Background.

The United States achieved universal male suffrage in 1870 with passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Women, however, had to educate, agitate, and organize for another fifty years before they obtained the right to vote in federal elections. On 4 June 1919 Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women suffrage, and by August 1920 the requisite number of states had ratified it. It had been a long fight, with roots that can be traced back to Abigail Adams's importuning her husband, John Adams, to "remember the ladies" during the Constitutional Convention. Woman's suffrage was proposed at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, but the drive to achieve it did not begin in earnest until 1869 with the founding of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of NWSA focused on national suffrage; Lucy Stone and...