The women’s suffrage movement was a period of time when women throughout the United States fought for their right to vote. Lasting for decades, it took nearly 100 years for women to gain the right to vote in the United States.
Social reform groups began to pop up all over the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. This included anti-slavery organizations, temperance leagues, religious movements and others. Women were often at the center of these organizations, pushing back against the notion that a woman’s place was in the home.
In 1848, a group of abolitionists (mostly women, but some men were included) gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss women’s rights. This movement was led by early suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. From 1848 on, women’s suffrage activists took up a campaign to grant women the right to vote in the United States.