Collection complied by Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library

The first women's rights meeting in the United States was a social gathering of five women in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. The women who attended the meeting, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Wright, and Jane Hunt organized a convention at Seneca Falls later the same year that included approximately 300 men and women and set the movement for women's suffrage in full motion. After seven decades of lobbying and outreach by several generations of activists, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote was ratified in 1920.