On the first Tuesday of November 1872, more than 150 women around the country, including Susan Anthony, tried to vote.
Susan Anthony was arrested, but she didn’t give up. “Failure is impossible,” she told her followers.
Finally, in August 1920, Tennessee voted for ratification of the 19th Amendment and women were given the right to vote in the United States.
The fight had started even before Susan Anthony tried to vote. “Winning the vote required 72 years of ceaseless agitation by three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists, who fought to overturn centuries of law and millennia of tradition concerning gender roles,” writes Elaine Weiss in her book The Woman’s Hour.
The suffragettes “undertook 480 petitions and lobbying drives to get state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks in their platforms and 56 state referendum campaigns, trying to convince male voters to grant them the vote.”