Women's suffrage in the United States

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Suffragist Genevieve Clark, circa 1914. In 1914 her father, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, announced his support for what became the 19th amendment.^[1]

Women's suffrage in the United States was achieved gradually, at state and local levels, during the 19th Century and early 20th Century, culminating in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provided: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

[edit] Beginnings

Lydia Chapin (Taft) (February 2, 1712 – November 9, 1778) was a forerunner of women's suffrage in Colonial America. She was the first woman legally allowed to vote in colonial America. After the death of her wealthy husband and elder son left the family without an adult heir, she was granted this right by the town meeting of Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1756. For the great majority of American women, voting rights were not granted.

During the early part of the 19th century, agitation for equal suffrage was carried on by only a few individuals. The first of these was Frances Wright, a Scottish woman who came to the country in 1826 and advocated women's suffrage in an extensive series of lectures. In 1836 Ernestine Rose, a Polish woman, came to the country and carried on a similar campaign so effectively that she obtained a personal hearing before the New York Legislature, though her petition bore only five signatures. At about the same time, in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Margaret Fuller became active in Boston, the latter being the author of the book The Great Lawsuit; Man vs. Woman.

[edit] 1848

Gerrit Smith made woman suffrage a plank in the Liberty Party platform on June 14–15, 1848.

On June 2, 1848 in Rochester, New York, Gerrit Smith was nominated as the Liberty Party's presidential candidate.^[2] Smith was Elizabeth Cady Stanton's first cousin, and the two enjoyed debating and discussing political and social issues with each other whenever he came to visit.^[2] At the National Liberty Convention, held June 14–15 in Buffalo, New York, Smith gave a major address,^[3] including in his speech a demand for "universal suffrage in its broadest sense, females as well as males being entitled to vote."^[2] The delegates approved a passage in their party platform addressing votes for women: "Neither here, nor in any other part of the world, is the right of suffrage allowed to extend beyond one of the sexes. This universal exclusion of woman... argues, conclusively, that, not as yet, is there one nation so far emerged from barbarism, and so far practically Christian, as to permit woman to rise up to the one level of the human family."^[2] At this convention, five votes were placed calling for Lucretia Mott to be Smith's vice-president—the first time in the United States that a woman was nominated for federal executive office.^[2]

On July 19–20, 1848, in upstate New York, the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights was hosted by Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; some 300 attended including Frederick Douglass, who stood up to speak in favor of women's suffrage to settle an inconclusive debate on the subject. Lucy Stone met with Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Abby Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and six other women to organize the larger National Women's Rights Convention in 1850; a speech she gave the thousand-strong audience inspired Susan B. Anthony to join the cause.^[4]

Efforts to gain various women's rights were subsequently led by women such as Virginia Minor and Sojourner Truth.

[edit] Civil War

During the Civil War, and immediately thereafter, little was heard of the movement, but in 1869 the all-female National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Their object was to secure an amendment to the Constitution in favor of women's suffrage, and they opposed passage of the Fifteenth Amendment ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude") unless it was changed to guarantee to women the right to vote.

In the same year, another suffrage group was organized by Lucy Stone, the much larger and more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) which included both men and women in its membership. AWSA supported the proposed Fifteenth Amendment as written, resolving to gain the incremental victory of black men's voting rights before moving forward to achieve women's voting rights. In 1887, Stone called for a merger of the splintered women's rights organizations, and plans were drawn up for approval. In 1890, the two groups united to form one national organization, known as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).^[5]

[edit] National American Woman Suffrage Association

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, although wary of the merger between NWSA and AWSA, served as president of the organization from 1890–1892. Susan B. Anthony succeeded Stanton and served from 1892–1900.

In 1900, regular national headquarters were established in New York City, under the direction of the new president, Carrie Chapman Catt, who was endorsed by Susan B. Anthony after her retirement as president. Three years later headquarters were moved to Warren, Ohio, but were then brought back to New York again shortly afterward, and re-opened there on a much bigger scale. The organization obtained a hearing before every Congress, from 1869 to 1919.

[edit] National Woman's Party

The National Woman's Party (NWP), was a women's organization founded in 1917 that fought for women's rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states and from which the NWP split, the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Women's Party.

[edit] World War I

World War I provided the final push for women's suffrage in America. After President Woodrow Wilson announced that World War I was a war for democracy, women were up in arms. Members of the NWP help up banners saying that the United States was not a democracy. Women in the audience of his public speeches began to ask the question "Mr. President, if you sincerely desire to forward the interests of all the people, why do you oppose the national enfranchisement of women?"^{[citation needed]} On January 1918 the President acceded to the women who had been protesting at his public speeches and made a pro-suffrage speech. The next year Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote.

