To get the word “male” out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign… During that time they were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks; and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. Carrie Chapman Catt, 1923
Achieving women’s suffrage in the USA involved a political movement and campaign whose main task, from its inception, involved challenging an all-encompassing ideological model which laid down the purported proper places of men and women in society, their essential natures, and the consequent activities which were deemed suitable to each. Women’s subordinate role in American society was socially constructed through a matrix of tradition, religion, prejudice, economic structures, law, political power, political ideology, and the constitution of the United States. Every one of these factors had to be confronted and either changed or interpreted in a new way before women could be enfranchised. In a situation which began with every vestige of political power in the hands of men, this was a monumental task.
The movement for female emancipation and the vote was intertwined with a broad socio-economic phenomenon of the 19th century – the changing nature of the family and its relation to society. As production and paid work relocated from home to factories, mills and offices, with an accompanying shift of community life and civic activities, the separation of private and public spheres became increasingly marked. This led to a new conceptualising of domesticity, which elicited a refined ideological definition of the roles of men and women. This in turn produced speculative theories about the very natures of men and women, focussing in particular upon purported differences. These views were not so much rational as rationalising, employed to justify and underpin attitudes and structures which were still infused with the paternalism of an earlier age. However now, because of the confinement of women’s locus to the home where far fewer connections to the world of work and community were centred, it made that a far more restrictive forum than before (Hall, 15-20).
The concept of gender spheres is important for understanding the conditions and the ideology against which women struggled throughout the 19th century. Domestic reformers such as Catharine Beecher sought to recover the loss of female social status by appealing for greater recognition of women’s unique character and virtues, and although she advocated improved educational opportunities, she was against female suffrage. The domestic reformers’ approach actually reinforced the ideas of separate spheres by seeking only to modify women’s subordinate role, making it less starkly objectionable, but not eliminating it (DuBois, 16-17). To understand the oppressive and patronising nature of the separate-spheres theory, it is instructive to hear an exposition of it by a man – a man regarded as progressive and enlightened in his day, and who was as influential in the USA as he was in his native Britain.
In his 1865 essay, Of Queens’ Gardens, John Ruskin began by deriding those who said women are innately inferior to men, citing the opinion of Shakespeare that women are virtuous, faithful, truthful, patient and wise. He approvingly quoted Walter Scott’s list of female virtues, among which were grace, tenderness, dignity, self-sacrifice and restrained affection. His particular personal favourites appear to have been loyalty, devotion and patient wisdom. Having praised women so resoundingly, he then proceeded to explain how all these qualities could be reconciled with his ideal of “true wifely subjection” (Ruskin, 58). This relied upon his ability to comprehend the “true” nature of men and women, such specious insight allowing him to assign them their proper roles in society:
The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest… But the woman’s power is for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision… Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial… But he guards the woman from all this; within his house need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence… And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her… This, then, I believe to be… the woman’s true place and power. (Ruskin, 59-60)
These were the sort of condescending attitudes with which women of the mid-19th century had to contend, here coming from one who was seen as liberal-minded and an early socialist, but subscribed to across the whole political spectrum. Conservative views, often emanating from the churches, echoed Ruskin’s secular assertions, as this passage from the Council of the Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts indicates:
The appropriate duties and influence of women are clearly stated in the New Testament… The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection. (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 42)
Ruskin’s vision was a gilded-cage existence for women, denying them the right to a career beyond the confines of the home, a virtual open prison bedecked with brocade. Although he was aiming his patronising syrup at the book-buying middle-classes, such a view percolated down through the social strata where it was seen as an aspirational goal (Hobsbawm, 1980, 332).
Ensnared in deep-rooted, widespread ideological and institutional suffocation, the movement for women’s suffrage was a political ambition which was just part of a far greater phenomenon – a social movement whose ultimate goal was control by women over their own lives. It was a quest for emancipation which went well beyond the political, an emancipation fought for by the first-ever independent movement of women uniting for a cause which was their own, and was fundamentally for themselves (DuBois, 17-18). It was a challenge to the seductive and insidious ideas of female self-sacrifice and being helpmates to the presumed real actors in human society – men. This was at heart, and from the beginning, a feminist movement (Giele, 2), even if that term had not yet been minted, and even if many of its participants shied away from such an assertive declaration.
