Women's suffrage movements and political representation

Woman's Suffrage

Women in the United States made the fight for suffrage their most fundamental demand because they saw it as the defining feature of full citizenship. The philosophy underlying women's suffrage was the belief in "natural rights" to govern themselves and choose their own representatives. Woman's suffrage asserted that women should enjoy individual rights of self-government, rather than relying on indirect civic participation as the mothers, sisters, or daughters of male voters. However, most men and even some women believed that women were not suited by circumstance or temperament for the vote. Because women by nature were believed to be dependent on men and subordinate to them, many thought women could not be trusted to exercise the independence of thought necessary for choosing political leaders responsibly. Others feared that entry of women into political life challenged the assignment of women to the home and might lead to disruption of the family. For all of these reasons, women's enfranchisement did not come easily. American women have toiled long and hard for many decades to secure a voice in the United States Government; and through much effort, women and women's groups have worked to gain freedom in the same areas as men. This paper recants these struggles, beginning in 1647 and ending in 1920 when women were finally obtained a Constitutional amendment that gave them the right to vote.

The first woman in the North American colonies to demand the vote was Margaret Brent, the owner of extensive lands in Maryland. In 1647 Brent requested two votes in the colonial assembly, one for herself and one for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose power of attorney she held. However, the governor denied her request which let to Brent's boycott of the assembly. Although Brent's original bid for voting rights failed, widowed property owners voted in several eighteenth-century colonial elections.

And, New Jersey women voted as early as 1790 when they discovered a loophole in the state's constitution that gave the vote to anyone who satisfied certain property and residential requirements. Unfortunately, their ability to take advantage of the loophole didn't last long. A state legislator who had almost been defeated by women voters helped to pass a bill to disenfranchise the state's women and black men in 1807. Thereafter, with only few and minor exceptions until 1869, American women were barred from voting in all federal, state and local elections.

American women were the first in the world to voice organized demands for the vote. Abolitionist activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with several other women friends organized the women's rights convention which was held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 and 20, 1848. The catalyst for the event was discontent with the limitations placed on women after the American Revolution had been fought to put an end to tyranny, but the benefits had largely eluded women. They called "A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the group's leader, used the Declaration of Independence as the basis for what she called a Declaration of Sentiments. In doing so, she connected the campaign for women's rights directly to a powerful American symbol of liberty. The grievances elaborated in the Declaration of Sentiments included:

Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law

Women were not allowed to vote

Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation

Married women had no property rights

Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity

Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women

Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation in the levying of these taxes

Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they were paid only a fraction of what men earned

Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law

Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university would accept women students

With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the church

Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men

The convention unanimously endorsed the Declaration of Sentiments and all resolutions with the exception of the woman's right to vote. This right was the most controversial of all the resolutions because the right to vote was inconceivable to many women during this time period. A heated debate about the right to vote ensued. Surprisingly, it a black male abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, that swayed the convention to pass the resolution, but only by a narrow majority.

And, the women agreed to endorsement of the following statement, "It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise."

The 1848 convention was followed by the first national women's right convention in 1858 which attracted more than 1,000 participants to Worcester Massachusetts from as far away as California. Paulina Wright Davis was the organizer and president of the 1850 national convent. Remarks in her opening speech outlined the purpose of the gathering, "It is one thing to issue a declaration of rights...but quite another thing...to commend the subject to the world's acceptance...to secure the desired reformation." National conventions continued to be held yearly (except for 1857) through 1860.

The early feminists in the United States demanded a wide range of changes in woman's social, moral, legal, educational, and economic status, but shied away from emphasizing the right to vote as a major area of reform. But, after the Civil War, women's rights leaders saw enfranchisement as one of the most important of their goals. This is because of their disappointment when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution did not provide universal suffrage for all Americans, but extended the franchise only to black men. In response, two women suffrage organizations were founded in 1869, with different positions on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment and different ideas about how to best promote woman suffrage. Regretfully, the net effect of the two separate groups was to dilute the efforts of woman's suffrage for more than twenty years.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment and, instead, called for a Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise women. Led exclusively by women, the New York-based NWSA focused upon the enfranchisement of women through federal action, and adopted a radical tone in promoting a wide variety of feminist reforms. The efforts of the NWSA yielded poor results. Between 1869 and 1888 Members of Congress submitted eighteen constitutional amendments designed to extend voting rights to women, but these proposals received little consideration and none won legislative approval in either the House or the Senate.

Outside of Congress, the NWSA resorted to other tactics, including civil disobedience. In 1872, Anthony and others were arrested for attempting to vote in state elections. Their trials attracted a considerable amount of attention to the suffrage movement and prompted a United States Supreme Court decision, Minor v. Hapersett (1875). In this case the Court decisively rejected the claim that the term "citizens" in the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to women. The Court's decision was a major setback for the NWSA, and it also signaled the Court's subsequent and similarly narrow reading of the individual rights protected by the Fifteenth Amendment.

