The following two passages deal with the political movements working for the woman’s vote in America.
Passage 1
The first organized assertion of woman’s rights in the United States was made at the Seneca Falls convention
in 1848. The convention, though, had little immediate impact because of the national issues that would soon
embroil the country. The contentious debates involving slavery and state’s rights that preceded the Civil War
soon took center stage in national debates.
Thus woman’s rights issues would have to wait until the war and its antecedent problems had been addressed
before they would be addressed. In 1869, two organizations were formed that would play important roles in
securing the woman’s right to vote. The first was the American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA).
Leaving federal and constitutional issues aside, the AWSA focused their attention on state-level politics. They
also restricted their ambitions to securing the woman’s vote and downplayed discussion of women’s full
equality. Taking a different track, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Elizabeth Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony, believed that the only way to assure the long-term security of the woman’s vote was to
ground it in the constitution. The NWSA challenged the exclusion of woman from the Fifteenth Amendment, the
amendment that extended the vote to African-American men. Furthermore, the NWSA linked the fight for
suffrage with other inequalities faced by woman, such as marriage laws, which greatly disadvantaged women.
By the late 1880s the differences that separated the two organizations had receded in importance as the
women’s movement had become a substantial and broad-based political force in the country. In 1890, the two
organizations joined forces under the title of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
The NAWSA would go on to play a vital role in the further fight to achieve the woman’s vote.
Passage 2
In 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-eighth state to approve the constitutional amendment securing the
woman’s right to vote, woman’s suffrage became enshrined in the constitution. But woman’s suffrage did not
happen in one fell swoop. The success of the woman’s suffrage movement was the story of a number of partial
victories that led to the explicit endorsement of the woman’s right to vote in the constitution.
As early as the 1870s and 1880s, women had begun to win the right to vote in local affairs such as municipal
elections, school board elections, or prohibition measures. These “partial suffrages” demonstrated that women
could in fact responsibly and reasonably participate in a representative democracy (at least as voters). Once
such successes were achieved and maintained over a period of time, restricting the full voting rights of woman
became more and more suspect. If women were helping decide who was on the local school board, why should
they not also have a voice in deciding who was president of the country? Such questions became more difficult
for non-suffragists to answer, and thus the logic of restricting the woman’s vote began to crumble
Which of the following does the first passage say was the first organized push for woman’s suffrage?