Carrie Chapman and the Women's Movement

Introduction
The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S. got going in the 19th century with the National Woman’s Rights Convention of 1850 in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the role of women in society was a major focal point (Siegel, 1994). Women were becoming more outspoken and many women like Sojourner Truth and Angelina Weld were traveling around and speaking out on the evils of slavery and so on. The Women’s Movement would continue on through the latter half of the 19th century into the 20th century. Women’s suffrage would become a major focal point in the early 20th century and women would finally win the right to vote in 1920. Carrie Chapman was a big leader in the Women’s Rights Movement at that time, campaigning hard for the 19th Amendment to be passed. However, there were other campaigns by women that had other outcomes—such as the campaign by Carrie Nation at around the same time to enact Prohibition, a campaign that gave rise to scofflaws, bootlegging and organized crime (Lawson, 2013).
Women’s Roles and Rights
As Siegel (1994) shows, the big focus at the beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement in the 19th century was what their work in the home should consist of. There was no question really of women working outside the home. It was firmly established culturally that a woman’s place was in the domestic sphere. That notion would not really be challenged until WWII and the post-war era, when the next wave of the Women’s Movement was getting started by Betty Friedan and her book The Feminine Mystique, which advocated for women to leave the household and stop sitting at home waiting for their husbands to try to satisfy them. Friedan launched major controversy by stating such things as: “We have made woman a sex creature…She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive” (Friedan, 1963, p. 29). That was the general feeling of Feminists in the 1960s when Friedan was writing. Others like Gloria Steinem followed with Ms. Magazine, promoting new changes in society, women in the workplace, gender equality, abortion rights, and so on.
In the late 19th and early 20th century such steps would have been unfathomable. It was an entirely different world in those days and it took two World Wars to change it. The First World War helped to light a fire for Progressivism, which is why the 1920s saw so much social and political change in America. The Second World War helped to set the stage for the Women’s Movement shifting into a higher gear. The American Civil War in the 19th century also played a part, as it set the stage for transformation in society and put an end to slavery, which was a major focus of many progressive women at the time. That victory gave them confidence to keep going and to keep striving for new ground.
Still, there were many different women involved in the Movement as it developed over the decades. Elizabeth Blackwell, for instance, felt that the National Woman’s Rights Convention of 1850 was a bit much and that women were demonstrating an anti-man bias. Blackwell (1850) stated, for instance, in an Editorial written about the Convention that “I cannot sympathize fully with an anti-man movement. I have had too much kindness, aid, and just recognition from men to make such attitude of women otherwise than painful; and I think the true end of freedom may be gained better in another way.” Other women adopted a much more aggressive point of view and saw the patriarchy as an obstacle to women’s empowerment. They would especially become dominant in the latter half of the 20th century under the leadership of Feminists like Friedan, Steinem and numerous others.
But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the focus was mainly on moral reform, temperance movements, and overturning the idea of the Cult of True Womanhood—the notion that true women were pious and submissive and domesticated. The Seneca Falls Convention helped to put a new kind of woman on the map, thanks to the work of leaders like Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The main focus for them was on promoting the idea of autonomy among women—i.e., autonomous womanhood—women who could be independent of men. Slavery was the big issue but as that began to be settled by the Civil War, politics opened new doors for women: the 14th Amendment, for instance, defined American citizens as male—and that did not sit well with women like Susan B. Anthony, who saw it as an opportunity to strike up a movement for women’s suffrage (History, 2019).
Suffragists campaigned for decades to get the vote for women—but it would not be after World War I that they would actually obtain it. Many women contributed to the campaign. But one who especially helped to lead it was Carrie Chapman.
Carrie Chapman
Carrie Chapman was a major campaigner for the 19th Amendment, which granted women’s suffrage in the U.S. in 1920. She was a major figure, serving as President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and as founder of both the League of Women Voters and the International Alliance of Women, which sought to promote the human rights of women all over the world. She lobbied Congress and put pressure on politicians and lawmakers to change the Constitution (no small feat in and of itself) and give women explicit rights with respect to the vote.
Women faced a lot of pressure in the U.S. over this issue. Voting rights were a big deal back in those days—much more than they are today, as most people take voting for granted and do not even exercise their right to vote. Men viewed voting as a way to protect their own property and place. Voting rights in the beginning of the nation’s founding were reserved for the propertied class. If one did not have property one was not able to vote. This was a fairly common concept in the 18th century, but as revolution begat revolution, changes in society and politics occurred and equality began to be pursued in earnest and not just by way of lip service.
Carrie Chapman was born in 1859, two years before the Civil War broke out. She was thus brought into a world that was undergoing a drastic change. Carrie attended Iowa State Agricultural College and was one of six females in her class. Carrie was outspoken and challenged the rules even while in college. For instance, at debates only men were permitted to speak. Carrie decided she would not sit for that and she spoke her mind at the college debates without permission and her boldness brought up a new debate—whether women should have the right to debate. In the end, the college decided they should have the right to debate (Van Voris, 1996). 
