HISTORY MATTERS. Susan B. Anthony knew that, but she refused to stay stuck in the past. When the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage appeared in 1902, the eighty-two-year-old Anthony looked back with pride at what the movement had accomplished, but she also looked forward to what still needed to be done. With a firm hand and a penetrating choice of words, she penned this inscription in her friend Caroline Healey Dall’s personal copy: “This closes the records of the 19th century of work done by and for women—what the 20th century will show—no one can foresee—but that it will be vastly more and better—we cannot fail to believe. But you & I have done the best we knew—and so must rest content—leaving all to younger hands. Your sincere friend and coworker, Susan B. Anthony … Rochester, N.Y.”1 Anthony had devoted more than fifty years of her life to the woman suffrage movement, and victory was nowhere in sight when she wrote those words. Yet she remained proud of what she and her co-workers had done for the cause, and confident that the future would bring even more progress. I suspect that the suffrage leaders who guided the movement to its successful conclusion on August 26, 1920 felt the same way.
That hard-fought victory, the culmination of three generations of sustained political mobilization and spirited public advocacy, represented a breakthrough for American women as well as a major step forward for American democracy. By the early twentieth century, women’s lives had already moved far beyond the domestic sphere. Barriers had fallen, and opportunities had opened up. Yet the fundamental responsibility of citizenship—the right to vote—was arbitrarily denied to half the population. The Nineteenth Amendment changed that increasingly untenable situation, and that is no small achievement.
Participating in the suffrage campaign provided women with the kind of exhilaration and camaraderie often described by men in periods of war or political upheaval. Women were proud to be part of this great crusade, and they cherished the solidarity it engendered for the rest of their lives. Frances Perkins, a veteran of the New York suffrage campaign and the first woman to serve in the cabinet as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, remembered it this way: “The friendships that were formed among women who were in the suffrage movement have been the most lasting and enduring friendships—solid, substantial, loyal—that I have ever seen anywhere. The women learned to like each other in that suffrage movement.”2
The campaign also honed women’s political skills. As Gertrude Foster Brown observed at its conclusion, “We were wiser politically than any group of women had ever been.” Because the opposition of politicians had been so fierce and because most of the public remained indifferent if not outright hostile, women were forced to become extremely effective campaigners, lobbyists, and publicists. Once learned, these skills were put to use after the vote was won. “Men are saying perhaps ‘Thank God, this everlasting woman’s fight is over!’ ” Crystal Eastman observed. “But women, if I know them, are saying, ‘Now at last we can begin.’ ” That sentiment is just as true today as women approach their second century of full voting rights.3
Once the Nineteenth Amendment passed, activists claimed a new moniker—that of women citizens. The sustained activism of suffragists-turned-women-citizens provides the clearest answer to why suffrage mattered. Historians agree that there was no significant difference in the level or intensity of women’s activism “across the great divide”—that is, before and after 1920. In many ways, the suffrage movement was an anomaly, the rare time when a broad range of women came together under one banner. Women collectively won the vote, but they exercised that right as individuals. In the postsuffrage era, politically engaged women embraced a wide variety of causes rather than remaining united around a single goal. A similar insight applies to antisuffragists once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Either way, progressive and conservative women remained active in public life. When it came to politics, women were saying forcefully, “We have come to stay.”4
In this enlarged perspective, the suffrage victory is not a hard stop but part of a continuum of women’s political mobilization stretching not just between 1848 and 1920 but across all of American history. It is still appropriate, indeed welcome, to celebrate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment as an important marker in American women’s history, but rather than positioning 1920 as the end of the story, it is far more fruitful to see it as initiating the next stage in the history of women’s political activism, a story that is still unfolding.
When thinking about the larger implications of the suffrage victory, we also need to remember that many women, especially those in western states, were already voting in the years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In addition, women across the country had recourse to a range of voting opportunities on the local level, such as municipal suffrage or participating in school committee elections, well before the Nineteenth Amendment took effect. Focusing too much on the 1920 milestone downplays the political clout that enfranchised women already exercised. The focus on the 1920 victory also tends to overshadow women’s earlier roles as community builders, organization founders, and influence wielders. Throughout American history, women have been political actors, even without the vote. Women’s political history is far broader than the ratification of a single constitutional amendment.
