11.2 Women Gain Rights

Suffrage

the right to vote

Frances Willard

(1839-1898) was a professor who grew interested in the temperance movement in 1874. She joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), where she clashed with other members by insisting on linking its goals with women's suffrage. By 1879, she had gained enough support to be elected president of the WCTU, a position she held the rest of her life.

Florence Kelley

(1859-1932) played a major role at Hull House in calling attention to the working conditions of women and children. In 1899, she headed the newly founded National Consumers League. In 1909 Kelley helped found the NAACP.

Carrie Chapman Catt

(1859-1947) was an educator before becoming involved in the women's suffrage movement in 1887. IN 1890, she joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She became its president in 1900, and headed the organization almost without interruption until her death.

Ida B. Wells

(1862-1931) was an African American journalist who worked throughout her life to end the practice of lynching in the South. She contributed to several newspapers, including the Memphis Free Speech, the New York Age, and the Chicago Conservator. In 1895, she published a detailed inquiry into lynching, entitled A Red Record.

Margaret Sanger

(1879-1966) first coined the term "birth control" in a pamphlet she published in 1914. A medical organization she founded, the Birth Control Research Bureau, evolved into Planned Parenthood in 1942.

Alice Paul

(1885-1977) joined the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1912 but soon left to found a more militant organization, which became the National Woman's Party in 1917. After the passage of the 19th Amendment, Paul expanded her work for women's rights. In 1923 she introduced the first equal rights amendment into Congress.

National American Woman Suffrage Association

(NAWSA) group founded in 1890 that worked on both the state and national levels to gain women the right to vote.

National Consumers League

(NCL) group organized in 1899 to investigate the conditions under which goods were made and sold and to promote safe working conditions and a minimum wage.

Nineteenth Amendment

1920 constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote

Temperance Movement

movement aimed at stopping alcohol abuse and the problems created by it.