many abolitionists and women’s rights activists parted ways over the question of female suffrage.

In the early years of the women’s rights movement, the right to vote was just one of many goals of women’s rights activists, whose broad agenda included equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage and a married woman’s right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body. But during the post-Civil War debate over the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which would give citizenship and suffrage to African-American men, many women’s rights activists refocused their efforts on the battle for female suffrage. While Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others campaigned against any suffrage amendment that would exclude women, some of their former allies—including Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and Frederick Douglass—argued that this was “the Negro’s hour” and female suffrage could wait. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony founded the female-only National Woman Suffrage Association, which stood in opposition to Stone and Blackwell’s American Woman Suffrage Association. The rift between the two sides endured until 1890, when the two organizations merged to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association.