A BRIEF HISTORY OF WOMEN’S POLITICAL INEQUALITY
“A woman in politics is like a monkey in a toy shop. She can do no good, and may do harm.”
—UNITED STATES SENATOR, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1814
VICTORIA WOODHULL, THE first woman to run for president, spent the night of the 1872 presidential election in New York City’s Ludlow Street Jail. She would remain there for the next thirty days, unable to raise the $16,000 bail to defend herself against federal obscenity charges for revealing a sex scandal involving the nation’s most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher.
Granted, spending Election Day in jail did not affect Woodhull’s electoral chances. A beautiful divorcée who practiced free love, conducted séances, and published the first U.S. translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Woodhull was the candidate of an obscure third party that hadn’t qualified for the ballot in a single state. President Ulysses S. Grant was reelected in a landslide.
ONE HUNDRED AND forty years after Woodhull’s symbolic run, America still has not elected a woman president. Who is to blame?
The roots of our presidential gender gap stretch all the way back to the Founding Fathers. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he did not in fact intend to include women. His fellow Founding Fathers, likewise, passed over in silence the question of women’s political rights. The U.S. Constitution, written in secret by fifty-five men behind closed curtains in the summer of 1787, spelled out exactly how “we the people” would govern ourselves. It included not a word on women’s right to self-government.
Indeed Jefferson, America’s third president, held remarkable ideas about the “good ladies,” whom he believed were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” Instead, he wrote, American women valued “the tender and tranquil amusement of domestic life,” and “were contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate.” Jefferson left 6,700 books to the Library of Congress and founded the University of Virginia but once said that he had never given a thought to women’s education. He refused to appoint women to federal offices when he was president, saying it would be “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”
As every American schoolchild knows, colonial Americans declared independence from England, fought the American Revolution, and created a new republic to recover individual rights to freedom and self-government. But in the eyes of the law, a woman ceased to exist as an individual once she got married. Under the English common law doctrine of coverture, she was legally dependent on her husband and could not own property, keep her own earnings, or make contracts. In the eyes of philosophy, women were inferior. At the mercy of their emotions, women were unfit to exercise political rights. The creator made women “weak and timid, in comparison with man, and had thus placed her under his control, as well as under his protection,” a delegate to Virginia’s constitutional convention said. In other words, freedom for man meant the consent to be governed. Freedom for woman meant the consent to be married, and once she did, her actual freedom vanished.
American patriots added their own peculiar gloss to these legal and philosophical ideas that they had brought with them from Europe. The infant republic, surrounded on all sides by enemies, depended for its survival on women’s submission to the biological division of labor. John Adams insisted that the family was “the foundation of national morality,” and ignored his wife Abigail Adams’s call to “remember the ladies.” (Abigail’s famous letter included a pointed criticism of Virginian slaveholders as well.) John spent most of the war away while Abigail, alone, managed their farm and educated their four children—including John Quincy, America’s sixth president—all while surviving British attacks, a smallpox epidemic, and an outbreak of dysentery that killed her mother. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most renowned scientists and Enlightenment thinkers of the age, believed that “every man that is really a man is master of his own family.” A good wife consented to this arrangement with “a becoming obedience.” It’s worth noting that Deborah Franklin, his wife, was his business partner. On another occasion, Franklin wrote a patriotic satire in which he likened women who refused to bear children to a British troop of pig castrators dispatched across the Atlantic to exercise their art on American men.
IT’S HARDLY THAT the Founding Fathers didn’t know better.
In 1776, when Abigail Adams accused her husband John and his fellow patriots of hypocrisy—”whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives”—she might have been a step ahead of her time. But by the early 1790s and Washington’s presidency, “the rights of women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear,” one congressman wrote. “They are now heard as familiar terms in every part of the United States.”
