anthony Amendment" to extend the vote to women was introduced into the United States Congress.
1878: First Senate committee hearing on the Anthony Amendment.
1880: Lucretia Mott died.
1887: Three volumes of a history of the woman suffrage effort were published, written primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Mathilda Jocelyn Gage.
1890: American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman Suffrage Association merge into the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1893: Colorado passed a referendum giving women the vote.
1893: Lucy Stone died.
January 25, 1887: The United States Senate voted on woman suffrage for the first time -- and also for the last time in 25 years.
1896: Utah and Idaho passed woman suffrage laws.
1900: Carrie Chapman Catt became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1902: Elizabeth Cady Stanton died.
1904: Anna Howard Shaw became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1906: Susan B. Anthony died.
1910: Washington State established woman suffrage.
May 4, 1912: Women marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding the vote.
May 4, 1913: About 5,000 paraded for woman suffrage up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.
1913: Women in Illinois were given the vote in most elections -- the first state East of the Mississippi to pass a woman suffrage law.
1913: Alice Paul formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, first within the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1914: The Congressional Union split from the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1915: Carrie Chapman Catt elected to presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
1916: The Congressional Union recreated itself as the National Woman's Party.
1917: National American Woman Suffrage Association officers meet with President Wilson. (photo)
1917: National Woman's Party began picketing the White House.
June 1917: Arrests began of pickets at the White House.
1917: Montana elected Jeannette Rankin to the United States Congress.
March 1918: A court declared invalid the White House suffrage protest arrests.
January 10, 1918: House of Representatives passed the Anthony Amendment but the Senate failed to pass it.
May 21, 1919: United States House of Representatives passed the Anthony Amendment again.
June 4, 1919: United States Senate approved the Anthony Amendment.
August 18, 1920: Tennessee legislature ratified the Anthony Amendment by a single vote, giving the Amendment the necessary states for ratification.
August 24, 1920: Tennessee governor signed the Anthony Amendment.
August 26, 1920: United States Secretary of State signed the Anthony Amendment into law.
1923: Equal Rights Amendment introduced into the United States Congress.
From Women's History