Another reason for decentering 1920 concerns the plight of African American voters, for whom the Nineteenth Amendment was at most a hollow victory. To be sure, African American women in the North, such as Ida Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell, could now exercise the right to vote—although Terrell would lack full voting rights even today as a resident of Washington, DC, which is not entitled to voting representation in Congress. In 1920, however, the vast majority of African Americans still lived in the South, where their voting rights were effectively eliminated by devices such as whites-only primaries, poll taxes, and literacy tests. For blacks, it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, not the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, or Nineteenth Amendments, that finally removed the structural barriers to voting.5
In a parallel disfranchisement, few Native American women gained the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1884 that the Fourteenth Amendment did not automatically confer citizenship on Native Americans, it took Congress until 1924 to pass legislation declaring that all Native Americans born in the United States were citizens, which cleared the way for tribal women to vote. But as with African Americans after the 1920 milestone, Native American women still faced ongoing restrictions and barriers to voting on the state and local levels, especially in the West, well into the twentieth century.6
Today, the battle for voting rights is far from over. A Supreme Court decision in 2013 significantly weakened key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. People of color and other minorities face obstacles deliberately designed to keep them from exercising their right to vote, such as photo ID laws, purging of voter rolls, and widespread delays at under-resourced polls which serve to suppress voting, especially in urban areas. And large groups, especially convicted felons, are prevented from voting altogether in many states. When assessing who can exercise the right to vote, it is always essential to ask who cannot.
In addition to the importance of woman suffrage for American political history, women’s demand for fair and equitable treatment in the political realm emerges as an integral part of the history of feminism. To protest women’s exclusion from voting demanded an assault on attitudes and ideologies that treated women as second-class citizens; to formulate that challenge involved conceptualizing women as a group whose collective situation needed to be addressed. Even though white suffragists were often clueless that they were speaking primarily from their own privileged class and race positions, the growing consciousness of women’s common concerns fostered a unique sense of sisterhood in early twentieth-century America. The fact that certain groups of women, especially women of color, were often excluded from this supposedly universal vision demonstrates how racism intersected with feminism throughout the woman suffrage movement and during its aftermath. Contemporary feminists have significantly broadened their commitment to recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences and worked hard to include multiple perspectives within the broader feminist framework, but it is still a struggle. The suffrage movement is part of that story, warts and all.
Suffrage mattered to the later careers of suffragists as well. Not all of the women in this book lived to see the suffrage victory, but many enjoyed significant careers in the postsuffrage era. Most of their names are little known within the realm of mainstream history, which says a great deal about how the contributions of politically engaged women are often marginalized or overlooked. Maud Wood Park served as the first president of the National League of Women Voters, and Gertrude Foster Brown oversaw The Woman Citizen, the LWV’s main publication. Ida Wells-Barnett ran for political office in Illinois. Molly Dewson, Rose Schneiderman, and Sue Shelton White all served with distinction in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. Nina Allender pursued her career as an artist. Alice Stone Blackwell continued her activism through the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters. Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan joined the British feminist movement. In her eighties, Mary Church Terrell marched on a picket line in Washington, DC to protest segregation in the nation’s capital.
These examples point to the public continuities of women’s activism before and after suffrage, but the suffrage experience also played out in less visible ways. To paraphrase Betty Friedan about her own involvement in second-wave feminism, participating in the movement changed lives. For women such as Maud Nathan, Cora Smith Eaton, Mary Johnston, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, their suffrage activism came towards the end of long and productive public careers, and thus served as something of a valedictory. For others, such as Claiborne Catlin, who remarried and worked as a school administrator, or Hazel MacKaye, who stepped back from her theatrical career to take care of an ailing mother before succumbing to ill health herself, it was more of a temporary if exciting blip. In ways large and small, suffrage made a difference to all of their subsequent lives.
If there is a clear take-away to these suffrage stories, it is that we need to keep individual lives in focus while also tracking the big picture. Suffragists participated in one of the largest mobilizations of women the United States has ever seen, and being part of that collective effort was immensely rewarding. Even though many of these women were foot soldiers—after all, not every one aspires to be a leader or a general—their rank-and-file contributions made a difference to the larger movement, to the larger society, and to the participants themselves. “It was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity,” Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler realized. “Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.” As one character states in Oreola Williams Haskell’s Banner Bearers: Tales of the Suffrage Campaigns, “It’s not hard to tell what I am. Just an ordinary woman trying to do her best—often with a prayer in her heart—for a great cause.… I am just a cog in a big machine.”7
Biography captures the power and passion of those individual “cogs”; material culture helps make the stories even more real. Sojourner Truth’s carte de visite shows how commitment to a cause could also sustain a livelihood. Hazel MacKaye’s souvenir program from the 1913 Washington, DC suffrage parade demonstrates how the movement marshaled traditional iconography in the service of radical new forms of public spectacle. The treasured prison pins of Hazel Hunkins and other National Woman’s Party members passed down through the generations remind us that women were literally willing to die for the cause. And the lowly ballot box provides a physical reminder of what the movement was all about: the chance for women to cast their ballots alongside men.
