When the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, the fight for women’s suffrage had already gone on for decades. Many women had hoped that women would win suffrage at the same time as African Americans. However, the Fifteenth Amendment only extended suffrage to African-American men. In this lesson, students explore the broad context of the women’s suffrage movement through reading selections from Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Image: Photograph of Sojourner Truth taken in 1864. From the Library of Congress.