Women Activists Dilemma to support or Oppose the 15th Amendment as evidenced by the split in the Women’s suffrage Movement
Introduction
After the Civil war, three amendments were passed which massively transformed the women’s rights movement. These were the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. The thirteenth amendment approved in the year 1865 declared slavery illegal (Parker, 1849). Thus, all the women who were previously enslaved became free and acquired protection by human rights. The fourteenth amendment declared that everyone born in the U.S was a legal U.S citizen and should not be deprived off their rights including all slaves. Moreover, the law added that all male American citizens had the right to vote (Anderson, 590).
Finally, there was the controversial Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870. The amendment granted black American men the right to vote by stating that the rights of U.S citizens to participate in elections must not be denied on the basis of their race or color. The Fifth Amendment had no mention of women or their rights (Pankhurst, 478). Hence, women were greatly offended by the Amendment because it intentionally omitted the mention of gender. Women activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony together with their women followers were extremely offended by this omission (Anderson, 591). According to them, the amendment was extremely wrong to omit the rights of women. They argued that the rights of women should have been defended together with those of black American men. Other activists e.g. Lucy Stone and Mary Livermore were also offended by the fifteenth amendment yet still supported it (Pankhurst, 493). They feared that if the rights of women were included in the amendment, the amendment would not pass meaning no new suffrage rights would be won....
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