This is a list of Pennsylvania suffragists, suffrage groups and others associated with the cause of women's suffrage in Pennsylvania.
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Groups
Women's suffrage was established in the United States on a full or partial basis by various towns, counties, states, and territories during the latter decades of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. As women received the right to vote in some places, they began running for public office and gaining positions as school board members, county clerks, state legislators, judges, and, in the case of Jeannette Rankin, as a member of Congress.
Caroline Katzenstein was an American suffragist, activist, advocate for equal rights, insurance agent, and author. She was active in the local Philadelphia suffragist movement through the Pennsylvania branch of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Equal Franchise Society of Philadelphia. She played a role in the formation of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage, which later became the National Women's Party. Katzenstein was also active in the movement for equal rights, serving on the Women's Joint Legislative Committee with Alice Paul, and championing the cause for the Equal Rights Amendment. She was the author of Lifting the Curtain: the State and National Woman Suffrage Campaigns in Pennsylvania as I Saw Them (1955).
The first women's suffrage effort in Florida was led by Ella C. Chamberlain in the early 1890s. Chamberlain began writing a women's suffrage news column, started a mixed-gender women's suffrage group and organized conventions in Florida.
Hannah Jane Patterson was an American suffragist and social activist. She was a key member of the women's suffrage movement in Pennsylvania and worked for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. During World War I Patterson was a member of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense. For her service, she was awarded with a Distinguished Service Medal. Patterson graduated from Wilson College and studied at both Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
This is a timeline of women's suffrage in Pennsylvania. Activists in the state began working towards women's rights in the early 1850s, when two women's rights conventions discussed women's suffrage. A statewide group, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (PWSA), was formed in 1869. Other regional groups were formed throughout the state over the years. Suffragists in Pittsburgh created the "Pittsburgh Plan" in 1911. In 1915, a campaign to influence voters to support women's suffrage on the November 2 referendum took place. Despite these efforts, the referendum failed. On June 24, 1919, Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Pennsylvania women voted for the first time on November 2, 1920.
The women's suffrage movement in Pennsylvania was an outgrowth of the abolitionist movement in the state. Early women's suffrage advocates in Pennsylvania wanted equal suffrage not only for white women but for all African Americans. The first women's rights convention in the state was organized by Quakers and held in Chester County in 1852. Philadelphia would host the fifth National Women's Rights Convention in 1854. Later years saw suffragists forming a statewide group, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (PWSA), and other smaller groups throughout the state. Early efforts moved slowly, but steadily, with suffragists raising awareness and winning endorsements from labor unions.
Jennie Eliza Kennedy was an American clubwoman and suffragist. Kennedy was one of the activists that helped create the "Pittsburgh Plan" as a women's suffrage strategy.
Lucy Kennedy Miller (1880–1962), also known as Mrs. John O. Miller, was a prominent 20th-century American suffragist who became the president of the Equal Franchise Federation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the first president of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters (PLWV). In 1919, the League of Women Citizens of Pennsylvania called her "the woman to whom, more than to any other" was "owe[d] the triumph of" women's suffrage in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Eliza Kennedy Smith, also known as Mrs. R. Templeton Smith, was a 20th-century American suffragist, civic activist, and government reformer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon her death in 1964, The Pittsburgh Press described her as "a relentless, tenacious watchdog of the City's purse strings" who "probably attended more budget sessions over the years than anyone else in Pittsburgh either in or out of government".