Structure and Style in The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects Answers

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Read the excerpt from Suffragists' "Great Demand" Banner.From colonial times to the American independence movement and the writing of the U.S. Constitution, voting rights had been restricted. Each colony had made its own rules about who could vote, and this practice continued once they became states. Requirements generally called for a certain age of maturity, generally twenty-one, and ownership of property, among other qualifications. Younger adults, Indians, African Americans, and women were typically disqualified from voting. While there were stirrings for the right of women to vote in the early nineteenth century, the cause took on a new seriousness with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

Read the excerpt from Suffragists' "Great Demand" Banner.In June 1917, the District of Columbia police began arresting picketers for obstructing sidewalk traffic. The women would be sentenced to serve in the Occoquan Workhouse Prison in Lorton, Virginia. In August, scuffles broke out at the gates of the White House as angry spectators assaulted suffragists while city police stood by. The picketing continued.

Read the excerpt from Suffragists' "Great Demand" Banner.On October 20, Alice Paul was arrested and sentenced to seven months in jail. She and her companions were held in solitary confinement and denied counsel. Paul went on a hunger strike and was violently force-fed. Authorities confined her to a psychiatric ward in an effort to discredit her. On November 14, thirty women in the Workhouse Prison were beaten, threatened, and mistreated in what came to be known as the Night of Terror. The subsequent storm of critical publicity was such that the administration itself soon called for the release of all suffragist prisoners.

Look at the images.

Look at the images.

Look at the images.

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Read the excerpt from Suffragists' "Great Demand" Banner.Graddy can’t help but wonder about the dinner-table conversations that might have occurred between the young suffragist and her father-in-law, who, in his job as police chief, might have been arresting her fellow protesters.

Read the excerpt from Suffragists' "Great Demand" Banner.The effort picked up steam after the Civil War, when debate over the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended the vote to African American men, split the movement. Some leaders, like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, refused to endorse the amendment, believing it should also give women the vote. Others, such as Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, and long-term women’s rights ally Frederick Douglass, argued that if black men were enfranchised, their support would help women achieve their goal. The conflict fractured the women’s movement, with some focusing on obtaining women’s suffrage state by state, others aiming at achieving universal suffrage at the federal level.