Compare the Women’s Suffrage Movements of the United States and Great Britain for Their Effectiveness in Gaining Women the Right to Vote

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It is the turn of the century and more and more women in the United States and Great Britain were beginning to express their desires for the right to voice their opinions and cast their votes for who should govern and be in charge of their government. Switzerland had granted suffrage to women in 1971, while France, Germany, and Italy enfranchised women decades earlier (Abrams and Settle 292), and now it was time for the American and British women to join the suffrage movement as well. Thousands of women petitioned, lobbied, protested, demonstrated, and engaged in civil disobedience in order to gain their right to vote. Although the right to vote was referred to with different names (“suffrage” and “enfranchisement”), the movement had the same aims. Women in these countries were not being paid the same as men although they were doing the same work, there were laws discriminating against the female race, and women wanted to be heard. All of these reasons led to the notion of women to feel the need to have their voices heard in the government. The effectiveness of the movement and the success of the aims as a result of the women’s suffrage movement in America and Great Britain varied and will be discussed in this paper.

The fight for the right to vote in America was referred to as the women’s suffrage movement, and it was led and organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and other “radical” female leaders. This movement was started in 1848 when the Convention of Seneca Falls was held in New York as the first women’s rights convention. At the Convention of Seneca Falls, Lucretia wrote a line in the Declaration of Sentiments calling for “the right [of women] to the elective franchise” (Winslow “Sisters”). The Civil War got in the way of the women’s suffrage movement for a couple years after it was initiated, but from 1976 to the turn of the century, women’s rights movements continued with campaigns, referendums, lobbying, etc. Because of this continuous,...
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