document_title: Women's suffrage in the United States

question_text: who started the women's right to vote movement

question_tokens: who started the women 's right to vote movement

root

text: Women's suffrage in the United States

text: National History[edit]

text: Early voting activity[edit]

text: Lydia Taft (1712–1778), a wealthy widow, was allowed to vote in town meetings in Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1756.[2] No other women in the colonial era are known to have voted.

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text: The New Jersey constitution of 1776 enfranchised all adult inhabitants who owned a specified amount of property. Laws enacted in 1790 and 1797 referred to voters as "he or she", and women regularly voted. A law passed in 1807, however, excluded women from voting in that state.[3]

text: Emergence of the women's rights movement[edit]

text: The demand for women's suffrage[4] emerged as part of the broader movement for women's rights. In England in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a pioneering book called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.[5] In Boston in 1838 Sarah Grimké published The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, which was widely circulated.[6] In 1845 Margaret Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a key document in American feminism that first appeared in serial form in 1839 in The Dial, a transcendentalist journal that Fuller edited.[7]

text:
"The very truths you are now contending for, will, in fifty years, be so completely imbedded in public opinion that no one need say one word in their defense; whilst at the same time new forms of truth will arise to test the faithfulness of the pioneer minds of that age, and so on eternally."

Angela Grimké, 1851, in a letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton [8]

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text: Significant barriers had to be overcome, however, before a campaign for women's suffrage could develop significant strength. One barrier was strong opposition to women's involvement in public affairs, a practice that was not fully accepted even among reform activists. Only after fierce debate were women accepted as members of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its convention of 1839, and the organization split at its next convention when women were appointed to committees.[9]

text: Opposition was especially strong against the idea of women speaking to audiences of both men and women. Frances Wright, a Scottish woman, was subjected to sharp criticism for delivering public lectures in the U.S. in 1826 and 1827. When the Grimké sisters, who had been born into a slave-holding family in South Carolina, spoke against slavery throughout the northeast in the mid-1830s, the ministers of the Congregational Church, a major force in that region, published a statement condemning their actions. Despite the disapproval, in 1838 Angelina Grimké spoke against slavery before the Massachusetts legislature, the first woman in the U.S. to speak before a legislative body.[10]

text: Other women began to give public speeches, especially in opposition to slavery and in support of women's rights. Early female speakers included Ernestine Rose, a Jewish immigrant from Poland; Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister and abolitionist; and Abby Kelley Foster, a Quaker abolitionist.[11] Toward the end of the 1840s Lucy Stone launched her career as a public speaker, soon becoming the most famous female lecturer.[12] Supporting both the abolitionist and women's rights movements, Stone played a major role in reducing the prejudice against women speaking in public.[13]

text: Opposition remained strong, however. A regional women's rights convention in Ohio in 1851 was disrupted by male opponents.[14] The National Women's Rights Convention in 1852 was similarly disrupted, and mob action at the 1853 convention came close to violence.[15] The World's Temperance Convention in New York City in 1853 bogged down for three days in a dispute about whether women would be allowed to speak there.[16] Susan B. Anthony, a leader of the suffrage movement, later said, "No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized."[17]

text: Laws that sharply restricted the independent activity of married women also created barriers to the campaign for women's suffrage. According to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, an authoritative commentary on the English common law on which the American legal system is modeled, "by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage",[18] referring to the legal doctrine of coverture that was introduced to England by the Normans in the Middle Ages. In 1862 the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court denied a divorce to a woman whose husband had horsewhipped her, saying, "The law gives the husband power to use such a degree of force necessary to make the wife behave and know her place."[19] Married women in many states could not legally sign contracts, which made it difficult for them to arrange for convention halls, printed materials and other things needed by the suffrage movement.[20] Restrictions like these were overcome in part by the passage of married women's property laws in several states, supported in some cases by wealthy fathers who didn't want their daughters' inheritance to fall under the complete control of their husbands.

text: Sentiment in favor of women's rights was strong within the radical wing of the abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, said "I doubt whether a more important movement has been launched touching the destiny of the race, than this in regard to the equality of the sexes".[21] The abolitionist movement, however, attracted only about one per cent of the population at that time, and radical abolitionists were only one part of that movement.[22]

text: Early backing for women's suffrage[edit]

text: The New York State Constitutional Convention of 1846 received petitions in support of women's suffrage from residents of at least three counties.[23]

text: Several members of the radical wing of the abolitionist movement supported suffrage. In 1846, Samuel J. May, a Unitarian minister and radical abolitionist, vigorously supported women's suffrage in a sermon that was later circulated as the first in a series of women's rights tracts.[24] In 1846, the Liberty League, an offshoot of the abolitionist Liberty Party, petitioned Congress to enfranchise women.[25] A convention of the Liberty Party in Rochester, New York in May 1848 approved a resolution calling for "universal suffrage in its broadest sense, including women as well as men."[26] Gerrit Smith, its candidate for president, delivered a speech shortly afterwards at the National Liberty Convention in Buffalo, New York that elaborated on his party's call for women's suffrage. Lucretia Mott was suggested as the party's vice-presidential candidate—the first time that a woman had been proposed for federal executive office in the U.S.—and she received five votes from delegates at that convention.[27]

text: Early women's rights conventions[edit]

text: Women's suffrage was not a major topic within the women's rights movement at that point. Many of its activists were aligned with the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement, which believed that activists should avoid political activity and focus instead on convincing others of their views with "moral suasion".[28] Many were Quakers whose traditions barred both men and women from participation in secular political activity.[29] A series of women's rights conventions did much to alter these attitudes.

text: Seneca Falls convention[edit]

text: The first women's rights convention was the Seneca Falls Convention, a regional event held on July 19 and 20, 1848, in Seneca Falls in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Five women called the convention, four of whom were Quaker social activists, including the well-known Lucretia Mott. The fifth was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had discussed the need to organize for women's rights with Mott several years earlier.[30] Stanton, who came from a family that was deeply involved in politics, became a major force in convincing the women's movement that political pressure was crucial to its goals, and that the right to vote was a key weapon.[31] An estimated 300 women and men attended this two-day event, which was widely noted in the press.[32] The only resolution that was not adopted unanimously by the convention was the one demanding women's right to vote, which was introduced by Stanton. When her husband, a well-known social reformer, learned that she intended to introduce this resolution, he refused to attend the convention and accused her of acting in a way that would turn the proceedings into a farce. Lucretia Mott, the main speaker, was also disturbed by the proposal. The resolution was adopted only after Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist leader and a former slave, gave it his strong support.[33] The convention's Declaration of Sentiments, which was written primarily by Stanton, expressed an intent to build a women's rights movement, and it included a list of grievances, the first two of which protested the lack of women's suffrage.[34] The grievances were aimed at the United States government "demanded government reform and changes in male roles and behaviors that promoted inequality for women."[35]

text: This convention was followed two weeks later by the Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848, which featured many of the same speakers and likewise voted to support women's suffrage. It was the first women's rights convention to be chaired by a woman, a step that was considered to be radical at the time.[36] That meeting was followed by the Ohio Women's Convention at Salem in 1850, the first women's rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis, which also endorsed women's suffrage.[37]

text: National conventions[edit]

text: The first in a series of National Women's Rights Conventions was held in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 23–24, 1850, at the initiative of Lucy Stone and Paulina Wright Davis.[38] National conventions were held afterwards almost every year through 1860, when the Civil War (1861–1865) interrupted the practice.[39] Suffrage was a preeminent goal of these conventions, no longer the controversial issue it had been at Seneca Falls only two years earlier.[40] At the first national convention Stone gave a speech that included a call to petition state legislatures for the right of suffrage.[41]

text: Reports of this convention reached Britain, prompting Harriet Taylor, soon to be married to philosopher John Stuart Mill, to write an essay called "The Enfranchisement of Women," which was published in the Westminster Review. Heralding the women's movement in the U.S., Taylor's essay helped to initiate a similar movement in Britain. Her essay was reprinted as a women's rights tract in the U.S. and was sold for decades.[42][43]

text: Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist and women's rights advocate, delivered a speech at the second national convention in 1851 called "Shall Women Have the Right to Vote?" Describing women's suffrage as the cornerstone of the women's movement, it was later circulated as a women's rights tract.[44]

text: Several of the women who played leading roles in the national conventions, especially Stone, Anthony and Stanton, were also leaders in establishing women's suffrage organizations after the Civil War.[45] They also included the demand for suffrage as part of their activities during the 1850s. In 1852 Stanton advocated women's suffrage in a speech at the New York State Temperance Convention.[46] In 1853 Stone became the first woman to appeal for women's suffrage before a body of lawmakers when she addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention.[47] In 1854 Anthony organized a petition campaign in New York State that included the demand for suffrage. It culminated in a women's rights convention in the state capitol and a speech by Stanton before the state legislature.[48] In 1857 Stone refused to pay taxes on the grounds that women were taxed without being able to vote on tax laws. The constable sold her household goods at auction until enough money had been raised to pay her tax bill.[49]

text: The women's rights movement was loosely structured during this period, with few state organizations and no national organization other than a coordinating committee that arranged the annual national conventions.[50] Much of the organizational work for these conventions was performed by Stone, the most visible leader of the movement during this period.[51] At the national convention in 1852, a proposal was made to form a national women's rights organization, but the idea was dropped after fears were voiced that such a move would create cumbersome machinery and lead to internal divisions.[52]

text: Anthony-Stanton collaboration[edit]

