AS THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT WAS being defied, another addition to the Constitution was getting closer to passage, gaining support more rapidly than even its most optimistic advocates could have hoped. And in this case, unlike Prohibition, what the momentum represented was real.
Between January 6 and January 27, 1920, five states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, bringing the number in favor to twenty-seven. Only nine more of America’s states had to formalize their approval, and the three-quarter mark would be reached: American women would at long last be able to join men in the voting booth. In his healthier days, President Woodrow Wilson had made it known that he thought they belonged there, although he disappointed suffragists by not making his support more vocal.
Most members of Congress agreed with Wilson. A. Mitchell Palmer was another backer of the female cause, at least in part because he thought that women, by their very nature, would tend to vote more conservatively than men and help to safeguard the nation from anarchists and Bolsheviks and the continuing danger they posed. The Wall Street explosion was still a few months away, but Palmer and the BOI were as vigilant as they could be, still investigating previous acts of violence and taking into custody the occasional innocent with an Italian surname.
Palmer was especially encouraged by Carrie Chapman Catt, not only the sole woman in her graduating class at Iowa State University but the valedictorian. A member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which seemed to Palmer further evidence of her conservative nature, she went on to succeed the better-known Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. When that organization breathed its last in 1920, Catt founded the League of Women Voters to take its place, and that group has endured ever since, one of the most powerful nonpartisan political voices in the country for decades. A woman of many talents, Catt also edited the National Suffrage Bulletin, which later changed its name to Progress. Further, she managed two statewide campaigns in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, winning them both. In Idaho, the vote was 122,126 in favor of suffrage, a mere 5,844 against.
But what particularly attracted Palmer to Catt was comments like this: “There is but one way to avert the danger,” she declared, the danger being that more and more foreigners would take up residence in the United States, foreigners who might not have the best interests of the country at heart, and that is to “cut off the vote of the slums and give to woman … the power of protecting herself … the ballot.”
A number of factors, both past and present, led to the Nineteenth Amendment’s rapid approach. Even the Great War had a little to do with it. But very little. In his grand opus The American Century, the eminent historian Norman F. Cantor states that the Amendment was “a reward for what women had done during the war in ammunition factories and hospitals and on farms.” It was true, but barely. A great deal of work had to be done before the fighting began to allow females into the polling place in 1920. But little known though it is, the majority of American women were already voting, at least part-time, before the Constitution was expanded for them.
The Nineteenth Amendment would make suffrage “universal,” as both friends and foes alike agreed. But prior to the war it was already universal in almost every state west of the Mississippi River, Texas being the largest exception. Six other states, all in the vicinity of the Canadian border, allowed women to vote for president only. Even Texas allowed the female ballot in presidential primaries, but not in general elections. In fact, a mere nine states denied women the vote in all instances, and seven of those, to their inexplicable shame, were among the original thirteen colonies—which is to say, those soon-to-be states that were responsible for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the first place.
Bias against giving women an electoral voice, however, existed even before the nation’s founding, long before. Miriam Gurko tells us that, as far back as 1638, Margaret Brent, “a large property owner and woman of many business affairs, demanded a vote in the [Virginia] House of Burgesses. It was denied, but not without a lively argument. This was probably the first demand for woman suffrage in America.” Historian George Brown Tindall makes a further case for Brent, pointing out that even though she was so competent at her tasks that two of her brothers turned over the management of their acreages when they were away from home, no matter. “The governor, in response, acknowledged her gifts, but denied her request. When she became perhaps the first American suffragette, she had overstepped the bounds of acceptance.”
In her study of the long, frustrating battle to grant women entrance to polling places, The Ladies of Seneca Falls, Gurko continues:
In some colonies women did have the right to vote, since this was generally based not on sex but on ownership of property. Ironically, it was the arrival of independence and the spread of democracy that removed this right. As states adopted their constitutions or revised their laws under the new political conditions, voting qualifications were more clearly defined, usually spelling out the voter as a free, white, male citizen, in addition to whatever property or tax requirement there might be. Thus New York took the vote away from women in 1777, Massachusetts in 1780, New Hampshire in 1784, and New Jersey, the last to do so, in 1807.
