The ratification in Tennessee, the last state, passed the legislature in 1920 by a single vote, at the very last minute, during a recount.
             Women were a poor, unarmed and disenfranchised class when they first organized to gain political power in the mid-1800s. The struggle for the ballot took over 70 years of constant, determined campaigning, yet it didn't take a single life, and its achievement has lasted. Compare this with male-led independence movements. Without firing a shot, throwing a rock, or issuing a personal threat, women won for themselves rights that men have launched violent rebellions to achieve. This deliberate rejection of violence may be one of the reasons the movement has not received the attention lavished on other, bloody periods of American history-or on the suffrage movement in Britain. But it should not deceive us; this struggle was waged every bit as seriously as any struggle for equality, and we would do well to consider how women were able to do what men have rarely even tried, changing society in a positive and lasting way without violence and death.
             The movement's many nonviolent strategies deserve closer inspection particularly because they repeatedly offered suffragists the way out of strategic binds, dead ends, discouragements and immobility. The nonviolent approach was a logical strategy as a remarkable number of prominent suffrage leaders, from Lucretia Mott to Alice Paul, were Quakers and pacifists, exponents of nonresistance and opponents of war and violence. They were clear about their goals: not victory over men, but equality; not constant war, but reconciliation.
             The suffrage movement offers a unique window into the emergence of women into American political life. This is where many of the intelligent, active, politically oriented women of the time, denied the right to participate directly in national politics, went. They put their energy into attacking social problems dire...