When Women Won the Vote: The Final Decade, 1910-1920 1315109107, 9781315109107

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When Women Won the Vote

When Women Won the Vote focuses on the final decade (1910–1920) of American women’s fight for the vote—a fight that had already been underway for more than sixty years, and which culminated in the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Sandra Opdycke reveals how woman suffragists campaigned in communities across the country, building a mass movement and tirelessly publicizing their cause. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the main suffrage organization led by Carrie Chapman Catt courted the President and Congress with diplomatic skill, while the smaller National Woman’s Party, headed by Alice Paul, intensified political pressure with confrontational picketing and demonstrations. Supported by primary documents and online eResources, this book adds context by describing the historical events that shaped this crucial decade in American women’s fight for the vote. The story of how American women won the vote is a compelling chapter in US women’s history and in the story of American democracy. This book is essential reading for students of American Political or Women’s History, Gender Studies, or Progressivism. Sandra Opdycke, PhD, is a retired history professor. She has published books about the 1918 f lu epidemic, the New Deal’s WPA, and Bellevue Hospital, as well as a biography of Jane Addams, an historical atlas of American women, and several co-authored books on social policy.

Critical Moments in American History Edited by William Thomas Allison, Georgia Southern University

Bleeding Kansas Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border Michael E. Woods The Marshall Plan A New Deal for Europe Michael Holm The Espionage and Sedition Acts World War I and the Image of Civil Liberties Mitchell C. Newton-Matza McCarthyism The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare Jonathan Michaels Three Mile Island The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Popular Culture Grace Halden The 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing Anarchy and Terrorism in Progressive-Era America Jeffrey A. Johnson America Enters the Cold War The Road to Global Commitment, 1945–1950 Kevin Grimm Title IX The Transformation of Sex Discrimination in Education Elizabeth Kaufer Busch and William E. Thro The “Silent Majority” Speech Richard Nixon, The Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right Scott Laderman When Women Won the Vote The Final Decade, 1910–1920 Sandra Opdycke

When Women Won the Vote The Final Decade, 1910–1920

Sandra Opdycke

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Sandra Opdycke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Opdycke, Sandra, author. Title: When women won the vote / Sandra Opdycke. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Critical moments in American history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019013087 (print) | LCCN 2019017135 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315109107 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138044876 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138044883 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315109107 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Women–Suffrage–United States–History. | Women–Political activity–United States–History. | Women’s rights–United States–History. | United States. Constitution. 19th Amendment–History. Classification: LCC JK1896 (ebook) | LCC JK1896 .O97 2020 (print) | DDC 324.6/230973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013087 ISBN: 978-1-138-04487-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-04488-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10910-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Visit the: www.routledge.com/9781138044883

This book is dedicated to ten cherished friends: Albert, Chris, Jerry, and Valerie, Marc and Marque, Mitzi, Laura, Mary, and Betsy

Contents

Series Introduction List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Timeline

viii ix xi xii

Introduction

1

1 The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910

7

2 New Life for the State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

31

3 The Federal Amendment Takes Center Stage: 1913–1917

54

4 Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918

79

5 The Culmination: 1918–1920

104

6 Living with Woman Suffrage

128

Documents Bibliography Index

153 186 191

Series Introduction

Welcome to the Routledge Critical Moments in American History series. The purpose of this new series is to give students a window into the historian’s craft through concise, readable books by leading scholars, who bring together the best scholarship and engaging primary sources to explore a critical moment in the American past. In discovering the principal points of the story in these books, gaining a sense of historiography, following a fresh trail of primary documents, and exploring suggested readings, students can then set out on their own journey, to debate the ideas presented, interpret primary sources, and reach their own conclusions – just like the historian. A critical moment in history can be a range of things – a pivotal year, the pinnacle of a movement or trend, or an important event such as the passage of a piece of legislation, an election, a court decision, a battle. It can be social, cultural, political, or economic. It can be heroic or tragic. Whatever they are, such moments are by definition “game changers,” momentous changes in the pattern of the American fabric, paradigm shifts in the American experience. Many of the critical moments explored in this series are familiar; some less so. There is no ultimate list of critical moments in American history – any group of students, historians, or other scholars may come up with a different catalog of topics. These differences of view, however, are what make history itself and the study of history so important and so fascinating. Therein can be found the utility of historical inquiry – to explore, to challenge, to understand, and to realize the legacy of the past through its inf luence of the present. It is the hope of this series to help students realize this intrinsic value of our past and of studying our past. William Thomas Allison Georgia Southern University

Illustrations

FIGURES 1.1 In 1888, nearly 20 years after first winning the vote, a group of Wyoming Territory women gather to cast their ballots 2.1 A contingent of nurses marches in one of the first big suffrage parades in New York City, 1913 3.1 Inez Milholland prepares to lead off the great suffrage parade in Washington, DC, 1913 3.2 On a rainy day in 1917, the Congressional Union pickets maintain their vigil at the White House gate 4.1 Carrie Chapman Catt (on right) and NAWSA’s top lobbyist, Helen Gardener, pose on the White House steps after a visit with President Wilson 4.2 Uncle Sam, with “Public Opinion” emblazoned on his sleeve, assures a military nurse that service in wartime can lead to suffrage in peacetime 5.1 Alice Paul, as the suffrage movement’s own Betsy Ross, adds another star to her “ratification f lag” 5.2 Suffrage states (full and partial) and ratification states, as of August, 1920

20 44 58 75 86 97 116 123

TABLES 2.1 Suffrage states, as of December 31, 1913 50 4.1 Suffrage states, as of December 31, 1917 98 5.1 State ratifications of the 19th amendment after August 1920 124 6.1 Women in US Congress 141

x

I llustrations

SIDEBARS 1.1 Suffrage as an Automatic Right of Citizenship? The New Departure 17 1.2 Woman Suffrage in the South: The Intersection of Race and Gender 26 2.1 Women Against the Vote: The Anti-Suffragists 41 2.2 Tackling the Biggest State: Suffrage in New York, 1907–1917 46 3.1 British Suffragettes Blaze a Trail: The WSPU 55 3.2 Winning Over the President: Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage 64 4.1 Women Serving the Nation: American Women’s Role in World War I 83 4.2 All Together Now: America’s War on Dissent During World War I 89 5.1 Dealing with Two Governors: Woman Suffrage in Texas 105 6.1 Looking Beyond the Vote: The Equal Rights Amendment 133

DOCUMENTS   1 Arguments For and Against Giving Women the Vote   2 Campaigning for Suffrage in Washington State and California   3 Suffrage at Home and in the Workplace   4 The Congressional Union Announces Its Arrival   5 Taking On the Party in Power   6 Carrie Chapman Catt Introduces Her “Winning Plan”   7 Instructions for Lobbying Congress   8 A White House Picket Describes the “Night of Terror”   9 The President Comes Through for Suffrage 10 Two Visions for the Future

155 159 162 165 167 170 173 176 179 182

Acknowledgments

Anyone who writes about the American women’s campaign for the vote owes an enormous debt to the many participants who recorded their experiences with such clarity and verve. I am also grateful to the scores of historians, starting with Eleanor Flexner in 1959, who have continued to expand our understanding of the woman suffrage movement, adding depth and context to the accounts of the participants. This is the third time I have had the pleasure of working with Bill Allison, the series editor for Critical Moments in American History, and I very much appreciate his thoughtful assistance, as well as that of Zoë Forbes and the other editorial staff at Routledge. In addition, I have benefited from having had access to the resources of the libraries at Vassar College and Columbia University, as well as the Library of Congress. As always, my family and friends have played a vital role in the process. My dear husband has supported me through every day of this project, reading each chapter as it appeared. My sister Karen and my daughter Robin are my revered final readers. My daughter Megan made the handsome map for this book. And finally, a word of thanks to all our wonderful progeny, who delight me every day of my life.

Timeline

1848

The first women’s rights convention in US history is held in Seneca Falls, New York. One of the 11 resolutions adopted by the convention calls for woman suffrage.

1850s

Traveling lecturers promote women’s rights, local meetings are organized, and an annual Women’s Rights Convention is established.

1861–1865

Women’s rights activists suspend their advocacy during the Civil War.

1866–1870

During this period, voting emerges as the central focus of the women’s rights movement.

1869

Congress passes the 15th amendment, prohibiting voter discrimination by race, while making no mention of discrimination by gender. The suffrage movement splits into two rival groups, dividing mainly over whether or not to support the amendment. The Territory of Wyoming approves woman suffrage. A bill proposing a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage is introduced in the US House of Representatives. and re-introduced in each Congress thereafter, but it attracts little attention.

1870–1874

Several hundred women try to vote, claiming that voting is a basic right of US citizenship. But in 1875 the Supreme Court rules that eligibility to vote is controlled by the states.

1887

The woman suffrage amendment receives its first congressional vote in the Senate. It is soundly defeated. (It will not be voted on again for 26 years).

1890

The two rival suffrage groups reunite to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

1890–1896

The states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho approve woman suffrage.

1910–1914

Between 1910 and 1914, 7 more western states approve full women’s suffrage, bringing the total to 11. And in 1913, Illinois allows women to vote in presidential elections.

Timeline 1913

A new NAWSA worker, Alice Paul, galvanizes public attention with a massive suffrage parade in Washington DC. Soon afterward, Paul organizes a separate group, the Congressional Union, focused specifically on passing the federal suffrage amendment. (At this time, NAWSA is focusing primarily on the states).

1914

During the mid-term elections, Alice Paul’s Congressional Union urges women in the states that have approved suffrage to vote against all Democrats (the party in power in Washington), as punishment for the lack of federal action on suffrage.

1915

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw retires as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and is succeeded by Carrie Chapman Catt.

1916

NAWSA adopts Carrie Chapman Catt’s “Winning Plan.” It calls for turning the organization’s principal energies to the federal amendment, while continuing to pursue state suffrage campaigns where they appear most achievable. Alice Paul and the Congressional Union form the Women’s Party—aimed, once again, at mobilizing women in the suffrage states to vote against the Democrats in the fall election.

1917

In January, the Congressional Union starts picketing the White House, to demand action on the federal suffrage amendment. In March, the Congressional Union and the Women’s Party combine, to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP). In April, the US enters World War I. NAWSA commits itself to the war effort, while also continuing its suffrage advocacy. The NWP takes no stand on the war and continues its picketing of the White House. The women are mobbed by spectators who condemn them as unpatriotic. When the women continue to picket, they are jailed and force-fed.

1918

The House of Representatives passes the 19th amendment in January but the Senate refuses to approve it, despite months of lobbying, as well as President Wilson’s personal appeal in September. Demanding more decisive action, the NWP starts publicly burning Wilson’s speeches about democracy. Once again, the protesters are jailed and force-fed. November 11, World War I ends.

1919

When the new Congress convenes in May, the 19th amendment finally passes both the House and the Senate. It is sent to the states for ratification.

1920

By this time, 15 states have granted women full suffrage, and 15 have approved primary or presidential suffrage. After an intensive 18-month campaign, the required 36 states ratify the 19th amendment. It is officially certified on August 26.

xiii

Introduction

Y

ou can hear the band playing, even before the parade comes into sight. Then here they are—thousands of women, all in white, marching six abreast, as far back as the eye can see. Some of the women are pushing baby carriages, others are grouped by their professions or unions or civic organizations. You might think that they would be smiling and waving to the crowd, but their faces are serious and they are looking straight ahead. This is no time for frivolity; these are women on a mission. If there is a single image that we identify with American women’s campaign for the vote, it is the suffrage parade (see Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2, p. 44). So powerful is this image that even today, a century after the last of these parades, the mere mention in the press that female demonstrators in a recent Washington protest were “clad in suffragist white” conjured up the image of women on the march. But the suffrage parade represents more than a generalized symbol of the campaign for the vote. It was the product of one specific phase of the campaign—the final ten years, from 1910 to 1920. Over the course of that dramatic decade, changes within the suffrage movement, interacting with a series of historical events, made it possible for American women to achieve the goal they had been pursuing for more than 70 years: the right to vote. When the decade began, in 1910, the prize still seemed far out of reach. At that point, only four states had adopted suffrage, many other states had decisively rejected the idea, and the movement’s proposed suffrage amendment to the US Constitution had not been voted on in Congress since 1887. This book is an account of how, in the space of just ten years, the suffragists took this unpromising situation and—with the help of changing circumstances in the world around them—converted it to victory.

2

Introduction

On the suffrage scene, three events took place in the same year— 1910—that set the stage for the decade that followed: ••

••

••

First, the state of Washington voted to approve woman suffrage. Four other western states had done so previously, but it had been fourteen years since the last success; every campaign since then had ended in defeat. By contrast, between 1910 and 1920, 10 additional states would approve full suffrage for women, while 15 more would allow women to vote in either presidential or primary elections. Second, a group of dissidents at the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) tried to force out their president, Anna Howard Shaw, primarily because they believed that NAWSA needed stronger leadership. Shaw survived the 1910 crisis, but although the organization’s state affiliates continued to thrive, NAWSA’s power to direct events at the national level remained limited until Shaw was replaced in 1915 by a more forceful leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Third, a young woman named Alice Paul sailed home to the United States after several years in England. While she was abroad, Paul had worked with the controversial British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, whose followers were making international headlines with the militancy of their protests. Within a few years of her return, Paul would found a new suffrage group—the Congressional Union (later called the National Woman’s Party)—which would galvanize the campaign for the vote with its confrontational style and its f lair for public display.

Historians differ over which of the various segments of the suffrage movement contributed the most to the final victory in 1920, but in fact, each played an essential part, as this account will make clear. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how suffrage could have been achieved as soon as it was without the interplay of these very different approaches to political persuasion. In order to understand the challenges—and the opportunities—facing the suffragists of 1910, it is important to remember the social and political context within which they were operating. On the positive side, women’s status in American society had evolved considerably over the past several decades, with a notable expansion of their educational and occupational opportunities. Women were also gaining new recognition—as both professionals and volunteers—through their leadership in the world of Progressive Era reform. These changes helped the suffragists’ cause by making the idea of women’s participation in public life more

Introduction

acceptable. Nevertheless, millions of Americans in 1910—both male and female—continued to believe firmly in traditional gender roles, and the idea that women’s public participation should be extended to the ballot box was still very much a minority position when the decade began. In the political arena, the suffragists benefited from the fact that— unlike today—the Republican Party and the Democratic Party each contained both liberals and conservatives. In addition, there were several very active minor parties. Under these circumstances, especially in the western states, coalitions often formed across party lines, creating an environment in which there was room for the suffragists to maneuver and build alliances. But the women also faced some formidable political obstacles. For instance, the Democrats who dominated the South strongly opposed woman suffrage, both in their state legislatures and in Congress. In addition, the many groups who benefited from the current political system—urban bosses, large manufacturers, etc.—tended to oppose suffrage because they worried that female voters might support intrusive new reforms. Finally, organizations associated with the liquor industry fought woman suffrage with all their might, convinced that if women got the vote, they would bring in Prohibition. (Only Congress’ approval late in 1917 of the constitutional amendment establishing Prohibition finally defused that issue). One major event in the 1910–1920 period helped to give suffrage an extra push—America’s participation in World War I (1917–1918). When the members of the nation’s largest suffrage group threw themselves into the war effort, their well-publicized service highlighted women’s role as deserving citizens. Meanwhile, President Woodrow Wilson’s eloquent speeches about fighting for democracy overseas created the perfect context for the more confrontational suffrage group—the National Woman’s Party—to stage public protests demanding that America live up to its democratic ideals here at home. It is clear that the suffragists had to surmount formidable obstacles between 1910 and 1920. And even the events that favored them were only helpful because the women developed the capacity to take full advantage of them. One theme of this book, therefore, is to trace precisely how that happened—how, between 1910 and 1920, woman suffrage was transformed from a political long-shot into the law of the land. Among other things, we will observe the suffragists’ determined drive during these years to reach beyond their original circle of educated middleclass, native-born Protestants to build a mass movement that included immigrants and socialites, college girls and factory workers, store clerks, and farmers’ wives. Regrettably, movement leaders did not provide much encouragement to the many African-American women who supported

3

4

Introduction

woman suffrage. But in other respects, these leaders expanded the movement well beyond its original limited circle. And this, in turn, enabled them to appeal to a much broader range of male legislators and voters. At the same time, to make their message more compelling, the suffragists launched a veritable blitz of publicity. Besides the memorable suffrage parades, they spread the word through pamphlets, posters, banners, street-corner speeches, huge public rallies, and auto cavalcades. This effort to dramatize the suffrage message reached its peak in 1917, when Alice Paul and the members of the National Woman’s Party lined up at the White House gates, first to picket the president, and later to hold ceremonial burnings of his speeches about democracy—a series of demonstrations that were met with mob violence, mass arrests, and brutal treatment in the county workhouse. Taken alone, Paul’s provocations might not have carried the day, but they were brilliantly effective when combined with the backstage diplomacy of Carrie Chapman Catt and her team, as well as the tireless work of thousands of suffragists in local groups around the country. Together, these very different approaches to political persuasion accomplished what no one of them could have achieved alone: the approval of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution by both houses of Congress and by 36 state legislatures (the required three-quarters of the states). The second theme of this book is an exploration of what woman suffrage meant to the many people whose lives were touched by the campaign. Historians sometimes question whether it was wise for the women’s movement to have focused so narrowly on “just” the vote. But in truth, few protagonists in this extended drama ever saw “just” giving women the vote as such a simple matter. Consider, for instance, the multiple meanings that woman suffrage had for the many Americans—male and female—who opposed it. Depending on their particular point of view, they saw it as a threat to traditional gender relations, or to family values, or to women’s purity, or to the prosperity of the liquor industry, or (in the South) to the whole structure of white supremacy. A good number of politicians—both in the states and in Washington— started out sharing these anti-suffrage views, but over time, many of them changed their minds and came to perceive the women’s demand as a legitimate democratic claim. More importantly, because of the suffragists’ zealous promotion of their cause, even those politicians who remained unconverted came to recognize suffrage as a significant political issue, one that could not be brushed aside. Count among this latter group President Woodrow Wilson, who started out firmly opposed to woman suffrage and wound up supporting it. Women’s service during the war probably facilitated his conversion, but he was clearly motivated

Introduction

as well by his growing realization that the suffragists were never going to stop pushing and demonstrating until they achieved their goal. And what did getting the vote mean to the suffragists themselves? They certainly rejected the idea that exercising their political rights meant neglecting their domestic responsibilities. “I’ve voted most of my life,” said one resident of an early suffrage state. “And let me tell you right here that my husband hasn’t run away, and my children are perfectly fine and well looked after.”1 So what did the vote mean to these women? For some, it represented a passport to full citizenship; for others, it was a weapon against male domination, or a chance to support stronger labor laws, or a path to personal development, or a way to keep their neighborhoods safe and their children healthy. And along the way, for hundreds of thousands of American women, pursuing the goal of suffrage represented something else as well—the adventure of a lifetime. Suffragist or anti-suffragist, everyone seemed to agree that giving women the vote would bring real change to American society. Yet, as we will see in Chapter 6, it took a long time for the “woman vote” to become a significant factor in American politics. Given that fact, what did it mean for the women to focus so much of their energies on this specific goal? That question will recur throughout this narrative. Chapter 1 of this book, “The Long Road from Seneca Falls,” describes the period from the founding of the American women’s movement at Seneca Falls in 1848, through the growing emphasis on the importance of the vote, to the very halting progress made in promoting suffrage between 1870 and 1910. Chapter 2, “New Life for the State Suffrage Campaigns,” discusses the revitalization of the movement that began around 1910—broadening the membership, sharpening the suffragists’ lobbying skills, and devising a galaxy of new ways to bring the cause to public attention. In Chapter 3, “The Federal Amendment Takes Center Stage,” we meet the two women who dominated the last phase of the effort. One was Alice Paul, whose new suffrage group, the Congressional Union (later named the National Woman’s Party) re-energized the drive to add a suffrage amendment to the US Constitution. The other was Carrie Chapman Catt, who in 1916 refocused the vast resources of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) on the same federal amendment. Chapter 4, “Working for Suffrage in Wartime,” shows how the two wings of the movement promoted their cause during World War I. Catt continued NAWSA’s suffrage advocacy, including her tireless courting of President Wilson, while at the same time providing massive organizational support to the war effort. In contrast, Paul staged a series of controversial protests that dramatized the link between fighting a war for democracy and the need for democracy at home.

5

6

Introduction

This chapter ends with the passage of the federal amendment by the House of Representatives in early 1918. Chapter 5, “The Culmination,” completes the story of the suffrage campaign, recounting the 17-month struggle to get the federal amendment through the Senate (achieved in mid-1919), followed by the challenge of persuading 36 state legislatures to ratify the amendment—a goal that was achieved in August 1920. The final chapter, “Living With Woman Suffrage,” describes the events that followed the ratification of the amendment, including the rapid dissolution of the suffrage movement, the evolution of two successor organizations (the League of Women Voters and a restructured National Woman’s Party), and the slow emergence of female voters as a significant sector of the American electorate. The final section of this chapter uses the book’s two principal themes—how suffrage was achieved, and what it meant to the various participants—to explore what female activists today can learn from the suffragists’ experience during the historic final decade of their campaign. Just as women winning the vote meant different things to different people in 1910–1920, so the story of the suffrage campaign’s final decade offers a variety of meanings for those of us living today. Depending on our perspective, these crucial years may seem most significant as a foundational moment in American women’s history, as a major step forward in the expansion of American democracy, as an overlooked chapter in civil rights history, as an account of individual women coming into their own through political action, or as an object lesson in the art of political persuasion. But whichever aspect of the story strikes us most forcefully, there is much to be learned from observing the ups and downs, the failures and successes, of a great social and political movement making history.

NOTE 1 Karen J., Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 112.

Chapter 1

The Long Road from Seneca Falls 1848–1910

T

he advertisement in the Seneca County Courier on July, 11, 1848, began like this: Woman’s Rights Convention—A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the nineteenth and twentieth of July.1

This announcement was the result of one of the most productive tea parties in American history. The hostess was Mrs Jane Hunt of Waterloo, New York, and the guests included Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Wright, and Wright’s visiting sister, the famous reformer and abolitionist, Lucretia Mott. The fourth guest was a 32-year-old mother of 3 from nearby Seneca Falls named Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As the women sipped their tea, their conversation turned to the many ways in which their sex was discriminated against—legally, financially, occupationally, and educationally. In an era alive with movements for reform—for temperance, for social welfare, for the abolition of slavery—it struck the women that there was one major issue that was not being addressed: their own rights. And so they decided to organize a two-day convention on the subject. In making that decision, the women were taking an historic step. People had been writing and speaking about women’s rights off and on for many years, but this would be the very first public meeting in American history organized specifically to discuss the rights of women. The group chose a date less than two weeks away, so that Lucretia Mott would still be in town to participate. They agreed to place newspaper ads in the surrounding towns, as well as spreading the word through

8

The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910

their own personal networks. In recent decades, this area of upstate New York (roughly between Syracuse and Buffalo) had become such a hotbed of enthusiasm for religious revivals and social reform that it was known as the Burned-Over District. The women at the tea party were part of that world—mostly Quakers, mostly abolitionists—and they could hardly have chosen a more promising region in which to launch their new project. In order to lay out the facts of women’s oppression, the group decided to prepare a statement they could present at the meeting. Over the next week, they searched for an historic document that they could adapt to their purposes. Finally, when they gathered on July 16 (just three days before the meeting) to review an early draft prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they thought of the Declaration of Independence. Right away, they realized that it was just the model they needed, since using its familiar phrases would highlight the connection between women’s rights and the broader tradition of American liberty. That night, adapting Thomas Jefferson’s words as she went, Stanton started over on a new draft (italics represent Stanton’s changes): When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the powers of the earth, a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.2

MAKING THE CLAIM: 1848–1865 On July 20, 1848, the second day of the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood in the pulpit of the Wesleyan Chapel, looking out over the 300 people who had answered the organizers’ call. Over the past two days, Stanton had presented the women’s “Declaration of Sentiments” twice—first, reading it straight through, and then later going through it again, paragraph by paragraph to get people’s comments and corrections. Just like Thomas Jefferson’s original, the women’s Declaration began with a list of grievances. But instead of describing the ways that King George III had oppressed the colonists, this one itemized the ways that men were oppressing women—including taking control of their

The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910

property once they married, excluding them from higher education and many professions, preaching female submission from the pulpit, maintaining a double standard of morality, and forcing them to obey laws and leaders they had no part in choosing. Stanton read the women’s list of grievances aloud one last time. Then she called for a vote, and it was unanimously adopted. Now it was time to vote on the second part of the document—a list of 11 Resolutions, which laid out principles for undoing this pattern of oppression. Ten of the 11 Resolutions were accepted immediately, but a sharp debate broke out over the remaining 1, which asserted, “It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” Many participants worried that demanding the vote was so extreme, it would discredit the rest of the Declaration. In fact, a few days earlier, when Stanton had told Lucretia Mott that she planned to include a call for woman suffrage in the Declaration, Mott had exclaimed, “Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous!” In an era when not a single country in the world allowed its women to vote, was this resolution asking too much? A good number of participants thought it was. In addition, many people were concerned that voting would demean women, drawing them away from higher-minded pursuits and plunging them instead into the corrupt world of politics.3 These negative views might have prevailed, if it had not been for the compelling words of Frederick Douglass (as far as we know, the only African-American at AMERICA’S FIRST the Seneca Falls Convention). FEMALE VOTERS Having escaped slavery just 10 years earlier, the 30-year-old New Jersey’s first state constitution, Douglass was already celebrated adopted in 1776, permitted all qualias an abolitionist leader, an orafied “inhabitants” of the state, including tor, and a best-selling author. His women, to vote. In 1807, however, amid a vital contribution to this debate wave of concern about political corruption, was to elevate the idea of voting the state passed a new law that limited the from a mere political transaction vote to free, white, male citizens. No one to an essential act of citizenship. accused female voters of any irregularDouglas insisted that denying ity, but the drive to narrow the electorate women the vote would be unjust squeezed them out too, along with nonto them. But more than that, he citizens and African-Americans. It would be said that it would diminish society, 113 years before New Jersey women were by repudiating “one-half of the able to vote again. moral and intellectual power … 4 of the world.” Douglass’ words

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carried the day, and the suffrage resolution was included in the Seneca Falls Declaration. Now came the next challenge: how to sustain the momentum of the Seneca Falls Convention. During the 13 years between that first meeting and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, women activists submitted scores of petitions on behalf of their rights to state legislatures and state constitutional conventions. They also spread the word through f liers, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. Most notably, a hardy band of advocates started traveling around the country giving lectures on women’s rights. Many of the major figures in the later suffrage movement started by campaigning for women’s rights during the 1850s. The 30-year-old Lucy Stone, for example, was already a famous abolitionist speaker, but her grim childhood, during which her father had tyrannized the whole family, sensitized her early to the hardships faced by women. At first, she simply added bits about women’s rights to her abolitionist lectures. But in 1851 she switched over to full-time work for the women’s movement. As she explained to her former colleagues, “I was a woman before I was an abolitionist.”5 Unlike most activists, Stone married a man who was as committed to the cause as she was. Her marriage to Henry Blackwell in 1853 represented the start of a lifelong partnership spent promoting, first, the cause of women’s rights and later the specific issue of woman suffrage. At the same time, Stone’s commitment to remaining her own woman was signaled by her pioneering insistence on keeping her own name. She remained Lucy Stone, not Mrs Henry Blackwell, or even Lucy Blackwell. Another stellar convert to women’s rights in the early 1850s was Susan B. Anthony, who was also in her early 30s. Anthony, who never married, started out as a teacher—an occupation where the pay-gap between men and women caught her attention early on. She then became a traveling lecturer for the temperance crusade against alcohol. But the dismissiveness with which male temperance leaders treated the female members of the movement led Anthony to decide that women’s rights had to come first. For the rest of her life, she would dedicate every ounce of her energy to that cause. The nature of Anthony’s service to the movement was shaped by a chance meeting with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851. The Seneca Falls Convention, just three years earlier, had been Stanton’s first chance to play an important role in public life, and she was brimming with ideas about women’s rights. She was a compelling speaker as well as a talented writer, but her ability to participate in the movement was limited by her family responsibilities—she already had three children in 1848, and she would bear four more in the course of the 1850s. In any case, Stanton

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always preferred spinning new ideas and writing brilliant prose to spending months on the road. And so the match was made. For the next decade, Stanton would stay at home, writing speeches and essays, while Anthony traveled tirelessly around the country, delivering the speeches and building the movement. As Henry Stanton observed to his wife, “You stir up Susan and she stirs the world.”6 The early women’s rights meetings drew primarily from their immediate surroundings, but in 1850, activists in New England organized the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Remarkably, the event attracted more than a thousand people. From then until the Civil War, in addition to local meetings, a national convention was held in a different city nearly every year. By 1853, the annual convention in New York City drew more than 2,000 people from 11 states. Of course, large crowds did not necessarily mean large numbers of converts. Hecklers frequently interfered with the proceedings, and even better-behaved observers were often troubled by the claims the women were making. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was unfazed by the intensity of the opposition. As she said, “We cannot estimate the good that a fearless utterance of our best thoughts may do.” 7 But in truth, the concept of gender equality contradicted a whole set of widely-held ideas about how society should work. People who believed that the two genders belonged in their own separate spheres were convinced that nothing but harm could result if women started venturing into “male” activities like attending college, and entering politics and the professions. The skeptics were certain that these women would be neglecting their essential duties at home while taking up activities they were ill-equipped to pursue— physically, intellectually, and psychologically. Furthermore, immersing themselves in the harsh public sphere of life would diminish the When men at the 1853 annual women’s very qualities that made women rights convention started hissing and so admirable—their purity and booing, they got a stern response from their idealism. Sojourner Truth—a former slave who All through the 1850s, the emerged during these years as a leading female activists did their best to orator for the cause of women’s rights: persuade the public that expand“Some of you have got the spirit of a ing women’s rights was no threat goose, and some have got the spirit of a to the social order, but rather a snake,” thundered Truth. “We’ll have our simple matter of justice. As it rights. You may hiss as much as you like, happened, their efforts were but it is coming.”8 reinforced by the political mood of the time, which was highly

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alert to the issue of democratic rights. In recent decades, more and more states had been dropping their property qualifications for voting, so that by 1860 almost all adult white males were able to vote. Meanwhile, the furor of debate over slavery further highlighted the issue of individual liberty. Equality was in the air, and if most Americans were not yet ready to go so far as to apply it to women, the political atmosphere did provide a persuasive context for the women’s claims. And so the women continued their traveling lectures and their local meetings, as well as the annual conventions. Fearing that creating a central organization could lead to rigidity or divisiveness, they chose instead to rely on an informal group of leaders, backed up by the initiative of local supporters. They also drew on the resources of the highly organized abolition movement, with which many of them continued to be associated. This close link to abolitionism helps explain why advocacy for women’s rights did not spread into the South during the years before the Civil War. A movement that questioned accepted gender roles might not have been particularly popular in the tradition-minded South in any case, but the movement’s ties to abolitionism guaranteed a hostile response there. Moreover, neither the South nor the West, being primarily rural regions, had shared in the burst of reform activity during the 1830s and 1840s that had led so many urban women in the North and Midwest to take their first steps into public activism. So it was that, until after the Civil War, the American women’s movement centered almost entirely in the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi. And what about the racial makeup of the movement? If our only source of information were the official reports, we might easily assume that the early women’s rights activists were all white, except for occasional luminaries like Frederick Douglass and the formidable Sojourner Truth. But recent scholarship has shown that by the 1850s scores of African-American women were also participating in the movement. They attended the women’s rights meetings, occasionally addressed the gatherings, promoted the issue of women’s rights in their own communities, and continually reminded their white fellow activists not to forget the needs and rights of black women. We cannot know how the campaign for women’s rights might have evolved if the Civil War had not broken out in 1861. But it did break out, presenting the female activists with a new dilemma. Should they continue their advocacy, stressing the connection between the emancipation of the slaves and the emancipation of women? Or would pursuing their own interests in time of war come across as selfish and unpatriotic? In the end, the claims of patriotism won out, and (over the vigorous objections

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of Susan B. Anthony) the women suspended their own campaign and threw themselves into working for the Union cause—rolling bandages, collecting food, and raising funds for medical supplies. In 1863, Stanton and Anthony also organized the Women’s Loyal National League, whose members gathered more than 400,000 petition signatures urging Congress to move beyond President Lincoln’s wartime Emancipation Proclamation (which covered only the Confederacy) and pass a constitutional amendment forbidding slavery anywhere in the United States. The women’s rights advocates noticed how often political leaders stressed black soldiers’ military service as proof of their worthiness, and they hoped that their own wartime service to the Union would also be remembered when peace returned. Linking the two kinds of service, Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed, “We intend to avail ourselves of the strong arm and the blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side.” The women’s hopes were raised higher when, working through Stanton’s politically connected husband, Henry Stanton, they won a promise from President Lincoln that if they would refrain from agitation during the war, he would support woman suffrage once peace returned. But events outran his promises. The war ended on April, 9, 1865, and just five days later, the President was struck down by the bullet of John Wilkes Booth. The nation—and the women’s rights movement—had entered a new era.9

FOCUSING ON THE VOTE: 1865–1869 During the years just after the Civil War, the women’s movement went through a remarkably fast transformation, from promoting a whole array of women’s rights to focusing specifically on the right to vote. One likely inf luence was the fact that women had begun to see at least modest progress in some of their other goals; for instance, higher education was showing signs of opening up to women, and by 1865, the majority of states had passed some kind of law enabling married women to control their own property. By contrast, there had been no movement at all on suffrage. An even more powerful factor shaping the movement’s new focus on the vote was the explosion of interest in citizenship and suffrage that emerged as the nation debated the future of the South’s former slaves. Was emancipation enough to ensure the freedmen’s well-being? Frederick Douglass insisted that it was not, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” Other politicians agreed, reiterating that being able to vote was, as Senator Charles Sumner put it, “the Great

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Guaranty without which all other guaranties will fail.” Observing these debates, members of the women’s movement came to hope that if—as seemed increasingly likely—the freedmen were going to get the vote, then women would get it too.10 But that was not how it worked out. Starting in 1865, the Republican majority in Congress set out to remake the defeated South into a society that would accommodate the former slaves as citizens. The underlying framework for this Reconstruction, as it was called, was a set of three constitutional amendments. The first one, the 13th amendment (passed even before the war ended; ratified in December, 1865), abolished slavery nationwide. The 14th amendment (passed in 1866; ratified in 1868) said that all persons born in this country—including, obviously, the former slaves—were citizens, with all the rights of citizens. And the 15th amendment (passed in 1869; ratified 1870) prohibited discriminating against voters because of their race. In terms of promoting black suffrage, the first tentative move came in Section 2 of the 14th amendment, which warned that any state that limited the voting rights of its male citizens would have its representation in Congress cut proportionally. The 15th amendment was more explicit; it f latly prohibited discriminating against voters by race. The women’s rights activists supported the overall goals of Reconstruction, but they were troubled by the wording of the 14th and 15th amendments because each of them put new obstacles in the path of the women’s own access to the vote. The problem with the 14th amendment lay in Section 2, which threatened sanctions for limiting male voting rights. In fact, this section was never enforced, but the women hated to see the word “male” injected into the Constitution for the very first time, especially since the context made clear that only male voting rights were entitled to protection. And the 15th amendment was even worse: it forbade voter discrimination by race while saying nothing at all about the universal practice of discriminating by gender. The women insisted that what the country needed was universal suffrage, unlimited by race or gender. Toward that end, in 1866 they reorganized their annual convention into the American Equal Rights Association. But though a significant number of their former abolitionist allies were now part of the Republican leadership in Congress, and though these men were generally sympathetic to the women’s goals, their paramount concern was African-American suffrage. Many of the women felt betrayed by the Congressional leaders’ decision to put black men first, but the politicians did have some compelling reasons for acting as they did. During this period, white southerners were using every resource they could muster, including violence, to keep

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their former slaves subordinated. Congressional Republicans believed that having the vote would provide the freedmen with an essential source of power in a desperate situation. The Republican leaders also had a political motive for giving black men the vote. The southern states would soon be rejoining the Union, bringing with them several million white voters. Most white southerners still considered the Republican Party their enemy, since the Republicans had been so closely identified with the Union side during the war. For the same reason, most black southerners considered the Republicans their friends. Therefore, the only way to rebuild Republican strength in the South would be to add black men to the electorate. (Enfranchising women would not help, since the votes of Democratic white women would presumably cancel out the votes of Republican black women). There was also one more reason to give the vote to black men only—the need to get the 15th amendment ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Both black suffrage and woman suffrage were controversial issues. The leaders in Congress were certain that putting the two together would only diminish the amendment’s chances for ratification. Weighing the risks, they told the women that they would have to wait. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips explained, “This is the Negro’s hour.”11 The question of how to respond to this defeat tore the women’s movement apart. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony insisted that they could not accept the 15th amendment as written, and they vowed to campaign against it. Others spoke up in defense of the amendment, including Frederick Douglass, the same man who had carried the day for woman suffrage at Seneca Falls. Douglass had been a loyal member of the woman’s rights movement for years, but he asserted that the freedmen’s need for the vote was a matter of life and death, and must be put first. As he said, When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts … then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

African-American suffragist Frances Harper concurred, saying, “When it is a question of race, let the lesser question of sex go.”12 Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, sided with Douglass and Harper. The task now, they said, was to support the 15th amendment at the national level, while building support in the states for women’s own suffrage.

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After a lacerating debate over the 15th amendment at the American Equal Rights Association convention of 1869, Stanton and Anthony walked out of the meeting and two days later founded a new group, the National Woman Suffrage Association. That fall, the Blackwells joined with others to form a rival group, the American Woman Suffrage Association. The fact that both these organizations used the term “woman suffrage” in their titles underlines how important the vote had become to female activists by the late 1860s—so important that for the next 50 years, nearly all their efforts to expand their own rights would be focused on a single goal: winning the vote.

THE YEARS OF SEPARATION: 1869–1890 Early in 1870, just a few months after the two suffrage groups broke apart, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. One might expect that, with this issue settled, the two groups would have come back together fairly quickly. But differences in style, as well as lingering personal resentments, kept them apart for more than two decades. During that time, the Blackwells’ American Woman Suffrage Association organized state affiliates around the country, supported many campaigns for state suffrage, and built its weekly Women’s Journal into the country’s leading suffrage publication. Meanwhile, as leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Stanton and Anthony pursued a more varied path—working for a federal amendment as well as suffrage in the states, and addressing a broader array of women’s issues, primarily because of Stanton’s continuing emphasis on the whole Seneca Falls agenda. The split in the movement put African-American suffragists in a difficult position. Several of them—including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Purvis, Sarah Remond, and Frances Harper—had played significant roles in the short-lived American Equal Rights Association just after the war, and when the women’s movement divided, they felt pulled in both directions. Some, including Harper, chose to join the American Woman Suffrage Association, primarily because they appreciated the Blackwells’ defense of the 15th amendment. Others, including Purvis, joined the National group instead, mostly because of their long association with Susan B. Anthony. During these years, the need for the vote among African-American women in the South might well have emerged as a central concern for both suffrage groups, given the repressive conditions these women were facing. African-American suffragists continually tried to remind white suffragists that, in Frances Harper’s words,

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“As much as white women need the ballot, colored women need it more.”13 However, the two suffrage organizations continued to concentrate primarily on the rights of educated white women like themselves. And if the white suffragists did less than they might have for AfricanAmerican women, some of them were downright venomous toward African-American men, whose possession of the vote contrasted shamefully, the women felt, with their own lack of it. Stanton was a particular offender in this respect, asserting, for instance, “I would not trust [the black man] with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon [white] rulers are.”14 White suffragists often lumped African-American men together with other “unworthy” men, such as foreigners and illiterates, objecting to the fact that all of them could vote, while cultured women like themselves could not. In fact, having to appeal to such men for state suffrage was one reason that Stanton and Anthony preferred working at the federal level for an amendment to the US Constitution. But Stanton and Anthony also had another, less exclusionary, reason for choosing the federal route, and that was the unbelievable intricacy of state procedures for enacting woman suffrage. The rules varied from state to state, but they were all complicated and time-consuming. Multiply these procedures by 37 (the number of states in 1875), and one can understand why Stanton and Anthony, as well as many other suffragists, came to believe that the federal amendment was the way to go.

Sidebar 1.1: Suffrage as an Automatic Right of Citizenship? The New Departure Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were bitterly disappointed when the 15th amendment (ratified 1870) gave the vote to African-American men but not to women. The two then threw their energies into another suffrage effort, called the New Departure. This initiative based its claim on the recently-passed 14th amendment, which guaranteed full rights of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Here is the women’s argument: “We are citizens. Voting is a right of citizenship. So we don’t have to ask for the right to vote. It is ours already, by virtue of the 14th amendment!” The New Departure argument reached its widest audience when it was presented to the US House Judiciary Committee in 1872 by the glamorous Victoria Woodhull, who had recently burst upon the women’s rights scene. The 34-year-old Woodhull already had a complicated past, which included two marriages, several

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lovers, and an early career as a fortune teller. A few years before Woodhull made her appearance before Congress, her sister Tennessee Claflin had begun a liaison with millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt. Fascinated by Tennessee’s beauty and Victoria’s apparent ability to predict the stock market through spiritualism, Vanderbilt set the two sisters up as the city’s first female stock brokers, and helped them establish a weekly magazine. Woodhull began speaking out for women’s rights, and in 1872 she became the first woman ever to be nominated for president (by the new Equal Rights Party). Woodhull’s career as a spokeswoman for women’s rights ended abruptly, shortly before the 1872 election, when she published an article exposing the fact that one of America’s most revered preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, was having an affair with a woman in his congregation. The resulting scandal was humiliating (though not fatally damaging) for Rev. Beecher, and embarrassing for the suffrage leaders who had welcomed Woodhull as a fellow activist. But it was Woodhull herself whose life was affected the most; she served a brief jail sentence for publishing “obscene material,” and a few years later she left the United States for good. Meanwhile, the New Departure campaign carried on. Encouraged by the National Woman Suffrage Association, more than 150 women in 10 states tried to vote on Election Day in 1872. Although most of them were turned away, some were mistakenly allowed to cast their ballots, including Susan B. Anthony herself. That night, she wrote exultantly to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Well, I have been & gone & done it!”15 Anthony’s subsequent arrest, trial, conviction, and refusal to pay her fine made national headlines. One of the women who had not been allowed to vote was Virginia Minor of St. Louis, Missouri. With her husband (because in Missouri, married women were not allowed to bring legal actions on their own), Minor sued the registrar who had turned her away. Their case, Minor v. Happersett, worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and in 1875 the justices rendered their decision. They ruled that voting was not an automatic right of citizenship covered by the 14th amendment; it was up to the states to determine who was eligible to vote. Thus, the registrar in St. Louis was innocent. And the New Departure was dead. If the women wanted to establish a constitutional right to vote, they would have to get an amendment of their own.

