Suffrage Topics

Suffrage Info ...

Women Suffrage - A Comparative Perspective ... According to Dictionary of World History The first European nation to grant female suffrage was Finland in 1906, with Norway following in 1913... "Instead, it produced fertile ground for a snowballing socialist movement of which the Social Democratic Party, formed in 1899, took advantage." Already by the mid-1890s, the workers' movement together with the worker-led temperance movement had expressed its support for universal and equal suffrage for men and women...

... in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all Negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters.
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

WHEREAS: It is our conviction that had the women of the countries of Europe, with their deep instinct of motherhood and desire for the conservation of life, possessed a voice in the councils of their governments, this deplorable war would never have been allowed to occur; therefore, be it
RESOLVED: That the National American Woman suffrage Association, in convention assembled, does hereby affirm the obligation of peace and good will toward all men and further demands the inclusion of women in the government of nations of which they are a part, whose citizens they bear and rear and whose peace their political liberty would help to secure and maintain.
—National Woman Suffrage Association. Quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, ch. 14, by Ida Husted Harper (1922)

The equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion according to the dictates of conscience is held by the same tenure with all our rights. [The legislature] are bound to leave this particular right untouched and sacred, [or] we must say, that they may control freedom of the press, may abolish the trial by jury, may swallow the Executive and the Judiciary Powers of the State; nay that they may despoil us of our very right of suffrage ... or we must say, that they have no authority to enact [a religious assessment].
—James Madison (1751–1836)