text: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in 1851 and soon became close friends and co-workers. Their decades-long collaboration was pivotal for the suffrage movement and contributed significantly to the broader struggle for women's rights, which Stanton called "the greatest revolution the world has ever known or ever will know."[53] They had complementary skills: Anthony excelled at organizing while Stanton had an aptitude for intellectual matters and writing. Stanton, who was homebound with several children during this period, wrote speeches that Anthony delivered to meetings that she herself organized.[54] Together they developed a sophisticated movement in New York State,[55] but their work at this time dealt with women's issues in general, not specifically suffrage. Anthony, who eventually became the person most closely associated in the public mind with women's suffrage,[56] later said "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work."[57] In the period just before the Civil War, Anthony gave priority to anti-slavery work over her work for the women's movement.[58]

text: Women's Loyal National League[edit]

text: Over Anthony's objections, leaders of the movement agreed to suspend women's rights activities during the Civil War in order to focus on the abolition of slavery.[59] In 1863 Anthony and Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League, the first national women's political organization in the U.S.[60] It collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery in the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time.[61]

text: Although it was not a suffrage organization, the League made it clear that it stood for political equality for women,[62] and it indirectly advanced that cause in several ways. Stanton reminded the public that petitioning was the only political tool available to women at a time when only men were allowed to vote.[63] The League's impressive petition drive demonstrated the value of formal organization to the women's movement, which had traditionally resisted organizational structures,[64] and it marked a continuation of the shift of women's activism from moral suasion to political action.[61] Its 5000 members constituted a widespread network of women activists who gained experience that helped create a pool of talent for future forms of social activism, including suffrage.[65]

text: American Equal Rights Association[edit]

text: The Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War, was held in 1866, helping the women's rights movement regain the momentum it had lost during the war.[66] The convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage.[67]

text: In addition to Anthony and Stanton, who organized the convention, the leadership of the new organization included such prominent abolitionist and women's rights activists as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass. Its drive for universal suffrage, however, was resisted by some abolitionist leaders and their allies in the Republican Party, who wanted women to postpone their campaign for suffrage until it had first been achieved for male African Americans. Horace Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor, told Anthony and Stanton, "This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation... I conjure you to remember that this is 'the negro's hour,' and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims."[68] They and others, including Lucy Stone, refused to postpone their demands, however, and continued to push for universal suffrage.

text: In April 1867 Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell opened the AERA campaign in Kansas in support of referenda in that state that would enfranchise both African Americans and women.[69] Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist leader who opposed mixing those two causes, surprised and angered AERA workers by blocking the funding that the AERA had expected for their campaign.[70] After an internal struggle, Kansas Republicans decided to support suffrage for black men only and formed an "Anti-Female Suffrage Committee" to oppose the AERA's efforts.[71] By the end of summer the AERA campaign had almost collapsed, and its finances were exhausted. Anthony and Stanton were harshly criticized by Stone and other AERA members for accepting help during the last days of the campaign from George Francis Train, a wealthy businessman who supported women's rights. Train antagonized many activists by attacking the Republican Party, which had won the loyalty of many reform activists, and openly disparaging the integrity and intelligence of African Americans.[72]

text: After the Kansas campaign, the AERA increasingly divided into two wings, both advocating universal suffrage but with different approaches. One wing, whose leading figure was Lucy Stone, was willing for black men to achieve suffrage first, if necessary, and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement. The other, whose leading figures were Anthony and Stanton, insisted that women and black men be enfranchised at the same time and worked toward a politically independent women's movement that would no longer be dependent on abolitionists for financial and other resources. The acrimonious annual meeting of the AERA in May 1869 signaled the effective demise of the organization, in the aftermath of which two competing woman suffrage organizations were created.[73]

text: New England Woman Suffrage Association[edit]

text: Partly as a result of the developing split in the women's movement, in 1868 the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA), the first major political organization in the U.S. with women's suffrage as its goal, was formed.[74] The planners for the NEWSA's founding convention worked to attract Republican support and seated leading Republican politicians, including a U.S. senator, on the speaker's platform.[75] Amid increasing confidence that the Fifteenth Amendment, which would in effect enfranchise black men, was assured of passage, Lucy Stone, a future president of the NEWSA, showed her preference for enfranchising both women and African Americans by unexpectedly introducing a resolution calling for the Republican Party to "drop its watchword of 'Manhood Suffrage'"[76] and to support universal suffrage instead. Despite opposition by Frederick Douglass and others, Stone convinced the meeting to approve the resolution.[77] Two months later, however, when the Fifteenth Amendment was in danger of becoming stalled in Congress, Stone backed away from that position and declared that "Woman must wait for the Negro."[78]

text: The Fifteenth Amendment[edit]

text: In May 1869, two days after the final AERA annual meeting, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Blackwell and others, many of whom had helped to create the New England Woman Suffrage Association a year earlier, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The hostile rivalry between these two organizations created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades, affecting even professional historians of the women's movement.[79]

text: The immediate cause for the split was the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a reconstruction amendment that would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race. Stanton and Anthony opposed its passage unless it was accompanied by another amendment that would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of sex.[80] They said that by effectively enfranchising all men while excluding all women, the amendment would create an "aristocracy of sex" by giving constitutional authority to the idea that men were superior to women.[81] Male power and privilege was at the root of society's ills, Stanton argued, and nothing should be done to strengthen it.[82] Anthony and Stanton also warned that black men, who would gain voting power under the amendment, were overwhelmingly opposed to women's suffrage.[83] They were not alone in being unsure of black male support for women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, a strong supporter of women's suffrage, said, "The race to which I belong have not generally taken the right ground on this question."[84] Douglass, however, strongly supported the amendment, saying it was a matter of life and death for former slaves. Lucy Stone, who became the AWSA's most prominent leader, supported the amendment but said she believed that suffrage for women would be more beneficial to the country than suffrage for black men.[85] The AWSA and most AERA members also supported the amendment.[86]

text: Both wings of the movement were strongly associated with opposition to slavery, but their leaders sometimes expressed views that reflected the racial attitudes of that era. Stanton, for example, believed that a long process of education would be needed before what she called the "lower orders" of former slaves and immigrant workers would be able to participate meaningfully as voters.[82] In an article in The Revolution, Stanton wrote, "American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters ... demand that women too shall be represented in government."[87] In another article she made a similar statement while personifying those four ethnic groups as "Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung".[88] Lucy Stone called a suffrage meeting in New Jersey to consider the question, "Shall women alone be omitted in the reconstruction? Shall [they] ... be ranked politically below the most ignorant and degraded men?"[89] Henry Blackwell, Stone's husband and an AWSA officer, published an open letter to Southern legislatures assuring them that if they allowed both blacks and women to vote, "the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged" and "the black race would gravitate by the law of nature toward the tropics."[90]

text: The AWSA aimed for close ties with the Republican Party, hoping that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to a Republican push for women's suffrage.[91] The NWSA, while determined to be politically independent, was critical of the Republicans. Anthony and Stanton wrote a letter to the 1868 Democratic National Convention that criticized Republican sponsorship of the Fourteenth Amendment (which granted citizenship to black men but for the first time introduced the word "male" into the Constitution), saying, "While the dominant party has with one hand lifted up two million black men and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other it has dethroned fifteen million white women—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood."[92][93] They urged liberal Democrats to convince their party, which did not have a clear direction at that point, to embrace universal suffrage.[94]

text: The two organizations had other differences as well. Although each campaigned for suffrage at both the state and national levels, the NWSA tended to work more at the national level and the AWSA more at the state level.[95] The NWSA initially worked on a wider range of issues than the AWSA, including divorce reform and equal pay for women. The NWSA was led by women only while the AWSA included both men and women among its leadership.[96]

text: Events soon removed much of the basis for the split in the movement. In 1870 debate about the Fifteenth Amendment was made irrelevant when that amendment was officially ratified. In 1872 disgust with corruption in government led to a mass defection of abolitionists and other social reformers from the Republicans to the short-lived Liberal Republican Party.[97] The rivalry between the two women's groups was so bitter, however, that a merger proved to be impossible until 1890.

text: New Departure[edit]

text: In 1869 Francis and Virginia Minor, husband and wife suffragists from Missouri, outlined a strategy that came to be known as the New Departure, which engaged the suffrage movement for several years.[98] Arguing that the U.S. Constitution implicitly enfranchised women, this strategy relied heavily on Section 1 of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment,[99] which reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

text: In 1871 the NWSA officially adopted the New Departure strategy, encouraging women to attempt to vote and to file lawsuits if denied that right. Soon hundreds of women tried to vote in dozens of localities. In some cases, actions like these preceded the New Departure strategy: in 1868 in Vineland, New Jersey, a center for radical spiritualists, nearly 200 women placed their ballots into a separate box and attempted to have them counted, but without success. The AWSA did not officially adopt the New Departure strategy, but Lucy Stone, its leader, attempted to vote in her home town in New Jersey.[100] In one court case resulting from a lawsuit brought by women who had been prevented from voting, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that women did not have an implicit right to vote, declaring that, "The fact that the practical working of the assumed right would be destructive of civilization is decisive that the right does not exist."[101]

text: In 1871 Victoria Woodhull, a stockbroker, was invited to speak before a committee of Congress, the first woman to do so. Although she had little previous connection to the women's movement, she presented a modified version of the New Departure strategy. Instead of asking the courts to declare that women had the right to vote, she asked Congress itself to declare that the Constitution implicitly enfranchised women. The committee rejected her suggestion.[102] The NWSA at first reacted enthusiastically to Woodhull's sudden appearance on the scene. Stanton in particular welcomed Woodhull's proposal to assemble a broad-based reform party that would support women's suffrage. Anthony opposed that idea, wanting the NWSA to remain politically independent. The NWSA soon had reason to regret its association with Woodhull. In 1872 she published details of a purported adulterous affair between Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, president of the AWSA, and Elizabeth Tilton, wife of a leading NWSA member.[103] Beecher's subsequent trial was reported in newspapers across the country, resulting in what one scholar has called "political theater" that badly damaged the reputation of the suffrage movement.[104]

