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Got another update done! Footnotes to be added tomorrow.

Part Eighty-Three: Births of Political Movements

The Birth of Women's Suffrage:
The women's suffrage movement in the United States began in the early 19th century. Individual women were the first to begin campaigning for the right of women to vote. Abigail Fairbanks, one of these early proponents, spread the idea of women's suffrage through a series of lectures she gave across the United States. Little action was taken, however, until the 1850s. The Worcester Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1852 was the first major convention on women's rights' and suffrage, and attracted over 250 people including then Massachusetts state assemblyman Charles Francis Adams, son of president John Quincy Adams. Four years later, another convention on women's suffrage was held in Bristol, Pennsylvania with Quaker activist Lucretia Mott and assemblyman Adams as the main speakers. The movement gathered some strength in some circles in the Northeast prior to the National War, but dwindled during the war.

After the National War, the women's suffrage movement began to gain steam again after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Lincoln court's ruling on Fox v. Bennett. Some suffrage activists began claiming that the disenfranchisement of women amounted to involuntary servitude and was thus unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. The York Convention in Pennsylvania in 1876 gave birth to the White Rose Movement[1], the first national movement advocating the right of women to vote. The movement grew across the country and in 1884 achieved its first major success, getting the Champoeg state legislature to pass a law in 1879 that "granted the right to vote in all statewide and local elections to both men and women". The movement gained traction more quickly in the less populated western United States, and Colorado and New Mexico Territory enfranchised women in 1880 and 1882, respectively.

As the White Rose Movement grew in strength, national political parties started taking notice. In the 1880 and 1884 elections, the small Equal Rights Party ran candidates for the presidential and Congressional elections in a few states, but did not receive very many votes. In the 1888 election, the newly formed People's Party campaigned with women's suffrage as part of its platform. The growing popularity of the People's Party in the western United States during the 1890s gathered acceptance of women's suffrage and led to more states passing laws granting women voter participation at some level of elections. By 1900, nine states had granted women full political participation, and five more had allowed women to vote in municipal elections.


The Birth of Anarchism:
The Silver Depression enabled many smaller ideologies to rise into the mainstream as people around the world turned to more extreme political beliefs in the hopes of a recovering economy. Socialist ideologies such as Morelian collectivism and Progressivism gained popularity in the Americas among those who believed that the cause of the economic troubles of the late 19th century was too little regulation of businesses. There were also prominent thinkers who believed that the government was at the heart of the problem. Out of this belief formed the basic tenet of anarchism. But like all broad political beliefs, anarchism had many different branches.

The most well known anarchist ideology today is insurrectionism. Insurrectionism arose primarily from the works of Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer[2], who like Karl Marx were students of Hegel during the early 19th century. Stirner and Bauer's writings about the eventual overthrow of a statist system were influential on later insurrectionists and served as a call to violent action against world governments. In 1886, Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany was assassinated by Polish anarchist Janusz Opalinski[3]. Further attacks by revolutionary anarchists were made during the 1880s and 1890s against business leaders and other members of the state.

Other branches of anarchism urged not for a violent revolution against the state but for the voluntary abolition of the national government as a concept. Some of these ideologies had similar ties to some forms of socialism and advocated a return to solely local governance. Enrico Malatesta, a 19th century Italian anarchist whose works formed the basis for Poleisism, wrote that "the governing structure that best meets the needs of all people is that of the city-state or poleis." The poleis, according to Malatesta, was the point at which a people were most involved in social and political participation and therefore was the ideal entity for distributing goods to a people. Anarchist movements such as Poleisism continued to grew in the early 20th century, and became especially popular after the Great War.

[1] Named for the White Rose of York.
[2] Two OTL influential early 19th century anarchists, though I'm not sure what branch they'd fall under.
[3] Wilhelm's I death leaves Frederick III as emperor.