The expression women’s rights was made popular in the United States by Mary Wollstonecraft, a London political activist and writer, in her 1792 essay, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Wollstonecraft’s essay was widely known and circulated in the United States. In fact, more Americans owned a copy of “The Rights of Woman” than owned patriot leader Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man.” Following Wollstonecraft’s example, Americans wrote many poems, plays, and essays exploring women’s rights. (Like many women before 20th-century advances in medicine, Wollstonecraft died of complications from giving birth, just seven years after her famous pamphlet was published. The daughter who survived, Mary Shelley, grew up to write the novel Frankenstein.) In “On the Equality of the Sexes,” one of the most influential patriot writers, Judith Sargent Murray, wrote, “The ‘Rights of Women’ begin to be understood. Our young women are forming a new era in female history.”
Plenty of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic were perfectly able to see the gap between America’s stated ideals and the reality. A nation supposedly founded on self-evident truths about human equality was giving political rights to some people while depriving others of their most basic human rights. (That recognition, in fact, catalyzed the first movement in world history to abolish slavery, and during the Revolutionary era all the northern states set in motion the end of slavery.) One important legal thinker could not help but point out that women were taxed without consent, like “aliens, children, idiots, and lunatics.” Even teenagers debated women’s political rights. In a 1793 graduation speech, one girl accused her fellow countrymen of the sort of behavior that had gotten the British kicked out of the colonies in the first place: “The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us. Who shut them? Man; despotic man, first made us incapable of the duty, and then forbid us the exercise.” One New York woman wrote about the “curious fact that a republic which avows equality of right as its first principle persists in an ungenerous exclusion of the female sex from its executive department.” A sympathetic character in one play called The Rights of Woman says, “This constitution is unjust and absurd. Lawmakers thought as little of comprehending us in their code of liberty, as if we were pigs, or sheep.”
To be sure, the belief that women were inferior to men remained common in early America. However, it is not quite accurate to say the Founding Fathers were merely men of their era who shared its prejudices and couldn’t have been expected to embrace women’s equality. After all, they were men of the Enlightenment who valued rational inquiry. And they were men of unusual talent, creativity, and intellect. Franklin was considered throughout the capitals of Europe to be one of the world’s leading scientists. General George Washington defeated the world’s most powerful empire with a ragtag volunteer army. Jefferson was the president of the American Philosophical Society. And really, with so many people talking about women’s rights, you didn’t have to be Galileo or Einstein to discover that women had the same natural right to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Thanks to Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and untold numbers of Americans whose names are lost to us, anyone who cared to listen could consider its truth.
ON THE OTHER hand, despite what the Declaration of Independence said, a good portion of America’s Founding Fathers did not in any modern sense believe that all people were equal. George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and the men who joined them in the Federalist Party were absolutely certain that government should be run by society’s natural leaders. Themselves.
Indeed, Washington and Adams spent the weeks leading up to America’s first presidential inauguration absorbed with how best to impress the common people with their own superiority. Vice President Adams felt tremendous anxiety as he pondered how to address George Washington. What about “His Most Benign Highness,” Adams thought. Washington preferred “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.” The Senate split the difference and recommended that Washington and all future presidents be called “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of Their Liberties.” While the Senate met behind closed doors and kept no transcript of the debate, Virginia congressman James Madison—America’s fourth POTUS—became alarmed. After all, America had just won a revolution against another King George. Madison maneuvered to have the House vote on calling the president, simply, the president of the United States, and the Senate was stuck with the decision.
The debate has a distinctly Monty Python and the Holy Grail feel about it. But as the eminent historian Gordon Wood observed, “Although America becoming a monarchy might seem absurd, in 1789 it did not seem so at all.” When Washington won unanimous election, for example, his future secretary of war wished him a “reign long and happy over us” and told him, “You are now a King, under a different name.” Washington typically traveled to public events like a European monarch, riding in a cream-colored coach pulled by four white horses accompanied by servants wearing livery uniform. Adams—who never fought in the Continental Army—wore a sword when he presided over the Senate. In Europe, a sword was a symbol that you were a titled aristocrat.
These kind of inegalitarian ideas were reflected in state laws about who could and could not vote. The year Adams became president, after Washington’s two terms in office, only 23 percent of the American population was eligible to vote. Even a white man—if he belonged to the wrong religion, or didn’t own enough property, or didn’t pay taxes—might not be enfranchised, depending on which state he lived in. In other words, women weren’t the only ones excluded from political rights.