text: The Supreme Court in 1875 put an end to the New Departure strategy by ruling in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone".[105] The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee voting rights for women.[106]

text: United States v. Susan B. Anthony[edit]

text: In a case that generated national controversy, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in the presidential election of 1872. The judge directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict. When he asked Anthony, who had not been permitted to speak during the trial, if she had anything to say, she responded with what one historian has called "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage".[99] She called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying, "... you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored."[107] The judge sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100, she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did.[99] However the judge did not order her to be imprisoned until she paid the fine, for Anthony could have appealed her case.[105]

text: History of Woman Suffrage[edit]

text: In 1876 Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage began working on the History of Woman Suffrage. Originally envisioned as a modest publication that would be produced quickly, the history evolved into a six-volume work of more than 5700 pages written over a period of 41 years. Its last two volumes were published in 1920, long after the deaths of the project's originators, by Ida Husted Harper, who also assisted with the fourth volume. Written by leaders of one wing of the divided women's movement (Lucy Stone, their main rival, refused to have anything to do with the project), the History of Woman Suffrage preserves an enormous amount of material that might have been lost forever, but it does not give a balanced view of events where their rivals are concerned. Because it was for years the main source of documentation about the suffrage movement, historians have had to uncover other sources to provide a more balanced view.[108]

text: Introduction of the women's suffrage amendment[edit]

text: In 1878 Senator Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, introduced into Congress a women's suffrage amendment. More than forty years later it would become the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution with no changes to its wording. Its text is identical to that of the Fifteenth Amendment except that it prohibits the denial of suffrage because of sex rather than "race, color, or previous condition of servitude".[109]

text: Early female candidates for national office[edit]

text: Calling attention to the irony of being legally entitled to run for office while denied the right to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared herself a candidate for the U.S. Congress in 1866, the first woman to do so.[110] In 1872 Victoria Woodhull formed her own political party and declared herself to be its candidate for President of the U.S. even though she was ineligible because she was not yet 35 years old.[111]

text: In 1884 Belva Ann Lockwood, the first female lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, became the first woman to conduct a viable campaign for president.[112] She was nominated, without her advance knowledge, by a California group called the Equal Rights Party. Lockwood advocated women's suffrage and other reforms during a coast-to-coast campaign that received respectful coverage from at least some major periodicals. She financed her campaign partly by charging admission to her speeches. Neither the AWSA nor the NWSA, both of whom had already endorsed the Republican candidate for president, supported Lockwood's candidacy.[113]

text: Initial successes[edit]

text: Women were enfranchised in frontier Wyoming Territory in 1869 and in polygamous Utah in 1870.[114][115] The short-lived Populist Party endorsed women's suffrage, contributing to the enfranchisement of women in Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.[116] In some localities, women gained various forms of partial suffrage, such as voting for school boards.[117]

text: In the late 1870s, the suffrage movement received a major boost when the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women's organization in the country, decided to campaign for suffrage and created a Franchise Department to support that effort. Frances Willard, its pro-suffrage leader, urged WCTU members to pursue the right to vote as a means of protecting their families from alcohol and other vices.[118] In 1886 the WCTU submitted to Congress petitions with 200,000 signatures in support of a national suffrage amendment.[119] In 1885 the Grange, a large farmers' organization, officially endorsed women's suffrage.[120] In 1890 the American Federation of Labor, a large labor alliance, endorsed women's suffrage and subsequently collected 270,000 names on petitions supporting that goal.[121]

text: Merger of rival suffrage organizations[edit]

text: The AWSA, which was especially strong in New England, was initially the larger of the two rival suffrage organizations, but it declined in strength during the 1880s.[122] Stanton and Anthony, the leading figures in the competing NWSA, were more widely known as leaders of the women's suffrage movement during this period and were more influential in setting its direction.[123] They sometimes used daring tactics. Anthony, for example, interrupted the official ceremonies of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to present the NWSA's Declaration of Rights for Women. The AWSA declined any involvement in the action.[124]

text: Over time, the NWSA moved into closer alignment with the AWSA, placing less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on respectability, and no longer promoting a wide range of reforms.[125] The NWSA's hopes for a federal suffrage amendment were frustrated when the Senate voted against it in 1887, after which the NWSA put more energy into campaigning at the state level, as the AWSA was already doing.[126] Work at the state level, however, also had its frustrations. Between 1870 and 1910, the suffrage movement conducted 480 campaigns in 33 states just to have the issue of women's suffrage brought before the voters, and those campaigns resulted in only 17 instances of the issue actually being placed on the ballot.[127] These efforts led to women's suffrage in two states, Colorado and Idaho.

text: Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of AWSA leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, was a major influence in bringing the rival suffrage leaders together, proposing a joint meeting in 1887 to discuss a merger. Anthony and Stone favored the idea, but opposition from several NWSA veterans delayed the move. In 1890 the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).[128] Stanton was president of the new organization, and Stone was chair of its executive committee, but Anthony, who had the title of vice president, was its leader in practice, becoming president herself in 1892 when Stanton retired.[129]

text: National American Woman Suffrage Association[edit]

text: Although Anthony was the leading force in the newly merged organization, it did not always follow her lead. In 1893 the NAWSA voted over Anthony's objection to alternate the site of its annual conventions between Washington and various other parts of the country. Anthony's pre-merger NWSA had always held its conventions in Washington to help maintain focus on a national suffrage amendment. Arguing against this decision, she said she feared, accurately as it turned out, that the NAWSA would engage in suffrage work at the state level at the expense of national work.[130]

text: Stanton, elderly but still very much a radical, did not fit comfortably into the new organization, which was becoming more conservative. In 1895 she published The Woman's Bible, a controversial best-seller that attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with the book despite Anthony's objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful. Stanton afterwards grew increasingly alienated from the suffrage movement.[131]

text: The suffrage movement declined in vigor during the years immediately after the 1890 merger.[132] When Carrie Chapman Catt was appointed head of the NAWSA's Organization Committee in 1895, it wasn't clear how many local chapters the organization had or who their officers were. Catt began revitalizing the organization, establishing a plan of work with clear goals for every state every year. Anthony was impressed and arranged for Catt to succeed her when she retired from the presidency of the NAWSA in 1900. In her new post Catt continued her effort to transform the unwieldy organization into one that would be better prepared to lead a major suffrage campaign.[133]

text: Catt noted the rapidly growing women's club movement, which was taking up some of the slack left by the decline of the temperance movement. Local women's clubs at first were mostly reading groups focused on literature, but they increasingly evolved into civic improvement organizations of middle-class women meeting in each other's homes weekly. Their national organization was the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1890. The clubs avoided controversial issues that would divide the membership, especially religion and prohibition. In the South and East, suffrage was also highly divisive, while there was little resistance to it among clubwomen in the West. In the Midwest, clubwomen had first avoided the suffrage issue out of caution, but after 1900 increasingly came to support it.[134] Catt implemented what was known as the "society plan," a successful effort to recruit wealthy members of the women's club movement whose time, money and experience could help build the suffrage movement.[135] By in 1914 women's suffrage was endorsed by the national General Federation of Women's Clubs.[136]

text: Catt resigned her position after four years, partly because of her husband's declining health and partly to help organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was created in Berlin in 1904 with Catt as president.[137] In 1904 Anna Howard Shaw, another Anthony protégée, was elected president of the NAWSA. Shaw was an energetic worker and a talented orator but not an effective administrator. Between 1910 and 1916 the NAWSA's national board experienced a constant turmoil that endangered the existence of the organization.[138]

text: Although its membership and finances were at all-time highs, the NAWSA decided to replace Shaw by bringing Catt back once again as president in 1915. Authorized by the NAWSA to name her own executive board, which previously had been elected by the organization's annual convention, Catt quickly converted the loosely structured organization into one that was highly centralized.[139]

text: Opposition to women's suffrage[edit]

text: Brewers and distillers, typically rooted in the German American community, opposed women's suffrage, fearing that women voters would favor the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.[140] German Lutherans and German Catholics typically opposed prohibition and woman suffrage; they favored paternalistic families with the husband deciding the family position on public affairs.[141][142] Their opposition to women's suffrage was subsequently used as an argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I.[143]

text: Defeat could lead to allegations of fraud. After the defeat of the referendum for women's suffrage in Michigan in 1912, the governor accused the brewers of complicity in widespread electoral fraud that resulted in its defeat. Evidence of vote stealing was also strong during referenda in Nebraska and Iowa.[144]

text: Some other businesses, such as southern cotton mills, opposed suffrage because they feared that women voters would support the drive to eliminate child labor.[145] Political machines, such as Tammany Hall in New York City, opposed it because they feared that the addition of female voters would dilute the control they had established over groups of male voters. By the time of the New York State referendum on women's suffrage in 1917, however, some wives and daughters of Tammany Hall leaders were working for suffrage, leading it to take a neutral position that was crucial to the referendum's passage.[146][147] Although the Catholic Church did not take an official position on suffrage, very few of its leaders supported it, and some of its leaders, such as Cardinal Gibbons, made their opposition clear.[148][149]

text: The New York Times after first supporting suffrage reversed itself and issued stern warnings. A 1912 editorial predicted that with suffrage women would make impossible demands, such as, "serving as soldiers and sailors, police patrolmen or firemen...and would serve on juries and elect themselves to executive offices and judgeships." It blamed a lack of masculinity for the failure of men to fight back, warning women would get the vote "if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.".[150]

text: Women against suffrage[edit]

text: Anti-suffrage forces, initially called the "remonstrants", organized as early as 1870 when the Woman's Anti-Suffrage Association of Washington was formed.[151] Widely known as the "antis", they eventually created organizations in some twenty states. In 1911 the National Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage was created. It claimed 350,000 members and opposed women's suffrage, feminism, and socialism. It argued that woman suffrage "would reduce the special protections and routes of influence available to women, destroy the family, and increase the number of socialist-leaning voters."[152]

