The following two passages deal with the political movements working for the woman’s vote in America.
Passage 1
The first organized assertion of woman’s rights in the United States was made at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. The convention, though, had little immediate impact because of the national issues that would soon embroil the country.
The contentious debates involving slavery and state’s rights that preceded the Civil War soon took center stage in national debates.
Thus woman’s rights issues would have to wait until the war and its antecedent problems had been addressed before they would be addressed. In 1869, two organizations were formed that would play important roles in securing the woman’s right to vote. The first was the American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA). Leaving federal and constitutional issues aside, the AWSA focused their attention on state-level politics. They also restricted their ambitions to securing the woman’s vote and downplayed discussion of women’s full equality. Taking a different track, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believed that the only way to assure the longterm security of the woman’s vote was to ground it in the constitution. The NWSA challenged the exclusion of woman from the Fifteenth Amendment, the amendment that extended the vote to African-American men. Furthermore, the NWSA linked the fight for suffrage with other inequalities faced by woman, such as marriage laws, which greatly disadvantaged women.
By the late 1880s the differences that separated the two organizations had receded in importance as the women’s movement had become a substantial and broad-based political force in the country. In 1890, the two organizations joined forces under the title of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NAWSA would go on to play a vital role in the further fight to achieve the woman’s vote.
Passage 2
In 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-eighth state to approve the constitutional amendment securing the woman’s right to vote, woman’s suffrage became enshrined in the constitution. But woman’s suffrage did not happen in one fell swoop. The success of the woman’s suffrage movement was the story of a number of partial victories that led to the explicit endorsement of the woman’s right to vote in the constitution.
As early as the 1870s and 1880s, women had begun to win the right to vote in local affairs such as municipal elections, school board elections, or prohibition measures. These "partial suffrages" demonstrated that women could in fact responsibly and reasonably participate in a representative democracy (at least as voters). Once such successes were achieved and maintained over a period of time, restricting the full voting rights of woman became more and more suspect.
If women were helping decide who was on the local school board, why should they not also have a voice in deciding who was president of the country? Such questions became more difficult for non-suffragists to answer, and thus the logic of restricting the woman’s vote began to crumble When is the earliest success of the woman’s suffrage movement that the second passage points to?
A. 1848
B. 1869
C. 1870s
D. 1880s
E. 1920
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