Dividing the suffrage movement into three distinct periods - 1848-1869, 1869-1890, and 1890-1920 - helps explain its shifting priorities and tactics over its more than decades of existence. The first period, from 1848 to 1869, began at the Seneca Falls convention, the first women's rights convention ever held in the world, where the Declaration on Sentiments included a controversial call for the ballot. Historian Ellen DuBois has pointed out how radical such a demand was in the mid-nineteenth century, because it challenged the separation of spheres in to men's (public) and women's (private). The suffrage plank barely passed the assembled convention.

During the first twenty years of the women's rights movement, it was closely aligned with abolitionism and the struggle to end slavery. Disagreements in the immediate post-Civil War period about the priorities of freed blacks versus women's rights led to a severing of this link. With the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, black people won their freedom and black men won the right to vote. As feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony pointed out, however, now that the word male was in the constitution as a definition of voting rights, it would take another constitutional amendment to enfranchise women.

By 1869, an independent woman suffrage movement had emerged in the United States. The period between 1869 and 1890 was not marked by any great breakthroughs for the cause. The suffrage movement on the national level split into two rival wings, mainly over whether to work on a state basis or the federal level. Only two states allowed women the vote - the territories of Utah in 1869 and Wyoming in 1870 - and the victories had come more local political considerations that suffragist efforts. In 1890, the rival wings reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

By 1890, the suffrage movement was on the threshold of new activism and success. In part, the movement was more palatable because it was less radical. Instead of early demands by feminists such as Stanton for divorce and women's economic emancipation, the movement leaders now stuck very closely to the sole demand for the vote. And increasingly suffragists argued for the vote not as a challenge to conventional notions about women's proper sphere, but as an extension of that sphere. Women cited their domestic orientation as the reason they needed the vote: they could do for the country what they did for their homes and families. Suffragists also played up women's supposed moral superiority. This tactic of accepting conventional views of women and exploiting them was highly successful, especially as the Progressive reform spirit gathered strength.

As late as 1910, the woman suffrage movement had won the vote in only four states, but the tide was turning. New leadership, notably the NAWSA presidency if Carrie Chapman Catt from 1915 to 1920, revitalized the movement with a winning plan. Attention-grabbing tactics, such as suffrage parades and open-air meetings, won publicity. The movement also branched out into immigrant and working-class urban communities to mobilize support. Suffragists effectively pointed out the irony of fighting to make the world safe for democracy in World War I, while the female population remained disenfranchised at home. Militant tactics, such as picketing the White House and conducting hunger strikes for the cause, won support.

But probably the main reason that women finally won the vote in 1920 was that it was now a far less radical demand than it had been in 1848. Try to imagine how nineteenth century political history would have been revolutionized if women had actually received the vote around the time of the Civil War. Compare that to the small ripple that occurred when women were finally granted the vote in 1920. Women's roles had changed dramatically since the mid-nineteenth century, with women actively participating in work, education, and voluntary organizations outside the home. The meaning of politics had also changed, so that the vote was less a potent symbol of political participation for men by 1920 than it had been at the height of separate male political culture of the previous century.