text: Middle and upper class anti-suffrage women were conservatives with several motivations. Society women in particular had personal access to powerful politicians, and were reluctant to surrender that advantage. Most often the antis believed that politics was dirty and that women's involvement would surrender the moral high ground that women had claimed, and that partisanship would disrupt local club work for civic betterment, as represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs.[153] The best organized movement was the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS). Its credo, as set down by its president Josephine Jewell Dodge, was:

text: We believe in every possible advancement to women. We believe that this advancement should be along those legitimate lines of work and endeavor for which she is best fitted and for which she has now unlimited opportunities. We believe this advancement will be better achieved through strictly non-partisan effort and without the limitations of the ballot. We believe in Progress, not in Politics for women.[154]

text: The NYSAOWS New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage used grass roots mobilization techniques they had learned from watching the suffragists to defeat the 1915 referendum. They were very similar to the suffragists themselves, but used a counter-crusading style warning of the evils that suffrage would bring to women. They rejected leadership by men and stressed the importance of independent women in philanthropy and social betterment. NYSAOWS was narrowly defeated in New York in 1916 and the state voted to give women the vote. The organization moved to Washington to oppose the federal constitutional amendment for suffrage, becoming the "National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage" (NAOWS), where it was taken over by men, and assumed a much harsher rhetorical tone, especially in attacking "red radicalism". After 1919 the antis adjusted smoothly to enfranchisement and became active in party affairs, especially in the Republican Party.[155]

text: Southern strategy[edit]

text: The Constitution required 34 states (three-fourths of the 45 states in 1900) to ratify an amendment, and unless the rest of the country was unanimous there had to be support from the 11 ex-Confederate states. Three more western territories became states by 1912, helping the suffragist cause; they now needed 36 states out of 48. In the end Tennessee provided the critical 36th state.[156] The South was the most conservative region and always gave the least support for suffrage. There was little or no suffrage activity in the region until the late nineteenth century.[157] Aileen S. Kraditor identifies four distinctly Southern characteristics that were in play: 1) Southern white men held to traditional values regarding women's public roles; 2) the Solid South was tightly controlled by the Democratic Party, so playing the two parties against each other was not a feasible strategy; 3) strong support for states' rights meant there was automatic opposition to a federal constitutional amendment; 4) Jim Crow attitudes meant that expansion of the black vote (to black women) was strongly opposed.[158]

text: Mildred Rutherford, president of the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy and a leaders of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage made clear the opposition of elite white women to suffrage in a 1914 speech to the state legislature:

text: The women who are working for this measure are striking at the principle for which their fathers fought during the Civil War. Woman's suffrage comes from the North and the West and from women who do not believe in state's rights and who wish to see negro women using the ballot. I do not believe the state of Georgia has sunk so low that her good men can not legislate for women. If this time ever comes then it will be time for women to claim the ballot.[159]

text: Elna Green points out that, "Suffrage rhetoric claimed that enfranchised women would outlaw child labor, pass minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws for women workers, and establish health and safety standards for factory workers." The threat of these reforms united planters, textile mill owners, railroad magnates, city machine bosses, and the liquor interest in a formidable combine against suffrage.[160]

text: Henry Blackwell, an officer of the AWSA before the merger and a prominent figure in the movement afterwards, urged the suffrage movement to follow a strategy of convincing southern political leaders that they could ensure white supremacy in their region without violating the Fifteenth Amendment by enfranchising educated women, who would predominantly be white. Shortly after Blackwell presented his proposal to the Mississippi delegation to the U.S. Congress, his plan was given serious consideration by the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, whose main purpose was to find legal ways of further curtailing the political power of African Americans. Although the convention adopted other measures instead, the fact that Blackwell's ideas were taken seriously drew the interest of many suffragists.[161]

text: Blackwell's ally in this effort was Laura Clay, who convinced the NAWSA to launch a state-by-state campaign in the South based on Blackwell's strategy. Clay was one of several southern NAWSA members who opposed the idea of a national women's suffrage amendment on the grounds that it would impinge on states' rights. (A generation later Clay campaigned against the pending national amendment during the final battle for its ratification.) Amid predictions by some proponents of this strategy that the South would lead the way in the enfranchisement of women, suffrage organizations were established throughout the region. Anthony, Catt and Blackwell campaigned for suffrage in the South in 1895, with the latter two calling for suffrage only for educated women. With Anthony's reluctant cooperation, the NAWSA maneuvered to accommodate the politics of white supremacy in that region. Anthony asked her old friend Frederick Douglass, a former slave, not to attend the NAWSA convention in Atlanta in 1895, the first to be held in a southern city. Black NAWSA members were excluded from 1903 convention in the southern city of New Orleans, which marked the peak of this strategy's influence.[162]

text: The leaders of the Southern movement were privileged upper-class belles with a strong position in high society and in church affairs. They tried to use their upscale connections to convince powerful men that suffrage was a good idea to purify society. They also argued that giving white women the vote would more than counterbalance giving the vote to the smaller number of black women.[163] No southern state enfranchised women as a result of this strategy, however, and most southern suffrage societies that were established during this period lapsed into inactivity. The NAWSA leadership afterwards said it would not adopt policies that "advocated the exclusion of any race or class from the right of suffrage."[164] Nonetheless NAWSA reflected its white membership's viewpoint by minimizing the role of black suffragists. At the 1913 suffrage march on Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a leader in the African American community, was asked to march in an all-black contingent to avoid upsetting white southern marchers. When the march got underway, however, she slipped into the ranks of the contingent from Illinois, her home state, and completed the march in the company of white supporters.[165]

text: New Woman[edit]

text: The concept of the New Woman emerged in the late nineteenth century to characterize the increasingly independent activity of women, especially the younger generation. The move from households to public spaces was expressed in many ways. In the late 1890s, riding bicycles was a newly popular activity that increased women's mobility even as it signaled rejection of traditional teachings about women's weakness and fragility. Susan B. Anthony said bicycles had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world".[166] Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that "Woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle.[167]

text: Activists campaigned for suffrage in ways that were still considered by many to be "unladylike," such as marching in parades and giving street corner speeches on soap boxes. In New York in 1912, suffragists organized a twelve-day, 170-mile "Hike to Albany" to deliver suffrage petitions to the new governor. In 1913 the suffragist "Army of the Hudson" marched 250 miles from New York to Washington in sixteen days, gaining national publicity.[169]

text: New suffrage organizations[edit]

text: College Equal Suffrage League[edit]

text: When Maud Wood Park attended the NAWSA convention in 1900, she found herself to be virtually the only young person there. After returning to Boston, she formed the College Equal Suffrage League, which affiliated with the NAWSA. Largely through Park's efforts, similar groups were organized on campuses in 30 states, leading to the formation of the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1908.[170][171]

text: Equality League of Self-Supporting Women[edit]

text: The dramatic tactics of the militant wing of the British suffrage movement began to influence the movement in the U.S. Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, returned to the U.S. after several years in England, where she had associated with suffrage groups still in the early phases of militancy. In 1907 she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, later called the Women's Political Union, whose membership was based on working women, both professional and industrial. The Equality League initiated the practice of holding suffrage parades and organized the first open air suffrage rallies in thirty years.[172] As many as 25,000 people marched in these parades[173]

text: National Woman's Party[edit]

text: Work toward a national suffrage amendment had been sharply curtailed in favor of state suffrage campaigns after the two rival suffrage organizations merged in 1890 to form the NAWSA. Interest in a national suffrage amendment was revived primarily by Alice Paul.[126] In 1910, she returned to the U.S. from England, where she had been part of the militant wing of the suffrage movement. Paul had been jailed there and had endured forced feedings after going on a hunger strike. In January 1913 she arrived in Washington as chair of the Congressional Committee of the NAWSA, charged with reviving the drive for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women. She and her coworker Lucy Burns organized a suffrage parade in Washington on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as president. Opponents of the march turned the event into a near riot, which ended only when a cavalry unit of the army was brought in to restore order. Public outrage over the incident, which cost the chief of police his job, brought publicity to the movement and gave it fresh momentum.[174] In 1914 Paul and her followers began referring to the proposed suffrage amendment as the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment,"[175] a name that was widely adopted.[176]

text: Paul argued that because the Democrats would not act to enfranchise women even though they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, the suffrage movement should work for the defeat of all Democratic candidates regardless of an individual candidate's position on suffrage. She and Burns formed a separate lobbying group called the Congressional Union to act on this approach. Strongly disagreeing, the NAWSA in 1913 withdrew support from Paul's group and continued its practice of supporting any candidate who supported suffrage, regardless of political party.[177] In 1916 Blatch merged her Women's Political Union into Paul's Congressional Union.[178]

text: In 1916 Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP).[179] Once again the women's movement had split, but the result this time was something like a division of labor. The NAWSA burnished its image of respectability and engaged in highly organized lobbying at both the national and state levels. The smaller NWP also engaged in lobbying but became increasingly known for activities that were dramatic and confrontational, most often in the national capital.[180] One form of protest was the watchfires, which involved burning copies of President Wilson's speeches, often outside the White House or in the nearby Lafayette Park. The NWP continued to hold watchfires even as the war began, drawing criticism from the public and even other suffrage groups for being unpatriotic.[181]

text: Suffrage periodicals[edit]

text: Stanton and Anthony launched a sixteen-page weekly newspaper called The Revolution in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage, but it also covered politics, the labor movement and other topics. Its energetic and broad-ranging style gave it a lasting influence, but its debts mounted when it did not receive the funding they had expected, and they had to transfer the paper to other hands after only twenty-nine months.[182] Their organization, the NWSA, afterwards depended on other periodicals, such as The National Citizen and Ballot Box, edited by Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Women's Tribune, edited by Clara Bewick Colby, to represent its viewpoint.[183]

text: In 1870, shortly after the formation of the AWSA, Lucy Stone launched an eight-page weekly newspaper called the Woman's Journal to advocate for women's rights, especially suffrage. Better financed and less radical than The Revolution, it had a much longer life. By the 1880s it had become an unofficial voice of the suffrage movement as a whole.[184] In 1916 the NAWSA purchased the Woman's Journal and spent a significant amount of money to enhance it. It was renamed Woman Citizen and declared to be the official organ of the NAWSA.[185]

text: Alice Paul began publishing a newspaper called The Suffragist in 1913 when she was still part of the NAWSA. Editor of the eight-page weekly was Rheta Childe Dorr, an experienced journalist.[186]

text: Turn of the tide[edit]

text: New Zealand enfranchised women in 1893, the first country to do so on a nationwide basis. In the U.S. women gained the franchise in the states of Washington in 1910; in California in 1911; in Oregon, Kansas and Arizona in 1912; and in Illinois in 1913.[187] Some states allowed women to vote in school elections, municipal elections, or for members of the Electoral College. Some territories, like Washington, Utah, and Wyoming, allowed women to vote before they became states.[188] As women voted in an increasing number of states, Congressmen from those states swung to support a national suffrage amendment, and paid more attention to issues such as child labor.