That changed over the next thirty years. By the time America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams (Adams’s son) was defeated by Andrew Jackson, nearly all white men had gained the right to vote and hold office. If the heart of democracy is rule by the people, by the 1830s the United States was the most democratic nation on the face of the earth.
However, expanding the vote to all white men went hand in iron glove with taking rights away from others.
Consider New Jersey. The state’s 1776 constitution enfranchised all “free inhabitants” who owned at least fifty pounds worth of property, and free black men and unmarried women who owned property did in fact vote. Was that just sloppy drafting? No, the legislature later demonstrated, when it added the words he or she to a bill, to clarify that the state constitution had intended to enfranchise women who owned property and paid taxes. A report in a state newspaper confirmed that the legislature acted “from a principle of justice, deeming it right that every free person who pays a tax should have a vote.”
So some widows and single women in New Jersey were able to and did vote. President Jefferson’s party in New Jersey put an end to it. In 1807, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans accused their opponents, the Federalists, of dressing up as women so that they could vote more than once. In the end, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans struck an ugly little deal. Federalists agreed to disfranchise propertied women in exchange for Democratic-Republicans agreeing to disfranchise free blacks. (Free blacks tended to vote for the Jeffersonian party in New Jersey.) Together, Democratic-Republican and Federalist white men passed a law restricting the vote to white male tax-paying citizens.
As the New Jersey case shows, some free blacks and some women had the right to vote in the early republic. But nearly all the new constitutions adopted during the Jacksonian era’s expansion of the suffrage explicitly said the right belonged to “males,” “white male citizens,” or “white men.” In the new, more democratic constitutions, not a single state enfranchised women, even though women’s legal and political rights were discussed at the constitutional conventions. Several states disfranchised free black men.
At the same time, day-to-day politics became more thoroughly a world of men, by men, and for men. On election days, party leaders marshaled their voters, who then marched military-style to the polls with their rifles over their shoulders. Riots were commonplace and everyone drank. A lot.
This was no place for women.
EVEN AS THE founding generation drew the line against the Rights of Woman, women’s contributions to the Revolution left their mark, and new ideas about gender took root. Americans in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War came to understand their society as if it were made up of two distinctive ecosystems, each with its own natural laws and dominant being. Politics, the market, and the military, where competition and conflict prevailed, were the domains of man, the competitive and self-interested sex. The home, the nursery, and the church were the domains of woman, the nurturing and benevolent sex. Because of women’s biological connection to child-rearing, women came to be seen as the selfless and morally superior sex.
In other words, many outdated stereotypes—that men are biologically driven to compete and women are biologically driven to nurture; that women’s place is in the home and men are naturally suited to be public leaders; that women are more spiritual, more peaceful, more virtuous—took root during the first decades of our nation’s history.
Such Mars-Venus thinking rings harsh in a 21st-century ear. Indeed, these ideas have been the very pillars of women’s inequality in politics and the economy. Only in the last few decades have they been toppled, and resistance to gender equality in some quarters remains. Still, this cult of domesticity (as historians have called it) was a decided improvement over the colonial past—when men did hold the power of patriarchy in a legal sense and women were occasionally burned to death as witches.
Not only did women gain substantial new powers in the home in the early republic, but together these ideas about women’s moral superiority, selflessness, and natural connection to children led to a new political role for women. True, no American woman could vote or hold office, but they had a more important calling: to raise their sons to be good American patriots and citizens. Metaphorically speaking, women were mothers of the republic. The infant nation desperately needed them in the home with their sons and daughters, molding and educating future American leaders and future American mothers, not in the voting booth or in Congress.
IN 1829, HARRIET Beecher Stowe organized the first women’s petition to Congress in the nation’s history. Stowe was outraged at President Andrew Jackson’s plan to expel several Indian nations from their home states. Explaining herself in religious terms and disavowing a political motive—women “have nothing to do with any struggle for power”—Stowe spearheaded an effort that brought in 1,500 signatures against Indian Removal.
