Ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement began to popularize, but lost some popularity when the Civil War began. When the war ended, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship. The 14th Amendment (1898), extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees black men the right to vote. Some woman-suffrage advocates, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African-Americans. In 1869, this faction formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association and began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the federal Constitution. Others argued that it was unfair to endanger black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.