A Decade

’s Moment Essay, Research Paper

A Decade?s Moment

The Cold War ended. The rise of CNN broadcasts. The death of Mother

Teresa. Females enter the Citadell. O.J. Simpson fights the courts on trial. A

woman?s business makes the Fortune 500. The Princess of Wales passed away.

The Gulf War was faght and returned from. Above all of this books were

written, awards were won, and countries declared their independence. Still,

there would be a mistake in saying that this is all that happened seeing as how

two times the poll boths were approached and two times they pasted the vote.

However, never once in these ten years did it ever cross our minds why now

women stand in booths beside men to cast heir vote with equal impact. To tell

why we must look back only a hundred years to 1890, and the Woman?s

Movement. A group entitled The National American Woman Suffrage

Association (NAWSA), stood up to the challenge to get women the right to vote.

They organized, spoke, and won, all to be titled with equality to men.

The NAWSA was formed by the coming together of two separate

ogranizations, the NWSA (National Woman Suffrage Association) and the

AWSA (American Woman Suffrage Association); Susan Anthony and Elizabeth

Stanton, Lucy Stone and Julia Howe. These women came together to from what

will be the largest organization of the time; larger than the Civil Rights

Organizations, the Union Labors, and the Political Activist, all together. With

Anthony as their first President the organization came to be powerful in all

forms of protests. They did little sitting, most of the time the women were

marching in the streets or standing in voting lines, local or national. As Alice

Paul once said, ?We are women with legs and voices. We are not fighting to sit

but rather to stand beside a man and cast our vote. (Dubois 826)? It was the

Movement?s path to the polls which was to be the talk for many years, simply

because it was a battle of words without violence. A battle which for many was

won by thousands refusing to move out of the lines to vote, refusing to let things

remain the same as they have been for years just simply because that is the way

of the years. The passing of the Nineteenth Amendment allowed women to now

stand as those people not only egaul to men in the eyes of God but equal in the

sight of law. (Kraditor 67)? ?We are a team of organizers formed from one

strong band; bonded to each other to rise above those who enpail us to became

those who we have only long to become over great time.? This quote by

Marguerite Higgins shows that the organization of women was not lacking but

rather bursting with energy and ready to fight.

?Words are our food, so let us eat.? The women?s movement would be

nothing with out great speakers such as Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Blatch, and

many others, to envoke a feeling of pride, a need for understanding, and the

ultimate desire to risk life and limb for the right to stand egual.