4
VOTES FOR WOMEN
Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!
—SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 1895
To protest the Fifteenth Amendment’s omission of voting rights for women, Susan B. Anthony of New York State voted in the presidential election of 1872, defying the state constitution that limited the ballot to male citizens. Officials arrested, prosecuted, and convicted Anthony of casting a ballot “without having a lawful right to vote.” The presiding judge fined her one hundred dollars—a considerable sum at the time—but she refused to pay, and the government never collected. Anthony used what she called this unjust trampling by men upon “my natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights” to bolster her case for women’s suffrage.1
Women voted in the early days of the republic in the single state of New Jersey. The suffrage provision of the New Jersey constitution of 1776 made no mention of sex but authorized voting by “all inhabitants” who met age, property, and residence requirements. Through election laws passed in 1773 and 1783, the state seemed to back off women’s voting by referring to voters as “he.” Then in 1790, a new law for seven counties referred to voters as “he or she.” Seven years later, in 1797, yet another law for the full state again labeled voters as “he or she,” making New Jersey the only American state to authorize voting by women. The state’s property requirements, however, denied the ballot to married women who lacked control over property under the laws of the time. Only unmarried women or widows who controlled property could vote. An editorial in the Washington Federalist praised the unique New Jersey system: “The ladies of New Jersey are very handsome and very federal; and they have a privilege which none of their sisters in other states enjoy. By the constitution of New Jersey, the unmarried women and the widows of that state, who are of full age and are worth $133 clear estate, have a right to vote in all elections.”2
That privilege was rescinded, however, in 1807, when New Jersey fell in line with other states. It added a tax-paying option to its property requirement for voting but disenfranchised both women and African Americans. Historians have puzzled over New Jersey’s exceptionalism in granting women voting rights. Perhaps lawmakers believed that property requirements blocked all but a few women from voting. More predictable was the elimination of female suffrage. Women had purportedly backed the Federalist Party, and their Democratic-Republican opponents controlled New Jersey’s government in 1807. Opponents of women’s suffrage typically claimed that women lacked the independence and strength of mind and body to cast a responsible vote. Yet, they also pointed to the special moral virtues of women that sustained the home and nurtured the future citizens of the republic. Participation in the nasty world of politics, the opposition said, would only corrupt women and weaken the American home and family.3
Opponents of women’s and black suffrage raised the specter of voter fraud, claiming that white men had exploited dependent women and ignorant blacks to cast illegal votes. An anonymous opinion writer in the Trenton Federalist praised the legislature for ending “what has made our elections disagreeable, contentious, and corrupt; all Females and Negroes being now deprived of a vote, who, not being eligible to nor much acquainted with the affairs of government, need not any longer be made use of to answer a party purpose, and this restriction I am persuaded is entirely agreeable to the generality of women.” Several decades later, in 1884, a historian of New Jersey, William A. Shaw, asserted without evidence that “women vied with the men, and in some instances surpassed them, in illegal voting.”4
The commentator in the Trenton Federalist correctly predicted that women would little protest their exclusion from the ballot. Still, women across the land managed to influence politics, not as decision-makers but as petitioners. To apply the virtues of the home to reforming society, women formed voluntary groups that pressed for temperance, prison reform, and economic rights for married women. American women became mainstays of the abolition movement, eventually gaining full membership in the American Anti-Slavery Society, but were excluded from full participation in the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. The European delegates still clung to the traditional view that women should not take part in political activity of any kind.5
Philanthropic engagement by women led to agitation for suffrage rights. In 1846, two years before the widely acknowledged emergence of a women’s movement at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, six women from Jefferson County petitioned the New York Constitutional Convention for the vote. The women insisted on their right to consent in governing, no less than men. Their petition said that women’s “equal, and civil and political rights with men” involved “no new right but only … those … which have ungenerously been withheld from them.”6 The all-male delegates were quick to dismiss the women’s concerns. They pointed to the now-universal disenfranchisement of women and minors across the nation as proof that voting was not an inherent right of citizenship. “If suffrage were a natural right,” said delegate John Kennedy, “women and children were among your electors.”7
In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two antislavery activists, frustrated by their second-class status in the World Anti-Slavery Convention, banded together to organize America’s first women’s rights convention. An estimated two hundred or more women and some forty men, including the prominent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, gathered at Stanton’s farm near Seneca Falls, in upstate New York. The convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” signed by one hundred of the participants, proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” It charged that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”8
The convention passed a dozen resolutions, all unanimously except for women’s suffrage rights, which some delegates thought too controversial. Only an eloquent plea by Douglass, the convention’s only African American, carried the majority for voting rights. He said, “In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”9
Although the Seneca Falls Convention did not lead directly to enduring women’s rights organizations or immediate change, it would take on symbolic importance for suffragists and inspire women and some men to gather at local and national conventions from 1850 to 1860, before the Civil War intervened. The conventions promoted women’s suffrage, economic equality between the sexes, reform of marriage and divorce laws, and opportunities for women’s education and employment. Yet white and black activists had already begun to diverge in their backing for gender and racial equality. No black women attended the national women’s conventions held in 1859 and 1860.10
