The complex role of faith in the women’s suffrage movement – Religion News Service

(RNS) — This week marks 100 years since Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote.Passed in the wake of a cataclysmic world war, it wasn’t ratified until 1920.Many of the women who had lobbied for it (it was first introduced in Congress in 1878), including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were dead.

Faith played a key role in the fight for women’s suffrage. Religious convictions compelled many to campaign on behalf of women’s suffrage — and many to fight hard against it.“Religion comes up quite a bit and in many different ways,” according to journalist Elaine Weiss, author of “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.”The battle for voting rights, according to Weiss and other experts, drew together women across a spectrum of religious practice, from Quakers to women active in the holiness movement who saw social reform as a means of testifying to their pursuit of holiness.

Many women’s suffrage proponents, including campaigners such as Lucretia Mott, emerged from the abolitionist movement. They saw suffrage as a matter of divine justice as well as human rights, Weiss said.Other women viewed the right to vote as not only a political and social but a moral issue — as did their opponents.

Source: The complex role of faith in the women’s suffrage movement – Religion News Service