t the conference debated that “the equal status for women was contrary to the will of God.” Eventually, two of the women, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were allowed to sit behind a curtain and listen to what was going on, even though they were not permitted to contribute (Microsoft 2000). While this was somewhat embarrassing to the women, it also angered them, and they decided to work even harder to reach their goal. One of the biggest motivators for the movement, and the event that most angered the suffragists was the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. This gave the recently emancipated African-American men the right to vote, but it did not even mention the women that had helped them. Plus, the white women in the United States could not understand why these people, who had also been and still were regarded as inferior, now were able to do something that they could not do (Millstein 1977, 175). Even though the reasons behind this argument were racist, the women did have a point in that the government gave the right to vote to people that had not even been free for very long, while it still held this right from women, many who held prominent positions in society. Lucy Stone founded the American Women Suffrage Association in November of 1869 along with her husband, Henry Blackwell. Instead of working on the passage of a federal law, they tried to convince individual states to adopt suffrage. That same year, they succeeded in convincing the State of Wyoming to give women the right to vote, and as a result, it came to be known as the “Equality State (Millstein 1977, 65).” The main reason that that Wyoming decided to let women vote was that Wyoming was a state just stating out and didn’t have very many women inhabiting the state. Wyoming thought that if they would allow women to be active in the voting process that more women would want to move here and establish homesteads. Women w...