By this time, traditional gendered notions of women’s essential role as wives and mothers had erased almost all trace of the Revolutionary era’s debates about women’s rights. Yet in a nation founded on high ideals about human potential and awash in religious fervor, the belief in women’s moral superiority could be politically potent. Social reform movements spread like prairie grass throughout the free states in the early 19th century, and women made up the foot soldiers in most of them. As historian Rosemarie Zagarri noted, women’s activism was “an extension of their feminine role, not a challenge to it.”
Women’s moralistic cast of mind was especially congenial to the movement to abolish slavery. As abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison saw it, participating in party politics was tantamount to a “pact with the devil,” given that both parties allowed slaveholders to dictate what could be said or done in the United States. By the late 1830s, abolitionism was the number one reform cause in the Northern free states. Tens of thousands of ordinary women participated in the movement, while individual women such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Abby Kelley, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and Lucy Stone emerged as nationally recognized movement leaders. Such higher, selfless motives could spur women to violate gender conventions. In 1838, Angelina Grimké became the first American woman to address a legislature. And the moral stance of purity and virtue should not be confused with a lack of courage. When Abby Kelley became the first woman to speak at a mixed-sex abolitionist meeting in 1838, a pro-slavery mob attacked the meeting with stones and torches and burned down the hall where they met.
Men welcomed women’s labor for the abolitionist cause. Up to a point, that is. In 1840, a number of men walked out in protest at the American Anti-Slavery Society convention when a woman, Kelley, was elected to their committee. Later that year at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, American women delegates Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were forced to sit behind a curtain so they could not be seen.
These sorts of experiences in the anti-slavery movement got women thinking. Stanton and Mott returned home from London determined to create a reform group to champion the rights of women. Women were circulating petitions to Congress, raising money for the cause, attending public meetings and rallies, giving speeches, and writing pamphlets and books—in short, doing everything men did in politics. Except, of course, voting and holding elective office.
“If I were to give free vent to all my pent-up wrath concerning the subordination of women, I might frighten you,” abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner in the late 1840s. “Suffice it to say, either the theory of our government is false, or women have a right to vote.”
In 1848, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first American women’s rights convention. Stanton was already convinced that the right to vote was the key for “woman to be free, as man is free.” The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments reached back to America’s founding ideal. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal,” it began, and closed with a full-throated demand for women’s equal rights: “Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation . . . we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”
American equal-rights feminism was born in the movement to abolish slavery. But abolitionism also reinforced the notion that women were the metaphorical mothers of the republic, as well as nourished the seed of an alternative claim about women’s place in America’s democracy. Women deserved a political voice not because they were equal to men, but because they were better than men. Women had little interest in competing on an equal footing in the political arena, so this line of thinking went. Rather, women would sweep in like Jesus to the Temple Mount, banishing the corrupt partisans and cleansing the seat of power of sin and sinners.
On one hand, the metaphor of women as mothers of the republic offered women leverage to influence the most critical public debates of their time. Women had no political rights, per se, but women spoke with moral and spiritual authority, and men had to listen. On the other hand, such zealotry about women’s purity of purpose and moral superiority made them prone to interpret the inevitable give-and-take of politics in terms of good versus evil. These gendered ideas of virtue and purity ill-equipped women to compete on the partisan political playing field, the place where real political power was won or lost.
In any event, with the conflict between the North and South deepening over slavery, women would just have to wait.
IN 1872, SEVEN years after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, Susan B. Anthony and fourteen other women tried to vote for president. Anthony was arrested and indicted. At Anthony’s trial the next year, as she began to testify on her own behalf, the presiding judge, Supreme Court justice Ward Hunt, interrupted her and would not let her speak in her own defense. He instructed the jury to convict her and, afterward, read a speech he had written before the trial had started. He then made the mistake of asking Anthony if she had anything to say.
“I have many things to say. You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection,” Anthony said, and as she continued he ordered her to sit down. Then he ordered her to stand, and he fined her $100 and the cost of the prosecution. (She never paid the fine.)
“Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life,” Supreme Court justice Joseph Bradley wrote a year after Anthony’s conviction in Bradwell v. Illinois, ruling that Myra Bradwell had no right to practice law because she was a woman. The “harmony” of the family itself would be threatened by Bradwell or any other woman “adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband,” the court argued. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things . . .”
