Bethune knew she was setting an example, stating, "I visualized dozens of Negro women coming after me, filling positions of high trust and strategic importance. And, thanks to a 1907 law, an American woman who wed a foreign national lost her U.S. citizenship. The role of women in the armed forces became a point of contention as some hoisted the standard of equality while others protested that mothers in the military should not be sent off to war. Terrell joined Alice Paul and other members of the National Women’s Party in picketing for women’s voting rights outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House. She was raised by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins, an abolitionist who set up his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. All Rights Reserved. In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. She came from a privileged background and decided early in life to fight for equal rights for women. READ MORE: 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More. The failure of the ERA was followed in the 1980s by a gradual decline in organized, often bellicose activity by masses of women in the United States. These women fought endlessly for equality women throughout the 20th century. Maud Wood Park not only aided female voters as the first president of the League of Women Voters, but she also helped form and chaired the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, which lobbied Congress to enact legislation favored by women's groups. who had received a pro-suffrage plea from his mother, 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment—And Much More, sued a D.C. restaurant after being refused service. The Bureau kept detailed patient records that proved the efficacy and safety of birth control. Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the 15th Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment. Women getting the vote — thanks to the 19th Amendment — was only one step on a long road toward equality. Bethune raised money to pay the poll tax in Daytona, Florida (she got enough for 100 voters), and also taught women how to pass their literacy tests. Anti-feminists such as Phyllis Schlafly organized a crusade against the amendment, warning—correctly or not—that it would, among other things, invalidate state sodomy laws, outlaw single-sex restrooms in public places, legalize same-sex marriage, and make taxpayer-funded abortion a constitutional right. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” One hundred of the delegates–68 women and 32 men–signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were citizens equal to men with “an inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage. Combining the disciplines of literary theory and psychology…, Important women’s movements completed the new roster of mass protests. With issues like these, activists had plenty to work on after suffrage. This led to a dramatic schism in the women’s rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to African Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association), and those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former slaves, even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their Black neighbors. ", Photo: National Photo Company Collection. Sanger also lobbied for birth control legislation, though she didn't meet with much success. During the Great Depression, Schneiderman called for unemployed female workers to get relief funds. In the 1920s Sanger put aside earlier radical tactics in order to focus on getting mainstream support for legal contraception.