Road to the 2012 London Olympics!

Baseball

Did you know- Baseball is the national sport in the Central American nation of Nicaragua. At the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas (Venezuela), the national team, backed by the Cuban Olympic Committee, won the silver medal, ahead of America and the host country. The silver medal was the second for the country in the Pan American Games; it was the first appearance for Nicaragua in the finals. In the next year, the national team realized its dream of competing in the Olympiad. At the Los Angeles Olympics, Nicaragua was the first Central American nation to compete in the Games. Two years prior to the 1984 Olympics, the men’s baseball team finished sixth place in the XIV Central American and Caribbean Games, behind the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, and Venezuela.

Seoul ’88

Did you know- As a result of its pro-Marxist policy, the nation’s then-dictator Daniel Ortega Saavedra did not send athletes -like Cuba, Ethiopia, Albania and North Korea– to the 1988 Summer Olympics in South Korea, an anti-Communist nation in Asia.

Claudia Poll

Did you know- Costa Rica’s famous swimmer Claudia Poll -who was one of Latin America’s most prominent athletes of the 20th century — was born on December 22, 1972, in Managua, Nicaragua. She was the first Central American athlete to win an Olympic gold medal in the mid-1990s. During Nicaragua’s 1978 war, she left to country.

Sports

Did you know- The most popular sports are baseball, boxing, table tennis, taekwondo, and weightlifting. Because of the country’s poor sports infrastructure, Nicaragua –unlike Costa Rica and Panama– has never produced an Olympic gold medalist.

2007 Pan American Games

Did you know- At the 2007 Pan American Games Nicaragua reached 24th place in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), winning a total of 2 bronze medals, outpacing Barbados, Bolivia, Paraguay, and the US Virgin Islands.

Sportswomen

Did you know- This Spanish-speaking nation has popular sportswomen: Maria de Lourdes Ruiz (athletics), Katerine Valle (judo), Beatriz Obregon (bowling), Xiomara Larios (track & field), Karla Moreno (weightlifting), and Maria Sacasa Cruz (cycling).

Alexis Arguello

Did you know- The nation’s former professional boxer Alexis Arguello was named as the flag bearer of the Nicaraguan Team at the opening ceremony of the Games of the 29th Olympiad in the People’s Republic of China. On the other hand, the National Olympic Committee sent six athletes -athletics, shooting, swimming, and weightlifting– to the 2008 Summer Games. The country’s best athlete was Karla Moreno, who came in 11th in the 48kg category in the Women’s Weightlifting Competition.

Volleyball

Did you know- By the early 1980s, the women’s volleyball squad finished tenth place in the Central American and Caribbean Games.

By: Alejandro Guevara Onofre

About the Author:

The term women suffrage refers to women’s right to vote by law in national and local elections. Great social and economical movements were conducted by British women due to take the suffrage law and establish it as a legal right in the parliament. One of the earliest advocators in Britain was John Stuart Mill whose subjection of women (in 1869) was established as one of the pioneering works of that time. The first woman suffrage committee was formed in Manchester in 1865. One year later, Mill presented to Parliament this society’s petition, which demanded the vote for women and contained about 1,550 signatures. On the other hand, United State is commonly known as the women’s suffrage origin in 1820s, while New Zealand is credited as the first country by which women got the right to vote; (Campbell 1966) even Corsican Republic, sometimes, is considered as one of the first countries to grant female suffrage in 1788. Thus, one can claim that different countries and locals in the world, obviously, experienced such a movement at various times. With these historical points, as a woman who lived in Iran for most of her life and graduated from Law, I want to point to some social, historic and legal improvements and difficulties toward the women suffrage matter in the Middle Eastern countries and compare them to the situation in Scandinavian countries. Iran will be my ultimate focus as one of the problematic countries over women issues. Regarding this comparison between these two geographic regions, what can we grasp from the conclusion and what are the roots which make these two regions so different and even oppose to each other? And at the end to what extent, regarding this issue, we are able to improve the status quo conditions of countries like Iran?

