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AAfter the Civil War, the movement of women's suffrage increased. This occured after attempts for women to equally take part in reforms such as temperance were slighted. This caused many women including Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Abby Kelly, and Lucretia Mott to begin to speak out for women's rights.

EEeInitially, the focus of women's rights was not suffrage but rather on changes in women's social, legal, and educational status. The adoption of the 14th and 15th Amendments came as a disappointment to feminists because they only gave black men rights of citizenship, rather than declaring universal suffrage. Because of this, the women's rights movement was divided about whether or not support the 15th Amendment. The views of the separate groups were further defined when two different groups were formed in 1869. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) which opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, but called for a Sixteenth Amendment that would give women their rights as citizen's of the United States and headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and women solely. It gave the reforms for women's rights a immoderate tone.

uuu Another movement known as the American Women Suffrage Movement (AWSA) supported the 15th Amendment but supported women's suffrage as well. This organization led by Lucy Stone her husband, Henry Blackwell, Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Ward Beecher, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others, tried to take the immoderate tone, mentioned above, away and make this idea of women's suffrage more traditional.

uuuAlthough most eastern states were completely against the idea of women suffrage, the western territories of America showed their support for women's rights by giving them rights to vote. Wyoming, which gave the women the right to vote in 1869, was not pleased when it seemed that Congress would not accept their request to join the Union unless they took away women's suffrage. In response, the legislature simply said, "we will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women." Soon Wyoming, as well as 3 other territories that had granted suffrage rights to women, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah were admitted into the Union. But it did not end there. Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona granted women's suffrage in he nineteenth century. Women's suffrage leaders soon combined efforts with antislavery activists.

uuuMany black women supported the suffrage movement. Some famous black suffragist include Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Adella Hunt Logan. After a long battle and journey, the 19th Amendent, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified and officially added to the United States Constitution on August 26, 1920.

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