Within the states, women continued to petition constitutional conventions for the vote. When Ohio held a second convention in 1850, several hundred women signed petitions for suffrage rights, and one delegate, the perhaps aptly named Norton Strange Townshend, spoke up in support. “Woman has by nature,” he said, “rights as numerous and as dear as man.… She is man’s equal in intelligence and virtue, and is therefore as well qualified as man to share in the responsibilities of government; and I can see no justice in making her a subject of government rather than a party to it.” So minimal was the sentiment for women’s suffrage in the convention hall that no delegate bothered to rise in response. The convention then rejected by a vote of seventy-two to seven an amendment to remove the word “male” from the constitution’s voting qualifications.11
At the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853, Abigail May Alcott, mother of famed author Louisa May Alcott, petitioned the male delegates to grant equal suffrage rights to women. “On every principle of natural justice, as well as by the nature of our institutions,” she wrote, a woman “is as fully entitled as man to vote, and to be eligible to office.” Another petitioner, Abby Hills Price, challenged the conventional assumption that politics would corrupt women. She observed, should women “yield a natural right, and be placed in an inferior position, because those who have assumed power over her have become corrupt? Perhaps she can govern herself better.”12
The petitions gained no traction in the convention, a result that Price had accurately prophesied: “But alas! It will, I fear, be weary years before ere so much is granted.” In 1869, the Massachusetts house voted against granting women suffrage rights, 133 to 68. In 1879, Massachusetts granted women the right to vote in school committee elections, but the commonwealth would do nothing more until after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.13
Controversy arose in Kansas during its founding Wyandotte Convention in 1859, not only over slavery but also over voting rights for women. Clarina Howard Nichols of the Moneka Women’s Rights Association lectured across the state for women’s rights and presented enough petition signatures to win the chance to speak before the convention’s suffrage committee—a signal accomplishment for a woman at the time. Although delegates rejected women’s suffrage, they moved ahead of other states in adopting property and child custody rights for married women and gender equality in “the formation and regulation of schools.”14
After the Civil War, politically engaged women believed that their moment for equal suffrage had arrived with the egalitarian impulse of Reconstruction for voting rights across racial lines. If former slaves could vote, they reasoned, why not women as well? But postwar male reformers opposed the coupling of black’s and women’s rights. Even Republicans sympathetic to women’s suffrage feared that support for such a radical proposition as female voting would doom the goal of rights for the freedmen, an essential vindication of the war. Wendell Phillips, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a mainstay of the prewar women’s movement, said in his 1865 keynote speech, “As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘One war at a time,’ so I say one question at a time. This hour belongs to the Negro.”15
Elizabeth Cady Stanton challenged Phillips’s proclamation of the “Negro hour” in a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Without abandoning the ideal of universal voting rights across racial and gender lines, she pivoted to arguing for the superior qualifications of white women as compared to black men. She questioned why egalitarian reformers would elevate black men “far above the educated women of the country.” She asked whether women should “stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first?” Although Stanton would vacillate between arguments from principle for universal suffrage and expediency for women, her pejorative contrast between black men and white women opened the predominantly white northern women’s movement to continuing charges of racism and complicated any potential alliance with African Americans.16
Phillips struck back, likewise arguing from expediency, not principle, that “we cannot agree that the enfranchisement of women and the enfranchisement of the blacks stand on the same ground, or are entitled to equal effort at this moment.” He continued, “Mrs. Stanton must see” that there is a good chance for Congress to adopt suffrage for black men but no chance “for an amendment to the Constitution which should include women.”17 Radical Republican leader Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, who upheld women’s suffrage in theory, agreed. “I know that the time will come” for women’s voting, Wade said, “not to-day, but the time is approaching.”18 Senator Wade could hardly have imagined at the time of his comments just how slow that approach would be; the guaranteeing of votes for women would not come until forty-two years after his death in 1878.
The dispute between Phillips and the women leaders became so bitter that he withheld from them funds that had been available for prewar female activists. Lacking other sources of funding, the women had few resources to pursue their campaign for suffrage.19
Philosophical and pragmatic objections to women’s suffrage guided decision-making in Congress on the Reconstruction amendments that reshaped America’s democracy. During debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, Susan B. Anthony implored Republicans to “hold the party to a logical consistency that shall give every responsible citizen in every State equal right to the ballot” and heed a petition for women’s suffrage that notable women leaders, including Stanton, Anthony, and Lucy Stone, had signed.20 Stone was the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree. She became a leading abolitionist and women’s rights organizer, and among suffrage leaders she was the most steadfast supporter of votes for black men. Four months later, in May 1866, suffrage advocates united in the American Equal Rights Association, dedicated to a “second Revolution” that would secure “equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex.”21
This effort to link voting rights for women and African Americans failed. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment penalized states for disenfranchisement only of “male inhabitants,” inserting for the first time the word “male” into the Constitution. In 1867, the Equal Rights Association petitioned a New York constitutional convention both to enfranchise women and abolish the burdensome property qualifications for black men. The women organized meetings across the state and secured twenty thousand petition signatures.
