Henry Street Settlement

“Men! Give Women Votes to Protect the Children!”

This sentiment, originating during WWI, is an example of the many tools first wave feminists used in their efforts to obtain the right to vote. Women of the first wave argued that the vote would allow them to fix social ills such as poverty, child labor, alcoholism, and the war, and they used these issues as political levers to achieve their suffrage goal. This was not a cynical calculation, however: these early feminists and suffragists believed in their causes and would go far to fight for them. Numerous activists were put on trial, arrested, force-fed, hounded and harassed in the papers for their adherence to the belief that women deserved a political voice, just like any man.

In the U.S., the first wave is generally considered the period from the mid-1800s, with the conference at Seneca Falls, through the installation of universal suffrage in 1920. While the women involved were most often from the privileged class, they understood a fact that is still central to the tenets of the feminist movement today: the condition of women as a whole has a great impact on the well-being of society. Thus, among the feminist causes of the era were pacifism, birth control, temperance, dress reform, Anarchism, free love, and the improvement of social and economic conditions for immigrants and the poor.  read more »