From the start the women’s rights movement saw women not just as beneficiaries of change, but as agents of the process of change. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “Woman herself must do the work.” (Dubois 22) That convention marked the first gathering of women specifically to campaign for women’s rights as an end in itself, and included a resolution demanding female suffrage. However, it was not the first instance of female political activity. Experience had been accrued in the anti-slavery movement where women had participated since the 1830s, learning how to organise, conduct petitions, hold public meetings and speak in public (Giele, 55). They also tasted the abuse and mob violence which frequently erupted when opposition to the social order was expressed in a public forum (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 39-40).
It is important to note that it was not just organisational and practical experience that involvement in abolitionism produced. DuBois (24) stresses that women’s lack of skills, part of the oppression of women, was a challenge in itself. However, that actually broadened the perspective of many women. Before and after 1848, women experienced obstacles put in their path simply for being women attempting to participate in abolitionism. On occasions that opposition even came from within the anti-slavery movement. The process of developing a feminist position from having to fight just to express an opinion is illustrated by the Grimké sisters whose religiously-inspired anti-slavery stance encountered opposition accusing them of “lack of decorum”. Within a few years such scorn led them to link the oppression of women with the oppression of slavery. Rejecting their prescribed meek role in society, they began challenging religious figures who invoked biblical justification for the subservient role of women. Sarah Grimké boldly declared that the scriptures were not divine, but were a reflection of the patriarchal, agricultural society in which they were written (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 42-44).
William Lloyd Garrison, an early supporter of women’s rights, advocated a similar anti-clericalism which reinforced the insistence on the moral equality of all human beings (Kraditor, 1967, 59). Such a common-humanity approach fitted well with the women’s rights movement, reinforced opposition to the concept of separate spheres, and fed into the growingly political ideal of equality. At the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention it was agreed that, “We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion… what is and what is not their ‘proper sphere’.” (DuBois, 36-37).
The Garrisonian tactics of acting as agitators of public opinion were taken up by women’s rights leaders such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the pre-Civil War years, the object being to keep the issues of women’s oppression permanently in the public eye. Central to that was the demand for the vote as both as an end in itself and as a means towards making possible other female-emancipation reforms. The idea of citizenship and democracy as feeder-streams of the movement’s evolving ideology is argued by Janet Giele (58-59). She sees growing acceptance in the mid-19th century that the vote should not be dependent on possessing substantial property, but that those subject to taxation and legal punishments should have a say in the formation of laws which prescribed these. This was a populist demand aimed at including the “common man” in active citizenship, but it dovetailed perfectly into female suffrage demands. The 1856 Woman’s Rights Convention resolved:
…that the main power of the woman’s rights movement lies in this: while always demanding for women better education, better employment, and better laws, it has kept steadily in view the one cardinal demand for the right of suffrage: in a democracy, the symbol and guarantee of all other rights. (Giele, 59)
While suffrage was paramount, there were many other issues of concern to female-emancipation activists, such as property law, control of earnings, guardianship of children, legal status in court cases, and inheritance rights. In the pre-Civil War years, there was a fair amount of success at state level, very largely in the North, for the reform of property laws, but no movement whatsoever on the franchise, and in spite of all the campaigning and activism, there emerged no permanent women’s rights organisation (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 77).
During the Civil War, women in the North became extremely active in certain areas related to the conflict. The most significant were the United States Sanitary Commission and the Woman’s Loyal National League. Founded largely by women within weeks of the outbreak of war, the USCC started as an organisation promoting health and cleanliness in army camps. By 1863 it had become an advisory body on hospital design, sanitation, hygiene, medical supplies and the logistics of moving the wounded from battlefield to hospital. It acted as a powerful political pressure group and a leading advocate of medical reform. Although the USSC’s formal leadership were all men, the influence of women in giving it direction was substantial and many were salaried employees. Tens of thousands of female volunteers greatly outnumbered the men in the organisation, and their role in fundraising and management of the organisation’s huge range of functions was central (Maxwell, 297, 305-07). William Hammond, the US Surgeon-General ordered that at least a third of all nurses in army general hospitals were to be women with Dorothea Dix employed as Superintendent of Female Nurses. Three thousand women thus became employees of the Federal government paid directly by the Army, two bastions of entrenched male monopoly (McPherson, 483).
The Women’s Loyal National League, headed by Stanton and Anthony, played an explicitly political role, campaigning during 1863 and 1864 for the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery. By its efforts a 400,000-strong petition was presented to Congress. Activity in this arena was highly significant – it persuaded women that creating a national organisation was feasible and useful, it involved women directly in national politics, and it demonstrated publicly that women could contribute to civic society (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 103-07).
