Abstract

In this Thesis I look at the women’s suffrage movement in the United States with particular emphasis on Southern strategies. In the beginning, I offer the history of the women’s movement as experienced by early women’s rights activists in Seventeenth Century New England. Essential to the history of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. is a look at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. As the Civil War split the country laterally, the women’s suffrage movement in the South began to separate itself from the federal amendment strategy of the North. There were three separate factions in the South including the anti-suffragists, the federal suffragists, and the states’ rights suffragists. Louisiana is the most powerful example of this as the leader of the states’ rights faction was particularly zealous in proclaiming that white supremacy was the true reason women needed the ballot in the South. Kate Gordon of New Orleans, Louisiana was the leader of the women’s movement in this State and quite likely responsible for the defeat of the Nineteenth Amendment in Louisiana.