There was actually a time in the early 1870s when the women thought they might be able to win the vote simply by claiming it as a right of citizenship. But that initiative was ruled out by the US Supreme Court in 1875 (see Sidebar 1.1, pp. 17–18). This threw the suffragists back to their original two options: they could try to win the vote

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in each individual state, or they could try for their own amendment to the Constitution. In fact, the two options were related. Stanton and Anthony still preferred the federal route, but even they believed that it would take a certain number of state victories to make the US Congress take the issue seriously. How many victories? Anthony answered the question this way, I don’t know the exact number of States we shall have to have, but I do know that there will come a day when that number will automatically and resistlessly act on the Congress of the United States to compel the submission of a federal suffrage amendment.16

So the state campaigns mattered, and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, both the National and the American Woman Suffrage Associations worked hard on them—lecturing, organizing local societies, and supporting local campaigns for suffrage. There were no state victories during these years, but three western territories did give women the vote— Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870, and Washington in 1883. However, only Wyoming’s law remained in place (see Figure 1.1). Washington’s was struck down by its territorial court in 1887, and that same year Utah’s law was reversed by the federal government, for fear that woman suffrage would give THE SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT too much political power to the Mormons, who at that time still “The right of citizens to vote shall not be practiced polygamy. denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” On the congressional front, a bill proposing a suffrage amendThis is the federal suffrage amendment ment to the Constitution had drafted by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth been introduced in the House of Cady Stanton that was introduced in the Representatives by Rep. George US Senate by California’s Aaron Sargent in Julian back in 1869, but it had made 1878, and finally ratified in 1920. The suflittle progress. In any case, Stanton fragists initially hoped that it would become and Anthony were concerned that the 16th amendment, as a fitting supplethe complicated wording of Julian’s ment to the 15th, which outlawed voting bill might lead to court challenges. discrimination by race. But three more So they drafted simpler language, amendments were adopted before the based almost word for word on woman suffrage amendment was ratified in the 15th amendment (see Box, 1920, so it became the 19th. p. 19).The new bill was introduced in 1878 and re-introduced in each

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Figure 1.1  In 1888, nearly 20 years after first winning the vote, a group of Wyoming Territory women gather to cast their ballots. Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/92516129/

new Congress thereafter. But for the next 35 years, it only got as far as a floor vote once—in the Senate in 1887—and when it did, it was overwhelmingly defeated. Gradually, a kind of ritual developed. Every year, the suffragists were invited to testify at a congressional hearing.They spoke their piece, the hearings ended, and nothing changed.

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But if progress toward the vote was slow, there was an important change within the suffrage movement itself: the two rival factions were thinking about reuniting. By the late 1880s, opposition to the 15th amendment was of course a bygone issue. And of the three women who had taken the split within the movement most personally, only Susan B. Anthony was still fully engaged in suffrage work. Lucy Stone was in failing health. As for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she continued to write prolifically, but she had become increasingly impatient with the movement leaders’ single-minded focus on the vote and their reluctance to tackle the more controversial issues that interested her, such as divorce and the church’s subjugation of women. So when reunification was proposed, Stanton wrote resignedly to a friend, “Lucy & Susan alike see suffrage only. They do not see women’s religious & social bondage, neither do the young women in either association, hence they may as well combine for they have one mind and one purpose.”17 And so in 1890, a new unified organization—the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)—held its first convention. Just over 20 years after the painful split, the suffrage movement was back together again.

DISAPPOINTED HOPES: 1890–1910 The 1890s began with a bang, bringing the suffrage movement four state victories in just six years: Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), and in 1896, Utah and Idaho. Neither Wyoming nor Utah had required a great deal of advocacy from the suffrage movement, because in each case political leaders simply took the suffrage provisions they had already enacted when they were territories, and wrote them into the constitutions with which they were now entering the Union as new states. (As noted previously, the federal government had rejected the Utah Territory’s adoption of woman suffrage in 1887, out of hostility to Mormon polygamy. But by 1896 the church had officially renounced that practice, so the approval of Utah’s new constitution, including woman suffrage, went through smoothly). In contrast to the situations in Wyoming and Utah, suffragists in Colorado and Idaho conducted vigorous campaigns, reinforced by alliances they had built with temperance groups and a new farm-labor political party, the Populists. These suffragists even developed the confidence to challenge the leaders at the National suffrage organization. In 1893 NAWSA’s new national organizer, Carrie Chapman Catt, wrote to the

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Colorado suffragists explaining that the time was not yet right for a full-scale campaign in their state. A local activist shot back, “You say you have talked with ‘no one who feels the slightest hopes of success in Colorado’; are you sure you have talked with anyone who understands the situation here?”18 Catt visited the state, was converted, and helped the Colorado women organize their winning campaign. A few years later, she helped suffragists in Idaho conduct a similar, equally successful, campaign. These four victories naturally led suffragists elsewhere to hope that their own states would be next. But replication was not as easy as it looked. In fact, specific local circumstances had helped push the law through in each of the new “suffrage states”—Wyoming’s wish to attract more female settlers, the aspirations of the Mormon community in Utah, and the temporary strength of pro-suffrage Populists in Colorado and Idaho. Outside of these states, suffrage continued to face formidable obstacles—so formidable, in fact, that it would be 14 years before the next state victory. The drive for suffrage seemed to be blocked at the federal level, too. NAWSA had been holding its annual conventions in Washington, so as to promote the amendment in Congress each year. But in 1893 the members showed their discouragement by deciding to meet in Washington only every other year, using the in-between years to convene in different cities around the country. Susan B. Anthony vehemently disagreed, warning, “The moment you change the purpose of this great body from National to State work you have defeated its object.”19 But the members outvoted her, and NAWSA’s focus on the state campaigns continued. Unfortunately, so did the defeats. Why did it take so long to win support for suffrage? Many of those who opposed votes for women continued to insist, just like their predecessors 50 years earlier, that women were too emotional to handle the rigors of political decision-making, that venturing into the gritty male world of politics would degrade them, and that in any case, they belonged at home caring for their families (see eResources, Image 1). But the anti-suffragists had also developed some new arguments, ref lecting how the world had changed since 1850 (see also Document 1 in the Documents appendix): ••

Women do not need the vote to improve their status: Anti-suffragists often pointed to the advances that had been made in women’s rights—in property laws, access to higher education, etc.—as proof that women’s lives could be improved perfectly well without their having the vote.

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••

••

••

••

At the same time, they maintained that conditions had not improved much in the four states where women now could vote. Women voters will promote excessive reform: Groups that were wary of social reform—such as manufacturing interests and urban political machines—tended to oppose woman suffrage because they feared that reform-minded female voters would help enact intrusive new regulations. Women voters will bring in Prohibition: People who opposed Prohibition (including those who produced alcohol, those who sold it, and those who consumed it) worried about woman suffrage, both because of women’s general reformist tendencies and, more specifically, because many female temperance groups supported woman suffrage. Woman suffrage is irrelevant to our lives: Immigrant men tended to be cool to suffrage, in part because suffrage leaders were so critical of them, regularly protesting the fact that “ignorant” foreigners could vote while American-born women could not. In addition, for many years the suffrage movement showed relatively little interest in the concerns of immigrant communities—or working-class communities in general. The electorate is already too big: The earlier enthusiasm for expanding democracy, which had helped to nourish the women’s rights movement in the 1850s, virtually evaporated in the 1890s, eroded by the backlash against rising levels of immigration, as well as disillusion with the alleged failure of black suffrage in the South during Reconstruction. As one anti-suffragist observed, the political climate was now dominated by “many thoughtful persons, anxiously doubting democracy.”20

If these various objections had been raised only by men that would have been one thing. But most American women, too, remained opposed— or indifferent—to suffrage. This situation was highlighted in 1895, when Massachusetts women were invited to participate in a non-binding “mock referendum” on whether women should vote. The majority of those who chose to participate did opt for suffrage, but a devastating 96 percent of the state’s women simply stayed home. It is true that organized anti-suffragism was particularly strong in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, the narrowness of female support for suffrage was a problem nationwide. And as long as so many women remained uncommitted to the cause, it was always going to be easy for men to ignore the issue (see Sidebar 2.1 in Chapter 2, pp. 41–42).

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On top of these external obstacles, the suffrage movement was also facing internal challenges. By the late 1890s, the leaders of the pioneer generation were aging or gone. Lucy Stone had died in 1893, and although Elizabeth Cady Stanton continued to write about women’s issues until her death in 1902, she had little involvement in NAWSA after the early 1890s. Susan B. Anthony would remain the revered public face of woman suffrage until (and after) her death in 1906, but the movement as a whole was losing energy. NAWSA was perennially short of funds, it had less than 15,000 dues-paying members nationwide, and many of the local affiliates it organized failed to last.21 There was one rising star within NAWSA—Carrie Chapman Catt. When she began volunteering for woman suffrage in her native Iowa in the late 1880s, she was a 28-year-old widow, supporting herself as a journalist. Her commitment to the cause grew so strong that when the wealthy George Catt proposed to her in 1890; she made him promise that if she married him, she could devote at least four months every year to woman suffrage. He agreed, they married, and from then on he supported her commitment so generously that she was able, in her words, to give “365 days’ work each year.”22 Catt soon made a name for herself within NAWSA, helping to lead several state campaigns. In 1893 she was named National Organizer, and two years later, after presenting a devastating report on NAWSA’s organizational failings, she was chosen to head a new National Organizing Committee. In 1900 Catt received the ultimate promotion, when Susan B. Anthony, now ready to retire, chose Catt to succeed her as president. The choice was not universally popular, because, despite her formidable talents, Catt had a demanding style that ruff led feathers among the older suffragists who still dominated the NAWSA board. Even the revered Anthony had bristled a bit during one of Catt’s early, highly critical, addresses to a NAWSA convention. On that occasion, Anthony observed, “There never yet was a young woman who did not feel that if she had had the management of the work from the beginning the cause would have been carried long ago. I felt just so when I was young.”23 The audience laughed, but everyone understood that the comment was a gentle barb aimed at Catt. Nevertheless, when it came time for Anthony to retire in 1900, she startled the membership by choosing Catt to succeed her. Nearly everyone had expected Anthony to pick Dr Anna Howard Shaw, her vice-president and longtime protégée. Shaw—both a physician and an ordained minister—was an electrifying orator who had spent years

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traveling for suffrage in the states and was very popular with the membership. She herself was surprised and disappointed at being passed over, but she responded loyally to Anthony’s decision that what NAWSA needed just then was Catt’s organizational skills. Catt’s rise to NAWSA leadership in the 1890s occurred during a period when NAWSA was concentrating almost entirely on state action— thanks in part to the first four state suffrage victories, (1890–1896) and in part to the total lack of progress on the federal amendment. Because of this focus on state campaigns, NAWSA leaders responded eagerly when woman suffrage began showing its very first signs of life in the South. In recent years, privileged white southern women had begun participating in local reform activities, and many of them had developed an interest in suffrage as well. Soon, local suffrage societies began springing up across the South. To foster this trend, NAWSA established a Southern Committee in 1892, it appointed several southerners to national leadership positions, and it scheduled two of its annual conventions in southern cities (Atlanta in 1895 and New Orleans in 1903). But the white southerners’ enthusiasm for woman suffrage came with its own racial perspective. In promoting their cause to local political leaders, the southern suffragists typically argued that giving women the vote with educational or property-holding requirements would solve the South’s “racial problem” by creating a big enough white electorate to offset the votes of African-Americans. In the past, NAWSA leaders had considered and then rejected the idea of supporting educational or property limitations on woman suffrage. But now they quietly acquiesced in the southerners’ promotion of the idea. They also accommodated the white southerners by discouraging African-Americans from attending the NAWSA conventions that were held in the South—in 1895 Susan B. Anthony even advised the venerable Frederick Douglass to stay away from the meeting in Atlanta.24 Two events slowed the momentum of NAWSA’s “southern strategy.” First, one of the most outspoken southern suffragists, Kate Gordon of Louisiana demanded in 1906 that NAWSA formally endorse seeking the vote for white women only. When the national leadership refused, the decision opened a rift with the more extreme southern suffragists that would widen over time. Then, at about the same time, a series of southern constitutional conventions, for which the women had had high hopes, ended with not a single state having adopted woman suffrage (see Sidebar 1.2, p. 26). After this defeat, many suffrage groups around the South drifted into inaction; it would be some years before they revived.

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Sidebar 1.2: Woman Suffrage in the South: The Intersection of Race and Gender When the campaign for woman suffrage made its first significant appearance in the South, during the 1890s, it reflected local women’s own aspirations, but there was also a larger context. By that time, northern Republicans had given up on trying to “reconstruct” southern society, federal troops had been withdrawn from the South, and local white Democrats were back in control, using their political and economic power, as well as periodic violence, to eliminate the rights that African-Americans had gained during Reconstruction. The new “Jim Crow” system institutionalized racial segregation in public spaces, but southern whites also wanted to systematize the exclusion of African-Americans from the political process. Accordingly, starting with Mississippi in 1890, every state in the former Confederacy set out to rewrite its constitution in a way that would limit the black vote. They discussed the use of poll taxes, as well as literacy tests, white-only primaries, and a variety of other methods. So what does this have to do with woman suffrage? As the constitutional conventions were exploring these approaches, almost every one of them debated whether enacting woman suffrage could help to diminish the power of the black vote. Since giving women the vote would mean enfranchising black women as well as white, some conventions discussed limiting the vote to white women, some pored over Census data to see how the gender and racial numbers would balance out in their states; and others debated whether the methods used to discourage black male voters would work with black women. Many of the South’s new suffrage societies made their first public appearances at these gatherings, leading an Alabama newspaper to comment, “No matter how modest a constitutional convention is nowadays, some female suffragist will find it out and insist on making a speech.” In their presentations, the suffragists warned the convention members that exclusionary procedures like poll taxes and white primaries could run into trouble with the US Supreme Court. On the other hand, as one South Carolina suffragist argued, “Give the women … the ballot, with a property and educational qualification, and they will outnumber the negro voters so that these people’s ballots can be honestly counted.” The Louisiana suffrage leader Belle Kearney put the matter more explicitly, “The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”25 In the end, not a single one of the constitutional conventions in the South adopted woman suffrage. Instead, the legislators chose to suppress black men’s vote by other means, such as poll-taxes and white primaries. And though the suffragists had warned of possible legal repercussions, many decades would pass before these arrangements were questioned by the Supreme Court. In the meantime, AfricanAmericans in the South were almost totally disenfranchised, and the first wave of southern suffragism was decisively defeated.

The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910

While these events were unfolding, Carrie Chapman Catt completed her first term as NAWSA president (1900–1904) and chose not to serve again, pleading her own burnout and her husband’s ill health (he would die the following year). In fact, much of Catt’s burnout stemmed from her frustration at not having been able to make the changes at NAWSA that she thought were necessary, primarily because of a resistant board and insufficient funds. However, Catt’s willing successor was standing in the wings, and in 1904 the presidency went to the woman who had been passed over in 1900: Dr Anna Howard Shaw. Shaw began her presidency about halfway through the long period between Idaho’s adoption of woman suffrage in 1896 and the next state victory in 1910. It was a disheartening time for suffrage work in the states, involving more than a dozen failed campaigns. And things were going no better in Washington DC, where the federal amendment seemed to be permanently stalled. In addition, the movement lost its most revered leader, when Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. Her last public address was relentlessly optimistic, concluding, “With such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!”26 Yet, if failure was impossible, victory still seemed very far away. Nevertheless, whatever the setbacks, these years did bring the start of changes within the suffrage movement that promised better times ahead. For it was during this period that suffragists began to develop a skill that was essential to the ultimate success of their campaign: the capacity to speak to and with and for a more diverse array of American women. One important step in that direction was a change in the way movement leaders explained why women should be granted the vote. In the years just after the Civil War, they had continued to rely primarily on the argument presented at Seneca Falls—that women deserved equality with men as a simple matter of justice. The trouble was, this “justice argument” carried little weight with the many people—male and female— who believed that the two sexes were not—and should not be—equal. Moreover, suffrage leaders too often limited their audience further by focusing too narrowly on the justice claims of white educated middleclass women like themselves. Movement leaders never fully abandoned the justice argument. But starting in the late 19th century, they supplemented it with a different rationale, which framed the vote as an instrument of social change, and stressed how women of every class and background could use it to pursue the goals they thought were important (see Document 1 in the appendix). Frances Willard, the charismatic president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), gave the suffrage movement a nudge in this direction in the 1880s, when she persuaded her organization to endorse woman suffrage. When thousands of WCTU members

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began turning out for suffrage campaigns, they were primarily motivated, not by some abstract principle of justice, but by the conviction that they could use the vote to help elect candidates who would support their own organizational goals—Prohibition, certainly, but also a variety of other laws to protect women and children. Soon afterward, another group of women took the same path. This time it was rural western women associated with the new farm–labor party, the Populists. At the national level, the Populist Party remained neutral on the suffrage question. But women participated actively in party affairs, especially in the West, and they helped persuade a number of the state Populist parties to endorse woman suffrage. Once again, like the members of the WCTU, these women were embracing suffrage primarily because they believed that they could use it to further the goals that were important to them. Not all suffragists, of course, were concerned with the social utility of the vote. For instance, members of the emerging feminist movement tended to see the vote as just one of a galaxy of rights that every woman needed in order to achieve her own fullest potential. Rather than stressing a woman’s role as a public benefactor, the feminists’ ideal woman was a liberated spirit, free to develop in whichever direction her talents took her. “Here she comes, running,” wrote economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “out of prison and off the pedestal; chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”27 For feminists, winning the vote was simply one helpful step toward a much more sweeping social revolution. The feminists represented an important strand in women’s activism that would resurface dramatically in later decades, but during the early 20th century, they were a relatively small minority within the suffrage movement. As a contemporary observed, “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists.”28 And for the many women who were not feminists, the suffrage movement’s growing emphasis on the social uses of the vote made a profound appeal. Did this approach represent a less principled stand than demanding the vote as a right? Some historians have thought so; Aileen Kraditor, for instance, called the new rationale the “expediency” argument.29 Her term, which is now widely used, certainly has a critical edge to it. And this negative interpretation is reinforced by the fact that during the same years that the movement was embracing the “expediency” argument for suffrage, it was also dropping the broad rights agenda of the Seneca Falls Declaration in favor of a single-minded focus on the vote. The movement’s new approach—pursuing only the vote and putting primary emphasis on how it could be used—can fairly be characterized as less radical than the sweeping vision of the Seneca Falls Declaration.

The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910

Nevertheless, winning the vote was a compelling goal. And if it was to be achieved, then the new strategy did offer powerful advantages: •• ••

••

It meant that women from different social backgrounds, with different social agendas, could work together for suffrage. It left room for people to support woman suffrage whether they believed in gender equality or in separate roles for the two genders. If women were equal to men, then it was only right that they should have an equal vote. If women were different from men, then they needed the vote to contribute their own unique perspective to public policy-making. Rather than stressing what society owed to women—the right to vote—the new approach made a more disarming case for how, as voters, women could contribute to society.

By 1910, the more goal-oriented way of explaining women’s need for the vote had become well-established, enabling the suffrage movement to appeal to a steadily expanding circle of women. These changes set the stage for the climactic final decade of women’s campaign for the vote, 1910–1920.

NOTES 1 Eleanor Clift, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003), 11. 2 “Declaration of Sentiments” (Seneca Falls, NY, 1848) in Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, ed., Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 20. 3 Chapman and Mills, Treacherous Texts, 23; Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93. 4 McMillen, Seneca Falls, 94. 5 Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1964, 1977), 106. 6 Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 63. 7 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 14. 8 “Clift, Founding Sisters, 29.” 9 Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 142; Clift, Founding Sisters, 38.

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10 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 477; Charles Sumner, “The Equal Rights of All,” (1866), in The Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 10 (Boston, MA: Lea and Shepard, 1876), 124. 11 This remark, made by abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1861, was frequently cited during the debates over the Reconstruction amendments. See, for instance, Davis, Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 141. 12 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 477; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 32. 13 Terborg-Penn, African-American Women, 47. See also, for instance, Ann D. Gordon et al., eds., African-American Women and the Vote: 1837–1965 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 48–51, 66–99. 14 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 178. 15 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 146. 16 Corinne M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 17 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 165. 18 McConnaughy, Woman Suffrage Movement, 3. 19 Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, eds., One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975, 1982), 24. 20 Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 21. 21 See, for instance, Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 8. 22 Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 16. 23 Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, v. 1 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881), 249. 24 Terborg-Penn, African-American Women, 110. 25 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 118; Scott and Scott, One Half the People, 105; Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 160. 26 Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 48. 27 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 37. 28 Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 15. 29 Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965, 1981), 43.

Chapter 2

New Life for the State Suffrage Campaigns 1910–1913

T

he state of Washington approved woman suffrage on November 8, 1910, marking the movement’s first victory in 14 years. A few days later, a local paper celebrated the event with a cartoon headlined “Uncle Sam’s Newest Girl Baby—He Has Five Daughters Now.” There stood Uncle Sam, proudly holding a baby labeled “Washington,” while a little girl labeled “Wyoming” (which enacted suffrage in 1890) stood nearby. A toddler labeled “Colorado” (1893) tugged at her father’s coattail, and twin babies labeled “Utah” and “Idaho” (1896) snuggled together in a cradle. Next to the cradle stood three beaming suffragists. Presumably the mother was the one in front—Emma Smith DeVoe, the principal leader of the Washington State campaign.1 Just a year later in 1911, it was California’s turn. That victory represented an even greater achievement. For one thing, California’s population was particularly diverse so that the suffragists had had to appeal to an unusually broad range of voters. Moreover, California was by far the largest state won so far—in fact, it had more people than all five of the previous suffrage states put together. Coming back to back, the victories in Washington and California marked a turning point in women’s campaign for the vote. Suffragists in the two states had followed very different paths to victory (see Document 2 in the appendix). Emma Smith DeVoe, the moving spirit in Washington State, was convinced that splashy public events only stirred up the opposition. Instead, Smith advocated what she called “the still hunt”—that is, working for suffrage as stealthily as a hunter sneaking up on his prey. So low-key was Smith’s approach that the amendment she steered through the legislature did not even include the words “woman suffrage” in its title. Once the amendment went to the voters, Smith and her co-workers did promote their cause

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through talks to unions, farmers’ associations, and church groups, as well as through a wide distribution of literature. But they resolutely avoided any conspicuous public events. And since their amendment passed by a two-to-one margin, it would be hard to quarrel with their strategy, at least for their particular state. The California suffragists, on the other hand, recognized that the subtle methods of the “still hunt” could not possibly succeed in a state as large and diverse and politically contentious as theirs. So instead of the typical close-knit team of middle-class activists that usually led state suffrage campaigns, the California campaign drew on the energies of dozens of suffrage societies around the state, led by everyone from wealthy clubwomen to Socialist labor organizers. And instead of the “still hunt” tactics used in Washington, the Californians immersed their fellow citizens in a veritable hurricane of publicity—parades, rallies, streetmeetings, plays, pageants, posters, buttons, banners, electric signs, high school essay contests, press releases, and auto caravans. Some of these tactics were borrowed from the labor movement, some from pioneering suffrage groups elsewhere, and some drew on the emerging techniques of mass marketing. But no one before had put the whole thing together so comprehensively in a winning statewide campaign. When the California amendment passed, it galvanized suffragists around the country. The victory was a close one, but the fact that it had happened at all in a state this big made it seem possible that even the most challenging states could be conquered. The main suffragist magazine, Woman’s Journal, called the California victory “the greatest single advance that the suffrage movement has yet made.”2 Taken together, the victories in Washington and California gave American suffragists a new sense of momentum. And the particular approaches used in California— enlarging the circle of participants and spreading the word to the general public so energetically—would be picked up and replicated in state campaigns all around the country. There would be plenty of setbacks and disappointments in the years ahead, but suffragists everywhere felt that they were witnessing the start of a new era. The new mood was captured by California’s Hannah Solomon, when she went to the polls on the first election day after her state approved woman suffrage. “Good morning, fellow citizens,” she said. “I’ve come to vote.”3

BUILDING A MASS MOVEMENT When we talk about enlarging the circle of suffrage participants, we need to appreciate what a departure that was, in a movement that had

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

remained almost exclusively middle-class for generations. As we noted earlier, activists in the national suffrage association, NAWSA, had taken one important step toward greater inclusiveness during the late 19th century, when they started to explain the need for suffrage in a way that left room for women with different social agendas to embrace the vote as a way to pursue their own goals. But though the suffragists’ language had changed, the movement as a whole was still quite narrow in its social outlook. Well into the 1st years of the 20th century, many local suffrage groups continued to operate more like social clubs than political organizations, sometimes even requiring new members to be voted in—a process that was virtually guaranteed to limit the membership to women very much like themselves. The radical leader Emma Goldman put it this way in 1911, “The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair.”4 But even as Goldman was writing those words, the state campaigns were beginning to reach out to a wider circle of women, not simply with a speech here and there, but with the specific goal of recruiting these women as active members of the movement. Why did this happen? Probably the most compelling reason was the leaders’ recognition that there were significant segments of the American electorate that they were simply not reaching. They needed a broader base. The new women they recruited might not be able to vote for suffrage themselves, but they could campaign for it, they could talk to people in their own communities, and above all, they could inf luence the men in their lives, who did have the power to vote. For instance, there were millions of American housewives whose primary interest lay in taking care of their own families. Why should they care about the vote? The suffragists told them that the world had changed, and family protection now required political action. One eloquent spokesperson for this argument was the celebrated reformer Jane Addams. She pointed out that dozens of the tasks that mothers used to perform in the home were now dependent on outside services—the commercial dairy, the butcher, the public water supply, the school system. Thus, keeping one’s family safe meant ensuring that those services were adequately regulated, which in turn required active participation as a voter. Thus, wrote Addams, “Women are pushed outside of the home in order that they may preserve the home”5 (see also Document 2 in the appendix). This argument had a particular appeal because, instead of framing suffrage as something women wanted for personal reasons, it was presented as something women needed in order to fulfill their social obligations. Another huge untapped audience for suffrage recruitment was working-class women. Historically, many NAWSA members had dismissed

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the members of the working class—male and female—as uneducated and not really qualified to vote. And they had been even more dismissive of the large segment of the working class that was foreign-born. As we have seen, NAWSA members had spent years pointing out the injustice of giving the vote to immigrant men instead of to native-born women like themselves. Obviously, one major impetus for NAWSA to change its stance was the hard fact that certain states appeared to be unwinnable without the votes of working-class men. And recruiting working-class women—including immigrants—offered a path to gaining that support. But knowing that these women needed to be recruited was one thing. It was quite another to understand their lives, to take seriously their potential role as voters, and to communicate with them in a way that would win their support. The people who did the most to help the suffrage movement make that transformation were the many NAWSA members who were active in the progressive movement, which was then at its peak. During these years, progressive reformers, male and female, formed hundreds of committees and associations designed to address the nation’s problems—from protecting public health to cleaning up urban politics to improving labor conditions. The group of NAWSA members who were interested in labor conditions made a special effort to awaken their fellow suffragists to the problems of working women (particularly immigrants), and how the vote could help them. One leader in this effort was Florence Kelley, a committed suffragist and lifetime advocate for the rights of labor. From 1898 on, Kelley repeatedly took the stage at NAWSA conventions to call for a more sympathetic outreach to working women. Jane Addams backed Kelley up, stressing that women could be useful voters and citizens, no matter how little formal education they had, and no matter what country they had been born in. All kinds of people, she said, have “reservoirs of moral power and civic ability.”6 Furthermore, on a pragmatic note, Kelley and Addams reminded NAWSA members that they were never going to win support from male working-class voters unless they showed more respect and concern for them—and for their wives. NAWSA also heard speeches on this subject from the numerous suffragists who belonged to the Women’s Trade Union League—a coalition of middle- and working-class women that had been established to help female workers organize unions and improve their occupational conditions. From the time of its founding in 1903, the League’s middle-class members continually spoke up at NAWSA meetings to remind their fellow suffragists of the challenges faced by working-class women and of their special need for the vote.

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

But NAWSA members I think that I was born a suffragist, but if I were not the only ones who hadn’t been I am sure that the conditions needed convincing. The fact of the working girls in New York … would was, many working women have made me one. saw the suffrage campaign as little more than a rich womRose Schneiderman, Jewish immigrant, an’s hobby. In response, the NYC labor organizer, and suffrage suffragists who belonged to speaker7 the Women’s Trade Union League did their best to convince their working-class “allies” that they could use the vote to improve their own lives. Meanwhile, activists outside of NAWSA were also preaching suffrage to working women. For instance, a number of women’s unions and socialist clubs had begun to take an interest in the issue, organizing their own wage-workers’ suffrage societies (see, for instance, Sidebar 2.2, pp. 46–47), As NAWSA intensified its effort to recruit working women to the suffrage movement, it periodically invited female labor organizers (many of them immigrants) to address its meetings, and—for the first time—it hired a number of these women to work as traveling suffrage speakers. The state campaigns were visibly strengthened by these new hires, since middle-class suffragists often had trouble striking just the right tone when addressing working-class audiences. As one immigrant suffrage speaker wrote to another, “The ‘cultured’ ladies may be very sincere in their desire for the ballot … but because their views are narrow, and their knowledge of social conditions limited, they cannot do as well as some of us can.”8 Whatever their limitations, NAWSA members’ social outlook did become broader during these years, thanks to a combination of pragmatism—the obvious need to attract working men’s votes—and the eloquent advocacy of reform-minded suffragists. The outreach was successful, and for the first time, thousands of working women—including many immigrants—who had never before thought seriously about suffrage began adding their voices to the campaign for the vote. In Philadelphia, for instance, a young factory worker—a Jewish immigrant named Olga Gross—became so committed to the cause that she used her savings to buy a 100-pound bag of peanuts, out of which she made a gigantic batch of peanut brittle. Then she sold the candy on her lunch hour and donated the proceeds to her local suffrage club9 (see also Document 3 in the appendix.) Besides having been quite limited in the past in terms of class and ethnicity, the NAWSA membership had also been growing older; even

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newer leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt were approaching their 50s. When 29-year-old Maud Wood Park attended her first NAWSA meeting in 1900, she was struck by the fact that she was the youngest person in the room. So when she got home to Boston, she persuaded a fellow Radcliffe graduate, Inez Haynes, to help her organize the Massachusetts College Equal Suffrage League (CESL). Their idea was that recent college alumnae should form CESL chapters, which would then recruit local college students and even high school students as members. Park began touring the country to promote the idea, and within a few years, she had established chapters in 30 states. At Park’s suggestion, NAWSA began holding a college evening at each year’s convention, featuring speeches by younger suffragists. And in 1908, the CESL chapters around the country united to form the National College Equal Suffrage League, a NAWSA affiliate. As suffrage enthusiasm swept the college campuses, the movement came to seem exciting and even romantic. The future suffrage heroine Inez Milholland, then a student at Vassar College, drew wide attention when, having been forbidden to hold a suffrage meeting on campus, she defiantly convened the meeting in a nearby graveyard. At Cornell University, co-ed Laura Ellsworth Seiler overheard her fiancé say, “Laura doesn’t believe in suffrage or any of that nonsense.” Suddenly, Seiler says, “I knew I did! … I forthwith started the Suffrage Club at Cornell.”10 When suffrage parades around the country began featuring entire phalanxes of female college graduates, marching together in their caps and gowns, it was clear that another new group of American women had joined the suffrage movement. While the state campaigns were reaching out, as best they could, to housewives and working-class women and college women, they were also making an effort to enlist women at the very top of the social and economic scale. Ever since the 1890s, Carrie Chapman Catt had been convinced that if these women could be attracted to the movement, they would give it new prestige, insulate it to some extent from hostile press coverage, and of course help with the movement’s finances. NAWSA embraced Catt’s “society plan,” and although many wealthy women remained resolutely opposed to suffrage, a good number of them did join up—so many, in fact, that the humorist Finley Peter Dunne commented on the trend in 1909, asking whether these society ladies were really prepared to go out in the rain to vote, or would they just send their footmen?11 The best-known of the new wealthy suffragists was Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who had already created a spate of national headlines—first by marrying a millionaire (William K. Vanderbilt), then by organizing a

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

succession of extravagant parties and building projects, then by divorcing Vanderbilt, then by marrying off her daughter to the Duke of Marlborough, and finally by marrying another millionaire, Oliver Belmont. After Oliver died in 1908, Alva became interested in suffrage, and for the next decade, she acted as one of its most generous contributors. Meanwhile, around the country, many other socially prominent women were also joining the campaign. Some dipped in and out according to their other priorities, but many became valuable members, contributing not only their hard work but also their money, their publicity value, and their inf luence with men in high places. The support of these elite women helped pave the way to winning support from an elite national organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Women’s clubs had started springing up after the Civil War, and they multiplied so dramatically that by 1906 the General Federation had 500,000 members. Not all of these women were movers and shakers in their communities, of course, but a considerable number of them were. And the conversion of so many of the leaders to suffrage helped speed up the process within the whole women’s club movement. The Federation debated endorsing suffrage for several years, but by the time it finally did so, in 1914, there were just 12 negative votes. Hailing the decision, the assembled delegates stood up, cheered, cried, and burst into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”12 Even men found a place for themselves within the new mobilization. The suffrage movement had always had male supporters, all the way back to Seneca Falls. But (except for a brief period during the split in the 1870s–1880s, when Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association had permitted men to hold office) men had had no formal role in the movement. That changed in 1909, when 150 prominent New York men— writers, doctors, businessmen, academics, and clergymen—organized the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. The idea spread, and within a few years, there were men’s suffrage leagues in 25 states, with a national membership of 20,000.13 The willingness of these men to speak and act publicly for what was still in many circles a controversial topic was a mark of their own moral fortitude, and a useful contribution to the cause. And so the circle of suffragists kept growing, adding housewives, working women, college students, socialites, and even men. And yet however eager NAWSA’s leaders were to expand their movement, there was one group they continued to hold at arms’ length—African-American women. By this time, having received little encouragement from the movement’s white leaders, African-American suffragists like Mary Church Terrell, Coralie Franklin Cook, Nannie Burroughs, and Adella Hunt Logan were working for the cause primarily through their own

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clubs and associations (see eResources, Image 2). Some of these groups explored affiliating with the national suffrage movement, but NAWSA’s rules required that they join through their state associations—and many of those associations refused to accept African-Americans. As for any possibility of mixed-race local societies, most NAWSA leaders resolutely discouraged this idea. As late as 1918, Carrie Chapman Catt advised a Texan woman who had received an application from an African-American, “Tell her that you will be able to get the vote for women more easily if they do not embarrass you by asking for membership and that you are getting it for colored women as well as for white women.”14 Was this insistence on racial separation a product of the leaders’ own prejudice or was it because of their continuing wish to avoid offending white southerners? Probably some of both. NAWSA did turn its back on the more extreme forms of racial exclusion, when it voted in 1906 to reject the idea of limiting suffrage to white women, and again in 1911 when the membership committee voted to reject any affiliate that advocated limited suffrage (such as having a property requirement). But less overt forms of race prejudice continued to characterize the movement’s behavior as long as the campaign for the vote lasted. Yet however discreditable the suffrage leaders’ position was on race that was not the whole story. NAWSA had entered the 20th century as an organization composed mainly of white, middle-class, native-born, mature women. By the early 1910s, the membership was still nearly all white, but the organization had been revitalized and expanded by the addition of women from a far greater variety of backgrounds. And of course, the total community of American suffragists had grown well beyond NAWSA’s own membership—encompassing African-American clubwomen, factory workers in unaffiliated wage-earners’ suffrage leagues, and farm wives who had no available suffrage group nearby. Progress was uneven, but the campaign for the vote was well on its way to becoming a mass movement.

DOING STATE POLITICS Despite the expansion of the movement, the suffragists still faced one unavoidable fact: the only way to win the vote was to persuade men to give it to them. At the federal level, getting the men in Congress to pass a constitutional amendment had come to seem almost hopeless. Once a year, ever since the Civil War, NAWSA representatives had testified before one or more congressional committees. But in all those years, the amendment had never got as far as a f loor debate in the House of

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

Representatives, and the last vote in the Senate had been in 1887. By 1912, Ida Husted Harper spoke for many suffragists when she summed up their years of effort in Congress as “absolutely barren of results.”15 Because of the lack of progress in Washington, even those women who were most committed to winning a federal amendment had come to believe that campaigning in the states was the most promising strategy for the present. Other suffragists preferred the state route anyway because this political arena was closer to home and thus seemed more approachable. Then there were the many white southerners who absolutely insisted on working at the state level, since they feared that federal involvement in any aspect of voting might revive federal interest in enforcing black suffrage in the South. For all these reasons, most of the woman suffrage movement’s energies in the years around 1910 were devoted to campaigns in the states. Campaigning for suffrage in the states involved formidable challenges, because to change voter qualifications in any given state required a change in the state constitution. If there happened to be a constitutional convention going on (for instance, when a territory was applying for statehood), the delegates could, if they chose, write votes for women into the new constitution. That is how Wyoming and Utah adopted suffrage in the 1890s. But despite repeated appeals from female activists over the years, women never again won the vote through a state constitutional convention. Thus, in almost every case, changing state suffrage laws involved trying to amend an existing constitution. And that required a statewide referendum, which generally could not happen without the approval of the state legislature. There was one exception. During the Progressive Era, some states adopted a new “initiative” process, which allowed state residents to bypass the legislature and put a question on the ballot themselves if they could gather enough signatures. Starting in 1906, suffragists used this process nine times (four of them in the same state—Oregon). But only two of these nine tries produced a positive vote (Arizona and Oregon in 1912), and the method ultimately fell into disuse among suffragists.16 Most state suffrage campaigns focused their efforts on the legislative route to scheduling a referendum. Typically, the rules stipulated that a proposed suffrage amendment had to be approved by a two-thirds majority in each house of the legislature. (Some states required that an amendment be approved by two consecutive legislatures; this regulation stretched out the timeline since most legislatures met only every other year). Once an amendment got onto the state ballot, it then had to be approved by the full electorate. So the process was always difficult, and

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in some states, the rules seemed explicitly designed to prevent action. In the most extreme case, New Mexico, constitutional amendments had to be approved by three-quarters of each house of the legislature, followed by three-quarters of the popular vote, including a two-thirds majority in every separate county.17 Given all these procedural hurdles, passing a state suffrage amendment would have been a demanding task even if it had only required one campaign in each state. But in fact, suffragists in many states endured repeated defeats—winning in one house of the legislature and losing in the second, or winning in the legislature and losing the popular referendum. Carrie Chapman Catt once calculated that between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the federal amendment in 1920, suffragists conducted 47 campaigns in state constitutional conventions, 480 campaigns in state legislatures, and 56 state referenda.18 So who carried out all these campaigns? NAWSA’s national office helped in some ways. For instance, its well-attended annual conventions, as well as its publication, The Woman’s Journal, kept the far-f lung members of the organization informed about each other’s activities. NAWSA leaders made frequent speaking tours, and its handful of paid organizers helped start some local societies, and revived others that fell apart after a failed campaign. Organizers also sometimes spent extended time in a single state, helping to prepare for a major referendum. As for finances, NAWSA did periodically allocate modest sums of money to the states where victory seemed most promising. Yet however helpful NAWSA was, the bulk of the work in each state campaign—month in, month out, year in, year out—was performed, unpaid, by the women who lived in that state. As we have noted, the first step in each campaign involved persuading the state legislators to approve a suffrage referendum. Many suffragists had gained political experience in recent years by lobbying for progressive reforms of one kind or another. Now they honed their skills, mastering the arcane rules of legislative procedure, learning which politicians carried the most weight with their colleagues, becoming expert vote-counters, and perfecting a blend of assertiveness and femininity designed to impress the men in power without alienating them. Many state suffrage associations also began organizing their campaigns by electoral district, so that each legislator could be monitored and lobbied by a specific team. What about the opposition? In the early days, the cause of suffrage had been so unpopular that opponents had not felt much need to organize a systematic resistance. But as the state campaigns gained strength during the early 20th century, the opposition also became more assertive. Anti-prohibition groups (especially liquor producers and sellers)

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

pressured legislators as well as the general public to vote against suffrage. So did many factory-owners and machine politicians, who believed that female voters might promote reforms that would interfere with their customary operations. In addition, the women’s anti-suffrage movement took formal shape during these years, growing larger and more politically active (see Sidebar 2.1, pp. 41–42).

Sidebar 2.1: Women Against the Vote: The Anti-Suffragists In 1869, just as the women’s rights movement was first starting to concentrate on pursuing the vote, 200 Massachusetts women petitioned their state legislature to reject a recent proposal for woman suffrage. Giving women the vote, they said, would “diminish the purity, the dignity and the moral influence of woman, and bring into the family circle a dangerous element of discord.”19 Over the next several decades, the anti-suffrage movement expanded into other parts of the country. Then in 1911, after the jolt of the suffrage victories in Washington and California, the various state groups came together in the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS). The organization was led by Mrs Josephine Dodge, a New York City widow in her late 50s, who had previously been active in developing day nurseries for the children of working mothers. Committed suffragists often tried to dismiss these female anti-suffragists as puppets of the men who opposed giving women the vote. But NAOWS was indeed founded, led, and staffed by women. And although these women made free use of their male supporters’ money and prestige, they believed in what they were doing, and they worked hard to maintain their own autonomy. Why would any woman oppose getting the vote? Some women were deeply committed to traditional gender roles. Some feared that if women insisted on political independence, they could lose men’s physical and economic protection. And some were repelled by the tawdriness of politics as it was then practiced (see Document 1 in the appendix). In addition, there were elite women who already exerted considerable influence in their communities, through their connections to the men who held power locally. Such women often had little interest in a measure that would give women of other classes—and races and ethnic backgrounds—their own share of influence in public affairs. Elite women like this—many of them prosperous urban easterners—tended to dominate the membership of the national anti-suffragist organization (NAOWS). In fact, although the organization ultimately claimed 26 state chapters, a number of those chapters consisted of little more than a single committee. With their ample

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funding, the women of NAOWS could flood a state with literature and speakers at campaign time. But the work was generally carried on with outside direction, outside money, and outside paid staff—an approach that did little to draw in the many local women who may well have shared some anti-suffragist sentiments. A few socially prominent women could make a good impression at a legislative hearing, but the anti-suffragists never managed to develop the broad-based kind of movement that the pro-suffrage forces were building during these same years. When the United States entered World War I in April, 1917, the NAOWS sharply narrowed its appeal by focusing almost exclusively on the argument that suffragists were unpatriotic radicals. As suffrage victories mounted despite these attacks, the NAOWS went through a series of bitter inter-organizational feuds, several changes of leadership, and plummeting membership. After failing to prevent the passage of the 19th amendment, the organization disbanded in 1920.

