The Struggle for Woman Suffrage

Leader

Marjorie J. Spruill
Professor of History, University of South Carolina
National Humanities Center Fellow

About the Seminar

This seminar will explore strategies suffragists adopted and arguments they made to obtain the vote for American women as political and cultural currents shifted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did the Second Great Awakening affect the suffrage movement? How did women's battle for the vote relate to other reform movements like abolition, temperance, and Progressivism? How did the movement balance the efforts of moderates and radicals? And how did it accommodate itself to debates on race and immigration?

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Assigned Readings

1. "A Short History of the Woman Suffrage Movement," from One Woman, One Vote.
2. "Jane Addams, Progressivism, and Woman Suffrage," from One Woman, One Vote.
3. "Abigail and John Adams letters."
4. "The Declaration of Sentiments," Seneca Falls Conference, 1848.
5. "Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening," by Donald Scott, from "Divining America," TeacherServe®, the National Humanities Center.
6. "American Abolitionism and Religion," by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, from "Divining America," TeacherServe®, the National Humanities Center.
7. From the American Memory Timeline from the Library of Congress: National Expansion and Reform, 1815-1880: Reformers and Crusaders.
   1. Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
   2. Photographs of Seneca Falls Organizers
   3. Jane Grey Swissholm, Crusader and Feminist
   4. Consistent Democtacy: Men Speak on Votes for Women
   5. First Annual Meeting of the American Moral Reform Society
   6. Women and the Alphabet
   7. Dancing as a Means of Physical Education
We also recommend:
1. Teacher's Guide to the Library of Congress's Primary Resource Set on Women's Suffrage.
2. Suffragists and Their Tactics.
3. Women's Suffrage: Their Rights and Nothing Less.
4. Suffrage Strategies: Voices for Votes.