o Women in Scandinavian countries

In this part I will, shortly represent some historical facts and points regarding women’s voting rights in some Scandinavian countries as well as giving some reasons to the improvement process in these countries. According to Dictionary of World History The first European nation to grant female suffrage was Finland in 1906, with Norway following in 1913. Sulkunen states that Finland’s thoroughgoing parliamentary reforms gave all adult men and women not only universal and equal suffrage, but also the full right to stand for elective office. In her analytical article looking for the reasons for the early enactment of voting rights in Finland and modern Finnish democracy, she points to some factors about the country’s overall cultural mould and how relations between the sexes were constituted in the field of conflicting pressures between a strong nationalist tendency, traditional agrarianism, and the democratization of social life. “No real place was left over for women’s issues per se, yet women were very visibly present in all reform-oriented activity. With the notable exception of the upper social classes, women also did not really perceive their social and political rights to be at odds with the rights of men in their own class. On the contrary, they considered themselves to be largely on an equal footing, seeing men as comrades and allies in the struggle to win a better life for all socially, politically and judicially downtrodden people.” (2000) Later in her article, she claims that the issue of voting rights thus did not offer a basis for the spreading of a conflict between the sexes in Finland. “Instead, it produced fertile ground for a snowballing socialist movement of which the Social Democratic Party, formed in 1899, took advantage.” Already by the mid-1890s, the workers’ movement together with the worker-led temperance movement had expressed its support for universal and equal suffrage for men and women. Their programme, which also included the demand for prohibition, was launched with panache amongst the masses during the so-called oppression years. In the year 1906 Finland made an almost revolutionary leap from having one of Europe’s most archaic systems of representation to having one of the most radical ones. As a result, all adult women in Finland were the first in Europe to receive full rights of representation. (ibid:2000)

Clar?us believes that there are some clear evidences of the influence of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s giving rise to an increasing range of concerns and styles among Scandinavian women. (1989) According to Greg Hurrell, the battle for equal rights in Norway started in the Nineteenth century with the formation of feminist organizations. Struggle to get suffrage right was one on their earliest demands. In 1885 the female suffrage union (Kvindestemmeretsforeningen) was established. (1998) Blom claimed that the primary obstacle to obtaining voting rights for women was that constitutional reform could only be achieved through men, and therefore the champions of the feminist cause had to exercise their influence by means of petitions, demonstrations, publications and through their own husbands and male colleagues who were affiliated with political parties. Despite the difficulty of this task, Norwegian women succeeded many years in advance of most other European countries, (e.g. even those of feminists in Britain) mainly, due to their non-militant, cooperative methods, which on the whole sought to emphasis that the suffrage struggle was not a ‘conflict between the sexes’, but rather that women were mature and interested enough to take on the vote, and play an active, supportive role in shaping society. (1980: 8-14)

In Sweden, the campaigns for women’s suffrage had been slow to get under way and also lacked the radicalism that had come to mark the campaigns in the other Scandinavian countries. The association for women’s suffrage, f?reningen f?r kvinnans politiska r?str?tt, was founded in 1902 and became a national organization in 1903; in ten years the membership of the organization climbed to around 17,000. The association published a newspaper, R?str?tt f?r kvinnor (votes for women), arranged public meetings, and also supported the production of plays on the topic of votes for women. Members worked on converting liberal and social democrat members of parliament to their cause, and as early as 1909 there was a majority for women’s suffrage in the Second Chamber. Swedish women were finally granted the right to vote in national elections in 1919. By 1921, four out of the 230 members of Second Chamber were women, and in 1924, the first woman took her seat among 149 male colleagues in the First Chamber. (Forsas-Scott 1997:28) As I mentioned above, Scandinavian countries experiences women’s movements and the demand to get as equal rights as men in various times. Roughly speaking, the current women’s conditions in these countries, regardless to the historical events, represent a highly developed situation in which women achieved equal rights; they, even are considered as a roll model for many other countries. In the following part, I will go through the history of another geographical region, known as Middle East, to examine the events, developments and obstacles confronting women’s activists.

