(CNN) -- On August 26, 1920, the United States took a giant democratic leap when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving millions of American women the right to vote for the first time in the nation's history.
The landmark event ended a long and, especially in its later years, intense struggle in which women challenged the era's social norms to participate in the political process.
This tension sometimes led to run-ins with the law, as it did three years earlier when female activists -- known as suffragettes -- picketed outside the White House, demanding that President Woodrow Wilson take action. Police arrested 10 protesters on August 28, 1917, just as authorities jailed hundreds of other suffragettes nationwide beginning in June of that year.
By the early 20th century, the women's suffrage movement had generated widespread attention, and with it controversy. Newspapers frequently ran stories of suffragette protests and arrests as well as hunger strikes and prison abuse. Other women's rights activists used humor, parades, vigils and logic -- most any means possible to make their case in the media, courts and government halls.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/08/20/womens.suffrage/index.html
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