It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.
-Frances Wright
Frances Wright, who is better known today as Fanny Wright, was an advocate for women’s suffrage. Wright published Course of Popular Lectures in 1829. Many believe that this fueled the starting point for women’s suffrage. Wright worked with other suffragist leaders to such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Suffragist leaders would use a three-part strategy to achieve their goals. First, they would try to convince state legislatures to grant women the right to vote. Second, women perused court cases to test the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that states denying their male citizens the right to vote would lose congressional representation. Leaders would then argue the fact that women were indeed citizens too. Third, women pushed for a national constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote. Through this strategy, suffragist leaders played a key role in gaining women’s suffrage.