In competing with these opposing forces for the legislators’ support, the suffragists were handicapped by the fact that, as non-voters, they lacked the power to reward their political friends or punish their political enemies at the polls. They could not even promise future rewards or punishment if suffrage passed since no one was really certain how women would vote. Opponents like the liquor interests certainly seemed convinced that women would vote overwhelmingly for Prohibition, but in fact, there were prohibitionist women and anti-prohibitionist ones. There were also conservative women and radical ones, as well as urban New Women and rural traditionalists. And of course, there were thousands of women who said they did not want to vote at all. Reacting to another dispiriting round of legislative calls, a California suffragist observed that because the politicians whom they visited saw nothing to gain from helping them, the men did not take them seriously. Instead, she said, they simply passed the ladies off with “doses of ‘soothing syrup’ of their own special legislative brand.”20 Looking around for sources of political pressure, the suffragists sought out alliances with groups that the legislators did take seriously (see Box, p. 43). Many states, for instance, had politically active farmers’ associations and labor unions. The farm-labor coalition known as the Populist Party had waned after 1896, but the 1910s brought another upsurge in third— and fourth and fifth—party activity that offered the suffragists new opportunities for political alliances. The largest group, the Progressive Party, offered a platform that called for a sweeping array of social and economic reforms, including woman suffrage. Then there was the Socialist Party of America. Some of its members focused exclusively on union activism, but the Socialists’ “electoral” wing had been participating in politics since its

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

founding in 1901, repeatedly runIn 1911, Ruth Gay, President of the ning its leader Eugene V. Debs for Oklahoma Woman Suffrage Association, president, while also sponsoring summed up the allies that her organization hundreds of local candidates and needed to work with: offering a platform that was only a little more radical than that of “First: Farmers – we must keep their the Progressive Party. The smaller interest and vote … Prohibition Party was also active Second: Socialists – of which almost all in a number of states. are friends of ours … The Progressive Party made its biggest splash on the national Third: Laborers – while we have many stage in 1912, the year it was of them, many more are not yet converted, and we need them.”21 founded, when its candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, came in second in the presidential election. Otherwise, the various minority parties played their principal role in state politics, where they won a fair number of seats in the state legislatures. Their influence was heightened by the fact that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party each contained a strong contingent of liberals, who periodically reached across party lines to form coalitions with each other and with like-minded members of the minor parties. Since the Progressives, the Socialists, and the Prohibitionists all supported woman suffrage, this was one area where they were sometimes able to make common cause. The suffragists’ minor-party alliances were important, but they were rarely enough by themselves to get a state referendum through the legislature. More generally, legislators from the majority parties—the Republicans and Democrats—had to be convinced that their own constituents would accept a vote for suffrage. For that reason, even during the legislative phase of each campaign, suffragists worked tirelessly to build support for their cause among the general electorate. And once a suffrage amendment got through the legislature, the drive to convert each state’s voters to suffrage became even more intense (see eResources, Image 3). Just as the suffragists had embraced a new broader approach to increasing their own membership and had acquired new political skills for lobbying state legislators, so they also adopted a host of new methods for conveying their message to the general public.

FINDING NEW WAYS TO PROMOTE SUFFRAGE Let’s start with the suffrage parades—those eye-catching events that captured the attention of communities all across the country during the final decade of the suffrage campaign. Featuring f loats and bands and

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colorful banners, these parades brought hundreds, sometimes thousands, of women into the streets, marching along in disciplined order, serious and beautiful in their white dresses (see Figure 2.1). Though the parade was only one of scores of new tactics introduced by the movement in the years after 1910, it was one of the most effective because it conveyed so many messages at once—the suffragists’ determination, their organizational ability, their attractiveness, their f lair for publicity, and their formidable numbers. Years later, Carrie Chapman Catt wrote, “To this day, women close their eyes and hear again the thrill of martial bugles, the tread of marching thousands, and see the air once more ablaze with the banners of those spectacular years.”22 The parades were a bold statement, but they probably would not have happened without accompanying changes in the larger society. Over the years since Seneca Falls, American women’s place in public life had changed dramatically. By 1910, the US workforce included nearly eight million women (about a fifth of the total). In addition, women now constituted nearly a quarter of each year’s college graduates; the number of women in the professions, though still small, was rising; and thousands of women were not only participating in but leading the wave Figure 2.1 A contingent of nurses marches in one of the first big suffrage parades in New York City, 1913. Source: Courtesy of Medical Center Archives of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

of reform activities associated with the Progressive Era.23 Thus, in the America of 1910, it was simply not the reach it had been in 1848 to imagine that women could also be voters. Here is one way to think of it—in 1848, the women at Seneca Falls had asserted that the times should change; in 1910, the parading suffragists were showing that times had changed, and that women’s political rights should change with them. In choosing parades as a way to make their claim, the suffragists had several earlier models to draw upon—the boisterous (male) political parades of the 19th century, the annual (male) labor parades in industrial cities, and particularly the huge parades organized by the feisty woman suffrage movement in England (see Sidebar 3.1 in Chapter 3, pp. 55–56). The first American suffrage parades, in 1908–1909, were small-scale, impromptu affairs. But they still represented a significant step, taking women from the protected space of the parlor and the lecture hall into the city streets. And in initiating this step, the parades fulfilled an additional purpose, which was to build courage and solidarity among the suffragists themselves. Between 1910 and 1918, with strong encouragement from NAWSA, parades were held in 24 different states, and they grew steadily more elaborate. 24 The goal of Emma Smith DeVoe’s quiet approach in Washington State had been to slip the suffrage campaign past the notice of the opposition. California suffragists, on the other hand, had chosen a different path in 1911, buoyantly inviting as much attention as possible. And the California model is the one that was most widely adopted in other states in the years that followed. As a Wisconsin suffragist observed, “It’s useless to try organizing quietly … Publicity is absolutely necessary to success these days.”25 This woman’s use of the word “publicity” reminds us that the rise of modern publicity techniques during these years was another inf luence on the suffrage campaigns of 1910–1920. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Blatch, was a true believer in this kind of activism. Applying the psychological principles of the advertising business to suffrage, she observed, “Mankind is moved to action by its emotions and not by argument, however logical and able.”26 The suffragists did not abandon logical arguments, but they supplemented them with activities that immersed their audiences in spectacle- and image-making. So, for instance, when their opponents insisted that most women did not want to vote, the suffragists refuted them with statistics, but they also organized their gigantic parades and let the spectacle of all those marching women make its own argument. The new campaign style called for speaking to people’s hearts and eyes and ears as well as their minds. And what was the message? Simply this: that giving women the vote would be good for the women, it would be good for society, and it would be

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good for American democracy. Suffragists had been making that argument, in quiet ways, for decades. But now they proclaimed it aloud, reinforced by marching bands and streamers six feet long. Of course, the suffragists did not leap from the parlor talks of the 1890s to the grand parades of the 1910s without making some stops along the way. One of their first innovations, modeled on British tactics, was the open-air meeting. Elisabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Blatch, spent many years living in England, during which time she had observed the British suffragettes holding gatherings of this kind. After moving back to the United States and becoming active in suffrage in New York City in 1907, she introduced open-air meetings there (see Sidebar 2.2, pp. 46–47). Because these meetings were generally held in public spaces, at no cost to the sponsors or to those who attended, Blatch described them as the “ideal auditorium for those who are trying to push an unpopular cause, who have in their pack no drawing cards, and lack money to ‘go hire a hall.’” Suffragists in other states quickly started holding their own open-air meetings, since it was clear that these events were an excellent way to draw in the people who, as one Wisconsin suffragist observed, “would not under any circumstances attend a suffrage meeting.” Street meetings were also ideal for reaching new kinds of audiences since they could be held in downtown squares or public parks or outside factory gates or in tenement neighborhoods.27

Sidebar 2.2: Tackling the Biggest State: Suffrage in New York, 1907–1917 When Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Blatch, moved back to New York State after years of living in England, she quickly concluded that the local suffrage movement was “completely in a rut.”28 So in 1907, she founded her own group, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later renamed the Women’s Political Union), with a membership that included both female professionals and factory workers. Blatch soon established a lobbying operation in Albany, New York, the state capital, while at the same time using every possible stratagem to bring the suffrage movement to public notice in the rest of the state, especially New York City. Borrowing methods from multiple sources, including the British suffragettes she had worked with in England (see Sidebar 3.1, pp. 55–56). Blatch popularized many of the techniques that would later be taken up in California and other states, including spectacular parades, street-corner speeches, selling suffrage papers on the street, and producing suffrage movies and plays.

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

Meanwhile, Carrie Chapman Catt, having completed her term as president of NAWSA, also began to devote herself to the New York campaign. In 1909, she pulled together many of the NAWSA-affiliated groups around the state into a new Woman Suffrage Party, rigorously organized down to the precinct level. In 1912 Catt established the Empire State Campaign Committee, which she hoped would serve as an umbrella organization for the whole suffrage initiative in New York. Blatch preferred to follow her own independent path, but most of the other suffrage groups joined Catt’s committee, helping her to build a formidable statewide organization. With Blatch’s creative flair and Catt’s relentless organizing, the suffragists finally got legislative approval for a state referendum in 1915. The stakes were monumentally high, both because New York had the largest population of any state in the country, and because if the referendum passed, New York would be the first state east of the Mississippi to grant full suffrage. Blatch predicted, “If we win the empire state, all the States will come tumbling down like a pack of cards.” Throughout the summer of 1915, the suffragists organized scores of publicity events around the state, including one last gigantic parade in New York City, featuring more than 20,000 marchers, 57 bands, 74 women on horseback, and 145 decorated cars. Overall, Catt estimated that more than 200,000 women had participated in the 1915 state campaign.29 And yet they lost—not just here and there, but in 56 out of the state’s 61 counties, including every borough of New York City. There were some crumbs of comfort in the returns—more than 500,000 New Yorkers (42 percent) had voted in favor of suffrage. But defeat is defeat, and for Blatch it marked the end of this particular road. Announcing that she had had enough of courting rank-and-file voters, she devoted herself from then on to the campaign for the federal amendment. Luckily for New York State, many suffragists felt differently. Within 2 days of their defeat, they raised $100,000 for the next campaign. And when the second referendum was held, in 1917, they won by 100,000 votes, bringing more than 1 million women into the US electorate.

Another way to catch the attention of casual passersby was to promote suffrage while standing on a wooden soapbox, strategically located on a city street corner. Soapbox speakers were a common sight in urban America in the early 1900s, but they were nearly all men. Women broke new ground when they took over the same corners to speak about suffrage. One of the pioneers, Miriam DeFord, later recalled going out for months, at least two nights a week, to speak on street corners in Boston. While one of her colleagues passed out literature, DeFord would climb up on her box and preach suffrage to the crowd for 15 or 20 minutes, then ask for questions. “We’d be interrupted, of course, and heckled,” she said. “That was all part

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of it. You expected that and learned how to handle it.” The special challenge of this kind of public speaking was the fact that people could just drift away when they got bored. “You couldn’t hold them if they wanted to go,” recalls DeFord. “You had to keep them entertained.”30 Many a suffragist developed her speaking skills and her self-confidence, as well as her sense of herself as a committed advocate, by tackling this challenge. Speaking on street corners was an ideal form of outreach in big cities like Boston. But how were the suffragists to reach people in smaller communities? In an era when interurban trolleys ran for miles, connecting dozens of small towns and cities, the suffrage “trolley tour” offered one diverting answer. Speakers would go from town to town, alighting at each stop to give a speech and hand out literature. For women to travel alone across the countryside was itself somewhat unusual in these years, so the suffragists’ mere presence on the trolleys tended to catch people’s attention. Harriot Blatch’s daughter Nora, also a suffragist, loved to recount the time a man struck up a conversation with her on the trolley, climbed off with her, insisted on carrying her bag (which held the stool she used as a platform), hovered solicitously as she set up shop in a corner of the park, and then f led in horror when she began to address the crowd on why women should have the vote.31 Another way to take the suffrage show on the road was to travel in a caravan of automobiles. At a time when cars were still relatively rare, one can imagine the effect on a country town, or even a small city, when a convoy of a dozen open cars came driving down Main Street, filled with waving suffragists and bedecked with streamers proclaiming “Votes for Women.” Nothing, exulted suffragist Mabel Youmans, could jolt a community like the “shock of seeing a woman stand up in an automobile on a street corner and plead for her political freedom.”32 This kind of event was guaranteed to draw a crowd, encouraging people to listen to the speeches, and perhaps even take home some literature. In fact, distributing literature was a vital element in the suffrage campaign. Cheaper printing methods were being developed during these years, which enabled NAWSA as well as state and local societies to produce a f lood of pamphlets, f liers, magazines, and newspapers. One Iowa suffragist assured a friend that she was not going to rest until her state was “strewn knee deep with literature.”33 Not a speech, not a street meeting, not an auto cavalcade took place that did not include the distribution of suffrage propaganda. Wisconsin women organized “suffrage steamers,” too, with stops at each landing along the river for speeches and handing out literature. In California, one enterprising group scattered f liers from a hot-air balloon, and in several states, suffragists even dropped their leaf lets from low-f lying airplanes.

The State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913

Besides the literature that was distributed free at meetings or through the mail, the activists made a surprisingly successful business of selling suffrage newspapers on the street. Part of the papers’ success was due to their content, which was an entertaining mix of reporting on the suffragists’ recent activities, cartoons, announcements of coming publicity stunts, and witty attacks on the movement’s critics, often enlivened by pop-culture references. Moreover, instead of being distributed by the boys who usually sold papers on the street, these papers—in another tactic borrowed from the British—were hawked on street corners by the suffragists themselves. The sight of these attractive young “newsies,” many from the upper reaches of society, certainly helped sell papers, and it also drew continual attention from the press. Suffrage newspapers were aimed at the general public, but as the movement expanded, a market also began to develop for commodities designed specifically for suffrage supporters. Targeting these individuals, local societies began selling suffrage-themed items through the mail, in booths at state fairs, and in their own headquarters. Here are some of the suffrage items that were offered for sale: posters, calendars, cookbooks, valentines, hats, hat pins, blouses, badges, pins, kewpie dolls, playing cards, cups, luggage tags, fans, candy, postcards, buttons, and notepaper.34 One purpose of all this merchandising was, of course, to raise money. But in addition, every item sold was marked with a suffrage message, and movement activists counted on those markings to keep their cause in the public eye. In California, Alice Park urged her members to wear a suffrage badge or pin at all times, so that it would be visible “at home to the chance inquirer at the door, the caller and the tradesman; in the street and in the cars to the chance passer-by; and in all meetings to all who attend.”35 As with the buttons and badges, so with the fans and luggage tags, the street meetings and trolley tours, the newspapers and auto caravans, the goal was always the same: to get people thinking and talking about suffrage.

TAKING STOCK By 1913, women had won the vote in nine states, with five of these victories (Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona) having been achieved in just the past four years. But during the same four years the suffragists had also lost six referenda—in Oregon and Oklahoma in the West, and in Ohio, Wisconsin, and two in a row in Michigan, in the Midwest. The regional pattern was beginning to be troubling: east of the Mississippi River, not a single referendum had ever succeeded. In fact, in

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many eastern states, the suffragists had never even been able to get a suffrage referendum onto the ballot. Why was suffrage faring better in the West than in the rest of the country? We have already discussed the hostility to suffrage in the South, where conservatives’ doubts about the whole question of gender equality were intensified by their fear that giving women the vote could reopen the issue of African-American suffrage. (see, for instance, Sidebar 1.2 in Chapter 1, p. 26). As for the North and Midwest, many of the groups that were most obdurately opposed to woman suffrage were particularly well-entrenched there—including urban political machines, large manufacturing interests, and the liquor industry. The western states, by contrast, were more rural, their strong minority parties provided the suffragists with more opportunities for political coalition building, and the legacy of pioneer days sustained a somewhat stronger tradition of gender equality. Taken together, these factors helped make the West the most fertile ground for suffrage campaigning well into the 1910s (see Table 2.1, p. 50). Despite this general regional pattern, one important breakthrough did occur in the eastern half of the country in 1913, when a different kind of suffrage victory in Illinois raised the possibility of a shortcut around the hurdles of the states’ complicated amendment procedures. During the 1890s, several state courts had ruled that if a particular elective office was not mentioned in the state constitution, then the legislature could change the rules on who could vote for that office without amending the state constitution, and therefore without going through a referendum. Over the years, legislatures in several states had used this loophole to let women vote in school or municipal elections. Suffrage leaders soon realized that if the process was legal in those cases, it should also apply to voting for the US president. So in 1893 NAWSA recommended that when full suffrage seemed unattainable in a given state, members should pursue the intermediate goal of workTable 2.1 Suffrage states, as of December 31, 1913 ing for school, municipal, or Wyoming (1890) California (1911) presidential suffrage.36 Colorado (1893) Oregon (1912) Illinois suffragist and lawUtah (1896) Kansas (1912) yer Catherine McCulloch had helped to arouse NAWSA’s Idaho (1896) Arizona (1912) interest in presidential suffrage, Washington (1910) Illinois (presidential and under her leadership, suffrage, 1913) Illinois activists campaigned Source: National American Woman Suffrage Association, for it in the state legislature Victory: How Women Won It—A Centennial Symposium, 1840– every year from 1893 on. 1940 (New York: HW Wilson Company, 1940), 161–162. Finally, in 1912, the election of

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a number of pro-suffrage state legislators from the Progressive Party helped ease the way, as did the suffragists’ new leader, Grace Trout, who put together a rigorously organized campaign of quiet, persistent, personal lobbying. The result was that in 1913 Illinois became a pioneer in two respects—as the first state in the country to adopt presidential suffrage for women, and as the first state east of the Mississippi to allow women to vote in any national election. In future years, the option of presidential suffrage would become a vital element in the overall suffrage campaign (see Figure 5.2 in Chapter 5, p. 123). In addition, presidential suffrage was often accompanied—as it was in Illinois—by municipal suffrage, which gave many women their first opportunity to participate in local politics. For example, the eminent African-American crusader against lynching, Ida Wells-Barnett, had founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1910, hoping to encourage local African-American women to take a more active interest in politics. The group started slowly, but once the women won the right to vote in city elections, they became much more engaged, holding weekly meetings, canvassing their neighborhoods for civic causes, and campaigning for an independent candidate—a local black businessman—in the 1914 primary for the city council. Their candidate lost, but the women’s efforts caught the attention of the city Republican political machine. Right after the primary, two representatives of the machine (one African-American, Oscar DePriest, and one white) made the suffrage club members an offer. If they would support the machine candidate in the upcoming fall election, the organization promised to nominate DePriest for the next vacancy. The vacancy opened up soon afterward, and in November, 1915, with vigorous support from Wells-Barnett and the Alpha Suffrage Club, DePriest became the first black member of the Chicago City Council.37 While these gains were being made in individual states, the suffrage movement as a whole was also gaining ground. Between 1906 and 1913, NAWSA membership soared from around 17,000 to over 150,000. These numbers represented an expansion in social range as well as in numbers, reaching from socialites like Alva Belmont to college students like Inez Milholland to labor leaders like Rose Schneiderman. Suffrage groups throughout the country had sharpened their legislative skills, strengthened their organizations, and become masters of public outreach. And at the same time, hundreds of thousands of individual suffragists had experienced the satisfaction of learning new skills, testing themselves against unfamiliar challenges, and working with like-minded women for a cause they cared about. The rewards were great, even when they lost. And when they won, they could exult, as one Kansas woman did after her state adopted suffrage in 1912, “There is sunshine in my heart, for while I went to bed last night a slave, I awoke this morning a free woman.”38

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NOTES 1 “A Ballot for the Ladies: Washington Women’s Struggle for the Vote (1850–1910),” at http://content.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/suffrage/. 2 Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1. 3 Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 41. 4 Emma Goldman, “Woman Suffrage” (1911), in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York: Shocken Books, 1972, 1982), 199. 5 Jane Addams, “Women’s Conscience and Social Amelioration” (1908), in The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 253. 6 Louise W. Knight, Citizen Jane: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 381. 7 Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners, 37. 8 Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, eds., Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 211. 9 Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners, 37. 10 Sherna Gluck, ed., From Parlor to Prison: Five Suffragists Talk About Their Lives (New York: Vintage, 1976), 188. 11 Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1968), 214. 12 Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 113. 13 Eleanor Clift, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003), 90. 14 Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 25. 15 Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle For the Ballot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 87. 16 Dennis Polhill, “The Role of Initiative & Referendum in Aiding the Women’s Suffrage Movement,” Initiative & Referendum Almanac, at www.dennis.polhill. info/archives/88. 17 Corinne M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 195–196. 18 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 139. 19 Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Seneca Falls, 223. 20 Brayden G. King, et al., “Winning Woman Suffrage One Step at a Time: Social Movements and the Logic of the Legislative Process,” Social Forces 83, no. 3 (March, 2005), 1216. 21 McConnaughy, Woman Suffrage Movement, 91. 22 Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 146.

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23 Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 129, 386. 24 Holly J. McCammon, “’Out of the Parlors and into the Streets’: The Changing Tactical Repertoire of the US Women’s Suffrage Movements,” Social Forces, 81, no. 3 (March, 2003), 793. 25 Genevieve G. McBride, On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights from Settlement to Suffrage (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 202. 26 Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: Putnam, 1940), 91. 27 Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 105; McBride, On Wisconsin Women, 210. 28 Blatch, Challenging Years, 92. 29 DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, 148; McCammon, Out of the Parlor, 791; Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 291. 30 Gluck, From Parlor to Prison, 148. 31 DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, 104 32 McBride, On Wisconsin Women, 211–212. 33 Sarah Egge, “‘Strewn Knee Deep in Literature’: A Material Analysis of Print Propaganda and Woman Suffrage,” Agricultural History 88, no. 4 (Fall, 2014), 601. 34 Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 121–123. 35 Finnegan, Selling Suffrage, 121. 36 Kraditor, Up From the Pedestal, 260–261. 37 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), 271–273. 38 Graham, Woman Suffrage Movement, 52, 73; Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 176.

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Chapter 3

The Federal Amendment Takes Center Stage 1913–1917

I

n January, 1910—just about the time that Emma Smith DeVoe was first starting to plan the suffrage campaign in Washington State—a young American named Alice Paul sailed into New York harbor on a ship from England. On the pier, a cluster of reporters waited eagerly to interview her. No one had shown much interest when Paul had sailed out of this same harbor in 1907, heading off to do graduate work abroad. But her activities while she was away had turned her into a newsmaker. Soon after her arrival in England, Paul had started participating in the protests of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)—a militant suffrage group led by the charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst. Under Pankhurst’s leadership, WSPU members dramatized their demand for the vote, not only through street corner speeches and huge public rallies, but also by waylaying officials in public places and forcing their way into closed meetings (see Sidebar 3.1, pp. 55–56). Paul’s suffrage activities alone might not have caught the interest of the American press, but the British government’s reaction to her activities did. Between 1907 and 1909 Paul was arrested seven times, and on three of those occasions, she was sent to prison. (Responding to reports of her daughter’s radical behavior, Paul’s mother exclaimed, “I cannot understand how all this came about. Alice is such a mild-mannered girl!”) Paul’s problems with the law multiplied when she joined her fellow suffrage prisoners in a hunger strike. She was then repeatedly force-fed, by means of a rubber tube that was pushed down her throat and into her stomach. Describing the terrible experience to the reporters in New York, Paul acknowledged that it had been a “trying ordeal.” She said she doubted that undergoing such punishment for suffrage would be necessary in the United States, since this was a much less conservative country. But she stated firmly, “If it ever becomes necessary for me to face it again, I shall do so without hesitation.”1

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For the next two years, Paul divided her time between completing her doctoral dissertation (on the legal position of women in Pennsylvania) and introducing American suffragists to British publicity techniques. She did not recommend following some of their more destructive tactics, such as breaking windows. But she expressed total agreement with Emmeline Pankhurst’s fundamental theory, which was that suffrage would ultimately be won through political assertiveness, not through humble petitioning.2

Sidebar 3.1: British Suffragettes Blaze a Trail: The WSPU During the early 20th century, one small suffrage group in England—the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)—had an outsize influence on the American suffrage movement. The WSPU’s leader was a charismatic woman in her 40s, Emmeline Pankhurst, whose late husband had submitted the first suffrage bill in Parliament back in 1870. The campaign for the vote had made little progress since then, however, so in 1903 (working with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia), Pankhurst founded the WSPU and set out to force the issue of woman suffrage into public notice. Over the next several years, the WSPU introduced many of the publicity techniques that American suffragists would later adopt, from street corner speeches to giant parades. But the British politicians remained unmoved. The WSPU then announced that they were holding the Liberals (the party in power) responsible for the lack of progress on suffrage. The women began confronting Liberal politicians in public places, forcing their way into closed meetings, and indulging in the timehonored British (male) protest of throwing rocks through windows. When the press condemned these actions, calling the WSPU members “suffragettes,” the women defused the insult by embracing the title as a badge of honor. As their protests increased, hundreds of suffragettes were arrested and sent to prison, where they demanded to be treated as political prisoners. Their demands were rejected, and in June, 1909 they started refusing to eat. At first that led to quick releases, but in September, 1909 prison staff instead began force-feeding the women. The process was violent and humiliating, and it sometimes caused longterm physical harm. But it continued off and on for several years. In 1912, Pankhurst told her followers that the time had come for “guerrilla warfare.” Defying the doubters within her own ranks, she asserted, “We shall never get this question settled until we make it intolerable for most people in this country.”3 With that, WSPU members began slashing telephone wires, breaking shop

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windows, cutting up train seat cushions, and blowing up mailboxes. They even set off a small bomb under the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. Then in June, 1913, at the Epsom racecourse, a young suffragette named Emily Davison stepped out onto the track during a race, hoping to tie a suffrage banner to the King’s horse. Instead, she was knocked down and trampled to death under the horses’ hooves. The event only intensified the controversy over suffrage, with opponents condemning Davison as an extremist, while the WSPU celebrated her as a martyr. When England entered World War I in August, 1914, Pankhurst ordered her followers to stop all agitation; the WSPU was dissolved a few years later. When the war ended in 1918, Parliament granted suffrage to women over 30 (with certain property qualifications), and in 1928, the vote was extended to all women over 21. Pankhurst died soon afterward. The WSPU influenced the American suffrage movement in many ways— through Pankhurst’s popular US speaking tours, through the American suffragists who worked with the WSPU in England (including Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Harriot Stanton Blatch), and through the British publicity tactics these women introduced at home, which were picked up by suffragists all across the United States. Even Pankhurst’s warmest US admirers never endorsed her strategy of “guerrilla warfare,” but her conviction that the suffragists’ concerns needed to be brought to a broader public, and the non-violent techniques she introduced for doing so, such as parades and open-air meetings, made an important contribution to the revitalization of American suffrage between 1910 and 1920.

ALICE PAUL GOES TO WASHINGTON When Alice Paul completed her PhD in 1912, she received job offers from several state suffrage associations, but she turned them all down. She had seen how time-consuming the state campaigns were, and it seemed clear that there were at least a dozen states that would never adopt woman suffrage. So instead, Paul submitted a proposal to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) offering to organize an intensified campaign for the federal amendment. She planned to start with a giant parade in Washington DC in March, 1913, timed to coincide with the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson as president. (The current system of inaugurating new presidents in January did not take effect until 1937). NAWSA leaders were dubious at first, but after some gentle pressure from Jane Addams, they decided late in 1912 to let Paul take charge of their relatively inactive Congressional Committee in Washington. And so began a new chapter in American women’s campaign for the vote.

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When Paul took up her new assignment, in December, 1912, there was little evidence that suffragists had been pursuing the federal amendment for decades. Her immediate predecessors at the Congressional Committee had generally performed just three tasks—making sure the suffrage amendment was re-introduced at each session, arranging for the annual testimony before Congress, and holding a yearly tea for congressional wives. So modest were the committee’s expenditures that there was still some change left over from the previous year’s budget of $10. Paul had more ambitious plans, but NAWSA’s leaders had made clear that she would have to raise every penny of the extra cost herself. Paul began by arranging for office space (a narrow basement, divided into three rooms) and recruiting four women to join her on the Congressional Committee—co-chair Lucy Burns, a red-haired firebrand whom Paul had met while they both were working with the suffragettes in England; Dora Lewis, a Philadelphia socialite who had been active in NAWSA; the writer and municipal reformer Mary Beard; and feminist Crystal Eastman, a lawyer and labor advocate. The sense of new energy in the group is suggested by the fact that all but one of these women were under 40, and Paul herself was just 28. To build up the Congressional Committee’s membership, Lucy Burns began holding daily suffrage meetings in parlors and on street corners around Washington. Meanwhile, Paul was working her own particular magic. Artist Nina Allender later described the day that Paul first called on her and her mother. Somehow, in the course of a single hour, Allender found herself promising to volunteer regularly for the Committee, while her mother agreed to make monthly financial contributions. Looking back on the visit, Allender was struck by the fact that Paul had not begged for help, or pleaded or argued. All the same, Allender had learned—as would many other people in the future—that when Alice Paul asked you to do something, you usually found yourself saying yes.4 Someone else was getting the Paul treatment during those early weeks: the District Police Superintendent, Richard Sylvester. When Paul first applied for permission to hold a suffrage march down Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913, Sylvester said absolutely not. The date was too close to the official inauguration parade the next day, and Pennsylvania Avenue was appropriate for great occasions—military victories and inaugurations—but not for a mere procession of ladies with a grievance. But for Alice Paul, March 3 was the essential date because Washington would be thronged with visitors in town for the inauguration the next day. And only Pennsylvania Avenue would give the women’s march the necessary historical and political significance. So she began reaching out

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to prominent women she had met, and soon the Police Superintendent was receiving calls from business leaders all over the city, urging him to change his mind. Late in December he reluctantly agreed to Paul’s preferred date. And on January 9, after more pressure, he told Paul she could have Pennsylvania Avenue too. And so, on March 3, 1913, after two intense months of preparation, the beautiful labor lawyer and suffragist Inez Milholland came riding down Pennsylvania Avenue on a white horse, followed by more than 5,000 marching women (see Figure 3.1). Representatives from countries that had already approved woman suffrage led the way, then a cluster of elderly suffrage “pioneers,” then women grouped into a dozen different occupations, then women marching by state, and then a group of male suffragists. In addition, there were 4 troops of women on horseback, 20 f loats, and 9 bands. Overhead, scores of banners f luttered in the air, including one bearing what came to be known as the “Great Demand.” It proclaimed, “We Demand an Amendment to the United States Constitution Enfranchising Women.”5 One blot on the proceedings was the fact that—in an accommodation to white southerners—the Congressional Committee had instructed black Figure 3.1  Inez Milholland prepares to lead off the great suffrage parade in Washington, DC, 1913. Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/97510669/

The Federal Amendment: 1913–1917

suffragists to walk as a separate group at the rear of the parade, rather than marching with their appropriate occupations or states. Although the antilynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett ignored these instructions and quietly joined the white suffragists from her state of Illinois, the parade was otherwise racially divided. Paul herself was not particularly prejudiced, but like many other white suffrage leaders, she was prepared to subordinate racial justice to the cause of winning the vote. The other blot on the 1913 suffrage parade—much more commented-upon at the time—was the harassment of the marchers by hundreds of male spectators, who crowded into the line of march, bringing some sections of the parade to a standstill. Soon the men started pushing the women around, cursing and spitting at them, grabbing their banners, and tearing their clothes—with only minimal intervention by the police. Paul had foreseen that there might be trouble, and when the police superintendent brushed off her repeated requests for extra security, she had persuaded the secretary of the army to have a troop of cavalry nearby, just in case. They were the ones who ultimately brought the mob under control, enabling the shaken women to finish the parade. The whole melée, in which more than 100 marchers were injured, triggered a congressional investigation and produced a wave of public sympathy for the suffragists. Nevertheless, some commentators insisted that the marchers had brought the trouble on themselves, by putting themselves forward in such an unladylike fashion (see Box, p. 59) Throughout the rest of 1913, Paul and her team organized a whirlwind of additional events in and around Washington, including eight mass rallies, an average of half a dozen street meetings every day, the founding of a Men’s League for Woman Suffrage (composed primarily of congressmen), campaigns in three nearby summer resorts, and several major appeals to Congress, each of which involved gathering suffrage petitions nationwide and If women want the kind of considerathen presenting them to the legtion to which they have been accusislators with elaborate ceremony. tomed, they must live by conventional One of these presentations, in standards. When women cease to July, 1913, coincided with the conduct themselves as “ladies”—when Senate’s first f loor debate on the they adopt the motives and antics and suffrage amendment in 26 years. methods of the circus—they must not The Senate took no action, but expect delicate consideration. the mere fact of the debate repEditorial: “The Suffrage Parade” The Argonaut (San Francisco, resented progress—almost surely CA), March 29, 19136 inspired by Paul’s success in drawing attention to the amendment.

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With this record of achievement, Paul and her co-chair Lucy Burns were greeted as stars when they made their report at NAWSA’s 1913 convention that December. But NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw and her board were not nearly so pleased because of Paul’s increasing resistance to NAWSA control. Back in the spring, soon after the inaugural parade, Paul had established a separate organization called the Congressional Union (CU), which she insisted would simply supplement the work of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee. Its primary purpose, however, was to raise funds specifically for the federal campaign, rather than having the money pass through (and perhaps disappear into) the NAWSA treasury. And once the Congressional Union was set up, it became more and more independent—establishing its own separate affiliates around the country; assisting with an American lecture tour by Emmeline Pankhurst, whose militancy horrified many NAWSA leaders; and producing its own journal, The Suffragist, which despite Paul’s denials, was an obvious competitor to the Woman’s Journal, published by NAWSA (see Document 4 in the appendix). Paul had hoped that her new organization would be admitted as a NAWSA auxiliary, but her negotiations with the leadership became increasingly acrimonious, and in February, 1914 the NAWSA board formally rejected Paul’s application, thus leaving the Congressional Union to stand on its own. It was tiny compared to NAWSA, initially attracting just a few thousand members compared to NAWSA’s 170,000.7 Nevertheless, Paul managed to imbue her followers with the conviction that they, and they alone, were changing history. How did she do this? Not by her imposing appearance—she weighed less than 100 pounds. And not by her personal warmth; as one member acknowledged, she could be “cold, austere, a little remote.” But, this member went on, “that is only because the fire of her spirit burns at such a heat that it is still and white. She has the quiet of the spinning top.” Paul’s followers were inspired by her absolute dedication to the work, and by her conviction that whatever the task, her members could carry it off. Pulling it all together, Paul had, as Lucy Burns put it, the “power to make plans on a national scale and a supplementary power to see that it is done down to the last postage stamp.”8 By the spring of 1914, just when NAWSA and the CU might have been starting to think about mending fences, a new point of contention emerged. It began when NAWSA supported a proposed substitute for the version of the federal amendment that suffragists had been pursuing since 1878 (officially known as the Bristow-Mondell Resolution). Instead of mandating woman suffrage nationwide, as the 1878 version

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did, the proposed substitute—known as the Shafroth Amendment— simply made it easier to get state-level suffrage passed. (It did this by allowing any state’s voters to bypass the legislature and put suffrage on the ballot themselves, if eight percent of them signed a petition to that effect). Supporters of the amendment thought that it would reduce the procedural obstacles faced in some states. They also thought that white southerners would prefer it, since under Shafroth, the federal government’s only role would be to facilitate state action. The Congressional Union adamantly opposed the Shafroth proposal, since it would force the suffragists to depend on state action alone, even though a good number of states would probably still refuse to give women the vote. As it turned out, even southerners disliked the measure, since for them it still bore the taint of federal involvement. In the end, after months of internal debate, NAWSA dropped its support for Shafroth. Besides further aggravating the tension between NAWSA and the CU, the incident’s principal legacy was the emergence of a new name for the original version of the federal amendment. In order to sanctify that version during the fight over Shafroth, Paul had begun calling it the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.” Today, the amendment that gave American women the vote is still known by that name.9 (For text of the amendment, see Box in Chapter 1, p. 19). Early in the summer of 1914, the ruling Democrats in Congress accepted President Wilson’s agenda for the remainder of the session, with not one word about woman suffrage. Responding to this evidence of the Democrats’ continuing indifference to their cause, the Congressional Union decided to follow the British suffragettes’ strategy of holding the political party that was in power responsible for the lack of progress on suffrage. Since the Democrats controlled the White House as well as both houses of Congress, that meant going into the nine states that had approved woman suffrage (see Table 2.1 in Chapter 2, p. 50) and organizing the women there to vote against Democratic candidates in the 1914 congressional elections. NAWSA members intensely opposed the CU plan, because— besides violating the suffragists’ traditional commitment to non-partisanship—it asked female voters to punish all Democratic congressmen, even those who were pro-suffrage. But Alice Paul reminded her critics that congressmen from the suffrage states where the CU planned to campaign nearly always supported the federal amendment, no matter which party they belonged to—out of deference to suffrage supporters at home, as well as to their new female constituents. Above all, Paul said, if the Democratic leaders became convinced that their inaction on

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the suffrage amendment was hurting them politically, they would find a way to get it passed. The CU’s campaign against the Democrats began in mid-September, 1914 when Paul sent a team of 16 organizers west to the suffrage states. The women—mostly young, mostly single—were met with hostility from Democratic officials, resentment from local NAWSA activists, and a certain apathy toward the federal amendment from women who already had the vote in their own states. But the organizers persevered, sending zestful reports back to headquarters (see Document 5 in the appendix and eResources, Image 5). When the election results were in, they showed that 23 of the 43 Democrats the CU had opposed in 1914 had gone down to defeat. Former NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt was furious, noting that nearly all of these men had been suffrage supporters. “They have lost our amendment for us,” she raged. “I shall never forgive them.” But Catt was probably overstating the CU’s inf luence, since it is not unusual for the party in power to lose congressional seats in a midterm election. Paul herself estimated that the CU could claim credit for just three of the Democrats’ losses, with significant inf luence on perhaps half a dozen more.10 All the same, Paul was convinced that even this number of defeats would make party leaders in Congress take notice. She also observed that NAWSA’s own strategy of pursuing suffrage at the state level had certainly not done very well on election day, with losses in five out of seven referenda. These state results strengthened Paul’s conviction that the federal amendment was still the only sure path to victory. Paul’s belief that Democratic leaders might now take woman suffrage more seriously was confirmed when, on the day after the election, the chair of the House Rules Committee—who had held up action on the suffrage amendment for more than a year—suddenly announced plans to bring the bill to the House f loor. When the vote actually took place, in January, 1915—the first ever such vote in the House—the amendment was soundly defeated. But having the vote at all represented a victory of sorts. And so the work went on. Congressional Union staff, including Alice Paul, spent most of 1915 on the road, working to develop a broader membership and additional funding sources outside their primary base in the Northeast. Paul was also eager to woo back CU members who had been put off by the 1914 campaign against the Democrats. Accordingly, she organized a series of festive events that summer at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, concluding in September with a lively Convention of Women Voters. The Convention’s activities included

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a gala send-off for three suffragists who set out by car on the 3,000mile trip to Washington, carrying with them a petition to President Wilson bearing 500,000 signatures that had been gathered over the summer. The cross-country trek was celebrated in CU-organized events all along the way, as well as at a jubilant welcome when the women arrived in Washington two months later. Just three years had passed since December, 1912, when Alice Paul had come to Washington, hoping to revitalize the campaign for the federal amendment. Much had been accomplished, but there was still a long way to go.

NAWSA CHANGES COURSE The final months of 1915 found the national suffrage organization, NAWSA, in considerable turmoil. Most of its state affiliates were f lourishing, having benefited from the expansion of the membership base and the new methods of public outreach described in Chapter 2. But NAWSA’s central administration exerted relatively little control over these affiliates, having neither the resources to provide significant help to promising campaigns, nor the authority to prevent hopeless ones. This weakness at the top had not been so noticeable in the heady period between 1910 and 1913, when five states approved full suffrage and Illinois adopted presidential suffrage. But the suffragists had lost five out of seven state campaigns in 1914, and four out of four in 1915 (for New York’s 1915 campaign, see Sidebar 2.2 in Chapter 2, pp. 46–47). Was the suffrage movement running out of winnable states? What should be done next? NAWSA’s leaders seemed to be uncertain of the answer. Nor were the suffragists making much headway with President Woodrow Wilson. Ever since he took office in 1913, both NAWSA and the Congressional Union had sent deputation after deputation to solicit his support (see eResources, Image 4). A southerner by birth, Wilson had quite conservative ideas about women’s place in public life, and he kept finding new ways to say no to suffrage (see Sidebar 3.2, p. 64). The president did make news in the fall of 1915 when he announced that he would vote for suffrage in his home state of New Jersey. But that decision was rumored to have been motivated at least in part by his wish to ingratiate himself with the female public after having just announced his plan to remarry, barely a year after the death of his first wife. In any case, Wilson’s personal vote in a state election did not signify any intention to exert national leadership on the suffrage question. NAWSA’s deputations had established friendly relations with the president, but his behavior was not changing.

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Sidebar 3.2: Winning Over the President: Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage On March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson was riding from the train station to his Washington hotel when he was struck by how empty the streets looked. “Where was everyone?,” he asked. A staffer replied, “Over on the Avenue, watching the Suffrage Parade.”11 Thus we see how, from Wilson’s very first day in Washington, the issue of woman suffrage kept tugging at his sleeve, demanding his attention. Born in 1856 to a slave-owning family in Virginia, Wilson remained in the South straight through the Civil War and Reconstruction, before going north in 1874 for college, then graduate school, and later a career as a college professor. After serving for eight years as president of Princeton University, he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. Just two years later, he ran successfully for president on the Democratic ticket. He took office in March, 1913. Wilson was notably reform-minded on some issues, but his racial views were far from progressive. He was also quite conservative on the question of gender roles. Writing to his wife in his late 20s, he described the “chilled, scandalized feeling that always overcomes me when I see and hear women speak in public.” As for giving women the vote, he opposed it while he was governor. And as a presidential candidate in 1912, he lobbied vigorously behind the scenes to make sure that the Democratic platform did not include a plank advocating woman suffrage.12 Through most of his first term as president (1913–1917), Wilson fended off the suffragists’ requests for support, telling their deputations, first, that he had not yet given the matter of suffrage much thought; second, that it was a matter for the states; and third, that he could not support it because it was not in his party’s platform. (The latter argument carried little weight, since, as one newspaper editor observed, “Wilson pays not the slightest attention to his party or his platform unless he feels like it”13). Gradually, Wilson abandoned his earlier stand against all forms of woman suffrage and shifted to supporting state suffrage—announcing that he would vote for it in his home state of New Jersey in 1915, and ensuring that support for state suffrage was included in the Democratic Party platform in 1916. At that point, he was still resisting the idea of supporting the federal amendment, but over the next year or so—as we will see in Chapters 4 and 5—he came to endorse that too. Were these gradual changes in his position a matter of true conversion? Education? Political calculation? Pressure from the suffragists? A need for wartime solidarity? Probably no one—even Wilson himself—could have said exactly. But in the end, the various factors did interweave to produce what the suffragists had long been convinced they needed: a president who was willing to spend political capital in support of the federal suffrage amendment.

