Free Republic

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote and catapulted them out of the shadows of dependence into the full sunlight of long-awaited civic freedoms. The right to vote was only the beginning of a long list of goals achieved by the early women’s right movement. It also gained for us the right to control our property, to defend ourselves and our children from abusive husbands, to earn advanced degrees, and join professions reserved for men. But one right the early feminists did not fight for was the right to...

One hundred forty-three years ago, women's suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced a conundrum: With the Civil War over, Stanton had to decide whether to support the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which enabled black men to vote -- at a time when white women such as herself still did not have that right. Stanton decided to oppose the amendments: "As the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see Sambo walk into the kingdom first." The question of what to do...