Yet another former ally, newspaper editor and later the 1872 Democratic presidential candidate, Horace Greeley, turned against the suffragists. He chaired the New York convention’s suffrage committee, which approved the removal of property requirements for black voters but rejected demands for women’s suffrage. Greeley echoed the pragmatism that had limited the scope of Fifteenth Amendment protections for black voting. He said, “We shall have very hard work to ratify any Constitution that enfranchises the blacks. Had we extended the suffrage to women we should have been voted down by hundreds of thousands. It seems but fair to add that female suffrage seems to me to involve the overthrow of the family relation as it has hitherto existed.” Stanton and Anthony lamented, “This campaign cost us the friendship of Horace Greeley and the support of the New York Tribune, heretofore our most powerful and faithful allies.”22
Also, in 1867, referenda for women’s and black suffrage failed in the relatively favorable state of Kansas. This was the first state referendum on women’s suffrage and led to recriminations by activists for women’s and black suffrage, each of whom blamed the other for their Kansas defeats. The losses splintered the women’s movement between leaders who wanted to remain loyal to the Republican Party and those who would abandon a party that seemingly had forsaken their cause.
The women’s suffrage movement endured additional dispiriting setbacks two years later in 1869. Legislation to grant women the right to vote in the District of Columbia died that year in Congress, and in the debates over the Fifteenth Amendment male advocates of women’s suffrage deferred to the practicalities of the moment. Republican senator Willard Warner of Alabama said, “I would have [women] share with us all the powers, the duties, and the responsibilities of government.… But I know that woman’s suffrage is not now attainable, and I would not as a practical legislator, jeopardize the good which is attainable by linking with it that which is impossible.”23
Without forsaking her commitment to women’s suffrage, Stone supported the Fifteenth Amendment and the Republican Party, but Stanton and Anthony refused to back any amendment that excluded voting rights for women. Again arguing from expediency, not principle, Stanton widened her invidious comparison between women and unfit men to include immigrants along with blacks: “American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters … awake to the danger of your present position, and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”24
In a departure from the prior rhetorical emphasis on the common humanity of all peoples, male and female, Stanton sought to turn on its head the ideology of separate spheres for men and women by extolling the unique and valuable contribution that women in distinction to men could make to politics. “With the black man you have no new force in government—it is manhood still,” she said. “But with the enfranchisement of women you have a new and essential element of life and power.” An 1869 suffrage convention argued that the “extension of suffrage to woman is essential to the public safety and to the establishment and permanence of free institutions,” because, “as woman, in private life, in the partnership of marriage, is now the conservator of private morals, so woman in public life, in the partnership of a republican State … will become the conservator of public morals.”25
In the wake of disputes over the failures in Kansas and Congress, suffragists fragmented into competing organizations in 1869 to replace the irreparably fractured American Equal Rights Association. Breaking from the Republican Party and the movement for black rights, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which fought for women’s rights beyond suffrage and maintained its independence from mainstream party politics. It eschewed male participation and sought to win suffrage nationally through a constitutional amendment. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). It allied with the Republican Party and continued to back voting rights for African Americans. It actively sought male participation, limited its focus to the vote, and worked for women’s suffrage rights in the states.26
The NWSA opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because of its singular focus on race. In June 1869, during the ratification struggle, the group passed a resolution authored by Anthony that declared, “We repudiate the Fifteenth Amendment, because by its passage in Congress the Republican Party proposed to substitute an aristocracy of race” that excluded women. “We know that what was apparently meant to protect the oppressed and help them on in life really aims at the ‘most odious distinction ever proposed since nations had an existence.’ ”27
During a more than two-decade period of dueling women’s rights organizations, only the state of Wyoming authorized suffrage for women. As a territory in 1869, Wyoming had become the first state or territory since New Jersey to establish women’s suffrage, which carried over into its statehood in 1890. Otherwise, only Utah and Washington Territories established voting for women. Thus, through 1890, women had gained voting rights in just a few, lightly populated western jurisdictions. These newly settled areas needed women settlers and lacked an established male elite. Wyoming, for example, had just 9,118 settlers enumerated in the census of 1870, with men outnumbering women by about 4 to 1.28
In response to their lack of political success, suffragists pursued what became known as the “New Departure,” arguing that the Constitution already guaranteed women’s suffrage, albeit indirectly. In 1872, election officials in Missouri barred Virginia Minor, an American-born citizen, from voting because the state constitution restricted the vote to men. On behalf of his wife, attorney Francis Minor filed suit in state court alleging that Missouri’s prohibition of female voting had violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Minor argued that because the fundamental right to vote was among these privileges and immunities, no state could deny suffrage to women citizens. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1874. Consistent with their narrow reading of the Reconstruction amendments and Bushrod Washington’s restrictive ruling on the original Constitution’s “privileges and immunities” clause, the justices unanimously rejected Minor’s plea.
The Court found that the “privileges and immunities” clause did not substitute for the lack of a right to vote in the Constitution. The decision held that “the Constitution has not added the right of suffrage to the privileges and immunities of citizenship as they existed at the time it was adopted.” It continued, “It cannot for a moment be doubted that if it had been intended to make all citizens of the United States voters, the framers of the Constitution would not have left it to implication” but “would have been expressly declared.” The decision added that “for nearly ninety years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage.” Thus, citizenship was not coterminous with suffrage, which was not a natural right. Each state had to decide, subject to limitations in the Fifteenth Amendment, which of its citizens were to be included within its political community of voters and officeholders. This decision ratified the longstanding practice in the United States of severing voting rights from citizenship, making some citizens more equal than others in choosing the representatives who governed their states and nation.29
In another disappointment for suffragists, their victories in the territories of Utah and Washington soon faded away. In 1887, through the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which restricted polygamy and other Mormon practices in Utah, Congress abolished acts of the territorial legislature, including votes for women. In Washington, the territorial supreme court struck down the women’s suffrage law on the thin technicality that its title did not fully express the subject of the legislation. After the legislature reinstated women’s suffrage in 1888, a territorial court again nullified the statute, holding that in the act establishing the territory, Congress intended the term “citizen” to mean only male citizens. The all-male constitutional convention for statehood that met the following year sidestepped the question of women’s suffrage by authorizing a popular referendum. The male voters resoundingly rejected voting rights for women by a vote of 35,527 to 16,613. Utah reestablished women’s suffrage when it achieved statehood in 1896, but women did not regain voting rights in Washington until 1910, twenty-one years after it joined the union.30
In the busy year of 1887, the U.S. Senate finally voted on a constitutional amendment on women’s suffrage that California Republican senator Aaron A. Sargent had introduced in 1878. This was the first time that either chamber of Congress held a clean vote on women’s suffrage not entangled with race. Yet arguments and sentiments had changed little since women first began petitioning for voting rights in the 1840s.