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Besides NAWSA’s inability to move President Wilson, its pre-eminence within the suffrage movement was weakened during these years by its uncertain position regarding the federal amendment. NAWSA leaders had always insisted that the federal amendment was their ultimate goal. But their strong emphasis on state campaigns, combined with their support for the substitute Shafroth Amendment in 1914–1915 (see p. 61), had weakened that message, enabling the Congressional Union to establish itself as the most visible champion of the federal amendment. And to complicate matters further, many of NAWSA’s southern members were condemning the national leadership for supporting the federal amendment at all. In 1913 a group of these women broke away to form yet another rival organization, the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference. Ever since the suffrage movement reunited in 1890, NAWSA had defined itself as the organizational home of all American suffragists. It was still by far the largest group, but its authority over the movement as a whole seemed to be crumbling. Certainly, the growing size of the organization represented an administrative challenge. During the years since Susan B. Anthony’s retirement, the number of NAWSA members had risen from about 17,000 to over 150,000. But why hadn’t NAWSA’s management scaled up accordingly? The logical place to look for answers to that question was Anna Howard Shaw, who had been serving as president since 1904. Shaw was one of the great orators of her time, and NAWSA members loved her for her spellbinding speeches, her approachable manner, and her tireless travels among the states. But Shaw had no particular gift for administration, she spent too much time on the road to keep a firm hand on NAWSA management, and her tendency to personalize organizational differences led to a succession of acrimonious disputes. It is a measure of the stresses within the organization that every NAWSA convention from 1910 to 1914 included an effort to replace Shaw as president. She weathered each of those challenges, but the contention took a toll, and the calamity of nine state defeats in two years (1914–1915) helped to settle the matter. Shaw resigned in November, 1915.14 The obvious candidate to replace Shaw was Carrie Chapman Catt. In the years since her previous term as president (1900–1904), Catt had won a global reputation for her work with the International World Suffrage Alliance, which she had helped to found in 1904 and served ever since as its president. She also had extensive experience in the states, having worked as a NAWSA organizer in her younger days and then more recently played a leading role in the New York State campaign (see Sidebar 2.2 in Chapter 2, pp. 46–47). Catt insisted that she did not want the job of NAWSA president, but after an extended courtship—including a petition

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from 100 women—she finally gave in, on condition that she be given an absolutely free hand to direct the organization as she thought best.15 The board agreed, and Catt was installed as president in December, 1915. With the promise of full control, it was clear that Catt would not face the resistance from the NAWSA board that had hobbled her first term. In addition, a solution had recently emerged for the lack of funds that had stalled her before. When Mrs Frank Leslie, a wealthy magazine publisher, died in 1914, she left $2 million in her will to Catt personally, to be spent on woman suffrage. Half the sum was ultimately eaten up in debts and litigation, but Catt did ultimately receive the $1 million that remained (worth about $12 million today). These funds, which she devoted entirely to the cause of suffrage, greatly eased the financial constraints that had bedeviled her during her previous term, enhancing her capacity—and therefore NAWSA’s—to support and shape the American suffrage movement. Catt began her presidency with several months of fact-finding— holding meetings in 23 states, and sending NAWSA officers out to do further investigation. In March, 1916 she summed up the findings in a long, searing report to the board. Within a few months, Catt would produce an ambitious new plan for NAWSA’s future. But her more immediate concern was the need to persuade both the Republicans and the Democrats to endorse woman suffrage at their presidential conventions that summer. When the Republicans met in Chicago in June, 1916, representatives from both NAWSA and the Congressional Union were there to testify, while anti-suffragists spoke in opposition. One particular highlight of the week was the day when—despite a torrential downpour—NAWSA and CU members joined forces in a giant parade to the Republican convention. By luck, they arrived at the hall just as a speaker on the dais was assuring the audience that American women did not want the vote. At that very moment, the doors at the back of the auditorium burst open, and in swept the best possible refutation of that argument: more than 5,000 drenched but exhilarated women demanding the right to vote.16 In fact, the suffragists’ glorious entrance had only a modest effect on the Republican platform. In 1872, the party had promised to give “respectful consideration” to women’s rights—a concession that Elizabeth Cady Stanton dismissed as a “splinter” of the platform rather than a plank. Forty-four years later, in 1916, the Republican platform was only slightly more accommodating, supporting the idea of woman suffrage, but making the states responsible for bringing it about. And the Democrats, meeting a week later in St. Louis, took the same

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line—endorsing suffrage (in their case, for the first time), but again leaving implementation to the states. One journalist hailed the party endorsements as a breakthrough, saying that suffrage had been “taken out of cold storage and made to sizzle.” But the suffragists themselves had hoped for more decisive action, and were unimpressed.17 In September, 1916, the NAWSA executive board caused a stir throughout the organization by summoning the membership to an “emergency” annual convention, scheduled three months earlier than usual, and described as “the most important meeting in the annals of our movement.” One feature of the proceedings was a speech by President Wilson (whose decision to appear was probably inf luenced by the fact that women in 12 states could now vote on his upcoming bid for re-election—those living in the 11 full-suffrage states, plus Illinois, which now had presidential suffrage, see Table 4.1 in Chapter 4, p. 98). The president affirmed his support for suffrage, but ducked the question of federal vs. state action, saying only, “We shall not quarrel with the method of it.” And, although he praised the women’s persistence in seeking the vote, he suggested that since suffrage was surely coming, they could afford to wait patiently for it. At that, Anna Howard Shaw exclaimed, “We have waited so long, Mr. President, for the vote—we had hoped it might come in your administration.” The whole audience rose and turned toward him, but he simply smiled, bowed, and left the stage.18 If the delegates found Wilson’s speech a bit disappointing, they were transfixed by Catt’s presentation. She began by laying out three choices for NAWSA’s future: to focus their principal efforts on the federal amendment, to continue dividing their energies between state and federal work, or to pursue only state suffrage. In a closed meeting a few days earlier, Catt had already persuaded NAWSA’s Executive Council to back her preference, which was to concentrate on the federal amendment. Now she used all her eloquence to convert the membership to the same course. Catt asserted that she had a “Winning Plan” that could secure suffrage for all American women within the next six years. Pointing to the many state losses over the past two years and the futility of continuing to beg for support from rank-and-file voters who were never going to say yes, Catt insisted that NAWSA must adopt the federal amendment as its primary goal. That did not mean the end of state work—state campaigns, when they succeeded, made a real contribution to building congressional support for the federal amendment. But from now on, Catt said, NAWSA should operate like a disciplined military organization, with strong direction from the top, and each state adhering to its assigned role in

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I really believe that we might pull off a campaign which would mean the vote within the next six years. Carrie Chapman Catt, on the eve of the NAWSA national convention, Sept. 191619

••

•• ••

the campaign. Would that mean a certain loss of independence for the states? Yes. But in exchange, they would gain the satisfaction of participating in a single grand plan (see Document 6 in the appendix). Here is how it would work:

Women in the 12 states that already had suffrage (including Illinois with the presidential vote) would dedicate all their energies to lobbying their congressional representatives to support the federal amendment. Members in the handful of states that stood a real chance of winning full suffrage would work energetically, with NAWSA’s help, to pass state referenda. In the remaining states (about 30 of them) where full suffrage seemed to be out of reach, NAWSA members would lobby their legislatures for “partial” suffrage—either presidential suffrage, like Illinois, or the right to vote in party primaries.

Not everyone responded positively to Catt’s presentation. Some women objected to the centralization of power implicit in her plan, while a good number of southerners condemned the new focus on the federal amendment. In addition, some participants complained about Catt’s overbearing style—one grumbled later that the opposition had been “f lattened by a well-oiled steamroller.” But the great majority of members embraced the Winning Plan, and when the time came for the state delegations to commit themselves, virtually all of them signed on. Maud Wood Park later recalled, I felt like Moses on the mountain top after the Promised Land had been shown to him and he knew the long years of wandering in the Wilderness were soon to end. For the first time I saw our goal as possible of attainment in the near future.20

ALICE PAUL INCREASES THE PRESSURE In September, 1916, while Carrie Chapman Catt was inspiring NAWSA members with her Winning Plan, Alice Paul was presiding over the Congressional Union’s second national campaign to persuade female

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voters in the suffrage states to vote against the Democrats. But this time the CU had a partner: the brand-new Women’s Party. Earlier that year, Paul had persuaded the CU Executive Committee that the power of female voters in the suffrage states would be highlighted if they were organized into a new single-issue political party. Accordingly, CU staff spread out across the suffrage states to promote the idea, and that June, when suffragists gathered in Chicago to lobby the Republican convention, 1,500 women held a convention of their own, to announce the founding of the Women’s Party. According to the plan, all the CU members who were eligible to vote (in other words, all CU members living in the suffrage states) would now also become members of the Women’s Party. The convention began with a rousing speech by Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter). Blatch had been a major force in the New York State campaign from 1907 on (see Sidebar 2.2 in Chapter 2, pp. 46–47). But after the defeat of the New York referendum in 1915, she had switched her energies to the campaign for the federal amendment, joining the Congressional Union and bringing along most of the 2,000 members of her Women’s Political Union. Blatch’s family association with Stanton, her force of character, and her oratorical skills were all valuable assets. (Another new recruit, the wealthy Alva Belmont, was also on the platform, having recently switched from NAWSA to the CU and promptly established herself as one of the CU’s foremost donors). Echoing CU policy, the participants agreed that the Women’s Party would concentrate solely on the federal amendment and that it would continue the principle of campaigning against the party in power (currently, the Democrats) for failing to pass the amendment. When it came to choosing a chair, Alice Paul was ineligible since she did not live in a suffrage state and therefore could not vote. So the position went to Anne Martin of Nevada. Blatch, who was named campaign director, was also a non-voter (being a New York resident), but she solved the problem by establishing legal residence for the duration of the campaign in Kansas, which had approved suffrage in 1912. Every effort was made to keep Women’s Party members in the foreground during the campaign in the suffrage states, stressing their role as local voters. But CU members from other parts of the country also helped out with the campaign in various ways, as speakers and support workers. In addition, since the official chair, Anne Martin, spent most of her time working in her home state of Nevada, it was CU chair Alice Paul who provided overall direction for the Women’s Party. Thus, the Women’s Party can best be thought of, not as a wholly separate organization, but as a subsidiary program of the Congressional Union.

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As the 1916 election campaign got underway, Democratic leaders talked privately among themselves about the danger that a solid block of women voting against them in the suffrage states could f lip the presidency to the Republicans.21 But they were overestimating the danger. Even back in 1914, convincing women to subordinate all other electoral concerns to the single issue of suffrage had not been an easy task. And it was much harder in 1916, because this election came at a time when Americans were locked in an intense debate over what to do about the war. When World War I had started, back in August, 1914, many Americans had hoped that it would prove to be no more than a shortlived dispute among Europeans. But by November, 1916, with the conf lict dragging into its third year and the Allies calling for assistance, there was increasing pressure for the United States to join the fighting. President Wilson, running for re-election, was making no explicit promises about the future, but he had avoided any military involvement so far, and he had established a global reputation with his calls for international peace. Add to this the fact that his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, actively favored American intervention, and by default, Wilson became the peace candidate—a status that he reinforced with his campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” Congressional Union activists quickly recast Wilson’s slogan to convey their own message, “He Kept Us Out of Suffrage,” while publicizing his opponent’s endorsement of the federal amendment. But given the pressures of the times, thousands of female voters concluded that the question of war or peace simply had to trump the question of suffrage. So the votes were counted, and Woodrow Wilson, the peace candidate, won re-election—not only nationwide but in 10 of the 12 suffrage states. In fact, a number of analysts concluded that it was women’s votes that had carried Wilson to victory. Declaring that the militant suffragists’ campaign against the Democrats had “failed utterly,” the New York Times gloated, “The dream of swinging [women’s] vote this way and that at the order of female political leaders is shattered forever.”22 Paul saw things differently. When colleagues bemoaned the fact that most people thought the CU’s election campaign had failed, she responded, “It is not important what the people think but what the Democratic leaders know.”23 She was certain the Democratic leaders recognized that they had prevailed this time, because of the paramount issue of the war. But the more women voters there were, the more dangerous it would be to ignore them. Indeed, even the fact that (against Paul’s wishes) women had played an important part in re-electing President Wilson showed the impact their votes could have. However the 1916

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election had come out, Paul thought, the Democratic leaders understood that women were emerging as a constituency that would have to be taken into account. There was one more legacy of the 1916 campaign—the death, and the sanctification, of Inez Milholland (Boissevain). Besides being extraordinarily beautiful, Milholland was a brilliant and free-spirited woman, whose short life included earning a law degree, embracing socialism and pacifism, and editing a popular woman’s column, while also maintaining a complicated marriage and several love affairs. She was a committed suffragist from her college days on, and some of the most memorable suffrage parades of the era were the ones led off by Milholland, riding on a white horse like a medieval queen (see Figure 3.1, p. 58). A gifted speaker, Milholland agreed to tour the western states for the Women’s Party in 1916. She was not feeling well when she set off, and the brutal schedule—50 meetings in 30 days—took a terrible toll on her. Her condition (a severe form of anemia) continued to worsen, and in California, on October 22, 1916, Milholland collapsed in the middle of a speech. She died a few weeks later, just three months past her 30th birthday. Within weeks of her death, Inez Milholland had entered into legend. From then on, portrayals of her in Congressional Union publications suggested a cross between Joan of Arc and Jesus, martyred for a noble cause. All these images came together on Christmas Day, 1916, when the CU staged a memorial service for Milholland in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Standard bearers stood at each corner of the room, a series of speakers emphasized themes of myth and sacrifice, a chorus sang religious music from behind a purple velvet curtain, and a huge banner (adapted from the one Milholland carried in the first New York City suffrage parade) proclaimed, “Forward Into Light.” The suffrage movement had long cherished its heroines and pioneers. Now it also had a saint. From the emotional heights of Milholland’s memorial, the women of the CU returned to the daily realities of pressure politics. By this time, thanks to Paul’s tireless fundraising, the organization had moved into larger quarters—an elegant former residence called Cameron House, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. It had enough space for the CU offices and meeting rooms, a number of rooms for rent-paying residents (including Alice Paul and Lucy Burns), and even a tearoom. NAWSA, meanwhile, had taken a similar step, establishing its new Washington headquarters in a 25-room mansion the members called Suffrage House. NAWSA and the Congressional Union each maintained a group of paid staff and a larger team of local volunteers, supplemented by members

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from around the country who came in to help for shorter periods of time. Women from the suffrage states were seen as especially valuable in lobbying Congress, since they were voters. As the head of the CU congressional team observed, legislators “said they respected femininity. But it was plain that they did respect a voter.” Meanwhile, to reinforce their message, both NAWSA and the CU encouraged their state chapters to keep up the pressure for the federal amendment in the congressmen’s home districts. NAWSA, whose membership had soared above a million by 1917, had a much larger presence in the states. But even the CU, with 60,000 members, now had 36 state chapters.24 The two groups of suffragists in Washington—one working for NAWSA, the other for the Congressional Union—had a good deal in common. Most of them were upper-middle-class white women, with the free time and the financial resources to work and travel extensively for suffrage. But there were also important differences between the two groups. NAWSA’s most active lobbyists tended to be middle-aged, and chosen to convey the image of substantial local citizens, while the women representing the CU were younger and distinctly more assertive. This difference in their age and outlook was ref lected in the way they approached their assignments. NAWSA’s head liaison to Congress, Maud Wood Park, said that her team’s job was to find friends in Congress who would work for the cause, and to keep those friends working “without annoying them by too much prodding” (see Document 7 in the appendix). In contrast, the CU approach was based on the assumption that politicians were most likely to respond when they were challenged—and even threatened— “Why do you come here and bother us?” by self-confident advocates. Lucy demanded the chair of the House Judiciary Burns, Paul’s co-chair, proudly Committee, Rep. Edwin Webb, at a sufrecorded the shock that congressfrage hearing in 1915. This inspired the men felt when, as she said, “after following poem by Congressional Union years of pleas politely phrased,” member Alice Duer Miller:26 they suddenly found themselves “face to face with a proGirls, girls, the worst has happened test couched in words of political Our cause is at an ebb. power.”25 How could you go and do it? Although this difference You’ve bothered Mr. Webb. in style aggravated the tenYou came and asked for freedom, sion between NAWSA and the (As law does not forbid) Not thinking it might bother him, CU, it was an asset for the camAnd yet, it seems, it did.27 paign, since some congressmen were disarmed by the ladylike

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demeanor of the NAWSA team, while others were stirred to action by the demands of the CU. Nevertheless, there were still many legislators who continued to resist the women’s appeals, no matter how they were presented. So the months went by, and the suffragists were still well short of the votes they needed in Congress, especially in the House. What was the solution? Alice Paul was convinced that the only answer was for Woodrow Wilson to assert his power as party leader and compel at least some of the ruling Democrats to vote for suffrage. Friendly legislators confirmed her impression. One senator advised her, “Turn your guns on President Wilson. He is the real center of power.”28 But what would it take to make the president commit himself to the suffrage cause? Ever since Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, Paul had been sending him one deputation after another, asking for his support. But the president grew increasingly testy with these challenging visitors, and in 1915 he more or less stopped receiving them. As we have noted, NAWSA was also sending him periodic deputations during these years. But the CU visitors were regarded as—in fact, took pride in being—more abrasive. Thus, when Wilson was informed one day that the new president of NAWSA, Carrie Chapman Catt, along with a friend, had come to see him, he had just one question. “Are these ladies of the Congressional Union variety?” No, the staff member reassured him, Catt was from NAWSA, “the conservative body.” The staffer added, “The Congressional Union people are of the ‘heckling’ variety and their methods are not approved by NAWSA.”29 Closed off from visits to the White House, Paul took another page from the British playbook and began sending her followers to confront the president at public events—at a labor ceremony in Washington, at the governor’s mansion in Kansas, at his hotel in Chicago, and while he was reviewing the f leet in New York City. It was also during this period that CU members interrupted Wilson’s annual address to Congress by suddenly unfurling a huge yellow suffrage banner from the balcony, emblazoned with the words, “Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?”30 Finally, capitalizing on the emotions evoked by Inez Milholland’s death, Paul came up with a request that she was certain the president would find hard to refuse: would he receive the Milholland Memorial Delegation? He agreed, and on January 9, 1917, some 300 women arrived, bearing with them suffrage resolutions from around the country. Milholland’s death had got them in the door, but the actual meeting did not go well. Wilson, who had been expecting a brief presentation, was irritated when the women began making speeches. Once again, he

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insisted that he was bound by his party’s platform, and after telling the women that the change they sought could only be achieved if they “concerted” public opinion, he abruptly left the room.31 Inez Haynes Irwin, who was in the group, described the women’s reaction, Stunned, talking in low, indignant tones, we moved slowly out of the East Room and returned to our headquarters. … We saw that the President would do nothing for some time, perhaps not until the eve of the Presidential election in 1920. He said we must concert public opinion. But how? For half a century women had been walking the hard way of the lobbyist. We had had speeches, meetings, parades, campaigns, organization. What new method could we devise?32

As the women cast about for a new approach—something non-violent but compelling—they turned to the idea of picketing. It was a familiar form of labor activism, and Paul had seen it used by the British suffragists. Harriot Blatch had used a similar tactic in New York State in 1912, placing “silent sentinels” outside the door of the State Assembly Judiciary Committee. She and Paul had occasionally discussed picketing as a possible tactic, and now, after the disappointing visit to Wilson, Blatch insisted that the time had come for the CU to post “silent sentinels” at the gates of the White House. Inez Haynes Irwin agreed, describing the action as a way to send the president a “perpetual deputation.” Some members hesitated—would picketing be too militant? But most of the women embraced the idea. And so, as Doris Stevens recalled later, “Volunteers signed up for sentinel duty and the fight was on.”33 At 9:00 the next morning, January 10, 1917, a dozen women marched single-file out of the CU headquarters and across the park to the White House. They were warmly dressed, and they carried big banners that f luttered in the chilly wind. With military precision, the women took up their positions at the two White House gates, six to each gate. And there they stood, silently, until 1:00 pm, when the next shift of sentinels arrived to replace them. The “optics” of this protest were indeed very effective, with the silent pickets suggesting both the women’s long patience in waiting for the vote, and Wilson’s own silence on the subject of woman suffrage. Paul announced that the picketing would continue until inauguration day in March. At one point during that first day, a limousine carrying President Wilson and his wife and daughter drove out through the White House gate. Both Mr and Mrs Wilson stared straight ahead, but their 30-yearold daughter Margaret, a known suffrage sympathizer, sneaked the

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picketers a wave. Passersby were also friendly. Mary Fendall, a recent Bryn Mawr graduate who was among the picketers that day, commented that there was “no rudeness at all. Not one unkind or insulting word from anyone.”34 Even the White House police greeted the picketers with smiles, promising to bring them hot bricks to stand on the next day, when a cold snap was predicted. The press also reacted quite positively, giving the silent sentinels front-page coverage. And so the picketing continued—eight hours a day, six days a week—through the winter and spring of 1917 (see Figure 3.2). The women’s protest did, of course, arouse some criticism, but on the whole, it seemed that the Congressional Union had struck a perfect balance between gentility and aggressiveness—a style they called “mild militancy.”35 Picketing the White House certainly did pose a challenge to the president, yet it was also true that the women were doing nothing more confrontational than standing there in silence, holding their banners. That comfortable definition of “mild militancy” might have held longer, had it not been for changes in the international situation. Eighteen months earlier, back in May, 1915, a German submarine Figure 3.2  On a rainy day in 1917, the Congressional Union ­pickets maintain their vigil at the White House gate. Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/2016884706/

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had sunk a British ship, the Lusitania, killing nearly 2,000 passengers, including more than 100 Americans. Battered by a storm of international criticism and eager to keep America from entering the war on the side of the Allies, Germany had promised not to attack passenger liners, or the ships of neutral countries. But in January, 1917, soon after the CU began its picketing, German leaders announced that they were going to go back to unrestricted submarine warfare. (They recognized that this would probably bring the United States into the war, but they were gambling that the British could be starved out and the Allies forced to surrender before the US could mobilize its forces and get them to Europe). Five days after that announcement, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Then, in March, the situation was aggravated further when the story of the “Zimmermann Telegram” hit the American newspapers, revealing that the German Foreign Minister had been secretly encouraging Mexico to attack the United States. Every day, it seemed more likely that America would finally be drawn into the war. But thousands of Americans were still passionately opposed to joining the conf lict, and the closer the war came, the more intense grew the debate. It was in this tense atmosphere that 1,000 members of the Congressional Union and the Women’s Party gathered on March 1, 1917 for a combined annual convention. The first order of business was organizational. Since there had always been considerable overlap between the CU and the WP, it was agreed to merge the two into a single new organization: the National Woman’s Party (NWP). To no one’s surprise, Alice Paul was elected NWP chair. The next item on the agenda was to define the new party’s position on the war. It was agreed that the NWP itself should take no stand, leaving its members free to work for or against American intervention, as they chose. And what about continuing to advocate for suffrage in wartime? Would it be better for the women to suspend their suffrage activities and concentrate on war work, in hopes that their service would be rewarded with the vote when peace returned? Nearly everyone opposed that idea, remembering how quickly women’s war service had been forgotten after the Civil War. So it was agreed: the agitation would continue. Three days later, the National Woman’s Party saluted Wilson’s second inauguration day with a procession of 1,000 banner-carrying suffragists drawn from every state in the union. This time, instead of marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, as in 1913, the women marched around the four-mile perimeter of the White House grounds, braving a rainstorm that soon turned into sleet and gale-force winds. They carried with them a set of petitions they had hoped to present to the president,

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but they found every gate locked against them. Even so, the grueling effort paid off in publicity; the next day, the women found their perseverance celebrated in friendly press coverage all over the country. One reporter observed, “Before Alice Paul and the pickets came, days would pass when the word suffrage didn’t appear in the dispatches. Since their activities, no word occurs more frequently than this.”36 But war was surely coming. What would happen to the suffrage campaign then?

NOTES 1 Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 5, 36. 2 See, for instance, Alice Paul, “The Woman Suffrage Movement in Great Britain,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 35 Supplement (May, 1910), 23–27. 3 Walton, Paul, 87 4 Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1964, 1977),19–20. 5 Eleanor Clift, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003), 124. 6 Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 53. 7 Congressional Union: J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 212; NAWSA: Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 73. 8 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 14–15; Lynda Dodd, “Sisterhood of Struggle: Leadership and Strategy in the Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law, ed. Tracy A. Thomas and Tracey Jean Boisseau (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 193 9 Bernadette Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 20. 10 Clift, Founding Sisters, 102; Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 209. 11 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 180. 12 Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 130; Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Presidency, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Lessons from the Woman’s Suffrage and Labor Movements,” Presidential Studies Quarterly vol. 29 no. 1 (Mar. 1999), 16. 13 Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 198. 14 Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, 52, 73; Walton, Woman’s Crusade, 82.

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15 Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 29. 16 Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 251–252. 17 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 146; Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 243. 18 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 258; Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 246–247. 19 Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, eds, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975, 1982), 34. 20 Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 133; Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 17. 21 Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965, 1981), 235. 22 Walton, Woman’s Crusade, 142. 23 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 29. 24 Ibid., 329–330; NAWSA membership: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 171; CU membership: Walton, Woman’s Crusade, 4; Steven L. Piott, American Reformers, 1870–1920: Progressives in Word and Deed (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 206. 25 Park, Front Door Lobby, 269; Linda G. Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912–1920 (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1991), 53. 26 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 132. 27 Alva Willing Belmont, “Militancy,” The Suffragist 5 no. 8 ( July 21, 1917). 28 Southard, Militant Citizenship, 129. 29 Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels, 72–73. 30 Clift, Founding Sisters, 120. 31 Doris Stevens, Jailed For Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1920)), 56. 32 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 195. 33 Ibid., 202; Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 58. 34 Walton, Woman’s Crusade, 149. 35 Alva Willing Belmont, “Militancy,” The Suffragist 5, no. 8 ( July 21, 1917). 36 Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 163.

Chapter 4

Working for Suffrage in Wartime 1917–1918

O

n April 2, 1917, the moment that the nation had long been expecting finally arrived: President Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war. “The world,” he said, “must be made safe for democracy.”1 Ranged before him sat the legislators who would respond to his call—435 members of the House of Representatives and 96 Senators. Or, to put it another way, 530 men and Jeanette Rankin. The 37-year-old Rankin had come a long way from the Montana ranch where she was born. The first of seven children, she had worked hard as a girl, helping to care for her younger siblings and carry on the tough labor of running a ranch. If she had been born a few decades earlier, ranch life might have been all she would ever have known. But thanks to the opening up of educational opportunities for women, Rankin was able to attend the state university (graduating in 1900) and later earned a degree in social work. After holding several different jobs in different parts of the country, Rankin accepted a new position in 1910 that happened to take her to the state of Washington just at the time of the suffrage referendum there. Volunteering with the campaign, Rankin became so inspired that she changed careers, and started working as a paid organizer for the national suffrage organization NAWSA. In her new job, Rankin assisted several states with their campaigns, and then in 1912, she took the fight home to Montana, where the movement had more or less fallen apart after a defeat in 1903. With Rankin as their new president, the reinvigorated Montana suffragists got their amendment through the state legislature in January, 1913, thus putting it on the November, 1914 ballot. They then launched an

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energetic statewide campaign, reaching out to farmers’ groups, labor unions, and women’s clubs, while Socialist women helped to spread the word in the state’s mining districts. Posters were plastered everywhere; movie theatres showed slides promoting suffrage between shows; even children were given hatbands saying, “I want my mother to vote.” Meanwhile, Rankin traveled tirelessly all over the state, covering 1,300 miles in one 25-day period.2 And on November, 3, 1914, the amendment passed, making Montana the 11th state in the country to give women full suffrage. Many people had contributed to the 1914 victory, but in 1916 Rankin had a victory all her own: she was elected to the US House of Representatives on the Republican ticket, becoming the first woman ever to serve in Congress. The new Congress was not constitutionally required to meet until the following fall, but in April 1917 President Wilson called them to Washington for a special “war session.” Preparing to take her seat, Rankin moved into NAWSA’s Suffrage House in Washington, and on April 2, the first day of the session, she got a gala send-off at a breakfast of 200 women. That evening, Wilson made his historic request for a declaration of war. Between that moment and the final vote in the House (which came at 3:00 am on the morning of April 6), Rankin experienced a host of conf licting pressures. A committed pacifist, she was personally convinced that America’s entry into the war would only make matters worse. But she knew that many of her constituents would consider a vote against the war to be misguided—perhaps even unpatriotic. And the suffrage leaders she admired only compounded her conf lict. On the one hand, Carrie Chapman Catt and other NAWSA leaders warned Rankin that a vote against the war would damage not only the cause of suffrage but the reputation of all American women. On the other hand, Alice Paul and a colleague from the National Woman’s Party told Rankin that “it would be a tragedy for the first woman ever in Congress to vote for war.” In the end, Rankin followed her conscience (and Paul’s advice). When the time came for her to vote, she said, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.”3 She was, of course, on the losing side; the total vote went overwhelmingly in the president’s favor. In the two houses of Congress combined, only 56 legislators opposed the declaration of war—55 men and Jeanette Rankin. Many people assumed that Rankin could not possibly be reelected after voting against the war; she herself was pessimistic about her chances. But there was some anti-war sentiment in her district, and

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she was generally well-regarded in the state. So, taking no chances, Montana Democrats redrew the boundaries of her formerly Republican district to produce one dominated by their own party. Rankin would not hold office again until 1940, when she took her seat in the House just in time to cast the only vote in Congress against US entry into World War II. As Catt had warned, Rankin’s 1917 vote against entering World War I was used by suffrage opponents to argue that women could not be counted on in times of national emergency, and that suffragists were not true patriots. Indeed, Catt (who was sometimes prone to exaggeration) claimed that Rankin’s vote had cost the movement a million votes.4 Overall, Rankin’s experience during this climactic period highlights the interplay between ideas about patriotism and ideas about suffrage that kept surfacing and resurfacing throughout the 19 months of America’s involvement in World War I.

NAWSA SIGNS ON On February 23, 1917—six weeks before President Wilson’s war message to Congress—Carrie Chapman Catt convened a special meeting of NAWSA’s top leaders to discuss how their organization should respond to the war that was surely coming. “The future of our movement,” she told them, “depends upon the right action being taken now.”5 Catt was convinced that by supporting the war, NAWSA could affirm the suffragists’ status as patriotic Americans and prove their value as (voteworthy) citizens. Once the delegates were gathered, Catt organized the discussion around a letter she had drafted to the president, pledging NAWSA’s support in the war effort. After a lengthy debate, the letter was approved by a vote of 63 to 13.6 The decision left some hard feelings behind; a number of pacifists would never forgive Catt for propelling NAWSA into the war. Nevertheless, the decision was made, and the next day, Catt’s letter was read aloud at a huge public meeting, with several dozen congressmen and administration We pledge the loyal support of our officials joining NAWSA leadmore than two million members. Carrie Chapman Catt to President ers on the stage. The secretary of Wilson, February, 1917, commitwar, who was present, formally ting NAWSA to the war-effort.7 agreed to deliver Catt’s letter to the president:

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There was some irony in Catt’s being the one to lead NAWSA into war, since until recently she had been a leader in the peace movement. When the war broke out in Europe in August, 1914, she had helped organize the first American peace march. Later that year, she had joined Jane Addams in visiting both the president and the secretary of state, urging them to keep the United States neutral. And in January, 1915 she had helped Addams found the Women’s Peace Party. But two considerations led Catt to abandon her peace advocacy. First, as the fighting stretched on, she grew increasingly pessimistic about the chances of achieving the Peace Party’s main goal—which was to end the war through international mediation. In late 1915, she told Addams (who was deeply involved in the effort) that trying to stop the world’s armies from fighting, once they had begun, was “like trying to throw a violet at a stone wall.” 8 Catt had no intention of committing herself to a venture—especially a controversial one—that had no chance of success. Catt’s second consideration—and the one that mattered most to her—was how being publicly identified with peace activism might affect her principal concern: the suffrage movement. Once it was clear that the United States was going to enter the conf lict, Catt severed her ties with the Women’s Peace Party and focused all her energies on committing NAWSA to the war effort. She summed up her position this way, “I am myself a pacifist, now and forever. War is to my mind a barbarism. … But I hold that that belief has nothing to do with the present situation. Whether we approve or disapprove, war is here.”9 (Catt would resume her work for international peace in the future, but not until World War I was over and the federal suffrage amendment safely passed). Early in April, Catt instructed every NAWSA affiliate to register its members for war service. Across the country, local chapters threw themselves into war-related tasks: sewing, gardening, nursing, rolling bandages, etc. (see eResources, Image 6). They also devoted themselves to selling Liberty Bonds; in New York City alone, the Woman Suffrage Party sold more than $1 million worth of bonds in just 6 months. Across the country, patriotic parades often featured columns of suffragists, combining their demand for the vote with evidence of their service to the nation—as nurses, military clerks, defense workers, farm laborers, Red Cross volunteers, and as soldiers’ wives and mothers (see Sidebar 4.1, p. 83).

Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918

Sidebar 4.1: Women Serving the Nation: American Women’s Role in World War I More American women participated actively in the war effort during World War I than during any previous war in American history. To start with, both the Navy and the Marines broke new ground by accepting women as enlistees. None of these women (about 13,000 of them) received combat assignments; their work was primarily clerical. Nevertheless, their presence represented a milestone in American military history. Meanwhile, several thousand other women took civilian jobs with various private social agencies that were active in the European war zone. American industry needed women, too. With so many male workers departed for the service, jobs opened up that had long been reserved for men, most notably in factories producing goods for the military. At the peak of wartime production, women constituted at least one-fifth of the labor force in many industries. Women in these jobs nearly always earned less than men, but the work still paid considerably better than traditional female occupations. Most married women remained outside the labor force, just as in peacetime. But huge numbers of them supported the war effort as volunteers, producing and conserving food, organizing day nurseries for defense workers, selling Liberty Bonds, etc. Meanwhile, 8 million Red Cross volunteers (mostly women) in more than 3,500 communities devoted themselves to tasks such as rolling bandages and knitting socks for soldiers. Indeed, when the call went out to collect fruit-pits (a source of carbon for gas masks), the volunteers went at the assignment so energetically that the inundated War Department had to beg them to stop.10 Despite the fact that the war opened up many non-traditional occupations to women, it also accentuated the importance of women’s most traditional responsibilities as mothers and caretakers. So it is understandable that among the millions of American women who contributed to the war effort, none were more celebrated than the country’s nurses, whose work involved precisely the nurturing qualities that had been valued in women for centuries. In the course of the war, nurses—particularly those who served overseas—emerged as the quintessential symbol of selfless American womanhood, in service to the nation (see Figure 4.2). The important contribution that American women made to the war effort provided a powerful new rationale for granting women the full privileges of citizenship. The impression that the women’s claim made on President Wilson can be seen, for instance, in this line from his address to the US Senate in September 1918, “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”11 (see Document 9 in the appendix).

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Meanwhile, at headquarters, NAWSA arranged to sponsor a hospital unit in France, while the press bureau made certain that every patriotic deed by every suffragist was widely publicized. In addition, when the Committee of National Defense (CND) was established to coordinate resources for the war effort, both Catt and Anna Howard Shaw agreed to join its Women’s Committee (Shaw as chair). Both Shaw and Catt felt that the men in charge condescended to the Women’s Committee, and never gave the group much to do. Nevertheless, the fact that two of NAWSA’s leaders were serving on this high-profile group provided one more bit of evidence that suffragists were doing their part for the nation. Catt was surely right about the public effect of all this activity. For instance, the records of one of the country’s leading anti-suffragist groups reveal that the leaders were keeping a careful tally of their own war work and continually comparing it to NAWSA’s.12 Moreover, the anti-suffragists’ ongoing effort to portray Catt as a secret pacifist was made more difficult because of her visible commitment to the war effort. When Catt first led NAWSA into war work, she made it clear that this did not mean giving up advocacy for suffrage. Instead, she said, “We must do both!”13 In fact, 1917 turned out to be the year when Catt’s Winning Plan, approved by NAWSA in 1916 (see Chapter 3, pp. 67–68), really began to pay off. According to the plan, each state had its assigned role, and only the most promising states were allowed to campaign for full suffrage. The rest were instructed to pursue “partial” suffrage (the right to vote in presidential or primary elections), which was more easily achieved because it required only legislative approval. In this category of partial suffrage, 1917 was a banner year: in just five months ( January to May), six states approved presidential suffrage—North Dakota, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Rhode Island—while Arkansas granted women the right to vote in party primaries (see Table 4.1, p. 98). 1917 brought defeats as well as victories. The spring win in Ohio was reversed in the fall by the general electorate, and the suffragists lost contests for full suffrage in six different states. Nevertheless, winning partial suffrage in six previously resistant states was a noteworthy achievement, especially since Rhode Island was the first state in the Northeast—and Arkansas was the first state in the former Confederacy—to grant women any kind of suffrage. All through 1917, Catt was maintaining regular contact with President Wilson. Shortly before she committed NAWSA to the war effort, she met privately over dinner with him and his wife, and although no explicit bargain was discussed, the president seems to have made it clear that, in exchange for NAWSA’s support of the war, he would do what he could to help the suffragists achieve their own goals.14 By then, both Wilson and the Democratic Party had gone on record in favor of

Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918

suffrage at the state level, but neither had committed themselves to the federal amendment. On that matter, the president’s assertion now was that he could not presume to tell Congress what to do. Catt knew that there were plenty of cases in which he had exerted great pressure on Congress. Accordingly, she spent most of 1917 trying to persuade him to assert similar leadership in the case of the suffrage amendment. NAWSA vice-president Helen Gardener was a key player in this wooing of the president. (Although born Alice Chenoweth, she had chosen Helen Gardener as a pen name and later started using it fulltime). A novelist, essayist, and lecturer, the 64-year-old Gardener had been raised in Virginia during the Civil War, just like Woodrow Wilson. She used their shared background as well as her considerable charm to make herself a welcome visitor in the Oval Office. Catt, who lived in New York, came to Washington as often as she could, but Gardener was right on the scene, and by 1917 she was considered NAWSA’s “special liaison” to the president. Suffrage lobbyist Maud Wood Park later said of Gardener, “She was one woman in whom the White House secretaries had complete confidence and to whom the President never refused an appointment”15 (see Figure 4.1 and Document 7 in the appendix). Catt and Gardener’s approach to Wilson, however persistent, was always deferential. One issue that came up early in the congressional session that began in April, 1917 was the announcement by the ruling Democrats that for the next six months, they would only take up bills that were categorized as war measures. Characteristically, when Catt wrote to Wilson soon afterward, she offered no criticism of his party’s decision; she simply asked him to take note of NAWSA’s restraint in not asking for immediate action on suffrage. She also requested that when Wilson decided the time was right, “will you not permit [NAWSA] to carry the glad news to the women of America?” Wilson wrote back, praising Catt’s “generous attitude.”16 Just a few days later, he took the kind of step he had previously said he could not take—he urged the House of Representatives to establish a Woman Suffrage Committee. Both the House and the Senate had created suffrage committees back in 1882. But while the one in the Senate was still active, the House committee had lapsed long ago, leaving suffrage bills in the unfriendly hands of the House Judiciary Committee—a group so unresponsive to the women’s cause that Inez Haynes Irwin called it “the graveyard of the House.” A knowledgeable friend had advised NAWSA that creating a new suffrage committee in the House would count as a procedural action, not new legislation, so it did not have to qualify as a war measure to be considered. Accordingly, NAWSA state affiliates got their legislatures to submit resolutions to Congress calling for the new committee, while NAWSA lobbyists in Washington tirelessly made the rounds

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Figure 4.1  Carrie Chapman Catt (on right) and NAWSA’s top lobbyist, Helen Gardener, pose on the White House steps after a visit with President Wilson. Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/94506345/.

among the House members. Maud Wood Park fondly described the briskest response she got that summer—from 35-year-old Representative Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, “I’m with you. I’m for it. I’m going to vote for it. Now don’t bother me.”17 Meanwhile, as we have noted, Wilson was adding his voice to the campaign. In May, he wrote to the chair of the House Rules Committee, calling formation of a suffrage committee “a wise move of public policy.” A few weeks later, he sent a similar message to another congressman, reiterating that creating the committee would be a good move, “both politically and from other points of view.” Soon afterwards, in an unspoken quid pro quo, Catt sent Alice Paul an open letter (published in 350 newspapers), asserting that the White House pickets were causing “annoyance and embarrassment” to the president, and urging her to withdraw them until the war was over. Catt also wrote privately to the president, sympathizing over the outrageous way the protesters were adding to his already heavy burdens. On occasion, she even tipped him off when friends within the National Women’s Party slipped her information about the group’s

Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918

plans. Overall, Catt did everything she could to clarify in Wilson’s mind the distinction between the NWP pickets and the many “real” suffragists represented by NAWSA, who regarded him as a trusted friend.18

