10 Clever Ways Women Influenced Politics Before Getting The Right To Vote

Though Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata is probably fiction, it has served as a model for women who want to exert political power without having the right to vote more than once. How? Through a sex strike.

Sex strikes, such as the one in Lysistrata, encourage women to take a stand by refusing to have sex with their husbands until desired actions are taken. In the case of Aristophanes' play, the women of Athens seize the treasury and refuse sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War. In real life, sex strikers are believed to have denied their husbands sex to punish them for widespread bad behavior, while some people have even suggested that sex strikes can be credited with forming civilization as we know it. Because the method of the strike borders on NSFW, it's impossible to know how many times it's been used as a proxy for women in politics.

When you can't vote, you have to resort to other methods of inserting your voice into the conversation. Lucy Stone, a suffragette and abolitionist, used a wagon. After finding the abandoned wagon in her barn, Stone and other suffragettes painted it with slogans and information that provided an eye-catching backdrop to their normal demonstrations.

While it might seem like just a prop compared to their more important face-to-face activism, it served the same purpose that many billboard advertisements do. Suffragettes transported flyers and other information back and forth in this wagon, which served as an additional conversation starter and reminder that women were seeking equal rights. Even if the wagon itself didn't convert anybody to the suffragette mindset, it got people talking, and talking is just one of many steps to action.

People are suckers for good stories, even when said stories are activism in disguise. Though Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin popularized many of the most pervasive stereotypes about Black people in American culture and has been rightly criticized for it, the novel was also a poignant anti-slavery work that galvanized abolitionist thinking among the American people. Slavery was often thought of as a Southern problem, and Stowe's novel brought a human component to the plight of the very real people suffering as slaves.

Stowe's novel has not stood the test of time because of its harmful stereotyping, but, in its day, it was credited with kickstarting the Civil War, including the legend that Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Stowe, remarked, "[so] this is the little lady who started this great war."

While conversation may be the preferred method of affecting change, sometimes those in power aren't willing to listen. To get the attention of the government, people like Carrie Nation, a prominent Prohibitionist, sometimes had to get destructive.

Nation's preferred method of getting attention was with a hatchet. She famously attacked bars with her favorite tool, even selling souvenirs to raise funds for more work. Though Prohibition was ultimately a failure, it was an important part of many women's movements because so much of a woman's life was dependent on her husband – when Nation's husband was killed by their alcoholic son, she was left alone to care for herself and her other child. She didn't live to see Prohibition enacted but was still an important part of the movement, which also included women's suffrage.

Women were often regarded as lesser citizens before they got the right to vote, with many men seeing them as property rather than as human beings. But as a sort of bargaining chip, women could wield a unique kind of power by refusing to marry somebody unless they voted in favor of women's rights.

While the attitudes around marriage were changing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women were still considered more property than partner. By leveraging their status as valuable, whether for a dowry or other things they might have to offer, women could swing the men in their lives to vote for a better life for them.

When you can't participate in politics, you have to find other ways to raise awareness. For Ida B. Wells, that way was investigative journalism. Wells, who was born as a slave, dedicated her life to fighting for justice for Black people, including traveling the South collecting information on lynchings to report to the public.

Wells even traveled overseas to raise awareness around the pervasive racism in the US. She founded several organizations for civil rights, including participating in the founding of the NAACP, though she later stepped away. Wells's tireless work to expose the treatment of Black people, as well as her reluctance to let votes for white women distract from the cause of votes for all made her a vital figure in the fight for civil rights.