The long struggle for suffrage

Women’s suffrage is sometimes portrayed as the triumphant end of a movement, the hard-won reward for decades of marches, protests, hunger strikes, feeding tubes. Really, it was a beginning.

Two sides are dueling over the answer, and the definition of feminism, in what has become a game of “political strategy,” according to one scholar.

No one knows whether New Jersey meant to do it. But for some reason, when it described the rules for the electorate, it said “they.”

In 1840, the idea of women taking part in the blood sport of politics was shocking to some men. That changed when the Whig Party decided to encourage female participation.

Experts say the court decision forced suffragists to abandon their argument that the Constitution ensured them voting rights and ushered in a new phase of their long fight for access to the ballot.

Inez Milholland led a long procession of women down Pennsylvania Avenue to demand the right to vote. A drunken crowd soon converged on the marchers.

Black women viewed the vote as a means of protecting themselves against sexual exploitation. They also saw it as a way to boost education for African Americans.

Granting women the right to vote, the anti-suffragists argued, would lead to a disruption of the family unit, of a woman’s role as a wife and mother, and of what they considered a privileged place in society.

The suffragists had readied themselves for defeat. They could win only if an opponent changed his mind. What followed became one of the defining moments of the movement.

Like many American-born women who lost their citizenship — thousands of them — she had absolutely no idea it had happened.

The origin of “suffrage” is not suffering, although plenty of people suffered in the pursuit of suffrage. It derives from the Latin suffragium, meaning a vote or a right to vote. It can also mean a prayer of intercession, certainly an apt description given the many groups of people who have prayed for the right to vote.