Tenuous Ties
This chapter details the development of a woman suffrage movement in New York State as it positions the state in the broad historical context of the national woman suffrage movement. Some rural upstate New Yorkers demanded social and political reforms for women well before the Civil War. As a result of controversy sparked by the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote, women founded two national organizations and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. State leaders dominated the movement in terms of strategy and tactics, and several of them rose to national prominence. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, suffragists had come to recognize the importance of fluidity and pliability in addressing their appeals to the broadest possible audiences. The divergent groups advocating for women's enfranchisement disagreed with each other over specific strategies, tactics, and whom to include, but they unfailingly agreed that women needed the vote.