HJRES59JUL29

TheWeekInCongress.com

Week Ending July 29, 2005

H.J.RES.59 Expressing the sense of Congress with respect to the establishment of an appropriate day for the commemoration of the women suffragists who fought for and won the right of women to vote in the United States.

BRIEF

If you are disturbed by the voting anomalies of the 2000 election and those since you would be distraught and more by what American women went through going back as far as 1848.

Those taking up the prohibition on women voting early on were Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Sojourner Truth and then the more familiar Susan B. Anthony. To suffragist organizations were created in 1869.

Ms Anthony brought the matter to a head by actually voting for president in New York where she was arrested and fined. About fifteen years later the Senate took up the issue with no resolve.

In 1900 a new wave of suffragists marched, voted, got arrested, conducted hunger strikes and generally raised Cain until 1940 when Congress passed the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution providing that a person’s gender will not prohibit them from voting.

Sponsor: Representative Shelley Berkley (D-NV-1^st)

Vote: Passed House 378 to 0 (RC 417) (July 25, 2005)

Cost to the taxpayers: No discernible cost.

MORE INFORMATION

Whereas one of the first public appeals for women's suffrage came in 1848 when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19, 1848;

Whereas Sojourner Truth gave her famous speech titled `Ain't I a Woman?' at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio;

Whereas in 1869, suffragists formed two national organizations to work for the right to vote: the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association;

Whereas these two organizations united in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association;

Whereas in 1872, Susan B. Anthony and a group of women voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York;

Whereas she was arrested and fined for voting illegally;

Whereas at her trial, which attracted nationwide attention, she made a speech that ended with the slogan `Resistance to Tyranny Is Obedience to God';

Whereas on January 25, 1887, the United States Senate voted on women's suffrage for the first time;

Whereas during the early 1900s, a new generation of leaders joined the women's suffrage movement, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Maud Wood Park, Lucy Burns, Alice Paul, and Harriot E. Blatch;

Whereas women's suffrage leaders devoted most of their efforts to marches, picketing, and other active forms of protest;

Whereas Alice Paul and others chained themselves to the White House fence;

Whereas the suffragists were often arrested and sent to jail, where many of them went on hunger strikes;

Whereas almost 5,000 people paraded for women's suffrage up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC; and

Whereas on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women in the United States the right to vote: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That it is the sense of Congress that an appropriate day should be established for the commemoration of the women suffragists who worked for the right of women to vote in the United States.

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