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Article: Women's Rights
- Article from:
- West's Encyclopedia of American Law
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WOMEN'S RIGHTS
The effort to secure equal rights for women and to remove gender discrimination from laws, institutions, and behavioral patterns.
The women's rights movement began in the nineteenth century with the demand by some women reformers for the right to vote, known as suffrage, and for the same legal rights as men. Though the vote was secured for women by the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, most of the gains women have made in achieving legal equality and ending gender discrimination have come since the 1960s. civil rights legislation of that era was primarily focused on ensuring that African Americans and other racial minorities secured equal protection ...