That paean to objects and artifacts brings us full circle to Susan B. Anthony’s inscription and the Schlesinger Library, whose archives document so many of the stories told in this book. While women’s history is extraordinarily broad overall, the history of the woman suffrage movement provides a central strand, especially in terms of extant archival material.8 Maud Wood Park was one of those who honored suffrage history by donating her extensive Woman’s Rights Collection to Radcliffe College in 1943. The Woman’s Rights Collection became the Radcliffe Women’s Archives, which in 1965 was renamed the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
There is a direct link between Anthony’s inscription in the History of Woman Suffrage and the emergence of the field of women’s history. Anthony foreshadowed not only the significance of women’s contributions to public life—what the historian Mary Beard, another early supporter of the Women’s Archives, called “woman as force in history”—but also the need for collecting the material that would make studying those contributions possible. Park’s decision to give her suffrage collection an institutional home demonstrated suffragists’ determination to document their story so their legacy would be available to future generations. Their collective decisions in turn laid the foundations for the exponential growth of the field of women’s history since the 1970s, whose scholarship has been central to reclaiming the history of feminism and keeping its legacy alive.9
The specific volume that contained Susan B. Anthony’s handwritten inscription was not part of the original 1943 donation, and there is a story behind that too. The History of Woman Suffrage, especially its first three volumes, was probably found in the library of every prominent suffrage supporter in the country. When suffragists donated their papers to Radcliffe, the Schlesinger Library accumulated multiple copies—sometimes a full set, other times a partial one, some inscribed, some not. No one had paid any special attention to this specific volume included in Caroline Healey Dall’s bequest. Only years later, when every last volume in the library’s vast book collection was barcoded for retrieval and tracking, did a cataloguer pick up Dall’s volume and gasp with astonishment at the inscription it contained. It was almost as if the physical object spoke.
And now, more than a century later, Susan B. Anthony’s inscription speaks again, reminding us that feminism and women’s rights are an ongoing struggle with no clear endpoint in sight and that the woman suffrage movement is a vital part of that story. The strategies and lessons of the suffrage campaign link past and present to provide a clear blueprint for the mobilization of women in our contemporary political landscape. To wit: Embrace a broad definition of political activism which goes beyond electoral politics but still encourages women to change the political system from within. Use popular culture and new forms of media to get the word out, but don’t forget older techniques like lobbying and grassroots organizing. Deploy public spectacle and mass demonstrations to bring women (and men) into public spaces, while simultaneously creating instantly recognizable symbols and slogans to support their demands. Be intersectional: mobilize coalitions and alliances that cross race, class, and other boundaries and draw on the energies of multiple, overlapping generations. Remember that feminism is a cumulative effort, not a one-off event, and it will always be necessary. All of these observations are as relevant today as they were at the height of suffrage mobilization in the 1910s. History can be both a guide and an inspiration.
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson grasped that dual legacy when they collaborated on The Mother of Us All, an operatic pageant that premiered in 1947. Following on the heels of their groundbreaking opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), The Mother of Us All tells the story of the winning of political rights for women in the United States through the life of Susan B. Anthony. The cast of characters includes historical figures such as Daniel Webster, John Adams, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as some unusual additions such as the actress Lillian Russell and the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. The opera culminates in a scene at the US Capitol, where a statue honoring Susan B. Anthony is unveiled.
As befits its creator, Gertrude Stein’s playful but pointed libretto contains many whimsical moments, but its overall thrust is clear. The Mother of Us All is an operatic assault on the patriarchy. One of Susan B. Anthony’s lines has special resonance: “I speak as loudly as I can.… I even speak louder than I can.”10 The powerful voices that suffragists raised to win the vote echo in the activism of the generations of women who followed and still speak loudly today.