It was within the slowly increasing female presence in the professions and higher education realm that demand for the vote initially found the most resonance. The suffrage movement, and particularly its leadership, was dominated by middle-class women who had more time, education, social connections and the resources required to undertake such work. As more of them encountered impediments to entering, progressing and being properly rewarded and recognised, so appreciation of the injustice of this spread. Arising as it did within the middle classes, it is no surprise that the American suffragist movement was infused with the values of liberal tradition (Marilley, 3). Liberalism has legal equality at its root, and is a universalist doctrine emphasising the uniqueness of the individual, stressing the right to self-fulfilment, championing free speech, and demanding representative government. All those values self-evidently allowed women to claim them for themselves as a matter of logic as well as justice. John Stuart Mill recognised this and expounded it in The Subjection of Women (1869), a work which was very popular among American women seeking greater rights. It was a call for equality of opportunity aimed squarely at the middle classes where female emancipation was not hindered by lack of resources, but by cultural and ideological dogmatism in the midst of changing social structures which had created greater expectations among women. That dogmatism arose from both atavistic traditionalism steeped in Christian teachings, and, ironically, from a central tenet of liberalism – property. As long as women were regarded as a form of property, denying women the franchise had ideological underpinning. The prevailing concept of citizenship and the separate-spheres assertion justified legal and political impediments.
A further aspect of American liberalism also hindered female enfranchisement – the Americanist tradition (sometimes called Nativism) which embodied exclusionist attitudes toward those not of white, Anglo-Saxon, native-born, Protestant stock. Originating among descendants of early colonial settlers, this belief held that there was a unique American mix of liberal freedoms and republican responsibilities resulting from America’s superior culture and biological make-up. Americanists approved of liberal principles for self-governance among their own self-defined fellow-citizens, but withheld that right from blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians and those perceived as “other”. That tradition, elevating “manners and customs” to a virtue because that was seen as the path which had allowed them to endure and prosper, meant that women too were excluded. This was justified under the rubric of the “natural order”, derived from Natural Law which was one of the underpinnings of classic liberalism. Americanism was not anti-democratic, but its progress towards a greater inclusivist citizenry was exceptionally slow and hamstrung by parochial conservatism (Marilley, 4-5; Kraditor, 1965, 44).
For the suffragists, the vote constituted an essential step in the right of women to claim autonomy over themselves, something quite different from what it had meant for men. For early-19th-century un-enfranchised men it had been about class discrimination, the undue privileges of wealth, traditional rights and dues, or protecting their livelihoods. It manifested in the Workingmen’s Parties of the late 1820s and 1830s and the early trade unions where women played no part whatsoever (Henretta, 345-47). For all white men and for a minority of black men in the North, the property qualification had all but been abolished across the USA before mid-century, but for women it remained in a legal as well as political form.
Centred on the notion of dependency, that essential component of separate-spheres ideology, the law of the land granted husbands and fathers control not just of women’s property, earnings and labour, but of their physical person. After marriage a woman ceased to have a legal existence, was unable to contract legal relationships, had no rights over her children and could not separately own property, a common-law convention known as “coverture” (Giele, 52-53). Male authority over women was regarded as part of Natural Law, and was ensured by man-made laws which all-male legislatures elected by all-male electorates had created. If women remained excluded from the sphere in which politics was practised, then they had no hope of change unless it was granted by the grace of men. Even then that would be tantamount to an act of charity, not one of genuine empowerment, and what was given could readily be taken away again. Thus even the passage of laws granting women limited property rights amounted to male-monopoly legislatures addressing grievances within a concept of “protecting” women rather than granting them political participation. The significance of the vote was that it would empower women and allow them to protect themselves, undermining the dependency rationale and bringing into question the validity of separate-spheres thinking (DuBois, 40-47). Even as late as 1910, Rheta Childe Dorr could write a book in which she described the gross injustices which such legal disablement still caused women (Dorr, 24-36).
An important tenet of liberalism is belief in the power of education to enhance individuality and create the responsible citizen. This belief was seen clearly in the American women’s rights movement; it permeated all shades of opinion and even extended to domestic reformers. It was a great unifying feature of the movement and much effort was put into establishing women’s colleges from the 1830s. This emphasis was to bear fruit, because the majority of the leaders of the movement in later years and large numbers of rank-and-file supporters were educated into their beliefs and acquired their campaigning motivations and skills within such institutions (Flexner & Fitzpatrick, 108-25).