Republican senator Joseph N. Dolph of Oregon made the case for suffrage, saying that sex is the “least defensible” of all distinctions. Women “have sufficient capacity to vote intelligently.” They “have ruled kingdoms” and “commanded armies. They have excelled in statecraft, they have shone in literature, and, rising superior to their environments and breaking the shackles with which custom and tyranny have bound them, they have stood side by side with men in the fields of the arts and the sciences.” If suffrage were an issue of capacity, then let any requirement “be applied to women and to men alike.”31
Democratic senator George G. Vest of Missouri countered that women’s suffrage would add emotionally driven and corruptible voters to the electorate and upset the divinely ordained sex roles that preserved social order and harmony. If American government, he said, “shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature, or corrupt suffrage.” He warned his colleagues, “If we are to tear down all the blessed traditions, if we are to desolate our homes and firesides, if we are to unsex our mothers and wives and sisters and turn our blessed temples of domestic peace into ward political-assembly rooms, pass this joint [suffrage] resolution.” Vest dismissed the precedent of women voting in western territories as irrelevant to national policy. “It is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested,” he said. “Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities? Where are the localities in those Territories where the strain upon popular government must come?” He concluded by presenting a letter from an anti-suffrage woman, Clara T. Leonard of Massachusetts, who wrote, “One sex lives in public, in constant conflict with the world; the other sex must live chiefly in private and domestic life, or the race will be without homes and gradually die out.”32
Most senators sided with Vest, not the pro-suffrage Dolph. Only sixteen senators voted for the suffrage amendment; thirty-four voted against, with twenty-six not voting, including fourteen senators paired yes and no. An editorial in the New York Times said that women should not despair over a vote that “at the present stage of the agitation is not a desperate showing by any means.”33 Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, said more cynically, “If the Senate will not allow women to vote,” the women should all “emigrate to Wyoming and leave them in their lonely bachelorhood occupying the Senate.” Lillie Devereaux Blake, representing women’s suffrage groups in New York, commented, “When you see a little skinny, wizened-up man you may know he will oppose women, because he thinks if he gives women a chance they will overshadow him.”34
Three years later, in 1890, women’s rights advocates healed their split and merged their competing groups into the single National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new association, with Stanton as symbolic president and Anthony as de facto leader, had about seven thousand members and focused on suffrage as the fount of all other rights. Still, unity did not portend victory for suffrage. Just eight months after NAWSA’s founding, voters in South Dakota crushed a women’s suffrage referendum by a two-to-one margin. During the next twenty years, only a few lightly populated western states adopted women’s suffrage, and Congress held no additional votes on a constitutional amendment.
Especially bitter for suffragists was their failure to gain momentum for the cause by winning voting rights in the nation’s most populous state, New York, at its constitutional convention of 1894. Suffragists failed to get women seated at the convention, which the legislature called for the express purpose of curbing political corruption, and faced opposition from both men and women arrayed into anti-suffrage leagues across the state. Stanton wrote that “one of the most interesting features of the present agitation for woman suffrage is the organization of the women who are opposed to the demand.” She noted the irony that these women, like the suffragists, were engaging in politics by drafting and signing petitions, canvassing door to door, lobbying convention delegates, holding meetings, and making public speeches. She hoped, largely in vain, that the anti-suffrage women would come to learn of “the helpless condition of women in this Republic,” and that “universal suffrage is the first truth and only basis of a genuine republic.”35
Even before the New York convention convened, the Baltimore Sun noted that women’s suffrage had suffered a “Waterloo defeat” when the New York suffrage committee voted unanimously against enfranchising women, and sixteen to one against holding a popular referendum on women’s suffrage.36 The committee warned that women’s participation in politics would introduce “political dispute and party work in family life, which will develop and increase estrangement, separations, infidelity, and divorce, and the consequent destruction of the home.” The full convention voted ninety-seven to fifty-eight in support of the committee’s recommendation against a suffrage referendum.37
Jean Brooks Greenleaf of Rochester, president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, tried to snatch a small victory from the jaws of this defeat saying, “Our vote of 58 was a great improvement on the 19 votes which we had in the convention of 1867.” But the New York Times observed that after the convention, suffrage leaders “could not be found” in New York City, and “the equal-suffrage headquarters at 10 East Fourteenth Street were closed and no one could be found there to speak upon the matter.”38
Prospects for women’s voting rights picked up in 1911, when voters in California approved a suffrage amendment to the state constitution by a bare majority of 50.7 percent. In the nation’s twelfth most populous and most rapidly growing state, suffragists, who ranged from socialists to wealthy socialites, overcame widespread opposition from an anti-suffrage movement financed by the liquor industry, which conflated suffrage with Prohibition, given women’s preeminence in the anti-alcohol movement. According to one historian of the California campaign, “suffragists engaged in precinct canvassing and organization, soapboxing, automobile campaigns, staging pageants and parades, coordinating press work, producing literature, advertising and slogans for mass distribution, and holding public outdoor meetings and rallies.” The women “pushed the battle for woman suffrage ‘out of the parlors and into the streets.’ ”39
As before, the women mixed arguments from stances of principle and prejudice. Enfranchised white women, they said, would offset the state’s dangerous minority vote. California suffragist Maud Younger warned that “women of California are in daily competition with Asiatics.… In different parts of the country the vote has been given to negroes, Indians, Hindoos, and other Asiatics. Have they greater interests to protect than have the American women? Are they more capable of citizenship?”40 Not until 1926 did California repeal the provision of its 1879 constitution prohibiting any “native of China” from voting.41
In California and elsewhere, women tapped into the burgeoning movement for progressive reform. The loose coalition of reformers known as progressives believed that government should serve the public interest by steering a middle course between unchecked corporate greed and socialist remedies. The progressives backed economic reforms such as corporate regulation, progressive income taxes, restrictions on child labor, and public ownership of utilities. They demanded moral reforms such as Prohibition and immigration restriction.
