California women and men worked tirelessly to strengthen the campaign for women's suffrage since 1893, when the state legislature passed an amendment allowing women to vote in state elections, through the amendment's final passage in 1911. The strength of the movements themselves, the passionate support that overcame stiff opposition, driven by the people and organizations that defended women's suffrage were major factors contributing to the eventual passage of Amendment 8. Since California women started voting, there. There were many advances and setbacks in other women's rights movements, including the Nineteenth Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1849, California entered the United States as a state. Less than fifty years later, in 1893, the state legislature passed an amendment allowing women to vote in state elections. According to the Women of the West Museum, a museum dedicated to sharing the achievements of women in the Western United States, “[the amendment] was vetoed by the governor who deemed it unconstitutional” (Women of the West Museum). Just three years after the first defeat, women's right to vote was put to a state referendum. He was again defeated, this time by the voting public by a wide margin (Women of the West Museum). This defeat brought even more determination to the women's suffrage movement; women, men and organizations worked together to secure women's right to vote. This time, the movement succeeded in granting women the right to vote when voters approved the referendum introduced in 1910 in the 1911 election. The amendment became known as Amendment 8 to the California state constitution. California was the sixth state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress. The proposed Twenty-Seventh Amendment was sent to the states for ratification on March 22, 1972 (Francis). States, however, had only a limited amount of time to ratify the amendment, seven years. At first, it didn't seem like there would be any problems getting states to ratify the treaty in twenty-two of the thirty-eight states needed within the first year. After the first year, the pace of ratifications slowed until it stopped in 1977 with Indiana (Francis). As the seven-year deadline approached, ERA supporters appealed to Congress to give the amendment a 1982 deadline, which was not done. But the Madison Amendment, introduced in 1789 and ratified in 1992, shows that it might still be possible to ratify the amendment if Congress repealed the time limit (Francis).