However, the women’s rights movement was not immune to internal disagreements and differences over strategies and tactics. In the years after the Civil War these became more pronounced and resulted in separate organisations pursuing different agendas. When the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing citizenship was published in 1866, it caused dismay among many since it specifically referred to male citizens in connection with the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment when it was introduced in 1869, also failed to ban franchise exclusion on the grounds of sex. These progressive measures to outlaw racial exception in elections actually looked like a retrograde step for women, since they were enshrining in the constitution the declaration that the franchise was a male preserve. Previously the scope and the limits of the electorate had been a matter decided at state level, and between 1776 and 1807 New Jersey had actually allowed propertied women the vote which had been exercised in both congressional and presidential elections (Lewis, 1017, 1025).
It was over the issue of constitutional amendment that a split in the suffragist ranks appeared, just three years after the first national organisation dedicated to obtaining the vote, the American Equal Rights Association, had been founded. Headed by Stanton and Anthony, the National Woman Suffrage Association became an organisation whose leadership, unlike the AERA, was open only to women (Marilley, 76). Its aim was to achieve a federal ruling in favour of female franchise, but it was prepared to champion other causes such as the organising of working women and divorce law. Its rival, the American Woman Suffrage Association led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, aimed to increase women’s access to the franchise on a state-by-state basis, their gradualism manifested in accepting the constitutional amendments as better than no progress at all (Giele 60). The essential distinction between the two organisations was a basic difference of social viewpoints, the NWSA being a radical suffragist movement, the AWSA a conservative one; both had the same goal but chose different strategies for how to achieve it.
The split in the movement was exacerbated by an attempt to win a referendum in Kansas in 1867 which would have simultaneously extended the franchise to women as well as black men. Kansas was a strongly abolitionist state under firm Republican control and seemed like a good prospect. However, the state Republican Party opposed this and separated the referendum into two separate ones. It then refused to back the female suffrage one, the Radical Republican press withheld support until too late, and the suffragists’ former allies, the abolitionists, turned their backs on the campaigners. In fact the Republicans eventually became active opponents of the female-franchise referendum, stating that such linkage might jeopardise male black enfranchisement, a similar argument to their failure to include female citizen and voting protection in the constitutional amendments (DuBois, 79-92). In the event both referenda were lost, but the reason given by the Republican establishment was at best partial. Hostility to female equality and belief in the separate spheres was still too deeply rooted among men at this point to allow women the vote and threaten their comfortable hegemony.
A similar proposal to enfranchise women in New York state in 1867 was overwhelmingly rejected by a constitutional convention chaired by Horace Greeley. One of the most prominent abolitionist in the USA, and supposedly a friend of the suffragists’ cause, he nevertheless recommended rejecting the female suffrage proposition while backing the vote for black men (DuBois, 87). Stanton, Anthony and many within the women’s rights movements saw the disappointments of Kansas and New York as betrayals by the Republicans and by their erstwhile allies in the anti-slavery movement for whom they had campaigned and set aside their own objectives during the Civil War. Having turned towards finding support among Democrats as well as Republicans during the Kansas campaign, the subsequent NWSA became an independent women’s suffrage movements aligned to no party and no longer anchored to the abolitionists. The AWSA initially remained closer to the Republicans, but over time it also moved away from partisan political alignment.
For twenty years until they re-amalgamated in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the two organisations remained apart and although each pursued the single agenda of suffrage, both were prepared to work with anyone else who would further their cause. This created some uneasiness when the NWSA took money from the notorious speculator, George Francis Train (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 143), and also accepted support from racist Democrats whose politics were close to the Americanist variety except for their admission of women to the white body politic (DuBois, 93).
The first victories for women’s suffrage came at state level and encouraged pursuit of the stepping-stone strategy. It occurred in the remote and sparsely populated territory of Wyoming in 1869 when women were granted the vote at all levels. Not only was the franchise achieved, but women were empowered to sit on juries and the first-ever female court bailiff and first justice of the peace were appointed the following year (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 152-54).