Politically, progressive reformers sought both to purify politics and, most critically for disenfranchised women, to expand the impact of the vote. Beginning with South Dakota in 1898, some twenty-two states by 1918 had adopted the initiative, which authorized the electorate by petition to vote directly on legislation and in some jurisdictions on constitutional amendments. Most states also adopted the referendum, which authorized either the legislature or a petition of the electorate to place enacted legislation on the ballot to be voted up or down at a subsequent election.42 Some states adopted the recall of public officials as well—a form of direct democracy that the first Congress had rejected for federal officeholders in the late eighteenth century. After the path-breaking recall of Mayor Hiram Gill of Seattle in 1911, reform advocate H. S. Gilbertson said, “No elected public officer in this country was ever before relieved of his authority and emoluments without a legal process, before the end of a definite term. But now, public office subject to the recall becomes a public trust.” Not coincidentally, the successful recall of Mayor Gill marked the first election for Washington women after the achievement of statewide suffrage in 1910.43
For the first time in the early twentieth century, voters gained the opportunity to supersede nominations by closed party conventions and caucuses, and instead elect nominees for public offices. By the 1920s, nearly every state had required direct primaries for at least some positions. For presidential nominations, a 1928 compilation found that seventeen states had binding primaries for selecting delegates to national nominating conventions. The rules for conducting primaries varied markedly among the states. Closed primaries authorized voting only by those voters who registered with a party or pledged their loyalty to party nominees. Open primaries posed no restrictions on a voter’s choice of primaries, whereas partially open primaries authorized this option only for unaffiliated voters.44
The direct primary diminished party discipline in elections, encouraged candidates to form their own political organizations, and expanded candidate-centered voting by the electorate. It contributed to increased ticket-splitting by voters and to the consolidation of support by candidates in areas of strength in the primaries. Even for presidential nominations, with party organizations still appointing most national convention delegates, primaries became important for selecting delegates and testing the popular appeal of competing candidates.45
Through the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913, reformers succeeded in gaining the election of U.S. senators directly by popular vote, supplanting 125 years of selection by state legislatures. Echoing the arguments made for the Twelfth Amendment more than a century earlier, proponents of direct elections said that the reform would bring government closer to the people and avoid the corruption of vote-trading and -buying in legislatures. The report of a U.S. House Committee endorsing the Seventeenth Amendment noted “the instances of bribery and corruption which have taken place in the legislatures of the different States in the last 25 years, and which could not have occurred had popular elections prevailed.” Popular elections would rest the choice of senators “securely upon the judgment and wisdom of the individual voter” and avoid the legislative deadlocks that at times deprived states of full representation in the Senate.46
In this newly receptive climate, suffragists deemphasized arguments from pure egalitarian principle and instead turned around the claim that politics would corrupt women. They insisted instead that virtuous women would uncorrupt politics and bolster reform. These liberal, maternalist women shared conservative assumptions about sex differences but sought to raise socially conscious children and apply principles of the household economy to political and social reform as engaged voters. During the California campaign, suffragist leader Mary Swift said that votes for women “will be a benefit to society,” and that women voters “knew what justice means for humanity, [have] minds and hearts big and kind enough to be a great help in forming the policy of our government, of any government.” An advertisement called “I Can Handle Both,” published in the San Francisco Call, stressed that women were capable of shouldering responsibilities as mothers and as voters who would bring the morality of the home into politics. The Equal Suffrage League of Baltimore pointed to the adoption in Denver, Colorado, of progressive reforms, proclaiming, “The women voters led!”47
Women in the anti-suffrage movement drew on similar maternalist ideology for opposite effect. These conservatives, who formed the backbone of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, urged women not to repudiate custom and tradition by barging into politics but instead to maintain their motherly responsibilities of rearing courageous sons and domesticated daughters. Women’s suffrage, they argued, would confuse sex roles, weaken families, and instigate a destructive “war of the sexes.” An “Iowa Woman,” writing in the preeminent anti-suffragist newspaper The Woman Patriot, said women “cannot take on the affairs of government and political life, without neglecting or abandoning vital duties that they are foreordained to accomplish. They are the Mothers of all mankind, and the home makers for the world. No man can fill that place.… The Mother and the Home is the making of the man.”48