o Women in Middle Eastern countries

There has been a continuous struggle between defenders of Islam and critics upon women issues. Advocators of Islamic rights claim that the law of creation has so ordained that both man and woman seek, and are interested in each other. But their relationship is not of that nature which they have with other possessions; that relationship emerges from selfishness. They want to possess things for their own use, and look on them as the means of their comfort. But, the relationship between man and woman means that each one of them wants the comfort and happiness of the other, and enjoys making sacrifices for the sake of the other. (Motaharri 199u) The idea stands against European point of view that want to compare genders, since in Islamic thoughts the nature of creation of man and woman is as different that makes any comparison impossible. One can claim that there’s now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. Joshua Holland, as a denial of this idea believes that there is no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women’s ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. (2008) However, the matter of women’s suffrage seems quite absent from academic works of these countries. In many countries in the region, women’s right to vote, to acquire an identity card or passport, to marry, to work, or to travel is granted only with the consent of a spouse or other male family member. Most of the countries -with the exception of Iran, Tunisia, Israel, and to a limited extent Egypt- have permitted only fathers to pass citizenship on to their children.

Women married to non-nationals are denied this fundamental right. One significant point we should take into account is that the social and cultural situations of these countries should not be considered as the same as well as their women’s social situations. There is a great distinction -which is ignored in most cases, between these people naming Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Persians, Afghans, Pakistani, etc. all these names connote to a specific culture and attitude toward women, e.g. in Saudi Arabia, one of the most male-dominant countries, there is No suffrage for women. In 2003, 300 Saudi women signed a petition calling on the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, to recognize their legal and civil rights. The first local elections ever held in the country occurred in 2005. Women were not given the right to vote or to stand for election. On the contrary, Turkey has provided a better situation for women and granted women to vote in the same time of many pioneer countries. Burcak Keskin writes that Turkish women entered parliament in 1934 but the number of female MPs has decreased in time. In the early Republic, Ataturk was facing accusations of dictatorship. In order to eliminate this undemocratic image, women’s suffrage was granted in 1934. During the one-party regime women had secured their place in the parliament. (Keskin 1997) in Pakistan, as an example, full suffrage for women was introduced in national election in 1956. So my point, besides introducing some historical facts about voting rights in Middle East was that the different cultural and social backgrounds of these regional countries should make us to be more precise about the various ethnicities and people live there. In the following part, the condition of women’s suffrage in Iran, as a country located in this region will be examined.

o Women in Iran

First there is a need to present some snapshot about Iranian women movement during last century. Women’s NGOs and movement were very active in Tehran and other major cities during 1920-1930. These NGOs finance schools, health clinics for women and cultural activities. In 1934, following secular ideological plans, Reza Shah banned the veil. Women’s suffrage became a burning issue in Iran during the 1940s and early 1950s. Mossadeq, Iran’s popular prime minister at that time, was then in the midst of a fight with the United States and England over nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. But it was Mossadeq’s social reforms, including his support for women’s suffrage that contributed to the break up of his coalition from within when the leading clerics withdrew their support. (Afary 2004) ‘In 1963, the Shah granted female suffrage and soon after women were elected to the Majlis (the parliament) and the upper house, and appointed as judges and ministers in the cabinet. In 1967 Iranian family law was also reformed to improve the position of women in Iranian society which was the most progressive family law in the Middle East. After granting some of these equal rights legislation in the 70s, all these gains were replaced when the revolutionary government came to power in 1979. Women were eliminated from all decision-making positions within the government, dress requirements were enforced, and women’s organizations were declared corrupt and disbanded.

The future looks brighter today. A growing urban, middle class is making some progress by situating women’s rights within the cultural framework of Iran, and noting that in order to modernize, Iran must improve the status of women. But governmental authorities try to give clear statistics over women participation in policy and in the society. In Chronology of Events Regarding Women in Iran since the Revolution of 1979, they have declared many important dates e.g. four women are elected to the First Majles (1980-1984. These female Majles representatives were elected for ideological reasons. Even though they lack higher education, they are proficient in the Quran and religious matters. (Ghetanchi 2000) Shirin Ebadi, winner of the peace Nobel in 2003 believes that laws in Iran institutionalize prejudice and support men. The law looks down on Iranian women – literally with a male face. Since the 1979 Revolution Iranian women have been forbidden from serving as judges. In Iran a woman’s evidence in court is worth half that of a man and some similar unjust laws. (2008) I have to point to current great movement of Iranian women in the name of ‘Campaign for Equality’ by which many women activists and feminists try to get a million signatures on a petition calling for an end to discriminatory laws.

