suffragist

A campaigner for the right of women to vote. In the USA, the organized suffrage movement was launched with the Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in which a Declaration of Sentiments included the demand for equal voting rights for women. Stanton and Susan B Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869; Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association merged with the NWSA in 1890. Alice Paul, who worked with suffragists in England 1906-09, emulated their more militant approach and organized mass demonstrations. Later Carrie Chapman Catt, working at both state and federal levels, played a major role in pushing through the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (ratified 1920), which guaranteed women over 21 the right to vote (see Amendment, Nineteenth).

In the UK, women's suffrage bills were repeatedly introduced and defeated in Parliament between 1886 and 1911, and a militant campaign was launched in 1906 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. Suffragettes (the term was coined by a Daily Mail reporter) chained themselves to railings, heckled political meetings, refused to pay taxes, and in 1913 bombed the home of Lloyd George, then chancellor of the Exchequer. One woman, Emily Davison, threw herself under the king's horse at the Derby horse race in 1913 and was killed. The struggle was called off on the outbreak of World War I. In 1918 women were granted limited franchise in the UK; in 1928 it was extended to all women over 21.