Women's Suffrage Trivia
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60 free Women's Suffrage trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The fight for votes for women stretched across a century and every continent, and this women's suffrage trivia quiz covers the whole campaign. The American story runs from Seneca Falls and the Declaration of Sentiments through Susan B. Anthony's arrest for voting, the Wyoming Territory, the Silent Sentinels picketing the White House and the single Tennessee vote that ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The British story covers suffragists and suffragettes, Millicent Fawcett and the Pankhursts, hunger strikes and the Cat and Mouse Act, Emily Davison at the Derby and the acts of 1918 and 1928. The quiz also travels further: Kate Sheppard's petition and New Zealand's 1893 first, South Australia letting women stand for parliament, Finland's 19 women MPs of 1907, France waiting until 1944, Switzerland until 1971 and one canton until 1990, and Saudi Arabia in 2015. There are questions on the colours of the movement, the origin of the word suffragette, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells and Carrie Chapman Catt's League of Women Voters. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on women's suffrage and the people, laws and events involved, and each question links to its source. Try our Women in History and US Constitution quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which was the first self-governing country to grant women the vote at national level, in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand's premier, Richard Seddon, tried to sink the bill, but his meddling so angered two councillors that they switched sides and it passed by 20 votes to 18.
Q 02Which US territory gave women the vote and the right to stand for office in 1869?
Wyoming
Wyoming's all-male legislature wanted publicity and hoped the law would draw women to a territory where men outnumbered them about six to one. It kept the right on becoming a state in 1890.
Q 03Which Seneca Falls newspaper editor gave her name to the loose trousers worn by 1850s dress reformers?
Amelia Bloomer
Amelia Bloomer didn't invent bloomers: Elizabeth Smith Miller designed the outfit, and Bloomer's paper The Lily made it famous. In 1851 she also introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Q 04Which famous abolitionist spoke up at Seneca Falls to keep the demand for the vote in the Declaration of Sentiments?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both spoke in its defence, and the demand passed, the only one of the convention's resolutions not carried unanimously.
Q 05Elizabeth Cady Stanton modelled the Declaration of Sentiments, signed at Seneca Falls, on which famous document?
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence. Stanton kept its phrasing but wrote that 'all men and women are created equal' and charged man, not a king, with tyranny; 68 women and 32 men signed it.
Q 06Where did Elizabeth Cady Stanton first meet Lucretia Mott?
The 1840 anti-slavery convention in London
The 1840 anti-slavery convention in London refused to seat Mott and the other women delegates, and Stanton later recalled that the two resolved that day to hold a women's rights convention back home.
Q 07Susan B. Anthony was arrested in 1872 in which city for the crime of voting?
Rochester, New York
Rochester, New York, was Anthony's home, where she talked election inspectors into registering her. Fined $100 at her trial, she refused to pay, and the case was carried no further.
Q 08Which Montanan became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment?
Jeannette Rankin
Jeannette Rankin had helped lead the campaign that won Montana women the vote in 1914. In Congress she voted against war with Germany in 1917 and cast the only vote against war with Japan in 1941.
Q 09Susan B. Anthony became the first real woman on a circulating US coin when her portrait appeared on what in 1979?
The dollar coin
The dollar coin flopped because it was almost the size and colour of a quarter, so people kept confusing the two, and the Mint suspended production after 1981.
Q 10Why did Stanton and Anthony oppose the Fifteenth Amendment?
It enfranchised Black men but not women
It enfranchised Black men but not women, and the quarrel over whether to back it anyway split the movement into two rival associations that did not reunite until 1890.
Q 11Which suffragist, leader of the wing that rivalled Stanton and Anthony's, kept her own surname after marrying in 1855?
Lucy Stone
Lucy Stone kept her name when she married Henry Blackwell as a protest against the laws that bound wives, and women who followed her example came to be called 'Lucy Stoners'.
Q 12Which formerly enslaved speaker gave the 1851 Ohio convention speech later titled "Ain't I a Woman?"?
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth probably never said the famous line: the version with that refrain was published 12 years later by Frances Gage, and the report printed weeks after the speech in Akron does not contain it.
Q 13Alice Paul staged a huge suffrage parade in Washington on 3 March 1913, the day before what event?
Q 21Which state sent a courier by train to Washington in June 1919 so its ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was recorded first?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin actually voted about an hour after Illinois, but David James, a suffragist's father, left at once with the papers and handed them in at the State Department first.
Q 22In the 1920 ratification fight nicknamed the War of the Roses, suffrage supporters wore a rose of which colour?
