Brenda Montgomery, age 16, of Galveston, Texas, for her question:
WHEN DID U.S. WOMEN GET THE VOTE?
Women in the United States were given the right to vote with the passing of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. It was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920. For more than 40 years before this, amendments giving women the right to vote were introduced in Congress one after another, but never passed.
The Revolutionary War had inspired liberal thought on women's rights, but the Continental Congress left decisions on suffrage, or voting, to the states. Only the New Jersey constitution gave women the right to vote. But the state took that right away again in 1807.
Early American women actually had few rights. There were almost no colleges for women and most professional careers were closed to them. A married woman could not own property and women were barred from voting in all elections.
A women's rights movement developed after 1820 and brought about some changes. In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio became the first men's school to admit women. Other men's colleges soon began admitting women and new colleges for women were built.
In 1848, New York became the first state to allow married women to own real estate. That same year, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Stanton organized a Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y. The convention issued the first formal appeal for women's suffrage.
The first national convention on equal rights for women was held at Worcester, Mass., in 1850. It had been called by Lucy Stone and organized by Paulina Davis.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton founded the radical National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Many others joined the crusade to give women the vote.
The territorial legislature of Wyoming gave women the right to vote in 1869. This was the first such action in the nation's history. In the 1890s, several states granted suffrage to women and other states became more friendly to the cause.
World War I required full cooperation from women and gave the suffragists their chance. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, a women's suffrage amendment was submitted to the House of Representatives.
By 1919, the amendment had passed both houses of Congress and was soon ratified by the necessary 36 states. Amendment 19 to the Constitution became a new law in 1920.
Before World War I, several countries had given women the vote: New Zealand in 1893, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1907, Australia in 1908 and Denmark and Iceland in 1915.
Canada, Germany, Luxembourg and Poland followed by giving the women the right to vote in 1918. India, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands did so in 1919. And Great Britain granted complete women's suffrage in 1928.