The other competing woman's suffrage organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was led by Lucy Stone with the aid of her husband Henry Blackwell, Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Ward Beecher, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others. This group endorsed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments while simultaneously working for woman suffrage as well by developing state-level grass roots support. The AWSA strategy was to try to make woman suffrage and other feminist reforms seem less radical and consistent with widely-shared American values than did the AWSA. However, its strategy didn't fare any better than that of NWSA; the group did not achieve any state-level voting rights for women.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged into one organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected President; Lucy Stone, head of the Executive Committee; and Susan B. Anthony, Vice President. It was Anthony who actually took command of the new organization and she officially became president in 1892. Members agreed that they would first need to build support within the states before they could make headway at the federal level The goal was to win enough state suffrage amendments that Congress would have to approve a federal amendment which would then be supported by enough states to ensure ratification. Most NAWSA leaders thought it imperative that the movement focus almost exclusively on winning the vote rather than on broader feminist issues to gain acceptance from conservatives.

With the efforts of the NAWSA, woman's suffrage was making headway in the West, but most of the East remained dead set against it. One theory for this dichotomy was that frontier conditions undermined traditional gender roles and that women, having proven their ability to conquer difficult conditions and do "men's work," were rewarded with the vote. Other historians believe that western politicians found it expedient to enfranchise women for a variety of other reasons. For example, Mormons in Utah hoped that the votes of women would help tip the balance of power in their favor in their ongoing power struggle with the non-Mormon population, consisting largely of miners, railroad construction workers, cowboys, and prospectors, who tended not to have women with them.

For whatever reasons, Wyoming was the only territory and Colorado, Utah and Idaho were the only states to adopt woman suffrage in the nineteenth century.

Susan B. Anthony retired from the presidency of NAWSA in 1900 and was replaced by Carrie Chapman Catt. Although Catt was an astute political campaigner, her leadership was cut short after her husband became terminally ill in 1903 and she quit the organization to take care of him. Anna Howard Shaw became NAWSA's president from 1904 until 1915. Shaw was among the first women to be ordained by the Methodist Protestant Church and had also earned a medical degree from Boston University in 1885. Shaw was know for being an excellent orator and was highly committed to the cause of the NAWSA. But, she was widely criticized for her ineffective leadership. "The phase of suffrage history during which Shaw was the leader of NAWSA saw few major victories and the NAWSA was thought by many to have been too quiet a force during her tenure."

During her tenure, only four additional states endorsed the woman's suffrage cause (Washington, 1910; California, 1911; Oregon, 1912; Kansas, 1912; and Arizona, 1912), bringing the count to only eight out of forty-eight states.

In 1915, Catt resumed the leadership of NAWSA. In 1916, at a NAWSA convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Catt unveiled her "Winning Plan," a strategy to campaign simultaneously for suffrage on both the state and federal levels, and to compromise for partial suffrage in the states resisting change. Under Catt's dynamic leadership, NAWSA won the backing of the House and Senate, as well as state support for the amendment's ratification. In 1917, New York passed a state woman suffrage referendum. Also, under Catt's direction, NAWSA became successful at recruiting large numbers of socially prominent and politically influential women and convincing the growing numbers of middle and upper-class women that woman's suffrage would be an asset to their civic improvement efforts. NAWSA also reached out to the new generation of college-educated women, many of them professionals, reminding them that their opportunities were owed to the efforts of the woman's movement.

There were several indicators that the public was becoming more receptive to woman's suffrage. For example, President William H. Taft chose to speak at the NAWSA 1910 annual convention. Although Taft did not offer an explicit endorsement of women's suffrage, his presence and speech sent a message to both the public and NAWSA members. Another significant indicator was the Progressive Party's public endorsement of women's suffrage in 1912. The endorsement underscored the long-term electoral and partisan stakes associated with the reform support. Women's suffragists also benefited from industrialization and urbanization and from increased public interest in political reform and other social movements. By 1917, the NAWSA membership had increased to two million and twelve additional states had approved women's suffrage since 1910.

In addition to the NAWSA's efforts, the more radical Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS) which would later become the National Woman's Party was formed by former NAWSA member, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Inez Milholland and several other feminists. This group introduced the militant methods used by the Women's Social and Political Union in Britain and organized huge demonstrations and daily picketing of the White House. The day before Woodrow Wilson's first inauguration, on March 13, 1913, Paul organized a women's suffrage parade of more than 5,000 participants from every state in the Union and hundreds of thousands of spectators. Some onlookers began assaulting the marchers and the police did little to stop the attack. Despite the violence, the parade succeeded in obtaining Paul's objective of gaining national attention on the women's suffrage issue. Paul was later arrested during another protest and began a hunger strike. She was force fed through tubes and threatened with commitment to an insane asylum. Some credit Paul with making President Wilson aware of the suffrage movement's growing political strength and resolve, but most agree that Catt's more conservative tactics had a far greater impact on Wilson.