There never will be complete equality until women themselves
help to make laws and elect lawmakers. ~ Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

Although it took nearly three-quarters of a century, American women made good on Abigail Adams’s threat in 1776 to her husband, John Adams, as he participated in the creation of the United States Constitution: “…we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” Once underway, that rebellion — begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 — lasted another nearly three-quarters of a century, but it resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, which guaranteed all women nationwide the right to vote. Prior to that, each state decided whether to grant women the right to vote, and, shockingly, some states actually revoked their right. But many states did grant women the right to vote, and it was in 1917 that a leader in the suffrage movement of one of those states, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, became the first woman elected to Congress.