150 Years of Women’s Suffrage Movements

In 1869, the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA) coexisted in the United States. By the 1880s, AWSA’s memberships and influence had begun to wane. Its president, Lucy Stone, therefore proposed a merger in 1887. The two organisations united in February 1890 to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first president of NAWSA and advocated for reforms on the matter of women’s disfranchisement.

NAWSA’s Early Actions

In its early years, NAWSA continued to advocate for a women’s suffrage federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution, while concentrating on state-by-state campaigns. This strategy was systematised after Carrie Chapman Catt became president in 1900. Her Society Plan recruited powerful women from wealthy families across the U.S. Their influence and financial support contributed strongly to making NAWSA more respectable.

The organisation, at the same time, expanded its grassroots outreach, relying on door-to-door visits and playing with traditional female stereotypes. In particular, it portrayed women as nurturing mothers in order to make women’s suffrage appear non-threatening. This strategy was designed to reassure men that enfranchising women would support family values, promote social stability, and uphold traditional gender norms. Although progress was slow given that only eight states granted women suffrage before the onset of World War I, these strategies established public awareness and local support for subsequent national movements.

The Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment

The outbreak of World War I provided NAWSA with opportunities. Rather than pressing its demands in opposition to the state, the organisation aligned itself closely with the national war effort. It encouraged its members to participate in four war service departments. It emphasised loyalty and national patriotism by positioning women as moral citizens who contribute to political inclusion. This strategic patriotism helped shift public opinion as well as the stance of President Woodrow Wilson, who was a long-time opponent of suffrage. By 1918, Wilson publicly argued that women provided vital roles during the war. He contended that allowing women’s suffrage was essential to win the war, solve postwar problems, and make the world safe for democracy. Ultimately, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919. The amendment was officially incorporated into the Constitution on 26 August 1920, and prohibited the denial of suffrage to U.S. citizens based on their sex.

From NAWSA to the League of Women Voters

The enormous achievement of women’s suffrage did not, in the view of NAWSA’s president Carrie Chapman Catt, mark the end of the movement’s responsibilities. She believed that women required a nonpartisan civic organisation capable of bringing together women in an effort for legislation on many issues. As a result, on 14 February 1920, NAWSA transformed into the League of Women Voters (LWV).

Conceived as a nonpartisan grassroots organisation, LWV was designed to protect suffrage and expand voter access, addressing the continued challenges to democratic participation due to health, age, and race. It supported women with learning how to participate in politics and promote broader democratic reforms. Today, LWV operates through more than 750 local and state Leagues with a presence in all 50 U.S. states and more than 1 million members and supporters.

Feeling Unsafe in Daily Life

Across the U.S.’s Southern border, Mexico only granted women the right to vote in 1953. Despite many strides in equality since, the country recorded nearly 800 femicides as of the latest available data from 2024. But this figure only represents the tip of the iceberg. Cases of femicide are believed to be significantly underreported due to investigative failures and stigmas. In 2021, over 70% of women in Mexico reported feeling unsafe in their daily lives, leaving feminist movements to emerge from this context. Their collective responses are grounded in women’s lived experiences of insecurity rather than an abstract human rights discourse.

Militarised Security and the Impact on Women

For over two decades, Mexico’s public security strategy has heavily relied on military involvement, particularly within the framework of the so-called War on Drugs. This approach has subsumed violence against women under broader narratives of organised crime, obscuring gender-specific patterns of harm such as femicide and sexual violence. Feminist and human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, Equis Justicia para las Mujeres, and Human Rights Watch, have connected militarisation to practices like arbitrary detention and sexual violence, which disproportionately affect women. According to a 2021 report by Amnesty International, “police officers arrested more than a dozen women [protesting against gender-based violence] without duly identifying themselves, held them incommunicado for long periods of time, transferred them using unusual routes without telling them where they were taking them, and in some cases without bringing them before the relevant authorities, causing them intense fear of becoming victims of enforced disappearance”.

Demeaning and Sexualised Language

Tani Reneaum Panszi, executive director at Amnesty International Mexico, explains that during the arrests and transfers of women protesters, “police officers spoke to the women using violent and sexualized language, threatened them with sexual violence and subjected them to physical and sexual violence. Many women did not know where they were, who was arresting them or where they were taking them”. Women are also affected indirectly as family members of detainees and the disappeared, if they are not detained or disappear themselves.

A Case Study: Equis Justicia para las Mujeres

Equis Justicia para las Mujeres is a feminist legal and policy organisation that actively intervenes in Mexico’s justice system. Through its programme on the criminalisation of women, Equis works to prevent incarceration driven by poverty and punitive security policies. This is done through co-designing reintegration frameworks and public policy proposals with previously incarcerated women. They also published a Rights Booklet for Women Released From Prison to provide women who have left prison with a clear understanding of their rights. The organisation furthermore engages in legal research, and strategic advocacy for institutional reform to address practices such as arbitrary detention, exclusion from access to the justice system, and gender-blind criminal procedures like arraigo (pre-trial detention).

The Concept of Arraigo

Arraigo, a form of pre-trial detention, is a procedure that formally can apply to anyone. However, it systematically disadvantages women and reproduces gendered harm while treating detention as formally neutral. Women are detained without consideration of caregiving responsibilities, pregnancy, or risk of gender-based violence in detention. Practices like arraigo are embedded within Mexico’s security framework, in which exceptional powers for law enforcement are institutionalised under the War on Drugs. When applied without a gender perspective, such a framework reproduces the harmful patterns seen under militarisation more broadly.