To the surprise of many (even today) it was the Mormon-dominated territory of Utah which next gave women the vote in 1870. Since no active suffragist movement existed in the territory the reason for this has been debated ever since. Flexner and Fitzpatrick (155) argue it was an attempt to enlist women’s support in opposition to the Cullom Bill of the time which was aimed at outlawing polygamy. However, this is not convincing since Mormon men on their own had sufficient control of the legislature in Utah to ensure adequate opposition. The reason more likely lies in the cultural, religious and ideological differences between Mormons and the mainstream of 1870 American society. Despite women not being allowed to hold office in their church hierarchy and despite a small minority of the community practising polygamy, nevertheless the division into separate spheres seems to have been less all-encompassing. It did not preclude women taking part in the civic activities of their communities, a tradition created and fostered by the enduring persecution which Mormons had suffered since their inception where maximum input and activity was needed from everyone in the community for reasons of survival. Perhaps liberal America (both then and now) could not admit that the much-scorned Mormons might actually be more socially progressive than themselves in this matter and at that juncture.
There was then a gap of more than twenty years before Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896) followed suit, helped by political endorsement of the cause by the Populist Party. A few years later, western states began to fall like dominoes: Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Oregon and Kansas (1912). It is important to analyse what happened between 1870 and 1912 to create a situation where political support began to come from other organisations, both party political and socially reformist ones, and why membership in the reunited NAWSA eventually soared to over two million and expanded well beyond the comfortable middle classes (Foner, 666).
In 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, five women of the NWSA dramatically unveiled a Declaration of Rights for Women. What is significant about this document is how it differs from a similar one announced at Seneca Falls in 1848. It was more focused upon political issues, particularly exclusively male government, and this emphasis was reflected in the efforts of the NWSA to get their case raised in Congress. Where previously they could not get past the door, from 1882 both houses appointed Select Committees on Women’s Suffrage and, until 1896, at regular and frequent intervals the issue was debated in Congress with a substantial minority of congressmen consistently supporting it (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 164-67). While the NWSA concentrated upon the Federal Congress, the AWSA independently pushed similar demands at state level. While not acting in conscious tandem, nonetheless the campaigns complemented each other.
Of equal significance was the growth of women’s organisations in the last quarter of the 19th century. Advances in technology such as improved domestic utilities, house and street lighting, passenger transport and cheaper printed material, plus an increased availability of unskilled labour available for domestic work, allowed middle-class women much more freedom, leisure and opportunity to participate in social activities. Additionally, the number of women categorised in middle-class occupations as well as those who were the wives of middle-class men mushroomed (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 171). Women flocked to social clubs, reading circles, sports organisations and groups with a campaigning purpose. It was through the latter that many women were politicised into supporting the cause of female suffrage. Organisations with concerns for the welfare of children and orphans were numerous, as were those with a moral purpose, such as tackling prostitution, prison reform, addressing poverty, and fighting the evils of excessive alcohol consumption.
It was the temperance issue which was to prove one of the most powerful and enduring of the many reform movements of the age, and its aid to the women’s suffrage movement was immense. Started in the 1840s, by the 1880s this movement had become a vast national organisation of 70,000 women under the umbrella of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. By 1895 it had 135,000 members (Giele, 63). The problem of alcohol abuse was serious in 19th-century America, particularly for women who suffered at the hands of drunken fathers and above all drunken husbands. Because the law deemed that all property within marriage was controlled by the husband, he could drink away his wife’s earnings, sell her goods and lose the shared family home to pay for his habit – and the wife had no recourse in law (Flanagan, 42). Domestic violence was widespread as a result of alcohol abuse, but unless it was life-threatening this went unchallenged, considered a private matter and the prerogative of a husband to do as he wished in his own home. The only way to address this nationwide problem was by legislation to limit or ban alcohol sales, and to change the law regarding women’s vulnerability to pauperisation.
There was little appetite among male legislators to adopt temperance or prohibition laws even if they were appalled at the effects of drunkenness – it was a potential vote-loser since many of these reprobates were their constituents, and many more responsible drinkers would baulk at the idea of being restricted in their consumption by the bad behaviour of others. It seemed to many in the temperance movement that only when women had the vote would there be the political will and wherewithal to change the laws. In this way a problem which appeared confined to the domestic sphere and therefore nearly impervious to change was moved into the public sphere. Under the leadership of the feminist Frances Willard, the WCTU endorsed the campaign for women’s suffrage in 1879 (Giele, 97). With so many women involved in this movement, their presence in what had been regarded as the male sphere corroded its exclusivity, its hermetical nature gradually succumbing to both political pressure and ongoing socio-economic change. Aileen Kraditor (1965, 65) has argued that support for suffrage among temperance women was based more on arguments of expediency rather than justice, being fundamentally a means to an end. Giele (104) believes, however, that about 40% of temperance women saw it as an end in itself worth pursuing. It is arguable that suffrage is only ever meaningful if seen as obtaining power for a purpose, but Kraditor (1965,45) counter-argues that some suffragists actually supported social reform only as a means towards their final goal of the vote.