[edit] Women's suffrage in individual states

Women's suffrage laws before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment     Full suffrage      Presidential suffrage      Primary suffrage      Municipal suffrage      School, bond, or tax suffrage      Municipal suffrage in some cities      Primary suffrage in some cities      No suffrage

In addition to the strategy to obtain full suffrage through a constitutional amendment, reformers pursued state-by-state campaigns to build support for, or to win, residence-based state suffrage. Towns, counties, states and territories granted suffrage, in full or in part, throughout the 19th and early 20th century. As women received the right to vote, they began running for, and being elected to, public office. They gained positions as school board members, county clerks, state legislators, judges, and eventually, shortly before ratification of the 19th Amendment, as Members of Congress. To make the point that women were interested in partisan politics and would be effective public officials, in the 19th century two women ran for the presidency: Victoria Woodhull in 1872, and Belva Lockwood in 1884 and 1888. Neither was permitted under the law to vote, but nothing in the law prevented them from running for office. Each woman pointed to this irony in her campaigning. Lockwood ran a fuller, more national campaign than Woodhull, giving speeches across the country and organizing several electoral tickets.^[6]

[edit] New Jersey

New Jersey, on confederation of the United States following Revolutionary War, placed only one restriction on the general suffrage—the possession of at least £50 (about USD250 today^[7]) in cash or property.^[8][9] In 1790, the law was revised to include women specifically, and in 1797 the election laws referred to a voter as "he or she".^[10] Female voters became so objectionable to professional politicians, that in 1807 the law was revised to exclude them. Later, the 1844 constitution banned women voting, the 1947 one then allowed it—but, by 1947, all state constitutional provisions that barred women from voting had been rendered ineffective by the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920.

[edit] Kansas

In the summer of 1865, Republicans proposed a Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that would enfranchise the two million newly freed black men. This was the first time the word “male” would be introduced into the Constitution, and women were now explicitly not guaranteed the right to vote.^[11] Thus, feminists, in an effort to secure their political rights alongside freedmen, resolved to combine the abolitionist and suffragist movements into one Equal Rights Association, an idea officially proposed by female suffrage activists Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony at an antislavery meeting in January, 1866.^[12] The suffragists believed they had support for the proposal from the abolitionists, who had previously supported their cause. However, when the Republican Party chose to make black suffrage part of their program after the American Civil War, the Republicans began to collaborate more closely with the abolitionists, and by 1867, most were full supporters of the Republican Party. The Republican party believed that black suffrage, which was a party measure in national politics held far more prospects than women’s suffrage, and the Republican cry was “this is the negro’s hour.”^[13]

Feminists, knowing that women’s suffrage could not succeed without support, put their hope in the Equal Rights Association and pushed for a campaign for universal suffrage. From April until November 1867, women furiously campaigned, distributing thousands of pamphlets and speaking in numerous locations for the cause. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton focused their attentions on New York, while Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, her husband, headed to Kansas, where the November election would be taking place.^[14]

During the New York Constitutional Convention, held on June 4, 1867, Horace Greeley, the chairman of the committee on Suffrage and an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage over the previous 20 years, betrayed the women’s movement and submitted a report in favor of removal of property qualification for free black men, but against women’s suffrage. New York legislators supported the report by a vote of 125 to 19.^[15]

After the defeat in New York, Sam Wood, leader of a rebel faction of the state Republican Party, arrived in Kansas by request of Stone, and invited the Equal Rights Association to help launch their women’s suffrage campaign. Wood had emigrated to Kansas to prevent the extension of slavery, but was also lured by the prospect of land and fortune. A true abolitionist and successful politician, Wood won election to the Kansas senate in 1867. Though he genuinely cared about women’s suffrage, Wood also hoped to make his campaign in Kansas a success so that he could get enough recognition to run for national office. He directed a strong rights campaign, forcing the Republican Kansas legislature to submit two separate bills for black and women’s suffrage. The Equal Rights Association tried to sway the abolitionists to campaign alongside them, but received no response. Wood, though he claimed to support both women’s and black suffrage, was only interested in women’s suffrage. Many abolitionists, however, began to question Wood’s motives when he openly opposed black suffrage as a member of the house in 1864. They began to heavily criticize his campaign, accusing him of promoting women’s suffrage only to defeat black suffrage.^[16] Nonetheless, the equal rights campaign managed to stay afloat through the spring of 1867, due to a large female populace in Kansas that produced “the largest and most enthusiastic meetings and any one of our audiences would give a majority for women.”^[17]

