In Seneca Falls, New York, during the summer of 1848, abolitionists Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other progressive luminaries convened the first women’s rights convention, endorsing (among other things) the right of women to vote. Historians view this meeting as the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.
Women had been a leading force in the abolition movement, and the ratification of the three Civil War amendments protecting the constitutional rights of freed slaves fueled women’s demands for their own right to vote. In 1869, the new National Women’s Suffrage Association selected Stanton as its president. That same year, the American Suffrage Association selected Henry Ward Beecher as its president, and the Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote, followed by Colorado in 1893.
A turning point in the movement occurred in 1872, when Susan B. Anthony registered to vote in violation of New York state law and was jailed for refusing to pay the $100 fine. Anthony maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment permitted women the right to vote, although the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that states had the authority to determine whether or not women could vote. In 1878, congressional supporters of women’s suffrage responded by proposing a women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, the women’s suffrage movement continued to gain strength. In 1880, the Greenback Party endorsed women’s right to vote. The growing electoral parity between the Democratic and Republican parties put pressure on both entities to support women’s suffrage, as political campaigns looked for new sources of potential supporters. Equally important, the growing strength of third parties during this era contributed pressure as well. In 1892, the Prohibition Party included a plank in its platform stating, “No citizen should be denied the right to vote on account of sex.” The 1908 platform of the Socialist Party called for “unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.” And the 1912 Progressive Party platform pledged the party “to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.” By the Campaign of 1916, both Republicans and Democrats supported the women’s suffrage amendment.
In 1919, both chambers of Congress ratified a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote and sent it to the states, and on August 26, 1920, a sufficient number ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it the law of the land. In the decades that followed, no single party benefited from women’s enfranchisement. Rather, women tended to vote according to patterns of class, geography, race, and other traits, in much the same manner as men.
The publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) heralded a new era in the women’s rights movement. Women sought to define themselves as more than wives and mothers, and as part of that effort, they sought more political equality and more equality in the workplace as well. Many of the positions advocated by the new women’s rights movement, however, did not sit well with conservative voters. These included legalizing access to contraception and abortion, equal pay in the workplace, legal protections against sexual harassment in the workplace, and more aggressive enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited workplace sex discrimination. The women’s movement threw its full support behind a proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution that would have made all governmental classifications based on gender subject to strict judicial scrutiny. The Senate and the House passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. Within a short period of time, twenty-two of the required thirty-eight states had ratified the ERA. By the mid-1970s, an anti-ERA backlash significantly slowed the ratification by additional states. Critics argued that ratification of the ERA would strip states of the right to regulate abortions, would eliminate spousal support in cases of divorce, would require that the military allow women to serve in combat units, and would even eliminate same-sex public bathrooms and changing rooms. Nonetheless, in the Campaign of 1976, Republican presidential nominee Gerald Ford, egged on by his wife, Betty, voiced his support for the ERA, as did Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter. (Dismayed conservatives would support Ronald Reagan in the GOP primaries in this election, and again four years later.) Support for the ERA appeared in both parties’ platforms, as it had in the Campaign of 1972.
Despite four decades of official Republican Party support for the ERA, it was removed from the GOP platform during the Campaign of 1980. In this same year, the Democratic Party, historically less enthusiastic about the ERA due to its perceived weakening of union workplace rules, not only endorsed the constitutional amendment, but also used it as a litmus test for funding political candidates. The parties also diverged sharply on abortion in 1980, with the Republican Party supporting a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortions (eliminating the commitment to public dialogue on the issue that had appeared in the 1976 platform) and the Democratic Party, for the first time, taking an explicitly pro-choice position. While both parties continued to support equal pay for women in 1980, such language disappeared entirely from the GOP platform by 1984, replaced by opposition to “quotas and preferential treatment.” The Democrats continued to support the ERA in their party platform throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, while the Republican Party platform remained silent on the topic.