text: The reform campaigns of the Progressive Era strengthened the suffrage movement. Beginning around 1900, this broad movement began at the grassroots level with such goals as combating corruption in government, eliminating child labor, and protecting workers and consumers. Many of its participants saw women's suffrage as yet another progressive goal, and they believed that the addition of women to the electorate would help their movement achieve its other goals. In 1912 the Progressive Party, formed by Theodore Roosevelt, endorsed women's suffrage.[189] The socialist movement supported women's suffrage in some areas.[190]

text: By 1916 suffrage for women had become a major national issue, and the NAWSA had become the nation's largest voluntary organization, with two million members.[191] In 1916 the conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties endorsed women's suffrage, but only on a state-by-state basis, with the implication that the various states might implement suffrage in different ways or (in some cases) not at all. Having expected more, Catt called an emergency NAWSA convention and proposed what became known as the "Winning Plan".[192] For several years the NAWSA had focused on achieving suffrage on a state-by-state basis, partly to accommodate members from southern states who opposed the idea of a national suffrage amendment, considering it an infringement on states' rights.[193] In a strategic shift, the 1916 convention approved Catt's proposal to make a national amendment the priority for the entire organization. It authorized the executive board to specify a plan of work toward this goal for each state and to take over that work if the state organization refused to comply.[194]

text: In 1917 Catt received a bequest of $900,000 from Mrs. Frank (Miriam) Leslie to be used for the women's suffrage movement. Catt formed the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission to dispense the funds, most of which supported the activities of the NAWSA at a crucial time for the suffrage movement.[195]

text: The entry of the U.S. into World War I in April 1917 had a significant impact on the suffrage movement. To replace men who had gone into the military, women moved into workplaces that did not traditionally hire women, such as steel mills and oil refineries. The NAWSA cooperated with the war effort, with Catt and Shaw serving on the Women's Committee for the Council of National Defense. The NWP, by contrast, took no steps to cooperate with the war effort.[196] Jeannette Rankin, elected in 1916 by Montana as the first woman in Congress, was one of fifty members of Congress to vote against the declaration of war.[197]

text: In January 1917 the NWP stationed pickets at the White House, which had never before been picketed, with banners demanding women's suffrage.[198] Tension escalated in June as a Russian delegation drove up to the White House and NPW members unfurled a banner that read, "We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement".[199] In August another banner referred to "Kaiser Wilson" and compared the plight of the German people with that of American women.[200]

text: Some of the onlookers reacted violently, tearing the banners from the picketers' hands. The police, whose actions had previously been restrained, began arresting the picketers for blocking the sidewalk. Eventually over 200 were arrested, about half of whom were sent to prison.[201] In October Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. When she and other suffragist prisoners began a hunger strike, prison authorities force-fed them. The negative publicity created by this harsh practice increased the pressure on the administration, which capitulated and released all the prisoners.[202]

text: In November 1917 a referendum to enfranchise women in New York - at that time the most populous state in the country - passed by a substantial margin.[203] In September 1918, President Wilson spoke before the Senate, calling for approval of the suffrage amendment as a war measure, saying "We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"[204] By the end of 1919, women effectively could vote for president in states with 326 electoral votes out of a total of 531.[205] Political leaders who became convinced of the inevitability of women's suffrage began to pressure local and national legislators to support it so that their respective party could claim credit for it in future elections.[206]

text: The war served as a catalyst for suffrage extension in several countries, with women gaining the vote after years of campaigning partly in recognition of their support for the war effort, which further increased the pressure for suffrage in the U.S.[207] About half of the women in Britain had become enfranchised by January 1918, as had women in most Canadian provinces, with Quebec the major exception.[208]

text: Nineteenth Amendment[edit]

text: World War I had a profound impact on woman suffrage across the belligerents. Women played a major role on the home fronts and many countries recognized their sacrifices with the vote during or shortly after the war, including the U.S., Britain, Canada (except Quebec), Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Sweden; and Ireland introduced universal suffrage with independence. France almost did so but stopped short.[209] Despite their eventual success, groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic.[210]

text: On January 12, 1915, a suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but was defeated by a vote of 204 to 174, (Democrats 170-85 against, Republicans 81-34 for, Progressives 6-0 for).[211] President Woodrow Wilson held off until he was sure the Democratic Party was supportive; the 1917 referendum in New York State in favor of suffrage proved decisive for him. When another bill was brought before the House in January, 1918, Wilson made a strong and widely published appeal to the House to pass the bill.[212] Behn argues that:

text: The Amendment passed by two-thirds of the House, with only one vote to spare. The vote was then carried into the Senate. Again President Wilson made an appeal, but on September 30, 1918, the amendment fell two votes short of the two-thirds necessary for passage, 53-31 (Republicans 27-10 for, Democrats 26-21 for).[214] On February 10, 1919, it was again voted upon, and then it was lost by only one vote, 54-30 (Republicans 30-12 for, Democrats 24-18 for).[215]

text: There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so the President called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 304 to 89, (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, Prohibitionist 1-0 for),[216] 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays (Republicans 36-8 for, Democrats 20-17 for).[217] Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. After Washington on March 22, 1920, ratification languished for months. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it the law throughout the United States.[218] Thus the 1920 election became the first United States presidential election in which women were permitted to vote in every state.

text:
"To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign...During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into State constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. Millions of dollars were raised, mainly in small sums, and expended with economic care. Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could."

Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.[219][220]

text: Three other states, Connecticut, Vermont and Delaware, passed the amendment by 1923. They were eventually followed by others in the south. Nearly twenty years later Maryland ratified the amendment in 1941. After another ten years, in 1952, Virginia ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, followed by Alabama in 1953.[221] After another 16 years Florida and South Carolina passed the necessary votes to ratify in 1969, followed two years later by Georgia,[222] Louisiana and North Carolina.[221]

text: Mississippi did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1984, sixty four years after the law was enacted nationally.[223]

text: Effects of the Nineteenth Amendment[edit]

text: Immediate effects[edit]

text: Politicians responded to the newly enlarged electorate by emphasizing issues of special interest to women, especially prohibition, child health, public schools, and world peace.[224] Women did respond to these issues, but in terms of general voting they shared the same outlook and the same voting behavior as men.[225]

text: The suffrage organization NAWSA became the League of Women Voters and Alice Paul's National Woman's Party began lobbying for full equality and the Equal Rights Amendment which would pass Congress during the second wave of the women's movement in 1972 (but it was not ratified and never took effect). The main surge of women voting came in 1928, when the big-city machines realized they needed the support of women to elect Al Smith, while rural drys mobilized women to support Prohibition and vote for Republican Herbert Hoover. Catholic women were reluctant to vote in the early 1920s, but they registered in very large numbers for the 1928 election—the first in which Catholicism was a major issue.[226] A few women were elected to office, but none became especially prominent during this time period. Overall, the women's rights movement declined noticeably during the 1920s.

text: Changes in the voting population[edit]

text: Although restricting access to the polls because of sex was made unconstitutional in 1920, women did not turn out to the polls in the same numbers as men until 1980. From 1980 until the present, women have voted in elections in at least the same percentage as have men, and often more. This difference in voting turnout and preferences between men and women is known as the voting gender gap. The voting gender gap has impacted political elections and, consequently, the way candidates campaign for office.

text: Changes in representation and government programs[edit]

text: The presence of women in Congress has gradually increased since 1920, with an especially steady increase from 1981 (23 female members) to the present (97 female members). The 113th Congress, serving from 2013-2015, includes a record 20 female senators and 77 female representatives.[227]

text: Notable legislation[edit]

text: Immediately following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, many legislators feared a powerful women's bloc would emerge as a result of female enfranchisement. The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s, was one of the first laws passed appealing to the female vote.[228]

text: Socio-economic effects[edit]

text: A paper by John Lott and Lawrence W. Kenny, published by the Journal of Political Economy, found that women generally voted along more liberal political philosophies than men. The paper concluded that women's voting appeared to be more risk-averse than men and favored candidates or policies that supported wealth transfer, social insurance, progressive taxation, and larger government.[229]

text: A paper found that "exposure to women’s political empowerment during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. We also find improvements in employment outcomes among this group."[230]


document_title: Left- and right-hand traffic

question_text: when did american cars switch to left hand drive

text: Left- and right-hand traffic

text: History[edit]

text: Ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Roman troops kept to the left when marching.[10] In 1998, archaeologists found a well-preserved double track leading to a Roman quarry near Swindon, in southern England. The grooves in the road on the left side (viewed facing down the track away from the quarry) were much deeper than those on the right side, suggesting LHT, at least at this location, since carts would exit the quarry heavily loaded, and enter it empty.[11]

text: The first reference in English law to an order for LHT was in 1756, with regard to London Bridge.[12]

text: Some historians, such as C. Northcote Parkinson, believed that ancient travellers on horseback or on foot generally kept to the left, since most people were right handed. If two men riding on horseback were to start a fight, each would edge toward the left.[10] In the year 1300, Pope Boniface VIII directed pilgrims to keep left.[10]

text: In the late 1700s, traffic in the United States was RHT based on teamsters' use of large freight wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. The wagons had no driver's seat, so the (typically right-handed) postilion held his whip in his right hand and thus sat on the left rear horse. Seated on the left, the driver preferred that other wagons pass him on the left so that he could be sure to keep clear of the wheels of oncoming wagons.[13]

text: In France, traditionally foot traffic had kept right, while carriage traffic kept left. Following the French Revolution, all traffic kept right.[12] Following the Napoleonic Wars, the French imposed RHT on parts of Europe. During the colonial period, RHT was introduced by the French in New France, French West Africa, the Maghreb, French Indochina, the West Indies, French Guiana and the Réunion, among others.

