WHAT IS WOMEN VOTE 100?
WomenVote100 is Cumberland County’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote.
In many ways, our county was way ahead of its time in the women’s suffrage movement. Some of the movement’s most determined trailblazers were county residents and some of the earliest protest actions took place here — decades ahead much of the nation.
The most well-known protest took place in the 1868 general election when 172 defiant women from Vineland brought their own ballot box to a polling place and cast their votes. That was more than a half a century before women eventually won legal voting rights.
FACT CHECK
- For well over half of this country’s history, women were denied the right to vote.
- Women in the United States didn’t have the right to vote until 1920, not long before many of our grandparents were born.
- Although it feels practically ancient, it really wasn’t very long ago that women were being discriminated against in this way.
- Today, we recognize and celebrate the brave people who worked tirelessly to change the course of history.
CUMBERLAND COUNTY’S SUFFRAGIST TRAILBLAZERS
Why does any of this matter?
Cumberland County wasn’t simply following the national trend of women fighting for the right to vote.
Instead, Cumberland County was setting the trend nearly half a century early.