Thank you, Woodrow! At last!

I wish I could find the pictures I took on the day each of my daughters went to the local school gym to vote for the first time in a national election. We all felt the importance of it. It amazes me to realize that American women didn't get the right to vote until 1920- that was during MY MOTHER'S lifetime.  Ninety three years ago.

Carrie and Eliza's great grandmother, Barbara Blackman O'Neil, was a leader in the Suffragette Movement in St. Louis.  Below a short review of the history.

On this date, June 4 in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate. Fifteen months later, it was ratified by the necessary 36 state legislatures, giving American women the right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere.

But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "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 right?" The amendment passed both houses of Congress the following May.