text: Meanwhile, LHT was introduced by the British in Atlantic Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the East Africa Protectorate, British India, Southern Rhodesia and the Cape Colony (now Zimbabwe and South Africa), British Malaya (now Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore), British Guiana, and British Hong Kong. LHT was also introduced by the Portuguese Empire in Portuguese Macau, Colonial Brazil, East Timor, Portuguese Mozambique, and Angola.

text: The first keep-right law for driving in the United States was passed in 1792 and applied to the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike.[7] New York formalized RHT in 1804, New Jersey in 1813 and Massachusetts in 1821.[14]

text: Changing sides[edit]

text: Europe[edit]

text: Influential in Europe was the 1920 Paris Convention, which advised driving on the right-hand side of the road, in order to harmonise traffic across a continent with many borders. This was despite the fact that left-hand traffic was still widespread: in 1915 for example, LHT was introduced everywhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[15] However, three years later the Empire was split up into several countries, and they all changed eventually to RHT, notably including when Nazi Germany introduced RHT with almost immediate effect in Czechoslovakia in 1938-39.[16]

text: Sweden was LHT from about 1734 to 1967,[17] despite having land borders with RHT countries, and approximately 90 percent of cars being left-hand drive (LHD) vehicles.[18] A referendum was held in 1955, with an overwhelming majority voting against a change to RHT. Nevertheless, some years later the government ordered a conversion, which took place at 5 am on Sunday, 3 September 1967. The accident rate dropped sharply after the change,[19] but soon rose back to near its original level.[20] The day was known as Dagen H ("H-Day"), the 'H' being for Högertrafik ("right traffic"). When Iceland switched the following year, it was known as H-dagurinn, again meaning "H-Day".[21]

text: In the late 1960s, the UK Department for Transport considered switching to RHT, but declared it unsafe and too costly for such a built-up nation.[22] Road building standards, for motorways in particular, allow asymmetrically designed road junctions, where merge and diverge lanes differ in length.[23]

text: Asia and the Pacific[edit]

text: China adopted RHT in 1946. Taiwan changed to driving on the right at the same time. Hong Kong and Macau continue to be LHT.

text: Both North Korea and South Korea switched to RHT in September 1945 after liberation from Japan which was defeated and surrendered by the Allies.

text: Myanmar switched to RHT in 1970.[24]

text: Samoa, a former German colony, had been RHT for more than a century. It switched to LHT in 2009,[25] being the first territory in almost 30 years to switch.[26] The move was legislated in 2008 to allow Samoans to use cheaper right hand drive (RHD) vehicles imported from Australia, New Zealand or Japan, and to harmonise with other South Pacific nations. A political party, The People's Party, was formed to try to protest against the change, a protest group which launched a legal challenge,[27] and an estimated 18,000 people attending demonstrations against it.[28] The motor industry was also opposed, as 14,000 of Samoa's 18,000 vehicles are designed for RHT and the government has refused to meet the cost of conversion.[26] After months of preparation, the switch from right to left happened in an atmosphere of national celebration. There were no reported incidents.[3] At 05:50 local time, Monday 7 September, a radio announcement halted traffic, and an announcement at 6:00 ordered traffic to switch to LHT.[25] The change coincided with more restrictive enforcement of speeding and seat-belt laws.[29] That day and the following day were declared public holidays, to reduce traffic.[30] The change included a three-day ban on alcohol sales, while police mounted dozens of checkpoints, warning drivers to drive slowly.[3]

text: The Philippines was mostly LHT during its Spanish[31] and American colonial periods,[32][33] as well as during the Commonwealth era.[34] During the Japanese occupation the Philippines remained LHT,[35] also because LHT had been required by the Japanese;[36] but during the Battle of Manila the liberating American forces drove their tanks to the right for easier facilitation of movement. RHT was formally finalised by Executive Order No. 34 signed by President Sergio Osmeña on 10 March 1945.[37]

text: Africa[edit]

text: A number of non-contiguous former British colonies in West Africa originally drove LHT and switched to RHT in the early 1970s to match the surrounding countries. Sierra Leone switched to RHT in 1971, Nigeria in 1972 and Ghana in 1974. Before this period The Gambia, a country entirely contained within RHT Senegal, had officially switched to RHT in 1965.

text: Rwanda, a former Belgian colony in central Africa, is RHT but is considering switching to LHT, to bring the country in line with other members of the East African Community (EAC).[38] A survey, carried out in 2009, indicated that 54% of Rwandans were in favour of the switch. Reasons cited were the perceived lower costs of RHD vehicles as opposed to LHD versions of the same model, easier maintenance and the political benefit of harmonisation of traffic regulations with other EAC countries. The same survey also indicated that RHD cars are 16 to 49 per cent cheaper than their LHD equivalents.[39] In 2014 an internal report from consultants to the Ministry of Infrastructure recommended a switch to LHT.[40] In 2015, the ban on RHD vehicles was lifted; RHD trucks from neighbouring countries cost $1000 less than LHD models imported from Europe.[41][42]

text: Changing sides at borders[edit]

text: While most LHT jurisdictions are on islands, there are cases where vehicles may be driven from LHT across a border into a RHT area.

text: LHT Thailand has three RHT neighbours: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar. Most of its borders use a simple traffic light to do the switch, but there are also interchanges which enable the switch while keeping up a continuous flow of traffic.[43]

text: There are four road border crossing points between Hong Kong and Mainland China. In 2006, the daily average number of vehicle trips recorded at Lok Ma Chau was 31,100.[44] The next largest is Man Kam To, where there is no changeover system and the border roads on the mainland side Wenjindu intersect as one-way streets with a main road.

text: The Takutu River Bridge (which links LHT Guyana and RHT Brazil[45]) is the only border in the Americas where traffic changes sides.

text: Although the United Kingdom is separated from Continental Europe by the English Channel, the level of cross-Channel traffic is very high; the Channel Tunnel alone carries 3.5 million vehicles per year, by rail, between the UK and France.

text: Road vehicle configurations[edit]

text: Driver seating position[edit]

text: In RHT jurisdictions, vehicles are configured with LHD, with the driver sitting on the left side. In LHT jurisdictions, the reverse is true. The driver's side, the side closest to the centre of the road, is sometimes called the offside, while the passenger side, the side closest to the side of the road, is sometimes called the nearside.[46]

text: Historically there was less consistency in the relationship of the position of the driver to the handedness of traffic. Most American cars produced before 1910 were RHD.[7] In 1908 Henry Ford standardised the Model T as LHD in RHT America,[7] arguing that with RHD and RHT, the passenger was obliged to "get out on the street side and walk around the car" and that with steering from the left, the driver "is able to see even the wheels of the other car and easily avoids danger."[47] By 1915 other manufacturers followed Ford's lead, due to the popularity of the Model T.[7]

text: In specialised cases, the driver will sit on the nearside, or kerbside. Examples include:

text:
Where the driver needs a good view of the nearside, e.g. street sweepers, or vehicles driven along unstable road edges.[48]
Where it is more convenient for the driver to be on the nearside, e.g. delivery vehicles. The Grumman LLV postal delivery truck is widely used with RHD configurations in RHT North America. Some Unimogs are designed to be switch between LHD and RHD to permit operators to work on the more convenient side of the truck.

tag: ul

text: Generally, the convention is to mount a motorcycle on the left,[49] and kickstands are usually on the left[50] which makes it more convenient to mount on the safer kerbside[50] as is the case in LHT. Some jurisdictions prohibit fitting a sidecar to a motorcycle's offside.[51][52]

text: Headlamps and other lighting equipment[edit]

text: Most low-beam headlamps produce an asymmetrical beam distribution suitable for use on only one side of the road. Low beam headlamps for use in LH-traffic countries throw most of their light forward-leftward; those for RH-traffic countries throw most of their light forward-rightward, thus illuminating obstacles and road signs an adequate distance ahead on the driver's own side of the road while limiting glare to oncoming traffic on the other side of the road.

text: Within Europe, headlamps designed and approved for use on one side of the road must be adaptable to produce adequate illumination with controlled glare for temporarily driving on the other side of the road,[53]:p.13 ¶5.8 as for example on holiday or in transit. This adaptation may be achieved by affixing masking strips or prismatic lenses to a designated part of the lens or by moving all or part of the headlamp optic so all or part of the beam is shifted or the asymmetrical portion is occluded.[53]:p.13 ¶5.8.1 Some varieties of the projector-type headlamp can be fully adjusted to produce a proper LH- or RH-traffic beam by shifting a lever or other movable element in or on the lamp assembly.[53]:p.12 ¶5.4 Some vehicles adjust the headlamps automatically when the car's GPS detects that the vehicle has moved from LH to RH traffic or vice versa.

