When Women Won The Vote

The Final Decade, 1910-1920

Sandra Opdycke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138044876
• eBook ISBN: 9781351612043
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

chapter 1

The Long Road from Seneca Falls

1848–1910

The 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 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 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

America’s First Female Voters

New Jersey’s first state constitution, adopted in 1776, permitted all qualified “inhabitants” of the state, including women, to vote. In 1807, however, amid a wave of concern about political corruption, the state passed a new law that limited the vote to free, white, male citizens. No one accused female voters of any irregularity, but the drive to narrow the electorate squeezed them out too, along with non-citizens and African-Americans. It would be 113 years before New Jersey women were able to vote again.

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 the Seneca Falls Convention). Having escaped slavery just 10 years earlier, the 30-year-old Douglass was already celebrated as an abolitionist leader, an orator, and a best-selling author. His vital contribution to this debate was to elevate the idea of voting from a mere political transaction to an essential act of citizenship. Douglas insisted that denying women the vote would be unjust to them. But more than that, he said that it would diminish society, by repudiating “one-half of the moral and intellectual power … of the world.”⁴ Douglass’ words 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 fliers, 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 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 very qualities that made women so admirable—their purity and their idealism.

When men at the 1853 annual women’s rights convention started hissing and booing, they got a stern response from Sojourner Truth—a former slave who emerged during these years as a leading orator for the cause of women’s rights: “Some of you have got the spirit of a goose, and some have got the spirit of a snake,” thundered Truth. “We’ll have our rights. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.”⁸

All through the 1850s, the female activists did their best to persuade the public that expanding women’s rights was no threat to the social order, but rather a simple matter of justice. As it happened, their efforts were reinforced by the political mood of the time, which was highly 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 r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 The Long Road from Seneca Falls: 1848–1910
• 2 New Life for the State Suffrage Campaigns: 1910–1913
• 3 The Federal Amendment Takes Center Stage: 1913–1917
• 4 Working for Suffrage in Wartime: 1917–1918
• 5 The Culmination: 1918–1920
• 6 Living with Woman Suffrage
• Documents
• Bibliography
• Index