In the South, both white and black women fought for suffrage, although largely independent of one another as black suffragists forged their own organizations. White suffragists in the South had varying views on race. Some mirrored the anti-Asian arguments made by suffragists in California, claiming that votes for women would strengthen white supremacy by countering the black vote. A 1906 statement by the Conference of Southern Women Suffragists said, “We ask for the ballot as a solution of the race problem. There are over 600,000 more white women in the southern states than all the negro men and women combined.”49 Anti-suffrage women and their male allies responded that any expansion of voting rights threatened the South’s restriction of black voting. A statement by Virginia anti-suffragists noted, “Every argument for sexual equality in politics is, and must be, an argument also for racial equality.… If the white woman is entitled to vote because she bears, has borne, or might have borne children, the Negro woman is entitled to the same right for the same reason.”50
Particularly troubling for southern suffragists was the fear that a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage would validate federal intervention in southern race relations. Laura Clay of Kentucky, a leader of NAWSA and a nationally prominent advocate of state-level suffrage for women—although with a literacy requirement to restrict the black vote—opposed what became known as the Susan B. Anthony Women’s Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clay premised her arguments on states’ rights, not race, decrying the proposed amendment as the “Anthony Force Bill,” the pejorative that southerners applied to bills that would enforce voting rights for African Americans. In mustering opposition to a federal amendment, she wrote to western members of Congress who, she said, also had a “race problem.” She warned that adoption of the Anthony Amendment might threaten anti-Asian laws. At the 1919 NAWSA convention, she was one of only three delegates, all from the South, voting against a resolution supporting the Anthony Amendment. The Woman Patriot gleefully cited her opposition. After Congress adopted the amendment in 1919, Clay opposed its ratification by the states.51
In the North, the lobbying and grassroots campaign for suffrage drew its vitality from the same ethnic, racial, and religious forces that backed Prohibition. Suffragist Florence Kelley told Congress in 1906, “I have rarely heard a ringing suffrage speech that did not refer to the ‘ignorant and degraded’ men or ‘ignorant immigrants’ as our masters.”52 In twenty-seven suffrage and prohibition referenda held in northern states from 1906 to 1918, white, mostly evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly lined up behind both Prohibition and suffrage, irrespective of their economic standing, literacy, occupation, or urban or rural residence.53
By 1911, the suffrage movement had advanced in numbers and in the sophistication of its political organization. California alone boasted more than fifty local women’s suffrage groups active at the time of the referendum. Independent organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs came to back the previously isolated suffrage movement. A Mrs. John O’Connor, president of the Chicago Women’s Club, explained in 1912 that the concerns of club women had expanded from “the home and its needs” to “all matters pertaining to the growth and welfare of the city and its people. These awakened interests and the work which they demanded made these women feel the need of the ballot.”54
Since the formation of NAWSA, women had become more educated and more likely to work outside the home. In most states, married women had gained control of their own earnings, the right to own property, and expanded access to divorce and child custody. It became difficult to argue that a woman who had graduated from college and taught high school was unfit to vote in elections. Yet women still faced the daunting task of convincing men who held sway over politics to enfranchise women in their states. Politically, women needed to forge strategic alliances with political parties seeking to gain favor with existing constituents or from newly empowered women voters. In Colorado, the suffragists allied with the insurgent Populist Party; in California, with the Republican Party.
The victory in California led to winning suffrage campaigns in a half-dozen other states during the next three years, including presidential and municipal voting rights in Illinois, the first suffrage state east of the Mississippi River. Still, the state-by-state campaign promised only limited success and protracted struggle. Opponents defeated suffrage referenda in the northeastern states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania in 1915, and suffragists saw little hope of victory in southern and border states. So, when Carrie Chapman Catt became president of NAWSA for the second time in 1915, women regrouped and changed their strategy.
Under Catt’s leadership, the 1916 NAWSA convention adopted her “Winning Plan,” which substituted national strategy for disjoined efforts in the states. The movement would push for state-level suffrage only to advance prospects for the Anthony Amendment; the more states they won for suffrage, the more members of Congress they could muster for their cause. NAWSA would focus on winning one state in the South, one full suffrage state in the Midwest, and one populous state in the East. The women would peacefully and respectfully but persistently lobby members of Congress and speak before congressional committees. They would work to elect representatives and senators who backed suffrage for women. Like Stanton earlier, Catt also played on racist sentiments, decrying that ignorant blacks could vote but not educated, refined women.55
In 1916, both Republicans and Democrats had endorsed suffrage for women in their party platforms, but only by the states. However, Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes called for adoption of the Anthony Amendment, putting pressure on his opponent, President Woodrow Wilson, who felt constrained by opposition from the solidly Democratic South. Although Wilson’s victories in 1912 and 1916 appeared to set back the suffragists’ cause, they achieved their most notable success in 1917 by winning voting rights for women in a New York State referendum. Given the recent defeat in New York and other large states such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, another loss in New York might well have stalled the suffrage movement indefinitely.
