And Yet They Persisted

How American Women Won the Right to Vote

Johanna Neuman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119530794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

A comprehensive history of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, from 1776 to 1965

Most suffrage histories begin in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first publicly demanded the right to vote at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And they end in 1920, when Tennessee became the 36 th state to ratify the 19 th Amendment, removing sexual barriers to the vote. And Yet They Persisted traces agitation for the vote over two centuries, from the revolutionary era to the civil rights era, excavating one of the greatest struggles for social change in this country and restoring African American women and other women of color to its telling.

In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power. Reintegrating the long struggle for the women's suffrage into the metanarrative of U.S. history, Dr. Neuman sheds new light on such questions as:

• Why it took so long to achieve equal voting rights for women
• How victories in state suffrage campaigns pressured Congress to act
• Why African American women had to fight again for their rights in 1965
• How the struggle by eight generations of female activists finally succeeded

And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote his is the ideal text for college courses in women's studies and history covering the women's suffrage movement, as well as courses on American History, Political History, Progressive Era reforms, or reform movements in general. Click here to read Johanna Neuman's two-part blog postabout the hidden history of Women's Suffrage as we celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

1
The Dawn of Republican Motherhood

Lydia Chapin Taft no doubt wore black on October 30, 1756 when she attended a town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Both her 18‐year‐old son Caleb and her husband Josiah had died the previous month. During their twenty‐five‐year marriage, Josiah had worked his way through the ranks of the esteemed – becoming a captain in the militia, serving on the local Board of Selectmen, often chosen to represent their town in the Massachusetts General Court. His astute purchases and sales of property made him a wealthy landowner, and left Lydia, with three minor children still at home, the town’s largest taxpayer. Property assured male patriarchy, and conferred status on landed families. So civic leaders in Uxbridge, not far from the Quaker stronghold of Worcester, where women were invited to speak at meeting, asked Lydia to cast a vote in her husband’s place. Her affirmative vote on funding the local militia was the first of three she would cast as a widow. Two years later, in 1758, she voted on tax issues. And in 1765, she again appeared at a town meeting, this time to weigh in on school districts. Before Massachusetts or the other original Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from the British, she became America’s first recorded female voter.

Central to scholars of women’s history is why the American Revolution – with its rhetoric of no taxation without representation and its themes of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – did not liberate American women. After the war, revolutionary leaders encouraged women to act as keepers of civic virtue, teaching young Americans the perils of monarchies, instilling a quality of democracy in the next generation of patriots. Historian Linda K. Kerber, who coined the phrase “the Republican Motherhood,” noted that this new function restricted women to the domestic arena, while giving them new standing in the polity. Others have countered that this post‐revolutionary era saw more of a turn toward a Republican Womanhood, tethered less to a woman’s role as a mother than to her place as a citizen in the new republic, with influence not only on children but also on suitors, husbands, and brothers. By whatever name, the emphasis on women’s role in America’s new democracy unleashed a surge of interest in female education and public participation. That is why it is important to begin this account of women’s suffrage not in the 1840s, when women’s rights activists began to call conventions, but in the 1790s, when they began to participate in the nation’s political life. It was here, early in the Republic’s history, that women joined the public sphere, learning “to stand and speak.” This controversial first step toward activism would have lasting effects on the fight for the vote over the next two centuries.

Antecedents of Republican Motherhood

Like other linguistic constructs of history, patriarchy was a concept designed by men, to favor men. In Biblical story, Eve lured Adam to sin, casting both of them from the Garden of Eden. In ancient Greece, Aristotle excluded women from the polis, which he regarded as the highest calling in life, arguing that those who did not participate in the political life of the state were little better than idiots. The main function of wives in ancient Greece was to produce male heirs – girl infants could be killed at their father’s discretion. Part of the patriarchal code required dividing the female population into respectable and non‐respectable women, rewarding women who showed their obedience to men through sexual subordination, allowing men to roam the sexual field with slaves, lower‐class women or young men. Men would fight wars, oversee property, participate in the nation’s public life, and dictate the rules for women and children at home. Women would obey or find themselves further degraded as prostitutes or impoverished servants.