In the 1880s, Carrie became involved in the women’s suffrage movement. She worked with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and spoke at the organization’s convention in 1890 and Susan B. Anthony later asked Carrie to speak about the importance of women’s suffrage to Congress in 1892 (Van Voris, 1996).
All in all, Carrie was a bit more reserved when it came to gender issues. Like Elizabeth Blackwell, she did not feel the women’s movement should be anti-man, and she did not feel that Elizabeth Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible was an accurate reflection of how women should cultivate their disposition. Stanton’s book was controversial in the same way Friedan’s Feminine Mystique would be controversial in the 1960s: both called for a reshaping of women’s basic attitudes towards men and society. Stanton essentially foreshadowed Friedan by opposing traditional religious beliefs, attitudes of submissiveness, and deference towards men. Carrie felt that Stanton was taking things too far and both she and Susan B. Anthony tried to distance NAWSA from Stanton’s hyperbole (Griffith, 1984).
Carrie became President of NAWSA in 1900 and served from 1900 to 1904 for one term and then again for a second term from 1915 to 1920. Carrie played a pivotal role in increasing the membership of NAWSA and she created a plan to lobby Congress more effectively so that it would pass an amendment to the Constitution to explicitly recognize women’s suffrage. Her focus was to get suffrage granted at both the state and the federal level. The more that states granted women’s suffrage, the sooner the Constitution would be changed, she believed. One of the big success stories for her was when she campaigned to get New York state to change its laws on women voters. When New York granted women’s suffrage in 1917 it was a major victory for Carrie Chapman (Van Voris).
When the U.S. was considering entering WWI, even though Wilson had run on an isolationist platform to win re-election, Carrie decided to throw her support behind Wilson and the war effort. It was a stunning reversal for the women’s movement and for those lobbying for suffrage. Up to then, women had by and large been anti-war and anti-interventionist. By supporting Wilson’s own reversal and decision to enter the war in 1918, Carrie was being politically diplomatic. With the support from the women, Wilson was in a better position to sell the war to the rest of the public. If the women were supporting it, the men would have no choice but to get behind him as well. After the war, Wilson thanked Carrie for her support by pursuing the matter of women’s suffrage. The 19th Amendment was ratified and signed into law in 1920. All it took for women to earn the right to vote in America was for women to get behind world war (Van Voris, 1996).
Once women’s suffrage was granted, however, Carrie and the other suffragettes once again became advocates for peace. They had gotten the right to vote and all they had to do was compromise on their morals—but now that they had the right to sway politics, they were going to go right back to suing for peace. When WWII was on the horizon, Carrie lobbied Congress to accept Jewish émigrés from Europe because of her principles on persecution. And in 1940 she helped to organize the Women’s Centennial Congress in New York to celebrate the Feminism (Van Voris, 1996).
Conclusion
Carrie Chapman was an important leader in the Women’s Movement in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. She knew that the key to gaining rights for women was to play the political game and after lobbying Congress for decades, Carrie and the suffragettes finally found the way to get their way—and that was to give one to the State so that they could get their desire filled in return. The women who lobbied for peace at all other times, began to lobby for war in 1918. And in so doing they helped get America involved in the first of two World Wars. In exchange, they received the right to vote.
Summary
The Women’s Movement in America began early in the 19th century prior to the Civil War when women like Angelina Weld and Sojourner Truth would tour the country speaking out against slavery. After slavery ended, women took up the crusade for moral reform and the right to vote. Campaigning for women’s suffrage took up many decades of struggle and women became frustrated with what was happening on that front so they began to lash out against men and call for the total rejection of Old World values and attitudes the way Elizabeth Stanton and some others did.
However, women like Elizabeth Blackwell and Carrie Chapman resisted the more radical undercurrent within the Women’s Movement and advocated instead for a middle road approach. Carrie Chapman learned how to lobby by getting states to change their laws on suffrage for women. The big goal for her was to get an amendment to the Constitution. To do that she had to support the President’s war effort in 1918. Even though women were traditionally opposed to war, Carrie Chapman led the suffragettes in a campaign to support the war and her reward was the 19th Amendment.
The Women’s Movement did not stop with Carrie Chapman’s death but it did die down for a bit until the 1960s when Betty Friedan resurrected it with The Feminine Mystique—the updated version of Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. Friedan argued that women should reject the idea of being domesticated, that they should stop trying to be a housewife, and that they should instead look for fulfillment and meaning in the workplace. Thus, in the latter half of the 20th century the Women’s Movement took on a new direction—equal rights in the workplace and as a result there are now fewer marriages in the U.S. than ever, fewer children being born, and more divorces.



References
Blackwell, E. (1850). Elizabeth Blackwell on the 1850 Women's Rights Convention.
Retrieved from http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/WomansRights/blackwell_comments.html
Griffith, E. (1984). In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York:
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History. (2019). Women’s suffrage. Retrieved from
https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage
Lawson, E. N. (2013). Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York
City. SUNY Press.
Siegel, R. B. (1994). Home as Work: The First Woman's Rights Claims Concerning
Wives' Household Labor, 1850-1880. The Yale Law Journal, 103(5), 1073-1217.
Van Voris, J. (1996). Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York City: Feminist
Press at CUNY.