STANDING AT THE PRESIDENT’S DOOR All through these months—through Germany’s resumption of submarine warfare in January, the break-off of diplomatic relations in February, Wilson’s second inauguration, the declaration of war, and into the summer of 1917—through all this time (except for a short break between the end of the old Congress in March and the start of the new in April), Alice Paul’s pickets continued their daily vigil at the White House gates (see Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3, p. 75). Paul rarely met face-to-face with Woodrow Wilson, but she knew from studying his academic writing, and from watching him in action, that he had a truly elevated idea of the president’s role in American life. Seeking to reverse decades during which Congress had usually held the upper hand, Wilson believed that the president should function as the nation’s dominant political figure and moral leader. Once in office, he acted on that principle, strongly promoting his political agenda in Congress, and using his oratorical skill to inf luence and inspire his fellow citizens. And once the United States entered the war, he accentuated his exercise of what political scientist James Ceaser has called “the rhetorical presidency.”19 Soon Wilson began to be seen, both by others and by himself, as the definitive international spokesman, not only for the United States, but for democracy itself. In fact, the NWP’s White House picketing was specifically designed to unsettle and inf luence a president who thought of his role in this exalted way. Alice Paul shared Wilson’s conviction that the American president was uniquely positioned to inspire his people and shape congressional action. She later observed, “We knew that the American presidency, and perhaps it alone, would ensure our success.” She had seen Wilson act decisively in propelling legislation through Congress. Now, she said, “What the President has done in all these matters, he can do with regard to Suffrage.”20 The goal of the picketing was to persuade Wilson that he needed to do so. Wilson cannot have enjoyed the pickets, but he tolerated them in the early months, even inviting the women in for coffee one cold day. (They declined). Nevertheless, in April, 1917—knowing how much the protesters benefited from continuous press coverage—the president did have his staff explore whether local papers could be persuaded to pay the women a little less attention. However, the pickets were such a popular topic that the editors more or less ignored the request. Meanwhile, Wilson maintained

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his lofty tone, insisting that he was quite unmoved by the “so-called pickets.” And in May, 1917, when he came out in support of creating a House Woman Suffrage Committee, he made a point of telling Catt that this was “an act of fairness to the best women,” making a clear distinction between her “best” suffragists and the pickets outside his door.21 Although Paul would never admit it publicly, the decision to picket the White House caused the National Woman’s Party to lose a considerable number of members in the course of 1917 (perhaps 10,000 out of its previous total of 60,000).22 But the party also gained some new recruits—women who were attracted by the NWP’s neutral stand on the war and/or by its militancy in choosing to picket. Some groups even signed up en masse, like the entire board of NAWSA’s affiliate in Connecticut. Typically, the new enrollees were younger women; a number were also Socialists and labor activists. These women joined the rest of the NWP in sustaining the picket line. Despite some scattered criticism in the press, the pickets met a generally friendly reception during the first few months of their protest. The White House guards teased them if the morning shift arrived a few minutes late; tour buses began to point the women out as part of the Washington scene; some passersby even took a turn with the picketing. Indeed, the protest became such a familiar part of the landscape that Paul felt the need to revive press interest by initiating a series of “theme days”—occasions when the women’s banners would all celebrate a particular event, like Susan B. Anthony’s birthday, or when the pickets would all be drawn from a particular state or profession. For some years, Americans had been marching for the cause of labor and promoting a broad range of social reforms—as well as, more recently, debating vigorously whether or not the United States should enter the war. In that context, the pickets’ challenge to the president on the matter of suffrage seems to have been accepted by many people as just one more form of activism. But that was in peacetime. Once the decision was made in April, 1917 to enter the war, the attitude of the American public toward dissent of all kinds changed almost overnight. From the halls of Congress to the smallest country town, the importance of “loyalty” and “100% Americanism” came to obliterate all other concerns (see Sidebar 4.2, p. 89). Ref lecting the new, more repressive, political climate, the main organization of anti-suffragists, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), chose an entirely new set of officers, changed the name of its journal from Woman’s Protest to Woman Patriot, and narrowed its focus to a single message: that suffragists (not just the pickets or even just the National Woman’s Party, but all suffragists) were socialists, Bolshevists, and traitors. The NAOWS asserted that woman suffrage was “proving of more potent assistance to the Kaiser than his wonderful army.”23

Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918

Sidebar 4.2: All Together Now: America’s War on Dissent During World War I When the United States entered World War I in April, 1917, President Wilson recognized that the country’s participation was going to require new levels of sacrifice from the American people. He was convinced that the most effective and democratic way to encourage that sacrifice was to use persuasion rather than coercion. So, for instance, he chose to finance the war, not through higher taxes, but primarily through periodic Liberty Loan drives, during which all Americans were pressed to contribute whatever they could. The same philosophy shaped the way that people were urged to conserve food and gas, knit socks for soldiers, and help in the fields at harvest time—all voluntary, all done to support their country in time of war. But there is a dark side to promoting patriotism so relentlessly. In the government’s tireless psychological campaign to encourage support for the war and silence dissent, the public was encouraged to condemn anyone who obstructed the war effort in any way—from ordinary citizens who spent less than they could on Liberty Bonds to the “slackers” who avoided the draft to “hyphenated Americans” (especially those of German ancestry) who might be foreign spies. Inevitably, suffragists who dared to speak out against the president in a time of war came in for some of the same harsh treatment. At its most extreme, the drive to silence “disloyal” opinions was embodied in the Espionage Act of 1917 (and a harsher set of amendments known as the Sedition Act of 1918), which made it a criminal offense even to speak against the war and the draft. In addition, the Post Office used its censorship powers to close down scores of (usually left-wing) periodicals, while a private group called the American Protective League was given near-governmental power to hunt down suspected traitors. President Wilson himself reinforced the message, proclaiming to a group of peace advocates, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.”24 Back in April, 1917, on the night before President Wilson delivered his war message to Congress, he remarked to a friend, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.” He was right, and as the war progressed, the demand for “100% Americanism” took on a life of its own. In dozens of towns, local vigilantes began attacking and sometimes murdering people they suspected of disloyalty. After 1 particularly horrific lynching of a German immigrant suspected of being a spy, the jury deliberated for just 25 minutes before finding the killers not guilty. Amid the cheers that followed the reading of the verdict, one of the jurors shouted, “Well, I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now.”25

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This was precisely the shift in public mood that Carrie Chapman Catt had seen coming. Indeed, her decision to commit NAWSA to the war effort had been driven, most of all, by her determination to protect the suffrage movement from criticisms of disloyalty. The National Woman’s Party had chosen a different path, staying neutral on the war, and mounting a public challenge to the president on his very doorstep. It was true that the NWP’s protest related to voting rights, not to the war. But in the overheated mood of the time, a challenge to the president was a challenge to the nation. And many people now saw both as intolerable. All the same, the women doing the picketing took pride in the nonviolence of their approach, which they contrasted to the murderous way that the men of the world were dealing with their differences. As NWP organizer Doris Stevens observed, “How were we to make our fight seem more heroic and important by the side of men’s world conf lagration? … Our simple, peaceful, almost quaint device was a BANNER!” Of course, the NWP’s banners were not quite as inoffensive as Stevens suggested since they continually quoted the president’s own lofty rhetoric about fighting for democracy overseas, while contrasting it with the fact that in the United States half the adult population was denied the vote. Stevens explained that the NWP’s strategy was based on the military doctrine of concentrating all one’s forces on the enemy’s weakest point. For women, the weakest point in the Administration’s political lines during the war was the inconsistency between a crusade for world democracy and the denial of democracy at home.26

Alice Paul put it this way, “It will always be difficult to wage a war for democracy abroad while democracy is denied at home.”27 In the months after America joined the war, the public response to the NWP’s challenge quickly grew more hostile. A June editorial in the New York Times lumped “suffragettes” together with socialists and draft resisters as disloyal “inciters of rebellion.” Another paper asserted that the White House pickets were “serving the Kaiser to the best of their ability and calling it a campaign for equal suffrage.”29 About the same time, the recently formed Secret Service began conducting nationwide surveillance of the National Woman’s Party. Meanwhile, the In war time a mild conventional appeal pickets were starting to be harfor justice will not be heard. assed by people on the street— Alice Paul, 191728 nearly always young men, often in uniform. The men shouted

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insults at the women, pushed them around, and sometimes tore up their banners. The first really serious confrontation came in June, 1917. A few months earlier, after the Russian Revolution had brought in a new progressive government, President Wilson had sent his adviser, Elihu Root, to talk to Russia’s new rulers, assuring them of America’s commitment to democracy and urging them to stay in the war. On June 20, when a Russian deputation came to the White House for follow-up talks, they were met at the gate by the NWP pickets, carrying a banner that said, President Wilson and Envoy Root are deceiving Russia. … The women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote. … Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can claim free Russia as an ally.30

The Russians had barely reached the door of the White House door before an angry crowd descended on the pickets out front, mauling them and tearing down their banner. Over the course of the next week, the disturbances continued, while the police tried a variety of approaches to calm things down. But since their main solution involved removing the pickets rather than disciplining the crowds, Alice Paul refused to cooperate. When the police told Paul that if the pickets were not withdrawn, they would be arrested, she continued to send them out. When, over the course of a few days, the police did arrest two dozen women, and then immediately let them go, Paul sent them right back to the picket line. The seven-day drama climaxed on June 27, when six pickets were brought to trial and, having refused to pay their fines, were sent to jail for three days. Paul kept the picket line going with new volunteers, and when the NWP’s “jailbirds” were released, she staged a gala celebration to welcome them back. And so the cycle continued—the pickets standing at the White House gates with their banners, periodic scuff les with the crowd, more arrests, more trials, and more refusals to pay the fines (see Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3, p. 75). One thing that did keep changing was the charges against the women—they ranged from “unlawful assembly” to “unpatriotic, treasonous behavior” to, most commonly, “obstruction of traffic on a public sidewalk.” The other thing that changed was the severity of the sentences, which in mid-July abruptly jumped from 3 days in the city jail to 60 days in a grim county facility known as the Occuquan Workhouse. The bleak conditions there, and the hostile treatment the women received, triggered such a storm of telegrams, letters, and press coverage that the president

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pardoned the women after three days. Paul responded, “We’re very much obliged to the president but we’ll be picketing again next Monday.”31 There would be no more presidential pardons. In mid-August, Paul upped the ante again, with the most provocative banner yet: it addressed the president as “Kaiser Wilson.” For the National Woman’s Party to equate the president with the nation’s foremost enemy—the German Emperor—inf lamed the crowd more than any of the pickets’ actions so far. This time, the rioters chased the women back to the NWP headquarters, and then someone shot a bullet through the window. Nevertheless, the pickets returned to their posts the next day. The harassment continued, and so did the number of women being arrested and sent to the workhouse. But public opinion was starting to turn in the women’s favor. On September 1, 1917, the Boston Journal commented, “The little band representing the National Woman’s Party has been abused and bruised by government clerks, soldiers, and sailors, until its efforts to attract the President’s attention has sunk into the conscience of the whole nation.”32 Besides the stories about the harassment of the pickets, increasing publicity was also being given to the miserable conditions the women were enduring in the workhouse. Many of the privations they faced would have been familiar to any workhouse inmate, but a number of the NWP prisoners were from prominent Washington families (the group included the wives of several leading politicians) and that fact made their suffering more newsworthy. In addition, some of the guards do seem to have singled out the NWP women for rougher treatment, especially after they began demanding—like the suffragettes in England—to be treated as political prisoners. The mistreatment of the pickets, both on the street and in the workhouse, led to growing political pressure on President Wilson. No longer pariahs, the NWP women began to be praised as martyrs, and Wilson found himself besieged with demands that he improve their situation. Arrests were discontinued for a time, but the pickets kept going. So after a few weeks, the arrests resumed, and the sentences grew steadily longer. As the general public began to pay closer attention to what was going on in the workhouse, so did the men in Congress. In September, 1917, just one day after making his own inspection tour of the workhouse, the chair of the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee announced that his group was going to report out the suffrage amendment with a recommendation for passage—something the women had been requesting for months. And later that month, the House of Representatives voted to take another step that NAWSA had been lobbying for all summer: the creation of a Woman Suffrage Committee. One member of the

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House Judiciary Committee angrily warned that passing the bill would be seen as capitulating to the “nagging” of women he characterized as “iron-jawed angels, … bewildered, deluded creatures with short skirts and short hair.” The committee chair said he shared the member’s reluctance, but he added that the committee would have to be set up anyway, because otherwise, “these suffragette ladies … will abuse you and criticize you all over the country.”33 The House Woman Suffrage Committee was approved. That afternoon, a reporter suggested to Paul that, in view of this concession, perhaps she should stop the picketing. She sternly replied, “We ask no more bureaucracy, no more committees and reports. We demand the passage of the amendment.”34 In early October, 1917, speakers from the National Woman’s Party spread out across the country, further publicizing the punishment the women were enduring in the workhouse. Meanwhile, with the staff on the road and Congress near adjournment, Alice Paul decided it was time to go to the workhouse herself. Her first arrest for picketing, on October 6, only led to a suspended sentence. But on October 20 she was arrested again, and this time the authorities clearly decided it was time to teach the pickets’ main instigator a lesson. Accordingly, Paul was given the longest sentence yet: seven months in the workhouse. Ten days later, despite Paul’s terrible memories of being force-fed in England, she and another NWP member, labor organizer Rose Winslow, began a hunger strike. They were quickly joined by 15 other NWP prisoners. And, just as in England, the authorities dealt with the situation by subjecting the women to force-feeding. President Wilson did not initiate any of these tactics, but he knew about them and he permitted them to continue. Moreover, his involvement was quite direct, because the District of Columbia was governed by just three commissioners, all of whom were appointed by him, and with one of whom he was in frequent contact during this period. As punishment for her leadership role in the hunger strike, Alice Paul was moved to Occoquan’s psychiatric ward and threatened with a transfer to the notorious St. Elizabeth’s insane asylum. Looking back later on this terrible time, she wrote, One thing I did keep wondering about as I lay in the jail hospital. How is it that people fail to see our fight as part of the great American struggle for democracy; a struggle since the days of the Pilgrims? We are bearing on the American tradition, living up to the American spirit. Americans must sympathize, and grant us victory.35

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In early November, the picketing—and the arrests—intensified, sending as many as 40 women from 16 states to the workhouse in a single day. One can imagine the pressure on the workhouse staff, as the grim daily business of force-feeding continued, and every few days brought a new batch of assertive NWP pickets, demanding to be treated as political prisoners. The breaking-point came on November 14, 1917, when the guards exploded in a wave of beatings and mistreatment that the women dubbed “The Night of Terror” (see Document 8 in the appendix). The prisoners quickly got word of these events to the NWP. And about the same time, Rose Winslow managed to smuggle out a detailed account of what it was like to be force-fed, scribbled on tiny scraps of paper. She wrote, in part, Yesterday was a bad day for me for feeding. I was vomiting continually during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere that is painful. … Don’t let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul vomits much. I do too. … My throat aches afterward, and I always weep and sob to my great disgust, quite against my will. … We think of the coming feeding all day.36

The accounts from Winslow and the other prisoners—widely disseminated by the NWP—reached the public just about the time that President Wilson was releasing an investigator’s report on the workhouse, which insisted that conditions there were perfectly fine. The prisoners’ searing accounts gave the lie to every reassuring word in that report. Meanwhile, one of Wilson’s close advisers, whose wife was among the prisoners in the workhouse, was demanding a change in policy, and another adviser publicly resigned over the issue. Around the same time, a California Democrat wrote the president about a powerful address he had just heard by one of the NWP’s traveling speakers, who described the women’s suffering and explicitly blamed the Wilson administration for letting it continue. “The speech did much harm,” wrote the man. That night, Wilson’s aide, Joseph Tumulty, sent his boss a memo, “It is my opinion that the time is soon coming when we will have to seriously consider this matter.”37 Not everyone was moved by the pickets’ troubles. For instance, the NWP’s landlord hated the notoriety the group had attracted and declined to renew the lease on their headquarters. (Paul soon found a new location nearby). Fortunately, the judgmental landlord seemed to be in the minority. Somehow, the women’s quiet insistence on their rights, combined with the punishment they were enduring, had transformed them, at least in many Americans’ eyes, from disloyal radicals

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into examples of noble and persecuted womanhood. Ten months earlier, when the picketing first began, Alice Paul had recited to reporters a bit of Celtic law, “If a creditor stands before a man’s house all day demanding payment of his bill, the man must either remove the creditor or pay the bill.”38 Removing the creditor had proved to be far more difficult than anyone had anticipated; perhaps it would be easier to pay the bill. The final chapter of the saga came quickly. On November 23, 1917, after weeks of litigation, the NWP lawyers finally succeeded in forcing the workhouse to produce the prisoners in court. The women’s debilitated condition was so shocking (Lucy Burns, for example, had lost 30 pounds) that the judge moved quickly to set every one of the prisoners free. Some time later, all charges against them were dismissed. Perhaps the judge’s own merciful attitude was the whole story, or perhaps not. According to some sources, shortly before the court hearing, President Wilson sent the journalist David Lawrence to meet secretly with Alice Paul in the workhouse. The bargain they are said to have struck was that Paul would call a halt to the picketing, while the White House would help get the suffrage amendment through at least one house of Congress in 1918 and the other in 1919.39 There is no record that this encounter took place, but this much is clear. The NWP prisoners were all set free. The picketing did not resume. And as we shall see, the White House did soon begin lending its support to the suffrage amendment. And so, with the prisoners freed and the drama of the picketing finally over, it was time for a party. On December 4, in a theatre packed with 4,000 cheering supporters, Alva Belmont paid tribute to the courage of the roughly 2,000 women who had served as pickets, the 500 who had been arrested, and the 168 who had gone to prison. Then, as the 168 ex-prisoners filed by, each one was given the same kind of memento that the British suffragettes had given their own prison veterans: a silver pin in the shape of a jail-cell door. And finally, to affirm that this was the end of a battle, not the end of the war, the audience pledged $86,000 to continue the fight.

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES MAKES HISTORY Back in January, 1917, when the National Woman’s Party members were first starting to picket the White House, the prospect of getting the federal amendment through the House of Representatives had seemed almost impossibly out of reach. A year later, in January, 1918, things looked much more promising. This was less because of one sudden

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breakthrough, and more because of a convergence of forces that had been building for some time—in the country at large, in the state campaigns, in Congress, and in President Wilson’s own head. Let us start with the country at large. When the United States first entered the war in April, 1917, many suffragists worried that women’s concerns would soon be swept aside. But in fact, women turned out to be an essential part of the government’s plan for the war on the home front. Day after day, government spokesmen from President Wilson on down stressed that this war involved all Americans, male and female. Perhaps women could not carry guns, but they had their own national service to contribute—filling in for male workers who were away in the service, growing extra food in their gardens, saving their money to buy Liberty Bonds, and volunteering for the Red Cross (see Sidebar 4.1, p. 83). For years, the ideas of military service and the right to vote had been linked in people’s minds. Certainly, one of the justifications offered for enfranchising black men in 1870 was to reward them for their service as soldiers during the Civil War. Women had often argued that they too were serving the nation, simply by nurturing their families. (For example, a Tennessee suffragist acknowledged that women did not bear arms. But, she pointed out, “women bear armies”40). Nevertheless, the definition of “women’s work” as national service took on new force during World War I, when government propaganda leaned relentlessly on the duty of all American women to share in the work of the home front—as volunteers, as paid workers, and as wives and mothers. This wartime emphasis on American women as essential partners in the national struggle gave new legitimacy to the suffragists’ argument that American women were citizens and deserved to be treated as such. If they were standing shoulder to shoulder with American men in the war effort, why shouldn’t they vote as well? (see Figure 4.2). NAWSA’s highly publicized war work reinforced that message. And at the same time, the president’s eloquent speeches about fighting for the right of self-government overseas made a perfect opening for the NWP pickets to remind everyone that American women also had a right to self-government. This emphasis on women as fellow patriots clearly helped spark the succession of state suffrage victories in 1917, culminating in the monumental win in New York—the most populous state in the Union, and the first state in the East to grant full suffrage (see Sidebar 2.2 in Chapter 2, pp. 46–47). As an indicator of the changing times, it is worth noting that after years of opposing woman suffrage, the political bosses in New York City’s Tammany Hall chose to remain neutral in the 1917 campaign—in

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Figure 4.2 Uncle Sam, with “Public Opinion” emblazoned on his sleeve, assures a military nurse that service in wartime can lead to suffrage in peacetime. Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/2002698238/.

part because a number of their wives had become suffragists, and more generally because they saw the political current moving that way. In the end, upstate voters remained unpersuaded, but New York City went so strongly in favor of the amendment that the referendum passed in November, 1917 with a margin of 100,000 votes.

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And so, by the end of 1917, the country had 12 Table 4.1 Suffrage states, as of December 31, 1917 states with full suffrage, Full suffrage and 6 with partial suffrage (that is, women could vote Wyoming (1890) Kansas (1912) in either presidential or priColorado (1893) Arizona (1912) mary elections, see Table 4.1, Utah (1896) Oregon (1912) p. 98). Moreover, six more Idaho (1896) Nevada (1914) states had scheduled referenda for 1918. As one New Washington (1910) Montana (1914) York newspaper observed, California (1911) New York (1917) “In these progressive times, Partial suffrage war for men seems to mean votes for women.”41 Illinois (1913) Indiana (1917) State victories like the N. Dakota (1917) Rhode Island (1917) ones in 1917 were, of course, Nebraska (1917) Arkansas (1917) welcomed by the women Source: National American Woman Suffrage Association, who were directly affected Victory: How Women Won It—A Centennial Symposium, 1840– by them, but they also had 1940 (New York: HW Wilson Company, 1940), 161–162. an important effect on what happened in Congress, since once a state went for suffrage, its representatives in Washington tended to go that way too— both out of deference to their male constituents who had voted for suffrage, and as a way to court favor with their new female constituents. Comparing the record in 1917 to that of 1915 (the only previous vote in the House), NAWSA lobbyist Maud Wood Park found 56 changes from “no” to “yes” among congressmen representing states that had adopted some form of suffrage in 1917. Thirty-one of these new affirmative votes came from just two states—the huge New York delegation, and the Arkansas delegation, which switched from seven against suffrage in 1915 to seven for in 1918.42 Besides winning these state victories, which helped produce more congressional votes, the suffragists made certain procedural gains in Congress. Late in 1917, NAWSA workers were disappointed to learn that the House’s new (presumably more supportive) Woman Suffrage Committee might take some months to get organized, and that in the meantime, their old nemesis, the Judiciary Committee, would keep control over suffrage bills in the House. Similarly, the women were alarmed when they discovered that the next House vote on woman suffrage was scheduled for mid-December 1917, just one day after the vote on

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the 18th amendment enacting Prohibition (which forbade the production, sale, and transportation of alcohol). For years, the suffragists had fought the widespread impression that a vote for suffrage was a vote for Prohibition. The NAWSA women were certain that if the debates on the two amendments overlapped, suffrage would again become entangled in the Prohibition issue. In a whirlwind of backstage diplomacy, the NAWSA team persuaded friendly congressmen to negotiate an agreement with House leaders: 1) The Woman Suffrage Committee would be named immediately, and would take full jurisdiction over the suffrage amendment, and 2). The debate on suffrage would take place, not in December, 1917, but in early January, 1918, after the Prohibition amendment was settled.43 These were procedural matters that would not have been meaningful to most suffragists, let alone to the general public. But they helped clear the path for a more promising outcome in January. Even with all these forces coalescing in their favor, the suffragists were convinced that it would take the president to get the final votes they needed. Wilson had gone so far as to say that if the Democrats asked him for advice, he would give it. So his aide Joseph Tumulty, working with NAWSA’s Helen Gardener, made sure that the president’s advice was requested. And on the day before the House vote, 12 Democrats went to the White House to get the president’s views. He told them he hoped they would vote for the suffrage amendment. When they asked why he had altered his position, the president simply observed that times had changed, and so must they. He also pointed out that Canada was about to adopt woman suffrage. How could a great democracy like the United States lag behind, especially when its women were contributing so nobly to the war effort? With Wilson’s permission, one of the men jotted down a statement they could release to the press. It said that, upon being asked his opinion, the president had “very frankly and earnestly advised us to vote for the amendment.” Looking over the draft, Wilson took out a pencil and added, “as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and the world.”44 When the congressmen appeared on the White House porch to read their statement, Alice Paul was standing in the snow with a handful of reporters, waiting to hear the news. To her, and to many of her admirers then and since, there was only one possible explanation for the president’s decision to support the federal amendment: the pressure that had been exerted by the National Woman’s Party. As Paul said later, “Suffrage was not in his thought at all until we, ourselves, injected it there. And it was not in the center of his thought until the picketing was well along”45

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The pickets had certainly played an important role in Wilson’s conversion, but credit must also be given to Carrie Chapman Catt’s adroit and sustained courtship of the president on behalf of the same cause. From the time of her election as NAWSA president in December, 1915, Catt worked assiduously to develop a friendly and respectful relationship with Wilson, both through her visits and her correspondence. She particularly strengthened their relationship when, at a time when America’s entrance into the war was still being hotly debated, she committed NAWSA—the largest women’s organization in the country—to the war effort. All through 1917, she made clear that she hoped Wilson would ultimately support the federal amendment, but she was always deferential in pressing her case, acknowledging his other preoccupations, praising him for each small step, and only gently hinting at the further distance she wanted him to travel. Why did all this backstage diplomacy matter? Because Wilson was a proud and stubborn man. The treatment of the pickets in the workhouse certainly represented a political problem for him. But if the confrontational members of the National Woman’s Party had been the only suffragists he knew, he might still have found it difficult to give in and lend his support to their cause. Certainly, the mass arrests and force-feeding were politically unsustainable, but he could have decided to let the women continue their vigil, with police protection if necessary, and count on time to diminish their news value. The fact that he did not make that choice owes at least something to Catt, whose patient diplomacy had persuaded him that he had a loyal following in the broader suffrage movement—a following that had waited patiently for his support of the federal amendment and would appreciate it when it came. Catt’s diplomacy alone would probably not have done the trick, or at least not as quickly. But when, by the fall of 1917, the NWP pickets were forcing the president to consider his options, his path to conciliation was surely made easier by the fact that he could frame it in his mind, not as a concession to the pickets, but as a gift to his faithful friends at NAWSA. *** The day of the House vote arrived—January 10, 1918—and in a historic move, the opening speech supporting the amendment was delivered by the only female member of Congress, Rep. Jeanette Rankin (the same woman who had endured such criticism the previous April when she voted against the war). Rankin’s address was followed by what struck the waiting suffragists as far too many long-winded speeches. Then, in

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Maud Wood Park’s words, came “the triple agony” of the vote count. When, at last, the results were announced, they showed that the amendment had passed, 274 to 136—an increase of 100 pro-suffrage votes since the only previous House vote in 1915. The new count represented not just a majority, but (by a single vote) the two-thirds “super-majority” that was required to pass a constitutional amendment. The Senate and the ratification process still lay ahead. But the first great hurdle—passage in the House—had been surmounted.

NOTES 1 Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany” (April 2, 1917), The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366. 2 Ronald Schaffer, “The Montana Woman Suffrage Campaign, 1911–1914,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55, no. 1 ( January, 1964), 13. 3 Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle For the Ballot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 163. 4 “Jeanette Rankin: I Cannot Vote for War” (April 5, 2017), on History, Art, & Archives: United States House of Representatives, at http://history.house.gov/ Blog/Detail/15032448355. 5 Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 139. 6 Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 138. 7 Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 138. 8 Fowler, Carrie Catt, 138. 9 Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 140. 10 Sandra Opdycke, The Flu Epidemic of 1918: America’s Experience in the Global Health Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2014), 96. 11 Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1964, 1977), 368. 12 Eleanor Clift, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003), 119. 13 Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 62. 14 Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 138–139. 15 National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory: How Women Won It (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1940), 128. 16 J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 265. 17 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 36; National Woman Suffrage Association, Victory, 126. 18 Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, eds., One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975, 1982), 152; Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 257; Fowler, Carrie Catt, 151.

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19 James W. Ceaser, et al., “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Spring, 1981), 158–171. 20 Daniel J. Tichenor, “The Presidency, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Lessons from the Woman’s Suffrage and Labor Movements,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1 (March, 1999), 16; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 129–130. 21 Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 167; Phyllis Lee Levin, Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House (New York: Scribner, 2001), 183; Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 265. 22 Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 172. 23 Fowler. Carrie Catt, 140. 24 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 46. 25 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson (New York: Vintage, 2009), 382; Kennedy, Over Here, 68. 26 Doris Stevens, Jailed For Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995 [orig. pub. 1920]), 69. 27 Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 263. 28 Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 169. 29 Linda Ford, “Alice Paul and the Politics of Nonviolent Protest,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 182; Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 174. 30 Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013), 121. 31 Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 273. 32 Lynda Dodd, “Sisterhood of Struggle: Leadership and Strategy in the Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law, ed. Tracy A. Thomas and Tracey Jean Boisseau (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 198. 33 New York Times, September 25, 1917; Park, Front Door Lobby, 115. 34 Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 103. 35 Belinda A. Stillion Southard, “Militancy, Power, and Identity: The Silent Sentinels as Women Fighting for Political Voice,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 3 (Fall, 2007), 410. 36 Rose Winslow, “Prison Notes,” in Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946, ed. Mary Chapman and Angela Mills (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 283. 37 Sara Hunter Graham, “Woodrow Wilson, Alice Paul, and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Political Science Quarterly 98, no. 4 (Winter, 1983–1984), 677. 38 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 202. 39 See, for instance, Lunardini, Alice Paul, 131; Graham, “Woodrow Wilson, Alice Paul,” 677–678. 40 Clift, Founding Sisters, 189.

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41 Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 264. 42 Park, Front Door Lobby, 153–155; National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory, 129. 43 Park, Front Door Lobby, 124–125. 44 Walton, Woman’s Crusade, 209. 45 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 33.

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The Culmination 1918–1920

W

hen the US House of Representatives finally passed the federal suffrage amendment in January, 1918, Carrie Chapman Catt was so sure that the Senate would follow suit within a few weeks that she immediately sent out instructions to NAWSA’s state affiliates to get ready for the next step of the process: ratification of the amendment by the states. She even ordered a new dress to wear while touring the country during the ratification campaign. But Helen Gardener, NAWSA’s most experienced lobbyist, was more cautious. “You can’t hustle the Senate,” she warned.1 Looking back later, Catt admitted that Gardener had been right. The Senate, she wrote, was the American equivalent of the British House of Lords, our “citadel of fixed opinion.” Of course, senators were not appointed for life, like the British lords, but their six-year terms did make them less vulnerable to public opinion than the members of the House, who had to run for re-election every two years. National Woman’s Party member Inez Haynes Irwin put it this way, “The Senate is farther from the people than the House, and much, much harder to move.”2 It would be 17 long months before Catt got a chance to wear her ratification dress.

THE SENATE TAKES ITS TIME How many more votes did the suffragists need, to get their amendment through the Senate? Their count in February, 1918 showed that they were 11 short of the two-thirds majority that was required to pass a constitutional amendment. As the months went by, they steadily chipped away at that number, but the goal kept changing because, in

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the course of the year, 10 senators died—most of them suffrage supporters—and several of the men appointed to replace them were less committed to the amendment. On the other hand, there had been a string of recent suffrage victories in the states—in just two years, 1917 and 1918, New York, Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma had all adopted full suffrage, while six other states had approved presidential or primary suffrage (see Sidebar 5.1 on Texas, and the national map, Figure 5.2, p. 123). As these state victories mounted up, they added to the number of senators who might feel obligated to follow the will of their constituents. Senator Porter McCumber of North Dakota was one example. He had long opposed the federal amendment, but after his state adopted presidential suffrage in 1917, he announced that as the state’s representative, he felt compelled to “vote their views rather than my own upon this subject.”3

Sidebar 5.1: Dealing with Two Governors: Woman Suffrage in Texas According to Carrie Chapman Catt’s Winning Plan, adopted by the national suffrage association in 1916 (see Chapter 3, pp. 67–68), suffragists in Texas were instructed to work for the right to vote in primary elections. This should have been easier to achieve than full suffrage, since it did not require a statewide referendum. But it did require the governor’s signature, and everyone in Texas knew that the current governor, James Ferguson, was never going to sign a bill giving women the vote. “Farmer Jim” Ferguson’s folksy style and his populist attacks on the privileged classes had won him a solid rural following. But, besides antagonizing the suffragists, he had alienated many progressives, because of the flagrant corruption of his administration. Summing up her own response to the governor, an Austin suffragist observed, “Not having the vocabulary of a sea captain. … I can’t express what I think about Jim Ferguson.”4 Matters came to a head when the governor demanded that the University of Texas fire a dozen faculty members who had criticized him. When the university president refused, Ferguson vetoed the institution’s entire appropriation for the coming year. That galvanized his opponents, and in August, 1917, the governor was impeached and driven from office, with enthusiastic behind-the-scenes help from the members of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA). The lieutenant governor, William Hobby, now moved up to complete Ferguson’s term. The TESA suffragists believed that Hobby owed them a favor, because of the assistance they had provided with the impeachment. What they

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wanted was for him to call the legislature into special session, so they could get a vote on their primary suffrage bill. They already had a base of support in the legislature, and they expected to win more votes with a new rationale for their cause. Under Texas law, immigrants (many of whom were German) could vote as soon as they applied for citizenship, but men serving in the military could not vote. So, playing on the current hostility to Germany, the suffragists argued that enfranchising Texas women would make up for the absent soldiers, thus offsetting the votes of the “alien” German immigrants. In the past, the legislators had never given the suffragists quite the number of votes they needed. Now, said Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the TESA president, “perhaps we can prove to them that they need us even if they do not want us!”5 But Governor Hobby was going to have to run for a full term in the July 1918 primary, and he was hoping to avoid any controversial issues (including suffrage) by putting off the legislative session until after the primary election. That might have been the end of the matter if ex-governor Ferguson had stayed out of politics, as the terms of his impeachment required. But he soon announced that he was going to run against Hobby in the July primary. (He claimed that the prohibition against running for office did not apply because he had resigned before the final conviction). It seemed quite possible that Ferguson could win. In a confidential exchange of letters with one of Governor Hobby’s advisers, Minnie Cunningham made it clear that if Hobby called a special session of the legislature, and backed primary suffrage for women, then the women would support him in July. Moreover, she wrote, with the party as divided as it was, “whomsoever the women of Texas concentrate on in the July primaries, that man is as good as elected.”6 Soon afterward, Hobby called the special session as requested and within weeks, the primary suffrage bill passed both houses with healthy majorities. On March 26, 1918, Governor Hobby signed it into law. Four months later, the newly enfranchised women of Texas kept their end of the bargain and helped him win the Democratic primary, which in one-party Texas meant winning the election. So the women got primary suffrage and Hobby got the governorship. Opponents of suffrage had long insisted that women were too pure for the rough-and-tumble game of politics. But (like the members of the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, see Chapter 2, p. 51) the women of Texas had shown that they were ready and able to engage in some deal-making of their own, when the occasion demanded. In 1919, Texas women persuaded the legislature to schedule a statewide referendum on full suffrage, but that vote went against them. Ex-governor James Ferguson gloated publicly, “My crops are fine, my cattle are fat and my crowd beat woman suffrage.”7 But the ladies got the last laugh. Despite repeated efforts, Ferguson never again held public office, while in little more than a year, the federal amendment gave the women of Texas the full suffrage they had been seeking.

The Culmination: 1918–1920

The suffragists descended upon the Senate, trying to build support for the amendment. In earlier years, they had done their lobbying without much outside assistance, but by 1918 political leaders from around the country were joining in. Some were genuine converts; others may have felt obligated, as Senator McCumber did, to follow their constituents’ wishes. Still, others probably took a more fatalistic view. Whether they liked it or not, the growing number of suffrage states, plus the approval of the 19th amendment in the House, made it seem likely that woman suffrage was coming. And if it was, then it was important—for the men’s own political futures and for the good of their parties— to align themselves with the winning side. This may help to explain why, in February, 1918, within just 24 hours, both the Democratic and Republican National Committees—neither of which had previously uttered a word in favor of the federal amendment—passed resolutions urging that it be passed. Meanwhile, said Catt, “both the hopeful and the doubtful Senators were being bombarded with home petitions, letters and telegrams.” Former president Theodore Roosevelt, too, had become a vocal supporter of the cause. Only ex-president William Howard Taft seemed unmoved by the enthusiasm. “Why,” he said, “I’d take away the vote from most of the men.”8 And what about the current president, Woodrow Wilson? During the spring and summer of 1918, he lent a hand to the suffrage campaign in various ways—writing to some of the hold-out senators, warning his fellow Democrats that opposing woman suffrage could hurt them in the fall election, and encouraging a couple of governors to fill Senate vacancies with pro-suffrage men. Characteristically, NAWSA praised the president for his assistance, while Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party kept insisting that he was not doing half as much as he had done for other legislation he cared about. We get a sense of the complicated dynamics at work during these months from the occasion in June, 1918 when Carrie Chapman Catt and a NAWSA delegation called on the president with a petition for support from a suffragist organization in France. As the visitors had hoped, Wilson drafted a positive response, basing his endorsement on the women’s contribution to the French war-effort. He then asked NAWSA lobbyist Helen Gardener to share his response with Catt, who by then had returned to New York. But when Catt saw the letter, she thought it should also mention the key topic here at home—the need for an affirmative vote on suffrage in the US Senate. Gardener told Catt to revise the letter, and said she would ask Wilson to send that version instead. The president did sign and release Catt’s version, which included the sentence about the Senate. But in this case, the privileges of NAWSA’s special

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relationship with Wilson backfired, because the extra sentence offended a number of senators, and (combined with several other factors) helped derail what had looked like a possible favorable vote on the amendment in late June, 1918. “Suffrage is dead,” gloated Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee. “The senators don’t like being nagged anymore. They are tired of it.”9 And so the summer of 1918 went by. Pro-amendment resolutions continued to pour into Washington, and several mass meetings were held around the country, protesting the Senate’s delay. But with the Senate preparing for its summer recess, Alice Paul decided that something more was needed. So on August 6, 1918, 100 women dressed in white marched out of the National Woman’s Party headquarters and into Lafayette Park across the street. Standing in front of (and, in some cases, on) the statue of Lafayette, they saluted the historic French-American alliance for freedom and contrasted it with Prussian (that is, German) authoritarianism. One of their banners read, “We deplore the weakness of President Wilson in permitting the Senate to line itself with the Prussian Reichstag by denying democracy to the people.” About the same time, the NWP publication, The Suffragist, ran a cartoon showing Lafayette saying to another Frenchman who served with the colonists in the American Revolution, “Does the Republic we fought for deny liberty to its own citizens?”10 The gathering in Lafayette Park drew a sizable crowd; it also drew the police, who quickly began making arrests. When the women came to trial, it was clear that the authorities were still straining to come up with a crime to charge them with; they finally settled on “holding a meeting on public grounds” and “climbing a statue.” A few of the women were released, while the rest were sent to jail for 10 to 15 days. Over the next two weeks, the NWP staged several more park demonstrations, resulting in more arrests and more jailings. Just like the White House pickets the previous year, the prisoners began refusing to eat, and the terrible ritual of force-feeding began again. But this time, the authorities gave in more quickly; on August 20, the prisoners were all released and told they could march whenever they wanted. Paul responded briskly that the women were too weak from prison to demonstrate at the moment. And with that, the Senate went into recess and Paul set off on a cross-country fund-raising trip. A few weeks later, Paul announced that the NWP’s next demonstration would occur on September 16, 1918. On that very afternoon, perhaps in an effort to undercut the protest, President Wilson invited a group of Democratic women to the White House and assured them of his commitment to doing all he could for the cause of woman suffrage.

The Culmination: 1918–1920

Paul soon learned about the meeting, and adapted her plans accordingly. That evening, as the women gathered in the park, a NWP field organizer, Lucy Branham, held up a torch, which she described as a symbol of “the burning indignation of women who for one hundred years have been given words without action.” She condemned the president for not providing “real support” for suffrage, and concluded, “We, therefore, take these empty words, spoken by President Wilson this afternoon, and consign them to the f lames.”11 Then, holding up a scrap of paper on which his words were written, Branham thrust it into the f lame and burnt it to ashes. The day after the NWP’s torchlight gathering, the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee put the federal amendment on the calendar for debate, starting September 26. Perhaps the deluge of resolutions and deputations was finally taking its effect. And perhaps, too, the sight of the suffragists setting the president’s words on fire in Lafayette Park had given some doubtful senators a nudge. Whatever the contributing factors, pro-suffrage senators believed they finally had the votes to pass the amendment. But after a f lurry of last-minute headcounts, defections, and recounts, they delayed the debate to September 28 and then to September 30, still with no certainty of passage. Looking on in consternation, Carrie Chapman Catt was certain that if suffrage went down this time, it was dead for the rest of the session. So on September 29, with the amendment still lacking two votes, Catt played her highest card. She wrote the president an impassioned letter, warning him, If the Amendment fails [in the Senate], it will take the heart out of thousands of women. … It will arouse in them a just suspicion that men and women are not co-workers for world freedom, but that women are regarded as mere servitors with no interest or rightful voice in the outcome.12

To avert this danger, Catt asked the president to take a step he had taken only once before, for his “Peace Without Victory” speech in January, 1917. She wanted him to go to the Senate in person. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Wilson’s treasury secretary was giving him the same advice, though his rationale was political. He said that if the suffrage amendment passed, it would help the Democrats in the midterm elections; and if it failed, at least it would be clear that the president had done his best.13 Wilson was surely inf luenced by Catt’s letter and the Secretary’s political advice, and perhaps by the NWP’s bonfires, too. In addition, he was keenly aware that women had now won the vote in six other

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countries—New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Russia—as well as in all but one of Canada’s provinces. Even conservative England had recently approved suffrage for property-holding women over 30. The president cherished the idea of America as a world leader when it came to political freedom, and seeing his country falling behind other nations in this respect surely gave him one more reason to want the suffrage amendment to pass. And so it happened that on September 30, 1918, after providing just half an hour’s notice, President Wilson appeared at the Senate, accompanied not only by his wife but also by most of his Cabinet. In a 15-minute speech, he said that women had earned the vote by their service to the nation and that granting it would reinforce America’s standing as a leader among democratic nations. Insisting that he had not been inf luenced by what he called “the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators,” the president put his greatest emphasis on the bill’s importance to the war effort. “I tell you plainly,” he said, “that this measure which I urge upon you is vital to winning the war”14 (see Document 9 in the appendix). Maud Wood Park, who watched the whole proceedings, later speculated that if the senators had voted immediately after the president spoke, perhaps the amendment might have passed. But Wilson’s address was followed by many hours of anti-suffrage oratory. The opposition speakers no longer had much to say about woman’s proper sphere, but they hammered away at the theme of states’ rights (ironically, since many of them had recently voted for Prohibition, which subordinated every state’s liquor laws to federal policy). The negative arguments prevailed, and on October 1, 1918, the amendment was defeated by two votes. In the end, the president’s intervention had not changed a single senator’s mind. One might think that Wilson’s visit to the Senate would have won him some points with Alice Paul, but she insisted that his help had been “too reluctantly and too tardily given.”15 She maintained that by resisting the federal amendment all through his first term and well into his second, the president had strengthened the opposition beyond what could be repaired with a few letters and speeches. Accordingly, she made clear that the National Woman’s Party would continue to press him for more vigorous action. As for Carrie Chapman Catt, she reacted to the Senate defeat in two ways. First, she never again put herself through the agony of attending a congressional debate on suffrage. Second, looking to the 1918 midterm elections, now just a month away, she decided, as she wrote later, that “if there were not men enough in the Senate who could change their minds, it had become the inescapable duty of suffragists to change the men.”16 In past elections, NAWSA had supported political friends on both sides

The Culmination: 1918–1920

of the aisle, but it had never worked specifically to defeat its opponents. This time the members actively campaigned against four anti-suffrage senators—two from each party. (All four senators were from eastern states that had not approved suffrage). Meanwhile, the NWP continued its policy of opposing all Democrats, since they were still the party in power. But it did join NAWSA in targeting one particularly hostile Republican. The 1918 election campaign was a difficult one, carried out in the midst of one of the greatest health crises in American history, the inf luenza epidemic of 1918. Thousands of Americans were dying, many cities closed down all public gatherings, and the ranks of the suffragists themselves were thinned by sickness. Yet the election results were encouraging. Three new states approved full suffrage: Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. And at the national level, two of the four senators targeted by the suffragists were defeated. More importantly, the Republicans swept the elections, bringing in several new pro-suffrage senators. This virtually guaranteed the passage of the federal amendment when the next Congress convened, in 1919.

