I just finished watching on PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE “The Vote,” a two-part documentary about women’s right to vote. It was aired to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote in the U.S. It tells the dramatic story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote, a transformative cultural and political movement that resulted in the largest expansion of voting rights in U.S. history. In its final decade, movement leaders wrestled with contentious questions about the most effective methods for affecting social change, debating the use of militant and even violent tactics. Exploring how and why millions of 20th century Americans mobilized for — and against — women’s suffrage, “The Vote” brings to life the unsung leaders of the movement and the deep controversies over gender roles and race that divided Americans then — and continue to dominate political discourse today.
Beginning
According to history.com, the campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and 30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.
At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States — temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations — and in many of these, women played a prominent role.
According to the National Women’s History Museum, in 1829 British-born reformer Frances Wright toured the United States and lectured against slavery. The same year, an artist published this cartoon making fun of her. The cartoon depicts Wright standing near a table and giving a lecture, but she has the head of a goose. The title says she “deserves to be hissed.” According to this artist and many others, women should not speak in public, and the public should not care what she has to say.
Meanwhile — per history.com — many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.
Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.
Seneca Falls Convention
In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists — mostly women, but some men — gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, “that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.
Civil War and civil rights
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens — and defines “citizens” as “male;” the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees black men the right to vote.
Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.
In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Others argued that it was unfair to endanger black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.
Progressive campaign for suffrage
This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.
By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.
They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”
This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained."
Did you know? In 1923, the National Women's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.
Anti-suffrage
According to Wikipedia, there were several concerns that drove the anti-suffrage argument. Anti-suffragists felt that giving women the right to vote would threaten the family institution. Illinois anti-suffragist Caroline Corbin felt that women's highest duties were motherhood and its responsibilities. Some saw women's suffrage as in opposition to God's will. There were also those who thought that women could not handle the responsibility of voting because they lacked knowledge of that beyond the domestic sphere and they feared the government would be weakened by introducing this ill-informed electorate.
Anti-suffragists, such as Josephine Dodge, argued that giving women the right to vote would overburden them and undermine their privileged status. They saw participation in the private sphere as essential to a woman's role and thought that giving them public duties would prevent them from fulfilling their primary responsibilities in the home.
The anti-suffrage movement began to change in its position against suffrage in 1917, expanding their scope to include anti-radical rhetoric. The anti-suffrage movement focused less on the issue of suffrage and began to spread fear of radical ideas and to use "conspiratorial paranoia." Suffragists were accused of subversion of the government and treason. They were also accused of being socialists, “Bolsheviks” or "unpatriotic German sympathizers."
Winning the vote at last
According to history.com, starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.
Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, National American Woman Suffrage Association president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last — a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with special focus on those recalcitrant regions.
Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Women’s Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics — hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance — aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.
World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.
Finally, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.
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