Doris Weatherford (Essay Date 1998)

SOURCE: Weatherford, Doris. "The Hour Not Yet, 1871 to 1888." In A History of the American Suffragist Movement, pp. 127-54. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1998.

In the following essay, Weatherford combines a detailed overview of how suffragists worked at the statewide level in the 1870s and 1880s to secure the right for women to vote, along with a discussion of how the movement began to unite with European organizations in order to gain global acceptance.

At their Chestnut Street headquarters for the Philadelphia centennial, the National Woman Suffrage Association kept "an immense autograph book" for visitors. Greetings "from the old world and the new" in it showed that the women's movement increasingly was going global. Some international links had been part of the movement from the beginning: Scottish Francis Wright had set the example in the 1840s, while German Mathilde...