The organized women's rights movement in the United States grew out of another cause, the campaign to abolish slavery. In the 1830s women such as Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister from Philadelphia, and the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, from a South Carolina slaveholding family, spoke and wrote against slavery. When they addressed audiences of both men and women, clergymen attacked them for leaving their proper sphere. In defending their right to speak for the enslaved, they found themselves arguing for the rights of women.

From London to Seneca Falls

In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention met in London. American women delegates, Mott among them, were refused seats on the convention floor because they were women and had to watch from a curtained gallery. There Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in London on her honeymoon. The two talked of holding a convention on the rights of women. Eight years later they did.

On 19 and 20 July 1848 about three hundred people gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton drafted the meeting's manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments, and modeled it on the Declaration of Independence. Where Jefferson had listed the wrongs of King George, Stanton listed the injuries of "man toward woman." It opened: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." It complained that married women were "civilly dead" in law, that women were shut out of most colleges and professions, and that they had to obey laws they had no voice in making.

The convention passed a series of resolutions. All passed unanimously except one, the demand for the vote, which the text called the "elective franchise." Even Mott worried that it would make the meeting look ridiculous. It survived narrowly, helped by a speech from Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist, who argued that the power to choose rulers and make laws was the right by which all others were secured. In the end 100 people, 68 women and 32 men, signed the Declaration. Newspapers mocked it, and some signers later withdrew their names.

Growth in the 1850s

Women's rights conventions met almost every year through the 1850s. In 1851 Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, a teacher and temperance worker from a Quaker family. Their partnership lasted half a century and divided the work neatly: Stanton, at home with a growing family, wrote the speeches, and Anthony, who never married, traveled and organized.

The Fifteenth Amendment split

The Civil War paused the campaign. Afterward the question was whether the new constitutional amendments for the rights of freed people would include women. They did not. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 put the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time, when it penalized states that denied the vote to their adult male citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1869, banned voting discrimination on account of race but said nothing about sex.

This tore the movement apart. Stanton and Anthony refused to support an amendment that left women out, and at times Stanton used ugly racial and anti-immigrant language, complaining that educated women would be ruled by uneducated men. Others, including Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass, argued that this was the hour for Black men, who faced murder and terror in the South and needed the ballot urgently, and that women's turn would come. In 1869 the movement split into two rival organizations. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, pushed for a federal amendment and took up wider causes such as divorce reform. The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, supported the Fifteenth Amendment and worked state by state.

Both sides had a case. The National's leaders saw that a chance to change the Constitution comes rarely, and feared, correctly, that women would wait half a century for another. The American's leaders saw that tying Black men's votes to women's might sink both, and that in 1869 lives were at stake. Most historians now agree that the racism some suffragists expressed in these years left a lasting mark on the movement.

Worked example: Susan B. Anthony votes

Anthony and her allies tried a bold legal theory known as the "New Departure." They argued that women were already citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, with voting among their privileges. In November 1872 Anthony and a group of other women registered and voted in Rochester, New York. A few weeks later she was arrested for voting illegally.

At her trial in 1873 the judge, Ward Hunt, directed the all-male jury to find her guilty without deliberating. When he asked whether she had anything to say, she protested at length that she had been tried under laws made by men, interpreted by men and enforced by men. He fined her one hundred dollars, and she told him she would never pay a dollar of it. She never did, and the court never pursued her. In 1875 the Supreme Court closed the legal route in Minor v. Happersett, ruling that citizenship did not carry the right to vote. From then on the federal path meant amending the Constitution itself.