It was based on gender issues, women's sexual , reproductive rights, job opportunities for women, violence against women, and changes in custody and divorce laws.

Leaving aside the antiwar movement of the 1960s, which i think played an important role in bringing the war to an end, the women's movement was the most successful movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The idea that women should enjoy full equality with men was a startlingly radical idea then.

In 1848, elizabeth cady stanton and lucretia mott organized the first convention regarding women's rights in the united states. Called the seneca falls convention, the event in seneca falls, new york, drew over 300 people, mostly women. They wanted to be treated as individuals, not dependents of men.

First wave: 1848 - 1920.

Their broad goals included equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage, and a married woman's right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body.

In the decades during which the women's liberation movement flourished, liberationists successfully changed how women were perceived in their cultures, redefined the socio-economic and the political roles of women in society, and transformed mainstream society.

A major victory came in july 1980, with the passage of the matrimonial property act. The legislation recognized an equal division of property upon separation or divorce. It also guaranteed that widowed women and men would inherit the matrimonial home.

First, they convinced state legislatures to grant women the right to vote. Second, they pursued court cases to test the 14th amendment (states denying male citizens suffrage would lose congress representation). Women were citizens too.

They battled racism, economic oppression and sexual violence—along with the law that made married women little more than property of their husbands.

The leaders of this campaign—women like susan b. Anthony, alice paul, , lucy stone and ida b. Wells—did not always agree with one another, but each was committed to the enfranchisement of all american women.

By the mid-1800s, women started to fight back, demanding suffrage, or the right to vote. These women were called suffragists.

Instead of promoting a vision of gender equality, suffragists usually argued that the vote would enable women to be better wives and mothers. Women voters, they said, would bring their moral superiority and domestic expertise to issues of public concern.

Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them—alabama, georgia, louisiana, maryland, mississippi, south carolina and virginia—had already rejected it before tennessee's vote on august 18, 1920.

Because utah held two elections before wyoming, utah became the first place in the nation where women legally cast ballots after the launch of the suffrage movement. The short-lived populist party endorsed women's suffrage, contributing to the enfranchisement of women in colorado in 1893 and idaho in 1896.

The men and women who opposed woman's suffrage did so for many reasons. Many believed that men and women were fundamentally different and that women should not sully themselves in the dirty world of politics.