Background

• The beginnings of the women's suffrage movement in the U.S. trace to 1756, when Lydia Chapin Taft, a resident of Mendon, Massachusetts, was the first woman to vote in Colonial American history. After Taft's husband, Josiah, and 18-year-old son both died, the town fathers, out of respect for Josiah Taft's contributions, agreed to allow Lydia Taft to vote as his proxy during a vote to increase the town's contribution toward the cost of the French and Indian War. Until that point, only free male property owners were allowed to vote. More than a half century later, in 1848, a group of abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, and agreed that women were individual political entities and deserved the right to vote. This began a 70-year movement for women's voting rights.
  
  

Movement

• Near the end of the 19th century, Idaho and Utah granted women the right to vote, and several states in the West did the same beginning around 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt organized a campaign mobilizing state and local suffrage organizations to pressure federal, state and local elected officials to give women the right to vote. Some women even staged hunger strikes and pickets in front of the White House to increase publicity for the suffrage movement. Finally, Congress submitted the 19th Amendment for ratification by the states. The amendment said that the right of U.S. citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex..." On Aug. 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, giving it the requisite number of states needed to pass.
  
  

Property Rights

• The suffrage movement also resulted in expanded property rights for women. Starting around 1769, the colonies adopted a system which denied married women the ability to own property in their own name, or to keep their own wages. In 1848, thanks to the suffrage movement, the state of New York enacted the Married Women's Property Act, which allowed married women to keep their own earnings and to own property. By 1900, every other state had enacted similar legislation.
  
  

Public Office

• The momentum generated by the women's suffrage movement also helped women achieve a voice in public office. In 1916, four years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.