However, more militant suffragists, among them Quaker agitator Alice Paul and Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, continued to insist upon women’s absolute equality. They demanded a federal suffrage amendment as a necessary first step to achieving equal rights.

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Victory on the voting rights issue came in the wake of World War I. Impressed by the suffragists’ participation in the war effort, Congress passed what came to be known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” in 1919. Following state ratification a year later, it enfranchised American women nationwide in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

It had been 72 years since that daring call for female voting rights was issued at the Seneca Falls Convention. On November 2, 1920, 91-year-old Charlotte Woodward Pierce went to the polls in Philadelphia, the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration who lived long enough to cast her ballot in a presidential election.

Constance B. Rynder is a professor of history at the University of Tampa, and specializes in women’s history.

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