Women's Suffrage

Women's Suffrage campaign began in the decades before the civil war started. During the 1820s and 30s all kinds of groups were all over the US religious movements, anti-slavery organizations and more. In many of these groups women played a prominent role. Many American women were starting to be against what historians called the "Cult of True Womanhood" which ment that a true woman was a wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. All of these contributed a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman in the United States.

During 1848 a group of activists, mostly women gathered in Seneca Palls in NY to discuss the problem of women's rights. Most of the delegates agreed American women were individuals who deserved their own rights. The Declaration of Sentiments produced "that all men and women are created equal","That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this also meant was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

In 1910, A couple of states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. In 1923, the National Women's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. Thats called Equal Rights Amendment.

http://www.history.com/topics/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage