How American Women Challenged The Status Quo And Won the Vote

Some great reporting on the importance of the fight for women’s suffrage in the US comes from the Texas Public Radio and their hour-long live local call-in radio program, “The Source”. Featured in the discussion are Elaine Weiss, the award-winning journalist and author of “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote“, and Sally Roesch Wagner, a lecturer, author and editor of “The Women’s Suffrage Movement”. From a write up by Texas Public Radio’s Kim Johnson:

Over seven decades and three generations, women faced contempt, physical violence and even prison time for demanding equality. 2020 will mark the centennial anniversary of women achieving the right to vote. What can we learn from the suffrage movement? Nearly 100 years later, what inequalities are women still working to overcome?

A women’s rights convention in New York launched the suffrage movement in 1848, but it would take more than half a century of advocating and educating before a real victory was achieved for women’s voting rights. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, asserts: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

You can listen to the Texas Public Radio broadcast at this link. The goal of equal access for women in world politics continues to be incomplete. The statistics showing the dreadful lack of female political representation in American history are very important to the understanding of the character of the country’s democracy.