THE WAR ENDS. THE SENATE FIGHT CONTINUES Just six days after the election, on November 11, 1918, came a truly climactic event: the end of World War I. As individuals, the suffragists shared the delight of their fellow Americans over the end of the fighting. As activists, they recognized that the war had brought several important social changes that improved the chances for their campaign. There was, for instance, the part the war had played in getting Prohibition passed. Even before the war, the introduction of the income tax in 1913 had helped the cause of Prohibition by giving the federal government a new source of revenue to replace taxes on the sale of alcohol. But events during the war had further increased support for the idea. For one thing, as bars and liquor stores sprang up next to every military base, many Americans came to see prohibiting the sale of alcohol as one important way to keep “our boys” healthy and pure. In addition, the wartime hostility to all things German virtually silenced one of the leading opponents of Prohibition, the United States Brewers’ Association, whose leadership was predominantly German. With the help of these events, the Prohibition amendment—the 18th—sailed through Congress in 1917 and completed ratification by the states in January, 1919. The enactment of Prohibition made a real difference to the suffrage movement. For generations, their opponents had scored political

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points, locally and nationally, by insisting that if women got the vote, they would bring in Prohibition. Indeed, when the Senate Judiciary Committee investigated the Brewers’ Association, looking for pro-German activities, they found that the organization had spent millions to oppose woman suffrage, both through its own public expenditures and through secret funding of anti-suffrage groups—again, on the rationale that female voters would support Prohibition.17 By 1919, that argument had been made irrelevant. Prohibition had passed; it would take effect in January, 1920. Another helpful effect of the war was the opportunity it gave American women to show themselves as active and loyal partners in serving the nation. Their many and varied wartime contributions did a good deal to dispel the stereotype of women as passive homebodies whose interests extended no further than their kitchens and nurseries. Encouraged by the federal government’s heavy emphasis on universal participation in the war effort, American women served in any number of ways, including as nurses, hospital volunteers, fundraisers, drivers, farmers, clerks, and munitions workers. In short, in a time of national emergency, American women had acted like citizens. This put the suffragists in a strong position to argue that they should also be allowed to vote like citizens (see Sidebar 4.1, p. 83, and Figure 4.2 in Chapter 4, p. 97). And just as America’s wartime rhetoric reinforced the image of women as productive citizens, it also highlighted concepts of democracy and selfgovernment—ideas that had dominated the claims of early suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton but had been overshadowed in more recent decades by arguments about how constructively women would use the vote. During the war, when Woodrow Wilson explained that the United States was fighting to make the world safe for democracy, he set the stage for Alice Paul and her followers to assert—and put themselves in harm’s way to dramatize—that democracy begins at home. Thus, one more legacy of World War I for the suffragist movement was the way it helped to revive the idea that women should have the vote, not only because they would use it well, not only because they deserved it as a reward for wartime service, but also because they had a democratic right to it. With the war over, the suffragists set themselves a very concrete goal: they wanted American women to be able to vote in the 1920 presidential election, now just two years away. Ideally, they hoped to get the suffrage amendment through the Senate before Congress adjourned in March, 1919, thus giving themselves 18 months to complete the final step in the process: getting the amendment ratified by the states. Their project was made more difficult, however, by the fact that President Wilson—who had finally shown a willingness to speak up for the amendment—left the

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United States for Europe in December, 1918 to attend the Paris Peace Conference. Except for a brief visit home in February, he would stay overseas for the next seven months, trying to persuade the war-bruised Allies to end the war on terms that would foster world peace in the future. During his absence, Wilson kept in touch with American political leaders via letters and cables, but it was clear that the events at the Peace Conference were his primary concern. With the president overseas, with just 50 days left in the congressional session, and with no visible movement in the Senate, the National Woman’s Party decided it was time to put suffrage back in the headlines. And so, on a chilly evening in mid-December 1918, 300 torch-bearing women marched once more into Lafayette Park. This time, standing in front of a large urn filled with burning logs, they began tossing into the fire copies of the speeches that Wilson had recently been giving in France about democracy and self-government. Two weeks later, on New Year’s Day 1919, they took a bolder step, moving their bonfires—now dubbed the Watchfires of Freedom—to the sidewalk in front of the White House. Periodically, a bell on top of NWP headquarters would toll, and each time it did, another copy of what the women described as the president’s “beautiful but empty words” would be consigned to the f lames. The police continually tried to break up the bonfires, but the women managed to smuggle in new logs under their coats, having soaked them with kerosene so they would keep burning even when sprayed with water. Inez Haynes Irwin later observed, “The pickets themselves refer to that period as the most ‘messy and mussy’ in their history. Everything and everybody smelled of kerosene.”18 Once again, just as had happened with the White House pickets in 1917, the NWP protesters were attacked by street mobs; once again there were arrests and jailings and hunger strikes; once again, as soon as the women were released, they returned to the picket line and were arrested again. But also, once again, the demonstrations succeeded in catapulting the federal amendment back onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Besides the drama of the bonfires, both NAWSA and the We will not sit in silence, while the NWP continued to lobby indiPresident presents himself to the peovidual senators. President Wilson ple of Europe as the representative of a free people. also helped out by cable from National Women’s Party banoverseas, urging the Democratic ner, Watchfires of Freedom leaders to schedule another vigil, January 1, 191919 vote on the suffrage amendment before the session ended in

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March, 1919. The Democrats resisted, but a Republican pro-suffragist found a way to work around them, and the new vote was set for February 10. On the day before the vote, in their most provocative demonstration yet, 100 NWP members marched to the White House gates carrying a two-foot-long puppet dressed like the president. On reaching the burning caldron, they ceremoniously dropped the effigy into the bonfire. This action troubled even some true-blue NWP members. As Lavinia Dock blurted out, “It approaches so terribly to lynching.” But Doris Stevens insisted that this “more drastic form of protest” was necessary, because the president “always put forth more effort when under fire of protest from us.”20 On February 10, 1919, two dramas played out simultaneously. In District Court, several dozen women were tried and convicted for the previous day’s protest. A few blocks away in the Senate, the suffrage bill came to a vote once more, and failed once more—this time by just a single vote. Two weeks later, after months of protesting Wilson’s lack of action at long distance, Paul took 22 NWP protesters to Boston to confront the president directly, when he arrived on his first trip home since the previous December. The women were promptly arrested, banners and all. But perhaps their demonstration helped inspire the president to make one more try at getting the suffrage amendment through Congress before it adjourned. He did manage to secure an additional Democratic vote, which should have been enough. But now the Republicans were the ones blocking the way. Knowing that they would control both House and Senate when the new Congress convened later in the spring, they decided to wait and get credit for passing the amendment themselves. So the president sailed back to Paris, Congress adjourned in March 1919 without any further action on suffrage, and the NWP protests came to a halt, as they generally did when Congress was not in session. The final passage of the 19th amendment came almost as an anti-climax. The new Congress convened on May 19, 1919, having been called into special session by the president. Although he was still in Europe, Wilson managed to pick up a few additional votes for the amendment in the weeks before the session began. Furthermore, his cabled openingday message included a pro-suffrage statement, asserting that, “I, for one, covet for our country the distinction of being among the first to act on a great reform.”21 Because this was a new Congress, the House had to vote again on the suffrage amendment, but the bill swept through on May 21, with 42 more “aye” votes than the two-thirds needed for passage. Characteristically, the Senate took a little longer, and bent a little less to the prevailing winds. But on June 4, 1919, the amendment passed there as well, with two votes more than the necessary two-thirds.

The Culmination: 1918–1920

Now, all that remained was the process of ratification by the states. The suffragists knew that this would involve them in many more arduous months of campaigning. But what overwhelmed them on the day the amendment finally passed the Senate was the realization of how far they had come. As NWP member Maud Younger recalled, “We walked slowly homeward, talking a little, silent a great deal. This was the day toward which women had been struggling for more than half a century!” Many of the suffragists shared a sense of quiet satisfaction, but some also felt a sudden pang at seeing one of the great dramas of their lives entering its final phase. As the women filed out of the Capitol, someone said to NAWSA member Harriet Upton, “Well, Harriet, it’s all over.” Upton, who had spent almost half her life fighting for suffrage, smiled. Then her face crumpled and she began to weep.22

THE RATIFICATION CAMPAIGN Every amendment to the US Constitution has to be ratified by threequarters of the country’s state legislatures. So, since the United States had 48 states in 1919 that meant that 36 of them would have to approve the amendment. When the suffragists began surveying their chances around the country, they quickly recognized that there were nine southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, the two Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia) that would almost surely reject the amendment. There were also four border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) that looked highly unpromising. Subtract 13 states from 48, and you got 35—1 state short of the total they needed. This meant that in order to prevail, the suffragists would have to win every single state outside the South and the border area, plus one of the problematic 13 states. The NAWSA Executive Board had already approved a detailed plan for the ratification campaign back in April, 1919. As soon as the suffrage amendment left Congress in June, Carrie Chapman Catt instructed the state associations to swing into action. She also forwarded a national petition to each state legislature calling for swift ratification. She followed this with a wire to every governor, repeating the request for action, and urging them to call special sessions if their legislatures had already adjourned for the year. Meanwhile, Alice Paul was on the road organizing the National Woman’s Party’s ratification drive. That effort would never come close to the scale of the NAWSA operation, but the NWP did open offices in Chicago and San Francisco, and worked actively for ratification in

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nine key states. Paul also contributed a memorable image to the campaign, when she appeared on the cover of The Suffragist as “the Betsy Ross of Suffrage”—bending over a big gold, purple, and white “ratification f lag” on which she was sewing a new star for each state that passed the amendment (see Figure 5.1). This image became an icon of the campaign, with different NWP staff members playing Betsy Ross in subsequent pictures as the months went by and the f lag accumulated more stars. Once again, Paul had shown her gift for finding just the right symbol—one that highlighted the women’s determination, yet at the same time linked their effort both to patriotic history and to the benign tradition of “woman’s work.” Ratification began most promisingly, when nine states approved the suffrage amendment within the first four weeks after the Senate vote. Vying for the title of “first to ratify,” Wisconsin beat out two other states when a suffragist’s father hand-carried the resolution to Washington by train instead of waiting for the mail. Seven of the nine early-ratifying legislatures were still in session, which facilitated their prompt action. Figure 5.1 Alice Paul, as the suffrage movement’s own Betsy Ross, adds another star to her “ratification flag.” Source: Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/97519946/.

The Culmination: 1918–1920

In the other two states—Kansas and New York—the governors called special sessions in order to get the amendment passed. It was notable that Texas, a former member of the Confederacy, was among the first states to ratify. Texas had approved primary suffrage in 1918 (see Sidebar 5.1, pp. 105–106), but getting the federal amendment through the state legislature still took hard work and skillful coalitionbuilding. Minnie Fisher Cunningham, head of the Texas suffrage association, wrote Carrie exultantly when the whole thing was over, “Our men [in the legislature] were wonderful. I’ve never seen such splendid team work, and they did everything we asked or even suggested. … The women were wonderful too. They rose to this battle as though they were just home from long cool vacations instead of worn to a frazzle with our campaign.”23 Few of the other former Confederate states followed Texas’ example. All through the summer of 1919 and the winter of 1920, one southern legislature after another thundered its hostility to what a Georgia politician described as a “vicious piece of legislation.”24 One theme dominated these debates: the conviction that the 19th amendment was a device cooked up by northerners to establish “negro rule” in the South. As we discussed in Chapter 1, southern black men had been able to vote during the Reconstruction Era just after the Civil War, thanks to federal enforcement of the 15th amendment, which forbade voter discrimination by race. But once the federal government withdrew its troops—and its attention—from the South in the mid-1870s, white leaders had used a combination of physical violence and legal obstacles to eliminate virtually all African-American men from the voter rolls. Now here was the 19th amendment, which proposed to enfranchise all women, black and white. Given how successful southern white leaders had been in eliminating black men from the electorate, it may seem strange that they should have been worried about the claims of black women. However, some leaders argued that black women were smarter and more motivated than their men and would find a way around the legal obstacles that had been erected. Others thought that white vigilantes might shrink from inf licting the same physical violence on black women that had been used to deter the men from voting. Even the threat of getting fired, which had helped to keep black men from voting, might not be as effective here, because the leaders suspected that white women would refuse to fire their black cooks and laundresses, even if they did try to vote.25 These issues were all matters of concern, but they paled beside the greatest threat that white southerners had always associated with the suffrage amendment—the idea that passage of the 19th amendment might

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revive the federal government’s interest in enforcing voting rights for African-Americans of both genders, undoing the whole structure of white political supremacy in the South, and giving new life to the longneglected 15th amendment. In 1919 the recently-founded Southern Women’s Anti-Ratification League campaigned with the slogan, “The Fifteenth Amendment is not dead. It only sleepeth. Why arouse it from its slumber?” In a particularly derisive gesture, the Florida House referred the woman suffrage amendment, amid shouts of laughter, to the Committee on Unfinished Business—the place where, everyone knew, bills were sent that no one ever wanted to see again. In Mississippi, a legislator put it this way, “I would rather die and go to hell than vote for woman suffrage.”26 Black southern suffragists watched these debates play out, hoping against hope that if the 19th amendment became part of the Constitution, it would give African-American women and men a new chance at full citizenship. White suffragists in the region were more divided. Kate Gordon of Louisiana, for one, had been a leading proponent of state suffrage for years, but she had always opposed the federal amendment as a threat to white rule, and once the campaign to ratify the 19th amendment began, she threw herself into the fight to defeat it. By contrast, Laura Clay of Kentucky had supported the federal amendment in the early days, because there had seemed to be no danger of its getting through Congress, and she thought that its presence on the horizon might spur southern legislatures to pass state suffrage. But when the amendment did pass Congress, she too began campaigning against it. Other southern white suffragists—probably the majority—resigned themselves to the fact that the federal amendment represented their only feasible path to the vote. Many of them, as Alabama’s Pattie Ruffner Jacobs observed, resented the fact that their enfranchisement was being brought about by “the generous men of other states,” rather than by the men of their own region.27 Nevertheless, these women accepted the federal amendment as their only alternative, and many even campaigned for it. The fight was a disheartening one, however. Of the nine southern states that suffrage leaders had originally judged as hopeless, only one ultimately approved ratification. (That exception, Tennessee, will be discussed shortly, (see national map, Figure 5.2, p. 123). The national suffrage leaders, having anticipated the resistance in the South, focused most of their attention on the rest of the country. By early July, 1919, they had 9 ratifications behind them, with 27 states to go. Each state constituted its own distinct world, with its own politics and personalities and pressure points. We can appreciate the challenge of navigating those 27 separate worlds when we note that in Carrie Chapman Catt’s

The Culmination: 1918–1920

493-page history of woman suffrage, she devotes nearly 150 pages to the ratification campaign. Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party continued to participate as well, but the drive for ratification provided a particular opportunity for NAWSA to display its strengths: its large membership in nearly every state, its decades of experience in state politics, and Catt’s talent for large-scale organization. In early July, 1919, as the suffragists reviewed their options for lining up the remaining 27 states they needed, they confronted a major problem of timing. By then, every one of the state legislatures had adjourned for the year. Furthermore, since most of them met only every other year (generally in the odd years)—the great majority were not scheduled to convene again until 1921, after the 1920 election had come and gone. So the first task of the ratification campaign was to persuade more than two dozen state governors to call their legislatures back into special session. This was no easy undertaking. Some governors objected to the expense and inconvenience of an extra session. Some were personally opposed to suffrage and had no interest in facilitating its ratification. And some feared that their political opponents might use the special session to raise other topics that the governors wanted to avoid. Weeks and months were spent developing the precise arguments and incentives and legal stratagems necessary to get special sessions called in each of the different states. In the end, 24 of the 27 ratifications that took place after July 1, 1919, were done in special session. Throughout the summer of 1919, while the suffragists were worrying about getting their amendment ratified, Woodrow Wilson was going through his own political and personal drama. When he returned from Europe in July—having been out of the country, except for a brief interval, since the previous December—he brought with him the product of his long absence, the Treaty of Versailles (so named because the defeated nations had been required to sign it in the very symbol of French majesty, the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles). The treaty was more vengeful than Wilson had hoped, but it did include the provision he cared most about: a call to form a League of Nations, which would hopefully be an active force for world peace in the future. Now it was up to the governments of the world (in the case of the United States, the US Senate) to give that idea meaning by ratifying the treaty and agreeing to join the League. On July 10, 1919, Wilson presented the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate. But the Republicans who now controlled the Senate refused to accept it as written, nor would they agree to join the League, primarily because they insisted that the requirements for League membership would undermine American sovereignty. After several weeks

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of committee hearings, it appeared that the treaty might be passed if Wilson would accept certain revisions, but he refused to hear of any changes. Instead, he set out across the country on September 2, 1919, to take his case to the American people. He had been tense and exhausted when he started, and in late September—after traveling 8,000 miles and delivering 32 speeches in just 3 weeks—he suffered a total collapse. A week later, back in Washington, he had a devastating stroke. For the rest of his term in office, he remained secluded in the White House, while his wife acted as his principal spokesperson. Under these circumstances, the president, of course, played only a minor role in the campaign to ratify the suffrage amendment. Back in the summer of 1919, before his western trip, Wilson had reached out to a few governors, urging them to call special sessions. But after his stroke in the fall, it was clear that the years during which the suffragists could look to him for political leadership were gone forever. The women carried on, pressing for special legislative sessions in state after state, and lobbying vigorously when the sessions were called. Meanwhile, anti-suffragist legislators were using every possible maneuver to stop the progress of ratification—holding off debate as long as possible and forcing new votes when the first ones went against them. And when parliamentary maneuvers failed, the opposition turned to the courts, offering one legal objection after another. Among the most troublesome was the argument—supported by language in several state constitutions—that ratification of amendments to the US Constitution required not only legislative action but also a statewide referendum. If that argument prevailed, it would prolong the ratification process by many months, inevitably missing Election Day 1920, and demoralizing the suffragist troops who had been working so hard toward that goal. The ratification campaign proceeded, but always under the shadow of that legal challenge, which was working its way through the courts. Meanwhile, the number of ratifications climbed to 16 by October, 1919, with good representation from the North and the Midwest. But the Far West was visibly lagging—in part because most of those states had given their women the vote so long ago that the fire had gone out of the local suffrage movements. So Catt set out on a “Wake Up America” speaking tour across the West. Jessie Haver, a young activist who traveled with her on the train, never forgot the enthusiasm that trip aroused. “At every station where we stopped,” she wrote, “there were huge crowds there to greet Mrs. Catt. You never saw such admiration and faithfulness.” Impressed by Catt’s skill as an orator, Haver asked her once why she twisted her hands behind her back during her speeches. Catt confessed that she suffered agonies of stage fright every

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time she spoke. Then why, asked Haver, had she chosen a life that required so many public appearances? “I didn’t choose it,” Catt said. “It chose me and wouldn’t let me go.”28 Yet whatever stress the trip evoked in Catt, it paid off in results. Between September and December 1919, five western states ratified the amendment, and seven more would act in the first three months of 1920. In February, 1920, with 27 ratifications under its belt, NAWSA affirmed its faith in the future by holding a “victory” celebration at which it officially dissolved its organization and transferred its assets and membership to the League of Women Voters (which had been formed as a NAWSA affiliate the previous year). And even while this restructuring was taking place, news came in of 4 more ratification victories, bringing the total to 31. Catt exclaimed from the podium, “Oh, how do I pity the women who have had no share in the exaltation and discipline of our army of workers … of women struggling, serving, suffering, sacrificing for the righteousness of women’s emancipation!”29 Then, demonstrating her optimism about the outcome, she left the country for a series of suffrage meetings in Europe. Four more victories followed within the next few weeks, bringing the total to 35—the number the suffragists had originally counted on, outside of the South and the border states. To the suffragists’ surprise, two border states—Kentucky and Missouri—were among those that ratified. If all the other states had performed as expected, that should have carried the total over the top. But ratification was stalled in two states the suffragists had expected to win—Connecticut and Vermont. Members of the two legislatures were prepared to act, but the two governors, both anti-suffrage men, refused to call them into session. Thus stalled in New England, the suffragists turned their attention to Delaware. But after an intense two-month battle, ratification was defeated there in early May 1920. June 1, 1920, brought the suffragists a critical victory, when the US Supreme Court ruled that no matter what state constitutions might say to the contrary, the US Constitution was the sole authority on the amendment process; the states could not add extra hurdles of their own. With that decision, every one of the 35 ratifications gained so far was secure. Now all the suffragists had to do was find one more state. The best prospect seemed to “Republicans, We Are Here. Where Is be Tennessee. Action there had the 36th State?” been stalled by the fact that its National Woman’s Party banner, Republican Convention, June 192030 state constitution was one of the ones that required certain extra

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steps before ratifying a federal amendment, but this obstacle had been invalidated by the recent Supreme Court decision. Even so, Tennessee was hardly ideal ground on which to fight the climactic battle: •• ••

Republicans had generally been more favorable to suffrage than Democrats. Indeed, of the 35 states that had ratified so far, a full 25 were controlled by Republicans. Tennessee was a Democratic state. By region, every state west of the Mississippi except Louisiana had ratified the amendment, as had nearly all the states in the North and Midwest. But so far not a single state in the South had approved the amendment. Tennessee was a southern state.

On the other hand, there was one basis for optimism. So far, every state that had adopted state suffrage (full or partial) had also approved ratification (see Figure 5.2). And in the spring of 1919, Tennessee had approved presidential suffrage—making it the only southern state to do so. Moreover, the campaign was so recent that the local suffragists were still well-organized and determined to make their state the one that clinched the fight for ratification. So it was agreed: Tennessee would be the final battleground. The Tennessee legislature was not scheduled to reconvene until 1921, so the first task was to lean on the governor, pressing him to call the legislature back into session. This was done by everyone in sight. The Democratic National Committee exerted heavy pressure behind the scenes, and the governor’s rival in the Democratic primary publicly warned him that if he held back, “Some Republican state will ratify and rob Tennessee of its chance for glory.”31 Even President Wilson, now nearly invisible, wired his encouragement. At last the governor’s call for the session went out, and in late July 1920, hundreds of people began to converge on Nashville. The suffragists were there in force, handing out their trademark yellow roses and lobbying frenetically behind the scenes (see eResources, Image 7). The anti-suffragists were there as well, distributing their red roses, and besieging the legislators with talk of states’ rights and warnings of “race peril to the South.”32 The 200 members of the state Men’s Ratification Committee, recently organized by NAWSA, proclaimed their support for the amendment. Meanwhile (according to the suffragists) a crew of sinister opposition men prowled the halls of the Hermitage Hotel, dispensing liquor and bribes. Carrie Chapman Catt, who had just returned from Europe, arrived in Nashville with a small bag, expecting to stay three days. But, shocked by the size and force of the opposition, she immediately set off on a

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Source: Megan Auchincloss, created with mapchart.net©. Data from National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory: How Women Won It—A Centennial Symposium, 1840–1940 (New York: HW Wilson Company, 1940).

Figure 5.2  Suffrage states (full and partial) and ratification states, as of August, 1920.

The Culmination: 1918–1920

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speaking tour across Tennessee and then settled into the Hermitage Hotel for the duration. Meanwhile, Tennessean Sue Shelton White ran the local effort by the National Woman’s Party, and in Ohio (home of both presidential candidates that year), NWP member Abby Scott Baker worked to get the two candidates to commit themselves to suffrage. (Both men started by issuing pro-suffrage statements, but later sent letters watering down their support).33 By the time the legislators finally took their seats, on August 9, 1920, the suffragists had gathered enough signed pledges to make it look as if ratification was assured. But, as NWP member Inez Haynes Irwin observed “The fact that a member was numbered among their forces in the morning did not at all mean that he would be among them at night.”34 A case in point was the Speaker of the Tennessee House. In a coup for NAWSA, he had been one of the founding members of the Men’s Ratification Committee, but just days before the session started, he announced that he had changed his mind. So the proceedings began in a frenzy of vote counting. On Aug.ust 13, 1920, the amendment made it safely through the State Senate. That night, Catt Table 5.1  State ratifications of the 19th amendment after August 1920 wrote to a friend, “We now have 35 1/2 states. We are up to our last Connecticut September 14, 1920 half of a state. With all the politiVermont February 8, 1921 cal pressure, it ought to be easy, but Delaware March 6, 1923* the opposition of every sort is here fighting with no scruple desperMaryland March 29, 1941* ately.” After numerous procedural Virginia February 21, 1952* delays, the amendment finally Alabama September 8, 1953* came to a vote in the House on Florida May 13, 1969 August 17. Among those present was Harry Burn, at 24 the youngSouth Carolina July 1, 1969* est member of the legislature. Burn Georgia February 20, 1970* had promised to vote for ratificaLouisiana June 11, 1970* tion if his vote was needed to carry the motion, but everyone knew North Carolina May 6, 1971 that his constituents were against Mississippi March 22, 1984* it, and the suffragists’ hearts sank Source: Steve Mount.“Ratification of Constitutional when he appeared on the mornAmendments: 19th Amendment,” usconstitution.net, ing of the vote wearing the red www.USConstitution.net/constamrat.html. rose of the anti-suffragists in his * Voted to reject the amendment during the initial lapel. Burn initially tried to duck ratification campaign, 1919–1920. the choice by voting to table the

The Culmination: 1918–1920

motion. But when that effort failed, he made the climactic decision and voted yes. The deciding factor, he said later, was a letter he had received from his mother, a devout suffragist. She wrote, “Vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. … I have been watching to see how you stood, but have noticed nothing yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put ‘Rat’ in Ratification.”35 In the end, the amendment was approved by just two votes. More parliamentary skirmishes followed, but on August 26, 1920, at 3:45 am, the US Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, received official notification that Tennessee had approved the amendment. He then signed a proclamation announcing that the 19th amendment had been ratified by 36 states and was officially part of the Constitution. There would be two more years of legal challenges, but they all came to nothing. In any case, Connecticut and Vermont both approved ratification soon after Tennessee, giving the amendment a cushion of two extra states (for late-ratifying states, see Table 5.1, p. 124). The battle for suffrage was over—72 years after the Seneca Falls convention, American women had won the vote. *** About mid-day on August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Colby invited Carrie Chapman Catt to come and see his signed proclamation announcing the ratification of the 19th amendment. Later that day, she and a few others from NAWSA were also received by the president and his wife at the White House—a rare privilege, given his retirement from public life. The next day, as Catt and two colleagues traveled by train to New York, victory delegations met them at every stop along the way. And when they pulled into Pennsylvania Station, they were greeted by Governor Al Smith, a huge crowd, and a military band. As Catt led the joyful column out of the station, says the NAWSA account, “the last suffrage parade passed through New York into history.”36 Alice Paul was not invited by Secretary Colby to come and see the suffrage proclamation, nor did the Wilsons invite her to tea. No crowds hailed her accomplishments; no governors or brass bands turned out to congratulate her. From the beginning, she had adopted a more adversarial style than Catt. Her approach had inspired passionate devotion in her followers and spurred numerous politicians to reluctant action. But it had also antagonized many people. Paul’s contribution to suffrage—especially her relentless campaign to bring the federal amendment to public attention in 1913–1917—would go down in the history books, but it did not evoke the same instant approbation that Catt’s did. Nevertheless, the National

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Woman’s Party did stage its own celebration when it was clear that suffrage had been won. As soon as word of the crucial vote came in from Tennessee, a jubilant cluster of supporters gathered in front of NWP headquarters, waving their arms in triumph and cheering as Alice Paul, up on the balcony, unfurled the great “ratification flag,” now emblazoned with 36 stars.

NOTES 1 Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, 1975, 1996), 300. 2 Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 323; Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1964, 1977), 347. 3 National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory: How Women Won It (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1940), 127. 4 Judith N. McArthur, “Minnie Fisher Cunningham’s Back Door Lobby in Texas: Political Maneuvering in a One-Party State,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: NewSage, 1995), 319–320. 5 McArthur, “Minnie Fisher Cunningham,” 321. 6 McCarthur, “Minnie Fisher Cunningham,” 323. 7 Catt and Shuler Woman Suffrage and Politics, 315. 8 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 330; Eleanor Clift, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003), 159. 9 Clift, Founding Sisters, 161. 10 Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 221; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 155. 11 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 373. 12 Christine A. Lunardini and Thomas J. Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage: A New Look,” Political Science Quarterly, 95, no. 4 (Winter 1980–1981), 668. 13 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009), 413. 14 Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013), 136. 15 J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 308. 16 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 327. 17 US Senate, “Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda: Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate,” 66th Congress, 1st sess., 1919, vol. 1, 1179.

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18 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 484. 19 Bernadette Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century ( Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 40. 20 Zahniser and Fry, Alice Paul, 313; Doris Stevens, Jailed For Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1920)), 167. 21 Southard, Militant Citizenship, 168. 22 Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 266–267. 23 Ruthe Winegarten and Judith N. McArthur, eds., Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 195. 24 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 467. 25 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, “Caretakers of Southern Civilization: Georgia Women and the Anti-Suffrage Campaign, 1914–1920,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 82, no. 4 (Winter, 1998), 815. 26 Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 109; Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 471. 27 Wheeler, New Women, 182–183. 28 Sherna Gluck, ed., From Parlor to Prison: Five Suffragists Talk About Their Lives (New York: Vintage, 1976), 94. 29 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 382. 30 Clift, Founding Sisters, 185. 31 Elaine Weiss, The Women’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York: Viking, 2018), 70. 32 Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 215. 33 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 444, 452. 34 Irwin, Story of Alice Paul, 471. 35 Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 159–160; Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 316. 36 National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory, 154.

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Chapter 6

Living with Woman Suffrage

“Women Flock to Cast First Ballot.” That was the headline in the Norwich, Connecticut Bulletin on the morning after election day in 1920. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in Minnesota, female voters had also turned out in force. A reporter there observed that some skeptics had questioned the women’s level of interest, “but the members of the gentle sex proved that they are wide awake on politics and are determined to exercise their new right of franchise.”1 From the Daily Admoreite in Oklahoma came this report, The women voted en masse all over the state. In the wards of the larger cities, in the smaller towns and villages, at the country crossroads polling places, the wives, the mothers, the sisters, the sweethearts of Oklahoma men rallied to the polls.2

Even in Virginia, where political leaders had been resisting suffrage for generations, the Richmond Times-Dispatch acknowledged the day’s significance, “Above all else, woman has proven that she did want the vote, that she would use it, that she is not inferior to man in the political game.”3 Given the steady increase in the number of suffrage states from 1890 on, it may seem strange that the sight of women voting in 1920 should have struck the observers so forcefully. It is true that by then, 30 states had approved some kind of suffrage (15 full, 13 presidential, and 2 primary). But many of the full suffrage states, being in the West, had relatively small female populations. Moreover, in 12 of the 13 states with presidential suffrage, women had won the right so recently that 1920 was their first chance to use it. Most importantly, 18 states had never approved any form of woman suffrage. All these factors taken together

Living with Woman Suffrage

help to explain why, despite the progress that had been made in the states over the years, Election Day 1920 still represented the first voting opportunity for about 60 percent of American women. Of course, not all American women went to the polls in 1920. Some simply chose to stay home, while others were kept away by various legal obstacles. To begin with, several million women were ineligible to vote because they were non-citizens. This category included, as one might expect, immigrants who had not completed the naturalization process, but in 1920 it also applied to Native Americans, as well as to every US woman who had lost her citizenship by marrying a foreign national. And there were some state regulations that kept additional women from voting. For instance, by the time the 19th amendment was fully ratified in August, 1920, the voter registration dates for both Mississippi and Georgia had already passed. Since neither state was willing to adjust its rules, several hundred thousand women—black and white—in those two states were prevented from participating in the landmark election day of 1920.4 In the rest of the South, some African-American women did succeed in casting their ballots that day, but many were turned away. Restrictions against them would grow steadily harsher in the years that followed. So how many American women actually did cast their ballots on November 2, 1920? No one knows for certain, because at the time Illinois was the only state that kept electoral records by gender. However, historians estimate that about 10 million women voted that day.5 This was not a large percentage of the more than 25 million women who had theoretically been enfranchised by the 19th amendment. Nevertheless, the sudden appearance of 10 million women at the polls—many for the first time—was a significant event in American political history, and it certainly caught the attention of everyone who was there. What was it like to have ladies on the premises? The Chattanooga News commented approvingly that “loud talking and threats of betting are absent,” and “everything was as orderly as a Sunday school assemblage.” In South Carolina, it was reported that men “took off their hats, failed to chew the usual amount of tobacco, and stood aside for the ladies while waiting their turns at the ballot box.” In one southern city, the policeman on duty even assisted the ladies by holding their babies while they voted.6 Not everyone was impressed by the new members of the electorate. There was a touch of condescension, for instance, in some newspapers’ humorous anecdotes about women who went to the wrong polling places, or needed help completing their ballots. One statistically inclined reporter also pointed out that women were averaging 5 1/2 minutes in

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the voting booth, compared to only 2 1/4 minutes for men. Even some compliments came with a sting, as when a Kentucky paper noted that, “strange to relate, there were very few spoiled ballots this year, despite the new female voters.” All the same, the friendly reports far outweighed the unfriendly ones. And for those who still had their doubts, a South Carolina paper offered this encouraging headline, “Sun Still Shines Though Women Vote.” 7

WHAT COMES AFTER WINNING THE VOTE? Election Day in 1920 had particular resonance for a Philadelphia woman named Charlotte Woodward Pierce. At 91, she was the only person still alive who had signed the Seneca Falls Declaration in 1848. Although Pierce’s health did not permit her to go to the polls, she greeted the day with delight, recalling the excitement of attending the first woman’s rights convention when she was still in her teens. Pierce’s memories served as a bridge, spanning the 72 years between American women’s first formal claim to suffrage in 1848 and the fulfillment of that claim in 1920. Election Day also had a powerful meaning for the last generation of suffragists, the women who had carried the campaign to its grand conclusion. “Few people,” wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, “live to see the actual and final realization of hopes to which they have devoted their lives. That privilege is ours.”8 Catt was right; the adventure of pursuing—and finally achieving—the vote had been an extraordinary experience. But once a great goal has been achieved, what happens next? The fairy tales make it sound so simple, “And they all lived happily ever after.” In real life, things are a little more complicated.

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) The leaders of NAWSA had started planning for “ever after” as early as February 1919, when they established a new affiliate called the League of Women Voters, dedicated to “a program of education in citizenship for new voters and legislation for the protection of women, children and the home.”9 A year later, at its convention in February, 1920 (with final ratification still six months away), NAWSA officially dissolved itself, and the League of Women Voters took its place. One major point of debate at the 1920 meeting was whether the new League should drop the word “Women” from its title and open its membership to both sexes. Catt was eager to move past “sex-segregation,”

Living with Woman Suffrage

but Jane Addams and several In a speech in the fall of 1920, s­ uffragist others argued that women’s ­ Crystal Eastman said she knew just what distinctive voices would be would happen, now that the s­ uffrage submerged if men joined the amendment was ratified. Men, she organization. There was suppredicted, would say, “Thank God, this port for both approaches, but the everlasting women’s fight is over!” while membership ultimately voted to the women would exclaim “Now we keep the League as a womencan begin!”10 Begin what? That was the only organization. Carrying the challenge. single-sex idea further, some members proposed turning themselves into a women’s political party, but this idea was rejected. In the end, the League carried on several of NAWSA’s key characteristics—it was political, in the sense that it planned to promote change through political action, but it was nonpartisan, in the sense that it would endorse no party and no candidates. Instead, it would focus solely on the issues, hopefully bringing together women of both parties to pursue their common goals. But what were their common goals? In fact, as soon as suffrage was achieved, NAWSA members’ interests began to move in a dozen different directions. Catt, for instance, faithfully supported the League of Women Voters until her death in 1947, but she declined the League presidency and began devoting most of her energies to international peace—for instance, through the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which she founded in 1924 (see Document 10 in the appendix). Other NAWSA members chose different paths—promoting specific social reforms, or working in electoral politics, or simply retiring to private life. In the end, no cause emerged in the 1920s that managed to galvanize a mass movement of American women in the way that pursuing the vote had done in the past. So instead of building a membership of a million or more women, as NAWSA had done in its heyday, the League membership peaked (in the 1960s) at about 160,000.11 But if the League never enrolled the numbers that NAWSA had attracted in its best years, it did develop into a useful and long-lived organization. One of its first initiatives was to organize the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a coalition of more than a dozen women’s groups, which throughout the 1920s lobbied vigorously for federal legislation related to the welfare of women and children. As for the League itself, over the 100 years since its founding, it has engaged in a variety of activities related to voting and elections, including arranging local candidates’ nights, sponsoring several of the early presidential debates on TV, promoting campaign finance reform, and working to simplify

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the process of voter registration. Today, the organization (which began admitting men in 1974) consists of 700 local and 50 state branches. It continues to pursue two primary missions: lobbying for political reform and helping citizens understand and participate more fully and equally in their government.12

National Woman’s Party (NWP) Like NAWSA, the NWP was faced in 1920 with the need to work out its own interpretation of “happily ever after.” When the members gathered for their first post-suffrage convention in February, 1921, there was support for at least four different paths that the NWP might take. Paul had made her own preference clear in a Suffragist editorial released just before the convention began (see Document 10 in the appendix.). She asserted that the NWP must take up the unfinished business of Seneca Falls, combating the many laws that still blocked American women from full equality. Paul’s opening speech to the convention reiterated the necessity of fighting for legal equality. Three alternative proposals were then debated. Crystal Eastman wanted to pursue a list of specific reforms in areas such as divorce and birth control. Jane Addams argued (as she had at the NAWSA convention) that the NWP should transform itself into a peace organization. Other speakers wanted the NWP to focus on expanding “protective legislation”—that is, promoting labor laws that made special accommodation for women’s physical needs and family obligations. Each of these “minority” proposals was debated and then each was voted down. On the final day of the convention came the discussion of Paul’s own preferred choice—that the NWP should devote itself to combating all legal provisions that stood in the way of equality for women. Paul had expected a quick harmonious endorsement of this proposal, and she grew visibly impatient when it became evident that NWP members had many different ideas about exactly what “equality for women” meant. She particularly objected when several AfricanAmerican participants demanded that attention be paid to the systematic repression of black women’s vote in the South. Paul maintained that since this form of inequality was based on race rather than gender, it was not the NWP’s concern, and she called the women “spoilers” for insisting that their grievances be addressed. (This indifference to the racial side of equality also surfaced at an early meeting of the League of Women Voters, where the subject of voter discrimination was dropped after white southern delegates threatened to walk out if “the negro question” was discussed).13

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The NWP convention in February, 1921 was certainly not as harmonious as Paul had intended, but in the end, the “equality option” that she favored was adopted, and the membership agreed to dissolve the old NWP and create a new organization (of the same name) dedicated to pursuing equal rights for women. Paul declined the chairmanship, mainly because she was planning to go to law school, but she did agree to serve as vice-chairman. Throughout the years that followed, in or out of office, she continued to be the dominant figure in the NWP. In addition, she managed to obtain three different law degrees, by attending one law school during the day and another at night. Ever since her graduate-school days, back in 1910–1912, Paul had been studying the ways that America’s state and federal laws discriminated against women. She continued to explore that topic while in law school, and NWP staff members supplemented her work with their own research. They soon concluded that there were simply too many discriminatory laws to try to undo them one by one. The only solution was to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting all forms of legal inequality based on gender. So NWP staff set to work drafting a set of model equal rights amendments for the states, while Paul took responsibility for the centerpiece of the effort—a proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for the US Constitution. Paul’s document was presented at an NWP event in Seneca Falls, New York in 1923 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first women’s rights convention, held there in 1848. The ERA was introduced in Congress a few months later, and reintroduced in every session thereafter for nearly 50 years. It was passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states, but it never achieved full ratification (see Sidebar 6.1, pp. 133–135).

Sidebar 6.1: Looking Beyond the Vote: The Equal Rights Amendment In 1923, just three years after the passage of the 19th amendment, Alice Paul released a new document that she hoped would spark the next great women’s movement. What she proposed was a 20th amendment to the US Constitution, designed to address in one fell swoop all the ways in which American laws discriminated against women. The key portion read, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”14 Later that year, Paul managed to get her Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) introduced in Congress; it was reintroduced in every subsequent session for the next half-century, though for a long time, little further action was taken.

