“Suffrage”
by Ellen Dubois
It’s the tale of women’s fight for the right to vote from the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. 1848 was a time of revolutionary actions all over Europe to break the powers of the hereditary monarchies. The 19th amendment finally passed in the aftermath of the bloodbaths of the First World War, the flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed 50 million globally, and the overthrow of monarchies and empires in Russia, Austria Hungary and Turkey.
The struggle for the 19th Amendment reminded me of how strong and persistent our efforts must be to achieve such a simple, basic, democratic equality as the right to vote. Women were jailed, beaten, force fed and set upon by mobs as they struggled for this simple, basic, fundamental right of democracy. The opposition included many men, some women, the garment sweatshop owners, the textile mill manufacturers, the saloon owners, the preachers, the white Southern Democrats and even and especially the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162 (1875).
Let me just remind you that an Amendment to the United States Constitution requires a two thirds vote in both Houses of Congress and ratification by the state legislatures in three fourths of the states; to put it gently, this was not an easy lift.
In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass led the argument that persuaded 100 delegates at a convention in Seneca Falls, a small upstate New York town close to Rochester, to adopt a plank in support of universal suffrage for women. https://www.womensrightsfriends.org/pdfs/1848_declaration_of_sentiments.pdf It’s really worth a read. Susan B. Anthony became its chief organizer, Lucy Stone its best orator and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the best writer and theorist for the movement for women’s suffrage that emerged from Seneca Falls. When Susan B. Anthony sought to vote for the President of the United States; she was charged, tried and fined; the judge for her trial was a Supreme Court Justice who denied her every effort to be heard in her own defense. Stanton, Anthony, Stone and their organizations worked both state by state and nationally for a single issue – women’s suffrage -- for 72 years. and eventually they won. The greatest early progress was in Western states, led first by Wyoming. The greatest opposition was in the Southern states where white politicians feared the impacts of black women’s voting strength.
Initially the women’s suffrage movement closely aligned with the abolitionist movement. Its earliest adherents were individuals with devout, religious fervor such as the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and people aroused to a moral life as part of the Second Great Awakening. It later encompassed leading free thinkers, such as Matilda Gage and Victoria Woodhull. It included the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union), which under the leadership of Frances Willard sought to inspire and lead the nation on the issues of women’s suffrage, prison reform, and labor laws in addition to abstinence from alcohol. It later included working women from the labor movements in the textile mills, the garment sweatshops, the laundry workers and the waitresses. The industrial revolution had brought young women from the farms to factory jobs in the cities; as early as the 1830’s, they were among the nation’s earliest strikers at the Lowell weaving mills. So fair wages and safe working conditions were a key subtext to the women’s suffrage movement. Many professions and much of higher learning was shut to women, so discrimination was another key subtext.
After the Civil War, the 14th and 15th Amendments assured that a citizen’s rights to vote could not be denied based on their race, color, or previous condition of servitude; however it did not explicitly include women’s right to vote. Women’s suffrage leaders were dismayed and angered. This created a long rift and residual animus between the highly educated, upper class white women leaders of the women’s suffrage movement and the leaders of the African-American movement like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and others who initially were and should have continued to be their natural allies.
During the latter part of the 19th Century, the radical Republican politicians who had led the fight for the emancipation of slaves, and the enactment of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were the natural political allies for the women suffrage movement. At that time, Democratic politicians were hostile to women’s suffrage; they took their lead from the Southern Democrats who were opposed because it would allow African American women to vote.
The fast paced economic growth of the Industrial Revolution and America’s political freedoms attracted large numbers of immigrants from Europe and Asia. There was great nativist hostility to the many immigrants working in our nation’s fast growing industries in the Midwest and New York. Great industrial fortunes were being made, and workers were often poorly paid, working in hazardous conditions for exceedingly long hours and living in overcrowded tenements; child labor was common. The chieftains of American industry distrusted that the potential woman’s vote would reform the labor markets. Their daughters might be among the suffrage picketers in front of the White House.
Western states, starting with Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Washington, Idaho and Colorado, were early building blocks for a state-by-state strategy to develop women’s franchise. An alliance among progressive Republican voters, union voters and the organizing efforts of young college women activists pushed the California ballot initiative for women’s suffrage over the top.
In New York City, the terrible tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed many women workers in the garment district finally moved progressives from both political parties to put women’s suffrage on the ballot. And while it lost the first time up, it prevailed the next. In Illinois, labor and progressives, black voters and women activists combined to persuade the state’s legislature and Governor to approve women’s electoral franchise.
The suffrage movement had to learn painful lessons as they ultimately built winning coalitions in state election and legislative battles -- battles in which they themselves could not vote. They had badly alienated African American voters and had to win them back. They had to appeal to and rally strong support from union voters. They had to stand strong against inflamed mobs, white supremacists, nativists and religious bigots. They had to learn how to appeal to immigrant male voters speaking many different languages and coming from many different cultures. They had to appeal to, bring in, and give way to younger leaders and young voters. They had to operate and win votes within a political system of corrupt, big city and small town male political bosses. These were not easy lessons for a leadership consisting of highly educated, upper class, older, white women who had been passionate, single-issue advocates of women’s suffrage throughout many decades of defeats and disappointments.
The 19th Amendment was the starting point in building women’s political rights. It was a hard fought battle, but a winning one. In the aftermath, the women’s rights movement appeared to have gone underground for the next 40 years only to re-emerge in public consciousness in the 1960s through to the present day.
The question now facing all Americans is whether we will show the same courage and persistence as our grandmother and great grandmother and great great grandmother forebears in assuring the opportunity for every American to vote, or whether we will sit silent and supine as state Republican legislators and governors seek to disenfranchise our fellow American citizens.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 3/30/21