With what topics is the passage primarily concerned?

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 43 to 50.

During the nineteenth century, women in the United States organized and participated in a large number of reform movements, including movements to reorganize the prison system, improve education, ban the sale of alcohol, grant rights to people who were denied them, and, most importantly, free slaves. Some women saw similarities in the social status of women and slaves. Women like Elizabeth Candy Stanton and Lucy Stone were feminists and abolitionists who supported the rights of both women and blacks. A number of male abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, also supported the rights of women to speak and to participate equally with men in antislavery activities. Probably more than any other movement, abolitionism offered women a previously denied entry into politics. They became involved primarily in order to better their living conditions and improve the conditions of others.

When the civil war ended in 1865, the Fourteen and Fifteen Amendments to the Constitution adopted in1868 and 1870 granted citizenship and suffrage to blacks but not to women. Discouraged but resolved, feminists worked tirelessly to influence more and more women to demand the right to vote. In 1869, the Wyoming territory had yielded to demands by feminists, but the states on the East Coast resisted more stubbornly than before. A women’s suffrage bill had been presented to every Congress since 1878, but it continually failed to pass until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote.

With what topics is the passage primarily concerned?

• A. The Wyoming Territory
• B. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
• C. Abolitionists
• D. Women’s suffrage