By the late 1990s, the ERA had become a nonissue. Many women believed that the current legal protections against unequal pay and sexual harassment were similar to what the ERA would have provided—that is, until the Supreme Court ruled in a five-to-four decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (2007) that an employee who is subject to discriminatory pay cannot sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or the Equal Pay Act if the actions had occurred more than 180 days previously. In the Ledbetter case, the employer had concealed the pay disparity for years, preventing the employee from taking action in a timely fashion, but the court maintained that this left Ledbetter with no grounds to sue. Democratic nominee Barack Obama campaigned on the issue in the Campaign of 2008, noting that his opponent, Republican nominee John McCain, opposed remedial legislation that would enable Ms. Ledbetter and other similarly situated employees to sue for equal pay. Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 as his first official action after taking office, which permitted women to sue within 180 days after discovering evidence of pay discrimination (with each paycheck constituting a separate event). More recently, the Supreme Court ruled in another five-to-four decision that a gender-pay discrimination case against Wal-Mart could not proceed as a class-action suit, which placed cumbersome new limits on women’s ability to sue as a class.
In the Campaign of 2012, Democratic incumbent Barack Obama campaigned on equal pay and attempted to tie the contraception mandate in his Affordable Care Act to women’s earnings. He argued that if women had to pay for contraception at market rate (because men rarely pay for contraception), this would further erode their wages, which were already lower than men’s. He claimed that the ability to decide whether and when to have a child, and to not be overly burdened by the health care required to do this, was necessary for women to achieve economic parity with men. He highlighted GOP opposition to equal pay and suggested that his opponent did not support women’s equality in the workplace. Republican nominee Mitt Romney, for his part, did not take a position on equal pay, but he suggested that as governor, he had promoted a record number of women in the workplace. Romney also backed off from his party’s position on abortion, suggesting that he would be willing to permit access to abortion in cases of rape and incest, and that he was always in favor of contraception. He also propounded his opposition to Planned Parenthood—viewed by conservatives as a vehicle for abortion and viewed by liberals as a vehicle for contraception and wellness check-ups for economically disadvantaged women.
In the Campaign of 2016, the topic of women’s equality and women’s rights continues to be a focal point, particularly for Democrats, who view women voters as an important element of their party coalition. Moreover, the Democratic front-runner is a woman, whereas the crowded field of seventeen GOP hopefuls contains only one female candidate who is not viewed by any as a serious contender. But also, numerous events outside of the presidential campaign have drawn national attention to a debate about the role of public morality in influencing women’s health care choices.
After GOP gains in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, state legislatures sought new restrictions on women’s access to abortion, including bans on abortions after twenty weeks (on the grounds that the fetus, which would not yet be viable, might be able to feel pain); bans on abortion once a fetal heartbeat has been detected; requiring that abortion clinics be built and equipped as surgeries; requiring that abortion clinic doctors have admitting privileges at a local hospital; requiring that women submit to (and pay for) ultrasounds prior to receiving an abortion; requiring that women be compelled to look at an ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion; requiring that doctors deliver a state-authored script that states risks of an abortion (many of which the medical community disputes, such as suicide and mental illness) and that attempts to persuade a woman to forgo the procedure; requiring that non-surgical abortions use outdated (and dangerous) levels of prescribed drugs to induce abortions; bans on the use of insurance to pay for an abortion; bans on abortion for the purpose of sex or racial selection; bans on abortion if the fetus tests positive for Down syndrome; bans on abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother; and bans on abortion for reasons other than to save the life of the mother.
The Democratic Party has the luxury of unity on the topic of abortion; all of its nominees generally support the pro-choice position and oppose additional state interference in access to abortion. The Democratic position is one of access, and the ability of the woman to make her own choices about her health care and when to raise a family. The party takes no position on the morality of abortions. The GOP field in 2016 is populated, in part, by governors (and former governors) who presided over numerous efforts to restrict abortion in their states. Some of these candidates, like Scott Walker, have been quite blunt—they would ban abortions even if the life of the mother was at stake, a measure that supporters of the pro-choice position and even some who identify as pro-life fear might in effect privilege the life of the fetus over that of the mother. Others, such as Ben Carson, would permit emergency contraception for rape victims (viewed as abortion by some) and potentially other measures as well. That there is internal conflict within the GOP, that the restrictions on access are more far-reaching than they have been in the past, and that there is some element of conflict for the GOP with its overall message of freedom, particularly from government regulation, are what will make this topic continue to be controversial. It seems also more likely to create disunity within the GOP, but not necessarily within the voting public. Public opinion on abortion has long been stable, and most voters who favor more access have sorted toward one party, while those who favor more regulation have sorted toward the other, in the years since the topic has come onto the political agenda.
