Women have a very active role in society these days. However, it hasn"t always been that easy. It took many women to get our rights for today. The American women"s suffrage movement took more than eighty years to accomplish its goal of gaining women"s right to vote, which required the passage of a constitutional amendment. This is how we got the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution.

             An abolitionist by the name of Lucretia Mott led the women"s suffrage movement. She was a Quaker, who had grown up on the barren island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, a center of whaling and fishing, making the men usually away from home, therefore the women were very self-sufficient. He believed in educating his daughters and Lucretia was sent to a Quaker academy, the Nine Partners, a very well respected academy that taught serious academic subject. .

             When she graduated from there, she was qualified to be a teacher. She married James Mott and became a traveling speaker. The Quakers were the only denomination that allowed women to assume leadership roles within the religious community. Because of Mott"s reputation as an abolitionist she was invited to observe a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society. She was one of the four women present. The four women were not allowed joining the organization because the men didn"t think it was right for women to be a part of the organization. So, Mott helped form a group of her own, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. It was a chain reaction. Where ever females were not allowed to join an organization, they started their own. By doing this, they learned skills that would assist them in forming an active women"s rights movement. The most important skill taught to them was public speaking. Through lectures , women influenced a change in public opinion that would eventually lead to the vote for women. The earliest to speak to a larger crowd were sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke.