National American Woman Suffrage Association

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The National American Woman's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), an American women's rights organization, was established by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1890.

From the beginning it tended to take a more radical position than the American Woman Suffrage Association (see below). It established itself as an organization that would only allow female members, and it passed a resolution opposing the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which recognised black suffrage, but not women's suffrage. This set it apart from the Equal Rights Association, which had begun to concentrate on Negro suffrage to the exclusion of female suffrage, and prominent suffragist Lucy Stone was not invited to its inaugural meeting due to her association with the ERA. In a related connection, it associated itself with George Francis Train, who actively opposed Negro suffrage. It also aimed to cover a wider range of women's issues than simple suffrage.

The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) attracted more conservative members. Its membership overlapped with the ERA. It was established in 1869 by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Josephine Ruffin, in Boston, Massachusetts. The AWSA was less militant than the NWSA, and unlike the NWSA, it did not campaign on other issues such as employer discrimination and easier divorce for women. In 1870, the AWSA founded the Women's Journal, a magazine edited by Lucy Stone.

Over time, the National became more conservative. When Susan B. Anthony became president, she focused its effort upon women's suffrage to the exclusion of these side issues. Radical suffragists became disenchanted with the organization, and in 1890 the American Woman Suffrage Association agreed to a controversial merger with the NWSA to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which was led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Frances Willard, Mary Church Terrell, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Anna Howard Shaw. Joslyn Gage, Olympia Brown and Cady Stanton were all alienated by the merger.

The organization became gradually less effective after the merger, and eventually its political participation petered away to nothing.

[edit] Bibliography

• Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997)
• Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enlarged edition with Foreward by Ellen Fitzpatrick (1959, 1975; Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1996)
• Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, editor, One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995)