Gurko does not make clear the connection between independence for the country and the exclusion of women from voting booths; there seems no causal relationship. But she does point out that females, many times widows, continued to own property in what was now the United States, and that they were taxed on that property. Thus, after men had fought and won their battles against “taxation without representation,” women were forced to fight their own battles—and against the very men who had been victorious against the British. They did so, however, with much less success.
The most significant step that women took toward suffrage occurred in 1848, exactly two centuries and a decade after Margaret Brent confronted sexism in Virginia. Women’s-rights leaders summoned as many of their followers as they could to join them in the Finger Lakes region of New York for the Seneca Falls Convention, the first assembly of its kind in the United States and, to this day, still the most influential. Like the Founding Fathers, these Founding Mothers were determined to produce a document that would last the ages and inspire future generations. They did just that, even if less famously.
To make the point that the female was entitled to the same kinds of freedom as the male, they began their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions with familiar language: “When, in the course of human events. …” The second paragraph starts in similarly recognizable fashion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women [italics added] are created equal. …” The women of Seneca Falls were not copying the Declaration of Independence so much as trying to make the point that the document they were constructing was as basic to human rights as the one produced in Philadelphia by the Continental Congress. Further, they were slyly demonstrating that the Congress, in gainsaying female rights, was acting hypocritically, just as it was with Africans in American servitude.
That, at least, was the initial intent. But in continuing to make their arguments about treatment by males over the years, they resorted to language much less restrained, much less subtle, and even more incendiary than a previous generation of men had used against the British. I quote at some length from their Declaration:
The history of mankind is a history of repeat injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. …
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. …
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. …
He has denied her facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her. …
He allows her in church, as well as State, but in a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church. …
He has endeavored, in every way he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation,—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.
The women at Seneca Falls unanimously approved the provisions of the Declaration—except, surprisingly, the article that seemed the least controversial, the request for the vote, which, as the above demonstrates, was not even phrased as a request but rather a plaint. The organizers of the convention were astonished by the opposition. “It was argued,” writes Gurko, “that so excessive a demand would arouse such antagonism and derision that the movement would be killed before it even got under way.”
The argument is perhaps correct. But it is strange that the Seneca Falls delegates felt voting might be perceived as “so excessive a demand”; there is much more in the Declaration of Resolutions and Sentiments that seems likely to arouse men to opposition and derision than its statement of implied support for suffrage.
There were four women in particular whose support for suffrage was not implied, but vocal and insistent. Their places in history would have been assured even if the ban against women in the voting booth had never been lifted.
ELIZABETH CADY’S FATHER WANTED A boy, and made no secret of his disappointment to either family or friends when his hard-laboring wife gave him the wrong choice. His daughter could have grown up feeling lonely and unwanted as a result; instead, she was motivated to succeed as a man might succeed, to satisfy both nature’s product and her father’s hopes. She might have been the first American female to insist that the word “obey” be omitted from her wedding vows. She did, however, take the name of her husband, the abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton.
Like Thomas Jefferson, Stanton was the principal author of her convention’s Declaration; but also like Jefferson, she generously accepted the contributions and criticisms of others. But it was Stanton who made suffrage the first of the Sentiments in the Declaration, writing it in such a way that it implied, rather than insisted, that the time had come for men to allow women to cast their ballots. It was, thus, also she who was the most mystified by her sisters’ opposition to suffrage, and could not help but take it as a personal repudiation.
LUCRETIA MOTT, WHO WOULD EVENTUALLY become one of the founders of Swarthmore College, had no interest in women’s rights until, as a teacher at the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School in New York, from which she had graduated, she discovered that male teachers were being paid three times as much as she and the rest of the female staff. It did not seem possible to her; but no sooner did she confirm the information than she began to seethe, and her naturally dour expression made her dissatisfaction all the more obvious.
