The struggle for woman suffrage (the right to vote) in the United States first gained public recognition in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott led a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Over the next seven decades, the suffragette movement twice would peak in the aftermath of a defining historical event.

The movement first peaked following the Civil War. The suffragettes had suspended their cause during the war on the assumption that they would gain the right to vote together with the emancipated slaves. After the war, however, many politicians feared that their efforts to enfranchise the ex-slaves would fail if attached to the widely unpopular woman suffrage movement. When the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchised only black men, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony broke from the more conservative suffragette alliance to voice radical opposition to the Amendment.

After World War I, the movement reached its pinnacle. Women had made invaluable contributions during the war, and much opposition to woman suffrage had dissolved as a result. New suffragette leadership, meanwhile, encouraged active protest. Feminists marched, picketed and chained themselves to the White House fence. By 1918, 15 states included woman suffrage in their own constitutions. Finally, on August 26, 1920, upon the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, American women were guaranteed the right to vote.

PostScript: The suffragettes believed that political equality would empower women to gain other rights. The fight for the vote, however, sapped the movement, and a women’s revolution would not occur until the revival of feminism in the 1960s.