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To Paul’s distress, it soon became clear that some of the most passionate opposition to the ERA was coming, not from conservative men, but from progressive women, many of them former suffragists. These activists had spent years fighting for “protective legislation”—that is, laws that would require employers to take into consideration their female workers’ strength limitations and family responsibilities. These opponents of the ERA—including virtually every leading women’s group, as well as most representatives of organized labor—feared that requiring equal treatment for men and women would threaten the protections that had already been won for female workers and prevent further gains. Paul, on the other hand, maintained that defining rights by gender ultimately limited women more than it helped them. The bitter dispute over this issue stalled the progress of the ERA, and added its own push to the dissolution of the suffrage movement. In 1943, the National Woman’s Party began promoting a revised version of the ERA (also drafted by Paul), based more directly on the 15th and 19th amendments. This version, which has been supported by ERA proponents ever since, reads, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”15 But the battles with its opponents continued. In 1950, it seemed that there might be a chance for compromise, when Senator Carl Hayden proposed adding an extra sentence to the ERA, known as the Hayden Rider, which stated that the ERA would not interfere with any “rights, benefits or exemptions”—past or future—designated for women. However, Alice Paul and her NWP members insisted that this addition contradicted the rest of the amendment, which was designed to ensure equal treatment for both sexes. So although the ERA, with rider attached, did pass the House once and the Senate twice in the 1950s, and at one point was backed by President Dwight Eisenhower, it was ultimately withdrawn at the request of the NWP. Progressive women’s opposition to the ERA began to soften in the 1960s, partly because stronger laws regulating all labor conditions made protective legislation less necessary. Meanwhile, the rise of the women’s movement gave new energy to the ERA campaign, and when feminist Betty Friedan and a group of other activists founded the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966, they threw themselves into the drive to get the amendment passed. With the aging Alice Paul helping to lead the fight, the ERA was approved by both houses of Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification. There was just one fly in the ointment: Congress included a 7-year deadline—38 states would have to ratify the amendment before March 1979.16 For a time that seemed to pose no problem, as 30 states approved the ERA during the first 12 months. But conservative opposition to the amendment was rising, as part of a more general backlash against the women’s liberation movement and the Supreme Court decision upholding abortion rights (Roe v. Wade, 1973). The drive

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to block the ERA was brilliantly led by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative author and political activist who in 1972 launched STOP ERA, based on the acronym “Stop Taking Our Privileges.” For the next ten years, Schlafly engaged in a tireless round of public speaking, reiterating that “ERA means abortion,” and insisting that if the ERA passed, it would take away essential protections such as alimony and widows’ Social Security benefits, while forcing women to serve in the army and share public restrooms with male strangers. Schlafly’s campaign slowed the ERA’s progress, and by 1977 only 5 more states had ratified the amendment, bringing the total to 35—3 short of the goal. The following year, feminists succeeded in getting the deadline extended to 1982 (see eResources, Image 8). But during the extension period, not a single new stateapproved ratification, while five states rescinded their previous approvals. In 1982, the extension period ran out, and the ERA was stopped. Today, the supporters of the ERA are still hoping to get it passed, either by starting the whole process over again, or by challenging the legality of the 1982 time limit.17 Alice Paul, who died in 1977, just as the extension period was being negotiated, would have been disappointed to learn that her amendment was never ratified, but pleased to see that, nearly 100 years after she presented the first draft, the ERA still evokes such devotion in its supporters.

Besides continuously promoting the ERA, Alice Paul and the NWP worked in other ways to keep the issue of gender equality alive. For instance, the organization drafted 600 different pieces of legislation, about half of which were passed; these addressed topics such as army nurses’ military status, the legal treatment of prostitutes, and the use of gender specifications in civil service job postings. Paul also took an active role in international women’s rights, living in Geneva, Switzerland, from the founding of the World Women’s Party in 1938 until 1941, when America’s entry into World War II forced her to return to Washington. During the 1940s, the National Woman’s Party descended into turmoil, when a group of younger members, resentful of Paul’s top-down style, tried to wrest control of the organization from her. The dispute produced years of court battles and bitter personal feuds, decimating the NWP’s membership as well as its finances. But Paul survived the coup attempt and remained in charge, carrying on the fight for gender equality until her death in 1977. Besides campaigning for the ERA, she periodically won other victories, such as helping to ensure that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a prohibition against discrimination by gender.

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The National Woman’s Party is still active. Having switched in 1997 from lobbying to educational activities, it focuses today on informing the public about women’s rights and about the NWP’s role in the fight for woman suffrage.

The End of a Movement It is impressive that the two organizations that dominated the final decade of the suffrage campaign a century ago left successor groups that are still functioning today—the League of Women Voters and the current National Woman’s Party. But whatever contributions these two groups have made, their combined memberships represent just a fraction of the number of women who joined together to fight for the vote between 1910 and 1920. As an NWP member lamented in 1921, “The old crowd has scattered, never to gather in the old way again.”18 Why did the suffrage coalition break up so quickly and so completely? The simplest answer is this—for more than 50 years, the women’s movement had been organized around a single goal: winning the vote. Once that goal was achieved, there seemed to be little left for the movement as a movement to aim for. Some women may have believed that getting the vote would cure every social ill. But even those who knew that suffrage was just the first step had different ideas about what should come next. And so they began exploring other arenas—from world peace to social reform to electoral politics. One NAWSA veteran, ref lecting on the dissolution of the movement, speculated, “Maybe we needed new issues.”19 Many former suffragists did find new issues; the difference was that they did not gravitate by the millions to a single issue, as they had done during the campaign for the vote. Besides the pull of competing interests, there was another obstacle to bringing American women together around a single cause in the 1920s: many ex-suffragists felt they had had quite enough of campaigns and causes. Hundreds of thousands of these women had devoted most of their adult lives to fighting for the vote. Once it was achieved, said Paul gloomily, “everybody just went back to their respective homes.” This was not literally true, of course, but there were certainly fewer women who were prepared to dedicate every waking minute to a single cause. In particular, as NWP veteran Elizabeth Kent observed, “Many of our women long to drop everything controversial.”20 The changing times reinforced this tendency. Between 1910 and 1920, the suffrage movement had been buoyed by a wave of reform sentiment that had encouraged activism and a commitment to social change. But the winning of the vote in 1920 coincided with a significant

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weakening of that national impulse. During the decade that followed, the general mood in America grew much more inward-looking, darkened by disillusion over the unsatisfying results of the “war to end all wars,” by fear of international Communism, by backlash against the wave of recent immigrants from Europe, and by suspicion of anything that could remotely be associated with radical politics. The decade of the 1920s certainly had its upbeat moments—in fact, it is famous for them. But instead of the Progressive Era’s emphasis on collective action and working for the future, the focus during the 1920s was on private priorities and the satisfactions of the moment. This response was certainly understandable, given the ups and downs of the previous decade. But it was hardly fertile ground upon which to build a new mass movement of women.

WOMEN’S VOTE OVER TIME The American reaction against social reform did not take hold immediately. Indeed, during the first few years of the 1920s, Congress passed a number of pieces of reform legislation in which women had a strong interest. For example, the pioneering Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) provided federal assistance to the states to help them address America’s disturbingly high rates of maternal and infant mortality. In addition, the Cable Act (1922) took the first steps toward reforming the law that deprived American women of their citizenship when they married foreign men. Other female-friendly legislation followed, including expanded budgets for two federal agencies that were particularly active in areas of concern to women—the Children’s Bureau and the Women’s Bureau. A coalition of women’s organizations known as the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee led the campaign for these gains, galvanizing attention with its assertion of women’s new political power. Indeed, when the Sheppard-Towner Act passed the Senate in 1921, Senator William Kenyon acknowledged that the bill would probably have failed if his colleagues could have cast their votes in secret. It only passed, he said, because the senators had to vote “in the open under the pressure of the Joint Congressional Committee of Women.”21 The trouble with promising to reward your political friends and punish your enemies is that you have to be able to deliver on that promise. And by 1925, politicians had come to doubt whether the female vote was really quite as formidable as they had feared. For one thing, there was a question about how many women were actually turning out to vote. It happened that a drop in overall voter turnout rates began to be noticed at about this time, and because of the timing, many contemporary analysts

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suggested that women’s lower voting rate was what had dragged down the national average. This was wrong; it is now known that men’s turnout rates had already been dropping for some time—primarily, it appears, because the United States had settled into a pattern of regional party dominance (the Democrats in the South, and the Republicans in much of the rest of the country), which took a good deal of the excitement out of voting.22 However, this broader pattern was little commented upon at the time. What people did comment on was women’s alleged lack of interest in voting. In fact, no one really knew how many American women were voting in the 1920s, because systematic reports on turnout rates by gender did not become available until 1964. In the interim, people made do with what they could gather from the handful of localities that did keep such statistics. What these data suggested was that women, like men, were not voting in large numbers during the 1920s. It also did appear that women were voting at somewhat lower rates than men—perhaps because, as new voters, they had not had the chance to form the “voting habit” during earlier, more politically engaged, times. The evidence was scanty, but there was enough of it to convince most Americans—including most American politicians—that female voters were not going to make as much difference as everyone had thought. Being perceived as having a low turnout rate is a problem for any group of voters whose leaders hope to exert political clout. But there was also another factor at work in the 1920s that made it even easier for politicians to dismiss the claims of women as a group. And that was the growing evidence that women were not voting as a group. Instead, they were voting pretty much like their husbands. This did not mean that they were voting on their husbands’ instructions; it simply meant that the characteristics they shared with their husbands, like class and ethnicity and region, seemed to inf luence their votes more than their gender. This lack of bloc voting, combined with women’s unimpressive turnout rates, rapidly diminished politicians’ fear of vengeance at the polls if they voted against reforms promoted by women. It is true that the mid-1920s were not a particularly reform-minded period in any case. But it is also true that women’s capacity to push through the reforms they cared about grew noticeably weaker after the first few years of suffrage. A reporter commented in 1924, “I know of no politician who is afraid of the woman vote on any question under the sun.”23 In this changed atmosphere, Congress slashed the budgets of both the Children’s Bureau and the Women’s Bureau during the second half of the 1920s, and one of the most dramatic examples of women’s early political clout, the Sheppard-Towner Act, was repealed in 1929.

Living with Woman Suffrage

There is another way to gauge women’s political standing beside their capacity to promote specific legislation, and that is to look at the number of women in public office. In this respect, women did make modest gains during the 1920s. By 1928 there were 2 women in the House of Representatives, 2 state governors, and 145 women in 38 state legislatures (or about 4 per legislature). It is worth noting, however, that the women chosen by their parties to run for these offices tended to fit a distinct mold—neither abrasively feminist nor visibly ambitious. We can recognize these selection criteria at work in the fact that two-thirds of the women who served in Congress between 1920 and 1930 were widows chosen to succeed their dead husbands. And which sex set these criteria and chose these candidates? That question was answered decisively by the Democratic activist Belle Moskowitz. As one of Governor Al Smith’s closest advisors, Moskowitz wielded more political power than most women of her day. Nevertheless, as late as 1930, she summed up the gender situation in politics as follows, “The major political parties are still man-made and man-controlled.”24 Meanwhile, African-American women’s political participation was following its own trajectory. During the 1920s, the great majority of African-American women lived in the South. Some of them did manage to vote in 1920, primarily because their appearance at the polls was so unexpected. But within a few years, local leaders succeeded in applying to black women the whole arsenal of devices that had been developed a generation earlier to suppress the votes of black men (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.) This systematic exclusion drew few protests from the rest of the country, and it was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that southern black women gained the rights they had won on paper in 1920. On the other hand, in the rest of the country, AfricanAmerican women did freely join the female electorate, organizing their own voter education programs, and often becoming active workers for the Republican Party. Over the decades that followed, as the quest for economic opportunity and fairer treatment led several million AfricanAmericans of both sexes to leave the South for the North and West, black women’s votes, now aligned with the Democratic Party, became an increasingly significant factor in American politics. What about the impact of women’s vote in general? This, too, has grown in importance over time, spurred in part by the revival of feminism in the 1960s and 70s. This new generation of feminists initially focused primarily on personal liberation and economic concerns—in part because books like Betty Friedan’s best-selling The Feminine Mystique (1963) cast such a vivid spotlight on the gender oppression that women were experiencing every day in their private lives. But thinking about

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rights denied inevitably leads to thinking about remedies, and within a few years women were starting to bring their concerns about gender equality into the political arena. The imperfect statistics that exist suggest that, for several decades after 1920, men’s turnout rates generally exceeded women’s. But beginning in the 1960s, women began voting more consistently than men. This fact, combined with the larger number of females in the votingage population, meant that women were now in a position to decide a national election if enough of them voted the same way. This possibility was not tested for many years since both genders usually gave their majority votes to the same candidates. But in nearly every presidential election from 1972 on, a greater proportion of women than men voted Democratic. By 1996 this trend combined with women’s growing majority in the electorate to make history. That year, female voters carried the election for Democrat William Clinton, offsetting men’s Republican and third-party votes. The same thing happened again in 2012 when women provided President Barack Obama with the margin of victory for his second term. Throughout the long years of the suffrage campaign, people often speculated about the potential effect of the women’s vote. Today, that vote is recognized as a major feature of the American political landscape. And with voting comes, or should come, office-holding. Estelle Lindsey—who in 1916 became the first woman to serve on the Los Angeles Municipal Council—put it this way, “Suffrage without officeholding is like making apple-pie without the apples.”25 Nearly a century after winning the vote, women are still struggling for their fair share of elective positions, but they have certainly made progress. In 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party, and although she lost to Donald Trump in the Electoral College, she did get a majority of the popular vote, making 2016 one of the very few elections in US history when the winner of the popular vote did not win the election. Aside from this near-miss with the presidency, women’s progress can be seen at nearly every other level of elective office. For instance, in the 116th Congress (serving from 2019 to 2021), there were 127 women, including 47 women of color. Women now represented 24 percent of the total membership, up from 6 percent in 1989 (see Table 6.1, p. 141). Women also gained ground in state government, where there were 2,112 female legislators in 2019—26 percent of the total, up from 16 percent in 1988. In addition, there were 9 female state governors and 297 female mayors (22 percent of the total).26 Overall, it can fairly be said that in the first century after 1920, women fully established themselves as American voters, and gained

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considerable ground as office holders. No one can say that their progress was rapid, but women did appear to be moving steadily closer to assuming an equal share of the political life of the nation.

WHAT CAN THE SUFFRAGISTS TEACH US ABOUT MAKING POLITICAL CHANGE?

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Table 6.1 Women in US Congress (selected years, 1917–2019) Year

Number of women in Total

Percent of women in Congress

Senate

House

1917–1919

0

1

1

0%

1929–1931

0

9

9

2%

1939–1941

1

8

9

2%

1949–1951

1

9

10

2%

1959–1961

2

17

19

4%

1969–1971

1

10

11

2%

1979–1981

2

16

18

3%

1989–1991

2

29

31

6%

1999–2001

9

56

65

12%

2009–2011

17

76

95

17%

2019–2021 25 102 127 24% Today, as American Source: Center for American Women in Politics, Facts: Levels of Office, women pursue new “History of Women in the U.S. Congress,” at www/.cawp.rutgers.edu. political goals, they can learn a good deal from considering the way the suffragists worked together to win the vote, particularly during the crucial last decade of the campaign. Between 1910 and 1920, these women won full or partial suffrage in 26 states, they coaxed and bullied a reluctant president into supporting their cause, they got the 19th amendment through both houses of Congress, and they conducted 36 successful state ratification campaigns. It was an extraordinary achievement, which any activist group today would be proud of. There was a context for this victory. Women’s occupational and educational gains during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with their active participation in Progressive Era reform, had given them an increasingly visible place in the public sphere of American life, which helped to set the stage for the expansion of their political rights in 1920. It is also important to remember the role that men played in the winning of the vote—the men’s suffrage leagues, of course, but even more importantly, the millions of men who voted for suffrage—in Congress, in the legislatures, and in state referenda. National Woman’s Party member Abby Scott Baker was careful not to give the men too much credit, saying, “Individual men have helped splendidly and we thank them heartily. But the American women can take to themselves the happy

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assurance that it was the women themselves who won their enfranchisement.” Carrie Chapman Catt was more generous, “On the outside of politics,” she said, “women fought one of the strongest, bravest battles recorded in history, but to those men inside politics … the women of the United States owe their enfranchisement.”27 Yet however much men contributed to the end result, and however helpful the historical circumstances, it is important to remember this: as 1910 began, many of the social changes that paved the way for suffrage were already in place, while most of the men who would cast the crucial votes on suffrage were already politically active. And yet: up to that time, only 4 of the 48 states had approved woman suffrage, Woodrow Wilson (soon to be president) was on record as opposing the idea, and the federal amendment had not been voted on in Congress since 1887. Only an extraordinarily creative and disciplined movement, with strong roots throughout the country, could have taken these raw ingredients and in just ten years transformed them into victory. Some of the keys to the suffragists’ success had been present from the start, but many were lessons they picked up along the way. What can we learn from their experience?

Keep Expanding Your Base For a long time, whenever the suffragists lost a legislative battle or a state referendum, they would blame the defeat on corrupt politicians and ignorant voters. Those obstacles certainly existed, but it is also true that throughout the early years, the suffragists tended to focus their campaigns quite narrowly on the rights of women exactly like themselves—that is, educated, middle-class, white, native-born, Protestants. Inevitably, that left a good many women—and plenty of male voters as well—feeling that woman suffrage had little to say to them. But then, starting in the early 20th century, the suffragists began reaching out to a much wider audience of women–-to farm wives and college students, to socialites and store clerks and factory workers. To their shame, the suffragists did not welcome the participation of African-American women, partly because of the national leaders’ own prejudices and partly because of their continuing effort to build support among white southerners. The result was that, although many black women worked for the vote, they did it mainly through their own organizations. But if the suffrage leaders did less than they should have in terms of race, they did transcend their earlier limitations in other ways. They actively recruited working-class women and younger women into the movement, they began campaigning in tenement neighborhoods and at factory gates, and they built alliances with a variety of political partners.

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At the same time, they stressed how women from different backgrounds could use the vote to address the problems they cared about, whether that was temperance or their children’s health or better working conditions. This broadening of the base paid off in political results. As new groups of women came to see the value of suffrage themselves, they began to convert the men in their lives. And as that happened, the state victories began to mount up, which in turn exerted increasing pressure on Congress for federal action. The suffragists’ experience reminds us how productive it can be when we learn to think of the people who vote against us, not as a monolithic bloc of enemies, but as individuals with legitimate concerns that perhaps can align with our own, if we focus on defining our goals in terms that are meaningful to them.

Make Your Supporters Feel Like Part of the Action As the suffrage movement broadened its base, its membership numbers soared so that by 1917, the National Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had more than a million members, making it the largest women’s organization in the country. Even the much smaller National Woman’s Party increased from a few hundred to about 60,000. What made joining the suffrage movement so transformative for the participants was the fact that they were not just writing checks and signing petitions. Campaigning for the vote involved a thousand challenging tasks, some of which these women had never even thought of trying before. There were meetings to run, press releases to write, speeches to give, budgets to balance, parades to organize, auto cavalcades to join, leaf lets to hand out, legislative procedures to learn, and legislators to lobby. Carrying out these tasks gave the participants an opportunity to learn new skills, an ebullient sense of solidarity with their fellow suffragists, and a new confidence in their own power to shape the circumstances of their lives. The failure of the women’s anti-suffragist organization, NAOWS (National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage), is instructive in this respect. Female anti-suffragists were inf luential women in their own communities, they were well-funded, and they were deeply committed to their cause. But they remained a primarily eastern, urban, elite group, and they never built the mass following that gave NAWSA its political muscle in the states, nor the f lock of young do-or-die activists that kept the National Woman’s Party in the headlines. So, even though there certainly were many women opposed to suffrage throughout the country, the anti-suffragist leaders never developed an effective way of mobilizing their energies.

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The main pro-suffrage organization, NAWSA, provides an interesting contrast. In September, 1916, Carrie Chapman Catt introduced her Winning Plan, which refocused NAWSA’s primary attention on the federal amendment and strictly delineated each state’s role in the coming campaign. Under other circumstances, this aggressive centralization of authority might have diminished the members’ sense of involvement. But like a great military leader, Catt managed to inspire her followers with the sense that every one of them had a vital role to play in a great crusade—and that, working together, they could achieve the goal they all shared. Alice Paul, too, was a fairly authoritarian leader, more likely to seek a sign-off from her colleagues for a plan she had already conceived, rather than to ask their advice. But the plans she devised drew hundreds, sometimes thousands, of women into exciting, challenging work, from participating in elaborate processions to campaigning against the Democrats in western mining towns to the truly rigorous demands of picketing the White House and serving time in the county workhouse. The result of Catt’s and Paul’s leadership—reinforced by dedicated leadership in the state organizations, and the members’ own commitment—was that, at the peak of the movement, hundreds of thousands of American women woke up every day convinced that getting the vote depended on them—not just on their money, but on their talent, their energy, and sometimes their courage as well. Of course, the goal was to convert other people to suffrage. But every time the women engaged in this work, they were also re-converting themselves to the cause. Today, a century later, times have changed, and so have politics. But it is worth remembering how important it is to make supporters feel, not just like donors, but like active participants in a campaign that really needs them.

Make Your Cause the One People Are Talking About This was a challenge the suffragists embraced with real zest. In one state after another, they did everything they could to ensure that not a single person escaped their message. They held parlor meetings and outdoor rallies; they organized at women’s colleges; they spoke on street-corners; and they canvassed door-to-door. They made movies, they went on the radio, they even scattered suffrage leaf lets from airplanes. And in any number of communities, they organized that most photogenic of suffrage events, the grand parade. Summing up the effect the suffragists were aiming for, a Kansas City activist instructed her members: “Be spectacular. … Do the things that will force the indifferent to read of suffrage.”28 Year by year, the suffragists often experienced more defeats than victories, but they always bounced back to organize one more try,

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one more creative way of getting people to think and talk about votes for women. Because of NAWSA’s enormous size and its long experience in the states, it dominated the field when it came to state suffrage activities as well as the ratification campaign. And its massive contribution to the war effort during World War I reinforced the idea that suffragists were patriotic citizens, worthy of the full rights of citizens. Where the National Woman’s Party (NWP) made its historic contribution, particularly between 1913 and 1917, was in drawing public attention to the federal amendment. This amendment did face some ideological opposition in Congress, but perhaps even more of an obstacle was the large number of legislators who simply saw it as a distraction. They had been ignoring the amendment for years, and as the 1910–1920 decade began, they probably expected to keep on doing so. That was the assumption that Alice Paul set out to challenge. From the day she sent the first suffragists marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in March 1913 to the day in 1917 when her pickets lined up in front of the White House, Paul’s strategy played a decisive role in compelling both the president and the US Congress to start taking the federal amendment seriously. Once America entered World War I, the suffragists’ claims might have been overshadowed, but Paul managed to keep the campaign going, in a way that, in Inez Haynes Irwin’s words, was “so swift, so intensive, so compelling—and at the same time so varied, interesting, and picturesque—that again and again it pushed the war-news out of the preferred position on the front pages of the newspapers of the United States.”29 Winning attention does not necessarily mean winning friends, and the suffragists’ efforts to publicize their cause—in the states and in Washington DC—were frequently criticized for being too assertive. (One critic, for instance, dismissed marching in parades as “unfeminine and therefore obnoxious and ridiculous”).30 But the suffragists knew that before they could win the debate, there had to be a debate. Thus, the fundamental purpose of all their publicity efforts was to ensure that the issue of votes for women moved to the forefront of America’s public agenda.

Identify Your Cause with Shared Community Values Besides stirring the public to debate their cause, the suffragists continually worked to frame the debate in ways that would win people to their side. For many years, their opponents had been insisting that giving women the vote would destroy the social order—or, as an Ohio politician warned in 1912, that it would “blot out three of the most sacred words known in

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the world’s vocabulary of six thousand years, namely, mother, home, and heaven.” In response, the suffragists expanded the meaning of the vote, arguing that women actually needed it in order to fulfill their domestic responsibilities. Typically, an instructional manual for suffrage workers in Texas advised, “Touch on the need of mothers for the ballot for the protection of the home and children”31 (see Document 2 in the appendix.). And, having made the case for voting as a way of protecting the home, the suffragists often carried the argument further, arguing that women’s vote would bolster every kind of reform, bringing purity and betterment to all of society. Thus the suffragists took their opponents’ argument—that women were too bound up in their domestic responsibilities, too pure and high-minded for politics—and turned it on its head, citing those same qualities and responsibilities as justification for their enfranchisement. America’s entry into World War I opened up two more ways in which suffragists could link their cause to national values. On the one hand, NAWSA ensured that its members were active and visible participants in the American war effort, while simultaneously reiterating that this form of national service deserved to be rewarded with the most fundamental privilege of citizenship—the vote. At the same time, President Wilson’s soaring rhetoric about saving democracy overseas provided frequent opportunities for the National Woman’s Party to insist that any crusade for democracy must begin with giving America’s own female citizens the vote.

Two Approaches Are Better Than One Throughout the final decade of the suffrage campaign, NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party followed their respective paths, and although they were pursuing a common goal, they had little regard for each other’s methods. Carrie Chapman Catt was vocally critical of what she termed the NWP’s “entirely separate and often conf licting program.” She disapproved of the group’s insistence on campaigning against all Democrats, even those who supported woman suffrage and of its In 1917, a Colorado woman sent this mespicketing and bonfires in front sage to the National Woman’s Party when of the White House, which Catt her daughter came to Washington to join described as an “unwarranted the pickets in front of the White House, discourtesy to the President and “I have no son to give my country to fight a futile annoyance” to Congress. for democracy abroad, and so I send my In contrast to Paul and the daughter to Washington to fight for democNWP, Catt and her team stressed racy at home.”32 diplomacy and deference (see Document 7 in the appendix).

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They requested rather than demanded support, and they continually reminded Washington decision-makers that NAWSA, not the NWP, represented the heart, the majority, the mainstream of American womanhood. When suffrage passed the crucial vote in the House in 1918, Maud Wood Park spoke for many NAWSA members when she said, “We knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we had Mrs. Catt’s plan and its carrying out by our state organizations to thank for the victory.”33 Alice Paul rarely criticized NAWSA by name, but she and her followers left no doubt that they saw their organization as the primary factor in the suffrage campaign. And they were convinced that it was their approach— the confrontations, the challenges, the demands—that put the federal amendment on the road to victory. For instance, in an implied put-down of NAWSA’s more demure representatives, Inez Haynes Irwin described the NWP’s feisty lobbyists as “an army of young Amazons,” adding pointedly, “They never took ‘No’ for an answer.” Accounting for the president’s belated willingness to support the federal amendment, NWP member Doris Stevens explained, “We knew that he was able to overcome obstacles when his heart and head were set to the task. And since the federal woman suffrage was neither in his head nor his heart, it had been our task to put it there.” As for the picketing of the White House, Stevens asserted that it roused the Government out of its half-century sleep of indifference. It stirred the country to hot controversy. It made zealous friends and violent enemies. It produced the sharply drawn contest which forced the surrender of the Government in the second Administration of President Wilson.34

Read Carrie Chapman Catt’s account of the suffrage campaign (or books by some of her admirers), and you would assume that NAWSA won the vote entirely on its own, despite the interference of Alice Paul and the NWP. Read accounts by Paul’s admirers, and you would assume precisely the reverse. But a close review of the period suggests that each organization played an indispensable role in the campaign. The truth is, many politicians (probably including the president) were impressed by the determination of Alice Paul’s followers, and by the rough treatment they were willing to endure for their cause. These men were also aware that when NWP members were mistreated, the political pressure to address their demands increased. Even a longtime congressional opponent confessed to one NWP member, Your being so annoying and persistent and troublesome and being just like that sand that gets into your eyes when the wind

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blows, is what has put the suffrage amendment on the map. … What your organization has done means this amendment is going through ten years sooner than it ever would have done without you.35

But NAWSA, too, played a significant role in the saga. For one thing, the mounting number of state victories—which Paul always dismissed as a waste of energy—did provide what Catt called the “political dynamite”36 that brought scores of reluctant congressmen into the suffrage column. NAWSA’s work in the states also provided an essential base for the later ratification campaign. Furthermore, plenty of political leaders (including the president) preferred dealing with the well-behaved women from NAWSA. A good number of these men actively disliked what one congressmen referred to as the “damned women” standing with their signs at the White House gate.37 As a result, even when pressure from the NWP was inf luencing their actions, both the president and members of Congress found it easier to support the cause of suffrage because they could think of it as accommodating their friends at NAWSA rather than giving in to pressure which—however effective—they resented. While these events were actually playing out, it certainly appeared that the two suffrage groups were working at cross-purposes. But it is worth remembering that every time Alice Paul’s demonstrators offended someone, they made Catt and NAWSA look like moderates—which might not have been the case if NAWSA had been the only suffrage group around. Each group of suffragists was certain that it was pursuing the only effective path for changing politicians’ minds. But looking back, we can see that what really carried suffrage to victory in 1920 was the combination of these two very different approaches. *** The passage of the 19th amendment represented one of this country’s great civil rights victories, although it is not usually described as such. In fact, it enfranchised more people at one stroke than any other law in American history. Were the suffragists right to pursue the vote so singlemindedly? It certainly did not produce instant equality for women. A century later, that goal is still eluding us. But gaining the vote did represent a major step forward, and it made possible many of the further advances that have been achieved since then. Besides the value of the ultimate prize—the vote—the story of woman suffrage is an important one because of what it meant to the

Living with Woman Suffrage

hundreds of thousands of American women who devoted themselves to this collective endeavor. Even in the final decade of the campaign, the goal often seemed far beyond reach, but the women persevered, stretching their capacities and continually learning new ways to approach that most democratic of tasks: the effort to change the minds of one’s fellow citizens about a matter of vital importance. The rewards of participating in this path-breaking crusade can be seen in this comment, from suffragist Grace J. Clarke in 1913, “Oh, it is good to be alive at this particular time in the world’s history, and it is even better to feel one’s self a part of a great movement for the emancipation of one half of humanity.”38

NOTES 1 Bulletin (Norwich, CT) (November 3, 1920), 1; New Ulm Review (MN) (November 3, 1920), 1. 2 Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore, OK) (November 3, 1920), 8. 3 Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) (November 3, 1920), 6. 4 Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 26, 30. 5 See, for instance, Bernadette Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 129, who reports a total vote of around 28 million, and it was estimated that women’s votes represented about 60 percent of men’s, or about 10.5 million and 17.5 million respectively. 6 Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 20. 7 Richmond Time-Dispatch (VA) (November 3, 1920), 3; Central Record (Lancaster, KY) (November 3, 1920), 1; Schuyler, Weight of Their Votes, 20. 8 Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 381. 9 Ibid., Woman Suffrage and Politics, 386. 10 Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 279. 11 League of Women Voters, at www.lwv.org/about-us/history. 12 Ibid. 13 Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013), 147; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 155. 14 Lunardini, Alice Paul, 150. 15 Equal Rights Amendment, at www.equalrightsamendment.org/. 16 The number of ratifications required had increased by two since the passage of the 19th amendment, because of the addition of Alaska and Hawaii as states. 17 See, for instance, www.equalrightsamendment.org.

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18 Lynda Dodd, “Sisterhood of Struggle: Leadership and Strategy in the Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law, ed. Tracy A. Thomas and Tracey Jean Boisseau (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 200. 19 Sherna Gluck, ed., From Parlor to Prison: Five Suffragists Talk About Their Lives (New York: Vintage, 1976), 98. 20 Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 226; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 66. 21 J. Stanley Lemons, “The Sheppard-Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920s,” Journal of American History, vol. 55, no. 4 (March, 1969), 779. 22 See, for instance, Paul Kleppner, “Were Women to Blame? Female Suffrage and Voter Turnout,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 12, no. 4 (Spring, 1982), 621–643; and Kristi Anderson, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 9–12. 23 William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 30. 24 Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1 ­ 920–1941 (New York: Norton, 1992), 142; Chafe, American Woman, 38; Kathryn Anderson, “Steps to Political Equality: Woman Suffrage and Electoral Politics in the Lives of Emily Newell Blair, Anne Henrietta Martin, and Jeannette Rankin,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (1997), 115. 25 Mrs. Hamer-Jackson, “Interesting Westerners,” Sunset: The Pacific Monthly, no. 35 ( January, 1916), 35. 26 Center for Women in Politics, Rutgers University, Facts: Levels of Office, “Women in Elective Office, 2019,” at www.cawp.rutgers.edu. 27 Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 172; Corinne M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 251. 28 Frances Diodato Bzowski, “Spectacular Suffrage: Or, How Women Came Out of the Home and into the Streets and Theaters of New York City to Win the Vote,” New York History, vol. 76, no. 1 ( January, 1995), 77. 29 Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1964, 1977), 4. 30 Holly J. McCammon, “‘Out of the Parlors and into the Streets’: The Changing Tactical Repertoire of the US Women’s Suffrage Movements,” Social Forces, vol. 81, no. 3 (March, 2003), 791. 31 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009), 168; Ruthe Winegarten and Judith N. McArthur, eds, Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 30. 32 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 183. 33 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 266; J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 266; Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), 153.

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34 Irwin, Story, 334; Doris Stevens, Jailed For Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995 (orig. pub. 1920)), 176, 183. 35 Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle For the Ballot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 233. 36 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 280. 37 Park, Front Door Lobby, 231. 38 Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 78.

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DOCUMENT 1

Arguments For and Against Giving Women the Vote

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   hen we look at the arguments that follow, we can see that the pro-suffrage flier (Document 1a) comes from the later years of the campaign, with its emphasis on the many different kinds of women who can benefit from suffrage, and its focus on how these women will use the vote to improve conditions for themselves and for society. By contrast, the anti-suffrage flier (1b) includes arguments both old and new. Some of the claims on this list had been made continuously since before the Civil War—such as the warning that voting would distract women from their domestic duties, and the assertion that the best women did not want to vote. On the other hand, some of the arguments were more recent, such as the assertion that female voters had not improved conditions in the suffrage states. The final document (1c) can in a sense be said to give equal time to both sides. The 12 listed “reasons” against giving women the vote do accurately echo statements made by various anti-suffragists. But this list, published in the New York Tribune in 1914, was written by Alice Duer Miller, a prolific pro-suffrage author, and it is worded and organized in such a way as to highlight the internal contradictions of the anti-suffragists’ case.

(1A) PRO-SUFFRAGE Why Women Want to Vote Flier circulated in Texas WORKING WOMEN

need the ballot to regulate conditions under which

they work. need the ballot to regulate the sanitary conditions under which they and their families must live.

HOUSEKEEPERS

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MOTHERS need the ballot to regulate the moral conditions under which

their children must be brought up. need the ballot to secure just wages and to inf luence the management of the public schools. BUSINESS WOMEN need the ballot to secure for themselves a fair opportunity in their business. Tax paying WOMEN need the ballot to protect their property. ALL WOMEN need the ballot because they are concerned equally with men in good and bad government; and equally responsible for civic righteousness. ALL MEN need women’s help to build a better and juster government and WOMEN need MEN to help them secure their right to fulfill their civic duties. TEACHERS

(1B) ANTI-SUFFRAGE Why We Do Not Approve of Woman Suffrage Nebraska Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage We feel that the ballot makes absolutely no difference in the economic status of women. Whether she votes or not, her charities, great and small, will continue, professions will extend diplomas to her intelligence, and trade will recompense her ability. As for the protection of the ballot to working women, it will protect them no further than it protects working men who, in spite of their voting power, are unable to cope with labor conditions by legislation and form themselves into unions, outside of law and law making. BECAUSE: Our hospital Boards, our social and civic service work, our child welfare committees and countless other clubs and industries for the general welfare and uplift need women who can give nonpartisan and unselfish service, the worth of which services would be greatly lessened by political affiliation. BECAUSE: Behind law there must always be force to make it effective. If legislation was shaped by a majority of women over men we should soon have, not government, but chaos. BECAUSE: It is an attested fact that politics degrade women more than women purify politics. BECAUSE:

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We believe that American men would speedily remedy all conditions needing reform if urged with half the force now brought to bear in favor of suffrage. BECAUSE: We believe that the interests of all women are as safe in the hands of men as in those of other women. BECAUSE: Thorough investigation of the laws of suffrage states shows that non-suffrage states have by far the better and more humane laws, and that all laws are more strictly enforced than in suffrage states. BECAUSE: We believe that if franchise for women would better general conditions, there would be some evidence of that betterment on states where it has been exercised for twenty and up to forty-four years. BECAUSE: Women make little use of suffrage when it is given them. School suffrage has been a lamentable failure, the women vote averaging scarcely two percent in any state. BECAUSE: The energies of women are engrossed by their present duties and interests, from which men cannot relieve them, and there is great need of better performance of their work rather than diversion to new fields of activity. BECAUSE: The suffrage movement develops sex hatred which is a menace to society. BECAUSE: Of the alliance of suffrage with socialism which advocates free love and institution life for children. … BECAUSE: The great majority of intelligent, refined and educated women do not want enfranchisement. They realize no sense of injustice such as expressed by the small minority of suffragists. They have all the rights and freedom they desire, and consider their present trusts most sacred that none but themselves can perform and that political responsibilities could not be borne by them without the sacrifice of the highest interests of their families and of society. BECAUSE:

(1C)  PARODY OF ANTI-SUFFRAGE ARGUMENTS Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffragist Reasons Alice Duer Miller 1. Because no woman will leave her domestic duties to vote. 2. Because no woman who may vote will attend to her domestic duties.

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3. Because it will make dissension between husband and wife. 4. Because every woman will vote as her husband tells her to. 5. Because bad women will corrupt politics. 6. Because bad politics will corrupt women. 7. Because women have no power of organization. 8. Because women will form a solid party and outvote men. 9. Because men and women are so different that they must stick to different duties. 10. Because men and women are so much alike that men, with one vote each, can represent their own views and ours too. 11. Because women cannot use force. 12. Because the militants did use force.

Sources: Pro-suffrage: Ruthe Winegarten and Judith N. McArthur, eds, Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), p. 32. Anti-suffrage: Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), p. 214. Parody of anti-suffrage arguments: Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, eds, Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 236.

DOCUMENT 2

Campaigning for Suffrage in Washington State and California

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  he adoption of woman suffrage in Washington State in 1910 and California in 1911 represented a turning point in American women’s campaign for the vote, coming after 14 years during which not a single state had passed a suffrage referendum. However, Washington and California were very different states, and their suffrage campaigns differed accordingly. In Washington, the local leader, Emma Smith DeVoe, pursued a “still hunt” strategy, designed to campaign so quietly for votes that the suffrage opponents would hardly notice (see her “Principles” in Document 2a following). DeVoe must have read her state correctly, because the Washington suffragists won their referendum in 1910. California had twice as many people as Washington, its population was considerably more diverse, and its political environment was too contentious for a “still hunt” strategy to succeed. So, taking the opposite tack, the California suffragists set out to put their campaign on the front page of every newspaper, and to put their issue in every voter’s mind. This very different approach is described in Document 2b following. The Californians, too, won their referendum, in 1911. The results in California were a bit closer than in Washington, but to have prevailed at all in this large complicated state captured the attention of suffragists around the country, injecting new energy into the national campaign.

(2A)  WASHINGTON STATE Mrs. Emma Smith DeVoe’s Principles for Guidance in Suffrage Campaigns 1. Keep the issue single. Be for nothing but suffrage; against nothing but anti-suffrage.

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2. Pin your faith to the justice of your cause. It carries conviction. 3. Rely upon facts rather than arguments. 4. Offer affirmative arguments always. Put your opponents on the defensive. 5. Convert the indifferent; there are thousands of them. Let the incorrigible alone; there are only a few. 6. Avoid big meetings, they arouse your enemies. 7. Avoid antagonizing big business, but get the labor vote quietly. 8. Be confident of winning. 9. Try to have every voter in the state asked by some woman to vote for the amendment; this will carry it. 10. Always be good natured and cheerful.

(2B) CALIFORNIA The Winning of California James Stewart The winning of California for political equality for women is a stirring story. … Although only six months have elapsed since the passing of the act authorizing the submission of the question to the voters, the women of California met the demands upon them in a remarkably efficient manner. Organization was followed after the most approved methods. In the city of Los Angeles, for example, the Political Equality League (enrolling in a brief time some 2,500 workers) established suffrage organizations under able chairmen in more than a hundred precincts of the city, for the enlistment of campaign workers and for general educational work among the men and women of the precinct. The Central Suffrage Committee was formed of fifteen organizations in Los Angeles county. San Francisco was also a great centrifugal center for organized work by the women. There was the old State Woman Suffrage Association, the union of the many small clubs which have been in more or less active life since 1896; the Woman’s Suffrage Party, with its district organization on regular political lines; the College Women’s Suffrage League of 200 members; the Club Woman’s Franchise League; the Equal Suffrage League; the Votes for Women Club; the Susan B. Anthony Club; and last, but not least, the active Wage-Earners’ League, which secured the endorsement of almost every labor union. These organizations held an inter-league conference every week to sub-divide the work and to prevent overlapping of effort. A delegate from each of the five largest societies formed the general campaign committee.

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In addition, there were formed men’s leagues which rendered conspicuous service. “Get together” meetings were held, and all the fifty different state bodies worked in accord for the single aim—the ballot. … The campaign methods were unique and varied. … Not content with suffrage literature on library tables, … or with suffrage posters across the streets and on the bill boards of the highways and the byways, the leaders took to the realms of the air to distribute “Votes for Women” confetti [and] pamphlets. … On July 4, at Luna Park, one of the largest pleasure parks of the state, representatives from the three largest suffrage groups sailed to a height of 2,200 feet in a monster balloon and threw the suffrage literature out onto the wind, cheered by thousands of people. The moving picture theatres showed suffrage films, a suffrage speaker explaining the slides. Thousands of store show windows all over the state were decorated with suffrage colors, books, posters, and cards, asking the voters to remember the suffrage amendment. Suffrage teas, luncheons, plays, and vaudeville entertainments were the order everywhere. A “woman’s day” was held at the state fair and at many local fairs. … The Men’s League sent over half a million pamphlets to every voter and 10,000 letters to farmers. Literature was distributed in many languages by the College Suffrage Association, whose workers were most active in speaking and organizing. … Auto tours were conducted and open-air meetings were held everywhere during the summer. The press was supplied with suffrage news and logic. During the last twelve weeks of the campaign attention was concentrated on registration. Automobiles with suffrage pennants f lying whirled all day election day, carrying voters to the polls. The women won a majority of votes at the polls, thus carrying the amendment, which went into effect immediately. Sources: Washington: Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015), in picture section. California: James A. Stewart, “The Winning of California,” Journal of Education, vol. 74, no. 18 (November 9, 1911), 480–481.

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DOCUMENT 3

Suffrage at Home and in the Workplace

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   hen Marianne Moore wrote the following letter (3a), she was a middle-class schoolteacher and Bryn Mawr College graduate, living with her mother in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; she would later become one of America’s bestknown poets. When Caroline Lowe testified before Congress (Document 3b), she was a Socialist labor organizer; she would later earn a law degree and make headlines defending one of the most radical labor organizations of the day, the International Workers of the World. Despite these two women’s very different lives, they shared one thing: a conviction that American women needed the vote.