The Founding Fathers who wrote the United States Constitution had been silent about women’s right to self-government. After the Civil War, their heirs clarified that the omission had not been an oversight.
In 1868, for the first time in our history, Congress wrote the word male into the Constitution. Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment said, essentially, if a state deprived any male of the right to vote, it would lose congressional seats proportional to how many male citizens were disfranchised. Or, looked at from another angle, there would be no punishment for denying women access to the ballot box. In 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, declaring that “the right to vote shall not be abridged or denied by the United States on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (It was ratified in 1870.) When Anthony tried to vote in 1872, it remained perfectly legal for states to deprive citizens of the vote on the basis of sex. Every state did.
The movement for woman’s suffrage, which began before the Civil War, remained vibrant into the 1880s. But activists were rebuffed at every turn. They lost every vote in the U.S. Senate. In some states, they won votes in one house of the state legislature only to lose in the other. In Iowa, Maine, and Massachusetts, men voted down woman’s suffrage amendments to state constitutions. In 1880, the Supreme Court conceded in Minor v. Happersett that women were indeed citizens of the United States but also ruled that national citizenship didn’t confer the right to vote.
Granted, there were some baby steps forward in the last decades of the 19th century. Some states expanded women’s rights to make contracts, own property, and sue for divorce. Local governments in sixteen states and territories gave women the right to vote in a few lady matters, such as in school board and municipal elections. The territories of Wyoming and Utah enfranchised women. In Wyoming, where men made up six out of every seven residents, they thought the right to vote might attract brides. In Utah, voting rights for women gave Mormon polygamists an edge over the growing population of single non-Mormon men attracted to the territory’s silver mines.
Yet resistance to women’s political equality remained intense. The anti–woman’s suffrage camp made two main points against giving women the vote. One, they said, women were too virtuous for the sordid business of politics and women didn’t want to vote anyway. Two, giving women the vote would destroy the family, and with it, civilization itself. “This lunacy”—woman’s suffrage—”of all lunacies is the most destructive,” one man said at the California state constitutional convention. “It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal decrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.”
After Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896) adopted woman’s suffrage, no other state did until 1910. Congress took no votes on the federal woman’s suffrage amendment. Six referenda were held and all lost. Michigan and New Jersey courts ruled that even partial suffrage was unconstitutional. Among suffragists, the years 1896 to 1910 were known as “the doldrums.”
From the Civil War through the first decade of the 20th century, the Republican Party was America’s dominant party and as such took the lead in denying political rights to women. Soon it was the Democrats’ turn.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I to make the world “safe for democracy.” But he wasn’t quite ready to admit that the nation might be safe with women voting. Wilson came around, though. In January 1918, the president endorsed the woman’s suffrage amendment “as a war measure,” and the next day the Democratic-controlled House voted to approve woman’s suffrage by a one-vote margin. But most of those votes came from Republicans. Wilson’s own party split. Democratic resistance in the Senate delayed congressional passage until 1919.
In 1920, seventy-two years after Seneca Falls, forty-six years after Woodhull ran for president and Anthony was arrested for voting, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Drafted by Susan B. Anthony, it said simply that the right of citizens to vote “shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.”
These, then, are the milestones in women getting screwed, politically speaking.
For most of American history, no woman became president because American law, gendered cultural norms, and the United States constitution denied women the most basic political right: the right to vote. Of course no woman would become president of the United States until women could vote.
But there is more to the story. Plenty of men have policed that highest glass ceiling. But women haven’t always been hoisting each other through the cracks.
AFTER THE CIVIL War, the founders of American feminism put themselves on the wrong side of the global democracy project of the day.
The troubles began when Republicans pushed through the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. “What was outrageous to women’s suffrage advocates was that it introduced the word male into the representation clause, which basically said, if you deprive any man of the right to vote, you’re going to lose some representation in Congress. But presumably if you deprived women of the right to vote, you didn’t lose anything,” Eric Foner, the leading historian on this era, explained. “The aim of the Fourteenth Amendment was to encourage southern states to give black men the right to vote. But it did not actually give anybody the right to vote. Nonetheless, the feminist movement was upset because it did introduce this gender distinction in the constitution which hadn’t existed previously.”
