Above, Carrie Chapman Catt, founder of the League of Women Voters, leads an estimated 20,000 supporters in a women's suffrage march on New York's Fifth Avenue in 1915. Another photograph at right, from the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress, also shows a march in 1915.

Debates over who can vote and how they can vote have focused new attention on this year's 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.

“I would say because of the current climate, it's extremely important for women to vote and pay attention to what's going on,” said Lee Ann Hume, coordinator of ministry and volunteers for the Lighthouse Foundation, 116 Browns Hill Road, Middlesex Township.

Eileen Olmsted, communications director for the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and member of the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh, said the anniversary has been front and center as far as her organization is concerned.

The Pittsburgh league had its centennial event at the Heinz History Center in February before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Women have only had the right to vote in the United States since 1920, although the fight for the right to cast a ballot started long before that.

Suffragists began their organized fight for women's equality in 1848 when they demanded the right to vote during the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

For the next 72 years, women fought for the right to the ballot.

This is an excerpt from a larger article about the suffragette movement and women's battle for the right to vote and how that fight is continuing.