American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)

(noun)

An organization formed in 1869 in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association over the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Its founders, who supported the Fifteenth Amendment, included Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. The founders were staunch abolitionists and strongly supported securing the right to vote for African Americans. They believed that the Fifteenth Amendment would fail to pass in Congress if it included the vote for women.

Related Terms

  • First Wave Feminism
  • National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)

Examples of American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in the following topics:

  • Women's Activism

    • Gage, of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), embodied the radicalism of much second-wave feminism.
    • The members of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), for example, were willing to work within the political system, and they chose to unite with sympathetic men in power to promote the cause of suffrage.
    • The limited membership of the NWSA was narrowly focused on gaining a federal amendment for women's suffrage, whereas the AWSA, with 10 times as many members, worked to gain suffrage on a state-by-state level as a necessary precursor to federal suffrage.
    • The NWSA had broad goals, hoping to achieve a more equal social role for women, but the AWSA was aware of the divisive nature of many of those goals and instead chose to focus solely on suffrage.
    • The American woman had no legal recourse at that time against rape by her husband.
  • The Campaign for Suffrage

    • After years of rivalry, the organizations merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) with Anthony as its leading force.
    • Their opposition to women's suffrage was subsequently used as an argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I.
    • In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was created.
    • The best organized movement was the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS).
    • Men looking in the window of the National Anti-Suffrage Association headquarters.
  • The Women's Suffrage Movement

    • The conflict caused two organizations to emerge, the National Woman Suffrage Association, which campaigned for women's suffrage at a federal level and for married women to be given property rights.  
    • As well as the American Woman Suffrage Organization, which aimed to secure women's suffrage through state legislation.
    • World War I provided the final push for women's suffrage in America.
    • In addition to their strategy to obtain full suffrage through a constitutional amendment, reformers pursued state-by-state campaigns to build support for, or to win, residence-based state suffrage.
    • Discuss the historical events that culminated with women's suffrage in America
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Movement for Women's Suffrage

    • Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for constitutional rights for women.
    • Later, in May 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Susan B.
    • Susan Brownell Anthony (1820 – 1906) was a prominent American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to introduce women's suffrage into the United States.
    • Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement.
    • Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the first women's rights convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized woman's rights and woman's suffrage movements in the United States.
  • The Women's Rights Movement

    • The National Woman's Party authored more than 600 pieces of legislation for women's equality, more than 300 of which were passed.
    • In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states (and from which the NWP split), the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage.
    • Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Women's Party.
    • The National Woman's Party also opposed World War I.
    • Evaluate how the actions of the National Women's Party pressured Wilson to support the Suffrage Amendment
  • Women's Rights after Suffrage

    • Groups such as the National Woman’s Party worked hard not only to secure women’s continued suffrage, but also to oppose the ongoing mistreatment of women under President Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
    • Originally called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, its name changed to the National Women's Party in 1917.
    • In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states, the NWP put its priority on passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring suffrage.
    • Alice Paul founded the National Woman's Party in 1913 to promote women's suffrage and greater equal rights for women.
    • Members of the National Woman's Party picket in front of the White House for women's suffrage in 1917.
  • The Feminist Movement

    • Despite this, many American women achieved many political firsts in the 2000s.
    • In 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin became the first woman nominated for Vice President by the Republican Party.
    • In 2009 and 2010, respectively, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were confirmed as Supreme Court Associate Justices, making them the third and fourth female justices.
    • First-wave feminists marching for women's suffrage.
    • For example, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party.
  • Freedom, Inequality, and Democracy in the Gilded Age

    • The suffrage and temperance movements were particularly prominent.
    • Often overlooked in discussions of the advent of rapid industrialization, this product did more than any other single development (until women's suffrage) to change the daily life of the average American woman.
    • Between 1889 and 1922, as political disfranchisement and segregation were being established, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history.
    • In 1915, an era in which the Rockefellers and Carnegies dominated American industry, the richest 1% of Americans earned roughly 18% of all income.
    • Washington was a 17-year-old mentally disabled farmhand who confessed to raping and killing a white woman.
  • Conclusion: Trends of the Gilded Age

    • As American wages were much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants.
    • Unions crusaded for the eight-hour working day and the abolition of child labor; middle-class reformers demanded civil service reform, prohibition, and women's suffrage.
    • Often the WCTU women took up the issue of women's suffrage, which had lain dormant since the Seneca Falls Convention.
    • Anthony, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed in order to secure the right of women to vote.
    • The Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) that the, "conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure" of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America.
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