Woman’s suffrage was raised explicitly soon after, as Republicans prepared a constitutional amendment to enfranchise freed slaves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others argued for including women in a broad expansion of the suffrage. But most people in the anti-slavery movement and most Republicans in Congress rejected the idea as politically impractical.
“The question whether they should have expanded it to include women is a difficult historical issue. On a moral level, absolutely, of course they should have. On the political level, the movement for women’s rights was obviously not strong enough to force that issue into Congress,” Foner continued. “The things that had gotten black men support for the right to vote did not apply to women, black or white—black military service was very important in this. Lincoln himself, at the end of his life, had said black soldiers ought to have the right to vote. There were people in Congress, like Charles Sumner, who in principle supported women suffrage, but said, ‘No, this is the Negro’s hour’—by which they meant the black man’s hour. Frederick Douglass, who was certainly a feminist and had been there at Seneca Falls, said the same thing.”
It’s important, however, to note that the split wasn’t necessarily on race or gender lines, according to Foner. For instance, Robert Purvis, a leading black abolitionist, said, “I do not want my son to have the right to vote unless my daughter also has it.” Sojourner Truth also challenged Douglass. Foner continued, “Douglass said black men need the right to vote because it’s the only way to protect black people against violence. She said, ‘Well, aren’t black women also victims?’ To which Douglass said, ‘Well yes, of course, but they’re victims because they’re black, not because they’re women, and black men can protect them.’”
Stanton said, “It’s not the ‘Negro’s hour.’ It’s the Constitution’s hour. You don’t amend it every day. And if this moment passes, it will take a century to reopen the door.” Stanton drew from the debate the lesson that women “must not put her trust in man,” and when a woman’s suffrage referendum came up in Kansas, Stanton chose to make a strategic alliance with Democrats, who supported women’s suffrage but were simultaneously mounting a racist campaign against black suffrage. Kansas voters were presented with two separate referenda, one on black suffrage and one on women’s suffrage. They rejected both. When Congress took up the Fifteenth Amendment, enfranchising black men, Stanton, Anthony, and other mothers of American feminism actively opposed it.
“I tell students that this is a debate where both sides were right in a certain sense,” Foner continued. “They both had irrefutable arguments, but unfortunately the politics of the situation pushed in one direction. The public consciousness of the desirability of women voting had not developed to a sufficient stage.”
Still, no matter how just the cause of universal suffrage was, the battle between onetime allies took an ugly turn when Stanton began to express an unsavory brew of racism, nativism, and elitism. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and UngTung, who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble,” she said one time. At another, she asserted that African American women would be better off as “the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one.”
No 21st-century feminist can look back on this chapter in women’s rights with pride, so it is worth noting that the men in Congress shared these prejudices. And unlike women, they had power to act on them. The Fifteenth Amendment says specifically that the right of citizens “to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congress in fact considered and rejected broader language, barring discrimination in voting and officeholding based on “race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious beliefs.” The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, was silent about the right to hold office. It tacitly allowed poll taxes and literacy tests, the key means that Jim Crow states employed to deprive African Americans of their constitutional right to vote. But Congress’s intent was not to consign African Americans to second-class citizenship in the future. Rather, northern and western Congressmen wanted to keep their states’ own restrictions on voting. Rhode Island, for example, kept many immigrants from voting by requiring that anyone born in another country had to own real estate. Massachusetts imposed a literacy test. California allowed European immigrants to vote, but barred Chinese immigrants from doing so.
The conflict over black suffrage alienated women’s rights advocates from their close allies in the anti-slavery movement, and it also split the women’s movement itself. Angry that some suffragists (women and men) supported the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony broke away in 1869 to create their own organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association. Other advocates of woman’s suffrage, such as Lucy Stone, supported the vote for black men and the Fifteenth Amendment, and they formed the American Woman Suffrage Association after Stanton split the women’s rights movement into two camps. Both sides ended up weakened for the battles ahead.