(3A)  SUFFRAGE FOR THE HOME-MAKER A Plea for Suffrage Marianne Moore (Letter to the Editor, 1915) Among unthinking citizens, the anti-suffrage slogan, “Woman’s place is in the home,” is regarded as a clinching reason for not giving her the vote. When one stops to analyze the catch phrase, however, the fact which it sets forth—that woman’s place is in the home—makes it one of the strongest possible reasons for giving her a voice in the government. For during the past fifty years the home interests have been projected into politics in so many different ways that to deny woman the protection of the ballot is to deprive her of the most effective weapon that exists for preserving the onslaughts of the corrupt and the vicious. … Every sane and fair-minded citizen knows that politics comes into our homes every hour of the day and every day of the year. Let us consider just a few of the ways that politics enters:

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Politics comes in with the butcher when he brings the meat for dinner. This meat, instead of being butchered and cured on our own property, as was done in the days of our great-grandparents, has been prepared for us by the big “beef trust,” under conditions controlled by politics, and if politics are corrupt or careless, chances are that we are getting tainted meat that will bring sickness to some members of the family. Politics comes into the home with every pipe line of water. When we turn on the water spigot a whole stream of politics f lows into our home. Having no voice in politics, the women cannot say whether it shall be a clean stream or a dirty stream, but if it is a dirty stream and brings typhoid germs to the children, it is up to the mother to nurse them through the fever—and sometimes see them die. … Are mothers not vitally interested in such matters? Why then, continue to deny them a voice in the making of the laws that control such conditions? Miss M. M.

(3B)  SUFFRAGE FOR THE WORKING WOMAN Congressional Testimony Caroline Lowe (1912) Gentlemen of the committee, it is as wage earner and on behalf of the 7,000,000 wage-earning women of the United States that I wish to speak. I entered the ranks of the wage earners when 18 years of age. Since then I have earned every cent of the cost of my own maintenance, and for several years was a potent factor in the support of my widowed mother. … We need the ballot for the purpose of self-protection. Last Saturday afternoon, at the closing hour at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, a young woman cashier fell on the f loor in a dead faint and was carried away by her fellow workers. Long hours of the rush and strain of the Saturday shopping had overcome her. … Does the young woman cashier in Marshall Field’s need any voice in making the law that sets the hours of labor that shall constitute a day’s work? In the Boston Store, at the same hour, a delicate slip of a girl employed as an inspector was on the verge of a hysterical breakdown. The f loor woman, in all kindness, said to her: “My dear, it is useless to feel like this now. The busy season is just beginning, and you will have to stand it.” Receiving a wage of $4.50 a week, has this girl any need of a voice in demanding a minimum-wage law?

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Has the young woman whose scalp was torn from her head at the Lawrence mill any need of a law demanding that safety appliances be placed upon all dangerous machinery? … Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, the time is ripe for the extension of the franchise to women. We do not come before you to beg you to grant us a favor; we come presenting to you a glorious opportunity to place yourselves abreast of the current of this great evolutionary movement. You can refuse to accept this opportunity, and you may, for a moment, delay the movement, but only as the old woman who, with her tiny broom, endeavored to sweep back the incoming tide from the sea. If today, taking your places as men of affairs in the world’s progress, you step out in unison with the eternal upward trend toward true democracy, you will support the suffrage amendment now before your committee. Sources: Homemaker: Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, eds, Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pp. 239–240. Working Woman: Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, eds, One-Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 122–126.

DOCUMENT 4

The Congressional Union Announces Its Arrival

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   hen Alice Paul was appointed to chair the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Washington DC, it was understood that she would commit herself full time to promoting the passage of a federal suffrage amendment. But Paul knew that the bulk of NAWSA’s energies were devoted to state suffrage campaigns. So, to give herself more freedom of action, and to ensure that all the funds that she herself raised went to the federal campaign, she formed a new separate organization, the Congressional Union, with its own journal, The Suffragist. In the journal’s maiden issue (November, 1913), the lead editorial (written by Paul’s co-chair, Lucy Burns) made it unmistakably clear that an assertive new voice had joined the chorus of women demanding the vote.

The Federal Amendment Lucy Burns Women are continually being told that their enfranchisement is only a matter of time. Naturally, then, the only question that should interest them is, “What time?” To that question suffragists have only one answer, “Now.” There is no reason why we should wait indefinitely for enfranchisement. The question of self-government for women should have closed with the nineteenth century. It is a disgrace that in America the twentieth century should find us still politically unfree. If the vote were given to us today, it would still be too late, still be an act of delayed justice. There is now no constitutional reason which prohibits Congress from acting on our question at once, and women should be satisfied with nothing less than immediate action.

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We are perpetually being told that we must wait for the passage of one or another political reform. But we should make a capital mistake in disposing ourselves to an attitude of patient waiting. No reform is more fundamental than that of woman suffrage, since it touches the question of human liberty. No reform is more urgent, or attacks greater evils, or has been the object of more widespread and continuous activity. Until women vote, every piece of legislation undertaken by the administration is an act of injustice to them. All laws affect the interests of women, and should not be enacted and put into execution without the cooperation and consent of women. From the practical standpoint, a waiting policy would be a fatal policy. A movement is not really alive which does not ask for immediate action. … One thing we may be sure of—until we ask for instant action, no one else will ask for it. It is true that women are never at any time asked to wait long. They are only advised by their friends to concentrate their efforts on the next session, the present one being so occupied with matters of “urgent political interest.” To the average busy politician the next session is apparently a yawning gap—a long interval of peaceful idleness, when members of Congress can fold their arms and say, “Now, let us see what we can do for the ladies!” … There is no more reason why we should wait in the present session than in every session throughout the history of our country. Congress can act now, and will act now, if all the men and women in America who already believe in self-government for women will unite to demand it. Source: Lucy Burns, “A Federal Amendment Now,” The Suffragist, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 15, 1913), p. 3.

DOCUMENT 5

Taking On the Party in Power

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  f there was one principle that the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) held sacred, it was the practice of working with friends of suffrage on both sides of the political aisle. NAWSA leaders were thus horrified when Alice Paul announced in 1914 that, because the Democrats were the party in power (having control of the White House as well as both houses of Congress), and because they were providing no leadership in getting the federal suffrage amendment passed, the Congressional Union (CU) would campaign against every Democrat (even those who supported suffrage) in the congressional elections that fall. The arena for the CU’s campaign was the group of nine western states where women had won the vote. Over the summer, Paul recruited 16 women—mostly single, all in their 20s—to spend two months traveling through the suffrage states, persuading local women to vote against the Democrats in November. The organizers pursued their assignments with cheerful energy, as can be seen in the selections from their field notes reprinted next. In the end, 23 of the 43 Democrats running in the suffrage states were defeated. The CU campaign had been only one contributing factor in those defeats, but Paul was convinced that it had achieved enough to persuade Democratic leaders in Washington that woman suffrage was an issue they could not afford to ignore.

Reports from the Field, Fall 1914 Jessie Hardy Stubbs—On the train headed west Here we are—all bound for the field of battle …We have put up signs in each car that there will be a meeting tonight in the observation car, and that we will speak on the record of the Democratic Party in Congress and Women Suffrage. There is much interest. We have sold ten Suffragists today on board the train, secured new subscribers to the Suffragist, and contributions for the campaign.

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Lola Trax—Kansas The meeting at Lebanon was especially well advertised. The moving picture shows had run an advertising slide; the Wednesday prayer meeting had announced my coming, and the Public Schools had also made announcements to their pupils. The Ladies’ Aid Society invited me to speak in the afternoon, while they were quilting; and thus another anti-Suffrage argument was shattered; for quilting and politics went hand in hand. At Philipsburg the meeting was on the Court House green. It is fiftyseven miles from Phillipsburg to Osborne and the trip has to be made by freight. I was on the road from six-thirty o’clock in the morning until three p.m. About a dozen passengers were in the caboose on the freight, and we held a meeting and discussion which lasted about forty-five minutes. Upon reaching Osborne at three o’clock I found about one hundred people assembled for an auction sale in the middle of the street. … The urge to hold a meeting overcame fatigue. I jumped into an automobile nearby and had a most interested crowd until the auctioneer came.

Lola Trax—Kansas When I reached Great Bend, the streets were crowded with guests who had come to the Barton County Fair. It seemed best to have an open air meeting. The crowd was tense with interest, and after the record of the Democratic Party had been given and our election policy presented, they burst into spontaneous applause. … And thus it has been all along the way.

Helen Hill Weed—Idaho Today at noon I addressed a meeting of all the chambermaids in the hotel and they were enthusiastic about the help they could render the eastern working women through their vote. Many of the women had worked in the East under bad conditions before they came out here, but they had never stopped to think that they, by the use of their vote out here, could help the women in the East. I am to address a meeting which is being arranged by the waitresses in the hotel tomorrow evening. I have been invited to speak before a number of women’s organizations. I have mailed a copy of the current number of the Suffragist together with a complete set of our literature to every editor, every club president, and to all the candidates for office of all parties in the present election.

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Anna McCue—Washington Most of the leading club women are talking for us in Tacoma. I am to speak at a large meeting got up by the Charlotte Gilman Club in Tacoma next Wednesday and think the Progressives will have a large non-partisan meeting in the afternoon. We have arranged several outdoor meetings.

Gertrude Hunter—Wyoming The meeting last Saturday night was most encouraging. It was a stormy night, and we went in an auto twenty miles from here, through snow banks, and every other difficulty to a rally at a ranch home. … Every one was wildly enthusiastic over the meeting, even the Democratic women telling me how much they appreciated our position. We had a dance immediately after, and I danced with the voters (male) until one-thirty in the morning, when we were all taken to the railroad station in a lumber wagon and four-horse team. … Came in on a train at two-thirty a.m. I sold twenty Suffragists and could have disposed of more if I had had them with me. Source: “Congressional Election Campaign” column, The Suffragist (September 19, 1914; October 10, 1914; October 24, 1914; and October 31, 1914).

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DOCUMENT 6

Carrie Chapman Catt Introduces Her “Winning Plan”

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 n September 1916, Carrie Chapman Catt called the membership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to an “emergency convention” in Atlantic City NJ. Speaking in closed session to the Executive Council, and then a few days later to the general membership, Catt urged that NAWSA adopt her “Winning Plan,” which had the potential, she said, to achieve nationwide suffrage within the next six years. “The woman’s hour has struck!” Catt proclaimed. It was time to seize victory with both hands. Carrying out the Plan would require a dramatic change of direction for NAWSA. First, instead of focusing most of its energies on state-level suffrage, the organization would turn its primary attention to the campaign for the federal amendment. Second, instead of operating as a loose affiliation of 48 relatively autonomous state associations, NAWSA would transform itself into a tightly-disciplined army, with each state carrying out precisely the tasks assigned to it in the overall plan ( for more on the Winning Plan, see Chapter 3, pp. 67–68). In the end, nearly every state delegation in the hall signed on to the plan. And from then on, NAWSA became a major player in the campaign to pass the federal amendment.

Speech to the NAWSA Executive Council Carrie Chapman Catt (September 5, 1916) (excerpts) The Congressional work in Washington for the last six months cost $5,000. What are the results? An honest, reliable poll of the Congress and the absolute assurance that the Amendment cannot go through! We have gained the long sought planks in all party platforms, but those of the dominant ones tell us to go to the States. We have brought the demand of a great public opinion, and the achievement of one-fourth of the States won for full suffrage. It should be a sufficient mandate from the country,

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and the time has come to complete the campaign for the enfranchisement of women by the Federal Amendment. This has always been the plan. The time to turn back from the States to Congress is here. The facts are that the Congress does not recognize woman suffrage as an issue in its own constituencies, and now regards the issue as dismissed from Washington responsibility. … Nothing short of a campaign in every constituency will give our committee in Washington the authority to get the Amendment submitted [to the states]. There can be no serene, undisturbed army at home resting on its arms and yet expecting victory in the nation’s Capitol. There is one way to bring the Federal Amendment and only one, a solemn compact signed by the auxiliaries of at least thirty-six States that they will turn the full power of their organizations into the fight to secure the submission of the Amendment and ratification by their Legislatures. … There must be at least thirty-six State armies, alert, intelligent, never pausing, and they must move in the fixed formation demanded by the national strategy adopted. We already have the members, but many members consider themselves “reserve forces.” This is the time to call them all out. Do not forget that we cannot win with thirty-five States. It must be thirty-six. What will you do?

“The Crisis” – Speech to the NAWSA General Session Carrie Chapman Catt (September 9, 1916) (excerpts) Our cause has been caught in a snarl of constitutional obstructions and inadequate election laws. We have a right to appeal to our Congress to extricate our cause from this tangle. If there is any chivalry left, this is the time for it to come forward and do an act of simple justice. The women of this land not only have the right to sit on the steps of Congress until it acts but it is their self-respecting duty to insist upon their enfranchisement by that route. But, let me implore you, sister women, not to imagine a Federal Amendment is an easy process of enfranchisement. There is no quick, short cut to our liberty. The Federal Amendment means a simultaneous campaign in forty-eight States. It demands organization in every precinct; activity, agitation, education in every corner. It means an appeal to the voters only a little less general than is required in a referendum. Nothing less than this nationwide, vigilant, incessant campaigning will win the ratification. A few women here and there have dropped out from State work in the fond delusion that there is no need of work if the Federal Amendment

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is to be the aim. I hold such women to be more dangerous enemies of our cause than the known opponents. State work alone can carry the Amendment through Congress and through the ratifications. There must be no shirkers, no cowards, no backsliders these coming months. The army in every State must grow larger and larger. The activity must grow livelier and ever more lively. The reserves must be aroused and set to work. Women arise: demand the vote! Source: Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), pp. 261–263.

DOCUMENT 7

Instructions for Lobbying Congress

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 n January, 1917, Maud Wood Park accepted Carrie Chapman Catt’s invitation to serve as head of NAWSA’s congressional lobbying team in Washington DC. Back in 1900, Park had attended her first NAWSA meeting and—noticing how few young women were present—made up her mind to organize her own generation for suffrage; she subsequently founded the College Equal Suffrage Association. Now, nearly 20 years later, she was in the vanguard of NAWSA’s re-energized campaign for the federal amendment. Supervising a team of dozens of workers coming and going from different parts of the country, Park established an operation that reporters began calling ”the Front-Door Lobby,” in tribute to its freedom from back-room dealing. Park soon found a mentor to guide her in her dealings with Congress: NAWSA vice-president Helen Gardener (see Chapter 4, p. 85). Park’s memoir about these years includes many examples of Gardener’s lessons in diplomacy. On one occasion, for example, a congressional ally told the two women—incorrectly, as they knew—that an action they were requesting was against House procedure. Park was about to contradict him, but Gardener stopped her, knowing that this particular man would never forgive them for catching him out on a matter of law. Instead, later that day Mrs. Gardener pointed out the correct legal passage to the congressman’s male secretary, who subsequently drew it to his boss’ attention. The congressman quietly dropped his procedural objection. Park’s “Instructions for Lobbyists,” shown next, clearly bear the mark of Gardener’s training.

Directions for Lobbyists Maud Wood Park I. PREPARATION

1. Read our records of each member before calling on him. Also read biographical sketch in Congressional Directory. Records must not be taken from office.

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2. Provide yourself with small directory. Your own representative is the best source of supply.

II. INTERVIEWING

1. If the member appears busy ask whether he would prefer to see you at some other time. 2. Be courteous no matter what provocation you may seem to have to be otherwise. 3. If possible learn the secretary’s name and have a little talk with him or her. The secretary, if inclined to be interested, should be invited to headquarters. 4. If the member is known to be in favor show that you realize that fact and ask him for advice and help with the rest of the delegation. This point is very important. 5. Be sure to keep his party constantly in mind while talking with him. 6. Be a good listener. Don’t interrupt. 7. Try to avoid prolonged or controversial argument. It is likely to confirm them in their own opinion. 8. Do not stay so long that the member has to give the signal for departure. 9. Take every possible means to prevent a member from committing himself definitely against the Federal Amendment. This is most important. 10. Leave the way open for another interview if you have failed to convince him. 11. If the member is inclined to be favorable invite him and his family to headquarters. 12. Remember to hold each interview confidential. Never quote what one member has said to you to another member. It is not safe to talk of your lobby experiences before outsiders or before servants. We can never know by what route our stories may get back to the member and injure our cause with him. We cannot be too cautious in this matter.

III. REPORTS

1. Do not make notes in offices or halls. 2. Do find opportunity to make notes on one interview before starting another. If necessary, step into the “Ladies” dressing room to do this. 3. Write full report of your interview on the same day giving—

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a. Name and State of member. b. Date and hour of interview. c. Names of lobbyists and name of person making report. d. Member’s argument in detail, especially with view to follow-up work. e. Any information you may glean about his family or friends that may be useful to the Washington Committee. f. Hand-written report to Miss Bain, not later than the day following the interview. g. Promptness in turning in reports is most important in order that lists and polls may be kept up to date.

In later years, writing about her experience as a NAWSA lobbyist, Park reprinted the rules shown previously, and then commented, When I was sufficiently familiar with the work to have a little sense of humor about it, I condensed those rules into a series of ‘don’ts’: •• •• •• •• •• •• •• ••

Don’t nag Don’t boast Don’t threaten Don’t lose your temper Don’t stay too long Don’t talk about your work where you can be overheard. Don’t give the member interviewed an opportunity to declare himself against the amendment. Don’t do anything to close the door to the next advocate of suffrage.

Source: Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), pp. 38–39, 121–122.

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DOCUMENT 8

A White House Picket Describes the “Night of Terror”

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  rom the time the Congressional Union was founded in 1913 through the time when it was reorganized as the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in the spring of 1917, its demonstrations on behalf of the federal suffrage amendment were often disruptive, but they rarely trespassed beyond what they described as “mild militancy.” Even the picketing of the White House during the winter of 1917 seemed to fall within the bounds of acceptable activism. But the public attitude changed after America entered World War I in April, 1917, not only because the picketing continued, but because the women were carrying increasingly provocative banners, challenging the very idea that President Wilson was a fit spokesman for democratic ideals. All through the summer and fall of 1917, the pickets were subjected to bouts of mob violence, frequent arrests, and harsh treatment as prisoners. The account following, by 73-year-old suffragist Mary Nolan, describes the pickets’ grim experience at the Occoquan Workhouse on the night of November 14, 1917. Nolan’s account, quickly disseminated by the National Woman’s Party, helped precipitate a dramatic change in government policy. A few weeks after the so-called “Night of Terror,” every one of the NWP prisoners was released, and all charges against them were dismissed (see also Chapter 4, p. 94).

That “Night of Terror,” November 14, 1917 Mary Nolan I was giving all my time to Red Cross work … when I first heard of Alice Paul—that they had put her in prison with those others. They were suffering and fighting for all of us. When Mrs. Gould and Miss Younger asked Florida women to go to Washington to help, I volunteered. I am seventy-three, but except for my lame foot I was well. …

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I picketed three times with these splendid women, carrying a purple, white and gold suffrage f lag. The third time we spent the night in the [workhouse] because we refused to give bail. … It was about half past seven at night when we got to Occoquan Workhouse. A woman was standing behind a desk when we were brought into this office and there were six men also in the room. Mrs. Lewis, who spoke for all of us, refused to talk to the woman—who, I learned, was Mrs. Herndon—and said she must speak to Mr. Whittaker, the superintendent of the place. “You’ll sit here all night then,” said Mrs. Herndon. … Mrs. Herndon called my name, but I did not answer. “You had better answer or it will be the worse for you,” said one man. “I’ll take you and handle you, and you’ll be sorry you made me,” said another. The police woman who came with us begged us to answer to our names. We could see she was afraid. Suddenly the door literally burst open and Whittaker rushed in like a tornado; some men followed him. We could see the crowds of them on the porch. They were not in uniform. They looked as much like tramps as anything. They seemed to come in—and in—and in. … Mrs. Lewis stood up—we had been sitting and lying on the f loor; we were so tired—but she had hardly begun to speak, saying we demanded to be treated as political prisoners when Whittaker said: “You shut up! I have men here glad to handle you. Seize her!” I just saw men spring toward her and some one screamed, “They have taken Mrs. Lewis,” when a man sprang at me, and caught me by the shoulder. I am used to being careful of my bad foot and I remember saying, “I’ll come with you; don’t drag me; I have a lame foot.” But I was jerked down the steps and away into the dark. I didn’t have my feet on the ground; I guess that saved me. I heard Mrs. Cosu, who was being dragged after me, call, “Be careful of your foot.” It was very black. The other building, as we came to it, was low and dark. I only remember the American f lag f lying above because it caught the light from a window in a wing. We were rushed into a large room that we found opened on a long hall with brick dungeons on each side. “Punishment cells” is what they call them. They are dungeons. Mine was filthy; it had no window save a little slit at the top and no furniture but a sheet-iron bed and an open toilet f lushed from outside the cell. In the hall outside was a man called Captain Reems. He had on a uniform and was brandishing a stick as thick as my fist and shouting as we were shoved into the corridor. “Damn you, get in here!” I saw Dorothy Day brought in. She is a very slight girl. The two men were twisting her arms above her head. Then suddenly they lifted her up and banged her

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down over the arm of an iron bench—twice. As they ran past me she was lying there with her arms out, and I heard one of the men yell, “The _ suffrager! My mother ain’t no suffrager. I’ll put you through _.” At the end of the corridor they pushed me through a door. I lost my balance and fell on the iron bed. Mrs. Cosu struck the wall. Then they threw in two mats and two dirty blankets. There was no light but from the corridor. The door was barred from top to bottom. The walls were brick cemented over. It was bitter cold. … We had only lain there a few minutes trying to get our breath when Mrs. Lewis, doubled over and handled like a sack of something, was literally thrown in by two men. Her head struck the iron bed and she fell. We thought she was dead. She didn’t move. We were crying over her as we lifted her to the bed and stretched her out, when we heard Miss Burns call: “Where is Mrs. Lewis?” Mrs. Cosu called out, “They’ve just thrown her in here.” We were roughly told by the guard not to dare to speak again, or we would be put in straight-jackets. We were so terrified we kept very still. Mrs. Lewis was not unconscious; she was only stunned. But Mrs. Cosu was desperately ill as the night wore on. She had a bad heart attack, and then vomiting. We called and called. We asked them to send our doctor because we thought she was dying; there was a woman guard and a man in the corridor, but they paid no attention. A cold wind blew in on us from the outside, and we all lay there shivering and only half conscious until early morning. … I was released on the sixth day, and passed the dispensary as I came out. There were a group of my friends, Mrs. Brannan and Mrs. Morey and several others. They had on coarse striped dresses and big grotesque heavy shoes. I burst into tears as they led me away, my term having expired. I didn’t want to desert them like that, but I had done all I could. Source: Mary Nolan, “’That Night of Terror,’ November, 14, 1917,” Suffragist, vol. 5, no. 97 (December 1, 1917), p. 7.

DOCUMENT 9

The President Comes Through for Suffrage

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  t took the suffragists five years of lobbying and protesting before Woodrow Wilson made up his mind to state firmly and publicly that the US Constitution should include an amendment giving women the vote. When he finally took that step, in the speech to the Senate that follows, he failed to win the support he was aiming for—nine more months would pass before the Senate finally approved the suffrage amendment. Nevertheless, Wilson’s speech is an important document for two reasons. First, it marks the culmination of his slow conversion to suffrage, from evading the issue in 1913, to a personal vote for state suffrage in 1915, to discreet backing of the 19th amendment during the House vote in January, 1918, to this fullthroated endorsement in September, 1918. Second, his speech eloquently presents the two new arguments for woman suffrage that emerged during World War I— that women deserved the vote as a reward for their service during the conflict, and that America needed to give its women the vote in order to justify the country’s international role as the voice of democracy.

Address to the Senate President Woodrow Wilson (September 30, 1918) GENTLEMEN OF THE SENATE : The unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view not only of our own people and our own consciences but also in the view of all nations and peoples will, I hope, justify in your thought, as it does in mine, the message I have come to bring you. I regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged. … It is my duty to win the

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war and to ask you to remove every obstacle that stands in the way of winning it. … This is a peoples’ war and the peoples’ thinking constitutes its atmosphere and morale, not the predilections of the drawing room or the political considerations of the caucus. If we be indeed democrats and wish to lead the world to democracy, we can ask other peoples to accept in proof of our sincerity … nothing less persuasive and convincing than our actions. Our professions will not suffice. Verification must be forthcoming when verification is asked for. And in this case verification is asked for … You ask by whom? … It is not alone the voices of statesmen and of newspapers that reach me, and the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all. Through many, many channels I have been made aware what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war falls. They are looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject measures like this, … they will cease to believe in us; they will cease to follow or to trust us. … We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right? This war could not have been fought, either by the other nations engaged or by America, if it had not been for the services of the women. … We shall not only be distrusted but shall deserve to be distrusted if we do not enfranchise them with the fullest possible enfranchisement, as it is now certain that the other great free nations will enfranchise them. … The women of America are too noble and too intelligent and too devoted to be slackers whether you give or withhold this thing that is mere justice; but I know the magic it will work in their thoughts and spirits if you give it them. I propose it as I would propose to admit soldiers to the suffrage, the men fighting in the field for our liberties and the liberties of the world, were they excluded. The tasks of the women lie at the very heart of the war, and I know how much stronger that heart will beat if you do this just thing and show our women that you trust them as much as you in fact and of necessity depend upon them. … I tell you plainly, as the commander-in-chief of our armies and of the gallant men in our f leets, as the present spokesman of this people in our dealings with the men and women throughout the world who are now our partners, as the responsible head of a great government which stands and is questioned day by day as to its purposes, its principles, its

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hopes, … —I tell you plainly that this measure which I urge upon you is vital to the winning of the war and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle. And not to the winning of the war only. It is vital to the right solution of the great problems which we must settle, and settle immediately, when the war is over. We shall need then in our vision of affairs, as we have never needed them before, the sympathy and insight and clear moral instinct of the women of the world. … Without their counsellings we shall be only half wise. That is my case. This is my appeal. Many may deny its validity, if they choose, but no one can brush aside or answer the arguments upon which it is based. The executive tasks of this war rest upon me. I ask that you lighten them and place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments, which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ. Source: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Digital Edition, ed. Arthur S. Link, at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys= WILS-chron-1910-1918-09-30-1.

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DOCUMENT 10

Two Visions for the Future

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  n August 26, 1920, after being ratified by 36 states, the 19th amendment was officially certified as a part of the US Constitution. Both of the leading suffrage organizations—the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP)—were then faced with the same profound question: “What next?” NAWSA had already begun to answer that question by reorganizing itself as the League of Women Voters. But when NAWSA’s longtime leader Carrie Chapman Catt wrote the editorial shown next (10a), her words suggested that she felt torn between two competing priorities for the future. On the one hand, Catt stressed the importance of the League of Women Voters, but her concern for world peace also came through strongly. In the final paragraphs of the editorial, Catt cited some recent examples of intolerance towards radicals in the United States. And instead of identifying this behavior as an American problem, Catt interpreted it as evidence of a global challenge. She ended her editorial by calling for a kind of international women’s crusade against intolerance. A few months after Catt wrote these words, Alice Paul published her own editorial (10b), in preparation for the National Woman’s Party’s first post-suffrage convention. Instead of the tension that Catt’s editorial revealed between national and international concerns, Paul’s editorial presented one single America-focused argument. She declared that although American women had now won political equality, many other forms of gender discrimination remained. Combating these inequalities, she wrote, must become the NWP’s new mission. Paul did not, at this point, propose an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, but it is easy to see how that could follow from her argument here.

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These differing visions—offered by the two principal leaders of the suffrage movement’s final decade—suggest the array of choices that lay before America’s newly-enfranchised female voters as they contemplated the future.

(10A)  CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT’S VISION By Way of a New Beginning Woman’s Journal, August 28, 1920 The final triumph of suffrage means opportunity for more work and added responsibility. It is too belated for it to come with any shock of surprise. We have long been ready for it. We are ready for the work that lies on ahead of us. Since votes for women is now an accomplished fact, what are the women going to do with the vote? Are they going to draw back their skirts in disdain from all interest in politics on the ground that it is corrupt? Are they going to join the army of kid-gloved men slackers whom we have heard proudly boast that they would not touch politics with a ten-inch pole? Or, are they going to be of those who will help swell America’s army of voters, who put conscience and thought into the scales with party politics and party candidates? It was to help the new woman voter find her way through the maze of these besetting questions that the National League of Women Voters was formed. The League is not encouraging women to leave their parties, for it is through the political parties that we must work. They furnish us with the machinery through which we are enabled to reach the public, create public consciousness, and keep the public informed. Neither state nor nation should temporize with the problems of government before them. Lynchings, compelling the kissing of the American f lag, deportations do not meet the situation. The nation is suffering from having so long kept the tools of government from women. … We must set our strong American shoulders against intolerance wherever it may be. Intolerance anywhere will cause the crumbling of any foundation. The great war was the result of many causes, but after all the one great cause was intolerance. … Let us unite upon that principle and give our efforts, our every thought and energy to making this everybody’s world.

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(10B)  ALICE PAUL’S VISION Editorial The Suffragist (January, 1921) When the women of the United States first met to consider their position in the state and in human society, they drew up a Bill of Rights which— without power of any kind, political or economic, but with inspired determination—they started out to secure. Almost seventy-three years from the date of that first convention, the women of the United States again meet to consider where they stand. During these seventy-three years, women have won the right without which all others are insecure, the right of a full and equal voice in the government under which they live. … At that first convention in 1848, one of the resolutions unanimously adopted read: “RESOLVED, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance by asserting that they have all the rights they want.” This resolution still applies to the women of today. They have gained much since 1848, but they have made their gains piecemeal; rights which they possess in one state, they do not possess in another. This … makes it very difficult to secure accurate information in regard to their legal status, but enough facts have been collected to prove that the “present position” is not “satisfactory.” Many of the laws against which the early convention protested continue to exist to the detriment and humiliation of women. Discriminations persist in the universities. Women are far from enjoying equality in the trades and professions. They are discriminated against by the Government itself in the Civil Service regulations. They do not share in all political offices, honors and emoluments; there is in one state at least a law which prevents women from holding office at all. They have not attained complete equality in marriage or equal rights as married women over their property or even in the matter of the guardianship of their children. … There is danger that because of a great victory women will believe their whole struggle for independence ended. They have still far to go. ***

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During the years that followed the writing of these two editorials, Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt committed themselves to three organizations—Paul to the post-suffrage National Woman’s Party; Catt to the League of Women Voters, as well as to the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War—a peace organization she founded in 1924. None of these groups attracted anything like the mass participation that the suffrage movement had achieved during its peak years. But the larger goals these organizations were meant to address still live on. As articulated in the editorials shown previously, these goals are: the need for women’s full and active participation in American politics, the pursuit of equal rights for women in all aspects of our national life, and the search for world peace. Nearly a century after Catt and Paul wrote their editorials, the ideas that moved them continue to inspire American women. And if having won the vote did not magically achieve these goals, it has proved to be an indispensable asset in trying to address them. Sources: Carrie Chapman Catt, Woman Citizen 5 (August 28, 1920), p. 5; Alice Paul, The Suffragist vol. 9, no. 1 (January–February, 1921), p. 339.

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  or more images, as well as links to further information about suffrage online, go to eResources, at www.routledge.com/9781138044883.

Adams, Katherine H. and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Addams, Jane, “Women’s Conscience and Social Amelioration” (1908), in The Jane Addams Reader, Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 252–265. Adickes, Sandra, “Sisters, Not Demons: The Inf luence of British Suffragists on the American Suffrage Movement,” Women’s History Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), 675–690. Anderson, Kathryn, “Steps to Political Equality: Woman Suffrage and Electoral Politics in the Lives of Emily Newell Blair, Anne Henrietta Martin, and Jeannette Rankin,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (1997), 101–121. Anderson, Kristi, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Baker, Jean H., ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York; Oxford University Press, 2002). Baker, Jean H., Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). Blair, Karen J., The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980). Blatch, Harriot Stanton and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: Putnam, 1940). Blight, David W., Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). Buechler, Steven M., The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Bzowski, Frances Diodato, “Spectacular Suffrage: Or, How Women Came Out of the Home and into the Streets and Theaters of New York City to Win the Vote,” New York History, vol. 76, no. 1 ( January, 1995), 56–94.

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Cahill, Bernadette, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015). Catt, Carrie Chapman and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1926). Ceaser, James W., Glen E. Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph M. Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2 (Spring, 1981), 158–171. Chafe, William H., The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, ad Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). Chapman, Mary and Angela Mills, eds., Treacherous Texts: U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Clift, Eleanor, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003). Cooney, Robert P. J. Jr., ed., Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement (Santa Cruz, CA: American Graphic Press, 2005). Cooper, John Milton Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009). Corder, J. Kevin and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University, 2016). Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Davis, Sue, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Dodd, Lynda, “Sisterhood of Struggle: Leadership and Strategy in the Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law, Tracy A. Thomas and Tracey Jean Boisseau, ed. (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 189–205. Dodge, Mrs Arthur M., “Woman Suffrage Opposed to Women’s Rights,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 56 (November, 1914), 99–104. DuBois, Ellen Carol, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992). DuBois, Ellen Carol, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Egge, Sarah, “‘Strewn Knee Deep in Literature’: A Material Analysis of Print Propaganda and Woman Suffrage,” Agricultural History, vol. 88, no. 4 (Fall, 2014), 591–605. Finnegan, Margaret, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Flanagan, Maureen A., America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Flexner, Eleanor and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, 1975; enlarged edition, 1996). Ford, Linda G., Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912–1920 (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1991).

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Index

abolition movement 7–10, 12 Addams, Jane 33–4, 56, 82, 131–2 African-Americans 9, 13–15, 25–6, 50, 117–18; women 12, 26, 117, 129, 132, 139; see also Suffragists: African-Americans Alpha Suffrage Club 51, 106 American Equal Rights Association 14, 16 American Woman Suffrage Association (1869–90) 16, 19, 37 Anthony, Susan B.: and women’s rights 10–13; and woman suffrage 13–19, 21–2, 24–25, 27; tributes to 61, 88 anti-suffragism 4, 11, 22–3, 40–1, 59, 66, 111–12, 155–8; during World War I 42, 81, 84, 110; during ratification 120, 122; see also NAOWS; state-level woman suffrage: the South; woman suffrage arguments

Catt, Carrie Chapman 4, 62, 65–6, 110, 142; early career 21–2, 24–5, 27, 36, 38, 47; and ratification campaign 104, 115, 118–19, 120–2, 124–5; after suffrage 130–1, 182–3, 185; Winning Plan 67–8, 84, 144, 147, 170–2; and Woodrow Wilson 73, 84–8, 100, 107–9, 125; and World War I 80–2, 84, 100; Civil War 12–13, 76 Clay, Laura 118 College Equal Suffrage League see Suffragists: college students Congressional Union (CU, 1913–17 [became National Women’s Party]) 2, 60–1, 65, 71–3, 165–6; demonstrations 62–3, 73–7; see also elections: 1914–18; Paul, Alice Cook, Coralie Franklin 37 Cunningham, Minnie Fisher 106, 117

Belmont, Alva Vanderbilt 36–7, 51, 69, 95 Blackwell, Henry 10, 15–16 Blatch, Harriot Stanton 45–47, 56, 69, 74 British suffragettes see International suffrage Burns, Lucy 56–7, 60, 71–2, 95, 165–6 Burroughs, Nannie Helen 37

Democratic Party 3, 64, 66, 84, 107, 139–40; in Congress 61, 73, 85, 99, 109, 113–14, 121; in the states 15, 26, 43, 113–14, 122, 138; see also elections: 1914–18 DeVoe, Emma Smith 31, 45, 159 Dodge, Josephine 41 Douglass, Frederick 9–10, 12–13, 15, 25

192

I ndex

Eastman, Crystal 57, 131–2 elections: 1872 18; 1914–18 61–2, 68–71, 109–111, 167–9; 1920 112, 119–20, 128–30; see also women in politics after 1920 Equal Rights Amendment 133–5 federal vs. state suffrage 17–19, 22, 39, 65, 67–8, 84–5, 170–2 federal woman suffrage amendment (19th) 4, 56, 58, 65–7, 141, 145, 147–48, 165–6; advocacy before 1913 16–17, 18–19, 22, 27, 38–9; in House of Representatives (1913 on) 72, 95, 98–101, 114; ratification 104, 115–26, 141, 145, 148; in Senate (1913 on) 59, 104–5, 107–12, 114–15, 179 Gardener, Helen 85–6, 99, 104, 107, 173 gender equality 11, 27, 29, 50, 132–5, 139–40, 184–5; see also Seneca Falls Convention Gordon, Kate 25, 118 Harper, Frances E. W. 15–17 international woman suffrage 65, 135; campaign in Britain 2, 54–6; British inf luence on US campaign 46–7, 49, 56, 61, 73–4, 95; suffrage in other countries 99, 107, 110 Kelley, Florence 34 LaGuardia, Fiorello 86 League of Women Voters 121, 130–32, 136, 182–3, 185 Lincoln, Abraham 13 Logan, Adella Hunt 37 Lowe, Caroline, 162–4 Martin, Anne 69 men’s suffrage leagues 37, 59, 122, 141, 161 Milholland, Inez (Boissevain) 36, 51, 58, 71, 73

Miller, Alice Duer 72, 155, 157–8 Minor v. Happersett 18 Moore, Marianne 162–3 Mott, Lucretia 7, 9 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA, 1890–1920) 2, 21, 56, 60–3, 110–11, 167; federal campaign 22, 60–1, 63, 65, 71–3, 98–9, 148, 173–5; state campaigns 22, 25, 40, 63, 144–5, 147–8; membership 32–8, 51, 65, 72, 143–4; see also Catt, Carrie Chapman National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS, 1911–20) 41–2, 88, 143 National Woman Suffrage Association (1869–90) 16, 18–19 National Woman’s Party (NWP, 1917–present [formerly Congressional Union]) 76, 107, 143, 145–8; bonfires at the White House 109, 113–14; picketing the White House 86–8, 90–5, 99–100, 176–8; ratification campaign 115–16, 119, 121, 124–6; after suffrage 132–6, 182, 185; see also elections: 1914–18; Paul, Alice Nolan, Mary 176–8 Pankhurst, Emmeline 2, 54–6, 60 Park, Maud Wood 36, 68, 72, 85–6, 98, 101, 110, 147, 173–5 partial suffrage 68, 98, 123, 128; presidential 50–51, 84, 128; primary 84, 105–6, 122 Paul, Alice 2, 54–5, 56–9, 71, 144, 148; and Congressional Union 60–3, 165; and National Woman’s Party 4, 76–7, 80, 88, 90–1, 108, 112–14; ratification campaign 115–16, 125–6; after suffrage 132–5, 182–5; and Woodrow Wilson 73, 87, 92, 95, 99, 107, 110, 125 Populist Party 21–2, 28, 42 presidential and/or primary suffrage see partial suffrage

Index

progressivism: Progressive Era reform 2, 34, 39–40, 45, 137, 141; Progressive Party 42–43, 51, 169 Prohibition 3, 23, 28, 40, 42, 98–9, 110–12; Prohibition Party 43 Purvis, Harriet Forten 16 Rankin, Jeannette 79–81, 100 Reconstruction 14, 23, 26, 117 Remond, Sarah Parker 16 Republican Party 3, 66, 107, 139; in Congress 14–15, 26, 111, 114, 119; in the states 43, 121–2, 138 Roosevelt, President Theodore 43, 107 Schneiderman, Rose 35, 51 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) 5, 7–10, 130; legacy 16, 27, 132–3, 184 Shafroth Amendment 60–1, 65 Shaw, Dr. Anna Howard 2, 24–5, 27, 60, 65, 67, 84 Sheppard-Towner Act 137–8 Socialists 32, 35, 80, 88, 90; Socialist Party 42–3 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady: and women’s rights 7–11, 13, 24, 112; and woman suffrage 15–17, 19, 24 state-level woman suffrage 2, 18, 38–49, 63, 68, 84, 96, 105, 148; count of suffrage states 49–50, 98, 123; Midwest 49–51, 84; Northeast 46–7, 50, 84, 96–7; South 25–6, 50, 65, 84; West 2, 12, 21–2, 31–2, 49–50, 79–80, 84, 105–6, 159–61; see also federal vs. state suffrage; woman suffrage in US territories Stone, Lucy 10, 15–16, 21, 24 suffragists 3–4, 25, 27–9, 32–8, 142–3; African-Americans 3–4, 16–17, 51, 58–9, 118, 132, 142; college students 3, 36, 144; home-makers 33, 162–3; after suffrage 130, 136–7; rewards of participation 5, 51, 130, 143–4, 148–9; wageworkers and immigrants 3, 33–5, 46, 162–4

Temperance movement 7, 10, 21, 23, 27, 143; see also Prohibition Terrell, Mary Church 37 Truth, Sojourner 11–12 US Congress 14, 79–81, 119, 134, 137–8; female members 80, 139–41; Woman Suffrage Committees 85–6, 92–3; see also federal woman suffrage amendment US Constitution amendments: 14th 14, 17; 15th 14–17, 19, 21, 117–18; 18th (Prohibition) 98–9, 110–12; see also Equal Rights Amendment; federal woman suffrage amendment (19th); Shafroth amendment US Supreme Court 18, 26, 121–2 Wells-Barnett, Ida 51, 59 Willard, Frances 27 Wilson, President Woodrow 4, 56, 76, 87, 112–13, 119–20; evasiveness about woman suffrage 63–4, 67, 73–4, 84–5; response to suffrage demonstrations 87, 92–5, 108; supporting woman suffrage 5–6, 64, 83, 85–6, 99–100, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 179–81; and World War I 70, 79–80, 87, 89, 110; see also Catt, Carrie Chapman; Paul, Alice Winslow, Rose 93–4 woman suffrage arguments 5, 27–9, 143, 155–6; family protection 27–8, 33, 146, 162–3; justice 11, 27–9, 99, 112, 165–6, 171; reward for patriotism 4, 13, 83, 97, 112, 179–81; workers’ protection 34–5, 143, 163–4, 168; see also anti-suffragism woman suffrage in other countries see international suffrage woman suffrage participants see Suffragists woman suffrage publicity strategies 4, 10, 17, 32, 45–9, 56, 144–5, 159, 161; parades (general) 1, 36, 43–6, 56, 71, 82; specific parades 47,

193

194

I ndex

56–9, 64, 66, 125; see also Congressional Union; National Woman’s Party woman suffrage in US territories 19–21, 39 women in politics after 1920 5, 128–30, 133–6, 137–41 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) see Temperance movement Women’s Joint Congressional Committee 131, 137 Women’s Party (1916–17) 69, 71, 76

women’s rights movement 1–16, 28, 134, 139–40; see also Seneca Falls: legacy Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) see international suffrage Women’s Trade Union League 34–5 Woodhull, Victoria 17–18 World War I 70, 75–6, 79–80, 110–11; demands for patriotism during 81, 88–90; effect on woman suffrage 96–8, 111–12, 146; women’s contribution to 3, 80, 81–4, 96–7, 112, 145