suffragist

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One who seeks extension of the franchise especially to women. In the UK between 1900 and 1918 the term was distinguished from suffragette on the basis that a suffragette was prepared to use direct action, whereas a suffragist was not.

Pioneer of Women's Rights

Feminism took long strides forward on this date: In 1820, suffragist Susan B. Anthony was born. Anthony died 14 years before women were given the right to vote in the US – a cause she had spent most of her life crusading for. In 1879, Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female lawyers to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Feminist author Susan Brownmiller celebrates her 71st birthday today. Brownmiller wrote Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape in 1975. And Jane Seymour turns 55 today. Seymour portrayed Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, an icon of feminism in America's frontier days.

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, February 15, 2006

(suf-ruh-jist)

A participant in the women's movement to win voting rights in the United States. The fight for women's suffrage was organized in the middle of the nineteenth century. Wyoming, while not yet a state, granted women's suffrage in 1869, though the struggle for universal suffrage was to last another fifty years. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing that no state could deny the right to vote on the basis of sex.

See words rhyming with "suffragist."