o Ending point

In this paper, I tried to point to some factual events over women’s significant movements and particularly women suffrage within the last century in two different geographical regions, Scandinavian countries and Middle Eastern nations. Both regions experienced women’s resistance against unequal laws and their endeavour to get a very ordinary right, suffrage. Although the quality of these movements was different, the target and the demand were the same. Women’s movement in the Middle East was started later and has confronted some serious obstacles which root in the history, culture, religion, traditions, beliefs, etc. I believe that in the study of these countries, in order to get some proper outcomes, one should explicitly distinguish them by their various nations, races, ethnicities, languages, etc. As I mentioned earlier, in the case of Iran women experienced different and even conflicting periods within the last century. I think two factors play the most important roles to prolong women activities, one is the way these nations identify women and the other is the great power of current authorities which stop women’s activities in different ways. It seems that women still are looked inferior to men, so involvement in political matters is not considered as their business. For me as a person who lived in this country, women’s movement may be regarded as the most effective social trend in today’s Iranian society; and despite all the problems and uneven conditions, women have come up with their rights and powers to change the current situation.

? Reference

? Afary Janet, Seeking a Feminist Politics for the Middle East after September 11, P 3,

? Blom, Ida, ‘The Struggle for Women’s Suffrage in Norway, 1885-1913′, Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 5, 1980, ? Clar?us Ingrid, 1989, Scandinavian women writers (An Anthology from the 1880s to the 1980s), Greenwood press.

? Colin Campbell Aikman, ‘History, Constitutional’ in McLintock, A.H. (ed), An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 3 vols, Wellington, NZ:R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966, vol 2, pp.67-75.

? Ebadi Shirin, Suffering and suffrage in Iran, 2008, ? Forsas-Scott Helena, 1997, Swedish women’s writing, 1850- 1995 Women in Context. London: Athlone Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 333. The Women in Context series edi.

? Greg Hurrell, Henrik Ibsen, Frederika Bremer, Marie Michelet and the emancipation of women in Norway, Vol 2 1998 – Online Article,

? Gheytanchi Elham, 2000, Chronology of Events Regarding Women in Iran since the Revolution of 1979.

By: Negar Niknam

About the Author:

In 1975 the United Nations decided that March 8th should in perpetuity be celebrated throughout the world as United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and Peace. This is an event that shouldn’t be ignored. The world today, under male dominion, is in an appalling state. It is possible that it would be more congenial under a petticoat government? Women in England gained the right to vote in 1928, but they’re still nowhere near to achieving fair representation in the corridors of power. Of the fifty-two prime ministers in Britain, only one has been a woman. In America the record is even worse: forty-four president not one of whom has been a woman. The problem lies in the prevailing debating styles in council chambers, both regional and central. So long as this remains confrontational rather than co-operative and conciliatory, it will always favour the more aggressive male temperament. Women would flourish if nations were run by democratically elected, non-partisan representatives, who acted as a coalition, seeking the common good rather than building the power base, and serving the interests, of a small ruling elite.

A study of eminent historical women leaders – Elizabeth 1, Catherine the Great, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher – suggests that the world would be a far more united, peaceful place if women were given a more dominant role in Western society and government. We’d benefit, for instance, from the fact that women are generally more pragmatic than men. This was certainly the belief of Mrs. Thatcher who claimed: ‘Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.’ A similar view was held by Indira Gandhi who said: ‘My grandfather once told me that there were two types of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.’ When in positions of authority women also appear to be less obsessed with the pursuit of power. This again was well expressed by Mrs Thatcher who said: ‘Being powerful is like being a lady, if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t’. Golda Meir was of a similar mind and warned: ‘Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.’

Being more empathic than men, women also tend to be more gentle in their management style. This makes them far less prone to bullying. As Catherine the Great averred: ‘I praise loudly, I blame softly.’ Rather than criticise and harangue, Women leaders are more likely than their male counterparts to understand and pardon their underlings failings and mistakes. ‘Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave,’ was Indira Gandhi’s judgement. But best of all, women leaders seem to have developed the ability to focus on the task in hand, rather than be sidetracked by the Machiavellian pursuit of power. They’ve always been more interested in content rather than in style, as Elizabeth I showed when she criticised her legal advisers. ‘You lawyers are so nice and precise in shifting and scanning every word and letter that many times you stand more upon form than matter, upon syllables than the sense of the law.’

