http://www.vchsa.org/cfw/cfw-leaders.htm
Women's Suffrage in America 1848-1920 
A summary of events leading to the passage of the 19th Amendment 
•	Starting from the Seneca Falls Convention in a Seneca Falls, New York church, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted on including the right to vote in the Declaration of Sentiments, the struggle lasted 72 years. 
•	Women were fighting for other rights--to own their personal property, to keep their children after divorce, their earnings and their inherited property--but quickly realized these would be nearly impossible to achieve without the vote. 
•	Carrie Chapman Catt, in looking back on the struggle, said: "It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America. How much of time, patience, how much work, energy and aspiration, how much faith, how much hope, how much despair went into it. It leaves its mark on one, such a struggle. It fills the days and rides the nights. Working, eating, drinking, sleeping, it is there. Not all women in all the States of the Union were in the struggle. There were some women in every State who knew nothing about it. But most women in all the States were at least on the periphery of its effort and interest when they were not in the heart of it. To them all its success became a monumental thing." 
•	Two women led the struggle in the beginning, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was incensed by the refusal of the men at an anti-slavery convention in London to allow women to speak. Along with a handful of friends, she switched her considerable talents to working for women's rights, especially suffrage. 
•	Susan B. Anthony was a young idealistic Quaker, raised on a farm. She had worked as a teacher, been promoted to headmistress and was deeply dissatisfied with the treatment of women teachers. She tried working as a paid agent for the temperance movement, but this was run by men and they would not accept a woman leader. 
•	Soon after Anthony met Mrs. Stanton, they began a lifelong friendship and working relationship that brought the fight for women's suffrage and many legal and property rights from the radical fringe to respectability. They formed the National Women's Suffrage Association in 1869 to fight for a national suffrage amendment. 
•	The American Women's Suffrage Association, headed by Lucy Stone, and focused on a state by state effort, had some successes and some failures. In July 1890, Wyoming was admitted as a state with full enfranchisement granted to women in its constitution. Colorado, Utah and Idaho passed women's suffrage in the 1890s. But the national franchise was always a difficult fight. The two organizations joined together in 1890, and alternately tried to get state and national amendments passed. For a period of decades, the movement was in the doldrums. It needed new leadership. It needed professional organization--and money. 
•	A large parade in New York City was organized in 1910 by the Women's Political Union, led by Harriet Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, and repeated with even larger crowds each year after. 
•	In 1911 the campaign succeeded in California by only 3,857 votes: an average of only one vote for every precinct. And it happened not only because of the organization that went into the campaign leading up to the election. Suffragists also stayed at the polls until every vote was counted--correctly--so that the vote could not be stolen from them as had happened not only in California, but other states in the past. This gave women the vote in six states. 
•	In March of 1913, before Wilson's inauguration, from 5-8,000 suffragists paraded in Washington, D.C. Inadequate police allowed them to be mobbed by an abusive, jeering crowd. The organizer, Alice Paul, was not discouraged: she had formed the National Women's Party, and she was determined to take a more "direct approach." She formed the Party in January of 1913, revived the moribund movement, but was expelled form the NAWSA by December. In 1917, when Wilson still hadn't come out publicly in support of Women's Suffrage, although he promised he would, Paul gained public attention by organizing round-the-clock picketing of the White House. Eventually many were arrested, went on hunger strikes and were force-fed. After her release, Paul organized a train called the "prison special" which she rode around the country to tell about the experience. 
•	Meanwhile, the NAWSA, the joint suffrage organization, had received an endowment, and adopted Carrie Chapman Catt's strategy to win the franchise through Congress. Like a general she recruited and organized and sent out her troops to fight where there was hope, and give up where there was none. She wanted one southern state, although all southern senators were opposed because of the possibility even a campaign would disturb the Jim Crow legislation that had effectively taken away the right to vote from blacks. She wanted massive effort, supported nationally but led by small, local groups, in states where the fight seemed likely to succeed, and no effort in states that looked hopeless. Many African-American women, when refused membership, subtly or overtly, to segments of the women's movement, formed their own organizations. 
•	After World War I, women who had again put aside their personal goals to perform war work, as they had done in the Civil War, were incensed when Wilson resisted public support for women's franchise. 
•	In 1919, a year after the end of the war, The National Women's Party, placed an urn in a direct line of sight from the White House front door, and proceeded to burn the words of every hypocritical speech of Wilson in a "watchfire for freedom." They thought him hypocritical because he was arguing for representative democracy for Europeans but not supporting the right to vote for half of the population of his own country. 
•	Wilson did come to support women's suffrage in the crucial months before it was voted on in the House of Representatives. 
•	Finally, in May of 1919, the House of Representatives passed the 19th Amendment, 304 to 89, a margin of 42 votes over the required two-thirds majority. The Senate passed it in June 1919. And, on August 1920, the amendment was ratified by the 36th state, Tennessee, and then by a margin of one vote, a young legislator admonished to vote yes by his mother.