The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing American women
the right to vote, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.

The women’s suffrage movement was founded in the mid-19th century by
women who had become politically active through their work in the abolitionist
and temperance movements. In July 1848, 240 woman suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, met in Seneca Falls, New York, to
assert the right of women to vote. Female enfranchisement was still largely opposed by most Americans, and the distraction of the North-South conflict
and subsequent Civil War precluded further discussion.

During the Reconstruction Era, the 15th Amendment was adopted, granting
African American men the right to vote, but the Republican-dominated
Congress  failed to expand its progressive radicalism into the sphere of
gender. 

 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, founders of The
National Woman Suffrage Association, circa 1881.