The defining concern of the Progressive Era, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the transferring of responsibility for social policy from the states to the federal level of government. Abolition, prohibition, immigration, labor, and women’s suffrage were all social policy issues which the legislatures, at state and federal levels, heard and debated. Women felt the need to speak in public, about abolition in the beginning, and then realized that they had no power to affect decisions except through the influencing of men’s votes. Women’s suffrage was the first step towards equality of the sexes which has not yet been achieved. Women today need to reacquire the guiding principles and moral foundation of the initial campaign period and must exercise the right to vote which was given by the nineteenth amendment.