By the time of British kings, men had devised a new construct of power. The concept of coverture was embedded into Common Law, ensuring that a woman, on marriage, would cede all legal rights to her husband. She had no right to own property or keep income, no parental rights over her children, no standing in the law to make contracts or petition for divorce. Though they flew the British flag, the colonies survived in a land of natives, immigrants, and territorial ambition. Soon some laws of patriarchy loosened. Wives of German and Dutch immigrants, not bound by English laws, had more control over their own property, and could write wills. Once talk of rebellion began, with its rhetoric of “unhappy families” and “tyrannical rulers,” colonies such as Massachusetts and Connecticut liberalized divorce laws, allowing women to divorce on grounds of adultery, bigamy or impotence. And by the 1750s, opportunities for both girls and boys to obtain a formal education increased, as academies in New York and Philadelphia advertised in newspapers.

In 1792, amid the French Revolution, English author and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft further stoked the debate over education by publishing a tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pondering the injustices of male privileges and the meaning of women’s rights. If women were assumed to have natural rights, conferred by God, then it was up to the state to validate them, she argued. The book, which sparked debate on both sides of the Atlantic, contested the male view of women as superficial. If women lacked the language of politics, she argued, it was only for lack of adequate education. Dismissing the idea of teaching women “ladylike” demeanor, she advocated co‐educational institutions where women would be schooled for their minds, not their manners. “I do not want them to have power over men but over themselves,” she wrote. “Their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures.” With the sure knowledge that her idea might “excite laughter” among men, she also suggested “women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.”

The title of Wollstonecraft’s book paid homage to the manifesto of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But even before its publication, men and women in the colonies had pondered the roles of male and female citizens in a new republic. After the Revolution, American women would instill civic virtue in the next generation, while men attended to the dirtier call of politics. This gendering of America – much like the effort by Europeans to impose gender‐based divisions of labor on native peoples – reassured men such as John Adams that “power always follows property.” But on some level, Republican Motherhood was thus the price patriarchy paid for its survival. It was also the vehicle women would use to wrest new rights from a stubborn male polity.

Winning the War, and the Peace

Before the 1760s, many women were limited by their obligations in the home. The work was difficult and exhausting – described as backbreaking duties in the fields, repeated childbirths, taxing meal preparation and daily, and daylong, efforts to keep dust and dirt from invading primitive homes. Indentured servants, black and white, suffered from broken bones and pulled muscles from lugging 20‐gallon containers of water from well to home, for bathing and cooking. For the African Americans who were enslaved, one fifth of the nation, duties were exhausting, tinged with the threat of whippings and separation from loved ones on the auction block. Women who expressed interest in politics were rare, as it was considered unnatural. Exceptions were made for some upper‐class women, such as Mercy Otis Warren, who during the war years published plays and poems under the pseudonym, “A Columbian Patriot.” But once appeals for resistance spread through the colonies, women for the first time joined debates, wrote missives, and asked their husbands to send them updates on military developments. “Nothing else is talked of,” Sarah Franklin wrote to her father Benjamin Franklin. “The Dutch talk of the stomp tack, the Negroes of the tamp, in short everyone has something to say.” Traveling from Cambridge to Boston, one writer reported seeing “at every house Woman & Children making Cartridges, running Bullets, making Wallets, baking Biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the same time animating their Husbands & Sons to fight for their Liberties, tho’ not knowing whether they should ever see them again.”

As her husband John Adams set off for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Abigail Adams wrote him a letter. Hungry for details of the war effort, she begged him to write often, with details on “what sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence?” In joining a governing body that would lead the Thirteen Colonies during the Revolution, she urged him to “Remember the Ladies,” warning that women would foment a rebellion “if attention is not paid” to their interests, that they would “not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” She was not the first woman to seek a voice in politics. In 1648, Margaret Brent, an unmarried property owner, went before the Maryland Assembly requesting “a vote … and a voyce” for herself, and for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, as she held his power of attorney. The governor of Maryland denied both requests. In 1733, a few property‐owning women wrote the New York Journal protesting their disenfranchisement. There is no record of a response. Half a century later, as the colonies were on the cusp of revolution, there came a male rejoinder. It was filled with contempt and disdain. “To your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,” John Adams replied to his wife’s warning of a female rebellion. “Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” (Fig. 1.1.)

