Suffrage and Its Limits

The New York Story

Kathleen M. Dowley, Susan Ingalls Lewis, Meg Devlin O'Sullivan, Kathleen M. Dowley, Susan Ingalls Lewis, Meg Devlin O'Sullivan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479682, 9781438479699
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Reflects on the legacy and limits of suffrage in New York State as a way to understand present-day issues with women's social and political rights, as well proposes ideas for future progress.

Suffrage and Its Limits offers a unique interdisciplinary overview of the legacy and limits of suffrage for the women of New York State. It commemorates the state suffrage centennial of 2017, yet arrives in time to contribute to celebrations around the national centennial of 2020. Bringing together scholars with a wide variety of research specialties, it initiates a timely dialogue that links an appreciation of accomplishments to a clearer understanding of present problems and an agenda for future progress. The first three chapters explore the state suffrage movement, the 1917 victory, and what New York women did with the vote. The next three chapters focus on the status of women and politics in New York today. The final three chapters take a prospective look at the limits of liberal feminism and its unfinished agenda for women's equality in New York. A preface by Lieutenant Governor Katherine Hochul and a final chapter by activist Barbara Smith bookend the discussion. Combining diverse approaches and analyses, this collection enables readers to make connections between history, political science, public policy, sociology, philosophy, and activism. This study moves beyond merely celebrating the centennial to tackle women's issues of today and tomorrow.

PART I

INVESTIGATING THE PAST

Chapter 1

The Struggle for Suffrage and Its Aftermath in New York State

SUSAN GOODIER AND KAREN PASTORELLO

During a speech presented at the first annual convention of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City in 1867, Sojourner Truth, the most outspoken black feminist of her day, complained that discussions concerning the proposed Reconstruction amendments following the end of the Civil War ignored women. She elaborated: “I am glad to see that men are getting their rights, but I want women to get theirs … Now … is the time for women to step in.” Truth’s statement reveals the extraordinary promise of a social movement during a moment when working together to simultaneously end racial and gender discrimination in the United States Constitution seemed both logical and possible (Painter 1996, 220). The association, made up of women’s rights activists and former abolitionists, demanded that Congress include women in the legislative changes that Reconstruction necessitated. Out of this association of black and white women and men came the organized suffrage movement, part of a complicated tapestry of civil rights activism that spanned decades. Although the universal promise of the American Equal Rights Association remains unfulfilled to the present day, it makes clear that the power to change the world lies in collaboration, cooperation, and working together despite dramatic differences.

The New York State woman suffrage story began in the decades following the American Revolution as part of an expansion of the republican ideals of liberty and equality for all. Women’s rights activists faced monumental obstacles, not the least of which was the public attitude toward women’s special sphere of influence (Kerber 1980, 11–12). While men dominated politics and political discourse in the public sphere, the “true womanhood” ideology required piety, purity, submission, and domesticity from women.1 This ideology probably only applied to middle- and upper-class white women, and not to black, working-class, or immigrant women whose families could not afford to rely on one source of income. Yet promoters of this deeply rooted philosophy touted the necessity of gender separation for the health of society, rendering women’s subordination critical to the proper functioning of the nation-state. This ideal, even if women did abide by it, did not confine women to the private sphere, however, as most people expected women to extend their responsibilities to include benevolence and charity work for those in need in their communities. New York State, predominantly rural, but on the cusp of the tremendous changes that would come with industrialization and increasing immigration, shaped the expectations for women over the next century.

Tracing the progress of the women’s rights movement in New York illuminates the ways multifaceted groups of people dismantled formal and informal barriers that prevented women from full participation in the new democracy. By the 1840s, women activists demanded rights in social, legal, economic, and political arenas, with the vote as the “crowning jewel of individual freedom” (Du Bois 1998, 86). In 1846, six property-holding women in Jefferson County demanded the right, as taxpayers, to suffrage.2 Two years later, the well-known Quaker abolitionist and minister Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, her sister Martha Coffin Wright, and Quakers Jane Hunt and Mary Ann M’Clintock, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organized a two-day women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls.3 The more than three hundred female and male attendees debated the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and ultimately accepted twelve resolutions. The strategies they proposed to attain their goals included educating women and the broader public about the need for women to enjoy more civil rights under the law, distributing and signing petitions, giving speeches, and writing tracts advocating for the recognition of increased property, marital, earning, social, and educational rights.4 In essence, the resolutions would enable women to protect themselves and advance.

The cooperation between women’s rights activists and abolitionists endured throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, women’s rights activists suspended their annual women’s rights conventions and set aside their reform goals to focus on the emancipation of enslaved people, founding the Women’s National Loyal League to demand rights for African Americans (Tetrault 2014, 129). As these women displayed their patriotism, they also nursed wounded and dying soldiers in army hospitals, held sanitary fairs to raise money for the Union cause, and maintained the stability of their families while they ran farms and businesses. At the war’s end in 1865, women’s rights activists fully expected to be rewarded for their efforts in support of the Union (Free 2015, 133–61). Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Ernestine Rose, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Matilda Joslyn Gage paid close attention as Congress discussed and debated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In 1866, as Congress debated the wording of the amendments, abolitionists and women’s rights activists established the American Equal Rights Association to demand suffrage for white and black women along with black men. With the venerable Lucretia Mott as president, the association drew prominent abolitionists and suffragists, black and white, such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Purvis, Robert Purvis, Sarah Remond, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel J. May, Stone, Blackwell, Anthony, Stanton, and others. All annual meetings took place in New York State, but speakers hailed from across the Northeast. The strategy of the association involved direct lobbying of legislators, primarily at the federal level; public lectures; and direct appeals for funding and support (Tetrault 2014, 20–30; DuBois 1978, 53–78). Hinting at disagreements among the leadership of the association, however, Stanton, Anthony, and Parker Pillsbury, with the backing of the racist but wealthy George Train, established the Revolution, a weekly newspaper to especially promote women’s enfranchisement (Field 2014, 139–40). The Revolution stated in its first issue in 1868 that it would advocate “educated suffrage, irrespective of sex or color” (Stanton and Pillsbury 1868). The struggles of the association foreshadow some of the problems inherent in sustaining a cohesive woman suffrage movement until its ultimate success.

At the annual meeting held in New York City in May 1869, the American Equal Rights Association exploded over arguments about “how to achieve social transformation” (Tetrault 2014, 30). Some women and men urged support for the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchising only black men, while some women proposed a motion refusing to support the Fifteenth Amendment without an additional amendment enfranchising women. Charles C. Burleigh and Stephen Foster, both prominent white abolitionists, “wrested the control of the meeting” (Harper 1898, 1:324) from Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, demanding that the amendment be accepted without continuing the agitation for women’s enfranchisement until some unspecified time in the future (DuBois 1978, 186–91; Dudden 2011, 176–80; Goodier and Pastorello 2017, 12–13). Many women and men supported the amendment, but within days, Stanton, Anthony, and their colleague Matilda Joslyn Gage founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, headquartered in New York State, to focus on enfranchising women through an amendment to the federal constitution. The Bostonians Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, both of whom supported the Fifteenth Amendment, countered by establishing the rival American Woman Suffrage Association, seeking state-by-state enfranchisement, in September. This maelstrom shaped the woman suffrage movement for the duration of its existence. Its basic characteristics defined a reform movement that generally ignored the rights of African Americans; a leadership of mostly white, middle-class women; and women’s emancipation and equality primarily linked to their enfranchisement (DuBois 1978, 20). With the dissolution of the American Equal Rights Association, the leadership focused more specifically on the premise that all other rights women lacked would follow from their ability to vote (DuBois 1978, 54).

Gaining women’s right to vote required broad acceptance. New York State eventually harbored tens of thousands of able, dedicated, energetic women who worked in rural and urban communities to persuade men to support votes for women. Forging a collaborative movement demanded the commitment of a loosely structured alliance of rural, immigrant, middle-class, radical, and black women from temperance, auxiliary, and women’s clubs both upstate and downstate (Goodier and Pastorello 2017, 3).5 Well aware of the need to educate women about their lack of rights and their obligation to nurture the nation-state, suffragists urged support for women’s direct participation in the polity.6 However, the patriarchy of the dominant churches; the persistence of the separate spheres ideology; the reluctance of most men to relinquish social, legal, economic, and political power to women; and the notion that voting would interfere with their womanly responsibilities caused many women to resist the message of the movement. Susan B. Anthony and her biographer, the journalist Ida Husted Harper, saw it differently and claimed that “in the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women, lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement” (Anthony and Harper 1902, 2: xxiv). It was not that women did not want the vote; they did not know how much they needed it. The critical element was to convince their male relatives to vote for woman suffrage. The women of the broad coalition made progress by convincing their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers of the rightness of women’s voting rights.

To more effectively administer the activism of New York State suffragists, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a women’s rights activist from Fayetteville, called a meeting of interested women and men at Congress Hall in Saratoga Springs in July 1869. Attendees established the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, which affiliated with the National Woman Suffrage Association. Arguing that denying the ballot to women contradicted the “genius of our institutions and the Declaration of Independence,” they contended that taxation without representation was “base injustice,” and considered the ballot to be the “legalized voice of the people” and the right of every law-abiding citizen of the state (Woman Suffrage Association of New York State, box 1, volume 1). The purpose of the organization, as stated in its constitution, was to demand the ballot for every woman of the state. They elected officers and convinced Martha Coffin Wright, who could not attend the meeting, to serve as the organization’s first president. To encourage suffrage activism more broadly, members founded county-level suffrage clubs to oversee clubs in cities, towns, and villages in each of the (then) sixty counties of the state (Penney and Livingston 2003, 183; Penney and Livingston 2004, 186, 227; Revolution, February 4, 1869, 66).

Women engaged in the New York State woman suffrage movement, especially in rural areas, organized suffrage clubs, often called political equality clubs. Each club would make an annual dues payment of five dollars to affiliate with the state association. Clubs waxed and waned depending on the energies of the leaders. Some had as few as five members, while others, such as the Geneva Political Equality Club, counted approximately four hundred members by 1907. Thirty-six counties had clubs, representing over fifty-five thousand members, with Chautauqua County boasting over 1,800 members by the first decade of the twentieth century. During Harriet May Mills’s tenure as association president (1910–1913), the number of political equality clubs virtually doubled, from approximately 250 in 1910 to 487 by 1914, “honeycomb[ing] the entire state with organizations” (New York Woman Suffrage Collection, 1914–15, box 1). The clubs began their work by securing women’s right to vote for school board representatives, won in 1880, and moved on to advocating the same regarding tax questions in towns and villages. No matter how many issues club members addressed, and despite their constant struggle for money, woman suffrage remained the primary goal of all these clubs (Goodier and Pastorello 2017, 16, 34–36, 41). Club women worked to educate themselves on civil responsibilities, hosted suffrage schools to train speakers and organizers, attracted new members, printed and distributed literature, gathered signatures on petitions to the legislature, lobbied local politicians, published monthly newsletters, and forged liaisons between local, state, and national leadership (Mills 1901, 73).

The presidents of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association during the nineteenth century, in addition to Martha Coffin Wright (1869–1875), included Matilda Joslyn Gage (1875–1876, 1878), Susan B. Anthony (1876–1877), and Lillie Devereux Blake (1879–1890), all women with bold, dynamic, and broad visions for women’s equality. During Gage’s tenure, for example, she helped organize a centennial celebration at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. She procured rooms in the area, set about acquiring tickets to the celebration (she could only get five tickets as women were not really welcome), and drafted a “Declaration of Rights of Women.” Gage, Anthony, Blake, attorney Phoebe Couzins, and college administrator Sarah Spencer interrupted the formal proceedings to submit this document to the assembly, shocking the men. The women then continued their celebrations out of doors, accompanied by members of the Hutchinson singers (“State Woman’s Suffrage Association,” n.d.; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage 1886, 11–44; Flexner and Fitzpatrick 1996, 163–64; Tetrault 2014, 99–102; National Woman Suffrage Association Centennial Album). The women kept an autograph book to record the names of visitors to the centennial headquarters and in September displayed the book in New York City, where Charlotte E. Ray, the first black woman lawyer in the United States, and many others signed it. Among the signatures appeared that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Suffrage and Its Limits: The New York Story
• Part I: Investigating the Past
• Part II: Interrogating the Present
• Part III: Imagining the Future
• Appendix Women in Politics: Past, Present, and Future
• List of Contributors
• Index