She spoke to school officials about the disparity in wages, but to no avail. She was not able to obtain from them either satisfactory answers or a raise in pay.
Her husband, an educator and abolitionist whom she met at Nine Partners, was on her side. So were the five of her six children who survived childhood, reformers all. Yet another fifteen years would pass before Mr. and Mrs. Mott formed the American Equal Rights Association, of which she became the first president. But the Association was dedicated to abolition no less than to suffrage, thus choosing to fight the two most strenuously uphill battles in all the nineteenth century. The former led to the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, nominally ridding the nation of slavery, and Mott was delighted. That a full fifty-five years would pass before the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, gained the approval of the states would have been a particular heartache to her had she lived long enough to know.
Mott’s grand oeuvre was the Discourse on Woman, still debated today among scholars, an integral part of the curriculum of various women’s-rights programs in higher education. Mott began as follows:
There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large—of man as well as woman—as the true and proper position of women. Much has been said, from time to time, upon this subject. It has been a theme for ridicule, for satire and sarcasm. We might look for this from the ignorant and vulgar; but from the intelligent and refined we have a right to expect that such weapons shall not be resorted to,—that gross comparisons and vulgar epithets shall not be applied, so as to place woman, in a point of view, ridiculous to say the least.
Yet both before and after she wrote the Discourse, in fact all of her married life, Mott was a housewife and mother, and took great pleasure in both roles. She saw no conflict. She made her own choices.
IN 1847, LUCY STONE, THE daughter of a farm family with few educational interests running through its bloodstream, became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. After teaching for a while, she achieved another first, becoming, it is said, the first American female to insist that she not change her last name after marrying. “The precedent was so unusual,” writes Doris Weatherford in her history of the American suffragist, “that ‘stoner’ became a commonly used nineteenth-century noun to denote a woman who kept her maiden name.” Poor Henry Browne Blackwell, in keeping rather than sharing his name with his wife, achieved what was for the time a most unfortunate distinction of his own.
Stone was tireless in her efforts to convince fellow academics that women deserved universal education no less than universal suffrage, but was not surprised to be met with indifference and opposition and ever more energetic rebuttal. In fact, according to at least one observer, she “protested her disenfranchisement in 1858 by allowing the seizure of her household goods at her Orange, New Jersey, home rather than pay taxes levied by a government in which she could not participate.” The goods belonged to her husband, too. Mr. Blackwell made no complaint.
Prior to that, Stone was more seriously accused of slipping a knife to a former slave named Margaret Garner, who was on trial for murdering her child to prevent the little one from growing up into slavery. The knife, it was said, was for Garner to use on herself if she was sentenced to return to a life of being a white man’s commodity. Given a chance to address the court in her own defense, Stone seemed rather to speak for the prosecution. “With my own teeth I would tear open my veins and let the earth drink my blood, rather than wear the chains of slavery. How then could I blame her for wishing her child to find freedom with God and the angels, where no chains are?”
Like Mott and so many other suffragettes, Stone was as well an abolitionist, believing that women deserved no more, no less, than Negroes of either gender. It was almost surely a joining of beliefs that worked against the woman’s vote, but was also a connection that the more zealous of reformers simply could not sever. Stone died painfully, of stomach cancer, twenty-seven years before she would have known she was vindicated in her struggle for a woman’s place in the institutions that governed society. “Ever the innovator,” Weatherford tells us, “she was the first person in New England to leave orders that she be cremated.”
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, THE FOURTH of the most powerful voices of Seneca Falls, was used to getting her way, even when her way was prohibited by law. She and her sisters Guelma, Hannah, Mary, and Eliza were among the few American women ever to have voted in a Congressional election before 1920, a feat that took remarkable cleverness and no less remarkable courage. It is one of the more fascinating little-known events in the history of the female march to equality.