We need more women at the helm, which should be one of the main objectives of the United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and Peace. This can best be achieved by abolishing the party political system, which was created by men, for the benefit and amusement of men. So long as nations uphold party political systems their citizens will be denied equal representation. If electors have the good fortune to choose candidates who are members of the dominant party they will have more power than those whose choose members who sit on the opposition benches. If they belong to a fringe party, or worse still serve as independents, they’ll have yet less influence. It’s excellent for countries to provide universal suffrage, but unjust to allow these votes to have widely differing significance and influence. This favours the prolonged reign of autocratic elites, but undermines the very foundation of democratic government.

By: Donald Norfolk

About the Author:

Social movements have the habit of empowering the people who least deserve it and coming down hardest on the people who likewise deserve it the least. When Soviet Union fell, it was not the real wrongdoers – the corrupt bureaucrats, the KGB, the military hazers – that suffered the most, but the honest, dedicated, hard-working people such as teachers, doctors and scientists. So it comes as no surprise that the gender movements of the last two decades – both feminism and reaction against feminism – have likewise had similar results.

When political correctness swept America, I, as someone who’d lived in both Soviet Union and America, knew how thoroughly it was misconstrued. It maliciously attacked the very kind of men that are inclined to be sympathetic toward women – the men in liberal cities, liberal academia, feminism-influenced cultures – while doing nothing to change the conservative cultures that are not sympathetic toward women’s empowerment and believe in violence and oppression toward women as a natural way of life. It went after love, after beauty, after romance, after sexuality, claiming these things ridiculously to be the reason for the oppression of women, while doing nothing to address the real reasons for oppression of women – belief that women are evil, belief that the man must be head of the family, belief that controlling the woman is masculinity, and belief that women are to blame for the world’s suffering or are “whores” or are “sluts” or are “bitches” or are exploiters of men. They hyper-focused on minor issues while completely ignoring real issues. Meanwhile they did nothing whatsoever to address real wrongs facing women – the biggest of these wrongs having always been, and remaining, real brutality and real oppression in which a vast chunk of married women around the world and in the West live daily; a real wrong that they either ignored or for which they blamed its victims.

The feminism of 1990s resulted in many men losing their jobs, being robbed of their income, or put away in prison, for things as minor as telling a female co-worker that she was pretty, or for accusations that were proven untrue. These men were very rarely real, severe abusers. The real abusers, and especially the cultures that encourage real abuses, were not touched by political correctness. They sneered at it, despised it, proclaimed it ungodly or sissie or foolish, and then, in the following decade, took over and went, not after excesses of political correctness, but after women’s rights as such.

In the decade of Bush, Bin Laden, and Eminem, women came under a huge assault from all directions. And just as in case of 1990s feminism, it did not touch the real wrongdoers such as the world’s Catherine McKinnons, many of whom remained in quite comfortable state in liberal cities or in the academia, but rather came down hardest on the shoulders of good women – women who liked men enough to be with men and were by the men they’d elected horribly punished for having made the error of liking them. Here are just some of the more publicized cases.

“Candice,” a nurse in Kansas, lost her child to a man who’d broken her head so badly that she needed forty stitches. The brute who did this got full custody. “Leslie,” an engineer in Indiana, not only lost her children to her severely violent ex-husband, but is now living out of a truck because her whole income has been garnished to pay child support to that man. “Jeanne”, a resident of Richmond, Virginia, who has been exposing abuses in family courts after having left a severely brutal relationship, has had many attempts on her life and has a price on her head. In Australia, a man named Arthur Freeman threw his four-year-old daughter off Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge to her death, even though the child’s mother had repeatedly warned the court of his violence. On average, four women and nine children in America die daily as a result of domestic violence. In allied countries such as Australia, it is worse.

The name of decency – and secrecy of family courts – has been used as an accomplice to these and many other related wrongdoings. Both have been used to silence the truth and to allow real, severe crimes against women and children to go on unchecked. Meanwhile the name of family has likewise been used to maintain these real, severe abuses, and to severely persecute any woman or child who tries to get away from them or to expose the truth of what actually happens behind closed doors. So now, a fake disorder known as Parental Alienation Syndrome is used against women in case either woman or the child reports sexual abuse or real brutality, and the children are given fully into the custody of the ****** or the batterer.

