While the majority of women, who had marched, petitioned and lobbied for woman suffrage did not look further; most understood that the quest for women's rights would be an ongoing struggle that was only advanced and not satisfied by the vote.
In 1919, the League of Women Voters was created to ensure that women would take their newly acquired vote seriously and use it wisely. In 1920, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor was established to gather information about the situation of women at work, and to advocate for changes it found were needed. Many suffragists became actively involved with lobbying for legislation to protect women workers from abuse and unsafe conditions. In 1923, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman's Party, took the next step. She drafted an Equal Rights Amendment for the United States Constitution. It was argued that it would ensure that "Men and women have equal rights throughout the United States." A constitutional amendment would apply uniformly, regardless of where a person lived (Gurko 111).
Then in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, which had stood around in Congress for almost fifty years, was finally passed and sent to the states for ratification. The wording of the ERA was simple: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or.
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abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." To many women's rights activists, its ratification by the required thirty-eight states seemed almost a guarantee (Gurko 114).
Significant progress has been made regarding the topics discussed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The people attending that landmark discussion would not even have imagined the issues of the Women's Rights Movement in the 1990s. Much of the discussion has moved beyond the issue of equal rights and into territory that is controversial, even among feminists. To name a few:.
Women's reproductive rights--Whether or not women can terminate pregnancies is still.