Similarly, debates over access to contraception may appeal to these preexisting partisan divides. However, because the debate over contraception is newer, partisan sorting may be imperfect. Hillary Clinton is likely to borrow from Obama’s framing of the contraception topic in 2012, where he argued that access to affordable contraception influenced women’s ability to work, to earn, and to garner equal pay and provide their family with a decent standard of living. Research on issue evolution suggests that successfully reframing an issue (i.e., convincing people that an issue that they thought was moral is really one of economic inequality) may change the partisan divide in the long term.
Also at issue in the campaign is Title IX and the responsibility of colleges and universities to prevent the sexual assault (and sexual harassment) of students on their campuses. Sexual assault at U.S. military academies, and the greater problem of sexual assault throughout the armed forces in general, has been a topic of congressional hearings, and of proposed legislation, over the past several years. This is a problem most likely to be experienced by women (although men are also victimized), and candidates seeking their votes will undoubtedly find it useful to discuss potential reforms.
Other campaign topics, seemingly unrelated to women’s equality, may still evoke such a controversy. Because women still earn less than men, and are often heads of households (particularly of households with children), they are disproportionately affected by changes to government programs for the disadvantaged. They are also affected by changes in the benefit structure of other programs, such as Social Security. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women aged sixty-five and older are more likely to receive 90 percent or more of their total income from Social Security (even though they receive far less than men from the program, on average). Over a third of single women (unmarried, widowed, divorced) over sixty-five receive over 90 percent of their income from the program, while only 21 percent of married women do. Hispanic and African American women are more dependent on the program than are whites. And children of a deceased parent often rely on Social Security benefits to keep their families from sliding into poverty.
During the Campaign of 2016, Republican candidates directed their focus on controversies surrounding federal funding of Planned Parenthood, largely in reaction to provocative material circulated throughout social media alleging that a number of Planned Parenthood clinics were trading in body parts harvested from aborted fetuses, allegations that have been denied by the organization. In particular, GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, whose campaign at the time was on the upswing following her solid performances in the first two debates, drew attention for her pointed indictment of Planned Parenthood based on volatile images posted on the Internet; however, questions raised about the reliability of these video images soon blunted Ms. Fiorina’s momentum, pushing the criticism of Planned Parenthood toward the margins of the campaign. Nevertheless, issues such as abortion and any attendant support supplied by the federal government, while often evaded by candidates, are likely to resurface at any given moment within a presidential campaign. Finally, questions regarding discrimination against Sec. Hillary Clinton were raised during the 2016 campaign. Republican front runner Donald Trump made juvenile, shamefully personal remarks about Sec. Clinton’s physiology. Additionally, the secretary was also criticized for raising the volume of her voice during debates and other speaking events, describing her voice and delivery as “shrill.” Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders as well as Mr. Trump, both noted for raising the decibel level at their own campaign events, received no such criticism. When Sen. Sanders raises his voice, as he frequently does, he is perceived in the media as a firebrand exuding righteous indignation. Mr. Trump’s outbursts are but one more aspect of his hard-hitting personality, his bravado. That male candidates seem to raise their voices without raising an eyebrow while Sec. Clinton’s raised volume is reported as “shrill” and “screaming” clearly indicates a media double-standard that can only be described as sexist.
See also Abortion Issue; Campaign of 1920; Gender Gap; Health Care Issue; Marriage Gap; Social Security Issue; Voting Reform Issue
Hunter, Sara. Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
National Women’s Law Center. “Women and Social Security.” February 23, 2015. http://www.nwlc.org/resource/women-and-social-security. Accessed September 6, 2015.
Wolbrecht, Christina. “Explaining Women’s Rights Realignment: Convention Delegates, 1972–1992.” Political Behavior (September 2002): 237–82.