text: Because blackout strips and adhesive prismatic lenses reduce the safety performance of the headlamps, most countries require all vehicles registered or used on a permanent or semi-permanent basis within the country to be equipped with headlamps designed for the correct traffic-handedness.[citation needed]

text: Without sidecars attached, motorcycles, motor scooters, mopeds, and bicycles are almost symmetric with their handlebars in the centre. However, motorcycles are often equipped with automotive-type asymmetrical-beam headlamps that likewise require adjustments or replacement when brought into a country with opposite traffic-handedness.

text: Rear fog lamps[edit]

text: Within the European Union, vehicles must be equipped with one or two rear-facing red rear fog lamps. A single rear fog lamp must be located between the vehicle's longitudinal centreline and the outer extent of the driver's side of the vehicle.[54] When importing a vehicle to a country which drives on the opposite side of the road, this sometimes requires the purchase and installation of local-market lighting components.

text: Crash Testing differences[edit]

text: Some crash test results indicate that the RHD variant of a vehicle primarily developed for a LHD country may not protect the driver as well as the LHD variant, although differences in testing methodology could also cause the results to vary. [55]

text: One of the possible causes of this difference in crash test results is the RHD variant will not be an exact mirror image of the LHD variant. The number of differences in chassis, bodywork and parts needed to produce the RHD variant will be minimised to reduce the cost. The RHD vehicle is usually a variant of the LHD markets, due to potentially lower sales volumes of the RHD variant. When minimising the changes needed for the RHD variant, there is a possibility that key strengthening structures that would protect the driver in a crash may not be transferred to the driver side in the RHD variant. (There are no easily reference-able sources for LHD variant performing less well in crash testing than the RHD variant where the vehicle is primarily manufactured for/in RHD markets).

text: It is commonplace in Europe for only the LHD variant of a vehicle to be tested under the Euro NCAP crash testing scheme, although the result will be used in the promotion of the RHD variant in European countries which operate LHT.

text: Worldwide distribution by country[edit]

text: Of the 193 countries currently recognised by the United Nations (and the unrecognised Palestine), 140 use RHT and 54 use LHT. A country and its territories and dependencies is counted once.

text:
Country
Road traffic
Road switched sides
Multi-track rail traffic generally
Notes

 Afghanistan
RHT

RHT/LHT
Was LHT until the 1950s, in line with neighbouring British Raj and later Pakistan.[56]

 Albania
RHT[57]

RHT

 Algeria
RHT[57]

RHT

 Andorra
RHT[57]

 Angola
RHT[57]
1928

 Antigua and Barbuda
LHT[57]

 Argentina
RHT
10 June 1945
LHT
The anniversary on 10 June is still observed each year as Día de la Seguridad Vial (road safety day).[58]
The Metrotranvía Mendoza uses RHT.

 Armenia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Australia
LHT[59]

LHT
Commonwealth. Includes  Christmas Island,  Cocos Islands,  Norfolk Island

 Austria
RHT
1921 in Vorarlberg, 1930 in North Tyrol, 1935 in Carinthia and East Tyrol, 1938 in the rest of the country.
RHT[60]
Originally LHT, like most of former Austria-Hungary.

 Azerbaijan
RHT[57]

RHT

 Bahamas
LHT[57]

In Bahamas LHD vehicles are common due to the import of used cars from nearby USA[61].

 Bahrain
RHT
1967

Former British protectorate. Switched to same side as neighbours.[62]

 Bangladesh
LHT[57]

LHT

 Barbados
LHT

 Belgium
RHT[57]
1899
LHT
The Brussels Metro uses RHT.

 Belarus
RHT[57]

RHT

 Belize
RHT
1961[2]

Former British colony. Switched to same side as neighbours.

 Benin
RHT[57]

 Bhutan
LHT[57]

Under British protection before 1949.

 Bolivia
RHT[57]

 Botswana
LHT[57]

 Brazil
RHT
1928[57]
RHT
A Portuguese colony until the early 19th century, switched some states still using LHT[63] to RHT in 1928.[64]
Most metro systems use RHT.

 Brunei
LHT[57]

 Bosnia and Herzegovina
RHT[57]

RHT[65]
Switched sides after the collapse of Austria-Hungary.

 Bulgaria
RHT[57]

RHT

 Burkina Faso
RHT[57]

 Burundi
RHT

Considering switching to LHT[66] in line with neighbours Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

 Cambodia
RHT

RHT implemented while part of French Indochina. RHD cars, many of which were smuggled from Thailand, were banned from 2001, even though they accounted for 80% of vehicles in the country.[67]

 Cameroon
RHT[57]
1961

 Canada
RHT
1920s
RHT
Territories now in Canada have always been RHT, except British Columbia, which changed to RHT in stages from 1920 to 1923,[68][69] and New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island which changed in 1922, 1923, and 1924 respectively.[70] Newfoundland and Labrador changed to RHT in 1947 while still a dominion of the British Empire, two years before joining Canada.[71]

 Cape Verde
RHT[57]
1928

 Central African Republic
RHT[57]

 Chad
RHT[57]

 Chile
RHT[57]
1916
LHT
The Santiago Metro uses RHT.

 China
RHT
1946
RHT/LHT
At one time, northern provinces were RHT due to American influence, while southern provinces were LHT due to British influence. LHT was uniform in the 1930s.  Hong Kong and  Macau are all on LHT.

 Colombia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Comoros
RHT[57]

 Congo
RHT[57]

 Democratic Republic of Congo
RHT[57]

 Costa Rica
RHT[57]

 Côte d'Ivoire
RHT[57]

 Croatia
RHT[57]

RHT
Istria and Dalmatia were RHT, while Croatia-Slavonia was LHT when Croatia was part of Austria-Hungary [72]. The LHT regions switched to RHT on joining the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

 Cuba
RHT[57]

 Cyprus
LHT[57]

Former British colony.

 Czech Republic
RHT[57]
1939
RHT
Was LHT, like most of former Austria-Hungary, switched during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

 Denmark
RHT

RHT[73]
Includes  Faroe Islands and  Greenland

 Djibouti
RHT[57]

 Dominica
LHT[57]

Former British colony.

 Dominican Republic
RHT[57]

 East Timor
LHT
1976

Originally LHT, like its colonial power Portugal. Switched to RHT with Portugal in 1928.[2] Under the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, changed back to LHT in 1976.

 Ecuador
RHT[57]

LHT
The Quito Metro and Cuenca tram system will use RHT

 Egypt
RHT[57]

LHT
Road vehicles are RHT due to French influence, but railway system was built by British companies.

 El Salvador
RHT[57]

 Equatorial Guinea
RHT[57]

 Eritrea
RHT[57]
1964

 Estonia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Ethiopia
RHT[57]
1964
LHT
The Addis Ababa Light Rail runs on the right.

 Fiji
LHT

 Finland
RHT
1858
RHT/LHT
Formerly ruled by LHT Sweden, switched to RHT as the Grand Duchy of Finland by Russian decree.[74] Majority of Helsinki commuter rail uses LHT.

 France
RHT
1792
LHT[75]/RHT
Includes  French Polynesia,  New Caledonia,  Saint Pierre and Miquelon,  Wallis and Futuna,  French Guiana,  Réunion,  Saint Barthélemy,  Collectivity of Saint Martin,  Guadeloupe,  Mayotte.
Railways in Alsace and Lorraine use RHT as a former part of German Empire. CDGVAL uses RHT. Most metro systems use RHT, except for the Lyon Metro.

 Gabon
RHT[57]

 Gambia
RHT [57]
1965

 Georgia
RHT[57]

RHT
About 40% vehicles in Georgia are RHD due to low cost of used cars from Japan[76].

 Germany
RHT[77]

RHT

 Ghana
RHT
1974

Former British colony. When changing to RHT a Twi language slogan was "Nifa, Nifa Enan" or "Right, Right, Fourth".[78]

 Greece
RHT[57]

RHT

 Grenada
LHT[57]

 Guatemala
RHT[57]

 Guinea
RHT[57]

 Guinea-Bissau
RHT[57]
1928

 Guyana
LHT[57]

 Haiti
RHT[57]

 Honduras
RHT[57]

 Hungary
RHT[57]
1941
RHT
Originally LHT, like most of Austria-Hungary.

 Iceland
RHT
1968

The day of the switch was known as H-dagurinn. Most passenger cars were already LHD.

 Iran
RHT[57]

RHT

 Iraq
RHT[57]

LHT

 India
LHT[57]

LHT
Former British colony.

 Indonesia
LHT[59]

RHT[79]
The Jakarta MRT will use LHT.

 Ireland
LHT[57]

LHT
Former British Dominion.

 Israel
RHT[57]

LHT
The Jerusalem Light Rail uses RHT.

 Italy
RHT
1920s
LHT
Until 1927 the countryside was RHT while cities were LHT.[80] Rome changed to RHT in 1924 and Milan in 1926. Alfa Romeo and Lancia did not produce LHD cars until as late as 1950 and 1953 respectively, as many drivers favoured the RHD layout even in RHT as this offered the driver a clearer view of the edge of the road in mountainous regions at a time when many such roads lacked barriers or walls.[81]
The metro systems in Brescia, Genoa, Milan, and Turin use RHT, as well as all tram systems.

 Jamaica
LHT[57]

 Japan
LHT[82]

LHT
Post-World War II Okinawa was ruled by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands and was RHT. It was returned to Japan in 1972 went LHT in 1978.[83] The conversion operation was known as 730 (Nana-San-Maru, which means Nana(7)-San(3)-Maru(0)). Okinawa is one of few places to have changed from RHT to LHT in the late 20th century.

 Jordan
RHT[57]

RHT, despite the Mandate for Palestine and the Transjordan memorandum being under British rule till 1946.