Yellow
Yellow roses marked supporters and red roses opponents as both sides lobbied the lawmakers; the young legislator who cast the deciding yes was still wearing red when he did it.
Q 23Which state became the decisive 36th to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, on 18 August 1920?
Tennessee
Woodrow Wilson's inauguration
Woodrow Wilson's inauguration had filled the city with visitors, which is why Paul chose the date. Spectators mobbed the marchers until cavalry troops arrived to clear the avenue.
Q 14The Silent Sentinels' picket, begun in January 1917, was organised by Alice Paul and which militant suffrage organisation?
The National Woman's Party
The National Woman's Party grew out of the group Paul and Lucy Burns formed after breaking with the mainstream movement. Its pickets stood outside the White House day after day, whatever the weather.
Q 15Which suffragist was nominated for US president in 1872, almost half a century before women could vote nationwide?
Victoria Woodhull
Victoria Woodhull ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket but spent election day in a jail cell, arrested over a scandal she had printed in her own newspaper.
Q 16Where were many suffrage pickets arrested in Washington in 1917 sent to serve their sentences?
The Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia
The Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia took pickets jailed for 'obstructing traffic'. Faced with worm-ridden food, they demanded to be treated as political prisoners, and many went on hunger strike.
Q 17By what name is 14 November 1917 remembered, when prison guards beat the jailed White House pickets?
The Night of Terror
The Night of Terror left Lucy Burns with her hands shackled above her head until morning, and Dorothy Day, later famous as a Catholic activist, was among the women the guards threw into the cells.
Q 18Banners carried by White House pickets in 1917 provoked mob attacks by giving the president what mocking nickname?
Kaiser Wilson
Kaiser Wilson banners asked why the president pitied Germans who were not self-governed when 20 million American women were not either. With the country at war with the Kaiser, crowds tore them down.
Q 19At Washington's 1913 suffrage parade, where was Ida B. Wells told to march?
At the back, in a separate delegation
At the back, in a separate delegation, was the request, made for fear of offending Southern marchers. Wells refused, waited in the crowd and stepped into the Illinois ranks as they passed.
Q 20Which Chicago organisation did Ida B. Wells co-found in January 1913 to advance the vote for Black women?
The Alpha Suffrage Club
The Alpha Suffrage Club canvassed Chicago's Black neighbourhoods after Illinois women won the vote in 1913, and the voters it mobilised helped make Oscar De Priest the city's first Black alderman.
Tennessee's House ratified with the barest constitutional majority, fifty of its ninety-nine members, after the Speaker switched to yes as a ploy to force another vote and handed suffragists the margin.
Q 24In the decisive 1920 state ratification vote, 24-year-old legislator Harry T. Burn switched to yes after receiving a note from whom?
His mother
His mother, Febb Burn, had written telling him to 'be a good boy' and vote for ratification. He carried her letter in his pocket and later said a mother's advice is always safest for a boy to follow.
Q 25Which annual US observance falls on 26 August, the date the Nineteenth Amendment was certified in 1920?
Women's Equality Day
Women's Equality Day marks the certification, not the deciding state vote eight days earlier. Congress designated it in 1973 after Representative Bella Abzug championed the idea.
Q 26Who won the 1920 presidential election, the first held after the Nineteenth Amendment took effect?
Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding won, but Charlotte Woodward Pierce, the only woman who signed the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration and lived to see the amendment, was ill on election day and is not known ever to have voted.
Q 27Which state was the last of those existing in 1920 to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, doing so only in 1984?
Mississippi
Mississippi's legislature had rejected the amendment in 1920, so its women first voted under a law their own state refused to endorse. The 1984 vote was symbolic, coming 64 years late.
Q 28Which organisation was founded in February 1920 to guide newly enfranchised women?
The League of Women Voters
The League of Women Voters was launched at the suffrage association's Chicago convention to teach women to use the ballot, six months before the amendment was ratified.
Q 29Which NAWSA president unveiled the "Winning Plan" in 1916, pairing state campaigns with a drive for a federal amendment?
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt had returned as president the year before. Her plan made a federal amendment the goal and treated every state campaign as a step toward it, and ratification followed four years later.
Q 30After 1920 Alice Paul devoted herself to which proposal, first sent to Congress in 1923 and nicknamed for Lucretia Mott?
The Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment was revised and named by Paul at Seneca Falls in 1923, but Congress did not pass it until 1972, and only 35 of the 38 states needed had ratified it when the 1982 deadline ran out.