American women advocated women's right to vote from the 1820s onward.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, writers assumed that a patriarchal order was a natural order that had existed, as John Stuart Mill wrote, since "the very earliest twilight of human society." This was not seriously challenged until the eighteenth century, when Jesuit missionaries found matrilineality in native North American peoples.

The earliest voting rights for a woman were granted in 1756, when the town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts granted Lydia Chapin Taft the right to vote in the colony. In 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began a seventy year struggle to secure the right to vote for women. Women's suffrage activists pointed out that blacks had been granted the franchise and had not been included in the language of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (which gave people the right to vote regardless of their race). This, they contended, had been unjust.

Wyoming (1869) and briefly Utah (1870) granted women the right to vote. The push to grant Utah women's suffrage was at least partially fueled by outsiders' belief that, given the right to vote, Utah women would dispose of polygamy. After Utah women exercised their suffrage rights in favor of polygamy their voting right was revoked by by provisions in the federal Edmunds-Tucker Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1887.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming had enfranchised women after effort by the suffrage associations at the state level.

National women's suffrage, however, did not exist until 1920. During the beginning of the twentieth century, as women's suffrage gained in popularity, suffragists held dramatic and visible protests and marches. The women who participated knew they would be subject to arrest, and many were jailed. Finally, bowing to public sentiment, President Woodrow Wilson urged Congress to pass what became, when it was ratified in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted every woman who was a citizen in America the right to vote.

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