The Solitude of Self

For almost a century women struggled to achieve the right to vote. At Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, a pioneering Woman’s Rights Convention initiated a public discussion of woman suffrage. In 1869 a serious campaign began with the founding of two original (and competing) suffrage organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the more conservative and religiously based American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 the two groups joined forces to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA persevered in its quest for the vote, using a variety of tactics, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Stanton served for more than twenty years as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and then as first president of NAWSA. In that time she became a leading champion of women’s rights and the intellectual powerhouse of the woman’s movement in the United States. Late in life, in “The Solitude of Self,” she distilled her most compelling arguments.