Women & The Vote

MD Women’s Heritage Center presents Valiant MD Women: The Fight for the Vote

Explore “Valiant Maryland Women: The Fight for the Vote” to meet heroines who made their voices heard.

In 1648, as a property owner near St. Mary’s City and as the executor of Lord Baltimore’s will, Margaret Brent (1601-1671) demanded a voice and a vote in the Maryland Provincial Assembly. Although her petition was denied, she is considered the first woman in colonial America to request the right to vote.

Two hundred years later, American women still did not have the vote.

Maryland’s earliest known suffrage movement formed in Baltimore in the late 1800s, but it wasn’t long before women in small towns and rural areas all over the state embraced the fight for suffrage and passage of the 19th Amendment.

They organized parades and conventions to bring their cause to the public. Some traveled on unpaved and distant roads to encourage women in rural communities to demand their voices to be heard. There were conventions and village gatherings. The Maryland Suffrage News was published weekly between 1912 until the 19th amendment went into effect. A group of valiant women picketed in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, only to be locked in squalid jail cells.

For Black suffragists in Baltimore, women’s rights and civil rights activism intertwined. More than once, the women helped galvanize voters to defeat Maryland legislation designed to strip 15th Amendment voting protections from Black men.

The 19th Amendment’s passage in 1920 was a victory, but it left much work unfinished. To gain full access to the ballot and achieve electoral equality, Native American, Asian American, Latina, and African American women would continue to fight for decades.