The women's suffrage movement in Pennsylvania was an outgrowth of the abolitionist movement in the state. Early women's suffrage advocates in Pennsylvania wanted equal suffrage not only for white women but for all African Americans. The first women's rights convention in the state was organized by Quakers and held in Chester County in 1852. Philadelphia would host the fifth National Women's Rights Convention in 1854. Later years saw suffragists forming a statewide group, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (PWSA), and other smaller groups throughout the state. Early efforts moved slowly, but steadily, with suffragists raising awareness and winning endorsements from labor unions.

Lucy Kennedy Miller (1880–1962), also known as Mrs. John O. Miller, was a prominent 20th-century American suffragist who became the president of the Equal Franchise Federation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the first president of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters (PLWV). In 1919, the League of Women Citizens of Pennsylvania called her "the woman to whom, more than to any other" was "owe[d] the triumph of" women's suffrage in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.