Women's Rights

The struggle for women's rights is one of the longest in American history — a fight, waged across two centuries, to extend the nation's founding promise of equality to half its people. At the founding, women could not vote, were barred from most professions, and lost their legal and property rights upon marriage. Almost every freedom American women now hold had to be won.

The first great campaign was for the vote. Launched at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and led by figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the suffrage movement fought for over seventy years before the Nineteenth Amendment finally guaranteed women the right to vote in 1920.

Winning the vote did not bring equality. Through the twentieth century, women pressed for control over their own bodies, entry into the workforce and the professions, equal pay, and an end to legal and social discrimination. A "second wave" of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s reshaped American life, from the family to the law.

That fight remains unfinished and contested — over the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, and equality in work and public life. But the transformation has been profound: the women's movement is among the most consequential social movements in American history, having remade the place of half the population in the nation.