The defeat of women’s suffrage in New York strengthened the Republicans’ position against women’s suffrage, and on August 31, they opened their anti-female suffrage campaign in Kansas. By the time Stanton and Anthony arrived in September, Anthony wrote that “the mischief done was irreparable,” and the universal equal rights campaign, faced with a fierce Republican anti-feminist campaign and the refusal of support from ambivalent abolitionists, had fallen apart.^[18] Stanton and Anthony, desperate for support, looked towards the Democrats, who made up one-fourth of the Kansas legislature. They, however, expressed opposition to both women’s and black suffrage and refused to lend aid. One wealthy Democrat, George Francis Train, a former Copperhead, was willing to help Anthony and Stanton. Train was blatantly racist, and he campaigned by attacking black suffrage. Though his racist standpoint conflicted with the policy set forth by the Equal Rights Association, Stanton and Anthony, with no other political allies to turn to, chose to work with Train to keep women’s suffrage alive in Kansas, although they had long been abolitionists.^[19]

The results of the Kansas election saw both women’s and black suffrage defeated, with black suffrage receiving 10,483 votes and women’s receiving 9,070. With the defeat, equal rights activists were forced to realize that their campaign had failed.^[20]

The failure of the campaign stemmed from the tensions within the Equal Rights Association. The major problem arose from the fact that many members were feminists and abolitionists torn between supporting suffrage for freedmen, or fighting for freedmen and women at the same time.^[21]

Another problem for the Equal Rights Association was funding. It took good deal of money to rent halls for speeches, print pamphlets, and pay suffrage workers. Most of the contributors, however, were female volunteers without incomes. The campaign of 1867 was the very first test of women’s suffrage; and activists were not experienced in raising money. Even more frustrating, as Susan B. Anthony expressed in a letter to Sam Wood, “neither the radical republicans or Old Abolitionists, nor yet the Democrats open their purses, pulpits or presses to our movement.”^[22]

These conflicts eroded the loyalties between abolitionists and feminists in the Equal Rights Association until its near-disintegration in the summer of 1867. The major eruption, however, stemmed from the schism created within the women’s suffrage movement itself. Stone and Blackwell, who had worked closely with Stanton and Anthony throughout the campaign, were appalled by their decision to collaborate with the overtly racist Train. Stone even accused Anthony of squandering money on Train that should have been given to other workers. Stanton’s and Anthony’s steadfast commitment to Train left them vulnerable to the Republican accusation that the Democratic party was only using women’s suffrage to defeat black suffrage, thus giving black equal rights supporters reason to feel animosity towards suffragists.^[23] The final blow to the Equal Rights Association came during the annual meeting in May 1869. Stanton and Anthony found themselves outnumbered by abolitionists, among them their former allies Stone and Blackwell, and accused of supporting a racist and opposing the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Realizing that they could not win, the two women withdrew from the Equal Rights Association. Two days later, they formed their own separate National Woman Suffrage Association and continued work on their own newspaper, The Revolution. The paper was filled with harsh criticisms of the Republican party and radical feminist challenges to traditional female roles. Stone and Blackwell, embarrassed by the radical opinions of the Republican party expressed in The Revolution, formed their own organization, the New England Woman Suffrage Association. The feud between the two organizations would continue for another twenty years before the leaders could reconcile their differences and join together to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.^[24]

[edit] Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado

The first territorial legislature of the Wyoming Territory granted women suffrage in 1869.^[25] In the following year, the Utah Territory followed suit. However, in 1887, the United States Congress disenfranchised Utah women with the Edmunds–Tucker Act. In 1890, Wyoming was admitted to the Union as the first state that allowed women to vote. In 1893, voters of Colorado made that state the second of the woman suffrage states.^[26] In 1895, Utah adopted a constitution restoring the right of woman suffrage. Colorado was the first state where men voted to give women the right to vote.

[edit] California

California's voters enacted women's suffrage in 1911.

[edit] Illinois

In 1891, Ellen Martin became the first Illinois woman to vote in Lombard, after noting that Lombard's charter preempted Illinois law and did not mention gender. The charter was quickly amended after Martin and 14 other women voted in the 1891 elections.

In 1912, Grace Wilbur Trout, then head of the Chicago Political Equality League, was elected president of the state organization. Changing her tactics from a confrontational style of lobbying the state legislature, she turned to building the organization internally. She made sure that a local organization was started in every Senatorial District. One of her assistants, Elizabeth Booth, cut up a Blue Book government directory and made file cards for each of the members of the General Assembly. Armed with the names, four lobbyists went to Springfield to persuade one legislator at a time to support suffrage for women. In 1913, first-term Speaker of the House, Democrat Champ Clark, told Trout that he would submit the bill for a final vote, if there was support for the bill in Illinois. Trout enlisted her network, and while in Chicago over the weekend, Clark received a phone call every 15 minutes, day and night. On returning to Springfield he found a deluge of telegrams and letters from around the state all in favor of suffrage. By acting quietly and quickly, Trout had caught the opposition off guard.

