1914  

GOING BACK IN TIME

LOOKING BACK: 1914

By 1914, when Susan’s story takes place, suffragists had been fighting for women’s right to vote for more than 60 years. Suffragists had to battle the popular belief that women should tend to their homes and families, leaving politics and business to men. Some people even insisted that females were too emotional or not intelligent enough to be trusted with complex matters like government.

By the time of Susan’s story, early suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had given decades of their lives to the struggle. During the years these women worked for suffrage, the nation fought the Civil War, freed its slaves, and gave black men the right to vote with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Anthony and Stanton worked tirelessly for an amendment giving women the vote, but Congress defeated it again and again. Eventually, a few western states allowed women to vote—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho—but by the time Anthony died in 1906, not one state east of the Mississippi allowed women to vote. And much of the suffrage movement’s fire seemed to die with Anthony.

Soon, though, a new generation of women—including Alice Paul—brought fresh energy to the suffrage movement. While studying in England from 1907 to 1910, Paul met the Pankhursts, a mother and her daughters who were setting England’s suffrage movement ablaze. The Pankhursts and their followers were called “the wild women of England” because they were willing to face arrest and jail to carry their message to the public. Some even resorted to throwing rocks and smashing windows. Many Pankhurst followers, including Alice Paul, served prison sentences. In jail, they endured mistreatment and protested with hunger strikes.

Alice Paul didn’t agree with everything the Pankhursts were doing, but she was inspired by their energy and by their success at drawing attention to suffrage. In America at that time, people barely noticed the suffrage movement. In 1910, Alice Paul returned to the United States determined to change that.

By then, most American suffragists had given up on changing the Constitution. Instead, they were trying to win the vote for women one state at a time. Alice Paul insisted there was a better, quicker way—passage of the Constitutional amendment Anthony and Stanton had fought for, guaranteeing every woman the right to vote.

Alice Paul and other young leaders used some of the Pankhursts’ ideas to win support for the amendment. They held outdoor rallies and parades, carried signs, and gave speeches in public places. And, for the first time, American suffragists looked beyond the wealthy and the middle class for support. Under Paul’s leadership, they began to bring the movement to poor, working-class, and immigrant women, much as the fictional Bea Rutherford did.

In large cities, poor families like the O’Neals—many of them immigrants—lived in ramshackle buildings called tenements. Large families lived in apartments of only two or three rooms. Thousands of people were crammed into a few blocks. Most, like Mum, needed jobs so desperately that they worked long hours under terrible conditions. Many took jobs in filthy, unsafe factories, often working 12 to 14 hours a day for less than a dollar.

Such neighborhoods were usually controlled by apolitical machine—a powerful group of local politicians much like Lester Barrow and his men. Such men, called political bosses, had great influence over the poor, uneducated people who lived in their districts. Political bosses helped families in times of sickness and trouble, but they expected absolute loyalty in return. People were thrown out of their homes and jobs if they displeased the bosses, just as Mum’s friend Kathleen was. New York City had the most famous political machine in America. It was called Tammany Hall, after the building where the political bosses met. For years political machines in major cities opposed suffrage. They feared that women voters might limit their power or even vote them out of office.

Alice Paul not only brought the suffrage movement into tenements and factories, she also made the White House take notice. In 1913, Paul organized a huge parade to take place in Washington, D.C., on the day that President Woodrow Wilson took office. The parade ended in a riot, and the police refused to help the suffragists, just as Susan experienced at the rally she attended. The event made headlines across the country. American suffrage was getting noticed at last.

Over the next few years, suffragists gained more and more attention. They staged parades and rallies in every state. They picketed, carried signs, collected names on petitions, spoke in lecture halls and on street corners—wherever they could get someone to listen. Sometimes they were arrested and jailed, but like Mum, they came out even more determined to win their rights. The national organizations that worked for suffrage grew by leaps and bounds, counting among their members men and women from all walks of life. The cry “Votes for Women” echoed in towns and cities all across America.

Finally, in 1918 President Wilson decided to support the suffrage amendment. He helped convince other lawmakers that the time had come to grant women the vote. On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was signed into law, giving women full rights as United States citizens.

Yet Alice Paul and other suffrage leaders knew the fight for women’s equality had only begun. Perhaps someday American girls could not only look forward to voting for president, they could even hope to be president.