In a stunning turn of events, the suffrage amendment, which had lost 42 to 58 percent in 1915, prevailed 54 to 46 percent just two years later. In 1915, no borough of New York City and only seven small counties out of fifty-seven upstate backed suffrage. Yet in 1917, every borough and a majority of upstate counties voted for suffrage. The city’s vote for suffrage exceeded 60 percent. As compared to the earlier tally, the results of the 1917 referendum reflected the expansion of the traditional suffrage base. A dynamic coalition of labor, socialists, and New York City’s Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine led to newly won support from immigrant and African American voters. To illustrate, the majority-foreign-born assembly districts in Manhattan according to the U.S. censuses of 1910 and 1920 voted 57 percent against suffrage in 1915 but 69 percent for suffrage in 1917.56
Despite this victory, by 1918, only about a third of the states had granted women full suffrage. It took America’s entry into World War I and a combination of political action and protest to rescue the Anthony Amendment from legislative limbo. In 1916, militant suffragists, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, defected from NAWSA to form the independent National Woman’s Party (NWP), backed by a few wealthy women donors. Unlike the liberal maternalists of NAWSA, the feminists of the NWP rejected sex differences and advocated the complete social and legal equality of men and women. The small, lily-white, but ideologically consistent NWP pushed for suffrage nationally through a constitutional amendment and rejected NAWSA’s conventional political tactics in favor of nonviolent civil disobedience to humiliate President Wilson and his Democratic Party for their failure to back the Anthony Amendment.57
After America’s entry into World War I, many women joined the industrial labor force to replace men serving in the military, proving that women could shoulder traditionally male responsibilities. NAWSA organizers, who backed the war effort, made the case to Congress, the president, and the public that women’s patriotic wartime service merited voting rights. NAWSA leaders also drew on support from members of Congress in states that had already enfranchised women and campaigned for new members favorable to women’s voting rights. Catt told a Senate committee in January 1918 that her intention was “to replace our opponents with men who will give us what we want.”58
Leaders of the NWP exploited the contradiction between a war “to make the world safe for democracy,” in Wilson’s words, and the denial of democratic rights to women at home. In 1917, NWP protesters picketed the gates of the White House, braved arrest, organized hunger strikes in prison, and suffered forced feedings, all to dramatize their cause and shame the Wilson administration.
Police arrested and jailed NWP leader Lucy Burns three times for illegal protests. To make an example of the unrepentant Burns, prison guards at the District of Columbia Occoquan Jail in Virginia handcuffed her above her head, looped the handcuffs to the top of her cell door, and left her to suffer for an entire night. To show their solidarity with Burns, suffragists from an adjacent cell voluntarily held their hands above their heads and stood fixed in that position. These were not women hardened to prison life but society ladies accustomed to deference and respect. After enduring this “Night of Terror,” Burns and other women prisoners refused to eat. Worried about having to account for dead women prisoners, the warden ordered Burns transferred to another jail where a doctor forced a feeding tube through her nostril. Burns recalled, “It hurts nose and throat very much and makes nose bleed freely. Tube drawn out covered in blood.”59
In a remarkable speech delivered on the floor of the Senate on September 30, 1918, the president openly endorsed the Anthony Amendment. It had passed the House but remained stalled in the Senate. The mistreatment of protesting women appalled Wilson, who looked ahead to a difficult midterm election, with Republicans leading his party on the suffrage question. In the longer term he wanted not to antagonize but to win over for his party the many women who were already voting and the millions more who would eventually vote. Wilson tied suffrage to the war effort, saying, “We have made partners of the women in this war.… Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” Never had a president intervened so directly and dramatically in congressional deliberations. Still, the suffrage amendment stalled in the Senate, with unanimous opposition from southern Democrats in defiance of their president. But prospects for the Anthony Amendment improved when Republicans regained control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1918.60
In February 1919, the Anthony Amendment fell short in the Senate by one vote of the needed two-thirds majority. Three months later, the House once more voted in favor, with many votes to spare. Then on June 4, 1919, the Senate finally passed the amendment, by a vote of fifty-six to twenty-five, after southern Democrats abandoned a filibuster. Senate Republicans voted thirty-six to eight for the amendment and Democrats twenty to seventeen. Twelve senators were paired for and against, and three senators did not vote. Senators representing southern and border states cast all but two of the Democratic no votes.61
Leaders of both the NWP and NAWSA hailed the Senate vote and looked ahead to ratification by the states. “There is no doubt of immediate ratification,” Paul said. “We enter upon this final stage of the campaign joyously, knowing that women will be enfranchised citizens of this great democracy within a year.” Catt echoed this optimistic view of ratification. She looked ahead to “the end of a long and arduous struggle, needlessly darkened and embittered by the stubbornness of a few at the expense of the many.”62
The women of the NWP have become icons of popular culture, memorialized in the acclaimed docudrama Iron-Jawed Angels starring double Oscar-winner Hillary Swank as Alice Paul and Golden Globe–nominee Frances O’Connor as Lucy Burns. But Congress would not have passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in 1919 without the meticulous political work of NAWSA or the dynamics of party competition. It was NAWSA that led the campaign for state ratification, by no means a sure bet given widespread opposition in the South and border regions.
After thirty-five states ratified the amendment by March 22, 1920, it stagnated one state short of the three-quarters needed for ratification. Only one southern state (Texas) and only four border states had voted for ratification. The suffragists’ last chance for ratification in time for women to vote in the presidential election of 1920 came in mid-August in the former Confederate state of Tennessee.