The suffragist movement benefitted from a climate of socio-economic change and political developments in the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, known as the Progressive Age. Maureen Flanagan goes so far as to say, “Progressivism helped ensure that woman suffrage was inevitable.” (73) One of the principal features of the Progressive Movement was the degree of success achieved in tackling political corruption, especially within the political parties (Reynolds, 273), and this was of great benefit to the advocacy of women’s suffrage. Since women’s participation in electoral politics was negligible, they had clean hands. Furthermore the large brewers who were among the most vociferous opponents of female suffrage were deeply implicated in political corruption (Scott and Scott, 25), so when they became exposed and discredited, the resultant credibility that flowed to the WCTU translated into increased sympathy for their high-profile support for votes for women.
One of the tactics employed in this climate was to actually appeal to the separate-spheres ideal of womanly virtues, an example of Kraditor’s argument from expediency (1965, 45). This chimed well with the emerging advocacy of state regulation in industry, commerce, the environment and education in order to benefit society as a whole. Traditional “womanly” virtues were seen as a valuable ingredient in this protective and nurturing view of society and the body politic where the national state was becoming an active moral agent (Flanagan, 101). It is an irony that in enlisting the perceived values of the separate spheres to buttress support for women’s suffrage, this in fact contributed to dissolving the social divisions of the sexes. Even at the height of its influence in the mid-19th century, the separate-spheres doctrine was more of an ideal than a reality. By the turn of the 20th century, socio-economic developments had rendered it even less of a mirror of society. It was now largely a reactionary ideological weapon used in a rearguard political battle which the anti-women’s-suffrage movement had probably already lost by about 1912.
During the Progressive Era women’s reform and suffrage organisations among both the middle class and working class expanded greatly (Flanagan, 132-33). Although the American Federation of Labour was lukewarm on the issue of women’s enfranchisement, the recently formed National Women’s Trade Union League was solidly in favour (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 239). In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt split from the Republicans and his new Progressive Party ran on a ticket supporting the vote for women. In 1916 the National Woman’s Party led by Alice Paul embarked on high-profile activism aimed directly at Congress. It also organised and campaigned in the twelve states where women had the vote in the 1916 presidential election, which Flexner and Fitzpatrick (269) see as causing both Republicans and Democrats to make favourable, if vague, references to women’s suffrage. When the state of New York voted in a referendum in favour of the female franchise in 1917, the writing was clearly on the wall.
Although the states were falling one by one, there were certain areas, particularly the South, where there was almost no prospect of a state-referendum victory. The only solution was a Federal amendment to the constitution. After Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1916, Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the NWSA, set the organisation on a course of focussing upon Wilson who had progressed over the years from opposition to publicly casting his vote in favour of female enfranchisement in the 1915 New Jersey referendum. In 1917 he finally indicated his support for a constitutional amendment. With his support assured, the NWSA laid out and meticulously followed a remarkably well organised tactical plan to win enough support in 36 states to ensure that not only would the bill pass Congress, but would have the sufficient three-quarters state support required for ratification. Winnable states were targeted, hopeless cases ignored, and very shortly thereafter a flurry of referenda were won in quick succession. While the prize of New York was the biggest one, success in Arkansas was just as important because it was the first breach in the truculently recalcitrant South. The Nineteenth Amendment passed the House of Representatives in January 1918 and, after a bitter fight and several failures, finally passed the Senate. Within two years it had received state ratification, but this too required continuing dedication, campaigning and fund-raising by the NWSA and other organisations (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 300-17).
This study has scarcely touched upon the experience of Southern women or black women’s activities during the years covered. It has mostly ignored the dead-ends and failed initiatives. It has not described the intimidation, violence and imprisonment suffered by thousands of suffrage activists. These omissions have been made solely to allow concentration upon the successful dismantling of an ideological colossus. That process was aided by socio-economic structural changes in the nation, which were most auspicious during the Progressive Era when an altered view of the role of the state emerged. However, the greatest factors in achieving suffrage were the focus, determination, organisational abilities and, above all, skilful navigation of a cause by a movement which was overwhelmingly composed of women, and which lacked almost all the formal political power of the opposition. Gratifyingly too for the cause of female emancipation, in the process of gaining the vote, the oppressive model of separate-gender spheres was also reduced to rubble.
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