Question

What problem(s) did the U.S. face during the women's suffragist movement

Answer 1

Rapid industrialization and heavy immigration. Both strained traditional social structures, from the family to the community and state. Both provoked considerable anxiety, and led to a heavy surge in ideas for "fixing" American life.

Universal suffrage for women was one such solution, but it became deeply interwined with the prohibition movement, which started at about the same time and drew almost all of its heavy numerical support from women, and with progressive and moral-crusading movements generally. The alliance of convenience between the suffragettes and the "drys" led to the nearly simultaneous passage of the 18th (Prohibition, ratified 16 January 1919) and 19th (universal female suffrage, ratified 18 August 1920) Amendments to the US Constitution.

Answer 2

actually the question supposed to be: What problem(s) did the U.S. face because of the women's suffragist movement...not about what was happining during the movement

Answer 3

Because of the movement itself? Well, Prohibition, as I said above, was carried largely on the back of the womens' suffrage movement, so Prohibition is about as direct a consequence of the movement as you can find.

I suppose the movement's apparent moral righteousness was used as a cover for some unsavory other movements at the time, e.g. eugenics and racism, but that seems pretty minor. I suppose it also caused a fair amount of heartache in a minority of private households, as husbands and wives had to think about how they felt about female suffrage, and how it might reconstruct the age-old governing bargain between the sexes. In that sense it would not have been unlike how the Iraq War forced American families with Middle Eastern roots, or Islamic religion, to consider how they viewed the invasion of a Middle Eastern nation, resisted by Islamic fundamentalists. Overt action often forces re-examination of unspoken agreements and assumptions -- which can be unsettling, albeit sometimes productive and sometimes destructive.

If you mean as a consequence of the movement's success, then women did not start to vote as often as men, and their votes did not start to diverge from men, for many years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. It has been argued that the substantial gradual growth in government in the post-Second-World-War period, and its re-alignment towards "caring" issues like Federal support of education, civil rights, old-age and disability pensions, et cetera, was a result of the generic increased concern of women for these issues, but this is hotly debated. Others have argued that, even if the votes of women caused the enormous increase in the power and reach of the Federal government, this can be more directly traced to the breakdown of the family headed by married parents as the basic unit of American society, and the replacement of its charitable and mutual care functions (e.g. rearing of children and care of the elderly) by government.

Furthermore, most of the growth in government since 1945 was also supported by men at the time, as reflected in their votes. You can point to the Second World War itself, the Cold War following, and the general de-isolation of the US as additional reasons for an increased power and scope of the Federal government after 1945. It's complicated.