The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was formed in November 1869 in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association over the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Its founders, who supported the Fifteenth Amendment, included Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. The AWSA founders were staunch abolitionists, and strongly supported securing the right to vote for the Negro. They believed that the Fifteenth Amendment would be in danger of failing to pass in Congress if it included the vote for women. On the other side of the split in the American Equal Rights Association, opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, were "irreconcilables" Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to secure women's enfranchisement through a federal constitutional amendment. AWSA believed success could be more easily achieved through state-by-state campaigns.
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“... woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself ... we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man ...”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886)
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—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
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—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)