World News for Students of English

02-09-2020 15:00

It has been 100 years since the 19^th Amendment that gave US women to the right to vote and since it was ratified. However, the fight for women’s suffrage started decades earlier.

Many of the early women’s rights advocates in the US began their political lives as anti-slavery activists, who later started to rethink universal claims of human equality. In 1848, hundreds of people gathered in New York for the first US women’s rights convention. However, women’s right to vote was seen as too extreme.

In 1917, women first started to protest in front of the White House. President Woodrow Wilson was against giving women the right to vote; however, his opinion started to change after World War I. Southern states were concerned that if American women could vote, African Americans could vote, too. Surprisingly, it was Tennessee, a Southern state, that said that the 19^th Amendment could became law in 1920.

In 2016, almost 74 million women cast their vote for president, and each presidential election, more women than men vote.

Difficult words: amendment (a change that is designed to improve a law), ratify (to make a law start), suffrage (the right to vote in political elections), convention (a meeting of people for a common purpose).

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