• NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE: THE STORY OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B. ANTHONY, PBS
• Women's Rights National Historical Park

In 1869 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and began to focus on the vote as a way to cure many of womens' ills. The NWSA began to agitate for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution — an amendment like the recently added 14th and 15th Amendments which guaranteed the rights of African-American men to vote. The NWSA's insistence that educated white women deserved to vote even more than African-American men led to a split in the suffrage movement. Another organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, retained the pre-war alliance between abolition and women's suffrage, and worked for the vote through the state legislatures.

As the women's suffrage movement gained press and momentum, so did the anti-suffragists. The "antis," as they were known, often relied on satire to make their point. A prime example is the cartoon to the left where the "natural" order of things appears turned upside down as women go out to vote. The antis also maintained that a mere minority of women wanted the vote and that women would lose their special place "above" politics by entering the fray.

• More about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and THE WOMEN'S BIBLE
• American Women's History Collections, Library of Congress

The American suffrage movement was less radical than some of its counterparts across the Atlantic in England, where arrests, hunger strikes and broken windows were the hallmark of the Pankhurst's Womens' Social and Political Union. But as in England, women's labor during the First World War seemed to make the case for their right to vote. Under pressure President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support a women's suffrage amendment in 1918. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted nationwide suffrage to women.

• Library of Congress, American Women Collection
• World Chronology of Women's Suffrage

Just as the abolition movement had led women to compare their lot to that of the slaves, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s inspired the women's liberation endeavors of the 1970s. With one of its slogans — "the personal is political" — the second wave of American feminism addressed issues of sexual liberation, pay equity and reproductive rights.

But the women's movement also was determined to make a change to the American political backbone with its attempt to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution. The ERA had actually been written years earlier by Alice Paul, who considered it to be the next necessary step after the 19th Amendment in guaranteeing "equal justice under law" to all citizens.

From the time Paul wrote it in 1923, the ERA was introduced into every session of Congress. In 1972 it was passed and sent to the states for ratification. The seven-year time limit in the ERA's proposing clause was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at the deadline, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, leaving it three states short of the 38 required for ratification.

Today more women vote in presidential elections than do men — though this number is still less than in rest of the world.

• Map of ERA ratification
• The Gender Gap in American Voting