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Suffrage
2 articles on Suffrage
Suffrage
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 7176 Includes: First Generation | Second Generation | Third Generation | Nineteenth Amendment | BibliographyBlack women were active participants in the movement to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which in 1920 enfranchised all American women. For white women, the amendment's passage ended battles that had begun more than seventy years before. For most African American women, however, the struggle to maintain the ballot continued for two generations more, as they were robbed of their hard-won victory by white political supremacy in the South. But this is the story of the first seventy years, or the first three generations of African American women who became woman suffragists, their long struggle for political equity, and how through this movement many of their voices were heard for the first time. The term “woman suffrage” is the name of the historical movement whose members ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1130Suffrage, the right or privilege of voting to choose candidates or enact laws in a public election, has been practiced and regulated since classical times. In England, in 1430, Parliament imposed property restrictions that in effect limited those permitted to vote in parliamentary elections to no more than 15 percent of adult males. In the American colonies, land was cheap; rank was fluid; and suffrage restrictions, such as property, civility, and religious qualifications, were casually enforced and easily evaded. Surviving eighteenth-century voting records suggest that most adult white males could vote in local elections.In the United States, war has often been a catalyst for the extension of suffrage. Religious qualifications were largely abandoned during and after the Revolutionary War. ...
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