Alice Paul toasting Tennessee's ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Washington, D.C., August 17, 1920.

Credit: Library of Congress

Pennsylvania women played major roles in the suffrage movement that culminated in ratification of the 19th amendment. Suffragist leader Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman's Party in 1916, earned degrees from Swarthmore College (1905) and the University of Pennsylvania (1912), where she wrote her Ph.D. thesis on The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania.