1647
Margaret Brent demands two votes from the Maryland Assembly: one as a landowner and one as the legal representative of the colony’s proprietor, Lord Baltimore. She is refused.
Changing Role Of Women
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Women's rights
Timeline
1790
New Jersey gives the vote to “all free inhabitants” of the state. It is revoked from women in 1807.
1838
Kentucky allows widows to vote in local school elections, but only if they have no children enrolled.
1840
1840: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton meet in London, where they are among the women delegates refused credentials to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Women are very active abolitionists but are rarely in leadership positions.
1848
Mott and Stanton organize the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and take a cue from the Founding Fathers in issuing the Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
1868
The 14th Amendment guarantees civil rights to all citizens but gives the vote to men only.
1869
Wyoming Territory gives women the right to vote. The national suffrage movement splits into two factions: one that supports the 14th Amendment and the franchise for black men and one that calls for woman suffrage above all else.
1887
Federal legislation to end polygamy in Utah contains a measure to disenfranchise women, who had won the vote there in 1870. They wouldn’t get it back until 1895.
1890
Congress threatens to withhold statehood from Wyoming because of woman suffrage. Wyoming threatens to remain a territory rather than give up women’s votes. Congress backs down, and Western states take the lead in giving women full voting rights.
1912
With 4 million women eligible to vote in the West, presidential candidates vie for their attention for the first time. Democrat Woodrow Wilson wins.
About
Modern connections around the world
Impacts
The women's movement strives to end discrimination and violence against women through legal, political, and social change. It is one of the most influential social movements in the modern western world and can be divided into two waves. The first began in Newfoundland in the 1890s and eventually brought about voting rights for women. The second has focused on ending gender inequalities in laws, politics, the workplace, and society in general. It gained strength after 1970, when the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (established by the Canadian government in 1967) released its report.
There have been huge changes for women in terms of employment in the past decades, with women moving into paid employment outside the home in ways that their grandmothers and even their mothers could only dream of. In the US, for the first time, in 2011, women made up slightly more than half the workforce. There are (some) high-profile women chief executives. There is a small but increasing number of female presidents. Women are moving into jobs that used to be done by men. Even those women working in factories or sweatshops have more choice and independence than if they remained at home.
Women's suffrage has had a profound impact on the USA. Indeed, when Gallup polled Americans at the end of the 20th century, the pollster asked respondents to list "one of the most important events of the century" - most important and important (but not most important). Women getting the vote was ranked SECOND only to World War II!
That same poll found that Americans rejected a woman as president of the US in the 1930s (when polling began) but nearly all accept that possibility today. Getting the vote made it possible for women (other than widows) to become familiar faces in elected office and thus transformed the way society views women.
On some issues, there have been profound gender differences. The constitutional amendment for women getting the vote followed along with a constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol. The prohibition movement has been called "the first mass women's movement in US history" and prohibition was spurred by women getting the vote in many states before the national amendment took effect in 1920. And women backed prohibition more strongly than men.