Vote

Tuesday, March 19, 2002; Page C14

It was "outrageous!" the two women thought. It was 1840 and Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were in London at a convention on slavery: How wrong it was, how unjust. And yet because they were women, the two were not allowed to speak at the gathering, or even sit in the meeting hall. The men running the convention wouldn't allow it.

The way society treated women was wrong and unjust, too, the women agreed.

Eight years later they and other women held their own convention in Seneca Falls, New York. They came up with a list of goals for American women. The top one: winning suffrage, which means the right to vote in elections.

Suffrage opponents said women were too delicate, too innocent, too simple-minded for the world of politics and voting. A woman's role, they said, was to clean house and tend children.

"The woman who thinks that the keeping of the home is beneath her sex is not fit to vote and is not fit for anything else," declared Missouri Senator James Reed.

Over the years, suffragists protested in many ways. In Washington, women marched silently outside the White House. "How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?" one sign said. When spectators started jeering and grabbing at them, President Woodrow Wilson ordered police to haul the picketers away.

Finally, after voting rights proposals came before it some 40 years in a row, Congress approved the idea in 1919. After three-quarters of the states ratified the 19th Amendment, it became an official part of the U.S. Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920.

Women had won the right to vote.

• In the two years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, nearly 100 women were arrested for suffragist activities. One was Alice Paul, who fought back by going on a hunger strike. Prison doctors force-fed her through a tube, three times a day for three weeks. After five weeks, she was set free.