Because of the abuses of the political correctness, there has been a strong constituency not only against political correctness, but against women’s rights and against women period. Men’s movement – also known as father’s rights movement – led by such figures as Glenn Sacks in Canada, Ash Patil and Barry Williams in Australia, and the Fatherhood Foundation in the United States – has been spreading misogyny and deception, making such claims as that 90% of mothers are abusive; that all women are liars; and that patriarchial nuclear family is the only viable way to raise children, nevermind that the most successful man in the world – the President of United States – was raised by a single mother. In Australia, a group known as the Black Shirts has been picketing and assaulting women who’ve left severely violent husbands. There have been women collaborating with these men as well – mostly older women who are not subject to family violence but want the freedom for their sons to inflict it on their daughters-in-law. All of this, in the name of family.

The correct response to these people is that a man who cares about his family would not be beating his wife or raping his children, and that their use of the name of family or “family values” to justify such behavior is abuse of the name of family and of the concept of family values. A man who genuinely is a good father will not need such movements on his side, and a man who does is not a good father. So calling such groups men’s rights or fathers’ rights is a misnomer. The correct name for the above is wife beaters’ movement, in much the same way as correct name for 1990s political correctness is not women’s empowerment but harpies’ empowerment – both, at the expense of women and men who are neither of the preceding.

As the excesses and wrongs of 1990s feminism became obvious to more people, feminism lost much of its say in society. But that is not the right course to take either. Clearly there is a need to confront violence against and oppression of women, and there is very much a need now for a better construed feminism. A feminism that recognizes the woman’s right to be feminine and to be with a man, while supporting women against men who would abuse them and their children, is the feminism that is sorely needed right now and for as long as there are men in the world who think that violence against women is their God-given right or their masculine entitlement. And it is time that both women and men of goodwill work together to create and to apply this real, positive feminism that actually has a possibility of improving life for the women of the world.

By: Ilya Shambat

About the Author:

Most women under the age of 89 might take their voting rights for granted. For those women who were alive in the 1920s and before, you probably remember the struggle that women had to go through to earn the right to vote. Even after African-American men could vote in the Reconstruction Era, women of all colors were not allowed to vote in the United States.

Women had been fighting for their rights since 1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York. The first group for suffrage rights was formed by Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone, and was called the American Woman Suffrage Association. This group worked for more than just women’s suffrage-they also campaigned for black voting rights. Later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony developed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which worked solely for women’s rights. Stanton was the one who called for the Seneca Falls convention along with Lucretia Mott.

After the Civil War, women continued to push for enfranchisement. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded by Frances Willard in 1868, worked for many aspects of social reform, including the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony were part of a group that wrote about women’s rights after several states gave them the vote.

Later, in 1890, the two woman’s suffrage associations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt were instrumental in forming the one powerful group from the two rival organizations. As the original key leaders of the suffrage movement, such as Anthony, Mott, and Stanton, died off in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the effort to win the right to vote went in several different directions. Women began to also fight for prison reform and child labor laws, among other things.

Thus, some women, such as Alice Paul, broke away from NAWSA in order to be more militant. However, a number of pro-enfranchisement displays such as marches and parades took place in the early 1910s. Suffragettes also collected signatures to petition Congress to allow them the right to vote. All of this action got the attention of several states, including Montana, which sent the first woman congressional Representative to Washington, D.C., in 1917.

Finally, Congress devised an amendment in 1919 to enfranchise women. It was not completely adopted until 1920, when Tennessee was the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment-by only 1 vote. Thanks to the work of thousands of brave women starting in the 19th century, women now have the right to vote for their leaders.

Although women now have suffrage, they may be blocked from voting by things such as a boss refusing to give them time off of work to go vote. If you believe you have suffered from voting obstruction, you should contact a lawyer. For more information on your voting rights, check out the Phoenix law firm Haralson, Miller, Pitt, Feldman & McAnally, P.L.C.

By: Joseph Devine

About the Author: