How the Vote Was Won
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How the Vote Was Won

Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914

Rebecca Mead

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eBook - ePub

How the Vote Was Won

Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914

Rebecca Mead

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By the end of 1914, almost every Western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. These Western successes stand in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and the South, where African-American men were systematically disenfranchised. How did the frontier West leap ahead of the rest of the nation in the enfranchisement of the majority of its citizens?

In this provocative new study, Rebecca J. Mead shows that Western suffrage came about as the result of the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of Western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by Western women. She highlights suffrage racism and elitism as major problems for the movement, and places special emphasis on the political adaptability of Western suffragists whose improvisational tactics earned them progress.

A fascinating story, previously ignored, How the Vote was Won reintegrates this important region into national suffrage history and helps explain the ultimate success of this radical reform.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2006
ISBN
9780814759912

1

The Context of the Western Woman Suffrage Movement

I think civilization is coming Eastward gradually.
—Theodore Roosevelt1
By the end of 1914, almost every western state and territory in the United States had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. These western successes stand in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), and to the South, where African American men were systematically disfranchised. The regional pattern of early western victories has remained unclear, despite many state studies, and adequate explication requires reevaluation within the contemporary political context.2 This study establishes western precocity as the result of the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by western women. It recognizes suffrage racism and elitism as major problems deeply embedded in larger cultural and political processes, and places special emphasis on the political adaptability of suffragists. It argues that the last generation of activists, often educated and professional women, employed modern techniques and arguments that invigorated the movement and helped meliorate class tensions. Stressing political and economic justice for women and deemphasizing prohibition persuaded increasing numbers of wary urban voters and weakened the negative influence of large cities. Thus, understanding woman suffrage in the West reintegrates this important region into national suffrage history and helps explain the ultimate success of this radical reform.
The western victories fall clearly into three phases closely related to distinct periods of political instability and reform. The first successes occurred in the fluid “frontier” environment of western states and territories. Experiments in Wyoming Territory (1869), Utah (1870), and Washington Territory (1883) were connected to Reconstruction and territorial politics, as well as to Mormon influence. In the early 1870s, many women’s rights leaders felt betrayed by the failure of the Reconstruction amendments to establish universal suffrage as a fundamental citizen’s right. In the West, however, discussions of voting-rights issues continued because constitutional questions arose every time a western territory held a convention and applied for statehood. “Pioneer” suffragists took advantage of small territorial legislatures, the statehood process, third-party challenges, and reform politics to pursue a broad women’s rights agenda. Populist energy achieved suffrage in Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896), but hostility to the People’s Party, as well as internal ambivalence, prevented further success in other states. Building on this legacy of radical reform in the West, Progressive momentum finally carried woman suffrage in Washington State (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Alaska, Oregon (1912), Montana, and Nevada (1914).
Western suffragists often supported third-party and reform coalitions in the expectation of reciprocal assistance, helping to create a progressive political environment. These contacts helped western women suffragists develop strategies to overcome urban electoral opposition through trade unions and political parties. Women’s rights activists were able to draw attention to gender issues because male reformers of all classes needed female help—whether enfranchised or not—to elect candidates and implement programs. Women’s political activity took many forms, given their common exclusion from electoral rights. Some women established influential voluntary associations or lobbied legislators and candidates on behalf of bills. Some participated symbolically and actively in local party events, including boisterous parades, bonfires, and outdoor meetings.3 Many western suffragists joined the temperance movement and supported the Prohibition Party, while others became Nationalists, Populists, Socialists, and Progressives. Working-class women voted and ran for office within their unions, went on strike, supported labor parties and candidates, and lobbied for legislation.
In the 1890s, suffrage gained respectability as more moderate temperance and clubwomen became involved, frequently radicalized by their experiences in social reform. The western women’s club movement expanded rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s, and many clubwomen began to argue that the externalization of many decisions affecting family welfare required female civic participation. When involvement in reform activity quickly revealed the practical limits of indirect influence, women demanded the enforcement power of the vote. Leaving the domestic sphere in order to defend it transformed many women, while mainstream political culture also changed in response to female participation and priorities, including greater support for government social welfare intervention.4 “Municipal housekeeping,” “maternalism,” and “nonpartisanship” were all important motivations, but they should not obscure the inherent radicalism of the demand for political rights for independent women citizens.5
Understanding the western suffrage movement requires a basic comprehension of the movement in general, including its radical and fundamental challenge to the existing political status of women. Suffrage was radical in several ways. In the dictionary, “radical” primarily means “root,” or “fundamental,” in an explicitly political sense, and secondarily “extreme,” as in challenging the status quo. Both meanings fit the western suffrage movement. First, woman suffrage challenged the legal principle of coverture, which deprived married women of an independent political identity. As one California woman observed, “It was all right enough for a man to eat a meal, but that meal did the woman no good, and so it was with political rights.”6 In the 1840s, states began to pass legislation to protect women’s marital property and business interests (“sole trader” laws) from the worst effects of coverture, but they did not challenge the principle as fundamentally as suffrage. These efforts began in the East, but after the Civil War they accelerated in the West, where California, Colorado, and Nevada had passed such laws by 1873. Sometimes attributed to a “frontier effect,” roughly defined as a combination of economic need and political experimentalism, winning these legal reforms still required sustained effort by early women’s rights activists.7 Failure to credit women’s activism has obscured the radicalism of their goal and methods, limiting many earlier analyses.
Second, woman suffrage cultivated support among radical and third-party critics of the existing political order. In the 1890s, Populist support was responsible for referenda, and in the early 1900s Progressives agreed that woman suffrage was one of several direct democracy measures necessary to reform the political system. In theory, female enfranchisement roughly doubled any given constituency; in reality, no one knew how women would tend to vote until they actually began to do so, making it an inherently radical experiment. With more political options, women could and did threaten to abandon established parties unreceptive to female concerns. Finally, the western woman suffragists utilized radically modern direct-action tactics derived from the labor movement and popular politics. Similar developments were occurring simultaneously in England, but American suffragists never became violent suffragettes. In the West, suffragists refined creative new uses of drama, popular culture, advertising, and modern technology, including cars, telephones, billboards, and slide shows. The 1911 California campaign established the effectiveness of this bold new model, and by the end of 1914, a voting population of 4 million western women confirmed its success.
General suffrage histories have generally neglected the West, or failed to evaluate its significance within the national movement. Even contemporary studies often take a quick western tour, acknowledging the breakthrough victories before returning to the East. Women’s own efforts to organize against formidable geographic and demographic obstacles have received little attention aside from criticism for their failure to maintain viable organizations over decades of struggle. Instead, the popular “gift theory” emphasizes male boosterism and desires for women settlers, as well as efforts to strengthen particular constituencies with female voters (e.g., Mormons in Utah). This model favors “gentle tamers,” naïve, polite, middle-class women with “municipal housekeeping” and social purity goals. These women were often active suffragists, but they never won a campaign by threatening to “civilize” rowdy western communities.8 Aside from the obvious fact that men did the voting in legislatures and referenda, they did not “give” the vote easily—women won it only after many long and exhausting legislative lobbying sessions and public campaigns. Beverly Beeton has correctly identified male boosterism, political factionalism, and an experimental political environment as important factors, but ultimately reduces these to matters “of expediency, not ideology.”9 In fact, men often viewed the demand for woman suffrage as politically in expedient, even when they conceded its justice.
The West is largely ignored in the leading paradigm of late nineteenth century suffrage, the “justice v. expediency” model proposed by Aileen Kraditor over thirty years ago. Kraditor proposed that fin-de-siècle suffragists retreated from earlier high principles and compromised with racism and nativism to win political gains and elite support.10 Kraditor’s examination of suffrage racism is extremely significant, but her neat dichotomy is falsely reductive. The model conflates racism and nativism based on eastern conditions, and overgeneralizes the experiences of the national, largely eastern leadership. Most importantly, it describes moral declension when the political struggle demanded a constant process of negotiation between “justice” and “expediency.” Both aspects have been consistently present within the suffrage movement, often linked rhetorically as complements, not polarized as opposites. In western suffrage debates, it is striking how often both of these terms appear together. In fact, the appeal to justice remained fundamental, but the development of many rationales for suffrage, including those tailored to specific interests, was a crucial element in the success of modern campaigns.11 Kraditor defines “expediency” as instrumentalism and identifies a shift toward suffrage as a means to other ends rather than a goal in itself. This study uses the dictionary definition: “what is immediately advantageous independent of ethics or consistent principles.”12
“Expediency” is an appropriate term to describe suffrage racism. Suffragists were not exempt from contemporary prejudices and political pressures, and they struggled to reconcile noble ideals and practical realities as social attitudes hardened and legal options narrowed. Frequently challenged by white supremacist arguments, suffragists also manipulated white racial fears even though nonwhite western racial-ethnic groups were geographically, culturally, and politically marginalized by the 1890s. African American populations remained small and scattered until the twentieth century.13 Citizenship for Native Americans was inconsistent until the Immigration Act of 1924 finally granted full rights. Suffragists sometimes idealized Native American culture in search of an idyllic matriarchal past, but they also shared societal prejudices that dismissed indigenous peoples as degraded savages in need of intervention, instruction, or rescue.14 The Mexican American population of the Southwest theoretically enjoyed full citizenship rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), but the reality was a lost land base, de facto discrimination, and impoverishment.15 Particularly in Southern California, the tendency to romanticize both these cultures—once they had been firmly subjugated—helped to elide the reality of Anglo-American conquest and dominance. In the West, the “indispensable enemy” was the Chinese population in America, which suffered from widespread discrimination, hostile labor agitation, and violence. The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 declared the Chinese permanently “ineligible for citizenship,” and this naturalization ban was extended subsequently to other Asian Americans.16
The conflicted nature of western race relations probably strengthened support for woman suffrage among white residents of newly settled agrarian areas. Western politics and race relations fit the pattern of a “herrenvolk democracy,” in which an egalitarian code applied, but only to those qualified for inclusion.17 In fact, the term “franchise” denotes admission to a limited group and enjoyment of the rights and privileges available only to the members of that group, and white western suffragists used contemporary racial stereotypes to establish and monitor the boundaries. They used universalistic arguments for their own inclusion in the polity, but accepted racial differentiations that privileged whiteness. White western women generally avoided direct discussion of “the color question,” but they often reminded white western men how female labor promoted settlement and helped maintain white hegemony. To highlight their demands, they manipulated ideas about racial and ethnic “Others,” usually reinforcing contemporary racialist and racist attitudes, particularly those linking race, sex, and “civilization.”
The trope equating woman suffrage and “civilization” reflects the heavy influence of late nineteenth-century scientific racialist theories, especially Social Darwinism. Maladapted from evolutionary theory, these models conflated biology, race, morality, and culture into a crude biological determinism and ranked distinctions between “inferior” and “superior” peoples accordingly.18 Progressive evolution, or “civilization,” was frequently linked to the status of women, with the white, middle-class, “separate spheres” model defined as the apex of human success. White people considered themselves more “civilized” because they discouraged women’s manual labor and emphasized female purity and nurturance. In contrast, people of color were considered “savages” because of their allegedly uncontrolled sexuality and general irresponsibility, demonstrated by female “drudgery” and male sloth. White working-class people used these ideas to assert their white racial superiority, but the growing realities of proletarian economic dependence and a permanent female workforce blurred this distinction.19
Evolutionary progress requires sex, reproductive sex requires females, and sex—especially its symbolism and its regulation—is a powerful factor in knowledge/power relations, cultural values, and social institutions. Since racial purity is so tenuous and so easily corrupted by unauthorized intercourse, female sexual behavior is controlled by powerful gender prescriptions mediated by family, society, science, and the law. The political metaphor of “family,” rooted in shared blood, soil, and resources, is a common theme in nationalist and imperialist rhetoric. The root word “familus” means “servant” or “slave,” however, reflecting the status of the traditional patriarch as the only independent member of his household, as well as the economic nature of many family and kinship arrangements. Although they remain powerful, patriarchal metaphors that cast all authority figures as “fathers” and classified all women as perpetual dependents became anachronistic with the consolidation of industrial capitalism. Men found it increasingly difficult to fulfill these roles, and more women began to demand equal rights.20
The use of “civilization” rhetoric compromised woman suffrage when it encouraged racism. In 1903, Susan B. Anthony and other National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) officials publicly assured southerners that the race question was irrelevant to their purposes and adopted a “separate but equal” membership policy. As part of their questionable “southern strategy,” the national leadership accepted a series of compromises hoping to gain southern support. This approach created serious internal dissension and never really satisfied the “states’ rights” southern suffragists, who impeded efforts to revive a federal strategy well into the 1910s. Nor did it persuade southern legislators, who understood full well that African American women hoped to use this weapon to oppose racial discrimination and male disfranchisement.21 The prominent black intellectual and suffragist W. E. B. Du Bois repeatedly warned elite white women that this position “represents a climbing of one class on the misery of another,” but his words had little effect.22 Unwilling or unable to resist contemporary racist attitudes, white suffragists thus helped to reinforce them.
White suffragists who segregated, manipulated, or avoided race issues received little encouragement within the black community, but African American women organized their own clubs and suffrage organizations nationwide. They wanted the ballot to defend and “uplift” their communities, demanding both “rights” and “expedients,” in the sense of real solutions to oppressive conditions.23 In the West, African Ame...

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