After passing the Senate, the bill was brought up for a vote in the House on June 11, 1913. Trout and her team counted heads and went as far as to fetch needed male voters from their homes. Watching the door to the House chambers, Trout urged members in favor not to leave before the vote, while also trying to prevent "anti" lobbyists from illegally being allowed onto the House floor. The bill passed with six votes to spare, 83 to 58. On June 26, 1913, Illinois Governor Edward F. Dunne signed the bill in the presence of Trout, Booth and union labor leader Margaret Healy.

Women in Illinois could now vote for Presidential electors and for all local offices not specifically named in the Illinois Constitution. However, they still could not vote for state representative, congressman or governor; and they still had to use separate ballots and ballot boxes. But by virtue of this law, Illinois had become the first state east of the Mississippi River to grant women the right to vote for President of the United States. Carrie Chapman Catt wrote:

"The effect of this victory upon the nation was astounding. When the first Illinois election took place in April, (1914) the press carried the headlines that 250,000 women had voted in Chicago. Illinois, with its large electoral vote of 29, proved the turning point beyond which politicians at last got a clear view of the fact that women were gaining genuine political power."

Besides the passage of the Illinois Municipal Voting Act, 1913 was also a significant year in other facets of the women's suffrage movement. In Chicago, African American anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first such organization for Negro women in Illinois. Although white women as a group were sometimes ambivalent about obtaining the franchise, African American women were almost universally in favor of gaining the vote to help end their sexual exploitation, promote their educational opportunities and protect those who were wage earners.^{[citation needed]}

Women's suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, New York, October 1917, carrying the signatures of a million women

On March 3, 1913, over 5,000 suffragists paraded in Washington, D.C. When Wells tried to line up with her Illinois sisters, she was asked to go to the end of the line so as not to offend and alienate the southern women marchers. Wells feigned agreement, but much to the shock of Trout, she joined the Illinois delegation once the parade started.

As the suffragists started down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd became abusive and started to close in, knocking the marchers around with hostility. With local police doing little to keep control, the cavalry was called in as 100 women were hospitalized. Many suffragists concluded that public protests might be the quickest route to universal franchise.

[edit] Arizona, Oregon, other Western States, Texas, and New York

One after another, western states granted the right of voting to their women citizens, the only opposition being presented by the liquor interests and the machine politicians. In both Arizona and Oregon the right was won in 1912 by suffragettes forcing statewide votes through those states' ballot initiative processes. Montana's voting men gave women the vote in 1914, and together they proceeded to elect the first woman to the United States Congress two years later, Jeannette Rankin. New York joined the procession in 1917.

[edit] Making a federal case of suffrage: the Nineteenth Amendment

Many groups were opposed to women's suffrage at the time.

On January 12, 1915, a suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but was lost by a vote of 174 to 204. Again a bill was brought before the House, on January 10, 1918. On the evening before, President Wilson made a strong and widely published appeal to the House to pass the bill. It was passed with one more vote than was needed to make the necessary two-thirds majority. The vote was then carried into the Senate. Again President Wilson made an appeal, and on September 30, 1918, the question was put to the vote, but two votes were lacking to make the two-thirds majority. On February 10, 1919, it was again voted upon, and then it was lost by only one vote.

There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so the President called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays. It only remained that the necessary number of states should ratify the action of Congress. Within a few days Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, their legislatures being then in session, passed the ratifications. Other states then followed their examples, and Tennessee was the last of the needed 36 states to ratify, in the summer of 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was an accomplished fact, and the Presidential election of November 1920 was therefore the first occasion on which women in all states were allowed to exercise their right of suffrage.^[27]

[edit] See also

[edit] Biographical links

• Cynthia Leonard
• Frances Willard
• Ida Husted Harper
• Mary Livermore

[edit] Historical links

• Silent Sentinels (1917 imprisonment of suffragettes at the Occoquan Workhouse)
• Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
• National American Woman Suffrage Association
• Women's Rights Law Reporter

[edit] References

Notes

Bibliography

• Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. Hill and Wang, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8090-9528-9.
• Norgren, Jill. Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President New York University Press, 2007.
• Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ISBN 0-252-02904-6

[edit] External links

• International Woman Suffrage Timeline: Winning the Vote for Women Around the World provided by About.com

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