Anthony and Stanton had maintained a belief in universal suffrage even as they gave vent to elitism. Subsequent women leaders dropped the egalitarianism and embraced the elitism. Carrie Chapman Catt called the immigrants pouring in from southern and eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s “a class of men not intelligent, not patriotic, not moral. It is they who nominate officials at the polls through corrupt means, it is they who elect them and by bribery.” Racism in the white women’s suffrage groups prompted black women to create their own suffrage groups in the last decades of the century.
Although this kind of anti-democratic prejudice was widespread among the white Protestant middle class in the Gilded Age, on merely a pragmatic level it was self-defeating for women suffragists to add their voices. After all, women weren’t going to win the vote without men’s votes. And it was exactly these working-class and immigrant men who made up the majority of voters in many of the most populous states.
The first wave of American feminists laid the foundation for winning the vote. But by bickering among themselves and breaking with longtime partners, they diluted their political influence and set back the cause. By 1890, the two organizations created by the schism over black suffrage had each become so small and ineffectual that they merged again into a new organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In 1893, the New York Times wrote, “The cause of woman suffrage does not seem to have made the least progress in this part of the country in the last quarter of a century, if indeed it has not lost ground.”
SURELY WOMEN LEARNED a lesson about how to maneuver in the national political arena? Unfortunately, no. Instead, they devoted most of their political energy to America’s first disastrous war on drugs: Prohibition.
As we saw, the idea of women’s moral superiority had fueled social reform movements throughout American history. This moralizing women’s politics reached its pinnacle with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874 by Frances Willard. The WCTU was far and away the largest and most influential women’s organization that had ever existed in the United States, and if ever there was an identity politics of women, this was it. Men were barred from membership and officeholding in the WCTU. As the historian Mary Ryan wrote about this era, “Woman citizens increasingly pleaded their causes based on their womanly virtues and preeminently on their stature as mothers.” Increasingly these notions colored the case for woman’s suffrage. As one man who supported woman’s suffrage put it, “When our mothers, wives, and sisters vote with us, we will have purer legislation, and better execution of the laws, fewer tippling shops, gambling halls, and brothels.”
On Willard’s prompting, the Anti-Saloon League (the WCTU’s male counterpart in the temperance movement) launched a campaign in 1913 to win a constitutional amendment outlawing liquor. By 1915, twenty-three states were dry, thanks to the grassroots organizing done by WCTU women activists. In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified.
In short, when women got involved in politics on a mass scale, the nation got Prohibition. That was no way to win friends and influence people.
Not until the early 20th century did the women’s suffrage movement start to gain traction, thanks to an infusion of new blood and new ideas. It was the Progressive Era—one of the great waves of social reform in the nation’s history, which brought us the direct election of senators, food safety, and laws banning child labor, among many other essential innovations in policy and law. Progressive women leaders, such as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams, persuaded NAWSA to pay attention to working-class and immigrant women and their need for the vote to win for themselves better pay and safer working conditions. “No one needs all the powers of the fullest citizenship more urgently than the wage-earning woman,” Kelley said in 1898. (By 1900, women made up one-fifth of the labor force.) Some second-generation suffragists were themselves more attuned to progressive ideas. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, publicly opposed her mother’s support for literary tests for immigrants, and in 1906 NAWSA dropped its call to make education a requirement for the vote.
By this time, the woman’s suffrage movement had grown into a mass movement, one that brought together women of all classes and ethnicities and used a variety of techniques to pressure men to share political rights with women. One group, led by Alice Paul, employed militant tactics learned from British suffragists. In New York, suffragists followed the blueprint of the Democratic Party machine and organized by precinct. In California, suffragists went door to door and flooded the state with pamphlets. Women trade unionists became more active in the movement, eventually winning over the American Federation of Labor. In 1912, 5,000 suffragists, dressed in white, marched through the streets of Washington, DC.