Figure 1.1 As John Adams left for Philadelphia to attend the Third Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, his wife Abigail Adams wrote urging him to “remember the ladies,” or risk their “rebellion” from any laws “in which we have no voice or representation.” To this early, private plea for female empowerment, John Adams replied, “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

Source: Getty Images. Time Life Pictures.

Soon after, James Sullivan, a member of the Massachusetts General Court and a colleague, likewise wrote John Adams suggesting that the vote be extended to disenfranchised citizens, such as women and men without property. One of the Revolution’s legacies had been a loss of deference, where shoemakers stood next to their elite customers as both threw tea into the Boston Harbor. Sullivan’s plea for universal suffrage was part of this new egalitarianism. The reply from John Adams was less flippant than that he offered his wife, but no less dismissive, reflecting his elitist views. Warning against altering voter qualifications, Adams predicted, “There will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty‐one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing [one‐fourth of a penny in British coin], will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.” Adams believed that granting a vote to citizens without a permanent stake in the community – without property, without residency – was dangerous, much as Greek philosopher Aristotle had suggested centuries before. But Adams also understood the implications of revolutionary rhetoric, the logical extension of its arguments. His comment, “there will be no end of it,” was prescient. More than any other revolutionary leader, he feared and may have foreseen the waves of changes in the country’s electorate, as succeeding classes of residents gained access to the ballot. For now, he and other founding fathers were busy leading a rebellion against the status quo. And in one of the revolution’s unintended consequences, women heard its call. Once shielded from politics, occupied with backbreaking duties in “the domestic sphere,” they became its great champions.

All over the colonies, effective boycotts against British products had required a buy‐in from women. And buy in they did. Women founded anti‐tea leagues, meeting to brew concoctions of raspberry, sage, and birch to substitute their herbal mixes for well‐regarded English teas. Wives and daughters engaged in “public spirited measures” – growing their own food and weaving their own clothes. Called Daughters of Liberty, women would convene at the home of a local minister, sharing camaraderie as well as material, with as many as 100 weavers. Hundreds of spectators came to watch. Young women especially resonated to the task, feeling they were making a contribution to the nation’s future. One girl who participated in spinning parties wrote that she “felt Nationaly,” part of “a fighting army of amazones … armed with spinning wheels.” Calling the phenomenon a display of female patriotism, an editor at the Boston Evening Post wrote, “The industry and frugality of American ladies must exalt their character in the Eyes of the World and serve to show how greatly they are contributing to bringing about the political salvation of a whole Continent.”

Not all observers were so enamored. Both before and after the war, some newspapers complained that American women had undercut the boycott by their excessive spending on British imports. This was perhaps an assertion made by men who feared crediting any female contribution might lead to their emancipation. Accustomed to the insults, some women said they expected little from their participation. “You know that our Sex are doomed to be obedient in every stage of life,” wrote Mary Stevens Livingston, whose husband Robert was named by George Washington as one of the committee of five that drafted the Declaration of Independence (the others were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Roger Sherman). “So we shant be great gainers by this [revolutionary] contest.” But there is little question that the boycotts politicized the household economy, and the domestic conversation. As John Adams put it, “Was not every fireside, indeed, a theatre of politics?”

Revolutionary excitement was evident throughout the colonies. Eliza Wilkinson, living in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, said that by the time the British Army invaded her state in 1780, no greater politicos existed than “the several knots of ladies, who met together,” looking for all the world like “perfect statesmen.” After Charleston fell to the British on May 12, morale plummeted in the Continental Army. Poorly fed and rarely paid, they became the very definition of a rag tag army. Local officials and merchants in Philadelphia solicited funds to pay them. Women signed up for “public spirited measures” such as cleaning. And Esther DeBerdt Reed, wife of the governor of Pennsylvania, took to the newspaper to plead for female patriots to do more. In “Sentiments of American Woman,” she urged women in Philadelphia to form an organization to raise funds for the American rebel troops.

“Animated by the purest patriotism,” she wrote, “the time is arrived to display the same sentiments which animated us at the beginning of the Revolution, when we renounced the use of teas, however agreeable to our taste, rather than receive them from our persecutors.” With Sar...