The fight for women's voting rights in the United States was not won quickly or easily. It took roughly 72 years of organizing, lobbying, marching, and even arrest and imprisonment, before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Many agree that the movement started in earnest in July 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a two-day convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to address the political and social inequalities faced by women. The gathering produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence that laid out a set of demands, including the right to vote. It was signed by 68 women and 32 men, among them the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who delivered a speech in support of women's suffrage that helped secure the resolution's passage by a narrow margin.

In 1890, suffragists formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Progress was slow and came first at the state level, beginning in the West. Wyoming was the first state to grant women full voting rights, doing so in 1869. By the time the 19th Amendment was passed, 15 states had already extended the vote to women.

The final push was contentious. Suffragists picketed the White House, went on hunger strikes, and were arrested and force-fed in prison. Others, like Carrie Chapman Catt, worked within the political system, lobbying state legislatures one by one. Congress passed the amendment in 1919, and it was ratified the following year after Tennessee became the deciding 36th state to approve it. Even then, the victory was incomplete. The 19th Amendment effectively secured the vote for white women, but Black, Latina, Native American, and Asian American women continued to face poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers for decades. Full voting rights for women of color did not arrive until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.