With broader support and creative organizing, victories began to mount. In 1910, the Republican president William Howard Taft endorsed woman’s suffrage. In 1912, the Progressive Party, with former president Theodore Roosevelt at its head, did too. Between 1910 and 1914, women won the vote in Washington, California, Kansas, Montana, the territory of Alaska, and four other states. Still, the movement continued to suffer many defeats. Men voted suffrage down in state referenda in Ohio, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, and the Dakotas. As late as 1915, no state in the Northeast or the Midwest had granted the vote to women.
In 1916, as the United States entered World War I, suffragists tried to punish Wilson at the polls. In 1917, they chained themselves to the White House fence. In jail, they went on hunger strikes and were put in isolation cells and force-fed. They marched and demonstrated and lobbied throughout the country. By 1917, NAWSA’s membership stood at around 2 million. With the multipronged attack, the dominoes began to fall. In November 1917, New York State adopted woman’s suffrage, after the immigrant and labor-backed New York City Democratic political machine stopped fighting it.
In January 1918, when the House voted to approve woman’s suffrage, the deciding votes came from congressmen representing states that had recently adopted state woman’s suffrage amendments—in other words, from politicians who needed women’s votes to keep their jobs. But the amendment stalled again that summer, with a defeat in the Senate. Not until suffragists burned Wilson’s high-minded speeches from the Peace Conference at “watch fires” on the White House lawn, toured the nation in their prison garb, and defeated two anti-suffrage Democratic senators did Wilson prevail upon members of his own party in the Senate to support the vote for women. On June 4, 1919, the Senate approved the Nineteenth Amendment, and on August 18, 1920, it was ratified.
But for all the suffragists’ bravery in defying gender norms to win political rights for women, the movement as a whole was unwilling to challenge the racial status quo. To reach the three-fourths threshold required to ratify a constitutional amendment had taken affirmative votes from four southern border states, where Jim Crow laws denied the right to vote to African American men and women.
“In order to get southern votes for women’s suffrage, the activists sort of made a deal with the segregationists, saying ‘this will not affect black women in the south. The laws barring blacks from voting will continue in force,’” historian Eric Foner said. From the vantage point of the struggles after the Civil War, he continued, “The irony is that if you fast-forward fifty years, you get a reversal of the situation, which is to say that women’s suffrage had become more acceptable than black suffrage. Women suffragists made their own compromise fifty years later.”
IN 1920, FOR the first time in U.S. history, women would vote in a presidential election—and every other election for local, state, and federal office. But at the moment of triumph, the leading women’s organizations refused to step up to the main stage of American politics: running and supporting candidates for elective office. The National Woman’s Party, the group behind the radical hunger strikes, remained controlled by Alice Paul, and she steered it away from party politics. To add to the problem, Paul was an autocratic leader who took pride in the group’s “complete disregard for popularity.” NAWSA’s Carrie Chapman Catt also disavowed party politics, and in 1919 she converted the 2-million-member organization into the League of Women Voters. The nonpartisan League refused to endorse any political candidate, even when the candidate was one of its own members. With thousands of members who had on-the-ground experience canvassing voters, lobbying elected officials, organizing demonstrations, and speaking at mass rallies—that is, everything a political candidate did and more—the League mystifyingly decided that its job was solely to educate women about politics. Some suffragists turned down posts in presidential administrations, insulted by the tokenism they thought animated the offers. Movement purists accused women who ran for office of selling out.
At first, Democrats and Republicans courted the more than 30 million new women voters with promises about women-focused legislation. Both parties offered positions in party leadership to women leaders, appointing prominent feminists and suffragists to their governing councils, the Democratic and Republican National Committees. But when the predicted gender gap did not materialize, showing that women weren’t going to demand anything for their vote, politicians lost interest in the women’s vote and women’s issues.
In short, at the decisive moment of opportunity, when American women could have coasted into political leadership on the twin engines of experience and leverage, when they could have easily won seats in state houses and Congress, and so stepped onto the ladder leading to the governor’s mansion, the Senate, and ultimately the White House, the leaders of the women’s movement suffered a case of arrested development. Here stood the greatest number of potential women candidates ever in American history—women with the education, the campaign experience, and the interest in politics to launch successful campaigns. But their leaders kept them out of the real action. As one Republican woman suffragist said, it was like “going back to kindergarten days.”