In 1872, when the Anthony girls attempted to register at the polls in Rochester, New York, they were, as expected, told to go away. That was Susan’s cue. She withdrew a copy of the Constitution from her purse, waving it as she spoke. “[T]all and slender, with a fine, erect carriage, and almost classically regular features framed by smooth, glossy brown hair,” she captured the registration inspectors’ attention from her first word. She claimed that the oft-ignored Fourteenth Amendment would not be ignored in her case, that its Due Process Clause gave her the “liberty” to vote as an American citizen, and that the same Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause entitled her, as it entitled men, to participate in the process of electing public officials.
The voting inspectors did not know what to do, not at first. No one had ever made such an argument before, at least not in Rochester, New York. The officials talked among each other for a while; then, to Anthony’s and her sisters’ great surprise, their demand was approved. Two of the registration inspectors agreed “to take the responsibility” of allowing the Anthonys to vote, even though aware they might later be fined for their actions. By election day, realizing the fines could be as much as $500, the two registrars had changed their minds. But it was too late: the ladies’ names, appearing as out of place as they could be, had already been printed on the roster of eligible voters. Taking the precaution of hiring a lawyer first, Susan led her sisters and the attorney to the polls on the appointed November day, and they “had the incredible experience of exercising the democratic right of all citizens to a voice in their government: they voted.”
Two weeks later came a more expected experience. Susan, Guelma, Hannah, Mary, and Eliza Anthony were arrested. The trial, however, at which Susan, as the leader of her sisters’ insurrection, was the only defendant, proved as much a burlesque as a legal proceeding could be. Susan was fined $100, but refused to pay and was not forced to do so. The registrars who had allowed her and the others to vote were fined, not $500 apiece, but a mere $25. When, as a matter of principle, they also refused to pay, they were sent to jail, where they enjoyed themselves immensely:
“The women who had voted,” Gurko relates, “kept them fed with superb meals, and hundreds of Rochester residents came to visit them.” After a week, President Ulysses S. Grant pardoned the two men, annoyed that he even had to deal with so trifling a matter.
According to social critic Gilbert Seldes, however, there was more to the leniency shown Susan B. Anthony than met the court record. “Knowing that she would be tried for this crime,” he later wrote, “Miss Anthony took the precaution to vote the Republican ticket and so mollified the Republican prosecutor, judge, and jury.” The Anthony sisters’ counsel was himself a well-known Republican. These might have been the deciding factors in their favor.
In the late winter of 1906, approaching her eighty-sixth birthday, a year after having pleaded personally with President Theodore Roosevelt for an amendment allowing women to vote, Susan B. Anthony caught a cold from which she never recovered. She was “white and frail” as the end approached, and also greatly dispirited. “To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty,” she said weakly, on her deathbed, “and then to die without it seems so cruel.”
Had she been able to survive fourteen more years, to the nice, round, virtually impossible number of 100, she would not have felt her life’s struggles so sharply.
BY THE WINTER OF 1920, American women had massed into an irresistible force and knew well their strength. It was just a matter of time, and not much more of it at that. Stanton, Mott, Stone, and Anthony would have been amazed that so equitable a request had taken so long to be recognized. A “founding document” of its own, it had proven much more controversial than the original of those papers.
Still, one of the problems faced by the early leaders of the movement, the indifference, or even opposition, of so many females toward voting, existed well into the twentieth century. As John Milton Cooper, Jr. writes in Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920, “Both the organized women’s movement and the colleges drew from economically better-off, native-born whites, usually from the cities and larger towns of the Northeast and Midwest. Their concerns struck little response among poorer women, particularly blacks, newly arrived immigrants, and farm wives and daughters in the South and West.”
For the accomplishments of their own lifetimes, Stanton, Mott, Stone, and Anthony must be credited, as much as any women alive in 1920, for bringing about the Nineteenth Amendment. Ironically, though, when it finally passed that summer after a brutally corrupt campaign in Tennessee, women would have no choice but to join their husbands and other male voters in dismissing from office the first—and up to the time of this writing, only—female to serve as “president” in the history of the United States.