 Kazakhstan
RHT[57]

RHT

 Kenya
LHT[84]

British colony until 1963.

 Kiribati
LHT[57]

 North Korea and  South Korea
RHT
1946
LHT
Korea had been LHT because of the influence of Japan in the 1900s. Switched to RHT under Soviet and American occupation after 1945.
Most metro systems in South Korea use RHT (exceptions include Seoul Subway Line 1 and the Bundang Line); metro system in Pyongyang uses a mixture of RHT and LHT.

 Kuwait
RHT[57]

 Kyrgyzstan
RHT

RHT
Former part of RHT Soviet Union. In 2012, over 20,000 cheaper used RHD cars were imported from Japan.[85]

 Laos
RHT[57]

LHT
RHT implemented while part of French Indochina.

 Latvia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Lebanon
RHT[57]

Former French mandate.

 Lesotho
LHT[57]

 Liberia
RHT[57]

 Libya
RHT[57]

 Liechtenstein
RHT[57]

RHT

 Lithuania
RHT[57]

RHT

 Luxembourg
RHT[57]

RHT

 Macedonia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Madagascar
RHT[57]

 Malawi
LHT[57]

 Malaysia
LHT[57]

LHT
Former British colony.

 Maldives
LHT[57]

 Mali
RHT[57]

 Malta
LHT[57]

British colony until 1964.

 Marshall Islands
RHT[57]

 Mauritania
RHT

Mining roads between Fdérik and Zouérat are LHT.[86]

 Mauritius
LHT[57]

Former British colony. Island nation.

 Mexico
RHT[57]

RHT

 Micronesia
RHT [57]

 Moldova
RHT[57]

RHT

 Monaco
RHT[57]

LHT

 Mongolia
RHT[57]

RHT

 Montenegro
RHT[57]

RHT

 Morocco
RHT[57]

RHT

 Mozambique
LHT[87]

LHT

 Myanmar
RHT
1970
LHT
Much of infrastructure still geared to LHT, most cars are pre-owned RHD vehicles, imported from Japan.[88]

 Netherlands
RHT
1906[89]
RHT
Rotterdam was LHT until 1917.[90] Includes  Curaçao,  Sint Maarten, and  Aruba

 Namibia
LHT
1918

RHT as a German colony. After South Africa occupied German South-West Africa during World War I, switched to LHT.[2] South-West Africa was made a South African mandate by the League of Nations, and the new rule of the road was established in law.[91]

 Nauru
LHT[57]
1918

   Nepal
LHT[92]

 New Zealand
LHT[59]

LHT
Includes territories  Niue and  Cook Islands

 Nicaragua
RHT[57]

 Niger
RHT[57]

 Nigeria
RHT
1972[93]
LHT
Former British colony. Switched to RHT as it is surrounded by former French RHT colonies.

 Norway
RHT[57]

RHT

 Oman
RHT

Not a party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and bans all foreign-registered RHD vehicles.[94]

 Palau
RHT[57]

RHT

 Palestine
RHT[57]

 Pakistan
LHT[57]

LHT

 Panama
RHT
1943[95]

 Papua New Guinea
LHT[57]

 Paraguay
RHT
1945[96]

 Peru
RHT[57]

LHT

 Philippines
RHT
1946[37]
RHT
LHT up until the Battle of Manila in 1945

 Poland
RHT

RHT
Partitions of Poland belonging to the German Empire and the Russian Empire were RHT. Partitions that were part of Austria-Hungary were LHT and changed to RHT in the 1920s.[97]

 Portugal
RHT[59]
1928
LHT
Colonies Goa, Macau and Mozambique, which had land borders with LHT countries, did not switch and continue to drive on the left.[87] The Porto Metro uses RHT.

 Qatar
RHT[57]

 Romania
RHT[57]

RHT

 Russia
RHT[57]

RHT
In the Russian Far East RHD vehicles are common due to the import of used cars from nearby Japan.[98] Railway between Moscow and Ryazan is LHT. Sormovskaya line in Nizhny Novgorod Metro also uses LHT.

 Rwanda
RHT[66]

Former Belgian mandate. Considering switching to LHT[66][99] like its neighbours Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

 Saint Kitts and Nevis
LHT

 Saint Lucia
LHT

 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
LHT

 Samoa
LHT
2009

Switched to LHT to allow the import of cars more cheaply from Australia, New Zealand and Japan.[59]

 San Marino
RHT[57]

 São Tomé and Príncipe
RHT[57]
1928

 Saudi Arabia
RHT[57]

LHT
The Makkah Metro uses RHT.

 Senegal
RHT[57]

 Serbia
RHT[57]

RHT
Vojvodina was LHT while part of Austria-Hungary.

 Seychelles
LHT[57]

 Sierra Leone
RHT
1971[100]

Importation of RHD vehicles was banned in 2013.[101]

 Singapore
LHT[57]

LHT
Former British colony.

 Slovakia
RHT[57]
1939–41
RHT

 Slovenia
RHT[57]

LHT

 Solomon Islands
LHT[57]

 Somalia
RHT
1968[102]

 South Africa
LHT[103][104]

LHT
Former British colony.

 South Sudan
RHT
1973

Was LHT during the period of British colonial rule. Split from Sudan in 2011 after the majority of the population voted for independence.

 Spain
RHT
1924
RHT
Up to the 1920s Barcelona was RHT, and Madrid was LHT until 1924. The Madrid and Bilbao metro systems use LHT.[105]

 Sri Lanka
LHT[57]

LHT
Former British Colony.

 Sudan
RHT[57]
1973

Former British Colony.

 Suriname
LHT[57]

 Swaziland
LHT[57]

 Sweden
RHT[57]
3 September 1967
LHT
The day of the switch was known as Dagen H. Most passenger cars were already LHD. The tram systems in Gothenburg and Norrköping use RHT; the tram system in Stockholm is mostly RHT but some LHT.[106] The railways in Malmö uses RHT due to the connection to Denmark.

  Switzerland
RHT[57]

LHT
The tram system in Zurich and the Lausanne Metro use RHT.

 Syria
RHT[57]

 Taiwan
RHT
1946
LHT
Was LHT during the period of Japanese rule. The government of the Republic of China changed Taiwan to RHT in 1946 along with the rest of China.[107] Most metro systems use RHT.

 Tajikistan
RHT[57]

RHT

 Tanzania
LHT[57]

 Thailand
LHT[59]

LHT
One of the few LHT countries not a former British colony. Shares long land border with RHT Laos and Cambodia.

 Togo
RHT[57]

 Tonga
LHT[57]

 Trinidad and Tobago
LHT[108]

Former British colony.

 Tunisia
RHT[57]

LHT
French RHT was enforced in the French protectorate of Tunisia from 1881.

 Turkey
RHT[57]

RHT

 Turkmenistan
RHT[57]

RHT

 Tuvalu
LHT[57]

 Uganda
LHT[57]

 Ukraine
RHT
1922[97]
RHT
West Ukraine was LHT, like most of former Austria-Hungary. Carpathian Ruthenia remained LHT as part of Czechoslovakia before switching in 1941 as part of Hungary. The rest of Ukraine, having been part of the Russian Empire, already drove on the right.
Some sections of Kryvyi Rih Metrotram use LHT due to tramcars have doors only on right side, which makes it impossible to use RHT at stations with island platforms[109].

 United Arab Emirates
RHT[57]

RHT

 United Kingdom
LHT
(Mainland UK)
RHT
(Gibraltar)

LHT
Includes Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories  Isle of Man,  Guernsey,  Jersey,  Anguilla,  Bermuda,  British Virgin Islands,  Cayman Islands,  Falkland Islands,  Montserrat,  Pitcairn Islands,  Turks and Caicos Islands,  Saint Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha are all left hand drive.  Gibraltar has been RHT since 1929 because of its land border with Spain.[110] The Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) drove on the right under German occupation until their liberation in 1945.[111] The Falkland Islands similarly drove on the right during their occupation by Argentina in 1982.[112]

 United States
RHT
LHT
(U.S. Virgin Islands)

RHT/LHT[113]
Includes  American Samoa,  Guam,  Northern Mariana Islands,  Puerto Rico.  U.S. Virgin Islands is LHT, like much of the Caribbean.

 Uruguay
RHT[96]
1945
LHT
Became LHT in 1918, but as in some other countries in South America, changed to RHT on 2 September 1945. A speed limit of 30 km/h (19 mph) was observed until 30 September for safety.

 Uzbekistan
RHT[57]

RHT

 Vanuatu
RHT[114]

 Venezuela
RHT[57]

LHT
The Caracas Metro uses RHT.

 Vietnam
RHT[57]

LHT
Became RHT as French Indochina.

 Yemen
RHT
1977[2]

South Yemen, formerly the British colony of Aden, changed to RHT 1977. A series of postage stamps commemorating the event was issued.[115] North Yemen was already RHT.

 Zambia
LHT[57]

 Zimbabwe
LHT

LHT
Former British colony. In 2010 the government attempted to ban LHD vehicles.[116]

tag: table

text: Traffic behaviour[edit]

text:
Manoeuvre
LHT
RHT

Unless overtaking stay on the
left
right

In roundabouts traffic rotates
clockwise
anticlockwise

Oncoming traffic is seen coming from the
right
left

Traffic must cross oncoming traffic when turning
right
left

Most traffic signs are on the
left
right

Pedestrians crossing a two-way road look first for traffic from their
right
left

Dual carriageway ramps are on the
left
right

After stopping at a red light it may be legal to turn
left
right

text: Gallery[edit]

text:
Gibraltar is RHT (since 1929)

A sign reminding motorists to keep left in Australia

Vehicles entering and leaving Macau cross over each other at the Lotus Bridge.

Sign reminding motorists to drive on the left in Ireland