Suffragists and anti-suffragists from across the nation converged on Tennessee to make their case to legislators, and President Wilson intervened to urge ratification of the suffrage amendment. Then, in one of the most extraordinary reversals of fortune in American history, twenty-four-year-old representative Harry F. Burn, who had been elected two years earlier as the youngest member of the legislature, switched his ratification vote from no to yes. Apparently, Burn had heeded the plea of his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn, who wrote to him saying, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt.… Be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.”63
Although the Nineteenth Amendment still faced court challenges on the ratification process, suffrage leaders hailed the victory in Tennessee, which in Paul’s words, “completes the political democracy of America and enfranchises half the people of a great nation.”64 Catt said, “Now that it is all over the feeling of ‘ceaselessness’ is probably the sensation uppermost with us all.” But “women cannot stop.” NAWSA, she said, now had “a new purpose of making the vote register for an improved citizenship. The women of the national are already lined up under a new name, The League of Women Voters.” Legal challenges to the amendment’s ratification failed, and for the first time in U.S. history, women across America who otherwise qualified for the ballot could vote in 1920.65
The NWP maintained its identity after 1920, with its feminists following a divergent path from that of the liberal maternalists in the League of Women Voters. The NWP pressed for absolute legal equality between men and women, whereas the league supported special protective legislation for women. In 1923, the NWP introduced into Congress an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which both conservatives and the League of Women Voters opposed.
The league, which devoted itself to backing “good government” reforms, declined to help women become decision-makers through efforts to recruit, train, and fund women to compete for public office. President Catt said in 1921, we should be “working primarily for the education of women in citizenship and the removal of illiteracy.… We should drop the committee on Election Laws and Methods.” The league also backed Americanization programs and Prohibition, social welfare and consumer rights, jury service and equal property laws for women, and disarmament. Their work reinforced efforts to “Americanize” immigrant women and instill the virtues of respectable mothering through training in citizenship, English, morals, nutrition, cleanliness, and household budgeting.66
In her 1924 farewell address, President Maud Wood Park of the League of Women Voters said, “The fact that we should like to see more women of the right sort in public office, does not imply, however, that the League as an organization ought to start electioneering for women.” Rather, the league would “help women make the best of themselves as voters” and advance “the human welfare side of government, in which women are particularly fit to be useful.”67
League women cut themselves off from alliances with racial or ethnic minorities and worked to maintain their Victorian respectability. We “did not want to form a woman’s political party, and we are not ‘feminists’ in the embittered sense so often given to the word,” said Illinois chapter president Mary Morrison.68 Despite its heritage as an advocacy group for excluded women, the league backed stricter naturalization laws and educational requirements for voting. League women upheld the traditional ideal of voting as an individual decision by educated citizens, not as the mobilization of any organized bloc of voters, including women.69
Like the NWP, the league did nothing to combat the disenfranchisement of black women in the South. Its lily-white “Negro Problems Committee” ignored the boulder of racial disenfranchisement and bypassed the South when it opted to kick away a few pebbles through “ballot marking classes for colored women” in “the states where the colored vote is a material and accepted fact.” Two years later, the chair of the committee, renamed “Inter-Racial Problems,” said that she had “no report of meetings held or conferences conducted,” but that she had worked to block civil rights laws, because racial issues are “best considered outside of legislative halls.”70 In the 1920s, turnout campaigns led by the League of Women Voters and other groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Legion, and the National Civic Federation did not target typical nonvoters but focused on white, native, middle-class Americans as ideal voters, shutting out allegedly less-qualified “problem” voters.71
The league’s post-suffrage decision-making greatly diminished its impact on the next goal for women: translating voting opportunities into the holding of political office and participation in the policy-making of Congress and state and local governments. In effect, the league became a nonpartisan advocate of what it viewed as good government measures, not an advocacy group for the enhanced role of women in the political process. During the 1920s, only one woman served in the U.S. Senate (for twenty-four hours to fill a vacancy), and no more than five served in any session of the House. Two women won governor’s positions, one to replace her term-limited husband. In 1930, women held fewer than 2 percent of state legislative seats. A 1924 editorial in Youth’s Home Companion rhetorically asked, “What would have happened if women had aspired to office? … It is noteworthy that they have not done that and the number who have displayed any marked political ambition is small—smaller than most persons anticipated when suffrage was conferred on them.”72
In the United States in 2017, nearly a hundred years after suffrage, women held about 20 percent of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, comparable to the worldwide average of representation for women in national legislatures. Unlike the United States, however, other nations have affirmatively addressed the issue of women’s underrepresentation in elected office. About half of the world’s nations have adopted legislative or voluntary quotas for women’s parliamentary representation. Quotas apply both to candidates for office and to legislative seats reserved for women. In the 2012 elections, women won 24 percent of national legislative seats in nations with legislated quotas, 22 percent in nations with voluntary quotas, and 12 percent in nations with no quotas.73
As of 2017, the United States has not elected a woman president. Other nations have done somewhat better: among 146 nations studied by the World Economic Forum, 38 percent have had a woman head of state serve for one year or more. However, in 2017, only fifteen women (10%) were serving as heads of state worldwide. Thus, women of the United States, as in other democratic nations across the globe, have yet to attain full participation in political life.74